Morse's Greatest Mystery and Other Stories (23 page)

“We’d better be getting back, sir.”

“Yes.”

“Thanks for a lovely lunch.”

“Carol! I’ve had a lot to chink—you know that. But I just want you to know how ver’ much I’d like to go to bed with you this afternoon.”

Carol’s heart sank.

“Don’t be silly! Come on, let’s get back!”

He was hurt, she knew that; a bit ashamed, too. And as they walked back he tried so very hard to sound his usual sober self.

That night Carol Summerson dreamed of Frank Rawlins.

Erotically.

* * *

Carol’s raise came through in mid-January, and she was thrilled.

“I’m ever so grateful, sir.”

“You deserve it.”

“Will you come out one day and have lunch with
me
?”

“When?”

“Whenever you’re free.”

“Today?”

“Today!”

She saw to it that he drank almost all the wine, and she insisted on buying him a glass of brandy after their meal. They were sitting close together now, and gently she moved her right leg against the rough tweed of his trousers. And, just as gently, he responded, saying nothing, yet saying everything.

“Another brandy?” she ventured.

Rawlins looked down at his empty glass, and smiled a little sadly.

“Have you ever thought how wonderful it would be to have a quiet, civilized little place all to yourself where—”

He stopped, and there was a long silence between them before Carol spoke softly in his ear.

“But I’ve
got
a nice little place out at Wheatley. You see, John’s away for a few days …”

Seven weeks later, Carol’s GP told her that she was quite definitely pregnant.

On the Friday evening of that same week, John Summerson called as usual to collect his wife. It was quarter to five—exactly so—when he walked through into Rawlins’s office and sat down in the chair that his wife had just vacated.

Over his glasses, Rawlins’s eyes registered puzzlement:
it was as though a new boy had just strolled into the Masters’ Common Room.

“Can I help you? John—isn’t it?”

“You had sex with my wife.” Summerson spoke quietly, firmly—defying all denial.

“Where on earth did you get such—?”

“You’re lying!”

“Look here! You can’t be serious—”

“She’s pregnant!”

“But you can’t—”

“I
watched
you!” hissed Summerson.

“But you—”

“Shut up! I’m not the father. I can
never
be a father. You do understand what I’m saying, don’t you?”

“Yes,” answered Rawlins softly.

“Did you
enjoy
it?” The young man’s eyes were blazing with a terrible anguish.

“I just—”

“Shut up!”

Rawlins sank back in his chair, his shoulders sagging.

“I’m redundant now,” continued Summerson. “They gave me £3,000 for the five years I worked there. There’s not
much
you can do with £3,000, is there, Professor?”

Rawlins closed his eyes and thought of his sons and thought of Florence and thought of himself, too: he knew exactly what £3,000 might possibly have bought.

When he opened his eyes he saw the revolver in Summerson’s right hand—a British Enfield .380, Number 2, Mark 1, the wooden stock a dirty nicotine-brown, the gunmetal of the fluted barrel as clean and gleaming as a polished stone. Summerson swivelled the revolver round until it pointed straight at Rawlins’s heart, and his finger
squeezed the trigger until the hammer lifted to the limit of the catch.

“Pretty accurate, they tell me, at such close range as this, Professor!”

Rawlins said nothing, his eyes seemingly mesmerized as he stared at the cylinder-chamber. But now the revolver was no longer pointing at him; for with slow deliberation Summerson turned it round upon himself and brought the tip of the shining barrel up against his own right temple, where the index finger of his right hand finally exacted that minimal extra pressure on the double-action trigger, and the hammer drove against the cylinder-chamber.

The children had eaten half an hour previously, and Florence Rawlins looked down sadly at the juiceless fillet that lay beneath the low-burning grill. Why couldn’t Frank be more thoughtful?

Six o’clock.

Ten past.

Twenty past.

At half-past six she rang his private office number, but there was no reply.

“Fine! Fine!” The young gynaecologist had repeated. “No problems. Now you’ll promise not to smoke, won’t you?” “I promise.” Of course she wouldn’t smoke! Her thoughts drifted back happily to Rawlins … With a father like Rawlins, it would surely be a
boy
—and pretty certainly a
clever
little boy, at that! She’d longed to be a mother ever since she’d been a young girl, when she’d played incessantly, obsessively almost, with her dollies—dressing
them, combing their lank locks, bending their stiff joints before propping them up against the backs of chairs …

Six weeks after that first ante-natal clinic, an oblong parcel was delivered to the Rawlinses’ residence, where later in the day the Professor of Forensic Medicine inspected its contents with enthusiasm. The new case would naturally take pride of place, perhaps just inside the front entrance, he thought. He fitted the revolver carefully inside the specially constructed case, closed the glass cover, and held the exhibit up against some imaginary hook on the facing wall. Not a bad reward, really, for being trapped into exercising his dubiously enviable knack of procreating male offspring with even the most perfunctory ejaculation. And even that extraordinary afternoon when young Summerson had pointed the revolver at his heart hadn’t been all that traumatic an experience really, because long before the final, cosmically anticlimactic “click” he had known (as any expert in the field would have known) that there were no bullets in the open chambers of the revolver—not a single one. For all that though, it had been a great relief when the revolver had at last been lowered, and a genuine surprise when Summerson had presented it to him across the desk—reward for services rendered, so to speak. And he really
had
needed those two large whiskys, although he’d afterwards agreed with a worried, tearful Florence that he should have told her he’d be late.

