Part 3 (1/2)

'Lewis? Morse here.'

'Ah. Morning, sir.'

'Lewis, do you take the Sunday Times?'

”Fraid not, sir. We have the Sunday Mirror.' He sounded somewhat apologetic about his Sabbath-day reading.

'Oh.'

'I could get you a copy, I suppose.'

'I've got today's. I want the copy for August the twenty-fourth.'

It was Sergeant Lewis's turn to say, 'Oh.'

'I can't really understand an intelligent man like you, Lewis, not taking a decent Sunday newspaper.'

'The sport's pretty good in the Sunday Mirror, sir.'

'Is it? You'd better bring it along with you in the morning, then.'

Lewis brightened. 'I won't forget.'

Morse thanked him and rang off. He had almost said he would swop it for his own copy of the News of the World, but considered it not improper to conceal from his subordinates certain aspects of his own depravity.

He could always get a back copy from the Reference Library. It could wait, he told himself. And yet it couldn't wait. Again he read the letter from the parents of the prodigal daughter. They would be extra-pleased now, with a letter in the newspaper, to boot. Dad would probably cut it out and keep it in his wallet - now that the family unit was functioning once more. We were all so vain.

Cuttings, clippings and that sort of thing. Morse still kept his batting averages somewhere ...

And suddenly it hit him. It all fitted. Four or five weeks ago Ainley had resurrected the Taylor case of his own accord and pursued it in his own spare time. Some reporter had been along to Thames Valley Police and got Ainley to spill the beans on the Taylor girl. Ainley had given him the facts (no fancies with Ainley!) and somehow, as a result of seeing the facts again, he had spotted something that he had missed before. It was just like doing a crossword puzzle. Get stuck. Leave it for ten minutes. Try again - and eureka! It happened to everyone like that. And, he repeated to himself, Ainley had seen something new. That must be it.

As a corollary to this, it occurred to Morse that if Ainley had taken a hand in the article, not only would Valerie Taylor have been one of the missing girls featured, but Ainley himself would almost certainly have kept the printed article - just as surely as Mr J. Richardson would be sticking his own printed letter into his Kidderminster wallet.

He rang Mrs Ainley. 'Eileen?' (Right this time.) 'Morse here. Look, do you happen to have kept that bit of the Sunday Times - you know, that bit about missing girls?'

”You mean the one they saw Richard about?' He had been right.

'That's the one.'

'Yes. I kept it, of course. It mentioned Richard several times.'

'Can I, er, can I come round and have a look at it?'

”You can have it with pleasure. I don't want it any more.'

Some half an hour later, forgetful of his earlier pledge, Morse was seated with a pint of flat beer and a soggy steak-and-mushroom pie. He read the article through with a feeling of anticlimax. Six girls were featured - after the preliminary sociological blurb about the problems of adolescence - with a couple of columns on each of them. But the central slant was on the parents the girls had left behind them. ”The light in the hall has been left on every night since she went,' as one of the anguished mothers was reported. It was pathetic and it was distressing. There were pictures, too. First, pictures of the girls, although (of necessity) none of the photographs was of a very recent vintage, and two or three (including that of Valerie herself) were of less than definitive clarity. And thus it was for the first time that Chief Inspector Morse looked down upon the face of Valerie Taylor. Of the six she would certainly be in the running for the beauty crown - though run close by a honey of a girl from Brighton. Attractive face, full mouth, come-hither eyes, nice eyebrows (plucked, thought Morse) and long dark-brown hair. Just the face - no figure to admire.

And then, over the page, the pictures of the parents. Mr and Mrs Taylor seemed an unremarkable pair, seated unnaturally forward on the shabby sofa: Mr wearing a cheap Woolworth tie, with his rolled-up sleeves revealing a large purple tattoo on his broad right forearm; Mrs wearing a plain cotton dress with a cameo brooch somewhat ostentatiously pinned to the collar. And on a low table beside them, carefully brought into the focus of the photograph, a cohort of congratulatory cards for their eighteenth wedding anniversary. It was predictable and posed, and Morse felt that a few tears might well have been nearer the truth.

He ordered another pint and sat down to read the commentary on Valerie's disappearance.

Two years ago, the month of June enjoyed a long, unbroken spell of sunny weather; Tuesday 10 June was a particularly sweltering day at the village of Kidlington in the county of Oxfords.h.i.+re.

Valerie disliked school dinners and had returned home each lunch-time At 12.30 p.m. Valerie Taylor left the Roger Bacon Comprehensive School to walk to her home in Hatfield Way on the council estate nearby, no more than six or seven hundred yards from the school On the day of her daughter's disappearance Valerie's mother, Mrs Grace Taylor, had prepared a ham salad, with blackcurrant tart and custard for sweet, mother and daughter ate the meal at the kitchen table.

Afternoon lessons began again at 1.45, and Valerie usually left the house at about 1.25 Nothing seemed amiss that cloudless Tuesday afternoon as Valerie walked down that path so Like many of her friends Valerie walked down the short front path, turned in the direction of the school, and waved a cheery farewell to her mother. She has never been seen again.

