Death Is Now My Neighbor

Chapter one

It is perhaps unusual to begin a tale of murder with a reminder to the reader of the rules governing conditional sentences in a language that is incontrovertibly dead. In the present case, however, such a course appears not wholly inappropriate.

If (if) Chief Inspector Morse had been on hand to observe the receptionist’s dress — an irregularly triangled affair in blues, grays, and reds — he might have been reminded of the uniform issued to a British Airways stewardess. More probably, though, he might not, since he had never flown on British Airways. His only flight during the previous decade had occasioned so many fears concerning his personal survival that he had determined to restrict all future travel to those statistically far more precarious means of conveyance — the car, the coach, the train, and the steamer.

Yet almost certainly the Chief Inspector would have noted, with approval, the receptionist herself, for in Yorkshire she would have been reckoned a bonny lass: a vivacious, dark-eyed woman, long-legged and well-figured; a woman — judging from her ringless, well-manicured fingers — not overtly advertising any marital commitment, and not averse, perhaps, to the occasional overture from the occasional man.

Pinned at the top left of her colorful dress was a name tag: “Dawn Charles.”

Unlike several of her friends (certainly unlike Morse) she was quite content with her Christian name. Sometimes she’d felt slightly dubious about it; but no longer. Out with some friends in the Bird and Baby the previous month, she’d been introduced to a rather dashing, rather dishy undergraduate from Pembroke College. And when, a little later, she’d found herself doodling inconsequentially on a Burton beer mat, the young man, on observing her sinistrality, had initiated a wholly memorable conversation.

“Dawn? That is your name?”

She’d nodded.

“Left-handed?”

She’d nodded.

“Do you know that line from Omar Khayyam? ‘Dreaming when Dawn’s left hand was in the sky...’ Lovely, isn’t it?”

Yes, it was. Lovely.

She’d peeled the top off the beer mat and made him write it down for her.

Then, very quietly, he’d asked her if he could see her again. At the start of the new term, perhaps?

She’d known it was silly, for there must have been at least twenty years’ difference in their ages. If only... if only he’d been ten, a dozen years older...

But people did do silly things, and hoped their silly hopes. And that very day, January 15, was the first full day of the new Hilary Term in the University of Oxford.

Her Monday–Friday job, 6–10 P.M., at the clinic on Banbury Road (just north of St. Giles’) was really quite enjoyable. Over three years of it now, and she was becoming a fixture there. Most of the consultants greeted her with a genuine smile; several of them, these days, with her Christian name.

Nice.

She’d once stayed at a four-star hotel which offered a glass of sherry to incoming guests; and although the private Harvey Clinic was unwilling (perhaps on medical grounds?) to provide such laudable hospitality, Dawn ever kept two jugs of genuine coffee piping hot for her clients, most of them soberly suited and well-heeled gentlemen. A number of whom, as she well knew, were most seriously ill.

Yes, there had been several occasions when she had heard a few brief passages of conversation between consultant and client which she shouldn’t have heard; or which, having heard, she should have forgotten; and which she should never have been willing to report to anyone.

Not even to the police.

Quite certainly not to the Press...

As it happened, January 15 was to prove a day unusually easy for her to recall, since it marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the clinic’s opening in 1971. By prior negotiation and arrangement, the clinic was visited that evening, between 7 P.M. and 8:30 P.M., by Radio Oxford, by the local press, and by Mr. Wesley Smith and his crew from the Central TV studios out at Abingdon. And particularly memorable for Dawn had been those precious moments when the camera had focused upon her: first, when (as instructed) she had poured a cup of genuine coffee for a wholly bogus “client”; second, when the cameraman had moved behind her left shoulder as she ran a felt-tipped pen through a name on the appointments list in front of her — but only, of course, after a full assurance that no viewer would be able to read the name itself when the feature was shown the following evening.

Yet Dawn Charles was always to remember the name:

Mr. J. C. Storrs.

It had been a fairly new name to her — another of those patients, as Dawn suspected correctly, whose influence and affluence afforded the necessary leverage and money to jump the queues awaiting their calls to the hospitals up in Headington.

There was something else she would always remember, too...

