Death Is Now My Neighbor

Chapter seven

It reminded Morse of something — that rear window of Number 17.

As a young lad he’d been fascinated by a photograph in one of his junior school textbooks of the apparatus frequently fixed round the necks of slaves in the southern states of America: an iron ring from whose circumference, at regular intervals, there emanated lengthy, fearsome spikes, also of iron. The caption, as Morse recalled, had maintained that such a device readily prevented any absconding cotton picker from passing himself off as an enfranchised citizen.

Morse had never really understood the caption.

Nor indeed, for some considerable while, was he fully to understand the meaning of the neat bullet hole in the center of the shattered glass, and the cracks that radiated from it regularly, like a young child’s crayoning the rays of the sun.

Looking around him, Morse surveyed the area from the wobbly paving slabs which formed a pathway at the rear of the row of terraced houses stretching along the northern side of Bloxham Drive, Kidlington, Oxfordshire. About half of the thirty-odd young trees originally planted in a staggered design beside and behind this path had been vandalized to varying degrees: some of them wholly extirpated; some cruelly snapped in the middle of their gradually firming stems; others, with many of their burgeoning branches torn off, standing wounded and forlorn amid the unkempt litter-strewn area, once planned by some Environmental Officer as a small addendum to England’s green and pleasant land.

Morse felt saddened.

As did Sergeant Lewis, standing beside him.

Yet it is appropriate here to enter one important qualification. Bloxham Drive, in the view of most of its residents, was showing some few signs of unmistakable improvement. The installation of sleeping policemen had virtually eliminated the possibilities of joyriding; many denizens were now lying more peacefully in their beds after the eviction of one notoriously antisocial household; and over the previous two or three years the properties had fallen in price to such an extent as to form an attractive proposition to those few of the professional classes who were prepared to give the street the benefit of the doubt. To be more specific, three such persons had taken out mortgages on properties there: the properties standing at Number 1, Number 15, and Number 17.

But — yes, agreed! — Bloxham Drive and the surrounding streets were still a league from the peaceful, leafy lanes of Gerrards Cross; and still the scene of some considerable crime.

Crime which now included murder…

The call had come through to Lewis at 8:40 A.M.

Just over one hour previously, while the sky was still unusually dark, Mrs. Queenie Norris, from Number 11, had (as was her wont) taken out her eight-year-old Cavalier King Charles along the rear of the terrace, ignoring (as was her wont) the notices forbidding the fouling of pavements and verges. That was when she’d noticed it: noticed the cracked back window at Number 17 — yet failed to register too much surprise, since (as we have seen) vandalism there had become commonplace, and any missile, be it bottle or brick, would have left some similar traces of damage.

Back from her walk, Mrs. Norris, as she was later to explain to the police, had felt increasingly uneasy. And just before the weather forecast on Radio 4, she had stepped out once again, now minus the duly defecated Samson, and seen that the light in the kitchen of Number 17 was still on, the blind still drawn down to the bottom of the casement.

This time she had knocked quietly, then loudly, against the back door.

But there had been no reply to her reiterated raps; and only then had she noticed that behind the hole in the kitchen window — immediately behind it — was a corresponding hole in the thin beige-brown material of the blind. It was at that point that she’d felt the horrid crawl of fear across her skin. Her near-neighbor worked in North Oxford, almost invariably leaving home at about a quarter to eight. And now it was coming up to the hour. Had reached the hour.

Something was wrong.

Something, Mrs. Norris suspected, was seriously wrong; and she’d rung 999 immediately.

It had been ten minutes later when PCs Graham and Swift had finally forced an entry through the front door of the property to discover the grim truth awaiting them in the back kitchen: the body of a young woman lying dead upon her side, the right cheek resting on the cold red tiles, the light brown hair of her ponytail soaked and stiffened in a pool of blood. Indeed it was not only the dreams of the two comparatively inexperienced constables, but also those of the hardened Scenes-of-Crime Officers, that would be haunted by the sight of so much blood; such a copious outpouring of blood.

And now it was Morse’s turn.

“Oh dear,” said Lewis very quietly.

Morse said nothing, holding back (as ever) from any close inspection of a corpse, noting only the bullet wound, somewhere at the bottom of the neck, which clearly had been the cause of death, the cause of all the blood. Yet (as ever, too) Morse, who had never owned a camera in his life, had already taken several mental flashes of his own.

It seemed logical to assume that the murder had occurred toward the end of a fairly conventional breakfast. On the side of a wooden kitchen table — the side nearest the window — a brown plastic-topped stool had been moved slightly askew. On the table itself was a plate, a small heap of salt sprinkled with pepper at its edge, on which lay a brown eggshell beside a wooden eggcup; and alongside, on a second plate, half a round of toasted brown bread, buttered, and amply spread from a jar of Frank Cooper’s Oxford Marmalade. And one other item: a white mug bearing the legend GREETINGS FROM GUERNSEY; bearing, too, the remains of some breakfast coffee, long since cold and muddily brown.

That was what Morse saw. And for the present that was enough; he wished to be away from the dreadful scene.

Yet before he left, he forced himself to look once more at the woman who lay there. She was wearing a white nightdress, with a faded-pink floral motif, over which was a light blue dressing gown, reaching about halfway down the shapely, slim, unstockinged legs. It was difficult to be sure about things, of course; but Morse suspected that the twisted features of the face had been — until so very recently — just as comely as the rest of her. And for a few seconds his own face twisted, too, as if in sympathy with the murdered woman lying at his feet.

The SOCOs had now arrived; and after brief, perfunctory greetings, Morse was glad to escape and leave them to it. Bidding Lewis to initiate some immediate house-to-house inquiries, on both sides of the street, he himself stepped out of the front door onto Bloxham Drive, now the scene of considerable police activity, with checkered-capped officers, the flashing blue lights of their cars, and a cordon of blue-and-white tape being thrown round the murder house. A knot of local inhabitants, too, stood whispering there, shivering occasionally in the early morning cold, yet determined to witness the course of events unfolding.

And the media.

Recognizing the Chief Inspector, two pressmen (how so early there?) pleaded for just the briefest interview — a sentence even; a TV crew from Abingdon had already covered Morse’s exit from the house; and a Radio Oxford reporter waved a bulbous microphone in front of his face.

But Morse ignored them all with a look of vacuous incomprehension worthy of some deaf-mute, and proceeded to walk slowly to the end of the street (observing, all the time observing), where he turned left down one side of the terraced row, then left again, retracing his earlier steps along the uneven paving slabs behind the houses, stopping briefly where he and Lewis had stopped before; then completing the circuit and again curtly dismissing the converging reporters with a wave of his right hand as he walked back along the front of the terrace.

It would be untrue to say that Morse’s mind had been particularly acute on this peripatetic reconnaissance. Indeed, only one single feature of the neighborhood had made much of an impression upon him.

A political impression.

Very soon (the evidence was all around him) there was to be an election for one of the local council seats — death of an incumbent, perhaps? — and clearly, if unusually, there appeared to be considerable interest in the matter. Stickers were to be observed in all but two of the front windows of the north-side terrace: green stickers with the red lettering of the Labor candidate’s name; white stickers with the royal blue lettering of the Conservative’s. With little as yet upon which his mind could fix itself, Morse had taken a straw poll of the support shown, from Number 1 to Number 21. And hardly surprisingly, perhaps, in this marginally depressed and predominantly working-class district, the advantage was significantly with the Labor man, with six stickers to the Tory’s two.

One of the stickers favoring the latter cause was displayed in the ground-floor window of Number 15. And for some reason Morse had found himself standing and wondering for a while outside the only other window in the Drive parading its confidence in the Conservative Party — and in a candidate with the splendidly patriotic name of Jonathan Bull; standing and wondering outside Number 1, at the main entrance to Bloxham Drive.

Chapter eight

In his earlier years Geoffrey Owens had been an owl, preferring to pursue whatever tasks lay before him into the late hours of the night, often through into the still, small hours. But now, in his mid-forties, he had metamorphosed into a lark, his brain seeming perceptibly clearer and fresher in the morning. It had been no hardship, therefore, when he was invited, under the new flexitime philosophy of his employers, to start work early and finish work early — thereby receiving a small bonus into the bargain. And, since the previous September, Owens had made it his regular practice to leave his home on Bloxham Drive just before 7 A.M., incidentally thus avoiding the traffic jams which began to build up in the upper reaches of the Banbury Road an hour or so later; and, on his return journey, missing the corresponding jams the other way, as thousands of motorists left the busy heart of Oxford for the comparative peace of the northern outskirts, and the neighboring villages — such as Kidlington.

It was, all in all, a happy enough arrangement. And one which had applied on Monday, February 19.

Owens had left his house at about ten minutes to seven that morning, when he had, of course, passed the house on the corner, Number 1, where a woman had watched him go. But if he in turn had spotted her, this was in no way apparent, for he had passed without a wave of recognition, and driven up to the junction, where he had turned right, on his way down into Oxford. But if he had not seen her, quite definitely she had seen him.

Traffic had been unusually light for a Monday (more often than not the busiest morning of the week) even at such a comparatively early hour; and without any appreciable holdup Owens soon reached the entrance barrier of the large car park which serves the Oxfordshire Newspapers complex down in Osney Mead, just past the railway station along the Botley Road.

Owens had come to Oxford three years previously with an impressive-looking CV, in which the applicant asserted his “all-round experience in the fields of reporting, copyediting, advertising, and personnel management.” And he had been the unanimous choice of the four members of the interviewing panel. Nor had there been the slightest reason since for them to rue their decision. In fact, Owens had proved a profitable investment. With his knowledge of English grammar way above average, his job description had quickly been modified, with an appropriate increase in salary, to include responsibility for recasting the frequently ill-constructed paragraphs of his junior colleagues, and for correcting the heinous errors in orthography which blighted not a few of their offerings; and, in addition to these new tasks, to stand in as required when the Personnel Manager was called away on conferences.

As a result of these changes, Owens himself, nominally the group’s senior reporter, had become more and more deskbound, venturing out only for the big stories. Like now. For as he stood on Bloxham Drive that morning, he was never in doubt that this would be one of those “big stories” — not just for himself but also for the steadily increasing number of media colleagues who were already joining him.

All of them waiting...

Waiting, in fact, until 11:30 A.M. — well before which time, as if by some sort of collective instinct, each was aware that something grotesque and gruesome had occurred in the house there numbered 17.

Chapter nine

At 11:15 A.M. Lewis suggested that someone perhaps ought to say something.

For the past hour and a half a group of police officers had been knocking on neighborhood doors, speaking to residents, taking brief preliminary statements. But as yet nothing official had been released to the representatives of the media assembled in a street now increasingly crowded with curious onlookers.

“Go ahead!” said Morse.

“Shall I tell them all we know?”

“That won’t take you long, will it?”

“No need to keep anything back?”

“For Chrissake, Lewis! You sound as if we’ve got something to hide. If we have, why don’t you tell me?”

“Just wondered.”

Morse’s tone softened. “It won’t matter much what you tell ’em, will it?”

“All right.”

“Just one thing, though. You can remind ’em that we’d all welcome a bit of accuracy for a change. Tell ’em to stick an ‘h’ in the middle of Bloxham Close — that sort of thing.”

“Bloxham Drive, sir.”

“Thank you, Lewis.”

With which, a morose-looking Morse eased himself back in the armchair in the front sitting room, and continued his cursory examination of the papers, letters, documents, photographs, taken from the drawers of a Queen Anne-style escritoire — a rather tasteful piece, thought Morse. Family heirloom, perhaps.

Family…

Oh dear!

That was always one of the worst aspects of suicides and murders: the family. This time with Mom and Dad and younger sister already on their way up from Torquay. Still, Lewis was wonderfully good at that sort of thing. Come to think of it, Lewis was quite good at several things, really — including dealing with the Press. And as Morse flicked his way somewhat fecklessly through a few more papers, he firmly resolved (although in fact he forgot) to tell his faithful sergeant exactly that before the day was through.

Immediately on confronting his interlocutors, Lewis was invited by the TV crew to go some way along the street so that he could be filmed walking before appearing in front of the camera talking. Normal TV routine, it was explained: always see a man striding along somewhere before seeing his face on the screen. So, would Sergeant Lewis please oblige with a short perambulation?

No, Sergeant Lewis wouldn’t.

What he would do, though, was try to tell them what they wanted to know. Which, for the next few minutes, he did.

A murder had occurred in the kitchen of Number 17 Bloxham Drive: B-L-O-X-H-A-M—

One of the neighbors (unspecified) had earlier alerted the police to suspicious circumstances at that address—

A patrol car had been on the scene promptly; forced open the front door; discovered the body of a young woman—

The woman had been shot dead through the rear kitchen window—

The body had not as yet been officially identified—

The property appeared to show no sign — no other sign — of any break-in—

That was about it, really.

Amid the subsequent chorus of questions, Lewis picked out the raucous notes of the formidable female reporter from the Oxford Star:

“What time was all this, Sergeant?”

As it happened, Lewis knew the answer to that question very well. But he decided to be economical with the details of the surprisingly firm evidence already gleaned...

The Jacobs family lived immediately opposite Number 17, where the lady of the house, in dressing gown and curlers, had opened her front door a few minutes after 7 A.M. in order to pick up her two pints of Co-op milk from the doorstep. Contemporaneously, exactly so, her actions had been mirrored across the street where another woman, also in a dressing gown (though without curlers), had been picking up her own single pint. Each had looked across at the other; each had nodded a matutinal greeting.

“You’re quite sure?” Lewis had insisted. “It was still a bit dark, you know.”

“We’ve got some street lamps, haven’t we, Sergeant?”

“You are sure, then.”

“Unless she’s got — unless she had a twin sister.”

“Sure about the time, too? That’s very important.”

