‘I lied to you, Inspector, and I shouldn’t have done that. I know that other woman, you see. My husband occasionally gets-got involved in his brother’s-well, let’s say his brother’s… side of things, and he met her in one of the clubs a few weeks ago. I-I found out about it. You see-he wanted to leave me and -and-and go and live with her.

‘But she-’

Mrs Gilbert broke off, and Morse nodded his understanding.

‘But she didn’t want him.’

‘No, she didn’t.’

‘Did you tell him you’d found out?’

Mrs Gilbert smiled a wan sort of smile and she turned back to the window, her eyes drifting over and beyond the reservoir to where a DC10 droned in towards Heathrow. ‘No! I wanted to keep him. Funny, isn’t it? But he was the only thing I had.’

‘It blew over?’

‘Not really very much time for that, was there?’

Morse sat and looked once more at this very ordinary woman he had come to visit, and his mind drifted back to Molly Bloom in Ulysses, and he knew that Mrs Gilbert, too, was a woman who had offered, once, a presence and a bosom and a rose.

‘Please tell me about this other woman.’

‘I don’t know her real name-they call her “Yvonne” at the clubs. But I know her initials-W.S.-and I know where she lives – 23A Colebourne Road, just south of Richmond Road. It’s only about five minutes walk from the tube-station…’

‘You went to see her?’

‘You don’t know much about women, do you?’

‘No, perhaps not,’ agreed Morse. But he was impatient now. He felt like a man with an enormously ‘distended bladder who has been kept talking on the phone for half an hour, and he walked across to the door. ‘Will you be all right, Mrs Gilbert?’

‘Don’t worry about me, Inspector. I’ll give the GP a ring when you’ve gone, and he’ll give me a few tablets. They should take care of me for a little while, shouldn’t they?’

‘Yes, I’m sure they will. I know how you must be feeling-’

‘Of course you don’t! You’ve not the faintest idea. It’s not today-it’s not tonight. It’s tomorrow. Can’t you see that? You tell me Albert’s dead, and in an odd sort of way it doesn’t register. It’s a shock, isn’t it? And I’d be more than happy to live through one shock after another, but…’

The tears were running freely again, and suddenly she moved towards him and buried her head on his shoulder. And Morse stood there by the door, awkward and inept; and (in his own strange way) almost loving the woman who was weeping out her heart against him.

It was several minutes before he was able to disengage himself and finally to stand upon the threshold of the opened door. ‘Please look after yourself, Mrs Gilbert.’

‘I will. Don’t worry about that.’

‘If there’s anything I can do to help…’

She almost smiled. ‘Be gentle with the girl, Inspector. You see, I know you’re anxious to get away from here and see her, and I just want you to know that she’s the loveliest girl-woman-I’ve ever met in all my life-that’s all.’

Tears were spurting again now, and Morse leaned forward and kissed her lightly on the forehead, in the sure knowledge that this woman had somewhere touched his feelings deeply. And as he walked slowly away up the road towards Manor House tube-station he doubted whether Albert Gilbert had ever really known the woman he had asked to marry him.

For all his conviction that the tide was running fully in his favour, the open doors of the Manor Hotel proved irresistible, and Morse wondered as he drained his pints and watched the pimps and prostitutes walk by whether, in a life so full of strange coincidence, he might at last be facing the wildest and most wonderful coincidence of them all: “W.S”! Browne-Smith had mentioned those initials… and Emily Gilbert had just repeated them… and those were the selfsame glorious initials of a girl whom once he’d known, and loved too well.

Twenty minutes after Morse had left the seventh floor of Berrywood Court, a key was inserted into the outer door of the Gilberts’ flat, and a man walked in and flung his jacket carelessly down upon the sofa.

Two minutes later, Albert Gilbert, of Removals Anywhere, was talking (somewhat incoherently) over the phone to his GP, explaining how, for no apparent reason, his wife had fainted quite away on his return, and desperately demanding some instructions, since even now she showed no signs of sense or sanity returning.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

All men, even those of a pessimistic nature, fall victim at certain points in their lives to the most extravagant of hopes.

As Mrs Gilbert had told him, Colebourne Road was no more than five minutes’ walk from East Putney tube station. But Morse appeared in no hurry, and when he reached the street-sign he stopped awhile and stood beneath it, deep in thought. Surely he couldn’t be so utterly and stupidly sentimental as to harbour even the faintest hope that he was just about to see once more the woman whom he’d worshipped all those years ago. No, he told himself, he couldn’t. And yet a wild, improbable hope lived on; and as if to nourish the hope, he entered the Richmond Arms on the corner of the street and ordered a double Scotch. As he drank, his thoughts went back to the time when he’d visited his old mother in the Midlands, and gone off to an evening Methodist service to see if a girl, a very precious girl, was still in her place in the choir-stalls, still raising her eyes to his at the end of each verse of every hymn and smiling at him sweetly and seraphically. But she hadn’t been there-hadn’t been there for thirty years, perhaps-and he’d sat by a pillar alone that night. Morse walked to the bar, (‘Same again, please-Bell’s’), and the name of Wendy Spencer tripped trochaically across his brain… It couldn’t be the same woman, though. It wasn’t the same woman. And yet, ye gods-if gods ye be-please make it her!

Morse’s heart was beating at an alarming rate and his throat felt very dry as he rang the bell of Number 23. There was a light downstairs, a light upstairs; and the odds were very strongly on her being in.

‘Yes?’ The door was opened by a youngish, dark-complexioned woman.

‘I’m a police inspector, Miss-’

‘Mrs-Mrs Price.’

‘Ah yes-well, I’m looking for someone I think lives here. I’m not quite sure of her name but -’

‘I can’t help you much then, can I?’

‘I think she’s sometimes called “Yvonne”.’

‘There’s no one here by that name.’

‘The door had already closed an inch or two, but now there was another voice. ‘Anything I can do to help?’

A taller woman was standing behind Mrs Price, a woman in a white bathrobe, a woman with freshly showered and almost shining skin, a woman awkwardly re-making the tumbled beauty of her hair.

‘He says he’s a police inspector-says he’s looking for someone called “Yvonne”,’ explained an aggressive Mrs Price.

‘Do you know her surname. Inspector?’

Morse looked at the white-clad woman who now had moved towards the centre of the doorway, and a crushing wave of disappointment broke over him. ‘Not yet, I’m afraid. But I know she lives here-or she was staying-staying here until very recently.’

‘Well you must have got it wrong-’ began Mrs Price.

But the woman in white was interrupting her: ‘Leave this to me Angela-it’s all right. I think I may be able to help you, inspector. Won’t you come in?’

Morse climbed the narrow stairs, noting the slim ankles of the woman who preceded him.

‘Would you like a drink?’ she asked, as they sat opposite each other in the small but beautifully furnished living-room.

‘Er-no. Perhaps not.’

‘You’ve had enough already, you mean?’