By one of those minor coincidences (so commonplace in Morse’s life) it had been just as most of the personnel from the media were preparing to leave, at almost exactly 8:30 P.M., that Mr. Robert Turnbull, the Senior Cancer Consultant, had passed her desk, nodded a greeting, and walked slowly to the exit, his right hand resting on the shoulder of Mr. J. C. Storrs. The two men were talking quietly together for some while — Dawn was certain of that. But certain of little else. The look on the consultant’s face, as far as she could recall, had been neither that of a judge who has just condemned a man to death, nor that of one just granting a prisoner his freedom.

No obvious grimness.

No obvious joy.

And indeed there was adequate cause for such uncertainty on Dawn’s part, since the scene had been partially masked from her by the continued presence of several persons: a ponytailed reporter scribbling a furious shorthand as he interviewed a nurse; the TV crew packing away its camera and tripods; the Lord Mayor speaking some congratulatory words into a Radio Oxford microphone — all of them standing between her and the top of the three blue-carpeted stairs which led down to the double-doored exit, outside which were affixed the vertical banks of well-polished brass plates, ten on each side, the fourth from the top on the left reading:

If only Dawn Charles could have recalled a little more.

“If” — that little conjunction introducing those unfulfilled conditions in past time which, as Donet reminds us, demand the pluperfect subjunctive in both clauses — a syntactical rule which Morse himself had mastered early on in an education which had been far more fortunate than that enjoyed by the receptionist at the Harvey Clinic.

Indeed, over the next two weeks, most people in Oxford were destined to be considerably more fortunate than Dawn Charles: She received no communication from the poetry lover of Pembroke; her mother was admitted to a psychiatric ward out at Littlemore; she was twice reminded by her bank manager of the increasing problems arising from the large margin of negative equity on her small flat; and finally, on Monday morning, January 29, she was to hear on Fox FM Radio that her favorite consultant, Mr. Robert H. Turnbull, MB, ChB, FRCS, had been fatally injured in a car accident on Cumnor Hill.

Chapter two

Sir Clixby Bream would be almost sixty-nine years old when he retired as Master of Lonsdale. A committee of Senior Fellows, including two eminent Latin scholars, had found itself unable to interpret the gobbledegook of the Founders’ Statutes (vide supra); and since no “accommodation” (whatever that was) had presented itself, Sir Clixby had first been persuaded to stay on for a short while — then for a longer while.

Yet this involved no hardship.

He was subject to none of the normal pressures about moving to somewhere nearer the children or the grandchildren, since his marriage to Lady Muriel had been sine prole. Moreover, he was blessedly free from the usual uxorial bleatings about a nice little thatched cottage in Dorset or Devon, since Lady Muriel had been in her grave these past three years.

The position of Head of House at any of the Oxbridge Colleges was just about the acme of academic ambition; and since three of the last four Masters had been knighted within eighteen months of their appointments, it had been natural for him to be attracted by the opportunity of such pleasing preferment. And he had been so attracted; as, even more strongly, had the late Lady Muriel.

Indeed, the incumbent Master, a distinguished mathematician in his earlier days, had never enjoyed living anywhere as much as in Oxford — ten years of it now. He’d learned to love the old city more and more the longer he was there: It was as simple as that. Of course he was somewhat saddened by the thought of his imminent retirement: He would miss the College — miss the challenges of running the place — and he knew that the sight of the furniture van outside the wisteria-clad front of the Master’s Lodge would occasion some aching regret. But there were a few unexpected consolations, perhaps. In particular, he would be able (he supposed) to sit back and survey with a degree of detachment and sardonic amusement the infighting that would doubtless arise among his potential successors.

It was the duty of the Fellows’ Appointments Committee (its legality long established by one of the more readily comprehensible of the College Statutes) to stipulate three conditions for those seeking election as Master: first, that any candidate should be “of sound mind and in good health”; second, that the candidate should “not have taken Holy Orders”; third, that the candidate should have no criminal record within “the territories administered under the governance of His (or Her) Most Glorious Majesty.”

Such stipulations had often amused the present Master.

