Read Morse's Greatest Mystery and Other Stories Online
Authors: Colin Dexter
Lewis smiled wryly to himself.
Mrs. Pamela Sherwood had turned out to be a slim, well-groomed, delicately featured woman—distressed, yes, but well in control. Lewis himself never really knew what to do or what to say in times of bereavement; but that was exactly why (as Morse well knew) he performed the job so successfully, since it was not unusual on such sad occasions for roles to be reversed and for the bereaved themselves to feel an instinctively reciprocal sympathy with the good sergeant.
As now.
Over coffee, and after identifying her husband’s body, Mrs. Sherwood herself had looked quickly through the contents of the wallet, her eyes intent as she took out one item after another, including the tickets.
One item after another … except of course for the photograph of the dusky siren whose features for a little while had recently held the Chief Inspector mesmerized.
But it was the message on Morse’s Ansaphone which displaced any thoughts of Mrs. Sherwood; a message left by the manager of The Randolph; a message which Lewis, now for the third time, replayed as he waited for Morse to return.
Bamber Goodall here, Chief Inspector. I had a personal call this morning just before twelve. A woman, youngish woman by the sound of her, said she’d got to speak to me and I accepted the call. She said she was feeling guilty because she was the woman who was going to stay with Mr. Sherwood. She said she’d driven him down in her own car. She’d kept out of the way when he’d booked in, and when he’d gone up to the room with their luggage. Then he’d come down again, given her the room-key, and said he’d expect her in about ten or fifteen minutes, after she’d parked the car—which she had done, up in Norham Gardens. It seems they’d both been worried about leaving the car in the hotel garage. Then when she got back and walked up to their room she’d opened the door to find him lying there, and she’d just “panicked”—her word—and grabbed her case—still unopened—and got the hell out of things. She drove out to the Cotswolds, and then back home this morning. She was still feeling awful about it, she said. Somehow she’d known he was dead—though she didn’t say
how
she knew. Well, that’s it really. When I said she ought to talk to the police she said she couldn’t. I tried to keep her talking but it was no good. She just kept saying that if only Mrs. Sherwood could be kept out of it all—you know—kept in the dark about things, about
her
, well, she’d be extremely grateful. So that’s it, really.
I’ll be in the hotel here till about eight-thirty this evening … if you want me.
During the replay of this message, Lewis had been conscious that Morse was standing beside him, listening (it seemed) intently; and as Goodall signed off, Lewis noted that Morse’s eyes were shining with excitement; and impatience, too—like a camel sniffing the coolness of the air and eager to ride forth at evening from the wells …
Although Lewis himself would not have made that particular simile.
Morse’s verdict, whispered and intense, was barely audible in the now silent office:
“She did it! She murdered him!”
For a few moments Lewis looked across the desk with mouth agape, like a young lad bidden to display his tonsils to the doctor. He would have asked about that unspecified “She,” but already Morse had picked up the phone, asking to be put through to the Path lab—urgently. And as he covered the speaker with the palm of his left hand, he gave his instructions:
“Go and take a full statement from the manager, Lewis. I want to know
exactly
what she told him.
Verbatim
, as far as—
“Ah, Doctor Hobson?”
“You
can drive back,” Morse had said the following morning when just after 10
A.M.
he himself took the wheel of the maroon-coloured Jaguar and began the drive up to Shrewsbury, via Motorways 40, 42, 6, and 54. One hundred and ten miles. No Services. An hour and a half. Lewis, whose only indulgence in life (apart from eggs
and chips) was speedy driving, would have cut fifteen minutes off the time.
Did
cut fifteen minutes off, on the return journey.
“Difficult to know why anyone’d ever want to go from Shrewsbury to Oxford by British Rail,” declared Lewis, as Morse pulled up outside the elegantly appointed, detached house that stood at 53 Leominster Drive.
“Mrs. Sherwood,” began Morse, “we have some difficult things to tell you. When your husband went off to Oxford, we have every reason to believe, I’m afraid, that he’d arranged to spend two nights with a woman-friend—with a mistress—in The Randolph Hotel. She’d driven him down to Oxford in her own car—”
Mrs. Sherwood shook her head and closed her eyes, like a young girl refusing to believe that Santa Claus was just a dream.
