Alibi (n.) – the plea in a criminal charge of having been elsewhere at the material time.
(Chambers 20th Century Dictionary)
IT WAS, IN all, to be an hour or so before the interrogation of Wilkins was resumed. Morse had telephoned Max, but had learned only that if he, Morse, continued to supply the lab with corpses about twenty-four hours old, he, Max, was not going to make too many fanciful speculations: he was a forensic scientist, not a fortune teller. Lewis had contacted the Haworth Hotel to discover that one local call had in fact been made – untraceable, though – from Annexe 3 on New Year’s Eve. Phillips, who had returned from Diamond Close with the not unexpected news that Margaret Bowman (if she had been there) had flown, now resumed his duties in the interview room, standing by the door, his feet aching a good deal, his eyes idly scanning the bare room once again: the wooden trestle-table, on which stood two white polystyrene cups (empty now) and an ash-tray (rapidly filling); and behind the table, the fairish-haired, fresh-complexioned man accused of a terrible murder, who seemed to Phillips to look perhaps rather less dramatically perturbed than should have been expected.
‘What time did you get to the Haworth Hotel on New Year’s Eve?’
‘Say that again?’
‘What time did you get to the hotel?’
‘I didn’t go to any hotel that night—’
‘You were at the Haworth Hotel and you got there at—’
‘I’ve never played there.’
‘Never played what?’
‘Never played there!’
‘I’m not quite with you, Mr Wilkins.’
‘We go round the pubs – the group – we don’t often go to hotels.’
‘You play in a pop group?’
‘A jazz group – I play tenor sax.’
‘So what?’
‘Look, Sergeant. You say you’re not with me: I’m not with you, either.’
‘You were at the Haworth Hotel on New Year’s Eve. What time did you get there?’
‘I was at the Friar up in North Oxford on New Year’s Eve!’
‘Really?’
‘Yes, really!’
‘Can you prove it?’
‘Not offhand, I suppose, but—’
‘Would the landlord remember you there?’
‘Course he would! He paid us, didn’t he?’
‘The group you’re in – was playing there?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you were there all the evening?’
‘Till about two o’clock the next morning.’
‘How many others in the group?’
‘Four.’
‘And how many people were there at the Friar that night?’
‘Sixty? – seventy? on and off.’
‘Which bar were you in?’
‘Lounge bar.’
‘And you didn’t leave the bar all night?’
‘Well, we had steak and chips in the back room at about – half-past nine, I suppose it was.’
‘With the rest of the group?’
‘And the landlord – and the landlady.’
‘This is New Year’s Eve you’re talking about?’
‘Look, Sergeant, I’ve been here a long time already tonight, haven’t I? Can you please ring up the Friar and get someone here straight away? Or ring up any of the group? I’m getting awfully tired – and it’s been one hell of an evening for me – you can understand that, can’t you?’
There was a silence in the room – a silence that seemed to Phillips to take on an almost palpable tautness, as the import of Wilkins’s claim slowly sank into the minds of the detectives there.
‘What does your group call itself, Mr Wilkins?’ It was Morse himself who quietly asked the final question.
‘The “Oxford Blues”,’ said Wilkins, his face hard and unamused.
Charlie Freeman (‘Fingers’ Freeman to his musical colleagues) was surprised to find a uniformed constable standing on his Kidlington doorstep that evening. Yes, the ‘Oxford Blues’ had played the Friar on New Year’s Eve; yes, he’d played there that night, with Ted Wilkins, for about five or six hours; yes, he’d be more than willing to go along to Police HQ immediately and make a statement to that effect. No great hardship for him, was it? After all, it was only a couple of minutes’ walk away.
