Last Seen Wearing by Colin Dexter Page B

There was only one Phillipson: 'The Firs', Banbury Road, Oxford.

CHAPTER NINE

We hear, for instance, of a comprehensive school in Connecticut where teachers have three pads of coloured paper, pink, blue and green, which are handed out to pupils as authority to visit respectively the headmaster, the office or the lavatory.
(Robin Davis, The Grammar School)

S HEILA PHILLIPSON WAS absolutely delighted with her Oxford home, a four-bedroomed detached house, just below the Banbury Road roundabout. Three fully grown fir trees screened the spacious front garden from the busy main road, and the back garden, with its two old apple trees and its goldfish pond, its beautifully conditioned lawn and its neatly tended borders, was an unfailing joy. With unimaginative predictability she had christened it 'The Firs'.
   Donald would be late home from school; he had a staff meeting. But it was only a cold salad, and the children had already eaten. She could relax. At a quarter to six she was sitting in a deck-chair in the back garden, her eyes closed contentedly. The evening air was warm and still . . . She felt so proud of Donald; and of the children, Andrew and Alison, now contentedly watching the television. They were both doing so well at their primary school. And, of course, if they didn't really get the chances they deserved, they could always go to private schools; and Donald would probably send them there—in spite of what he'd told the parents at the last speech day. The Dragon, New College School, Oxford High, Headington—one heard such good reports. But that was all in the future. For the moment everything in the garden was lovely. She lifted her face to catch the last rays of the sloping sun and breathed in the scent of thyme and honeysuckle. Lovely. Almost too lovely, perhaps. At half-past six she heard the crunch of Donald's Rover on the drive.

Later in the evening Sheila did not recognize the man at the door, a slimly built man with a clean, sensitive mouth and wide light-grey eyes. He had a nice voice, she thought, for a police inspector.
   In spite of Morse's protests that Tom and Jerry ranked as his very favourite TV programme, the children were immediately sent upstairs to bed. She was cross with herself for not having packed them off half an hour ago: toys littered the floor, and she fussily and apologetically gathered together the offending objects and took them out. On her return she found her visitor gazing with deep interest at a framed photograph of herself and her husband.
   'Press photograph, isn't it?'
   'Yes. We had a big party in Donald's, er, in my husband's first term here. All the staff, husbands and wives—you know the sort of thing. The Oxford Mail took that. Took a lot of photographs, in fact'
   'Have you got the other photographs?'
   'Yes. I think so. Would you like to look at them? My husband won't be long. He's just finishing his bath.'
   She rummaged about in a drawer of the bureau, and handed to Morse five glossy, black-and-white photographs. One of them, a group photograph, held his keen attention: the men in dinner jackets and black bow ties, the ladies in long dresses. Most of them looked happy enough.
   'Do you know some of the staff?' she asked.
   'Some of them.'
   He looked again at the group. 'Beautifully clear photograph.'
   'Very good, isn't it?'
   'Is Acum here?'
   'Acum? Oh yes, I think so. Mr. Acum left two years ago. But I remember him quite well—and his wife.' She pointed them out on the photograph; a young man with a lively, intelligent face and a small goatee beard; and, her arm linked through his, a slim, boyish-figured girl, with shoulder-length blonde hair, not unattractive perhaps, but with a face (at least on this evidence) a little severe and more than a little spotty.
   'You knew his wife, you say?' asked Morse.
   Sheila heard the gurgling death-rattle of the bath upstairs, and for some inexplicable reason felt a cold shudder