Last Seen Wearing

'Such as?' Morse struggled hard before producing 'damson'. 'I'd rather have my parson, sir.'

Morse put the paper aside. 'Well. What do you think?'

'Seems to be her writing, doesn't it?'

There was a knock on the door and a pretty young office girl deposited the morning post into the in-tray. Cursorily and distastefully Morse looked through the correspondence.

'Nothing urgent here, Lewis. Let's go along to the lab. I think Old Peters must be getting senile.'

Now in his early sixties, Peters had previously worked for twenty years as a Home Office pathologist, and somewhere along the line the juices of human fallibility had been squeezed from his cerebral processes. His manner was clinical and dry, and his words seemed to be dictated by a minicomputer installed somewhere inside his brain. His answers were slow, mechanical, definitive. He had never been known to argue with anyone. He just read the information-tapes.

'You think this is Valerie Taylor's writing, then?'

He paused and answered. 'Yes.'

'Can you ever be certain about things like handwriting, though?'

He paused and answered. 'No.'

'How certain are you?'

He paused and answered. 'Ninety per cent.'

'You'd be surprised then if it turned out that she didn't write it?'

He paused and the computer considered its reaction to the improbability. 'Yes. Surprised.'

'What makes you think she wrote it?'

He paused and lectured briefly and quietly on the evidence of loops and quirks and whorls. Morse battled on against the odds. 'You can forge a letter, though, can't you?'

He paused and answered. 'Of course.'

'But you don't think this was forged?'

He paused and answered. 'I think it was written by the girl.'

'But a person's handwriting changes over the years, doesn't it? I mean the letter's written in almost exactly the same way as the exercise books.'

He paused and answered. 'There's a basic built-in style about all our handwriting. Slopes change, certainly, and other minor things. But whatever changes, there is still the distinctive style, carrying with it the essential features of our personal characteristics.' He paused again, and Lewis had the impression he was reading it all out of a book. 'In Greek, the word 'character' means handwriting, they tell me.'

Lewis smiled. He was enjoying himself.

Morse put a penultimate problem to the computer. 'You wouldn't go into the witness box and say it definitely was her writing, would you?'

He paused and answered. 'I would tell a jury what I've told you — that the order of probability is somewhere in the region of ninety per cent.'

Morse turned as he reached the door. 'Could you forge her handwriting convincingly?'

The desiccated calculating-machine actually smiled and the hesitation this time was minimal. 'I've had a lot of experience in this field, you know.'

'You could then?'

He paused and answered, 'I could, yes.'

Back in his office Morse brought Lewis up to date with his visit the previous evening to the Phillipson residence.

'You don't like him much, do you, sir?'

Morse looked aggrieved. 'Oh, I don't dislike him. It's just that I don't think he's completely above-board with me, that's all.'

'We've all of us got things we'd like to hide, haven't we, sir?'

'Mm.' Morse was staring through the window. Eyes had I — and saw not. Six letters. It still eluded him. Like the answer to this case. A whole orchestra of instruments and some of them playing just slightly out of tune.

'Did you know that 'orchestra' was an anagram of 'carthorse', Lewis?'

Lewis didn't. He idly wrote down the letters and checked. 'So it is. Perhaps the clue you can't get is an anagram, sir.'

The light dawned in Morse's eyes. 'You're a genius. SAW NOT.' Sherlock Holmes picked up The Times again, wrote in the answer and beamed at his own Doctor Watson.

'Now let's consider the case so far.' Lewis sat back and listened. Morse was away.

'We can say, can we not, that the letter was either written by Valerie herself or by another person. Agreed?'

'With odds of nine to one on Valerie.'