She nodded. “I’d just watched the news headlines on BBC1 — I like to do that. Then I turned the telly off. I might have filled the kettle again... but, like I say, it was only a few minutes past seven. Five past, at the outside.”

It therefore seemed virtually certain that there was a time span of no more than half an hour during which the murder had occurred: between 7:05 A.M., when Mrs. Jacobs had seen her neighbor opposite, and 7:35 A.M. or so, when Mrs. Norris had first noticed the hole in the window. It was unusual — very unusual — for such exactitude to be established at so early a stage in a murder inquiry; and there would be little need in this case for the police to be dependent upon (what Morse always called) those prevaricating pathologists...

“About quarter past seven,” answered the prevaricating Lewis.

“You’re quite sure?” It was exactly the same question Lewis himself had asked.

“No, not sure at all. Next question?”

“Why didn’t everybody hear the shot?” (The same young, ginger-headed reporter.)

“Silencer, perhaps?”

“There’d be the sound of breaking glass surely?” (A logically minded man from the Oxford Star.)

A series of hand gestures and silent lip movements from the TV crew urged Lewis to look directly into the camera.

Lewis nodded. “Yes. In fact several of the neighbors think they heard something — two of them certainly did. But it could have been lots of things, couldn’t it?”

“Such as?” (The importunate ginger knob again.)

Lewis shrugged. “Could have been the milkman dropping a bottle—?”

“No broken glass here, though, Sergeant.”

“Car backfiring? We don’t know.”

“Does what the neighbors heard fit in with the time all right?” (The TV interviewer with his fluffy cylindrical microphone.)

“Pretty well, yes.”

The senior reporter from the Oxford Mail had hitherto held his peace. But now he asked a curious question, if it was a question:

“Not the two immediate neighbors, were they?”

Lewis looked at the man with some interest.

“Why do you say that?”

“Well, the woman who lives there,” a finger pointed to Number 19, “she was probably still asleep at the time, and she’s stone-deaf without her hearing aid.”

“Really?”

“And the man who lives there,” a finger pointed to Number 15, “he’d already left for work.”

Lewis frowned. “Can you tell me how you happen to know all this, sir?”

“No problem,” replied Geoffrey Owens. “You see, Sergeant, I live at Number 15.”

Chapter ten

When Lewis returned from his encounter with the media, Morse was almost ready to leave the murder house. The morning had moved toward noon, and he knew that he might be thinking a little more clearly if he were drinking a little — or at least be starting to think when he started to drink.

“Is there a real-ale pub somewhere near?”

Lewis, pleasantly gratified with his handling of the Press and TV, was emboldened to sound a note of caution.

“Doesn’t do your liver much good — all this drinking.”

Surprisingly Morse appeared to accept the reminder with modest grace.

“I’m sure you’re right; but my medical advisers have warned me it may well be unwise to give up alcohol at my age.”

Lewis was not impressed, for he had heard the same words — exactly the same words — on several previous occasions.

“You’ve had a good look around, sir?”

“Not really. I know I always find the important things. But I want you to have a look around. You usually manage to find the unimportant things — and often they’re the things that really matter in the end.”

Lewis made little attempt to disguise his pleasure, and straightway relented.

“We could go up to the Boat at Thrupp?”

“Excellent.”

“You don’t want to stay here any longer?”

“No. The SOCOs’ll be another couple of hours yet.”

“You don’t want to see... her again?”

Morse shook his head. “I know what she looks like — looked like.” He picked up two colored photographs and one postcard, and made toward the front door, handing over the keys of the maroon Jaguar to Lewis. “You’d better drive — if you promise to stick to the orange juice.”

Once on their way, Lewis reported the extraordinarily strange coincidence of the pressman, Owens, living next door to the murdered woman. But Morse, who always looked upon any coincidence in life as the norm rather than the exception, was more anxious to set forth the firm details he had himself now gleaned about Ms. Rachel James, for there could now be no real doubt of her identity.

“Twenty-nine. Single. No offspring. Worked as a freelance physiotherapist at a place in the Banbury Road. CV says she went to school at Torquay Comprehensive; left there in 1984 with a clutch of competent O-levels, three A-levels — two Bs, in Biology and Geography, and an E in Media Studies.”

“Must have been fairly bright.”

“What do you mean? You need to be a moron to get an E in Media Studies,” asserted Morse, who had never seen so much as a page of any Media Studies syllabus, let alone a question paper.

He continued:

“Parents, as you know, still alive, on their way here—”

“You’ll want me to see them?”

“Well, you are good at that sort of thing, aren’t you? And if the mother’s like most women she’ll probably smell the beer as soon as I open the door.”

“Good reason for you to join me on the orange juice.”

Morse ignored the suggestion. “She bought the property there just over four years ago for £65,000 and the value’s been falling ever since by the look of things, so the poor lass is one of those figuring in the negative equity statistics; took out a mortgage of £55,000 — probably Mom and Dad gave her the other £10,000; and the salable value of Number 17 is now £40,000, at the most.”

“Bought at the wrong time, sir. But some people were a bit irresponsible, don’t you think?”

“I’m not an economist, as you know, Lewis. But I’ll tell you what would have helped her. Helped so many in her boots.”

“A win on the National Lottery?”

“Wouldn’t help many, that, would it? No. What she could have done with is a healthy dose of inflation. It’s a good thing — inflation — you know. Especially for people who’ve got nothing to start with. One of the best things that happened to some of us. One year I remember I had three jumps in salary.”

“Not many would agree with you on that, though, would they? Conservative and Labor both agree about inflation.”

“Ah! Messrs. Bull and Thomas, you mean?”

“You noticed the stickers?”

“I notice most things. It’s just that some of them don’t register — not immediately.”

“What’ll you have, sir?”

“Lew-is! We’ve known each other long enough, surely.”

As Morse tasted the hostelry’s best bitter, he passed over a photograph of Rachel James.

“Best one of her I could find.”

Lewis looked down at the young woman.

“Real good looker,” he said softly.

Morse nodded. “I bet she’d have set a few hearts all aflutter.”

“Including yours, sir?”

Morse drank deeply on his beer before replying. “She’d probably have a good few boyfriends, that’s all I’m suggesting. As for my own potential susceptibility, that’s beside the point.”

“Of course.” Lewis smiled good-naturedly. “What else have we got?”

“What do you make of this? One of the few interesting things there, as far as I could see.”

Lewis now considered the postcard handed to him. First, the picture on the front: a photograph of a woodland ride, with a sunlit path on the left, and a pool of azured bluebells to the right. Then turning over the card, he read the cramped lines amateurishly typed on the left-hand side:

That was all.

No salutation.

No valediction.

And on the right-hand side of the postcard — nothing: no address, with the four dotted, parallel lines devoid of any writing, the top right-hand rectangle devoid of any stamp.

Lewis, a man not familiar with seventeenth-century love lyrics, read the lines, then read them again, with only semi-comprehension.

“Pity she didn’t get round to filling in the address, sir. Looks as if she might be proposing to somebody.”

“Aren’t you making an assumption?”

“Pardon?”

“Did you see a typewriter in the house?”

“She could have typed it at work.”

“Yes. You must get along there soon.”

“You’re the boss.”

“Nice drop o’ beer, this. In good nick.” Morse drained the glass and set it down in the middle of the slightly rickety table, while Lewis took a gentle sip of his orange juice; and continued to sit firmly fixed to his seat.

Morse continued:

“No! You’re making a false assumption — I think you are. You’re assuming she’d just written this to somebody and then forgotten the fellow’s address, right? Pretty unlikely, isn’t it? If she was proposing to him.”

“Perhaps she couldn’t find a stamp.”

“Perhaps...”

Reluctantly Morse got to his feet and pushed his glass across the bar. “You don’t want anything more yourself, do you, Lewis?”

“No thanks.”

“You’ve nothing less?” asked the landlady, as Morse tendered a twenty-pound note. “You’re the first ones in today and I’m a bit short of change.”

Morse turned round. “Any change on you, by any chance, Lewis?”

“You see,” continued Morse, “you’re still assuming she wrote it, aren’t you?”

“And she didn’t?”

“I think someone wrote the card to her, put it in an envelope, and then addressed the envelope — not the card.”

“Why not just address the card?”

“Because whoever wrote it didn’t want anyone else to read it.”

“Why not just phone her up?”

“Difficult — if he was married and his wife was always around.”

“He could ring her from a phone box.”

“Risky — if anyone saw him.”

Lewis nodded without any conviction: “And it’s only a bit of poetry.”

“Is it?” asked Morse quietly.

Lewis picked up the card again. “Perhaps it’s this chap called ‘Wilmot,’ sir — the date’s just there to mislead us.”

“Mislead you, perhaps. John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, was a court poet to Charles II. He wrote some delightfully pornographic lyrics.”

“So it’s — it’s all genuine?”

“I didn’t say that, did I? The name’s genuine, but not the poem. Any English scholar would know that’s not seventeenth-century verse.”

“I’m sure you’re right, sir.”

“And if I’m right about the card coming in an envelope — fairly recently — we might be able to find the envelope, agreed? Find a postmark, perhaps? Even a bit of handwriting?”

Lewis looked dubious. “I’d better get something organized, then.”

“All taken care of! I’ve got a couple of the DCs looking through the wastepaper baskets and the dustbin.”

“You reckon this is important, then?”

“Top priority! You can see that. She’s been meeting some man — meeting him secretly. Which means he’s probably married, probably fairly well-known, probably got a prominent job, probably a local man—”

“Probably lives in Peterborough,” mumbled Lewis.

“That’s exactly why the postmark’s so vital!” countered an unamused Morse. “But if he’s an Oxford man...”

“Do you know what the population of Oxford is?”

“I know it to the nearest thousand!” snapped Morse.

Then, of a sudden, the Chief Inspector’s mood completely changed. He tapped the postcard.

“Don’t be despondent, Lewis. You see, we know just a little about this fellow already, don’t we?”

He smiled benignly after draining his second pint; and since no other customers had as yet entered the lounge, Lewis resignedly got to his feet and stepped over to the bar once more.

Lewis picked up the postcard again.

“Give me a clue, sir.”

“You know the difference between nouns and verbs, of course?”

“How could I forget something like that?”

“Well, at certain periods in English literature, all the nouns were spelled with capital letters. Now, as you can see, there are eight nouns in those six lines — each of them spelled with a capital letter. But there are nine capitals — forgetting the first word of each line. Now which is the odd one out?”

Lewis pretended to study the lines once more. He’d played this game before, and he trusted he could get away with it again, as his eyes suddenly lit up a little.

“Ah... I think— I think I see what you mean.”

“Hits you in the eye, doesn’t it, that ‘Wed’ in the first line? And that’s what it was intended to do.”

“Obviously.”

“What’s it mean?”

“What, ‘Wed’? Well, it means ‘marry’ — you know, get hitched, get spliced, tie the knot—”

“What else?”

“Isn’t that enough?”

“What else?”

“I suppose you’re going to tell me it’s Anglo-Saxon or something.”

“Not exactly. Not far off, though. Old English, in fact. And what’s it short for?”

“ ‘Wednesday?’ ” suggested Lewis tentatively.

Morse beamed at his sergeant. “Woden’s day — the fourth day of the week. So we’ve got a day, Lewis. And what else do you need, if you’re going to arrange a date with a woman?”

Lewis studied the lines yet again. “Time? Time, yes! I see what you mean, sir. ‘Ten Times’… ‘fifteen Bridesmaides’… Well, well, well! Ten-fifteen!”

Morse nodded. “With A.M. likelier than P.M. Doesn’t say where though, does it?”

Lewis studied the lines for the fifth time.

“ ‘Traine,’ perhaps?”

“Well done! ‘Meet me at the station to catch the ten-fifteen A.M. train’ — that’s what it says. And we know where that train goes, don’t we?”

“Paddington.”

“Exactly.”

“If only we knew who he was...”

Morse now produced his second photograph — a small passport-sized photograph of two people: the woman, Rachel James (no doubt of that), turning partially round and slightly upward in order to kiss the cheek of a considerably older man with a pair of smiling eyes beneath a distinguished head of graying hair.

“Who’s he, sir?”

“Dunno. We could find out pretty quickly, though, if we put his photo in the local papers.”

“If he’s local.”

“Even if he’s not local, I should think.”

“Bit dodgy, sir.”

“Too dodgy at this stage, I agree. But we can try another angle, can’t we? Tomorrow’s Tuesday, and the day after that’s Wednesday — Woden’s day...”

“You mean he may turn up at the station?”

“If the card’s fairly recent, yes.”

“Unless he’s heard she’s been murdered.”

“Or unless he murdered her himself.”

“Worth a try, sir. And if he does turn up, it’ll probably mean he didn’t murder her...”

Morse made no comment.

“Or, come to think of it, it might be a fairly clever thing to do if he did murder her.”

Morse drained his glass and stood up.

“You know something? I reckon orange juice occasionally germinates your brain cells.”

As he drove his chief down to Kidlington, Lewis returned the conversation to where it had begun.

“You haven’t told me what you think about this fellow Owens — the dead woman’s next-door neighbor.”

“Death is always the next-door neighbor,” said Morse somberly. “But don’t let it affect your driving, Lewis!”

Chapter eleven Wednesday, February 21

The next meeting of the Lonsdale Fellows had been convened for 10 A.M.

In the Stamper Room.

William Leslie Stamper, b. 1880, had graduated from Oxford University in 1903 with the highest marks (it is said) ever recorded in Classical Moderations. The bracketed caveat in the previous sentence would be unnecessary were it not that the claim for such distinction was perpetuated, in later years, by one person only — by W. L. Stamper himself. And it is pointless to dwell upon the matter since no independent verification is available: The relevant records had been removed from Oxford to a safe place, thereafter never to be seen again, during the First World War — a war in which Stamper had not been an active participant, owing to an illness which was unlikely to prolong his eminently promising career as a don for more than a couple of years or so. Such nonparticipation in the great events of 1914–18 was a major sadness (it is said) to Stamper himself, who was frequently heard to lament his own failure to figure among the casualty lists from the fields of Flanders or Passchendaele.

