Last Seen Wearing

swore on his solemn honour) he was himself completely innocent. Blackmail? The whole idea was laughable. The only person who had any hold on him was Valerie Taylor, and of Valerie Taylor he had seen or heard nothing whatsoever since the day of her disappearance. Whether she were alive or whether she were dead, he had no idea — no idea at all.

There the interview had finished. Or almost finished. For it was Morse himself who had administered the coup de grace which finally put his tortured and tortuous theory out of all its pain.

'Does your wife drive a car?'

Acum looked at him with mild surprise. 'No. She's never driven a yard in her life. Why?'

Lewis relived the interview as he drove on steadily through the night. And as he recalled the facts that Acum had recounted, he felt a deepening sympathy with the sour, dejected, silent figure slumped beside him, smoking (unusually) cigarette after cigarette, and feeling (if the truth be told) unconscionably angry with himself. .

Why had he gone wrong? Where had he gone wrong? The questions re-echoed in Morse's mind as if repeated by some interminable interlocutor installed inside his brain. He thought back to his first analysis of the case — the one in which he had cast Mrs. Taylor as the murderer not only of Reginald Baines but also of her daughter Valerie. How easy now to see why that was wrong! His reasoning had run aground upon the Rock Improbable and the Rock Impossible: the glaring improbability that Mrs. Taylor had murdered her only daughter (mothers just didn't do that sort of thing very often, did they?); and the plain impossibility that anyone had murdered Valerie on the day she disappeared, since three days later, alive and well, she had climbed into the back of a taxi outside a London abortion clinic. Yes, the first analysis had been brutally smashed to pieces by the facts, and now lay sunk without a trace beneath the sea. It was as simple as that.

And what of the second analysis? That had seemed on the face of it to answer all the facts, or nearly all of them. What had gone wrong with that? Again his logic had foundered upon the Reef of Unreason: the glaring improbability that Valerie Taylor had either sufficient motive or adequate opportunity to murder a man who seemed to pose little more than a peripheral threat to her future happiness; and the plain impossibility that the woman living with David Acum was Valerie Taylor. She wasn't. She was Mrs. Acum. And Analysis One lay side by side with Analysis Two — irrecoverable wrecks upon the ocean floor.

Almost frenetically Morse tried to wrench his thoughts away from it all. He tried to conjure up a dream of fair women; and failing this he essayed to project upon his mind a raw, uncensored film of rank eroticism; he tried so very hard. . But still the wretched earth-bound realities of the Taylor case crowded his brain, forbade those flights of half-forbidden fancies, and jolted him back to his inescapable mood of gloom-ridden despondency. Facts, facts, facts! Facts that one by one he once again reviewed as they marched and counter-marched across his mind. If only he'd stuck to the facts! Ainley was dead — that was a fact. Somebody had written a letter the very day after he died — that was a fact. Valerie had been alive on the days immediately following her disappearance — that was a fact. Baines was dead — that was a fact. Mrs. Acum was Mrs. Acum — that was a fact. But where did he go from there? He began to realize how few the facts had been; how very, very few. A lot of possible facts; a fair helping of probable facts; but few that ranked as positive facts. And once again the facts remarshalled themselves and marched across the parade ground. . He shook his head sharply and felt he must be going mad.

Lewis, he could see, was concentrating hard upon the road. Lewis! Huh! It had been Lewis who had asked him the one question, the only question, that had completely floored him: Why had Baines written the letter? Why? He had never grappled satisfactorily with that question, and now it worried away at his brain again. Why? Why? Why?

It was as they swept along the old Wading Street, past Wellington, that Morse in a flash conceived a possible answer to this importunate question; an answer of astonishing and devastating simplicity. And he nursed his new little discovery like a frightened mother sheltering her only child amid the ruin of an earthquake-stricken city. . The merry-go-round was slowing now. . the pubs were long shut and the chips were long cold. . his mind was getting back to normal now. . This was better! Mediodically he began to undress Miss Yvonne Baker.

Lewis had the road virtually to himself now. It was past 1.00 a.m. and the two men had not exchanged a single word. Strangely, the silence had seemed progressively to reinforce itself, and conversation now would seem as sacrilegious as a breaking of the silence before the cenotaph.

As he drove the last part of the journey his mind roved back beyond the oddly unreal events of the last few hours, and dwelt again on the early days of the Valerie Taylor case. She'd just hopped it, of course — he'd said so right at the beginning: fed up with home and school, she'd yearned for the brighter lights, the excitement and the glamour of the big city. Got shot of the unwanted baby, and finished up in a groovy, swinging set. Contented enough; even happy, perhaps. The last thing she wanted was to go back home to her moody mother and her stolid step-father. We all felt like that occasionally. We'd all like a fresh start in a new life. Like being born again. . He'd felt like running away from home when he was her age. . Concentrate, Lewis! Oxford 30 miles. He glanced at the inspector and smiled quietly to himself. The old boy was fast asleep.

They were within ten miles of Oxford when Lewis became vaguely conscious of Morse's mumbled words, muddled and indistinct; just words without coherent meaning. Yet gradually the words assumed a patterned sequence that Lewis almost understood: 'Bloody photographs — wouldn't recognize her — huh! — bloody things — huh!'

'We're here, sir.' It was the first time he had spoken for more than five hours and his voice sounded unnaturally loud.

Morse shrugged himself awake and blinked around him. 'I must have dozed off, Lewis. Not like me, is it?'

'Would you like to drop in at my place for a cup of coffee and a bite to eat?'

'No. But thanks all the same.' He eased himself out of the car like a chronic arthritic, yawned mightily, and stretched his arms. 'We'll take tomorrow off, Lewis. Agreed? We've just about deserved it, I reckon.'

Lewis said he reckoned, too. He parked the police car, backed out his own and waved a weary farewell.

Morse entered Police HQ and made his way along the dimly lit corridor to his office, where he opened his filing cabinet and riffled through the early documents in the Valerie Taylor case. He found it almost immediately, and as he looked down at the so familiar letter, once more his mind was sliding easily along the shining grooves. It must be. It must be!

He wondered if Lewis would ever forgive him.

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

And then there were two.