“You’ve got it all wrong! He went to Oxford by
train
—I took him to the station myself. He knew he’d be having quite a lot to drink at the conference—”
“He went to Oxford by
car,”
countered Morse. “His mistress drove him there.”
“But that’s
nonsense
! I’ve got the rail tickets—”
“Show me!”
From her handbag, Mrs. Sherwood took out her husband’s wallet; and from the wallet, the two tickets—which she handed to him.
“We
decided to buy these for you, Mrs. Sherwood, because we wanted to spare you some of the anguish and the pain of all this trouble. And if you’d been more observant, you’d have spotted the wrong date on them. Until yesterday, you see, we’d no suspicion at all that
your husband’s death was due to anything but natural causes.”
Her eyes flicked up sharply. “And now you’re saying …?”
Morse made no direct answer, but looked away from those compelling eyes, and slowly tore the rail tickets into smaller and smaller pieces, just as earlier he’d torn the photograph.
“Did you know your husband’s mistress?”
For a while it seemed that Mrs. Sherwood would challenge the premiss of Morse’s brutal question. But she didn’t.
“I know her.”
“We did find a photograph,” continued Morse, “but foolishly I tore it up, because, as I say, we wanted to—”
“She was hardly the first, Chief Inspector.”
“Please tell me who she is and where we can find her.”
But Mrs. Sherwood shook her head as she stared into some middle distance. “I felt jealous about his other women—of course I did. But I
envied
this one. I’d found out a few things about her and I think she was everything to Peter that I’d never been. You see, I’m so very careful and tight about life—about emotions, money, everything. And she’s open and vivacious, and wonderful in bed, for all I know …”
“And very young,” added Morse cruelly.
“About half Peter’s age, yes. Perhaps that’s what hurt more than anything.”
“But who
is
she, Mrs. Sherwood?”
Morse had lifted his fiercely blue eyes to challenge hers. Yet to no avail; and it was Lewis who pursued the questioning.
“We’re interested in two telephone calls, Mrs. Sher
wood, made about the time your husband died: one just before six o’clock; and one five or ten minutes later. At first we believed both calls were made by the same person. Yesterday, though, a woman rang and admitted making the second call—the one asking for a doctor—but she claimed quite certainly that she hadn’t made any earlier call—a call, we thought, possibly asking for your husband’s room-number, or whatever it was she needed to know. She said she already
knew
the room-number: he’d gone upstairs with the luggage after checking in, and then come down and actually
given
her the key—before she drove off to park the car somewhere. So what reason could she have had for ringing him?”
Mrs. Sherwood shrugged her thin shoulders. “Doesn’t seem much point, does there?”
“Do you think it was one of his other lady-loves?”
“Could have been—”
“You
, perhaps?” broke in Morse, very quietly.
Rising from her armchair, Mrs. Sherwood walked over to the french window and stood gazing out across the wide lawn.
“Is a wife not allowed to ring her husband? At least he almost always told me
where
he was staying, if not who he was staying with.”
“What time did you make the call?” continued Morse.
“Six—sixish? As you say.”
“Before or after?”
“Does it matter?”
“You said you’re—what was it?—a bit tight and careful about things like money.”
She nodded. “Silly really. We’d plenty of money—two salaries coming in.”
“You work in a pharmaceutical lab, I think?”
“Part-time, yes.”
“And you’re a Chemistry graduate.”
“Huh! You know all about me. But all you really want to know is about
her
. Am I right?”
“I’d like to know
more
about you, though. For example, the phone-rate gets cheaper after six o’clock, doesn’t it? So why didn’t you wait till
after
six o’clock—it was only a matter of a few minutes.”
“I didn’t think.”
“Come on, Mrs. Sherwood! You can do better than that.”
“No, I can’t.”
“You’ll have to, if you want us to find out who murdered your husband.”
She turned from the window, and in the pale face the eyes were now ablaze.
“Murdered?”
“Yes, murdered.”
“But you’re wrong! He died of a heart attack. That’s what they told me—the medical people—in Oxford.”