If one judged by the longevity of almost all the Masters appointed during the twentieth century, physical well-being had seldom posed much of a problem; yet mental stability had never been a particularly prominent feature of his immediate predecessor, nor (by all accounts) of his predecessor’s predecessor. And occasionally Sir Clixby wondered what the College would say of himself once he was gone... With regard to the exclusion of the clergy, he assumed that the Founders (like Edward Gibbon three centuries later) had managed to trace the source of all human wickedness back to the Popes and the Prelates, and had rallied to the cause of anticlericalism... But it was the possibility of the candidate’s criminality which was the most amusing. Presumably any convictions for murder, rape, sodomy, treason, or similar misdemeanors, were to be discounted if shown to have taken place outside the jurisdiction of His (or Her) Most Glorious Majesty. Very strange.

Strangest of all, however, was the absence of any mention in the original Statute of academic pedigree; and, at least theoretically, there could be no bar to a candidate presenting himself with only a Grade E in GCSE Media Studies. Nor was there any stipulation that the successful candidate should be a senior (or, for that matter, a junior) member of the College, and on several occasions “outsiders” had been appointed. Indeed, he himself, Sir Clixby, had been imported into Oxford from “the other place,” and then (chiefly) in recognition of his reputation as a resourceful fund-raiser.

On this occasion, however, outsiders seemed out of favor. The College itself could offer at least two candidates, each of whom would be an admirable choice; or so it was thought. In the Senior Common Room the consensus was most decidedly in favor of such “internal” preferment, and the betting had hardened accordingly.

By some curious omission no entry had hitherto been granted to either of these ante-post favorites in the pages of Who’s Who. From which one may be forgiven for concluding that the aforesaid work is rather more concerned with the third cousins of secondary aristocrats than with eminent academics. Happily, however, both of these personages had been considered worthy of mention in Debrett’s People of Today 1995:

Each of these entries may appear comparatively uninformative. Yet perhaps in the more perceptive reader they may provoke one or two interesting considerations.

Was, for example, the Senior Fellow of Lonsdale so affluent that he could afford to take a taxi everywhere? Did he never travel by car, coach, or train? Well, quite certainly on special occasions he would travel by train.

Oh, yes.

As we shall see.

And why was Dr. Cornford, soon to be fifty-four years old, so recently converted to the advantages of latter-day matrimony? Had he met some worthy woman of comparable age?

Oh, no.

As we shall see.

Chapter three

Denis Cornford, omnium consensu, was a fine historian. Allied with a mind both sharp and rigorously honest was a capacity for the assemblage and interpretation of evidence that was the envy of the History Faculty at Oxford. Yet in spite of such qualities, he was best known for a brief monograph on the Battle of Hastings, in which he maintained that the momentous conflict between Harold of England and William of Normandy had taken place one year earlier than universally acknowledged. In 1065.

In the Trinity Term of 1994, Cornford — a slimly built, smallish, pleasantly featured man — had taken sabbatical leave at Harvard; and there — somehow and somewhere, in Cambridge, Massachusetts — something quite extraordinary had occurred. For six months later, to the amazement and amusement of his colleagues, the confirmed bachelor of Lonsdale had returned to Oxford with a woman who had agreed to change her name from Shelly Benson to Shelly Cornford: a student from Harvard who had just gained her Master’s degree in American History, twenty-six years old — exactly half the age of her new husband (for this was her second marriage).

It is perhaps not likely that Shelly would have reached the semifinal heats of any Miss Massachusetts beauty competition: her jawline was slightly too square, her shoulders rather too strong, and her legs perhaps a little on the sturdy side. Yet there were a good many in Lonsdale College — both dons and undergraduates — who were to experience a curious attraction to the woman now putting in fairly regular appearances in Chapel, at Guest Nights, and at College functions during the Michaelmas Term of 1994. Her wavy, shoulder-length brown hair framed a face in which the widely set dark brown eyes seemed sometimes to convey the half-promise of a potential intimacy, while her quietly voiced New England accent could occasionally sound as sweetly sensual as some enchantress’s.

Many were the comments made about the former Shelly Benson during those first few terms. But no one could ever doubt what Denis Cornford had seen in her, for it was simply what others could now so clearly see for themselves. So from the start Shelly Cornford was regularly lusted after; her husband secretly envied. But the couple themselves appeared perfectly happy: no hint of infidelity on her part; no cause for jealousy on his.

Not yet.

Frequently during those days they were to be seen walking hand-in-hand the short distances from their rooms in Holywell Street to the King’s Arms, or the Turf Tavern (“Find Us If You Can!”), where in bars blessedly free from jukebox and fruit-machine Shelly had quickly acquired a taste for real ale and a love for the ambience of the English public house.

