Read Morse's Greatest Mystery and Other Stories Online
Authors: Colin Dexter
Morse's Greatest Mystery and Other Stories (10 page)
“You think not?” The half-smile on Wise’s face made Morse rather uncomfortably aware that a slightly more intelligent analysis had been expected of him.
“You don’t think,” suggested Morse weakly, “that Agnes might have had some plastic surgery or something?”
“No, no. It’s just that there are far too many coincidences for
me
to swallow.
Everything
fitted—down to the last detail. For example, Dodo told me that she and Ambrose once got a bit morbid about the possibility of his being killed in the war and how he’d told her that he’d settle for a couple of bits of music when they buried him: the ‘In Paradisum’—”
“Lovely choice!” interjected Morse. “I saw that in the Service.”
“—and the adagio from the Mozart Clarinet Concerto—”
“Ah yes! K662.”
“K622.”
“Oh!”
Morse knew that he wasn’t scoring many points; knew, too, that Wise was perfectly correct in believing that the coincidences were getting way out of hand. But he had no time at all to develop the quite extraordinary possibility that suddenly leaped into his brain; because Wise himself was clearly most anxious to propound his own equally astonishing conclusions.
“What would you say, Inspector, if I told you that Dodo wasn’t Ambrose Whitaker’s sister at all—
she was his wife.”
Morse’s face registered a degree of genuine surprise, but he allowed Wise to continue without interruption.
“It would account for quite a few things, don’t you think? For example, it always seemed a bit odd to me that when Ambrose got any leave he invariably came all the way from Cornwall here to Oxford—via
Bristol
, at that!—just to see his
sister
. You’d think he’d have called in on his parents once in a while, wouldn’t you? They were much nearer than Dodo was; and well worth keeping the right side of, surely? But it wouldn’t be surprising if he took every opportunity of coming all the way to Oxford to see his
wife
, would it? And that would certainly tie up with him sleeping in her room. You know, with all that family money he could have taken a suite in The Randolph if he’d wanted. Yet instead of that, he slept—or so he said—on Dodo’s
floor
. Then again, it
would probably account for the fact that she never once let me touch her physically—not even hold hands. She was fond of me, though—I know she was …”
Momentarily Wise stopped, nodding slowly to himself. “For some reason the Whitakers must have disapproved of Ambrose’s marriage and wanted as little as possible to do with his wartime bride—hence their cool reception of me, Inspector! There may have been talk of disinheriting him—I don’t know. I don’t
know
anything, of course. But I suspect she was probably pregnant underneath that boiler-suit of hers, and as her time drew nearer she just
had
to leave Oxford. Then? Your guess is as good as mine: she died—she was killed in an air-raid—she got divorced—anything. Ambrose remarried, and the woman I met at the Memorial Service was his
second
wife.”
“Mm.” Morse was looking decidedly dubious. “But if this Dodo girl
was
his wife, and if his parents couldn’t stand the sight or sound of her, why on earth did they write to her every week? And why did she think she had the right to invite
you
down to Bristol? To
have
a key, even—let alone to give
you
one.” Morse shook his head slowly. “She must have been pretty sure she could take their good-will for granted, I reckon.”
“You think they
were
her parents, then,” said Wise flatly.
“I’m sure of it,” said Morse.
Wise shook his head in exasperation. “What the hell
is
the explanation, then?”
“Oh, I don’t think there’s much doubt about that,” said Morse. But he spoke these words to himself, and not to Wise. And very soon afterwards, seeing little prospect of any further replenishment, he took his leave—with
the promise that he would give the problem “a little consideration.”
The following Monday morning, Morse stood beside the Traffic Comptroller at Kidlington Police HQ and watched as “AW 1” was keyed into the Car Registration computer. Immediately, the VDU spelled out the information that the car was still registered under the name of Mr. A. Whitaker, 6 West View Crescent, Bournemouth; and noting the address Morse walked thoughtfully back to his ground-floor office. After ringing Directory Inquiries, and getting the Bournemouth telephone number, he was soon speaking to Mrs. Whitaker herself, who in turn was soon promising to do exactly as Morse had requested.