“We’ve had a further report from the police pathologist, Mrs. Sherwood. Sergeant!”
Lewis now read out the relevant extract from Dr. Hobson’s second report:
The glass capsule had shattered into small pieces, and the liquid contents had been almost entirely spilled. Our analysis however shows that the original insulin within the capsule had been injected with Sodium Fluoroacetate, a substance readily soluble in water; and extremely poisonous even in the smallest quantity, interfering fatally and almost immediately as it does
with the Krebs cycle of metabolism. For obvious reasons this substance is never openly available to the general public.
“But would be available,” added Morse slowly, “to someone working in a pharmaceutical lab.”
“My husband died of a heart attack! I was told so. Are you now saying he didn’t?”
“No.”
“So please tell me what you
are
saying! What’s all this about murder?”
“You
wished to murder your husband, Mrs. Sherwood.
You
poisoned the insulin capsule. That’s what I’m saying.”
She turned to stare out of the window again.
“And if I did?” she asked finally.
“I don’t know,” replied Morse simply. “But I believe you
intended
to poison your husband. You’d lived with him for twenty-odd years and you knew him to be an extremely meticulous and methodical man. You knew perfectly well that in Oxford, just as here at home, he’d almost certainly be taking his insulin at six o’clock that evening. And the reason you rang him up just
before
six o’clock was to make sure he
didn’t
inject himself from the capsule you’d poisoned. Please tell me if I’m wrong, Mrs. Sherwood! But I think that in spite of all that had happened, in spite of all his infidelities, you didn’t hate him
quite
enough to go through with your plan. In the last analysis, you wanted him to stay alive. Perhaps you even hoped he’d come to love you once again.”
She nodded weakly, and spoke in a sing-song voice as if the events she now described were distanced and unreal.
“Five to six, it was when I rang. The line was engaged
at first and I began to panic. But then I
did
get through. It was just like when I was a girl; when I used to play little games with myself. I just asked him if he was going to sleep with her that night … I wanted to shock him, you see … And if he said ‘no,’ I was going to tell him about the insulin.”
She stopped.
“And if he said ‘yes’?”
“It never got that far. I just—I just heard a great crash.”
“Don’t you think you may have murdered him just as surely as if you’d poisoned him yourself?”
She shook her head, more in bewilderment, it seemed, than in denial. “What will happen to me?”
“I just don’t know,” said Morse.
At the front door, she laid a hand lightly on his arm, and lowered her eyes.
“It was very kind of you—what you did.”
“But you won’t tell me who this other woman is?”
“No.”
Once the Jaguar had disappeared from view, Mrs. Sherwood moved back inside the house, a semi-smile upon her lips.
Too clever for his own good, that man! She’d played it mostly by ear, of course. But how easy he’d made it for her! With
him
pointing out the escape route she’d so desperately been seeking after his mention of the Sodium Fluoroacetate;
him
suggesting the blessedly mitigating circumstance that it was she, Pamela Sherwood, who had rung her husband;
she
who had tried not to
cause
, but to
prevent
her husband’s death. Why he’d even told her the
time of that telephone call—a call she’d never made, of course.
Oh, she’d willingly enough have faced the consequences of poisoning her husband, because above all things in life she’d wanted him dead. But now? If by some happy chance she were to be seen as guilty only of causing him a heart attack—well, she’d settle for that all right. Why not? He was dead, that was the main thing. And that Jane bloody Ballantyre—pox-ridden strumpet!—would have to seek some other demerara daddy now.
“You
were
kind, you know,” said Lewis as he drove the Jaguar out of Leominster Drive.
“How come?”
“Well, the photo—”
“ ‘Stupid,’ do you mean?”
“—and the rail tickets.”
“You think so?”
“Yes, I do. You probably know you haven’t got a reputation for being too generous with money—”
“No?”
“—but I reckon underneath you’re a bit of an old softie, really. I mean, forking out of your own pocket for those tickets …”
Morse opened his mouth as if to reply; but decided against it. He
would
(he promised himself) inform Lewis about the expenses claim he had already submitted for £26—but not for the time being.