The phone rang again at half-past ten, and Morse started abruptly and guiltily in his chair, and looked at the time in disbelief.
It was Mrs. Lewis again. The doctor had called. Pharyngitis. At least three or four days in bed. But could Morse come round? The invalid was anxious to see him.
He certainly looked ill. The unshaven face was pale and the voice little more than a batrachian croak.
'I'm letting you down, chief.'
'Nonsense. You get better that's all. And be a good boy and do as the quack tells you.'
'Not much option with a missus like mine.' He smiled wanly, and supporting himself on one arm reached for his glass of weakly pale orange juice. 'But I'm glad you've come, sir. You see, last night I had this terrible headache, and my eyes went all funny — sort of wiggly lines all the time. I couldn't recognize things very well.'
'You've got to expect summat to go wrong with you if you're ill,' said Morse.
'But I got to thinking about things. You remember the old boy on the Belisha crossing? Well, I didn't mention it at the time but it came back to me last night.'
'It's just that I don't think he could see very well, sir. I reckon that's why he got knocked over and I just wondered if. .'
Lewis looked at the inspector and knew instinctively that he had been right to ask him to come. Morse was nodding slowly and staring abstractedly through the bedroom window and on to the neatly kept strip of garden below, the beds trimmed and weeded, where a few late roses lingered languidly on.
Joe was still in the old people's home at Cowley, and lay in the same bed, half propped up on his pillows, his head lolling to the side, his thin mouth toothless and gaping. The sister who had accompanied Morse along the ward touched him gently.
'I've brought you a visitor.'
Joe blinked himself slowly awake and stared vaguely at them with unseeing eyes.
'It's a policeman, Mr. Godberry. I think they must have caught up with you at last.' The sister turned to Morse and smiled attractively.
Joe grinned and his mouth moved in a senile chuckle. His hand groped feebly along the locker for his spectacle case, and finally he managed to hook an ancient pair of National Health spectacles behind his ears.
'Ah, I remember you, sergeant. Nice to see you again. What can I do fo' you this time?'
Morse stayed with him for fifteen minutes, and realized how very sad it was to grow so old.
'You've been very helpful, Joe, and I'm very grateful to you.'
'Don't forget, sergeant, to put the clock back. It's this month, you know. There's lots o' people forgits to put the clocks back. Huh. I remember once. .'
Morse heard him out and finally got away. At the end of the ward he spoke again briefly to the sister.
'He's losing his memory a bit.'
'Most of them do, I'm afraid. Nice old boy, though. Did he tell you to put the clock back?'
Morse nodded. 'Does he tell everybody?'
'A lot of them seem to get a fixation about some little thing like that. Mind you, he's right, isn't he?' She laughed sweetly and Morse noticed she wore no wedding ring. /
But the words wouldn't come, for he wasn't an architect who slept beneath the railway viaduct, and he could never say such things. Just as she couldn't. Morse wondered what she was thinking, and realized he would never know. He took out his wallet and gave her a pound note.
'Put it in the Christmas fund, Sister.'
Her eyes held his for a brief moment and he thought they were gentle and loving; and she thanked him nicely and walked briskly away. Fortunately the Cape of Good Hope was conveniently near.
Clocks! It reminded him. There was a good tale told in Oxford about the putting back of clocks. The church of St. Benedict had a clock which ran by electricity, and for many years the complexities of putting back this clock had exercised the wit and wisdom of clergy and laity alike. The clock adorned the north face of the tower and its large hands were manoeuvred round the square, blue-painted dial by means of an elaborate lever device, situated behind the clock-face and reached via a narrow spiral staircase leading to the tower roof. The problem had been this. No one manipulating the lever immediately behind the clock-face could observe the effects of his manipulations, and so thick were the walls of the church tower that not even with a megaphone could an accomplice, standing outside the church, communicate to the manipulator the aforementioned effects. Each year, therefore, one of the churchwardens had taken upon himself to mount the spiral staircase, to manipulate the lever in roughly the right direction, to descend the staircase, to walk out of the church, to look upwards at the clock, to ascend the staircase once more, to give the lever a few more turns before descending again and repeating the process, undl at last the clock was cajoled into a reluctant synchronization. Such a lengthy and physically daunting procedure had been in operation for several years, until a mild-looking thurifer, rumoured to be one of the best incense-swingers in the business, had with becoming diffidence suggested to the minister that to remove the fuse from the fuse-box and to replace it after exactly sixty minutes might not only prove more accurate but also spare the rather elderly churchwarden the prospect of a coronary thrombosis. This idea, discussed at considerable length and finally accepted by the church committee, had proved wonderfully effective, and was now a firmly established practice.
Someone had told Morse the story in a pub, and he recalled it now. It pleased him. Lewis, but for his illness, would even now be running up and down the spiral staircase looking at his alibis. But that was out — at least for several days. It was up to Morse himself now to take the fuse away and set the clock aright But not just for an hour — for much, much longer than that. In fact for two years, three months and more, to the day when Valerie Taylor had disappeared.