Now, the reader may readily be forgiven for assuming from the preceding paragraph that Stamper had been a timeserver; a dissembling self-seeker. Yet such an assumption is highly questionable, though not necessarily untrue. When, for example, in 1925, the Mastership of Lonsdale fell vacant, and nominations were sought amid the groves of Academe, Stamper had refused to let his name go forward, on the grounds that if ten years earlier he had been declared unfit to fight in defense of his country he could hardly be considered fit to undertake the governance of the College; specifically so, since the Statutes stipulated a candidate whose body was no less healthy than his brain.

Thereafter, in his gentle, scholarly, pedantic manner, Stamper had passed his years teaching the esoteric skills of Greek Prose and Verse Composition — until retiring at the age of sixty-five, two years before the statutory limit, on the grounds of ill health. No one, certainly not Stamper himself (it is said), anticipated any significant continuation of his life, and the College Fellows unanimously backed a proposal that the dear old boy should have the privilege, during the few remaining years of his life, of living in the finest set of rooms that the College had to offer.

Thus it was that the legendary Stamper had stayed on in Lonsdale as an honorary Emeritus Fellow, with full dining rights, from the year of his retirement, 1945, to 1955; and then to 1965... and 1975; and almost indeed until 1985, when he had finally died at the age of 104 — and then not through any dysfunction of the bodily organs, but from a fall beside his rooms in the front quad after a heavy bout of drinking at a Gaudy, his last words (it is said) being a whispered request for the Madeira to be passed round once again.

The agenda which lay before Sir Clixby Bream and his colleagues that morning was short and fairly straightforward:

(i) To receive apologies for absence

(ii) To approve the minutes of the previous meeting (already circulated)

(iii) To consider the Auditors’ statement on College expenditure, Michaelmas 1995

(iv) To recommend appropriate procedures for the election of a new Master

(v) AOB

Items (i)-(iii) took only three minutes, and would have taken only one, had not the Tutor for Admissions sought an explanation of why the “Stationery, etc.” bill for the College Office had risen by four times the current rate of inflation. For which increase the Domestic Bursar admitted full responsibility, since instead of ordering 250 Biros he had inadvertently ordered 250 boxes of Biros.

This confession put the meeting into good humor, as it passed on to item (iv).

The Master briefly restated the criteria to be met by potential applicants: first, that he be not in Holy Orders; second, that he be mentally competent, and particularly so in the “Skills of the Arithmetick” (as the original Statute had it); third, that he be free from serious bodily infirmity. On the second criterion, the Master suggested that since it was now virtually impossible (a gentle glance here at the innumerate Professor of Arabic) to fail GCSE Mathematics, there could be little problem for anyone. As far as the third criterion was concerned however (the Master grew more solemn now) there was a sad announcement he had to make. One name previously put forward had been withdrawn — that of Dr. Ridgeway, the brilliant microbiologist from Balliol, who had developed serious heart trouble at the comparatively youthful age of forty-three.

Amid murmurs of commiseration round the table, the Master continued:

“Therefore, gentlemen, we are left with two nominations only... unless we... unless anyone...? No?”

No.

Well, that was pleasing, the Master declared: He had always wished his successor to be appointed from within the College. And so it would be. Voting would take place in the time-honored way: A single sheet of paper bearing the handwritten name of the preferred candidate, with the signature of the Voting Fellow beneath it, must be delivered to the Master’s Lodge before noon on the nineteenth of March, one month away.

The Master proceeded to wish the two candidates well; and Julian Storrs and Denis Cornford, by chance seated next to each other, shook hands smilingly, like a couple of boxers before the weigh-in for a bruising fight.

That was not quite all.

Under AOB, the Tutor for Admissions was moved to make his second contribution of the morning.

“Perhaps it may be possible, Master, in view of the current plethora of pens in the College Office, for the Domestic Bursar to send us each a free Biro with which we can write down our considered choices for Master?”

It was a nice touch, typical of an Oxford SCR; and when at 10:20 A.M. they left the Stamper Room and moved outside into the front quad, most of the Fellows were grinning happily.

But not the Domestic Bursar.

Nor Julian Storrs.

Nor Denis Cornford.

Chapter twelve

Earlier that same morning Morse and Lewis had been sitting together drinking coffee in the canteen at Kidlington Police HQ.

“Well, that’s them!” said an unwontedly ungrammatical Morse as he pointed to the photograph which some darkroom boy had managed to enlarge and enhance. “Our one big clue, that; one small clue, anyway.”

As Lewis saw things, the enlargement appeared to have been reasonably effective as far as the clothing was concerned; yet to be truthful, the promised “enhancement” of the two faces, those of the murdered woman and of the man so close beside her, seemed to have blurred rather than focused any physiognomical detail.

“Well?” asked Morse.

“Worse than the original.”

“Nonsense! Look at that.” Morse pointed to the tight triangular knot of the man’s tie, which appeared — just — above a high-necked gray sweater.

Yes. Lewis acknowledged that the color and pattern of the tie were perhaps a little clearer.

“I think I almost recognize that tie,” continued Morse slowly. “That deepish maroon color. And that,” he pointed again, “that narrow white stripe...”

“We never had ties at school,” ventured Lewis.

But Morse was too deeply engrossed to bother about his sergeant’s former school uniform, or lack of it, as with a magnifying glass he sought further to enhance the texture of the small relevant area of the photograph.

“Bit o’ taste there, Lewis. Little bit o’ class. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s the tie of the Old Wykehamists’ Classical Association.”

Lewis said nothing.

And Morse looked at him almost accusingly. “You don’t seem very interested in what I’m telling you.”

“Not too much, perhaps.”

“All right! Perhaps it’s not a public school tie. So what tie do you think it is?”

Again Lewis said nothing.

After a while, a semi-mollified Morse picked up the photograph, returned it to its buff-colored Do-Not-Bend envelope, and sat back in his seat.

He looked tired.

And, as Lewis knew, he was frustrated too, since necessarily the whole of the previous day had been spent on precisely those aspects of detective work that Morse disliked the most: administration, organization, procedures — with as yet little opportunity for him to indulge in the things he told himself he did the best: hypotheses, imaginings, the occasional leap into the semidarkness.

It was now 9 A.M.

“You’d better get off to the station, Lewis. And good luck!”

“What are you planning to do?”

“Going down into Oxford for a haircut.”

“We’ve got a couple of new barbers’ shops opened here. No need to—”

“I — am — going — down — into — Oxford, all right? A bit later, I’m going to meet a fellow who’s an expert on ties, all right?”

“I’ll give you a lift, if you like.”

“No. It only takes one of those shapely lasses in Shepherd and Woodward’s about ten minutes to trim my locks — and I’m not meeting this fellow till eleven.”

“King’s Arms, is it?”

“Ah! You’re prepared to guess about that.”

“Pardon?”

“So why not have a guess about the tie? Come on!”

“I dunno.”

“Nor do I bloody know. That’s exactly why we’ve got to guess, man.”

Lewis stood by the door now. It was high time he went.

“I haven’t got a clue about all those posh ties you see in the posh shops in the High. For all I know he probably got it off the tie rack in Marks and Spencer’s.”

“No. I don’t think so.”

“Couldn’t we just cut a few corners? Perhaps we ought to put the photo in the Oxford Mail. We’d soon find out who he was then.”

Morse considered the possibility anew.

“Ye-es... and if we find he’s got nothing to do with the murder...”

“We can eliminate him from inquiries.”

“Ye-es. Eliminate his marriage, too—”

“—if he’s married—”

“—and ruin his children—”

“—if he’s got any.”

“You just get off to the railway station, Lewis.” Morse had had enough.

Chapter thirteen

At 9:45 A.M. Lewis was seated strategically at one of the small round tables in the refreshment area adjacent to Platform One. Intermittently an echoing loudspeaker announced arrivals or apologies for delays; and, at 9:58, recited a splendid litany of all the stops on the slow train to Reading: Radley, Culham, Appleford, Didcot Parkway, Cholsey, Goring and Streatley...

Cholsey, yes.

Mrs. Lewis was a big fan of Agatha Christie, and he’d often promised to take her to Cholsey churchyard where the great crime novelist was buried. But one way or another he’d never got round to it.

The complex was busy, with passengers constantly leaving the station through the two automatic doors to Lewis’s right, to walk down the steps outside to the taxi rank and buses for the city center; passengers constantly entering through those same doors, making for the ticket windows, the telephones, the Rail Information office; passengers turning left, past Lewis, in order to buy newspapers, sweets, paperbacks, from the Menzies shop — or sandwiches, cakes, coffee, from the Quick Snack counter alongside.

From where he sat, Lewis could just read one of the display screens: The 10:15 train to Paddington, it appeared, would be leaving on time — no minutes late. But he had seen no one remotely resembling the man whose photograph he’d tucked inside his copy of the Daily Mirror.

At 10:10 A.M. the train drew in to Platform One, and passengers were now getting on. But still there was no one to engage Lewis’s attention; no one standing around impatiently as if waiting for a partner; no one sitting anxiously consulting a wristwatch every few seconds, or walking back and forth to the exit doors and scanning the occupants of incoming taxis.

No one.

Lewis got to his feet and went out on to the platform, walking quickly along the four coaches which comprised the Turbo Express for Paddington, memorizing as best he could the face he’d so earnestly been studying that morning. But, again, he could find no one resembling the man who had once sat beside the murdered woman in a photographic booth.

No one.

It was then, at the last minute (quite literally so), that the idea occurred to him.

A young-looking ticket collector was leaning out of one of the rear windows while a clinking refreshment trolley was being lifted awkwardly aboard. Lewis showed him his ID; showed him the photograph.

“Have you ever seen either of these two on the Paddington train? Or any other train?”

The acne-faced youth examined the ID card as if suspecting, perchance, that it might be a faulty ticket; then, equally carefully, looked down at the photograph before looking up at Lewis.

Someone blew a whistle.

“Yes, I have. Seen him, anyway. Do you want to know his name, Sergeant? I remember it from his Railcard.”

Chapter fourteen

Morse caught a No. 2A bus into the center of Oxford, alighting at Carfax, thence walking down the High and entering Shepherd and Woodward’s, where he descended the stairs to Gerrard’s hairdressing saloon.

“The usual, sir?”

Morse was glad that he was being attended to by Gerrard himself. It was not that the proprietor was gifted with trichological skills significantly superior to those of his attractive female assistants; it was just that Gerrard had always been an ardent admirer of Thomas Hardy, and during his life had acquired an encyclopedic knowledge of the great man’s works.

“Yes, please,” answered Morse, looking morosely into the mirror at hair that had thinly drifted these last few years from ironish gray to purish white.

As Morse stood up to wipe the snippets of hair from his face with a hand towel, he took out the photograph and showed it to Gerrard.

“Has he ever been in here?”

“Don’t think so. Shall I ask the girls?”

Morse considered. “No. Leave it for the present.”

“Remember the Hardy poem, Mr. Morse? ‘The Photograph’?”

Morse did. Yet only vaguely.

“Remind me.”

“I used to have it by heart but...”

“We all get older,” admitted Morse.

Gerrard now scanned the pages of his extraordinary memory.

“You remember Hardy’d just burned a photo of one of his old flames — he didn’t know if she was alive or not — she was someone from the back of beyond of his life — but he felt awfully moved — as if he was putting her to death somehow — when he burned the photo... Just a minute... just a minute, I think I’ve got it:

Morse felt saddened as he walked out into the High. Hardy always managed to make him feel sad. And particularly so now, since only a few days earlier he’d consigned a precious photograph to the flames: a photograph hitherto pressed between pages 88–89 of his Collected Poems of A. E. Housman — the photograph of a dark-haired young woman seated on a broken classical column somewhere in Crete. A woman named Ellie Smith; a woman whom he’d loved — and lost.

Morse pondered the probabilities. Had other photographs been burned or torn to little pieces since the murder of Rachel James — photographs hitherto kept in books or secret drawers?

Perhaps Lewis was right. Why not publish the photo in the Oxford Mail? Assuredly, there’d be hundreds of incoming calls: so many of them wrong, of course — but some few of them probably right...

Morse turned left into Alfred Street, and walked down the narrow cobbled lane to the junction with Blue Boar Street, where he tried the saloon-bar door of the Bear Inn.

Locked — with the opening hour displayed disappointingly as midday. It was now 11:20 A.M., and Morse felt thirsty. Perhaps he was always thirsty. That morning, though, he felt preter-naturally thirsty. In fact he would gladly have swallowed a pint or two of ice-cold lager — a drink which at almost any other time would have been considered a betrayal by a real-ale addict like Morse.

He tapped lightly on the glass of the door. Tapped again. The door was opened.

A few minutes later, after offering identification, after a brief explanation of his purpose, Morse was seated with the landlord, Steven Lowbridge, at a table in the front bar.

“Would you like a coffee or something?” asked Sonya, his wife.

Morse turned round and looked toward the bar, where a row of beers paraded their pedigrees on the hand pumps.

“Is the Burton in good nick?”

The landlord (Morse learned) had been at the Bear Inn for five years, greatly enjoying his time there. A drinking house had been on the site since 1242, and undergraduates and undergraduettes were still coming in to crowd the comparatively small pub: from Oriel and Christ Church mostly; from Lincoln and Univ., too.

And the ties?

The Bear Inn was nationally — internationally — renowned for its ties: about five thousand of them at the last count. Showcases of ties covered the walls, covered the ceilings, in each of the bars: ties from Army regiments, sports clubs, schools, and OB associations; ties from anywhere and everywhere. The collection started (Morse learned) in 1954, when the incumbent landlord had invited any customer with an interesting-looking tie to have the last three or four inches of its back end cut off — in exchange for a couple of pints of beer. Thereafter, the snipped-off portions were put on display in cabinets, with a small square of white card affixed to each giving provenance and description.

