Last Bus to Woodstock (22 page)

Bernard left college at about twenty-past six. The roads were getting free again by now and he had an easy journey home. He let himself in with his Yale key and hung up his coat. Funny smell. Gas?

‘Margaret?’ He put his brief-case in the front room. ‘Margaret?’ He walked to the kitchen and found the door locked. ‘Margaret!’ He rattled the knob of the kitchen door, but it was firmly locked on the other side. He banged on the door. ‘Margaret! Margaret! Are you there?’ He could smell the gas more strongly now. His mouth went completely dry and there was wild panic in his voice. ‘MARGARET!’ He rushed back to the front door, through the side gate, and tried the back door. It was locked. He whimpered like a child. He looked into the kitchen through the large window above the sink. The electric light was on and for a fraction of a second a last ember of hope flared up, and glowed, and then was gone. The surrealistic sight that met his eyes was so strangely improbable that it registered itself blankly as a meaningless picture on the retina of his eyes – a sight without significance – a waxwork model, bright-eyed and brightly hued, with a fixed, staring smile. What was she doing sitting on the floor like that? Cleaning the oven?

He picked up a house-brick lying by the side of the wall, smashed a pane in the window, and cut his fingers badly as he reached for the catch and opened the window from the inside. The nauseating smell of gas hit him with an almost physical impact, and it was some seconds before, holding his handkerchief to his face, he climbed awkwardly in through the window and turned off the gas. Margaret’s head was just inside the oven, resting on a soft red cushion. In a numbed, irrational way he thought he should put the cushion back where it came from; it was from the settee in the lounge. He looked down with shocked, zombie-like eyes at the jagged cuts on his hand and mechanically dabbed them with his handkerchief. He saw the sticky brown paper lining the gaps by the door-jambs and the window, and noticed that Margaret had cut the ends as neatly as she always did when she wrapped the children’s birthday presents. The children! Thank God they were away! He saw the scissors on the formica top over the washing machine, and like an automaton he picked them up and put them in the drawer. The smell was infinitely sickly still, and he felt the vomit rising in his gorge. And now the horror of it all was gradually seeping into his mind, like a pool of ink into blotting paper. He knew that she was dead.

He unlocked the kitchen door, picked up the phone in the hall and in a dazed, uncomprehending voice he asked for the police. A letter addressed to him was lying beside the telephone directory. He picked it up and put it in his breast pocket and returned to the kitchen.

Ten minutes later the police found him there, sitting on the floor beside his wife, his hand on her hair, his eyes bleak and glazed. He had been deaf to the strident ringing of the front door bell.

Morse arrived only a few minutes after the police car and the ambulance. It was Inspector Bell of the Oxford City Police who had called Morse; Crowther had insisted on it. The two Inspectors had met several times before and stood in the hallway talking together in muted voices. Bernard had been led unresistingly from the kitchen by a police doctor and was now sitting in the lounge, his head sunk into his hands. He appeared unaware of what was going on or what was being said, but when Morse came into the lounge he seemed to come to life again.

‘Hullo, Inspector.’ Morse put his hand on Crowther’s shoulder, but could think of nothing to say that might help. Nothing could help. ‘She left this, Inspector.’ Bernard reached into his breast pocket and pulled out the sealed envelope.

‘It’s for you, you know, sir; it’s addressed to you – not to me,’ said Morse quietly.

‘I know. But you read it. I can’t.’ He put his head in his hands again, and sobbed quietly.

Morse looked enquiringly at his fellow-Inspector. Bell nodded and Morse carefully opened the letter.

It wasn’t going to be much comfort, but Crowther had got to face it some time.

‘Please read it, sir.’

Bernard read it, but he showed no emotion. His despair could plumb no lower depths. ‘What about the children?’ he said at last.

‘Don’t worry yourself about that, sir. We’ll look after everything.’ The police doctor’s voice was brisk. He was no stranger to such situations, and he knew the procedure from this point on. It wasn’t much that he could do – but it was something.

