Last Seen Wearing (16 page)

CHAPTER NINETEEN

One morn I miss'd him on the custom'd hill.

(Thomas Gray,

Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard)

F
ULL MORNING ASSEMBLY
at the Roger Bacon Comprehensive School began at 8.50. The staff stood at the back of the main hall, wearing (at least those authorized to do so) the insignia of their respective universities; it was something the head insisted on. Punctual to the second, and flanked at some short distance in the rear by the second master and the senior mistress, Phillipson, begowned and behooded, walked from the back of the hall, and the pupils rose to their feet as the procession made its way down the central gangway, climbed the short flight of steps at the side and mounted on to the stage itself. The routine seldom varied: a hymn sung, a prayer intoned, a passage read from Holy Writ—and paid for one more day were the proper respects to the Almighty. The last unsynchronized 'Amen' marked the end of morning devotions, and gave the cue to the second master to recall the attention of the assembled host to more terrestrial things. Each morning he announced, in clear, unhurried tones, any changes in the day's procedure necessitated by staff absences, house activities, the times and places of society meetings, and the results of the sports teams. And, always, reserved until the end, he read with doomsday gravity a list of names; the names of pupils who would report outside the staff room immediately after the assembly was finished: the recalcitrants, the anarchists, the obstructionists, the truants, the skivers, and the defectors in general from the rules that governed the corporate life of the establishment.

   As the procession walked up the central aisle on Tuesday morning, and as the school rose en bloc from their seats, several heads turned towards each other and many whispered voices asked where Baines could be; not even the oldest pupils could remember him being away for a single day before. The senior mistress looked lopsided and lost: it was like the dissolution of the Trinity. Phillipson himself read the notices, referring in no way to the absence of his adjutant. The girls' hockey team had achieved a rare and decisive victory, and the school greeted the news with unwonted enthusiasm. The chess club would meet in the physics lab and 4C (for unspecified criminality) would be staying in after school. The following pupils, etc., etc. Phillipson turned away from the rostrum and walked out through the wings. The school chattered noisily and prepared to go to their classrooms.

At lunchtime Phillipson spoke to his secretary.

   'No word from Mr. Baines yet?'

   'Nothing. Do you think we should give him a ring?' Phillipson considered for a moment. 'Perhaps we should. What do you think?'

   'Not like him to be away, is it?'

   'No, it isn't. Give him a ring now.'

   Mrs. Webb rang Baines's Oxford number and the distant burring seemed to echo in a vaulted, ominous silence.

   'There's no answer,' she said.

At 2.15 p.m. a middle-aged woman took from her handbag the key to Baines's house; she cleaned for him three afternoons a week. Oddly, the door was unlocked and she pushed it open and walked in. The curtains were still drawn and the electric light was still turned on in the living room, as well as in the kitchen, the door to which stood open wide. And even before she walked through to the kitchen she saw the slumped figure of Baines in front of the refrigerator, a long-handled household knife plunged deep into his back, the dried blood forming a horrid blotch upon the cotton shirt, like a deranged artist's study in claret and blue.

   She screamed hysterically.

It was 4.30 p.m. before the fingerprint man and the photographer were finished, and before the humpbacked surgeon straightened his afflicted spine as far as nature would permit

   'Well?' asked Morse.

   'Difficult to say. Anywhere from sixteen to twenty hours.'

   'Can't you pin it down any closer?'

   'No.'

   Morse had been in the house just over an hour, for much of which time he had been sitting abstractedly in one of the armchairs in the living room, waiting for the others to leave. He doubted they could tell him much, anyway. No signs of forcible entry, nothing stolen (or not apparently so), no fingerprints, no blood-stained footprints. Just a dead man, and a deep pool of blood and a fridge with an open door.

   A police car jerked to a halt outside and Lewis came in. 'He wasn't at school this morning, sir.'

   'Hardly surprising,' said Morse, without any conscious humour.

   'Do we know when he was murdered?'

   'Between eight o'clock and midnight, they say.'

   'Pretty vague, sir.'

   Morse nodded. 'Pretty vague.'

   'Did you expect something like this to happen?'

   Morse shook his head. 'Never dreamed of it.'

   'Do you think it's all connected?'

   'What do you think?'

   'Somebody probably thought that Baines was going to tell us what he knew.' Morse grunted noncommittally. 'Funny, isn't it, sir?' Lewis glanced at his watch. 'He'd have told us by now, wouldn't he? And I've been thinking, sir.' He looked earnestly at the inspector. 'There weren't many who knew you were going to see Baines this afternoon, were there? Only Phillipson really.'

   'Each of them could have told somebody else.'

   'Yes, but—'

   'Oh, it's a good point I see what you're getting at. How did Phillipson take the news, by the way?'

   'Seemed pretty shattered, sir.'

   'I wonder where he was between eight o'clock and midnight,' mumbled Morse, half to himself, as he eased himself out of the armchair. 'We'd better try to look like detectives, Lewis.'