Then Morse rang the War Office.
Ten days later, Philip Wise returned from a week’s holiday in Spain to find a long note from Morse.
P. W.
I’ve discovered a few more facts, but some of what follows may possibly be pure fiction. As you know, records galore got destroyed in the last war, affording limitless opportunity for people to cover up their traces by means of others’ identity-cards and so on, especially after a period of chaos and carnage when nobody knew who was who or which corpse was which.
After Dunkirk, for instance.
Gunner (as he then was) Whitaker was the only man of thirty on board who survived, quite miraculously, when the
Edna
(a flat-bottomed barge registered in
Felixstowe) was blown out of the water by a German dive-bomber on May 30th, 1940. He was picked up, with only a pair of waterlogged pants and a wrist-watch to call his own, by the naval sloop
Artemis
, and was landed at Dover, along with tens of thousands of other soldiers from almost every regiment in the land. (My own imaginative faculties now come wholly into play.) In due course, he was put on a train and sent to a temporary rehabilitation camp—as it happened, the one here in Oxford up on Headington Hill.
The fact that he was in a state of profound shock, with his nerves half-shot to pieces, is probably sufficient to account for his walking out of this camp (quite literally) after only one night under canvas, and hitchhiking down to Bristol. But he didn’t walk out alone. He took a friend with him, a man from the same regiment; and they both quite deliberately got out of the camp before either could be re-documented and re-posted. This second man had only a mother and sister as close family, who were both killed in one of the very first air-raids on Plymouth; and for some (doubtless considerable) sum of money, donated by the protective Whitaker parents, this man agreed to leave on permanent record the official War Office version of his fate after Dunkirk—“Missing presumed killed”—and for the rest of the war to assume the name and role of Ambrose Whitaker. In short, my guess is that the man who came up from Bodmin to see Dodo
was not Ambrose Whitaker at all
.
Your own guess about things fitted some of the facts well enough; but those facts also fit into a totally different pattern. Just consider some of them again. First, there was the weekly letter from Bristol, from parents
who seemingly didn’t even want to acknowledge their daughter and who hid all the family photos when you stayed with them. Odd! Then, take this daughter of theirs, Dodo. No great shakes physically, and only just up to attracting an impressionable young man after he’d had a few pints (please don’t think me unfair!) in a dim pub-lounge or a candle-lit bedroom—yet she decided to hide whatever charms she’d got under a baggy boiler-suit. Decidedly odd! What else did you tell me about her? She was nervy; she had a deepish voice; she wore too much face-powder; she knew a great deal about the war … (You’ve guessed the truth by now, I’m sure.) Her Christian name began with “A”, and you saw her sign her name that way at the Record Library—with the sinewy fingers of an executant musician. But that
wasn’t
odd, was it? Her name
did
begin with “A,” and Ambrose Whitaker, as we know, was himself a fine pianist. And so it wasn’t only the scar on her jaw she was anxious to conceal with those layers of face-powder—it was the stubble of a beard that grew there every day. Because Dodo Whitaker was a man! And not just any tuppenny-ha’penny old man, either: he was
Ambrose Whitaker
.
Two points remain to be cleared up. First, why was it necessary for Ambrose Whitaker to pose as a woman? Second, what was the relationship between Ambrose and the artillery corporal from Bodmin? On the first point, it’s clear that if he wanted to avoid any further wartime traumas Ambrose couldn’t stay in Bristol, where he was far too well known. Even if he moved to a place where he wasn’t known, it wouldn’t have been completely safe to move
as a man:
because suspicious questions were always going to be asked in
wartime about a young fellow who looked as if he might well be dodging the column. So he took out a double insurance on his deception—for him a desperately needed deception—not only by moving to Oxford, but also by dressing and living
as a woman
. On the second point, we don’t perhaps need to probe too deeply into the reasons why the sensitive and effeminate Ambrose was happy to take every opportunity of spending his nights with (forgive me!) the rather crude, whisky-swilling opportunist you got to know in the war. Such speculation is always a little distasteful, and I will say no more about it.