Mr George Taylor, an employee of the Oxford City Corporation, returned from work at 6.10 p.m.

to find his wife in a state of considerable anxiety. It was quite unlike Valerie not to tell her mother if she was likely to be late, yet at that point there seemed little cause for immediate concern. The minutes ticked by; the quarters chimed on the Taylors' grandfather clock, and then the hours. At 8.00 p.m. Mr Taylor got into his car and drove to the school. Only the caretaker was still on the premises and he could be of no help. Mr Taylor then called at the homes of several of Valerie's friends, but they likewise could tell him nothing. None of them could remember seeing Valerie that afternoon, but it had been 'games' and it was nothing unusual for pupils to slip away quietly from the sports field.

When Mr Taylor returned home it was 9.00 p.m. 'There must be some simple explanation,' he told his wife; but if there was, it was not forthcoming, and the time pressed slowly on. 10.00 p.m.

11.00 p.m. Still nothing. George Taylor suggested they should notify the police, but his wife was terrified of taking such a step.

When I interviewed them this week both Mr and Mrs Taylor were reluctant (and understandably so) to talk about the agonies they suffered that night. Throughout the long vigil it was Grace Taylor who feared the worst and suffered the most, for her husband felt sure that Valerie had gone off with some boyfriend and would be back the next morning. At 4.00 a.m. he managed to persuade his wife to take two sleeping tablets and he took her upstairs to bed.

She was sleeping when he left the house at 7.30 a.m., leaving a note saying that he would be back at lunch-time, and that if Valerie still had not returned they would have to call the vital dues thrown to the wind -police. In fact the police were and all because parents think notified earlier than that. Mrs they will be wasting the time of Taylor had awoken at about the police and would seem to nine and, in a distraught state, look foolish if the wayward off-had rung them from a neigh- spring should suddenly turn up hour's telephone.

whilst the police were busy Detective Chief Inspector Ainley of the Thames Valley Police was put in charge of the case, and intensive inquiries were immediately begun. During the course of the next week the whole of the area in the vicinity of Valerie's home and the area of woodland behind the school were searched with painstaking care and patience; the river and the reservoir were dragged ... But no trace was found of Valerie Taylor. Inspector Ainley himself was frankly critical of the delay. At least twelve hours had been lost; fifteen, if the police had been notified as soon as the Taylors'

anxiety had begun to deepen into genuine alarm. Such delay is a common feature of the cases a.s.sembled here.

Vital time lost; perhaps taking statements. It is a common human weakness, and it is only too easy to blame parents like the Taylors. But would we ourselves have acted all that differently? I knew exactly what Mrs Taylor meant when she said to me, 'I felt all the time that if we called the police something dreadful must have happened.' Illogical, you may say, but so very understandable, Mr and Mrs Taylor still live on the council estate in Hatfield Way.

For over two years now they have waited and prayed for their daughter to return, As in the five other cases discussed here, the police files remain open.

'No,' said Inspector Ainley, 'we shan't be closing them until we find her.'

Not bad reporting, thought Morse. There were several things in the article that puzzled him slightly, but he deliberately suppressed the fanciful notions that began to flood his mind. He had been right earlier. When Ainley had got the hard facts down on paper, he had spotted something that for over two years had lurked in the darkness and eluded his grasp. Some clue or other which had monopolized his attention and filled his spare time, and eventually, if indirectly, led to his death.

Just stick to the facts, Morse, stick to the facts! It would be difficult, but he would try. And tomorrow he and Lewis would start on the files wherein lay the facts as Ainley had gleaned them. Anyway, Christine was back in Kidderminster and, like as not, Valerie would be back in Kidlington before the end of the month. The naughty girls were all coming home and would soon be having the same sort of rows they'd had with mum and dad before they left. Life, alas, was like that.

Over his third pint of beer Morse could stem the flood of fancy no longer. He read the article through quickly once again. Yes, there was something wrong here. Only a small thing, but he wondered if it was the same small thing that had set Ainley on a new track ... And the strangest notion began to formulate in the mind so recently dedicated to the pursuit of unembellished fact.

CHAPTER Six.

He certainly has a great deal of fancy, and a very good memory; but, with a perverse ingenuity, he employs these qualities as no other person does.

Richard Brinsley Sheridan As HE KNOCKED at the door of Morse's office Sergeant Lewis, who had thoroughly enjoyed the police routine of the previous week, wondered just what was in store for him now. He had worked with the unpredictable inspector before and got on fairly well with him; but he had his reservations.

Morse was seated in his black leather chair and before him on his untidy desk lay a green box-file.

'Ah. Come in, Lewis. I didn't want to start without you. Wouldn't be fair, would it?' He patted the box-file with a gesture of deep affection. 'It's all there, Lewis, my boy. All the facts. Ainley was a fact man - no daydreaming theorist was Ainley. And we shall follow where the great man trod.

What do you say?' And without giving his sergeant the slightest opportunity to say anything, he emptied the contents of the file face downwards upon the desk. 'Shall we start at the top or the bottom?'