Occasionally the two of them ventured farther afield in and around Oxford; and one evening, just before Christmas 1994, they had taken the No. 2 bus from Cornmarket up to another King’s Arms, the one in the Banbury road, where amid many unashamedly festive young revelers Cornford watched as his (equally young) wife, with eyes half-closed, had rocked her shoulders sensuously to the thudding rhythm of some pop music, her black-stockinged thighs alternately lifted and lowered as though she were mentally disco dancing. And at that point he was conscious of being the oldest person in the bar, by about twenty years; inhabiting alien territory there; wholly excluded from the magic circle of the night; and suddenly sadly aware that he could never even begin to share the girlish animality of the woman he had married.

Cornford had said nothing that evening.

Nor had he said anything when, three months later, at the end-of-term Gaudy, he had noticed, beneath the table, the left hand of Julian Storrs pressed briefly against Shelly’s right thigh as she sat drinking rather a lot of Madeira, after drinking rather a lot of red wine at dinner, after drinking rather a lot of gin at the earlier reception... her chair perhaps unnecessarily close to the Senior Fellow seated on her right, the laughing pair leaning together in some whispered, mutual, mouth-to-ear exchange. Perhaps it was all perfectly harmless; and Cornford sought to make little of it. Yet he ought (he knew it!) to have said a few words on that occasion — lightly, with a heavy heart.

It was only late in the Michaelmas Term 1995 that Cornford finally did say something to his wife...

They had been seated one Tuesday lunchtime in the Turf Tavern, he immediately opposite his wife as she sat in one of the wooden wall seats in the main bar, each of them enjoying a pint of London Pride. He was eagerly expounding to her his growing conviction that the statistical evidence concerning the number of deaths resultant from the Black Death in 1348 had been wildly misinterpreted, and that the supposed demographic effects consequent upon that plague were — most decidedly! — extremely suspect. It should all have been of some interest, surely? And yet Cornford was conscious of a semipreoccupied gaze in Shelly’s eyes as she stared over his left shoulder into some more fascinating area.

All right. She ought to have been interested — but she wasn’t. Not everyone, not even a trained historian like his wife, was going to be automatically enthralled by any reevaluation of some abstruse medieval evidence.

He’d thought little of it.

And had drunk his ale.

They were about to leave when a man, in his early thirties or so, walked over to them — a tall, dark, slimly built Arab with a bushy mustache. Looking directly into Shelly’s eyes, he spoke softly to her:

“Madame! You are the most beautiful lady I see!”

Then, turning to Cornford: “Please excuse, sir!” With which, picking up Shelly’s right hand, he imprinted his full-lipped mouth most earnestly upon the back of her wrist.

After the pair of them had emerged into the cobbled lane that led up again into Holywell Street, Cornford stopped and so roughly pushed his wife’s shoulder that she had no choice but to stand there facing him.

“You — are — a — bloody — flirt! Did you know that? All the time we were in there — all the time I was telling you—”

But he got no further.

The tall figure of Sir Clixby Bream was striding down toward them.

“Hell-o! You’re both just off, I can see that. But what about another little snifter? Just to please me?”

“Not for me, Master.” Cornford trusted that he’d masked the bitterness of his earlier tone. “But if...?” He turned to his wife.

“No. Not now. Another time. Thank you, Master.”

With Shelly still beside him, Cornford walked rather blindly on, suspecting (how otherwise?) that the Master had witnessed the awkward, angry scene. And then, a few steps later — almost miraculously — he felt his wife’s arm link with his own; heard the wonderful words spoken in her quiet voice: “Denis, I’m so very sorry. Do please forgive me, my darling.”

As the Master stooped slightly to pass beneath the entrance of the Turf Tavern, an observer skilled in the art of labiomancy would have read the two words on his smoothly smiling mouth:

“Well! Well!”

Chapter four Wednesday, February 7

“Well, at least it’s left on time.”

“Not surprising, is it? The bloody thing starts from Oxford. Give it a chance, though. We’ll probably run into signaling failure somewhere along the line.”

She smiled, attractively. “Funny, really. They’ve been signaling on the railways for — what? — a hundred and fifty years, and with all these computers and things...”