Morse nodded encouragingly as the landlord told his well-rehearsed tale, occasionally casting a glance at the cabinet on the wall immediately opposite: Yale University Fencing Club; Kenya Police; Welsh Schoolboys’ Hockey Association; Women’s Land Army...

Ye gods!

What a multitude of ties!

Morse’s glass was empty; and the landlady tentatively suggested that the Chief Inspector would perhaps enjoy a further pint?

Morse had no objection; and made his way to the Gents where, as he washed his hands, he wondered whether all the washbasin plugs in the world could have disappeared — plugs from every pub, from every hotel, from every public convenience in the land. Somewhere (Morse mused) there must surely be a prodigious pile of basin plugs, as high as some Egyptian pyramid.

Back in the bar, Morse produced his photograph and pointed to the little patch of tie.

“Do you think there’s anything like that here?”

Lowbridge looked down at the slimly striped maroon tie, shaking his head dubiously.

“Don’t think so... But make yourself at home — please have a look round — for as long as you like.”

Morse experienced disappointment.

If only Lewis were there! Lewis — so wonderfully competent with this sort of thing: checking, checking, checking, the contents of the cabinets.

Help, Lewis!

But Lewis was elsewhere. And for twenty-five minutes or so, Morse moved round the two bars, with increasing fecklessness and irritation.

Nothing was matching...

Nothing.

“Find what you’re after?” It was the darkly attractive Sonya, just returned from a shopping expedition to the Westgate Center.

“No, sadly no,” admitted Morse. “It’s a bit like a farmer looking for a lost contact lens in a plowed field.”

“That what you’re looking for?”

Sonya Lowbridge pointed to the tie in the photograph that still lay on the table there.

Morse nodded. “That’s it.”

“But I can tell you where you can find that.”

“You can?” Morse’s eyes were suddenly wide, his mouth suddenly dry.

“Yep! I was looking for a tie for Steve’s birthday. And you’ll find one just like that on the tie rack in Marks and Spencer’s.”

Chapter fifteen

“Well?”

Julian Storrs closed the front door behind him, hung up his dripping plastic mac, and took his wife into his arms.

“No external candidates — just the two of us.”

“That’s wonderful news!” Angela Storrs moved away from her husband’s brief, perfunctory embrace, and led the way into the lounge of the splendidly furnished property in Polstead Road, a thoroughfare linking the Woodstock Road with Aristotle Lane (the latter, incidentally, Morse’s favorite Oxford street name).

“Certainly not bad news, is it? If the gods just smile on us a little...”

“Drink?”

“I think I may have earned a small brandy.”

She poured his drink; poured herself a large dry martini; lit a cigarette; and sat beside him on the brown-leather settee. She clinked her glass with his, and momentarily her eyes gleamed with potential triumph.

“To you, Sir Julian!”

“Just a minute! We’ve got to win the bloody thing first. No pushover, old Denis, you know: good College man — fine scholar — first-class brain—”

“Married to a second-class tart!”

Storrs shook his head with an uneasy smile.

“You’re being a bit cruel, love.”

“Don’t call me ‘love’ — as if you come from Rotherham, or somewhere.”

“What’s wrong with Rotherham?” He put his left arm around her shoulders, and forced an affectionate smile to his lips as he contemplated the woman he’d married just over twenty years previously — then pencil-slim, fresh-faced, and wrinkle-free.

Truth to tell, she was aging rather more quickly than most women of her years. Networks of varicose veins marred the long, still-shapely legs; and her stomach was a little distended around the waistband of the elegant trouser-suits which recently she almost invariably wore. The neck had grown rather gaunt, and there were lines and creases round her eyes. Yet the face itself was firmly featured still; and to many a man she remained an attractive woman — as she had appeared to Julian Storrs when first he had encountered her... in those extraordinary circumstances. And few there were who even now could easily resist the invitation of those almond eyes when after some dinner party or drinks reception she removed the dark glasses she had begun to wear so regularly.

Having swiftly swallowed her martini, Angela Storrs got to her feet and poured herself another — her husband making no demur. In fact, he was quite happy when she decided to indulge her more than occasional craving for alcohol, since then she would usually go to bed, go to sleep, and reawaken in a far more pleasant frame of mind.

“What are your chances — honestly?”

“Hope is a Christian virtue, you know that.”

“Christ! Can’t you think of anything better to say than that?”

He was silent awhile. “It means a lot to you, Angela, doesn’t it?”

“It means a lot to you, too,” she replied, allowing her slow words to take their full effect “It does, doesn’t it?”

“Yes,” he replied softly, “it means almost everything to me.”

Angela got up and poured herself another martini.

“I’m glad you said that. You know why? Because it doesn’t just mean almost everything to me — it means literally everything. I want to be the Master’s Wife, Julian. I want to be Lady Angela! Do you understand how much I want that?”

“Yes... yes, I think I do.”

“So... so if we have to engage in any ‘dirty tricks’ business...”

“What d’you mean?”

“Nothing specific.”

“What d’you mean?” he repeated.

“As I say...”

“Come on! Tell me!”

“Well, let’s say if it became known in the College that Shelly Cornford was an insatiable nymphomaniac...?”

“That just isn’t fair!”

Angela Storrs got to her feet and drained the last drop of her third drink:

“Who said it was?”

“Where are you going?”

“Upstairs, for a lie down, if you don’t object. I’d had a few before you got back — hadn’t you noticed? But I don’t suppose so, no. You haven’t really noticed me much at all recently, have you?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

But she was already leaving the room, and seemed not to hear.

Storrs took another small sip of his brandy, and pulled the copy of the previous evening’s Oxford Mail from the lower shelf of the coffee table, its front-page headline staring at him again:

“What did you tell Denis?”

“He’s got a tutorial, anyway. I just said I’d be out shopping.”

“He told you about the College Meeting?”

She nodded.

“You pleased?”

“Uh, uh!”

“It’ll be a bit of a nerve-racking time for you.”

“You should know!”

“Only a month of it, though.”

“What d’you think his chances are?”

“Difficult to say.”

“Will you vote for him?”

“I don’t have a vote.”

“Unless it’s a tie.”

“Agreed. But that’s unlikely, they tell me. Arithmetically quite impossible — if all twenty-three Fellows decide to vote.”

“So you won’t really have much say in things at all.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that. I’ll be a bit surprised if one or two of the Fellows don’t ask me for a little advice about, er, about their choice.”

“And?”

“And I shall try to be helpful.”

“To Denis, you mean?”

“Now I didn’t say that, did I?”

The great cooling towers of Didcot power station loomed into view on the left, and for a while little more was said as the two of them continued the drive south along the A34, before turning off, just before the Ridgeway, toward the charming little village of West Ilsley.

“I feel I’m letting poor old Denis down a bit,” he said, as the dark blue Daimler pulled up in front of the village pub.

“Don’t you think I do?” she snapped. “But I don’t keep on about it.”

At the bar, he ordered a dry white wine for Shelly Cornford and a pint of Old Speckled Hen for himself; and the pair of them studied the Egon Ronay menu chalked up on a blackboard before making their choices, and sitting down at a window table overlooking the sodden village green.

“Do you think we should stop meeting?” He asked it quietly.

She appeared to consider the question more as an exercise in logical evaluation than as any emotional dilemma.

“I don’t want that to happen.”

She brushed the back of her right wrist down the front of his dark gray suit.

“Pity we’ve ordered lunch,” he said quietly.

“We can always give it a miss.”

“Where shall we go?”

“Before we go anywhere, I shall want you to do something for me.”

“You mean something for Denis?”

She nodded decisively.

“I can’t really promise you too much, you know that.”

She looked swiftly around the tables there, before moving her lips to his ear. “I can, though. I can promise you everything, Clixby,” she whispered.

From his room in College, Denis Cornford had rung Shelly briefly just before 11 A.M. She’d be out later, as she’d mentioned, but he wanted to tell her about the College Meeting as soon as possible.

He told her.

He was pleased — she could sense that.

She was pleased — he could sense that.

Cornford had half an hour to spare before his next tutorial with a very bright first-year undergraduette from Nottingham who possessed one of the most astonishingly retentive memories he had ever encountered, and a pair of the loveliest legs that had ever folded themselves opposite him. Yet he experienced not even the mildest of erotic daydreams as now, briefly, he thought about her.

He walked over to the White Horse, the narrow pub between the two Blackwell’s shops just opposite the Sheldonian; and soon he was sipping a large Glenmorangie, and slowly coming to terms with the prospect that in a month’s time he might well be the Master of Lonsdale College. By nature a diffident man, he was for some curious reason beginning to feel a little more confident about his chances. Life was a funny business — and the favorite often failed to win the Derby, did it not?

Yes, odd things were likely to happen in life.

Against all the odds, as it were.

His black-stockinged student was sitting cross-legged on the wooden steps outside his room, getting to her feet as soon as she saw him. Being with Cornford, talking with him for an hour every week — that had become the highlight of her time at Oxford. But History was the great fascination in his life — not her.

She knew that.

Chapter sixteen

From Oxford railway station, at 10:20 A.M., Lewis had tried to ring Morse at HQ. But to no avail. The dramatic news would have to wait awhile, and at least Lewis now had ample time to execute his second order of the day.

There had been just the two of them at the Oxford Physiotherapy Center — although “Center” seemed a rather grandiloquent description of the ground-floor premises of the large, detached redbrick house halfway down the Woodstock Road (“1901” showing on the black drainpipe): the small office, off the spacious foyer; the single treatment room, to the right, its two beds separated by mobile wooden screens; and an inappropriately luxurious loo, to the left.

Rachel James’s distressed partner, a plain-featured, muscular divorcée in her midforties, could apparently throw little or no light on the recent tragedy. Each of them a fully qualified physiotherapist, they had gone freelance after a difference of opinion with the Hospital Trust, and two years earlier had decided to join forces and form their own private practice: women for the most part, troubled with ankles and knees and elbows and shoulders. The venture had been fairly successful, although they would have welcomed a few more clients — especially Rachel, perhaps, who (as Lewis learned for a second time) had been wading deeper and deeper into negative equity.

Boyfriends? — Lewis had ventured.

Well, she was attractive — face, figure — and doubtless there had been a good many admirers. But no specific beau; no one that Rachel spoke of as anyone special; no incoming calls on the office phone, for example.

“That hers?” Lewis had asked.

“Yes.”

Lewis took down a white coat from its hook behind the door and looked at the oval badge — CHARTERED SOCIETY OF PHYSIOTHERAPY — printed round a yellow crest. He felt inside the stiffly starched pockets.

Nothing.

Not even Morse (Lewis allowed the thought) could have made much of that.

Each of the two women had a personal drawer in the office desk, and Lewis looked carefully through the items which Rachel had kept at hand during her own working hours: lipstick; lip salve; powder compact; deodorant stick; a small packet of tissues; two Biros, blue and red; a yellow pencil; a pocket English dictionary (OUP); and a library book. Nothing else. No personal diary; no letters.

Again Lewis felt (though wrongly this time) that Morse would have shared his disappointment.

As for Morse, he had called in at his bachelor flat in North Oxford before returning to Police HQ. Always, after a haircut, he went through the ritual of washing his hair — and changing his shirt, upon which even a few stray hairs left clinging seemed able to effect an intense irritation on what, as he told himself (and others), was a particularly sensitive skin.

When he finally returned to HQ he found Lewis already back from his missions.

“You’re looking younger, sir.”

“No, you’re wrong. I reckon this case has put years on me already.”

“I meant the haircut.”

“Ah, yes. Rather nicely done, isn’t it?”

“You had a good morning, sir — apart from the haircut?”

“Well, you know— er— satisfactory. What about you?”

Lewis smiled happily.

“Do you want the good news first or the bad news?”

“The bad news.”

“Well, not ‘bad’ — just not ‘news’ at all, really. I don’t think we’re going to get many leads from her workplace. In fact I don’t think we’re going to get any.” And Lewis proceeded to give an account of his visit to the Oxford Physiotherapy Center.

“What time did she get there every morning?”

Lewis consulted his notes. “Five past, ten past eight — about then. Bit early. But if she left it much later she’d hit the heavy Kidlington traffic down into Oxford, wouldn’t she?”

“Mm... The first treatments don’t begin till quarter to nine, you say?”

“Or nine o’clock.”

“What did she do before the place opened?”

“Dunno.”

“Read, Lewis!”

“Well, like I said, there was a library book in her drawer.”

“What was it?”

“I didn’t make a note.”

“Can’t you remember?”

Ye-es, Lewis thought he could. Yes!

“Book called The Masters, sir — by P. C. Snow.”

Morse laughed and shook his head.

“He wasn’t a bloody police constable, Lewis! You mean C. P. Snow.”

“Sorry, sir.”

“Interesting, though.”

“In what way?”

But Morse ignored the question.

“When did she get it from the library?”

“How do I know?”

“You just,” said Morse slowly, sarcastically, “take fourteen days from the date printed for the book’s return, which you could have found, if you’d looked, by gently opening the front cover.”

“Perhaps they let you have three weeks — at the library she borrowed it from.”

“And which library was that?”

Somehow Lewis managed to maintain his good humor.

“Well, at least I can give you a very straight answer to that: I haven’t the faintest idea.”

“And what’s the good news?”

This time, it was Lewis’s turn to make a slow, impressive pronouncement:

“I know who the fellow is — the fellow in the photo.”

“You do?” Morse looked surprised. “You mean he turned up at the station?”