‘Look, sir, I want you to take . . .’

‘What about the children?’ He was a shattered, broken man, and Morse left him to the ministrations of the doctor. He retired with Bell to the front room, and noticed the list of the accounts, insurances, mortgage repayments, and stock-exchange holdings which Margaret had left so neatly ordered under a paper-weight on the desk. But he didn’t touch them. They were something between a husband and his wife, a wife who had been alive when he had interviewed Crowther earlier that day.

‘You know him, then?’ asked Bell.

‘I saw him this morning,’ said Morse. ‘I saw him about the Woodstock murder.’

‘Really?’ Bell looked surprised.

‘He was the man who picked up the girls.’

‘You think he was involved?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Morse.

‘Has this business got anything to do with it?’

‘I don’t know.’

The ambulance was still waiting outside and curious eyes were peeping from all the curtains along the road. In the kitchen Morse looked down at Margaret Crowther. He had never seen her before, and he was surprised to realize how attractive she must have been. Fortyish? Hair greying a little, but a good, firm figure and a finely featured face, twisted now and blue.

‘No point in keeping her here,’ said Bell.

Morse shook his head. ‘No point at all.’

‘It takes a long time, you know, this North Sea gas.’

The two men talked in a desultory way for several minutes, and Morse prepared to leave. But as he walked out to his car, he was called back by the police doctor.

‘Can you come back a minute, Inspector?’ Morse re-entered the house.

‘He says he must talk to you.’

Crowther sat with his head against the back of the chair. He was breathing heavily and the sweat stood out upon his brow. He was in a state of deep shock, and was already under sedation.

‘Inspector,’ he opened his eyes wearily. ‘Inspector, I’ve got to talk to you.’ He had great difficulty in getting this far, and Morse looked to the doctor, who slowly shook his head.

‘Tomorrow, sir,’ said Morse. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow.’

‘Inspector, I’ve got to talk to you.’

‘Yes, I know. But not now. We’ll talk tomorrow. It’ll be all right then.’ Morse put his hand to Crowther’s forehead and felt the clammy wetness there.

‘Inspector!’ But the top corner of the walls where Crowther was trying to focus was slowly disintegrating before his eyes; the angles melted and spiralled and faded away.

Morse drove slowly out of Southdown Road and realized just how close Crowther lived to Jennifer Coleby. It was a black night and the moon was hidden away deep behind the lowering clouds. Rectangles of light, shaded by curtains, showed from most of the front-room windows, and in many Morse could see the light-blue phosphorescent glow of television screens. He looked at one house in particular and looked up at one window in it, the window directly above the door. But it was dark, and he drove on.

M
ORSE HAD SLEPT
very badly and woke with a throbbing head. He hated suicides. Why had she done it? Was suicide just the coward’s refuge from some black despair? Or was it in its way an act of courage that revealed a perverted sort of valour? Not that, though. So many other lives were intertwined: no burdens were shed – they were merely passed from the shoulders of one to those of another. Morse’s mind would give itself no rest but twirled around on some interminable funfair ride.

It was past nine o’clock before he was sitting in his leather chair, and his sombre mood draped itself over his sagging shoulders. He summoned Lewis, who knocked apprehensively on the door before going in; but Morse had seemingly lost all recollection of the nasty little episode the day before. He told Lewis the facts of Margaret Crowther’s suicide.

‘Do you think he’s got something important to tell us, sir?’

There was a knock on the door before Lewis could learn the answer to his question, and a young girl brought in the post, said a bright ‘Good morning’ and was off. Morse fingered through the dozen or so letters and his eye fell on an unopened envelope marked ‘strictly private’ and addressed to himself. The envelope was exactly similar to the one he had seen the previous evening.

‘I don’t know whether Crowther’s got anything to tell us or not; but it looks as if his late wife has.’ He opened the envelope neatly with a letter-knife and read its typewritten contents aloud to Lewis.