'But you might have bought something more expensive?' Morse looked along the impressive rows of historical works that covered two walls of the lounge from floor to ceiling, and thought of Johnny Maguire's pathetic little collection.
'You could check up, I suppose,' said Phillipson curtly.
'Yes. I suppose we shall.' Morse felt suddenly very tired.
At half-past midnight Sheila Phillipson tiptoed quietly down the stairs and found the codeine bottle. It kept coming back to her mind and she couldn't seem to push it away from her — that terrible night when Donald had been making love to her, and called her Valerie. She'd never mentioned it, of course. She just couldn't.
Suddenly she jumped, a look of blind terror in her eyes, before subsiding with relief upon a kitchen stool.
'Oh, it's only you, Donald. You frightened me.'
'Couldn't you sleep either, darling?'
CHAPTER TEN
Not a line of her writing have I,
Not a thread of her hair.
(Thomas Hardy, Thoughts of Phena)
MORSE SEEMED RELUCTANT to begin any work when he arrived, late, in his office on Thursday morning. He handed Lewis the report on Valerie's letter and started on The Times crossword puzzle. He looked at his watch, marked the time exactly in the margin of the newspaper and was soon scribbling in letters at full speed. Ten minutes later he stopped. He allowed himself only ten minutes, and almost always completed it. But this morning one clue remained unsolved.
'What's this, Lewis? Six letters. Blank A — Blank S — Blank N. Eyes had I — and saw not?'
Lewis jotted down the letters and pretended to think. He just hadn't a crossword mind. 'Could it be "parson", sir?'
'Why on earth should it be "parson"?'
'Well, it fits.'
'So do a hundred and one other words.'
'Such as?' Morse struggled hard before producing 'damson'. 'I'd rather have my parson, sir.'
Morse put the paper aside. 'Well. What do you think?'
'Seems to be her writing, doesn't it?'
There was a knock on the door and a pretty young office girl deposited the morning post into the in-tray. Cursorily and distastefully Morse looked through the correspondence.
'Nothing urgent here, Lewis. Let's go along to the lab. I think Old Peters must be getting senile.'
Now in his early sixties, Peters had previously worked for twenty years as a Home Office pathologist, and somewhere along the line the juices of human fallibility had been squeezed from his cerebral processes. His manner was clinical and dry, and his words seemed to be dictated by a minicomputer installed somewhere inside his brain. His answers were slow, mechanical, definitive. He had never been known to argue with anyone. He just read the information-tapes.
'You think this is Valerie Taylor's writing, then?'
He paused and answered. 'Yes.'
'Can you ever be certain about things like handwriting, though?'
He paused and answered. 'No.'
'How certain are you?'
He paused and answered. 'Ninety per cent.'
'You'd be surprised then if it turned out that she didn't write it?'
He paused and the computer considered its reaction to the improbability. 'Yes. Surprised.'
'What makes you think she wrote it?'
He paused and lectured briefly and quietly on the evidence of loops and quirks and whorls. Morse battled on against the odds. 'You can forge a letter, though, can't you?'
He paused and answered. 'Of course.'
'But you don't think this was forged?'
He paused and answered. 'I think it was written by the girl.'
'But a person's handwriting changes over the years, doesn't it? I mean the letter's written in almost exactly the same way as the exercise books.'
He paused and answered. 'There's a basic built-in style about all our handwriting. Slopes change, certainly, and other minor things. But whatever changes, there is still the distinctive style, carrying with it the essential features of our personal characteristics.' He paused again, and Lewis had the impression he was reading it all out of a book. 'In Greek, the word "character" means handwriting, they tell me.'
Lewis smiled. He was enjoying himself.
Morse put a penultimate problem to the computer. 'You wouldn't go into the witness box and say it definitely was her writing, would you?'
He paused and answered. 'I would tell a jury what I've told you — that the order of probability is somewhere in the region of ninety per cent.'
Morse turned as he reached the door. 'Could you forge her handwriting convincingly?'
The desiccated calculating-machine actually smiled and the hesitation this time was minimal. 'I've had a lot of experience in this field, you know.'
'You could then?'
He paused and answered, 'I could, yes.'
Back in his office Morse brought Lewis up to date with his visit the previous evening to the Phillipson residence.
'You don't like him much, do you, sir?'
Morse looked aggrieved. 'Oh, I don't dislike him. It's just that I don't think he's completely above-board with me, that's all.'
'We've all of us got things we'd like to hide, haven't we, sir?'