   The ambulance men asked if they could have the body, and Morse walked with them into the kitchen. Baines had been eased gently on to his right side, and Morse bent down and eased the knife slowly from the second master's back. What an ugly business murder was. It was a wooden-handled carving knife. 'Prestige, Made in England', some 35-36 centimetres long, the cutting blade honed along its entire edge to a razor-sharp ferocity. Globules of fresh pink blood oozed from the wicked-looking wound, and gradually seeped over the stiff clotted mess that once had been a blue shirt. They took Baines away in a white sheet.

   You know, Lewis, I think whoever killed him was bloody lucky. It's not too easy to stab a man in the back, you know. You've got to miss the spinal column and the ribs and the shoulder blades, and even then you've got to be lucky to kill someone straight off. Baines must have been leaning forward, slightly over to his right and exposing about the one place that makes it comparatively easy. Just like going through a joint of beef.'

   Lewis loathed the sight of death, and he felt his stomach turning over. He walked to the sink for a glass of water. The cutlery and the crockery from Baines's last meal were washed up and neatly stacked on the draining board, the dish cloth squeezed out and draped over the bowl.

   'Perhaps the post-mortem'll tell us what time he had his supper,' suggested Lewis hopefully.

   Morse was unenthusiastic. He followed Lewis to the sink and looked around half-heartedly. He opened the drawer at the right of the sink unit. The usual collection: teaspoons, tablespoons, wooden spoons, a fish slice, two corkscrews, kitchen scissors, a potato peeler, various meat skewers, a steel—and a kitchen knife. Morse picked up the knife and looked at it carefully. The handle was bone, and the blade was worn away with constant sharpening into a narrowed strip. 'He's had this a good while,' said Morse. He ran his finger along the blade; it had almost the same cruel sharpness as the blade that had lodged its head in Baines's heart.

   'How many carving knives do you keep at home, Lewis?'

   'Just the one.'

   'You wouldn't think of buying another one?'

   'No point, really, is there?'

   'No,' said Morse. He placed the murder weapon on the kitchen table and looked around. There seemed singularly little point in any inspection, however intelligently directed, of the tins of processed peas and preserved plums that lined the shelves of the narrow larder.

   'Let's move next door, Lewis. You take the desk; I'll have a look at the books.'

   Most of the bookshelves were taken up with works on mathematics, and Morse looked with some interest at a comprehensive set of textbooks on the
School Mathematics Project,
lined up in correct order from Book 1 to Book 10, and beside them the corresponding Teacher's Guide for each volume. Morse delved diffidently into Book 1.

   'Know anything about modern maths, Lewis?'

   'Modern maths? Ha! I'm an acknowledged expert. I do all the kids' maths homework.'

   'Oh.' Morse decided to puzzle his brain no more on how 23 in base 10 could be expressed in base 5, replaced the volume, and inspected the rest of Baines's library. He'd been numerate all right. But literate? Doubtful. On the whole Morse felt slightly more sympathy with Maguire's uncompromising collection.

   As he stood by the shelves the grim, brutal fact of Baines's murder slowly sank into his mind. As yet it figured as an isolated issue; he'd had no chance of thinking of it in any other context. But he would be doing so soon, very soon. In fact some of the basic implications were already apparent. Or was he fooling himself again? No. It meant, for a start, that the donkey knew for certain which bundle of hay to go for, and that, at least, was one step forward. Baines must have known something. Correction. Baines must have known virtually everything. Was that the reason for his death, though? It seemed the likeliest explanation. But who had killed him? Who? From the look of things the murderer must have been known to Baines—known pretty well; must have walked into the kitchen and stood there as Baines reached inside the fridge for something. And the murderer had carried a knife—surely that was a reasonable inference? Had brought the knife into the house. But how the hell did anyone carry a knife as big as that around? Stuff it down your socks, perhaps? Unless . . .

   From across the room a low-pitched whistle of staggering disbelief postponed any answers that might have been forthcoming to these and similar questions. Lewis's facial expression was one of thrilled excitement mingled with pained incredulity.

   'You'd better come over here straight away, sir.'

   Morse himself looked down into the bottom right-hand drawer of the desk; and he felt the hairs at the nape of his neck grow stiff. A book lay in the drawer, an exercise book; an exercise book from the Roger Bacon Comprehensive School; and on the front of the exercise book a name, a most familiar name, was inscribed in capital letters: VALERIE TAYLOR: APPLIED SCIENCE. The two men looked at each other and said nothing. Finally Morse picked up the book gently, placing the top of each index finger along the spine; and as he did so, two loose sheets of paper fell out and fluttered to the floor. Morse picked them up and placed them on the desk. The sheets contained drafts of a short letter; a letter which began Dear Mum and Dad and ended Love Valerie. Several individual words were crossed out and the identical words, but with minor alterations to the lettering, written above them; and between the drafts were whole lines of individual letters, practised and slowly perfected: w's, r's, and t's. It was Lewis who broke the long silence.