“In a way, I suppose he did, yes. There was no one like him standing around waiting for his girlfriend. But I had a word with this ticket collector — young chap who’s only been on the job for a few weeks. And he recognized him straightaway. He’d asked to look at his rail pass and he remembered him because he got a bit shirty with him — and probably because of that he remembered his name as well.”

“A veritable plethora of pronouns, Lewis! Do you know how many he’s and him’s and his’s you’ve just used?”

“No. But I know one thing — he told me his name!” replied Lewis, happily adding a further couple of potentially confusing pronouns to his earlier tally. “His name’s Julian Storrs.”

For many seconds Morse sat completely motionless, feeling the familiar tingling across his shoulders. He picked up his silver Parker pen and wrote some letters on the blotting pad in front of him. Then, in a whispered voice, he spoke:

“I know him, Lewis.”

“You didn’t recognize him, though—?”

“Most people,” interrupted Morse, “as they get older, can’t remember names. For them ‘A name is troublesome’ — anagram — seven letters — what’s that?”

“ ‘Amnesia’?”

“Well done! I’m all right on names, usually. But as I get older it’s faces I can’t recall. And there’s a splendid word for this business of not being able to recognize familiar faces—”

“ ‘Pro-sop-a-something,’ isn’t it?”

Morse appeared almost shell-shocked as he looked across at his sergeant. “How in heaven’s name...?”

“Well, as you know, sir, I didn’t do all that marvelously at school — as I told you, we didn’t even have a school tie — but I was ever so good at one thing,” a glance at the blotting pad, “I was best in the class at reading things upside down.”

Chapter seventeen

There had been little difficulty in finding out information on Julian Charles Storrs — a man to whom Morse (as he now remembered) had been introduced only a few months previously at an exhibition of Thesiger’s desert photography in the Pitt Rivers Museum. But Morse said nothing of this to Lewis as the pair of them sat together that same evening in Kidlington HQ; said nothing either of his discovery that the tie whose provenance he had so earnestly sought was readily available from any Marks and Spencer’s store, priced £6.99.

“We shall have to see this fellow Storrs soon, sir.”

“I’m sure we shall, yes. But we’ve got nothing against him, have we? It’s not a criminal offense to get photographed with some attractive woman... Interesting, though, that she was reading The Masters.”

“I’ve never read it, sir.”

“It’s about the internal shenanigans in a Cambridge College when the Master dies. And recently I read in the University Gazette that the present Master of Lonsdale is about to hang up his mortarboard — see what I mean?”

“I think I do,” lied Lewis.

“Storrs is a Fellow at Lonsdale — the Senior Fellow, I think. So if he suggested she might be interested in reading that book...”

“Doesn’t add up to much, though, does it? It’s motive we’ve got to look for. Bottom of everything — motive is.”

Morse nodded. “But perhaps it does add up a bit,” he added quietly. “If he wants the top job badly enough — and if she reminded him she could go and queer his pitch...”

“Kiss-and-tell sort of thing?”

“Kiss-and-not-tell, if the price was right.”

“Blackmail?” suggested Lewis.

“She’d have letters.”

“The postcard.”

“Photographs.”

“One photograph.”

“Hotel records. Somebody would use a credit card, and it wouldn’t be her.”

“He’d probably pay by cash.”

“You’re not trying to help me by any chance, are you, Lewis?”

“All I’m trying to do is be honest about what we’ve got — which isn’t much. I agree with you, though: It wouldn’t have been her money. Not exactly rolling in it, that’s for sure. Must have been a biggish layout — setting up the practice, equipment, rent, and everything. And she’d got a mortgage on her own place, and a car to run.”

Yes, a car. Morse, who never took the slightest interest in any car except his own, visualized again the white Mini which had been parked outside Number 17.

“Perhaps you ought to look a bit more carefully at that car, Lewis.”

“Already have. Logbook in the glove compartment, road atlas under the passenger seat, fire extinguisher under the back seat—”

“No drugs or pornography in the boot?”

“No. Just a wheel brace and a Labor party poster.”

Lewis looked at his watch: 8:35 P.M. It had been a long day, and he felt very tired. And so, by the look of him, did his chief. He got to his feet.

“Oh, and two cassettes: Ella Fitzgerald and a Mozart thing.”

“Thing?”

“Clarinet thing, yes.”

“Concerto or Quintet, was it?”

Blessedly, before Lewis could answer (for he had no answer), the phone rang.

Chief Superintendent Strange.

“Morse? In your office? I almost rang the Red Lion.”

“How can I help, sir?” asked Morse wearily.

“TV — that’s how you can help. BBC wants you for the Nine O’Clock News and ITV for News at Ten. One of the crews is here now.”

“I’ve already told ’em all we know.”

“Well, you’d better think of something else, hadn’t you? This isn’t just a murder, Morse. This is a PR exercise.”

Chapter eighteen Thursday, February 22

Just after lunchtime on Thursday, Morse found himself once again wandering aimlessly around Number 17 Bloxham Drive, a vague, niggling instinct suggesting to him that earlier he’d missed something of importance there.

But he was beginning to doubt it.

In the now-cleared kitchen, he switched on the wireless, finding it attuned to Radio 4. Had it been on when the police had first arrived? Had she been listening to the Today program when just for a second, perhaps, she’d looked down at the gush of blood that had spurted over the front of her nightclothes?

So what if she had been? Morse asked himself, conscious that he was getting nowhere.

In the front living room, he looked again along the single shelf of paperbacks. Women novelists, mostly: Jackie Collins, Jilly Cooper, Danielle Steel, Sue Townsend... He read four or five of the authors’ opening sentences, without once being instantly hooked, and was about to leave when he noticed Craig Raine’s A Choice of Kipling’s Prose — its white spine completely uncreased, as if it had been a very recent purchase. Or a gift? Morse withdrew the book and flicked through some of the short stories that once had meant — still meant — so very much to him. “They” was there, although Morse confessed to himself that he had never really understood its meaning. But genius? Christ, ah! And “On Greenhow Hill”; and “Love-o’-Women” — the latter (Morse was adamant about it) the greatest short story in the English language. He looked at the title page: no words to anyone; from anyone. Then, remembering a book he’d once received from a lovely, lost girl, he turned to the inside of the back cover: and there, in the bottom right-hand corner, he saw the penciled capitals: FOR R FROM J — RML.

“Remember My Love.”

It could have been anyone though — so many names beginning with “J”: Jack, James, Jason, Jasper, Jeremy, John, Joseph, Julian...

So what?

Anyway, these days, Morse, it could have been a woman, could it not?

Upstairs, in the front bedroom, he looked down at the double bed that almost monopolized the room, and noted again the two indented pillows, one atop the other, in their Oxford blue pillowcases, whereon for the very last time Rachel James had laid her pretty head. The winter duvet, in matching blue, was still turned back as she had left it, the under sheet only lightly creased. Nor was it a bed (of this Morse felt certain) wherein the murdered woman had spent the last night of her life in passionate lovemaking. Better, perhaps, if she had...

Standing on the bedside table was a glass of stale-looking water, beside which lay a pair of bluish earrings whose stones (Morse suspected) had never been fashioned from earth’s more precious store.

But the Chief Inspector was forming something of a picture, so he thought.

Picture... Pictures...

Two framed pictures only on the bedroom walls: the statutory Monet; and one of Gustav Klimt’s gold-patterned compositions. Plenty of posters and stickers, though: anti deer hunting; anti export of live animals; anti French nuclear tests; pro the NHS; pro the whales; pro legalized abortion. About par for the course at her age, thought Morse. Or at his age, come to think of it.

He pulled the side of the curtains slightly away from the wall, and briefly surveyed the scene below. An almost reverent hush now seemed to have settled upon Rachel’s side of the street. One uniformed policeman stood at the front gate — but only the one — talking to a representative of the Press — but only the one: the one who had lived next door to the murdered woman, at Number 15; the one with the ponytail; the one whom Morse would have to interview so very soon; the one he ought already to have interviewed.

Then, from the window, he saw his colleague, Sergeant Lewis, getting out of a marked police car; and thoughtfully he walked down the stairs. Odd — very odd, really — that with all those stickers around the bedroom, the one for the party the more likely (surely?) to further those advertised causes had been left in the boot of her car, where earlier Lewis had found it. Why hadn’t she put it up, as so many other householders in the terrace had done, in one of her upper or lower windows?

Aware that whatever had been worrying him had still not been identified, Morse turned the Yale lock to admit Lewis, the latter carrying the lunchtime edition of the Oxford Mail.

“I reckon it’s about time we interviewed him,” began Lewis, pointing through the closed door.

“All in good time,” agreed Morse, taking the newspaper where, as on the previous two days, the murder still figured on page one, although no longer as the lead story.

“Nicely written,” conceded Morse. “Bit pretentious, perhaps... and I do wish they’d all stop demoting me!”

“No mistakes?”

Morse eyed his sergeant sharply. “Have I missed something?”

Lewis said nothing, smiling inexplicably, as Morse read through the article again.

“Well, I’d’ve put a comma after ‘reporters’ myself. Incidentally, do you know what such a comma’s called?”

“Remind me.”

“The ‘Oxford Comma’.”

“Of course.”

“Why are you grinning?”

“That’s just it, sir. It’s that ‘grim-faced.’ Should be ‘grin-faced,’ shouldn’t it? You see, the missus rang me up half an hour ago: She’s won fifty pounds on the Premium Bonds. Bond, really. She’s only got one of ’em.”

“Congratulations!”

“Thank you, sir.”

For a final time Morse looked through the article, wondering whether the seventeenth word from the beginning and the seventeenth word from the end had anything to do with the number of the house in which Rachel James had been murdered. Probably not. Morse’s life was bestrewn with coincidences.

“Is that ponytailed ponce still out there?” he asked suddenly.

Lewis looked out of the front window.

“No, sir. He’s gone.”

“Let’s hope he’s gone to one of those new barbers’ shops you were telling me about?” Morse’s views were beset with prejudices.

Chapter nineteen

At 2:25 P.M. that same day, Morse got into the maroon Jaguar and after looking at his wristwatch drove off. First, down to the Cutteslowe Roundabout, then straight over and along Banbury Road to the Martyrs’ Memorial, where he turned right onto Beaumont Street, along Park End Street, and out under the railway bridge onto Botley Road, where just beyond the river bridge he turned left into the Osney Industrial Estate.

There was, in fact, one vacant space in the limited parking lots beside the main reception area to Oxford City and County Newspapers; but Morse pretended not to notice it. Instead he asked the girl at the reception desk for the open sesame to the large staff car park, and was soon watching the black-and-white barrier lift as he inserted a white plastic card into some electronic contraption there. Back in reception, the same young girl retrieved the precious ticket before giving Morse a VISITOR badge, and directing him down a corridor alongside, on his left, a vast open-plan complex, where hundreds of newspaper personnel appeared too preoccupied to notice the “Visitor.”

Owens, as Morse discovered, was one of the few employees granted some independent square-footage there, his small office hived off by wood-and-glass partitions.

“You live, er, she lived next door, I’m told,” began Morse awkwardly.

Owens nodded.

“Bit of luck, I suppose, in a way — for a reporter, I mean?”

“For me, yes. Not much luck for her, though, was it?”

“How did you first hear about it? You seem to have been on the scene pretty quickly, sir.”

“Della rang me. She lives on the Drive — Number 1. She’d seen me leave for work.”

“What time was that?”

“Must have been... ten to seven, five to seven?”

“You usually leave about then?”

“I do now, yes. For the past year or so we’ve been working a fair amount of flexitime and, well, the earlier I leave home the quicker I’m here. Especially in term time when—” Owens looked shrewdly across his desk at Morse. “But you know as much as I do about the morning traffic from Kidlington to Oxford.”

“Not really. I’m normally going the other way — North Oxford to Kidlington.”

“Much more sensible.”

“Yes...”

Clearly Owens was going to be more of a heavyweight than he’d expected, and Morse paused awhile to take his bearings. He’d made a note only a few minutes since of exactly how long the same distance had taken him, from Bloxham Drive to Osney Mead. And even with quite a lot of early afternoon traffic about — even with a couple of lights against him — he’d done the journey in fourteen and a half minutes.

“So you’d get here at about... about when, Mr. Owens?”

The reporter shrugged his shoulders. “Quarter past? Twenty past? Usually about then.”

A nucleus of suspicion was beginning to form in Morse’s brain as he sensed that Owens was perhaps exaggerating the length of time it had taken him to reach work that Monday morning. If he had left at, say, ten minutes to seven, he could well have been in the car park at — what? — seven o’clock? With a bit of luck? So why... why had Owens suggested quarter past — even twenty past?

“You can’t be more precise?”

Again Morse felt the man’s shrewd eyes upon him.

“You mean the later I got here the less likely I am to be a suspect?”

“You realize how important times are, Mr. Owens — a sequence of times — in any murder inquiry like this?”

“Oh yes, I know it as well as you do, Inspector. I’ve covered quite a few murders in my time... So... so why don’t you ask Della what time she saw me leave? Della Cecil, that is, at Number 1. She’ll probably remember better than me. And as for getting here... well, that’ll be fairly easy to check. Did you know that?”

Owens took a small white rectangular card from his wallet, with a number printed across the top — 008 14922 — and continued: “I push that in the thing there and the whatsit goes up and something somewhere records the time I get into the car park.”

Clearly the broad-faced, heavy-jowled reporter had about as much specialist knowledge of voodoo technology as Morse, and the latter switched the thrust of his questions.

“This woman who saw you leave, I shall have to see her — you realize that?”

“You wouldn’t be doing your job if you didn’t. Cigarette, Inspector?”

“Er, no, no thanks. Well, er, perhaps I will, yes. Thank you. This woman, as I say, do you know her well?”

“Only twenty houses in the Drive, Inspector. You get to know most people, after a while.”

“You never became, you know, more friendly? Took her out? Drink? Meal?”

“Why do you ask that?”