“Over one hundred and seventy years, if we want to be accurate — and why shouldn’t we? Eighteen twenty-five when the Stockton to Darlington line was opened.”

“Yeah. We learned about that in school. You know, Stephenson’s Rocket and all that.”

“No, my dear girl. A few years later, that was. Stephenson’s first locomotive was called The Locomotive — not very difficult to remember, is it?”

“No.”

The monosyllable was quietly spoken, and he knew that he’d made her feel inadequate again.

She turned away from him to look through the carriage window, spotting the great sandstone house in Nuneham Park, up toward the skyline on the left. More than once he’d told her something of its history, and about Capability Brown and Somebody Adams; but she was never able to remember things as accurately as he seemed to expect. He’d told her on their last train journey, for example, about the nationalization of the railways after World War II: 1947 (or was it 1948?).

So what?

Yet there was one year she would never forget: the year the network changed its name to “British Rail.” Her father had told her about that; told her she’d been born on that very same day. In that very same year, too.

In 1965.

“Drinks? Refreshments?”

An overloaded trolley was squeezing a squeaky passage along the aisle; and the man looked at his wristwatch (10:40 A.M.) as it came alongside, before turning to the elegantly suited woman seated next to him:

“Fancy anything? Coffee? Bit too early for anything stronger, perhaps?”

“Gin and tonic for me. And a packet of plain crisps.”

Sod him! He’d been pretty insufferable so far.

A few minutes later, after pouring half his can of McEwan’s Export Ale into a plastic container, he turned toward her again; and she felt his dry, slightly cracked lips pressed upon her right cheek. Then she heard him say the wonderful word that someone else had heard a month or two before; heard him say “Sorry.”

She opened her white-leather handbag and took out a tube of lip salve. As she passed it to him, she felt his firm, slim fingers move against the back of her wrist; then move along her lower arm, beneath the sleeve of her light mauve Jaeger jacket: the fingers of a pianist. And she knew that very soon — the Turbo Express had just left Reading — the pianist would have been granted the licence to play with her body once more, as though he were rejoicing in a gentle Schubert melody.

She had never known a man so much in control of himself.

Or of her.

The train stopped just before Slough.

When, ten minutes later, it slowly began to move forward again, the Senior Conductor decided to introduce himself over the intercom.

“Ladies and Gentlemen. Due to a signaling failure at Slough, this train will now arrive at Paddington approximately fifteen minutes late. We apologize to customers for this delay.”

The man and the woman, seated now more closely together, turned to each other — and smiled.

“What are you thinking?” she asked.

“You often ask me that, you know. Sometimes I’m not thinking of anything.”

“Well?”

“I was only thinking that our Senior Conductor doesn’t seem to know the difference between ‘due to’ and ‘owing to.’ ”

“Not sure I do. Does it matter?”

“Of course it matters.”

“But you won’t let it come between us?”

“I won’t let anything come between us,” he whispered into her ear. For a few seconds they looked lovingly at each other. Then he lowered his eyes, removed a splayed left hand from her stockinged thigh, and drank his last mouthful of beer.

“Just before we get into Paddington, Rachel, there’s something important I ought to tell you.”

She turned to him — her eyes suddenly alarmed.

He wanted to put a stop to the affair?

He wanted to get rid of her?

He’d found another woman? (Apart from his wife, of course.)

“Tickets, please!”

He looked as if he might be making his maiden voyage, the young ticket collector, for he was scrutinizing each ticket proffered to him with preternatural concentration.

The man took both his own and the young woman’s ticket from his wallet: cheap day returns.

“This yours, sir?”

“Yes.”

“You an OAP?”

“As a matter of fact I am not, no.” The tone of his voice was quietly arrogant. “To draw a senior citizen pension in the United Kingdom a man has to be sixty-five years of age. But a Senior Railcard is available to a man who has passed his sixtieth birthday — as doubtless you know.”

“Could I see your Railcard, sir?”

With a sigh of resignation, the man produced his card. And the slightly flustered, spotty-faced youth duly studied the details.

“How the hell does he think I got my ticket at Oxford without showing that?” asked the Senior Fellow of Lonsdale.

“He’s only doing his duty, poor lad. And he’s got awful acne.”

“You’re right, yes.”

