Part 18 (2/2)

'Will he be back home for lunch?'

The head shook, and the top of the towel drooped tantalizingly to reveal the beautifully-moulded outline of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s.

'He's at school, I suppose?'

The head nodded, and the eyes stared blandly through the slits.

'Well, I'm sorry to have bothered you, Mrs Ac.u.m, especially at, er, such, er... We've spoken to each other before, you know - over the phone, if you remember. I'm Morse. Chief Inspector Morse from Oxford.'

The red towel bobbed on her head, the mask almost breaking through into a smile. They shook hands through the door, and Morse was conscious of the heady perfume on her skin. He held her hand for longer than he need have done, and the white towel dropped from her right shoulder; and for a brief and beautiful moment he stared with shameless fascination at her nakedness. The nipple was fully erect and he felt an almost irresistible urge to hold it there and then between his fingers. Was she inviting him in?

He looked again at the pa.s.sive mask. The towel was now in place again, and she stood back a little from the door; it was fifty-fifty. But he had hesitated too long, and the chance, if chance it was, was gone already. He lacked, as always, the bogus courage of his own depravity, and he turned away from her and walked back slowly towards The Prince of Wales. At the end of the road he stopped, and looked back; but the light-blue door was closed upon him and he cursed the conscience that invariably thus doth make such spineless cowards of us all. It was perhaps something to do with status. People just didn't expect such base behaviour from a chief inspector, as if such eminent persons were somehow different from the common run of lewd humanity. How wrong they were! How wrong! Why, even the mighty had their little weaknesses.

Good gracious, yes. Just think of old Lloyd George. The things they said about Lloyd George! And he was a prime minister...

He climbed into the Lancia. Oh G.o.d, such beautiful b.r.e.a.s.t.s! He sat motionless at the wheel for a short while, and then he smiled to himself. He reckoned that Constable d.i.c.kson could almost have hung his helmet there! It was an irreverent thought, but it made him feel a good deal better. He pulled carefully out of the car park and headed north on the final few miles of his journey.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX.

Merely corroborative detail, to add artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative.

W. S. Gilbert, The Mikado A SMALL GROUP of boys was kicking a football around at the side of a large block of cla.s.srooms which ab.u.t.ted on to the wide sports field, where sets of rugby and hockey posts demarcated the area of gra.s.s into neatly white-lined rectangles. The rest of the school was having lunch. The two men walked three times around the playing fields, hands in pockets, heads slightly forward, eyes downcast. They were about the same build, neither man above medium height; and to the football players they seemed unworthy of note, anonymous almost. Yet one of the two men pacing slowly over the gra.s.s was a chief inspector of police, and the other, one of their very own teachers, was a suspect in a murder case.

Morse questioned Ac.u.m about himself and his teaching career; about Valerie Taylor and Baines and Phillipson; about the conference in Oxford, times and places and people. And he learned nothing that seemed of particular interest or importance. The schoolmaster appeared pleasant enough - in a nondescript sort of way; he answered the inspector's questions with freedom and with what seemed a fair degree of guarded honesty. And so Morse told him, told him quietly yet quite categorically, that he was a liar; told him that he had indeed left the conference that Monday evening, at about 9.30 p.m., told him that he had walked to Kempis Street to see his former colleague, Mr Baines, and that he had been seen there; told him that, if he persisted in denying such a plain, incontrovertible statement of the truth, he, Morse, had little option but to take him back to Oxford where he would be held for questioning in connection with the murder of Mr Reginald Baines. It was as simple as that! And, in fact, it proved a good deal simpler than even Morse had dared to hope; for Ac.u.m no longer denied the plain, incontrovertible statement of the truth which the inspector had presented to him. They were on their third and final circuit of the playing fields, far away from the main school buildings, by the side of some neglected allotments, where the ramshackle sheds rusted away sadly in despairing disrepair. Here Ac.u.m stopped and nodded slowly.

'Just tell me what you did, sir, that's all.'

'I'd been sitting at the back of the hall - deliberately - and I left early. As you say, it was about half-past nine, or probably a bit earlier.'

'You went to see Baines?' Ac.u.m nodded. 'Why did you go to see him?'

'I don't know, really. I was getting a bit bored with the conference, and Baines lived fairly near. I thought I'd go and see if he was in and ask him out for a drink. It's always interesting to talk about old times, you know the sort of thing - what was going on at school, which members of staff were still there, which ones had left, what they were doing. You know what I mean.'

He spoke naturally and easily, and if he were a liar he seemed to Morse a fairly fluent one.

'Well,' continued Ac.u.m, 'I walked along there. I was in a bit of a hurry because I knew the pubs would be closed by half-past ten and time was getting on. I had a drink on the way and it must have been getting on for ten by the time I got there. I'd been there before, and thought he must be in because the light was on in the front room.'

'Were the curtains drawn?' For the first time since they had been talking together, Morse's voice grew sharper.

Ac.u.m thought for a moment. ”Yes, I'm almost certain they were.'

'Goon.'