On September 29 of that same year, a baby was delivered on the third floor of the Maternity Hospital up at Headington, and the young father had the name all ready. The gunsmith from Guildford may not have bothered to work
out any mathematical odds, but John Summerson had calculated the chances of a penny coming down heads for a
seventh
time; and at 128:1, they’d seemed to him wildly improbable.

They called the lovely little girl “Francesca.”

There were longish periods now when the A34 was quiet, almost completely free of the swishing traffic. Only up there along the lay-by, two “Long Vehicle” lorries ahead, was there still any continuum of activity—where at the side of a converted white caravan a single electric light bulb illuminated
MACS SNAX
—Open 24 Hour’s,.

Though with little formal education behind him, Danny had still felt the itch to transpose that single apostrophe from the last word to the first when, three-quarters of an hour earlier, he’d walked along to the serving-hatch and ordered a cup of tea and a Melton Mowbray pork-pie. Two other drivers had stood there then, chatting in desultory fashion and intermittently stamping their feet,
their white plastic cups of piping-hot tea steaming brightly in the cold air of that late-January night. But apart from swopping first names, the three of them had said little to each other.

Now, back in the cab of the furniture van, Danny began to realize how very cold he was. Yet he told himself that “cold” was only a relative concept and was trying to convince himself that he was only
relatively
cold. As with many things in life, it was all a question of mind over matter. His
feet felt
bloody frozen—Christ, they did. But they weren’t
really
frozen, were they, Danny boy? What if he were standing barefoot on the far North Pole? He’d always believed there was just that one square yard of ice and snow comprising yer actual North Pole, and no one yet had managed to persuade him otherwise.

There were two newspapers in the cab: the
Daily Telegraph
(oddly?) and a late edition of
The Oxford Mail
. And newspapers were super for insulation, everyone knew that. Just stick a few sheets all the way round between your shirt and your jumper …

He looked at his wrist-watch: half-past midnight, just gone.

It had been most unlike him to make one mistake—let alone two—on such an important day. How stupid, in the first place, to have left his faithful old army greatcoat behind! And absolutely bloody stupid to have drunk more than a little too much that lunchtime, because more than a little had amounted to more than a lot and he had spent far more than he could really afford of his meagre savings.

At a service station just north of Oxford he had stopped to buy two litre bottles of Spring Water—as well as
The Oxford Mail
—prior to pulling into the next lay
by, just before the M40 interchange. It was a bit naïve, he knew, but he’d always believed that considerable quantities of water must significantly, and soon, serve to dilute and thereby to diminish the alcoholic level in the human bloodstream. And so it was that, an hour earlier, he’d forced himself to swallow all that flat and tasteless fluid to the final drop.

How come he’d been so careless?

Nervousness partly; and partly the exhilaration of the chase—of the fox keeping a few furlongs ahead of the yapping hounds. Perhaps the fox wasn’t really exhilarated at all though—just frightened. Like he was, if he were honest with himself.

Just a bit.

Yet as he now sat behind the steering-wheel in the darkened cab, he couldn’t really believe he’d find himself in much trouble with the police that night. He wasn’t sure whether they
could
nick him for being over the limit in charge of a stationary vehicle. But they’d still need
some
reason for breathalysing him, wouldn’t they? They’d have one if they spotted the number-plate, of course. But that was a pretty unlikely possibility, he reckoned. He hadn’t read much of
The Oxford Mail
, but he’d seen one of its front-page headlines—
OXON POLICE “UNABLE TO COPE” WITH CRIME
—and at least that was a nugget of encouragement in a naughty old world. A vehicle, so it seemed, was stolen every something seconds in the Thames Valley region and that was very good news indeed—considerably lengthening the odds against him being caught.

No. There was something else that was worrying him much more: the wretched “tachometer” just to the left of the steering-wheel—a device (as he was now learning)
that showed details of speeds and times, of stoppings and startings. He just couldn’t
understand
the thing, that was the trouble. Nor the pile of paper discs, looking like so many CDs, that stood beside it—discs marked “Freightchart,” with lines and spaces and boxes for Name and Base and Destination and Cargo and Date and Mileage and God knows what else. Confusing. Unfamiliar. He could gauge all the other risks all right; but not this one. Perhaps the police couldn’t give him a random breath-test. But could they give him a random tacho-test?

He switched on the dimmish light in the roof of the cab and picked up one of the white discs, noting that two lines had already been completed, presumably in the cheap blue Biro that lay beside the pile:
SMITH, JOHN;
Southampton.

Danny shook his head; and turned to
The Oxford Mail
again.

The main editorial picked up the page-one article on car-related crime, and Danny smiled to himself as he read the last few sentences:

Danny inclined his head slightly to the right and wondered what exactly the manufacturers
could
do—given the nature of electric current. And already it was considerably more difficult than the editor was suggesting. Four minutes it had taken him with this particular van at Southampton—a ramshackle heap that’d have about as much chance with a police car as a moped would with Nigel Mansell.

Brrr … was it cold, though! And getting colder.

He could have turned on the engine for a quarter of an hour or so, but he was reluctant to waste any diesel. There was a long journey north ahead of him; and while he reckoned he’d be safe enough on the busy daytime motorways, he didn’t really want to stop again. At the same time he daren’t drive any further, either—not until he’d had a few hours’ rest; or kip, if he were lucky. Twice, only an hour or so since, he’d almost fallen asleep at the wheel, his eyes slowly drooping downwards … and further downwards, until his head followed them, only—suddenly!—to jerk upright in panic as consciousness reasserted itself.