Free Last Bus to Woodstock by Colin Dexter

This was the life. The Rhinemaidens swam gracefully to and fro and it was a few minutes before Morse felt willing to let the music drift away to the periphery of his attention. He read the preamble to the crossword:
    ‘Each of the across clues contains, in the definition, a deliberate misprint. Each of the down clues is normal, although the words to be entered in the diagram will contain a misprint of a single letter. Working from 1 across to 28 down the misprinted letters form a well-known quotation which solvers . . .’
    Morse read no more. He leapt to his feet. A solo horn expired with a dying groan as he switched off the record player and snatched his car keys from the mantelpiece.
    His in-tray was high with reports, but he ignored them. He unlocked his cabinet, took out the file on the Sylvia Kaye murder, and extracted the letter addressed to Jennifer Coleby. He knew there had been something wrong with the whole thing. His mouth was dry and his hand trembled slightly, like a schoolboy opening his O-level results:
    Dear Madam,
    After asessing the mny applications we have received, we must regretfully inform you that our application has been unsuccessful. At the begining of November however, further posts will become available, and I should, in all honesty, be sorry to loose the opportunity of reconsidering your position then.
    We have now alloted the September quota of posts in the Psycology Department; yet it is probable that a reliably qualified assistant may be required to deal with the routine duties for the Principal’s office.
    Yours faithfully,
    How wrong-headed he had been! Instead of thinking, as he had done, with such supercilious arrogance, of the illiteracy and incompetence of some poor blockhead of a typist, he should have been thinking exactly the opposite . He’d been a fool. The clues were there. The whole thing was phoney – why hadn’t he spotted that before? When you boiled it down it was a nonsense letter. He had first made the mistake of concentrating upon individual mistakes and not even bothering to see the letter as a synoptic whole. But not only that. He had compounded his mistake. For if he had read the letter as a letter, he might have considered the mistakes as mistakes – deliberate mistakes . He took a sheet of paper and started: ‘asessing’ – ‘s’ omitted; ‘mny’ – ‘a’ omitted; ‘begining’ – ‘n’ omitted; ‘loose’ – ‘o’ inserted; ‘Psycology’ – ‘h’ omitted. SANOH – whatever that signified. Look again. ‘our’ – shouldn’t it be ‘your’? ‘y’ omitted; ‘routnie’ – ‘n’ and ‘i’ transposed. What did that give him? SAYNOHNI . Hardly promising. Try once more, ‘alloted’ – surely two ‘t’s? ‘t’ omitted. And there it was staring him in the face. The ‘G’ of course from the signature, the only recognizable letter therein: SAY NOTHING . Someone had been desperately anxious for Jennifer not to say a word – and Jennifer, it seemed, had got the message.
    It had taken Morse two minutes, and he was glad that Jennifer had been out the previous evening. He felt sure that faced with her lies about the visit to the library, she would have said how sorry she was and that she must have got it wrong. It must have been Thursday, she supposed; it was so difficult to think back to events of even the day before, wasn’t it? She honestly couldn’t remember; but she would try very hard to. Perhaps she had gone for a walk – on her own, of course.
    But she would find things more awkward now. Strangely Morse felt little sense of elation. He had experienced an odd liking for Jennifer when they had met, and in retrospect he understood how difficult it must have been for her. But he must look the fact squarely in the face. She was lying. She was shielding someone – that someone who in all probability had raped and murdered Sylvia. It was not a pretty thought. Every piece of evidence now pointed unequivocally to the fact that it