She took his hand in hers, moving more closely again. And within a few minutes the PADDINGTON sign passed by as the train drew slowly into the long platform. In a rather sad voice, the Senior Conductor now made his second announcement: “All change, please! All change! This train has now terminated.”

They waited until their fellow passengers had alighted; and happily, just as at Oxford, there seemed to be no one on the train whom either of them knew.

In the Brunel Bar of the Station Hotel, Storrs ordered a large brandy (two pieces of ice) for his young companion, and half a pint of Smith’s bitter for himself. Then, leaving his own drink temporarily untouched, he walked out into Praed Street, thence making his way down to the cluster of small hotels in and around Sussex Gardens, several of them displaying VACANCIES signs. He had “used” (was that the word?) two of them previously, but this time he decided to explore new territory.

“Double room?”

“One left, yeah. Just the one night, is it?”

“How much?”

“Seventy-five pounds for the two — with breakfast.”

“How much without breakfast?”

Storrs sensed that the middle-aged peroxide-blonde was attuned to his intentions, for her eyes hardened knowingly behind the cigarette-stained reception counter.

“Seventy-five pounds.”

One experienced campaigner nodded to another experienced campaigner. “Well, thank you, madam. I promise I’ll call back and take the room — after I’ve had a look at it — if I can’t find anything a little less expensive.”

He turned to go.

“Just a minute!... No breakfast, you say?”

“No. We’re catching the sleeper to Inverness, and we just want a room for the day — you know? — a sort of habitation and a place.”

She squinted up at him through her cigarette smoke.

“Sixty-five?”

“Sixty.”

“Okay.”

He counted out six ten-pound notes as, pushing the register forward, she reached behind her for Key Number 10.

It was, one may say, a satisfactory transaction.

Her glass was empty, and without seating himself he drained his own beer at a draught.

“Same again?”

“Please!” She pushed over the globed glass in which the semi-melted ice cubes still remained.

Feeling most pleasantly relaxed, she looked around the thinly populated bar, and noticed (again!) the eyes of the middle-aged man seated across the room. But she gave no sign that she was aware of his interest, switching her glance instead to the balding, gray-white head of the man leaning nonchalantly at the bar as he ordered their drinks.

Beside her once more, he clinked their glasses, feeling (just as she did) most pleasantly relaxed.

“Quite a while since we sat here,” he volunteered.

“Couple o’ months?”

“Ten weeks, if we wish to be exact.”

“Which, of course, we do, sir.”

Smiling, she sipped her second large brandy. Feeling good; feeling increasingly good.

“Hungry?” he asked.

“What for?”

He grinned. “An hour in bed, perhaps — before we have a bite to eat?”

“Wine thrown in?”

“I’m trying to bribe you.”

“Well... if you want to go to bed for a little while first...”

“I think I’d quite enjoy that.”

“One condition, though.”

“What?”

“You tell me what you were going to tell me — on the train.”

He nodded seriously. “I’ll tell you over the wine.”

It was, one may say, a satisfactory arrangement.

As they got up to leave, Storrs moved ahead of her to push open one of the swing doors; and Rachel James (for such was she), a freelance physiotherapist practicing up in North Oxford, was conscious of the same man’s eyes upon her. Almost involuntarily she leaned her body backward, thrusting her breasts against the smooth white silk of her blouse as she lifted both her hands behind her head to tighten the ring which held her light brown hair in its ponytail.

A ponytail ten inches long.

Chapter five

Geoffrey Owens had a better knowledge of Soho than most people.

He’d been only nineteen when first he’d gone to London as a junior reporter, when he’d rented a room just off Soho Square, and when during his first few months he’d regularly walked around the area there, experiencing the curiously compulsive attraction of names like Brewer Street, Greek Street, Old Compton Street, Wardour Street... a sort of litany of seediness and sleaze.

In those days, the midseventies, the striptease parlors, the porno cinemas, the topless bars — all somehow had been more wholesomely sinful, in the best sense of that word (or was it the worst?). Now, Soho had quite definitely changed for the better (or was it the worse?): more furtive and tawdry, more dishonest in its exploitation of the lonely, unloved men who would ever pace the pavements there and occasionally stop like rabbits in the headlights.

Yet Owens appeared far from mesmerized when in the early evening of February 7 he stopped outside Le Club Sexy. The first part of this establishment’s name was intended (it must be assumed) to convey that je-ne-sais-quoi quality of Gallic eroticism; yet the other two parts perhaps suggested that the range of the proprietor’s French was somewhat limited.