“I’ve just got to find out as much as I can about everybody there, that’s all. Otherwise, as you say, I wouldn’t be doing my job, would I, Mr. Owens?”

“We’ve had a few dates, yes — usually at the local.”

“Which is?”

“The Bull and Swan.”

“Ah, ‘Brakspear,’ ‘Bass,’ ‘Bishop’s Finger’...”

“I wouldn’t know. I’m a lager man myself.”

“I see,” said a sour-faced Morse. Then, after a pause, “What about Rachel James? Did you know her well?”

“She lived next door, dammit! Course I knew her fairly well.”

“Did you ever go inside her house?”

Owens appeared to consider the question carefully. “Just the twice, if I’ve got it right. Once when I had a few people in for a meal and I couldn’t find a corkscrew and I knocked on her back door and she asked me in, because it was pissing the proverbials, while she looked around for hers. The other time was one hot day last summer when I was mowing the grass at the back and she was hanging out her smalls and I asked her if she wanted me to do her patch and she said she’d be grateful, and when I’d done it she asked me if I’d like a glass of something and we had a drink together in the kitchen there.”

“Lager, I suppose.”

“Orangeade.”

Orangeade, like water, had never played any significant role in Morse’s dietary, but he suddenly realized that at that moment he would have willingly drunk a pint of anything, so long as it was ice-cold.

Even lager.

“It was a hot day, you say?”

“Boiling.”

“What was she wearing?”

“Not much.”

“She was an attractive girl, wasn’t she?”

“To me? I’m always going to be attracted to a woman with not much on. And, as I remember, most of what she’d got on that day was mostly off, if you follow me.”

“So she’d have a lot of boyfriends?”

“She was the sort of woman men would lust after, yes.”

“Did you?”

“Let’s put it this way, Inspector. If she’d invited me to bed that afternoon, I’d’ve sprinted up the stairs.”

“But she didn’t invite you?”

“No.”

“Did she invite other men?”

“I doubt it. Not on Bloxham Drive, anyway. We don’t just have Neighborhood Watch here; we’ve got a continuous Nosey-Parker Surveillance Scheme.”

“Even in the early morning?”

“As I told you, somebody saw me go to work on Monday morning.”

“You think others may have done?”

“Bloody sure they did!”

Morse switched tack again. “You wouldn’t remember — recognize — any of her occasional boyfriends?”

“No.”

“Have you heard of a man called Julian Storrs?”

“Yes.”

“You know him?”

“Not really, no. But he’s from Lonsdale, and I interviewed him for the Oxford Mail last year — December, I think it was — when he gave the annual Pitt Rivers Lecture. On Captain Cook, as I recall. I’d never realized how much the natives hated that fellow’s guts — you know, in the Sandwich Islands or somewhere.”

“I forget,” said Morse, as if at some point in his life he had known...

At his local grammar school, the young Morse had been presented with a choice of the 3 Gs: Greek, Geography, or German. And since Morse had joined the Greek option, his knowledge of geography had ever been fatally flawed. Indeed, it was only in his late twenties that he had discovered that the Balkan States and the Baltic States were not synonymous. Yet about Captain Cook’s voyages Morse should (as we shall see) have known at least a little — did know a little — since his father had adopted that renowned British navigator, explorer, and cartographer as his greatest hero in life — unlike (it seemed) the natives of those “Sandwich Islands or somewhere...”

“You never saw Mr. Storrs on Bloxham Drive?”

In their sockets, Owens’ eyes shot from bottom left to top right, like those of a deer that has suddenly sniffed a predator.

“Never. Why?”

“Because,” Morse leaned forward a few inches as he summoned up all his powers of creative ingenuity, “because someone on the Drive — this is absolutely confidential, sir! — says that he was seen, fairly recently, going into, er, another house there.”

“Which house?” Owens’ voice was suddenly sharp.

Morse held up his right hand and got to his feet. “Just a piece of gossip, like as not. But we’ve got to check out every lead, you know that.”

Owens remained silent.

“You’ve always been a journalist?”

“Yes.”

“Which papers...?”

“I started in London.”

“Whereabouts?”

“Soho — around there.”

“When was that?”

“Midseventies.”

“Wasn’t that when Soho was full of sex clubs and striptease joints?”

“And more. Gets a bit boring, all that stuff though, after a time.”

“Yes. So they tell me.”

“I read your piece today in the Oxford Mail,” said Morse as the two men walked toward reception. “You write well.”

“Thank you.”

“I can’t help remembering you said ‘comparatively’ crime-free area.”

“That was in yesterday’s.”

“Oh.”

“Well... we’ve only had one burglary this last year, and we’ve had no joyriders around since the council put the sleeping policemen in. We still get a bit of mindless vandalism, of course — you’ll have seen the young trees we tried to plant round the back. And litter — litter’s always a problem — and graffiti... And someone recently unscrewed most of the latches on the back gates — you know, the things that click as the gates shut.”

“I didn’t know there was a market for those,” muttered Morse.

“And you’re wasting your time if you put up a name for your house, or something like that. I put a little notice on my front gate. Lasted exactly eight days. Know what it was?”

Morse glanced back at the corporate workforce seated in front of VDU screens at desks cluttered with in-trays, out-trays, file cases, handbooks, and copy being corrected and cosseted before inclusion in forthcoming editions of Oxford’s own Times, Mail, Journal, Star...

“ ‘No Free Newspapers?’ ” he suggested sotto voce.

Morse handed in his Visitor badge at reception.

“You’ll need to give me another thing to get out with.”

“No. The barrier lifts automatically when you leave.”

“So once you’re in...”

She smiled. “You’re in! It’s just that we used to get quite a few cars from the Industrial Estate trying it on.”

Morse turned left onto Botley Road and drove along to the Ring Road junction where he took the northbound A34, coming off at the Pear Tree Roundabout, and then driving rather too quickly up the last stretch to Kidlington HQ — where he looked at his wristwatch again.

Nine and a half minutes.

Only nine and a half minutes.

Chapter twenty

As Morse climbed the stairs to Lewis’s office he was experiencing a deep ache in each of his calves.

“Hardest work I’ve done today, that!” he admitted as, panting slightly, he flopped into a chair.

“Interview go okay, sir?”

“Owens? I wouldn’t trust that fellow as far as I could kick him.”

“Which wouldn’t be too far, in your present state of health.”

“Genuine journalist he may be — but he’s a phony witness, take it from me!”

“Before you go on, sir, we’ve got the preliminary postmortem report here.”

“You’ve read it through?”

“Tried to. Bullet entry in the left submandibular—”

“Lew-is! Spare me the details! She was shot through the window, through the blind, in the morning twilight. You mustn’t expect much accuracy about the thing! You’ve been watching too many old cowboy films where they mow down the baddies at hundreds of yards.”

“Distance of about eighteen inches to two feet, that’s what it says, judging from—”

“What’s it say about the time?”

“She’s not quite so specific there.”

“Why the hell not? We told her exactly when the woman was shot!”

“Dr. Hobson says the temperature in the kitchen that morning wasn’t much above zero.”

“Economizing everywhere, our Rachel,” said Morse rather sadly.

“And it seems you get this sort of ‘refrigeration factor’—”

“In which we are not particularly interested, Lewis, because we know—” Morse suddenly stopped. “Unless... unless our distinguished pathologist is suggesting that Rachel may have been murdered just a little earlier than we’ve been assuming.”

“I don’t think she’s trying to suggest anything, sir. Just giving us the facts as far as she sees them.”

“I suppose so.”

“Do you want to read the report?”

“I shall have to, shan’t I, if you can’t understand it?”

“I didn’t say that—”

But again Morse interrupted him, almost eagerly now recounting his interview with Owens...

“… So don’t you see, Lewis? He could have done it. Quarter of an hour it took me, to the newspaper offices via Banbury Road; ten minutes back via the Ring Road. So if he left home about ten to seven — clocked into the car park at seven, say — hardly anything on the roads — then drove straight out of the car park — there’s no clocking out there — that’s the system they have — drove hell for leather back to Bloxham Close—”

“Drive, sir.”

“—parks his car up on the road behind the houses,” Morse switched now to the vivid present tense, “—goes through the vandalized fence there — down the grass slope — taps on her window — the thin blinds still drawn,” Morse’s eyes seemed almost mesmerized, “—sees her profile more clearly as she gets nearer — for a second or two scrutinizes the dark outline at the gas-lit window—”

“It’s electric there.”

“—then he fires through the window into her face — and hits her just below the jaw.”

Lewis nodded this time. “The submandibular bit, you’re right about that.”

“Then he goes up the bank again — gets in his car — back to Osney Mead. But he daren’t go into the car park again — of course not! So he leaves his car somewhere near, and goes into the office from the rear of the car park. Nobody much there to observe his comings and goings — most of the people get in there about eightish, so I learn. Quod erat demonstrandum! I know you’re going to ask me what his motive was, and I don’t know. But this time we’ve found the murderer before we’ve found the motive. Not grumbling too much about that, are you?”

“Yes! It just won’t hold water.”

“And why’s that?”

“There’s this woman from Number 1, for a start. Miss Cecil—”

“Della — Owens called her Della.”

“She saw him leave, didn’t she? About seven o’clock? That’s why she knew he’d be at his desk when she rang him as soon as she saw the police arrive — just after eight.”

“One hour — one whole hour! You can do a lot in an hour.”

“You still can’t put a quart into a pint pot.”

“We’ve now gone metric, by the way, Lewis. Look, what if they’re in it together — have you thought of that? Owens is carrying a torch for that Miss Cecil, believe me! When I happened to mention Julian Storrs—”

“You didn’t do that, surely?”

“—and when I said he’d been seen knocking at one of the other doors there—”

“But nobody—”

“—he was jealous, Lewis! And there are only two houses in the Close,” Lewis gave up the struggle, “occupied by nubile young women: Number 17 and Number 1, Miss James and Miss Cecil, agreed?”

“I thought you just said they were in it together.”

“I said they might be, that’s all. I’m just thinking aloud, for Christ’s sake! One of us has got to think. And I’m a bit weary and I’m much underbeered. So give me a chance!”

Lewis waited a few seconds. Then:

“Is it my turn to speak, sir?”

Morse nodded weakly, contemplating the threadbare state of Lewis’s carpet.

“I don’t know whether you’ve been down the Botley Road in the morning recently — even in the fairly early morning — but it’s one of the worst bottlenecks in Oxford. You drove there and back in midafternoon, didn’t you? But you want Owens to do three journeys between Kidlington and Osney Mead. First he drives to work — perhaps fairly quickly, agreed. Twenty minutes, say? He drives back — a bit quicker? Quarter of an hour, say. He parks his car somewhere — it’s not going to be on Bloxham Drive, though. He murders his next-door neighbor. Drives back into Oxford after that — another twenty, twenty-five minutes at least now. Finds a parking space — and this time it’s not going to be in the car park, as you say. Walks or runs to his office, not going in the front door, either — for obvious reasons. Gets into his office and is sitting there at his desk when his girlfriend — if you’re right about that — rings him up and tells him he’ll be in for a bit of a scoop if he gets out again to Bloxham Drive. It’s just about possible, sir, if all the lights are with him every time, if almost everybody’s decided to walk to work that morning. But it’s very improbable even then. And remember it’s Monday morning — the busiest morning of the week in Oxford.”

Morse looked hurt.

“You still think it’s just about possible?”

Lewis considered the question again.

“No, sir. I know you always like to think that most murders are committed by next-door neighbors or husbands or wives—”

“But what if this woman at Number 1 isn’t telling us the truth?” queried Morse. “What if she never made that phone call at all? What if she’s in it with him? What if she’s more than willing to provide him with a nice little alibi? You see, you’re probably right about the timescale of things. He probably wouldn’t have had time to get back here to Kidlington, commit the murder, and then return to the office and be sitting quietly at his desk when she rang him.”

“So?”

“So she’s lying. Just like he is! He got back here — easy! — murdered Rachel James — and stayed here, duly putting in an appearance as the very first reporter on the scene!”

“I’m sorry, sir, but she isn’t lying, not about this. I don’t know what you think the rest of us have been doing since Monday morning but we’ve done quite a bit of checking up already. And she’s not lying about the phone call to Owens’ office. One of the lads went along to BT and confirmed it. The call was monitored and it’ll be listed on the itemized telephone bill of the subscriber — Number 1 Bloxham Drive!”

“Does it give the time?”

Lewis appeared slightly uneasy. “I’m not quite sure about that.”

“And if our ace reporter Owens is privileged enough to have an answer phone in his office — which he is...”

Ye-es. Perhaps Morse was on to something after all. Because if the two of them had, for some reason, been working together... Lewis put his thoughts into words:

“You mean he needn’t have gone in to work at all?... Ye-es. You say that electronic gadget records the number on your card, and the time — but it doesn’t record the car itself, right?”

Morse nodded encouragement. And Lewis, duly encouraged, continued:

“So if somebody else had taken his card — and if he stayed on the Drive all the time...”

Morse finished it off for him: “He’s got a key to Number 1 — he’s in there when she drives off — he walks along the back of the terrace — shoots Rachel James — goes back to Number 1 — rings up his own office number — waits for the answer phone pips — probably doesn’t say anything — just keeps the line open for a minute or two — and Bob’s your father’s brother.”

Lewis sighed. “I’d better get on with a bit of fourth-grade clerical checking, sir — this parking business, the phone call, any of his colleagues who might have seen him—”

“Or her.”

“It’s worth checking, I can see that.”

“Tomorrow, Lewis. We’re doing nothing more today.”

“And this woman at Number 1?”

“Is she a nice-looking lass?”

“Very much so.”

“You leave that side of things to me, then.”

Morse got to his feet and went to the door. But then returned, and sat down again.

