Arithmetic is where the answer is right and everything is nice and you can look out of the window and see the blue sky – or the answer is wrong and you have to start all over and try again and see how it comes out this time.
(CARL SANDBURG, Complete Poems)
THE THAW CONTINUED overnight, and lawns that had been totally subniveal the day before were now resurfacing in patches of irregular green under a blue sky. The bad weather was breaking; the case, it seemed, was breaking too.
At Kidlington HQ Morse was going to be occupied (he’d said) with other matters for most of the morning; and Lewis, left to his own devices, was getting progressively more and more bogged down in a problem which at the outset had looked comparatively simple. The Yellow Pages had been his starting point, and under ‘Beauty Salons and Consultants’ he found seven or eight addresses in Oxford which advertised specialist treatment in what was variously called Waxing, Facials, or Electrolysis; with another five in Banbury; three more (a gloomier Lewis noticed) in Bicester; and a good many other establishments in individual places that could be reached without too much travelling by a woman living in Chipping Norton – if (and in Lewis’s mind it was a biggish ‘if’) ‘Mrs Ballard’ was in fact a citizen of Chipping Norton.
But there were two quadratic equations, as it were, from which to work out the unknown ‘x’: and it was the second of these – the cross-check with the charity flag days – to which Lewis now directed his thinking. In recent years, the most usual sort of badge received from shakers of collection tins had come in the form of a little circular sticker that was pressed on to the lapel of the contributor’s coat; and Lewis’s experience was that such a sticker often fell off after a few minutes rather than stuck on for several days. And so Morse’s view, Lewis agreed, was probably right: if Mrs Ballard was still wearing a sticker on New Year’s Eve, she’d probably bought it the same day, or the day before at the very outside. But Lewis had considerable doubts about Morse’s further confidently stated conviction that there must have been an RSPCA flag day in Oxford on the 30th or 31st, and that Mrs Ballard had bought a flag as she went into a beauty salon in the city centre. ‘Beautifully simple!’ Morse had said. ‘We’ve got the time, we’ve got the place – and we’ve almost got the woman, agreed? Just a little phoning around and . . .’
But Lewis had got off to a bad start. His first call elicited the disappointing information that the last street-collection in Oxford for the RSPCA had been the previous July; and he had no option but to start making another list, and a very long list at that. First came the well-known medical charities, those dealing with multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, heart diseases, cancer research, blindness, deafness, et cetera; then the major social charities, ranging from Christian Aid and Oxfam to War on Want and the Save the Children Fund, et cetera; next came specific societies that looked after ambulancemen, lifeboatmen and ex-servicemen, et cetera; finally were listed the local charities which funded hospices for the terminally ill, hostels for the criminally sick or the mentally unbalanced, et cetera. Lewis could have added scores of others – and he knew he was getting into an awful mess. He could even have added the National Association for the Care and Resettlement of Criminal Offenders. But he didn’t.
Clearly some sort of selection was required, and he would have been more than glad to have Morse at his side at that moment. It was like being faced with a difficult maths problem at school: if you weren’t careful, you got more and more ensnared in some increasingly complex equations – until the master showed you a beautifully economic short-cut that reduced the problem to a few simple little sums and produced a glittering (and correct) solution at the foot of the page. But his present master, Morse, was still apparently otherwise engaged, and so he decided to begin in earnest: on the second of the two equations.
Yet an hour later he had advanced his knowledge of charity collections in Oxford not one whit; and he was becoming increasingly irritated with telephone numbers which didn’t answer when called, or which (if they did answer) appeared manned by voluntary envelope-lickers, decorators, caretakers or idiots – or (worst of all!) by intimidating answering machines telling Lewis to start speaking ‘now’. And after a further hour of telephoning, he hadn’t found a single charitable organization which had held a flag day in Oxford – or anywhere else in the vicinity, for that matter – in the last few days of December.
He was getting, ridiculously, nowhere; and he said as much when Morse finally put in another appearance at 11 a.m. with a cup of coffee and a digestive biscuit, both of which (mistakenly) Lewis thought his superior officer had brought in for him.
‘We need some of those men we’ve been promised, sir.’
‘No, no, Lewis! We don’t want to start explaining everything to a load of squaddies. Just have a go at the clinic angle if the other’s no good. I’ll come and give you a hand when I get the chance.’
So Lewis made another start – this time on those Oxford hair clinics which had bothered to take a few centimetres of advertising space in the Yellow Pages: only four of them, thank goodness! But once again the problem soon began to take on unexpectedly formidable dimensions – once he began to consider the sort of questions he could ask a clinic manageress – if she was on the premises. For what could he ask? He wanted to find out if a woman whose name he didn’t know, whose appearance he could only very imperfectly describe, and of whose address he hadn’t the faintest notion, except perhaps that it might just be in Chipping Norton – whether such a woman had been in for some unspecified treatment, but probably upper-lip depilation, at some unspecified time, though most probably on the morning of, let him say, any of the last few days of December. What a farce, thought Lewis; and what a fruitless farce it did in fact become. The first of the clinics firmly refused to answer questions, even to the police, about such ‘strictly confidential’ matters; the second was quite happy to inform him that it had no customers whatsoever on its books with an address in Chipping Norton; a recorded message informed him that the third would re-open after the New Year break on January 6th; and the fourth suggested, politely enough, that he must have misread the advertisement: that whilst it cut, trimmed, singed and dyed, the actual removal of hair was not included amongst its splendid services.
Lewis put down the phone – and capitulated. He went over to the canteen and found Morse – the only one there – drinking another cup of coffee and just completing The Times crossword puzzle.
‘Ah, Lewis. Get yourself a coffee! Any luck yet?’
‘No, I bloody haven’t,’ snapped Lewis – a man who swore, at the very outside, about once a fortnight. ‘As I said, sir, I need some help: half a dozen DCs – that’s what I need.’
‘I don’t think it’s necessary, you know.’
‘Well, I do!’ said Lewis, looking as angry as Morse had ever seen him, and about to use up a whole month’s ration of blasphemies. ‘We’re not even sure the bloody woman does come from Chipping Norton. She might just as well come from Chiswick – like the tart you met in Paddington!’
‘Lew-is! Lew-is! Take it easy! I’m sure that neither the “Palmers” nor the Smiths had anything at all to do with the murder. And when I said just now it wasn’t necessary to bring any more people in on the case, I didn’t mean that you couldn’t have as many as you like – if you really need them. But not for this particular job, Lewis, I don’t think. I didn’t want to disturb you, so I’ve been doing a bit of phoning from here; and I’m waiting for a call that ought to come through any minute. And if it tells me what I think it will, I reckon we know exactly who this “Mrs Ballard” is, and exactly where we should be able to find her. Her name’s Mrs Bowman – Mrs Margaret Bowman. And do you know where she lives?’
‘Chipping Norton?’ suggested Lewis, in a rather wearily defeated tone.