“Lookin’ for a bit o’ fun, love?”

The heavily mascara’d brunette appeared to be in her early twenties — quite a tall girl in her red high-heels, wearing black stockings, a minimal black skirt, and a low-cut, heavily sequined blouse stretched tightly over a large bosom — largely exposed — beneath the winking lightbulbs.

Déjà vu.

And, ever the voyeur, Owens was momentarily aware of all the old weaknesses.

“Come in! Come down and join the fun!”

She took a step toward him and he felt the long, blood-red fingernails curling pleasingly in his palm.

It was a good routine, and one that worked with many and many a man.

One that seemed to be working with Owens.

“How much?”

“Only three-pound membership, that’s all. It’s a private club, see — know wha’ I mean?” For a few seconds she raised the eyes beneath the empurpled lids toward Elysium.

“Is Gloria still here?”

The earthbound eyes were suddenly suspicious — yet curious, too.

“Who?”

“If Gloria’s still here, she’ll let me in for nothing.”

“Lots o’ names ’ere, mistah: real names — stage names...”

“So what’s your name, beautiful?”

“Look, you wanna come in? Three pound — okay?”

“You’re not being much help, you know.”

“Why don’t you just fuck off?”

“You don’t know Gloria?”

“What the ’ell do you want, mate?” she asked fiercely.

His voice was very quiet as he replied. “I used to live fairly close by. And she used to work here, then—Gloria did. She was a stripper — one of the best in the business, so everybody said.”

For the second time the eyes in their lurid sockets seemed to betray some interest.

“When was that?”

“Twenty-odd years ago.”

“Christ! She must be a bloody granny by now!”

“Dunno. She had a child, though, I know that — a daughter...”

A surprisingly tall, smartly suited Japanese man had been drawn into the magnetic field of Le Club Sexy.

“Come in! Come down and—”

“How much is charge?”

“Only three pound. It’s a private club, see — and you gotta be a member.”

With a strangely trusting, wonderfully polite smile, the man took a crisp ten-pound note from his large wallet and handed it to the hostess, bowing graciously as she reached a hand behind her and parted the multicolored vertical strips which masked from public view the threadbare carpeting on the narrow stairs leading down to the secret delights.

“You give me change, please? I give you ten pound.”

“Just tell ’em downstairs, okay?”

“Why you not give me seven pound?”

“It’ll be okay— okay?”

“Okay.”

Halfway down the stairs, the newly initiated member made a little note in a little black book, smiling (we may say) scrutably. He was a member of a Home Office Committee licensing all “entertainment premises” in the district of Soho.

His expenses were generous: needed to be.

Sometimes he enjoyed his job.

“Don’t you ever feel bad about that sort of thing?”

“What d’you mean?”

“He’ll never get his change, will he?”

“Like I said, why don’t you just fuck off!”

“Gloria used to feel bad sometimes — quite a civilized streak in that woman somewhere. You’d have liked her... Anyway, if you do come across her, just say you met me, Geoff Owens, will you? She’ll remember me — certain to. Just tell her I’ve got a little proposition for her. She may be a bit down on her luck. You never know these days, and I wouldn’t want to think she was on her uppers... or her daughter was, for that matter.”

“What’s her daughter got to do with it?” The voice was sharp.

Owens smiled, confidently now, lightly rubbing the back of his right wrist across her blouse.

“Quite a lot, perhaps. You may have quite a lot to do with it, sweetheart!”

She made no attempt to contradict him. “In the pub,” she pointed across the street, “half an hour, okay?”

She watched him go, the man with a five o’clock shadow who said his name was Owens. She’d never seen him before; but she’d recognize him again immediately, the dark hair drawn back above his ears, and tied in a ponytail about eight or nine inches long.

Apart from the midnight “milk float,” which gave passengers the impression that it called at almost every hamlet along the line, the 11:20 P.M. was the last train from Paddington. And a panting Owens jumped into its rear coach as the Turbo Express suddenly juddered and began to move forward. The train was only half-full, and he found a seat immediately.

He felt pleased with himself. The assignation in the pub had proved to be even more interesting than he’d dared to expect; and he leaned back and closed his eyes contentedly as he pondered the possible implications of what he had just learned...