By 9.30 p.m. Mr Edward Wilkins had been driven back to his home in Diamond Close; Phillips, at long last, had been given permission to call it a day; and Lewis, tired and dejected, sat in Morse’s office, wondering where they had all gone so sadly wrong. Perhaps he might have suspected – and he’d actually said so – that Morse’s ideas had all been a bit too bizarre: a man murdered in fancy-dress outfit; and then another man spending the night of the party pretending he was the murdered man and dressed in a virtually identical outfit. Surely, surely, the simple truth was that Thomas Bowman had been the man at the party, as well as the man who’d been murdered! There would be (as Lewis knew) lots of difficulties in substantiating such a view; but none of them were anywhere near as insurmountable as trying to break Wilkins’s alibi – an alibi which could be vouched for by sixty or seventy wholly disinterested witnesses. Gently, quietly, Lewis mentioned his thoughts to Morse – the latter sitting silent and morose in the old black leather armchair. ‘You could be right, Lewis.’ Morse rubbed his left hand across his eyes. ‘Anyway, it’s no good worrying about it tonight. My judgement’s gone! I need a drink. You coming?’
‘No. I’ll get straight home, if you don’t mind, sir. It’s been a long day, and I should think the missus’ll have something cooking for me.’
‘I should be surprised if she hasn’t.’
‘You’re looking tired, sir. Do you want me to give you a lift?’
Morse nodded wearily. ‘Just drop me at the Friar, if you will.’
As he walked up to the entrance, Morse stopped. Red, blue, green and orange lights were flashing through the lounge windows, and the place was athrob with the live music of what sounded like some Caribbean delirium at the Oval greeting a test century from Vivian Richards. Morse checked his step and walked round to the public bar, where in comparative peace he sat and drank two pints of Morrell’s bitter and watched a couple of incompetent pool-players pretending to be Steve Davises. On the wall beside the dartboard he saw the notice:
7th January
LIVE MUSIC 7–11 p.m.
Admission Free!!
The fabulous
CALYPSO QUARTET
Morse pondered a quick third pint; but it wanted only a couple of minutes to eleven, and he decided to get home – just a few minutes’ walk away, along Carlton Road and thence just a little way down the Banbury Road to his bachelor flat. But something thwarted this decision, and he ordered another pint, a large Bell’s Scotch and a packet of plain crisps.
At twenty minutes past eleven he was the last one in the public bar, and the young barman wiping the tabletops suggested that he should finish his drink and leave: it was not unknown (Morse learned) for the police to check up on over-liquored loiterers after a live music evening.
As he left, Morse saw the Calypso Quartet packing away its collection of steel drums and sundry other Caribbean instruments into the back of an old, oft-dented Dormobile. And suddenly Morse stopped. He stopped dead. He stopped as if petrified, staring at the man who had just closed the back door of the vehicle and who was languidly lolling round to the driving seat. Even in the bitter late-night air this man wore only a blood-red, open-necked shirt on the upper part of his loose-limbed body; whilst on his head he had a baggy black-and-white checked cap that covered all his hair apart from the beaded dreadlocks which dangled on either side of his face like the snakes that once wreathed the head of the stone-eyed Gorgon.
‘You all right, man?’ enquired the coloured musician, holding both hands up in a mock gesture of concern about a fellow mortal who seemed to have imbibed too freely perhaps and too well. And Morse noticed the hands – hands that were almost like the hands of a white man, as though the Almighty had just about run out of pigment when he came to the palms.
‘You all right, man?’ repeated the musician.
Morse nodded, and there appeared on his face a stupidly beatific smile such as was seldom seen there – save when he listened to the love duet from Act One of Die Walküre.
Morse should (he knew it!) not have left things where they were that night. But his eyelids drooped heavily over his prickly-tired eyes as he walked back to his flat and in spite of his elation, he had little enough strength left, little appetite for anything more that day. But before throwing himself on the longed-for bed, he did ring Lewis; and prevailed upon Mrs Lewis (still up) to rouse her husband (an hour abed) for a few quick words before January 7th drew to its seemingly interminable close. And when, after only a brief monologue from Morse, a weary-brained Lewis put his receiver down, he, too, knew the identity of the man who on New Year’s Eve had walked back to the annexe of the Haworth Hotel with Helen Smith on the one side and Philippa Palmer on the other.