“That ‘refrigeration factor’ you mentioned, Lewis — time of death and all that. Interesting, isn’t it? So far, we’ve been assuming that the bullet went through the window and ended up in the corpse, haven’t we? But if — just if — Rachel James had been murdered a bit earlier, inside Number 17, and then someone had fired through the window at some later stage... You see what I mean? Everybody’s alibi is up the pole, isn’t it?”

“There’d be another bullet, though, wouldn’t there? We’ve got the one from Rachel’s neck; but there’d be another one somewhere in the kitchen if someone fired—”

“Not necessarily the murderer, remember!”

“But if someone fired just through the window, without aiming at anything...”

“Did the SOCOs have a good look at the ceiling, the walls — the floorboards?”

“They did, yes.”

“Somebody might have picked it up and pocketed it.”

“Who on earth—”

“I’ve not the faintest idea.”

“Talking of bullets, sir, we’ve got another little report — from ballistics. Do you want to read it?”

“Not tonight.”

“Very short, sir.”

He handed Morse the single, neatly typed paragraph:

Morse handed the report back. “I’m not at all sure I know what ‘caliber’ means. Is it the diameter of the bullet or the diameter of the barrel?”

“Wouldn’t they be the same, sir?”

Morse got up and walked wearily to the door once more.

“Perhaps so, Lewis. Perhaps so.”

Chapter twenty-one

Morse did not go straight home to his North Oxford flat that evening; nor, mirabile dictu, did he make for the nearest hostelry — at least not immediately. Instead, he drove to Bloxham Drive, pulling in behind the single police car parked outside Number 17, in which a uniformed officer sat reading the Oxford Mail.

“Constable Brogan, sir,” was the reply in answer to Morse’s question.

“Happen to know if Number 1’s at home?”

“The one with the N-reg Rover, you mean?”

Morse nodded.

“No. But she keeps coming backward and forward all the time. She seems a very busy woman, that one.”

“Anything to report?”

“Not really, sir. We keep getting a few gawpers, but I just ask them to move along.”

“Gently, I trust.”

“Very gently, sir.”

“How long are you on duty for?”

“Finish at midnight.”

Morse pointed to the front window. “Why don’t you nip in and watch the telly?”

“Bit cold in there.”

“You can put the gas-fire on.”

“It’s electric, sir.”

“Please yourself!”

“Would that be official, sir?”

“Anything I say’s official, lad.”

“My lucky night, then.”

Mine, too, thought Morse as he looked over his shoulder to see an ash-blonde alighting from her car outside Number 1.

He hastened along the pavement in what could be described as an arrested jog, or perhaps more accurately as an animated walk.

“Good evening.”

She turned toward him as she inserted her latchkey.

“Yes?”

“A brief word — if it’s possible... er...”

Morse fumbled for his ID card. But she forestalled the need.

“Another police sergeant, are you?”

“Police, yes.”

“I can’t spare much time — not tonight. I’ve got a busy few hours ahead.”

“I shan’t keep you long.”

She led the way through into a tastefully furbished and furnished front room, taking off her ankle-length white mackintosh, placing it over the back of the red-leather settee, and bidding Morse sit opposite her as she smoothed the pale blue dress over her hips and crossed her elegant, nylon-clad legs.

“Do you mind?” she asked, lifting a cigarette in the air.

“No, no,” muttered Morse, wishing only that she’d offered one to him.

“What can I do for you?” She had a slightly husky, upper-class voice, and Morse guessed she’d probably attended one of the nation’s more prestigious public schools.

“Just one or two questions.”

She smiled attractively: “Go ahead.”

“I understand that my colleague, Sergeant Lewis, has spoken to you already.”

“Nice man — in a gentle, shy sort of way.”

“Really? I’d never quite thought of him...”

“Well, you’re a bit older, aren’t you?”

“What job do you do?”

She opened her handbag and gave Morse her card.

“I’m the local agent for the Conservative party.”

“Oh dear! I am sorry,” said Morse, looking down at the small oblong card:

“Was that supposed to be a sick joke?” There was an edge to her voice now.

“Not really. It’s just that I’ve never had a friend who’s a Tory, that’s all.”

“You mean you didn’t vote for us today?”

“I don’t live in this ward.”

“If you give me your address, I’ll make sure you get some literature, Sergeant.”

“Chief Inspector, actually,” corrected Morse, oblivious of the redundant adverb.

She tugged her dress a centimeter down her thighs. “How can I help?”

“Do you know Mr. Owens well?”

“Well enough.”

“Well enough to hand him a newspaper scoop?”

“Yes.”

“Have you ever slept with him?”

“Not much finesse about you, is there?”

“Just a minute,” said Morse softly. “I’ve got a terrible job to do — just up the street here. And part of it’s to ask some awkward questions about what’s going on in the Close—”

“Drive.”

“To find out who knows who — whom, if you prefer it.”

“They did teach us English grammar at Roedean, yes.”

“You haven’t answered my question.”

Adèle breathed deeply, and her gray eyes stared across almost fiercely.

“Once, yes.”

“But you didn’t repeat the experience?”

“I said ‘once’ — didn’t you hear me?”

“You still see him?”

“Occasionally. He’s all right: intelligent, pretty well read, quite good fun, sometimes — and he promised he’d vote Conservative today.”

“He sounds quite compatible.”

“Are you married, Inspector?”

“Chief Inspector.”

“Are you?”

“No.”

“Do you wish you were?”

Perhaps Morse didn’t hear the question.

“Did you know Rachel James fairly well?”

“We had a heart-to-heart once in a while.”

“You weren’t aware of any one particular boyfriend?”

She shook her head.

“Would you say she was attractive to men?”

“Wouldn’t you?”

“I only saw her the once.”

“I’m sorry.” She said it quietly. “Please, forgive me.”

“Do you know a man called Storrs? Julian Storrs?”

“Good gracious, yes! Julian? He’s one of our Vice Presidents. We often meet at do’s. In fact, I’m seeing him next week at a fund-raising dinner at The Randolph. Would you like a complimentary ticket?”

“No, perhaps not.”

“Shouldn’t have asked, should I? Anyway,” she got to her feet, “I’ll have to be off. They’ll be starting the count fairly soon.”

They walked to the front door.

“Er... when you rang Mr. Owens on Monday morning, just after eight o’clock you say, you did speak to him, didn’t you?”

“Of course.”

Morse nodded. “And one final thing, please. My sergeant found some French letters—”

“French letters? How old are you, Chief Inspector? Condoms, for heaven’s sake.”

“As I say, we found two packets of, er, condoms in one of her bedroom drawers.”

“Big deal!”

“You don’t know if she ever invited anyone home to sleep with her?”

“No, I don’t.”

“I thought,” said Morse hesitantly, “most women were on the pill these days?”

“A lot of them off it, too — after that thrombosis scare.”

“I suppose so, yes. I’m... I’m not really an expert in that sort of thing.”

“And don’t forget safe sex.”

“No. I’ll... I’ll try not to.”

“Did she keep them under her nighties?”

Morse nodded sadly, and bade goodnight to Adèle Beatrice Cecil.

ABC.

As he walked slowly along to the Jaguar, he felt a slight tingling behind the eyes at the thought of Rachel James, and the nightdress she’d been wearing when she was murdered; and the condoms so carefully concealed in her lingerie drawer — along with the hopes and fears she’d had, like everyone. And he thought of Auden’s immortal line on A. E. Housman:

As he started the Jaguar, Morse noticed the semistroboscopic light inside the lounge; and trusted that PC Brogan had managed to activate the heating system in Number 17 Bloxham Drive.

Chapter twenty-two

Morse headed south along the Banbury Road, turning left just after the Cutteslowe Roundabout, and through the adjoining Carlton and Wolsey Roads (why hadn’t the former been christened “Cardinal”?); then, at the bottom of the Cutteslowe Estate, down the steeply sloping entry to the Cherwell, a quietly civilized public house where the quietly civilized landlord kept an ever-watchful eye on the Brakspear and the Bass. The car phone rang as he unfastened his safety belt.

Lewis.

Speaking from HQ.

“I thought I’d told you to go home! The eggs and chips are getting cold.”

Lewis, as Morse earlier, showed himself perfectly competent at ignoring a question.

“I’ve had a session on the phone with Ox and Cow Newspapers, sir — still at work there, quite a few of them. Owens’ car park card is number 14922 and it was registered by the barrier contraption there at 7:04 on Monday morning. Seems he’s been in fairly early these last couple of months. Last week, for example, Monday to Friday, 7:37, 7:06, 7:11, 7:00, 7:18.”

“So what? Shows he can’t get up that early on Monday mornings.”

“That’s not all, though.”

“It is, Lewis! It’s still the card you’re on about — not the car! Can’t you see that?”

“Please listen to me for a change, sir. The personnel fellow who looked out the car park things for me, he just happened to be in earlyish last Monday morning himself: 7:22. There weren’t many others around then, but one of the ones who was... Guess who, sir?”

“Oh dear!” said Morse for the second time that evening.

“Yep. Owens! Ponytail ’n all.”

“Oh.”

In that quiet monosyllable Lewis caught the depth of Morse’s disappointment. Yet he felt far from dismayed himself, knowing full well as he did, after so many murder investigations with the pair of them in harness, that Morse’s mind was almost invariably at its imaginative peak when one of his ill-considered, top-of-the-head hypotheses had been razed to the ground — in this case by some lumbering bulldozer like himself. And so he understood the silence at the other end of the line: a long silence, like that at the Cenotaph in commemoration of the fallen.

Lewis seldom expected (seldom received) any thanks. And in truth such lack of recognition concerned him little, since only rarely did Morse show the slightest sign of graciousness or gratitude to anyone.

Yet he did so now.

“Thank you, my old friend.”

At the bar Morse ordered a pint of Bass and proceeded to drink it speedily.

At the bar Morse ordered a second pint of Bass and proceeded to drink it even more speedily — before leaving and driving out once more to Bloxham Drive, where no one was abroad and where the evening’s TV programs appeared to be absorbing the majority of the households.

Including Number 17.

The Jaguar door closed behind him with its accustomed aristocratic click, and he walked slowly through the drizzle along the street. Still the same count: six for Labor; two for the Tories; and two apparently unprepared to parade their political allegiances.

Yes! YES!

Almost everything (he saw it now so clearly) had been pushing his mind toward that crucial clue — toward the break-through in the case.

It had not been Owens who had murdered Rachel James — almost certainly he couldn’t have done it, anyway.

And that late evening, as if matching his slow-paced walk, a slow and almost beatific smile had settled round the mouth of Chief Inspector Morse.

Chapter twenty-three Friday, February 23

As Lewis pulled onto Bloxham Drive, he was faced with an unfamiliar sight: a smiling, expansive-looking Morse was leaning against the front gate of Number 17, engaged in a relaxed, impromptu press conference with one camera crew (ITV), four reporters (two from national, two from local newspapers — but no Owens), and three photographers. Compared with previous mornings, the turnout was disappointing.

It was 9:05 A.M.

Lewis just caught the tail end of things. “So it’ll be a waste of time — staying on here much longer. You won’t expect me to go into details, of course, but I can tell you that we’ve finished our investigations in this house.”

If the “this” were spoken with a hint of some audial semi-italicization, it was of no moment, for no one appeared to notice it.

“Any leads? Any new leads?”

“To the murder of Rachel James, you mean?”

“Who else?”

“No. No new leads at all, really... Well, perhaps one.”

On which cryptic note, Morse raised his right hand to forestall the universal pleas for clarification, and with a genial — perhaps genuine? — smile, he turned away.

“Drive me round the block a couple of times, Lewis. I’d rather all these people buggered off, and I don’t think they’re going to stay much longer if they see us go.”

Nor did they.

Ten minutes later the detectives returned to find the Drive virtually deserted.

“How many houses are there here, Lewis?”

“Not sure.” From Number 17 Lewis looked along to the end of the row: two other houses — presumably Numbers 19 and 21, although the figures from the front gate of the latter had been removed. Then he looked across to the other side of the street where the last even-numbered house was 20. The answer, therefore, appeared to be reasonably obvious.

“Twenty-one.”

“That’s an odd number, isn’t it?”

Lewis frowned. “Did you think I thought it was an even number?”

Morse smiled. “I didn’t mean ‘odd’ as opposed to ‘even’; I meant ‘odd’ as opposed to ‘normal.’ ”

“Oh!”

“Lew-is! You don’t build a street of terraced houses with one side having ten and the other side having eleven, now do you? You get a bit of symmetry into things; a bit of regularity.”

“If you say so.”

“And I do say so!” snapped Morse, with the conviction of a fundamentalist preacher asserting the divine authority of Holy Writ.

“No need to be so sharp, sir.”

“I should have spotted it from day one! From those political stickers, Lewis! Let’s count, okay?”

The two men walked along the odd-numbered side of Bloxham Drive. And Lewis nodded: six Labor; two Tory; two don’t-knows.

Ten.

“You see, Lewis, we’ve perhaps been a little misled by these minor acts of vandalism here. We’ve got several houses minus the numbers originally screwed into their front gates — and their back gates. So we were understandably confused.”

Lewis agreed. “I still am, sir.”

“How many odd numbers are there between one and twenty-one — inclusive?”

“I reckon it’s ten, sir. So I suppose there must be eleven.”

Morse grinned. “Write ’em down!”

So Lewis did, in his notebook: 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, 15, 17, 19, 21. Then counted them.

“I was right, sir. Eleven.”

“But only ten houses, Lewis.”

“I don’t quite follow.”

“Of course you do. It happens quite often in hotel floors and hotel room numbers... and street numbers. They leave one of them out.”

Enlightenment dawned on Lewis’s honest features.

“Number thirteen!”

“Exactly! Do you know there used to be people in France called ‘fourteeners’ who made a living by going along to dinner parties where the number of guests was thirteen?”

“Where do you find all these bits and pieces?”