I rang Ambrose’s widow, asking for a wartime photograph of her husband, and I gave her your address, telling her you are an archivist working for the Imperial War Museum. You should hear from her soon; and when you do you’ll be as near as anyone is ever likely to be to knowing the truth about this curious affair.
E. M.
It was two days later that a still-pyjamaed Wise took delivery of a stiff white envelope, in which he found a brief note, together with a photograph of a young man in army uniform—a photograph in which no attempt had been made to turn the left-hand side of the sitter’s face away from the honesty of the camera lens, or to retouch the line of a cruel scar that stretched across the face’s lower jaw. And as Philip Wise looked down at the photograph he saw staring back at him the familiar, faithless eyes of Dodo Whitaker.
LULU-BAR MOTEL
“I am sorry I have not learnt to play at cards. It is very useful in life.”
(Samuel Johnson, as reported by Boswell in
Tour to the Hebrides
)
I shall never be able to forget what Louis said—chiefly, no doubt, because he said it so often, a cynical smile slowly softening that calculating old mouth of his: “People are so gullible!”—that’s what he kept on saying, our Louis. And I’ve used those selfsame words a thousand times myself—used them again last night to this fat-walleted coach-load of mine as they debussed at the Lulu-Bar Motel before tucking their starched napkins over their legs and starting into one of Louis’s five-star four-coursers, with all the wines and a final slim liqueur. Yes, people are so gullible … Not
quite
all of them (make no mistake!)—and please don’t misunderstand me. This particular manifestation of our human frailty is of only marginal concern to me personally, since occasionally I cut a thinnish slice of that great cake for myself—as I did just before I unloaded those matching sets of leather cases and hulked them round the motel corridors.
But let’s get the chronology correct. All that hulking around comes right after we’ve pulled into the motel where—as always—I turn to all the good people (the black briefcase tight under my right arm) and tell them we’re here, folks; here for the first-night stop on a wunnerful tour, which every single one o’ you is goin’ to enjoy real great. From tomorrow—and I’m really sorry about this, folks—you won’t have me personally lookin’ after you anymore; but that’s how the operation operates. I’m just the first-leg man myself, and someone else’ll have the real privilege of drivin’ you out on the second leg post-breakfast. Tonight itself, though, I’ll be hangin’ around the cocktail bar (got that?), and if you’ve any problems about …well, about
anything
, you just come along and talk to me, and we’ll sort things out real easy. One thing, folks. Just one small friendly word o’ counsel to you all. There’s one or two guys around these parts who are about as quick an’ as slick an’ as smooth as a well-soaped ferret. Now, the last thing I’d ever try to do is stop you enjoyin’ your vaycaytions, and maybe one or two of you could fancy your chances with a deck o’ cards against the deadliest dealer from here to Detroit. But … well, as I say, just a friendly word o’ counsel, folks. Which is this:
some people are so gullible!
—and I just wouldn’t like it if any o’ you—well, as I say, I just wouldn’t like it.
That’s the way I usually dress it up, and not a bad little dressing up at that, as I think you’ll agree. “OK” (do I hear you say?) “if some of them want to transfer their savings to someone else’s account—so what? You can’t live other folks’ lives for them, now can you? You did your best, Danny boy. So forget it!” Which all makes good logical sense, as I know. But they still worry
me a little—all those warm-hearted, clean-living folk, because—well, simply because they’re so gullible. And if you don’t relish reading about such pleasant folk who plop like juicy pears into the pockets of sharp-fingered charlatans—well, you’re not going to like this story. You’re not going to like it one little bit.