He jolted awake at Didcot, wondering where he was — realizing that he had missed the Reading stop completely. Determined to stay awake for the last twelve minutes of the journey, he picked up an Evening Standard someone had left on the seat opposite, and was reading the sports page when over the top of the newspaper he saw a man walking back down the carriage — almost to where he himself was sitting — before taking his place next to a woman. And Owens recognized him.

Recognized Mr. Julian Storrs of Lonsdale.

Well! Well! Well!

At Oxford, his head still stuck behind the Evening Standard, Owens waited until everyone else had left the rear carriage. Then, himself alighting, he observed Storrs arm-in-arm with his companion as they climbed the steps of the footbridge which led over the tracks to Platform One. And suddenly, for the second time that evening, Owens felt a shiver of excitement — for he immediately recognized the woman, too.

How could he fail to recognize her?

She was his next-door neighbor.

Chapter six Monday, February 19

Painstakingly, in block capitals, the Chief Inspector wrote his name, E. MORSE; and was beginning to write his address when Lewis came into the office at 8:35 A.M. on Monday, February 19.

“What’s that, sir?”

Morse looked down at a full page torn from one of the previous day’s color supplements.

“Special offer: two free CDs when you apply to join the Music Club Library.”

Lewis looked dubious. “Don’t forget you have to buy a book every month with that sort of thing. Life’s not all freebies, you know.”

“Well, it is in this case. You’ve just got to have a look at the first thing they send you, that’s all — then send it back if you don’t like it. I think they even refund the postage.”

Lewis watched as Morse completed and snipped out the application form.

“Wouldn’t it be fairer if you agreed to have some of the books?”

“You think so?”

“At least one of them.”

Intense blue eyes, slightly pained, looked innocently across the desk at Sergeant Lewis.

“But I’ve already got this month’s book — I bought it for myself for Christmas.”

He inserted the form into an envelope, on which he now wrote the Club’s address. Then he took from his wallet a sheaf of plastic cards: Bodleian Library ticket; Lloyds payment card; RAC Breakdown Service; blood donor card; Blackwell’s Bookshops; Oxford City Library ticket; phone card... but there appeared to be no booklet of first-class stamps there. Or of second-class.

“You don’t, by any chance, happen to have a stamp on you, Lewis?”

“What CDs are you going for?”

“I’ve ordered Janáček, the Glagolitic Mass — you may not know it. Splendid work — beautifully recorded by Simon Rattle. And Richard Strauss, Four Last Songs — Jessye Norman. I’ve got several recordings by other sopranos, of course.”

Of course...

Lewis nodded and looked for a stamp.

It was not infrequent for Lewis to be reminded of what he had lost in life; or rather, what he’d never had in the first place. The one Strauss he knew was the “Blue Danube” man. And he’d only recently learned there were two of those, as well — Senior and Junior; and which was which he’d no idea.

“Perhaps you’ll be in for a bit of a letdown, sir. Some of these offers — they’re not exactly up to what they promise.”

“You’re an expert on these things?”

“No... but... take Sergeant—” Lewis stopped himself in time. Just as well to leave a colleague’s weakness cloaked in anonymity. “Take this chap I know. He read this advert in one of the tabloids about a free video — sex video — sent in a brown envelope with no address to say where it had come from. You know, in case the wife...”

“No, I don’t know, Lewis. But please continue.”

“Well, he sent for one of the choices—”

“Copenhagen Red-Hot Sex?”

“No. Housewives on the Job — that was the title; and he expected, you know...”

Morse nodded. “Housewives ‘on the job’ with the milkman, the postman, the itinerant button salesmen...”

Lewis grinned. “But it wasn’t, no. It just showed all these fully dressed Swedish housewives washing up the plates and peeling the potatoes.”

“Serves Sergeant Dixon right.”

“You won’t mention it, sir!”

“Of course I won’t. And you’re probably right. You never really get something for nothing in this life. I never seem to, anyway.”

“Really, sir?”

Morse licked the flap of the white envelope. Then licked the back of the first-class stamp that Lewis had just given him.

The phone had been ringing for several seconds, and Lewis now took the call, listening briefly but carefully, before putting his hand over the mouthpiece:

“There’s been a murder, sir. On the doorstep, really — up on Bloxham Drive.”