'Well, I thought, as I say, that he must be in. So I knocked pretty loudly two orthreetimes on the door. But he didn't answer, or at least he didn't seem to hear me. I thought he might be in the front room perhaps with the TV on, so I went to the window and knocked on it.'

'Could you hear the TV? Or see it''

Ac.u.m shook his head; and to Morse it was all beginning to sound like a record stuck in its groove.

He knew for certain what was coming next 'It's a funny thing, Inspector, but I began to feel just a bit frightened - as if I were sort of trespa.s.sing and shouldn't really be there at all; as if he knew that I was there but didn't want to see me ... Anyway, I went back to the door and knocked again, and then I put my head round the door and shouted his name.'

Morse stood quite still, and considered his next question with care. If he was to get his piece of information, he wanted it to come from Ac.u.m himself without too much prompting.

”You put your head round the door, you say?'

'Yes. I just felt sure he was there.'

'Why did you feel that?'

'Well, there was a light in the front room and...” He hesitated for a moment, and seemed to be fumbling around in his mind for some fleeting, half-forgotten impression that had given him this feeling.

'Think back carefully, sir,' said Morse. 'Just picture yourself there again, standing at the door.

Take your time. Just put yourself back there. You're standing there in Kempis Street. Last Monday night...'

Ac.u.m shook his head slowly and frowned. He said nothing for a minute or two.

'You see, Inspector, I just had this idea that he was somewhere about. I almost knew he was. I thought he might just have slipped out somewhere for a few seconds because ...” It came back to him then, and he went on quickly. ”Yes, that's it. I remember now. I remember why I thought he must be there. It wasn't just the light in the front window. There was a light on in the hall because the front door was open. Not wide open, but standing ajar as if he'd just slipped out and would be back again any second.'

'And then?'

'I left. He wasn't there. I just left, that's all.' 'Why didn't you tell me all this when I rang you, sir?' 'I was frightened, Inspector. I'd been there, hadn't I? And he was probably lying there all the time - murdered. I was frightened, I really was. Wouldn't you have been?'

Morse drove into the centre of Caernarfon, and parked his car alongside the jetty under the great walls of the first Edward's finest castle. He found a Chinese restaurant nearby, and greedily gulped down the oriental fare that was set before him. It was his first meal for twenty-four hours, and he temporarily dismissed all else from his mind. Only over his coffee did he allow his restless brain to come to grips with the case once more; and by the time he had finished his second cup of coffee he had reached the firm conclusion that, whatever improbabilities remained to be explained away, especially the reasons given for calling on Baines, both Mrs Phillipson and David Ac.u.m had told him the truth, or something approximating to the truth, at least as far as their evidence concerned itself with the visits made to the house in Kempis Street.

Their accounts of what had taken place there were so clear, so mutually complementary, that he felt he should and would believe them. That bit about the door being slightly open, for example - exactly as Mrs Phillipson had left it before panicking and racing down to the lighted street. No.

Ac.u.m could not have made that up. Surely not. Unless ... It was the second time that he had qualified his conclusions with that sinister word 'unless'; and it troubled him. Ac.u.m and Mrs Phillipson. Was there any link at all between that improbable pair? If link there was, it had to have been forged at some point in the past, at some point more than two years ago, at the Roger Bacon Comprehensive School. Could there have been something? It was an idea, anyway. Yet as he drove out of the castle car park, he decided on balance that it was a lousy idea. In front of the castle he pa.s.sed the statue erected to commemorate the honourable member for Caemarfon (Lloyd George, no less) and as he drove out along the road to Capel Curig, his brain was as jumbled and cluttered as a magpie's nest.

He stopped briefly in the pa.s.s of Llanberis, and watched the tiny figures of the climbers, conspicuous only by their bright orange anoraks, perched at dizzying heights on the sheer mountain faces that towered ma.s.sively above the road on either side. He felt profoundly thankful that whatever the difficulties of his own job he was spared the risk, at every second, and every precarious hand- and foot-hold, of a vertical plunge to a certain death upon the rocks far, far below. Yet, in his own way, Morse knew that he too was scaling a peak and knew full well the blithe exhilaration of reaching the summit. So often there was only one way forward, only one.

And when one route seemed utterly impossible, one had to look for the nearly impossible alternative, to edge along the face of the cliff, to avoid the impa.s.se, and to lever oneself painstakingly up to the next ledge, and look up again and follow the only route. On the death of Baines, Morse had considered only a small group of likely suspects. The murderer could, of course, have been someone completely unconnected with the Valerie Taylor affair; but he doubted it. There had been five of them, and he now felt that the odds against Mrs Phillipson and David Ac.u.m had lengthened considerably. That left the Taylors, the pair of them, and Phillipson himself. It was time he tried to put together the facts, many of them very odd facts, that he had gleaned about these three. It must be one of them surely; for he felt convinced now that Baines had been murdered before the visits of Mrs Phillipson and David Ac.u.m. Yes, that was the only way it could have been. He grasped the firm fact with both hands and swung himself on to a higher ledge, and discovered that from this vantage point the view seemed altogether different.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN.

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