'Well, I'll leave you to it. Thanks very much.'
'Not at all. If I can help in any other way, don't hesitate to ring me, will you?'
'Er, no. I won't. Thanks again.' '
Morse sat still for many minutes and began to wonder if he ought not to turn the jigsaw upside down and work the blue sky in at the bottom. There was no doubt about it: he ought to have gone home as he'd promised himself earlier. He was just walking blindly in the forest bumping into one wretched tree after another. But he couldn't go home yet; he had an appointment.
Baines was there already and got up to buy the inspector a drink. The lounge was quiet and they sat alone in a corner and wished each other good health.
Morse tried to size him up. Tweed jacket, grey slacks, balding on top and rather flabby in the middle, but obviously nobody's fool. His eyes were keen and Morse imagined the pupils would never take too many liberties with Baines. He spoke with a slight North Country accent and as he listened to Morse he picked away at his lower nostrils with his index finger. Irritating.
What was the routine on Tuesday afternoons? Why was there no register taken? Was there any likelihood that Valerie had, in fact, returned to school that afternoon, and only later disappeared? How did the pupils work the skiving that was obviously so widespread? Was there any sort of skivers' den where the reluctant athletes could safely hide themselves away? Have a smoke perhaps?
Baines seemed rather amused. He could give the boys and girls a few tips about getting off games! By jove, he could. But it was the staffs fault. The PE teachers were a bloody idle lot — worse than the kids. Hardly bothered to get changed, some of them. And anyway there were so many activities: fencing, judo, table-tennis, athletics, rounders, netball — all this self-expression nonsense. No one really knew who was expected when and where. Bloody stupid. Things had tightened up a bit with the new head, but — well. Baines gave the impression that for all his possible virtues Phillipson had a long way still to go. Where they went to? Plenty of places. He'd found half a dozen smoking in the boiler room one day, and the school itself was virtually empty. Quite a few of them just sloped off home though, and some didn't turn up at all. Anyway, like the headmaster, he wasn't really involved on Tuesday afternoons. It wasn't a bad idea, though, to get away from school occasionally — have a free afternoon. The headmaster had tried to do it for all the staff. Put all their free periods together and let them have a morning or an afternoon off. Trouble was that it meant a hell of a lot of work for the chap who did the timetabling. Him!
As he talked on Morse wondered whether he still felt bitter towards Phillipson; whether he would be all that eager to throw out a life-line to the drowning helmsman. He casually mentioned that he knew of Baines's ill luck in being pipped for the job; and bought more beer. Yes (Baines admitted), he'd been a bit unlucky perhaps, and more than once. He thought he could have run a school as well as most, and Morse felt he was probably right. Greedy and selfish (like most men), but shrewdly competent. Above all, thought Morse, he would have enjoyed power. And now that there no longer seemed much chance of power, perhaps a certain element of dark satisfaction in observing the inadequacies of others and quietly gloating over their misfortunes. There wasn't a word for it in English. The Germans called it
'Did you ever teach Valerie yourself?' asked Morse.
Baines chuckled. 'In the first form — just for a year. She didn't know a trapezium from a trampoline.'
Morse grinned, too. 'Did you like her?'
It was a sobering question, and the shrewdness gleamed again in Baines's eyes.
'She was all right.' But it was an oddly unsatisfactory answer and Baines sensed it. He went on glibly about her academic prowess, or lack of it, and veered off into an anecdote about the time he'd found forty-two different spellings of 'isosceles' in a first-year examination.
'Do you know Mrs. Taylor?'
'Oh, yes.' He stood up and suggested there was just time for another pint. Morse knew that the momentum had been broken, quite deliberately, and he felt very tempted to refuse. But he didn't. Anyway, he was going to ask Baines a rather delicate favour.
Morse slept fitfully that night. Broken images littered his mind, like the broken glass strewn about the rubbish tip. He tossed and turned; but the merry-go-round was out of control, and at 3.00 a.m. he got up to make himself a cup of tea. Back in bed, with the light left on, he tried to concentrate his closed, swift-darting eyes on to a point about three inches in front of his nose, and gradually the spinning mechanism began to slow down, slower and slower, and then it stopped. He dreamed of a beautiful girl slowly unbuttoning her low-cut blouse and swaying her hips sensuously above him as she slid down the zip at the side of her skirt. And then she put her long slim fingers up to her face and moved the mask aside, and he saw the face of Valerie Taylor.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
I am a man under authority.
(Matthew, viii, 9)
IT WASN'T TOO bad working with Morse. Odd sort of chap, sometimes, and should have got himself married long ago; everybody said that. But it wasn't too bad. He'd worked with him before, and enjoyed it most of the time. Sometimes he seemed a very ordinary sort of fellow. The real trouble was that he always had to find a complex solution to everything, and Lewis had enough experience of police work to know that most criminal activity owed its origins to simple, cheap, and sordid motives, and that few of the criminals themselves had sufficiently intelligent or tortuous minds to devise the cunning stratagems that Morse was wont to attribute to them. In Morse's mind the simple facts of any case seemed somewhere along the line to get fitted out with hooks and eyes which rendered the possibility of infinite associations and combinations. What the great man couldn't do, for all his gifts, was put a couple of simple facts together and come up with something obvious. The letters from Valerie were a case in point. The first one, Peters had said, was pretty certainly written by Valerie herself. Why then not work on the assumption that it was, and go on from there? But no. Morse had to believe the letter was forged, just because it would fit better with some fantastical notion that itself owed its abortive birth to some equally improbable hypothesis. And then there was the second letter. Morse hadn't said much about that; probably learned his lesson. But even if he had to accept that Valerie Taylor had written the letters, he would never be prepared to believe anything so simple as the fact that she'd got fed up with home and with school, and had just gone off, as hundreds of other girls did every year. Then why not Valerie? The truth was that Morse would find it all too easy; no fit challenge for that thoroughbred mind of his. Yes, that was it.