“Do you know, I think I saw that on the back of a matchbox in a pub in Grimsby. I’ve learned quite a lot in life from the back of matchboxes.”

“What’s it all got to do with the case, though?”

Morse reached for Lewis’s notebook, and put brackets round the seventh number. Then, underneath the first few numbers, he wrote in an arrow, →, pointing from left to right.

“Lewis! If you were walking along the back of the houses, starting from Number 1 — she must be feeling a bit sore about the election, by the way... Well, let’s just go along there.”

The two men walked to the rear of the terrace, where (as we have seen) several of the back gates had been sadly, if not too seriously, vandalized.

“Get your list, Lewis, and as we go along, just put a ring round those gates where we haven’t got a number, all right?”

At the end of the row, Lewis’s original list, with its successive emendations, appeared as follows:

“You see,” said Morse, “the vandalism gets worse the further you get into the Close, doesn’t it? As it gets further from the main road.”

“Yes.”

“So just picture things. You’ve got a revolver and you walk along the back here in the half-light. You know the number you want. You know the morning routine, too: breakfast at about seven. All you’ve got to do is knock on the kitchen window, wait till you see the silhouette behind the thin blind, the silhouette of a face with one distinctive feature — a ponytail. You walk along the back; you see Number 11; you move along to the next house — Number 13 — you think! And so the house after that must be Number 15. And to confirm things, there’s the ponytailed silhouette. You press the trigger — and there you have it, Lewis! The Horseman passes by. But you’ve got it wrong, haven’t you? Your intended victim is living at Number 15, not Number 17!”

“So,” said Lewis slowly, “whoever stood at the kitchen window thought he — or she — was firing...”

Morse nodded somberly. “Yes. Not at Rachel James, but Geoffrey Owens.”

Chapter twenty-four

The Senior Common Room at Lonsdale is comparatively small, and for this reason has a rather more intimate air about it than some of the spacious SCRs in the larger Oxford Colleges. Light-colored, beautifully grained oak-paneling encloses the room on all sides, its coloring complemented by the light-brown leather sofas and armchairs there. Copies of almost all the national dailies, including the Sun and the Mirror, are to be found on the glass-topped coffee tables; and indeed it is usually these tabloids which are flipped through first — sometimes intently studied — by the majority of the dons.

Forgathered here on the evening of Friday, February 23 (7:00 for 7:30), was a rather overcrowded throng of dons, accompanied by wives, partners, and friends, to enjoy a Guest Night — an occasion celebrated by the College four times per term. A white-coated scout stood by the door with a silver tray holding thinly fluted glasses of sherry: either the pale amber “dry” variety or the darker brown “medium,” for it was a basic assumption in such a setting that no one could ever wish for the deeply umbered “sweet.”

A gowned Jasper Bradley took a glass of dry, drained it at a swallow, put the glass back onto the tray, and took another. He was particularly pleased with himself that day; and with the Classical Quarterly, whose review of Greek Moods and Tenses (J. J. Bradley, 204 pp., £45.50, Classical Press) contained the wonderful lines that Bradley had known by heart:

Yes. He felt decidedly chuffed.

“How’s tricks?” he asked, looking up at Donald Franks, a very tall astrophysicist, recently head-hunted from Cambridge, whose dark, lugubrious features suggested that for his part he’d managed few imaginative insights that week into the origins of the universe.

“So-so.”

“Who d’you fancy then?”

“What— of the women here?”

“For the Master’s job.”

“Dunno.”

“Who’ll you vote for?”

“Secret ballot, innit?”

Mr. and Mrs. Denis Cornford now came in, each taking a glass of the medium sherry. Shelly looked extremely attractive and perhaps a little skimpily dressed for such a chilly evening. She wore a lightweight white two-piece suit; and as she bent down to pick up a cheese nibble her low-cut, bottle-green blouse gaped open to reveal a splendid glimpse of her beautiful breasts.

“Je-sus!” muttered Bradley.

“She certainly flouts her tits a bit,” mumbled the melancholy Franks.

“You mean ‘flaunts’ ’em, I think.”

“If you say so,” said Franks, slightly wounded.

Bradley moved to the far end of the room where Angela Storrs stood talking to a small priest, clothed all in black, with buckled shoes and leggings.

“Ah, Jasper! Come and meet Father Dooley from Sligo.”

Clearly Angela Storrs had decided she had now done her duty; for soon she drifted away — tall, long-legged, wearing a dark gray trouser-suit with a white high-necked jumper. There was about her an almost patrician mien, her face high-cheekboned and pale, with the hair swept back above her ears and fastened in a bun behind. It was obvious to all that she had been a very attractive woman. But she was aging a little too quickly perhaps; and the fact that over the last two or three years she had almost invariably worn trousers did little to discourage the belief that her legs had succumbed to an unsightly cordage of varicose veins. If she were on sale in an Arab wife market (in the cruel words of one of the younger dons) she would have passed her “best before” date several years earlier.

“I knew the Master many years ago — and his poor wife. Yes... that was long ago,” mused the little priest.

Bradley was ready with the appropriate response of scholarly compassion.

“Times change, yes. Tempora mutantur: et nos mutamur in illis.”

“I think,” said the priest, “that the line should read: Tempora mutantur: nos et mutamur in illis. Otherwise the hexameter won’t scan, will it?”

“Of course it won’t, sorry.”

The scout now politely requested dons — wives — partners — guests — to proceed to the Hall. And Jasper Bradley, eminent authority on the aorist subjunctive in Classical Greek, walked out of the SCR more than slightly wounded.

Sir Clixby Bream brought up the rear as the room emptied, and lightly touched the bottom of Angela Storrs standing just in front of him.

Sotto voce he lied into her ear: “You’re looking ravishing tonight. And I’ll tell you something else — I’d far rather be in bed with you now than face another bloody Guest Night.”

“So would I!” she lied, in a whisper. “And I’ve got a big favor to ask of you, too.”

“We’ll have a word about it after the port.”

“Before the port, Clixby! You’re usually blotto after it.”

Sir Clixby banged his gavel, mumbled Benedictus benedicat, and the assembled company seated themselves, the table plan having positioned Julian Storrs and Denis Cornford at diagonally opposite ends of the thick oak table, with their wives virtually opposite each other in the middle.

“I love your suit!” lied Shelly Cornford, in a not unpleasing Yankee twang.

“You look very nice, too,” lied Angela Storrs, smiling widely and showing such white and well-aligned teeth that no one could be in much doubt that her upper plate had been disproportionately expensive.

After which preliminary skirmish, each side observed a dignified truce, with neither a further word nor a further glance between them during the rest of the dinner.

At the head of the table, the little priest sat on the Master’s right.

“Just the two candidates, I hear?” he said quietly.

“Just the two: Julian Storrs and Denis Cornford.”

“The usual shenanigans, I assume? The usual horsetrading? Clandestine cabals?”

“Oh no, nothing like that. We’re all very civilized here.”

“How do you know that?”

“Well, you’ve only got to hear what people say — the way they say it.”

The little priest pushed away his half-eaten guinea fowl.

“You know, Clixby, I once read that speech often gets in the way of genuine communication.”

Chapter twenty-five Saturday, February 24

While the Guest Night was still in progress, while still the port and Madeira were circulating in their time-honored directions, an overwearied Morse had decided to retire comparatively early to bed, where almost unprecedentedly he enjoyed a deep, unbroken slumber until 7:15 the following morning, when gladly would he have turned over and gone back to sleep. But he had much to do that day. He drank two cups of instant coffee (which he preferred to the genuine article); then another cup, this time with one slice of brown toast heavily spread with butter and Frank Cooper’s Oxford Marmalade.

By 8:45 he was in his office at Kidlington HQ, where he found a note on his desk:

Please see Chief Sup. Strange A S A P

The meeting, almost until the end, was an amiable enough affair, and Morse received a virtually uninterrupted hearing as he explained his latest thinking on the murder of Rachel James.

“Mm!” grunted Strange, resting his great jowls on his palms when Morse had finished. “So it could be a contract killing that went cockeyed, you think? The victim gets pinpointed a bit too vaguely, and the killer shoots at the wrong pigtail—”

“Ponytail, sir.”

“Yes — through the wrong window. Right?”

“Yes.”

“What about the motive? The key to this sort of mess is almost always the motive, you know that.”

“You sound just like Sergeant Lewis, sir.”

Strange looked dubiously across the desk, as if a little uncertain as to whether he wanted to sound just like Sergeant Lewis.

“Well?”

“I agree with you. That’s one of the reasons it could have been a case of misidentity. We couldn’t really find any satisfactory motive for Rachel’s murder anywhere. But if somebody wanted Owens out of the way — well, I can think of a dozen possible motives.”

“Because he’s a newshound, you mean?”

Morse nodded. “Plenty of people in highish places who’ve got some sort of skeleton in the sideboard—”

“Cupboard.”

“Who’d go quite a long way to keep the, er, cupboard firmly locked.”

“Observed openly masturbating on the M40, you mean? Weekend away with the PA? By the way, you’ve got a pretty little lass for a secretary, I see. Don’t you ever lust after her?”

“I seem to have lost most of my lust recently, sir.”

“We all do. It’s called getting old.”

Strange lifted his large head, and eyed Morse over his half-lenses.

“Now about the case. It won’t be easy, will it? You’ve no reason to think he’s got a lot of stuff stashed under his mattress?”

“No... no, I haven’t.”

“You’d no real reason for thinking he’d killed Rachel?”

“No... no, I hadn’t.”

“So he’s definitely out of the frame?”

Morse considered the question awhile. “ ’Fraid so, yes. I wish he weren’t.”

“So?”

“So I’ll — we’ll think of some way of approaching things.”

“Nothing irregular! You promise me that! We’re just about getting over one or two unsavory incidents in the Force, aren’t we? And we’re not going to start anything here. Is that clear, Morse?”

“To be fair, sir, I usually do go by the book.”

Strange pointed a thick finger.

“Well, usually’s not bloody good enough for me! You — go — by — the book, matey! Understood?”

Morse walked heavily back to his office, where a refreshed-looking Lewis awaited him.

“Everything all right with the Super?”

“Oh, yes. I just told him about our latest thinking—”

“Your latest thinking.”

“He understands the difficulties. He just doesn’t want us to bend the rules of engagement too far, that’s all.”

“So what’s the plan?”

“Just nip and get me a drink first, will you?”

“Coffee?”

Morse pondered. “I think I’ll have a pint of natural, lead-free orange juice. Iced.”

“So what’s the plan?” repeated Lewis, five minutes later.

“Not quite sure, really. But if I’m right, if it was something like a contract killing, it must have been arranged because Owens was threatening to expose somebody. And if he was—”

“Lot of ‘if’s,’ sir.”

“If he was, Lewis, he must have some evidence tucked away somewhere: vital evidence, damning evidence. It could be in the form of newspaper cuttings or letters or photographs — anything. And he must have been pretty sure about his facts if he’s been trying to extort some money or some favors or whatever from any disclosures. Now, as I see it, he must have come across most of his evidence in the course of his career as a journalist. Wouldn’t you think so? Sex scandals, that sort of thing.”

“Like as not, I suppose.”

“So the plan’s this. I want you, once you get the chance, to go and see the big white chief at the newspaper offices and get a look at all the confidential stuff on Owens. They’re sure to have it in his appointment file or somewhere: previous jobs, references, testimonials, CV, internal appraisals, comments—”

“Gossip?”

“Anything!”

“Is that what you mean by not bending the rules too much?”

“We’re not bending the rules — not too much. We’re on a murder case, Lewis, remember that! Every member of the public’s got a duty to help us in our inquiries.”

“I just hope the editor agrees with you, that’s all.”

“He does,” said Morse, a little shamefacedly. “I rang him while you went to the canteen. He just wants us to do it privately, that’s all, and confidentially. Owens only works alternate Saturdays, and this is one of his days off.”

“You don’t want to do it yourself?”

“It’s not that I don’t want to. But you’re so much better at that sort of thing than I am.”

A semimollified Lewis elaborated: “Then, if anything sticks out as important... just follow it up... and let you know?”

“Except for one thing, Lewis. Owens told me he worked for quite a while in Soho when he started. And if there’s anything suspicious or interesting about that period of his life...”

“You’d like to do that bit of research yourself.”

“Exactly. I’m better at that sort of thing than you are.”

“What’s your program for today, then?”

“Quite a few things, really.”

“Such as?” Lewis looked up quizzically.

“Well, there’s one helluva lot of paperwork, for a start. And filing. So you’d better stay and give me a hand for a while — after you’ve fetched me another orange juice. And please tell the girl not to dilute it quite so much this time. And just a cube or two more ice perhaps.”

“And then?” persisted Lewis.

“And then I’m repairing to the local in Cutteslowe, where I shall be trying to thread a few further thoughts together over a pint, perhaps. And where I’ve arranged to meet an old friend of mine who may possibly be able to help us a little.”

“Who’s that, sir?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Not—?”

“Where’s my orange juice, Lewis?”

Chapter twenty-six

At ten minutes to noon Morse was enjoying his pint of Brakspear’s bitter. The Chief Inspector had many faults, but unpunctuality had never been one of them. He was ten minutes early.

JJ, a sparely built, nondescript-looking man in his midforties, walked into the Cherwell five minutes later.

When Morse had rung at 8:30 A.M., Malcolm “JJ” Johnson had been seated on the floor, on a black cushion, only two feet away from the television screen, watching a hard-core porn video and drinking his regular breakfast of two cans of Beamish stout — just after the lady of the household had left for her job (mornings only) in one of the fruiterers’ shops in Summertown.

Accepted wisdom has it that in such enlightened times as these most self-respecting burglars pursue their trade by day; but JJ had always been a night man, relying firmly on local knowledge and reconnaissance. And often in the daylight hours, as now, he wondered why he didn’t spend his leisure time in some more purposeful pursuits. But in truth he just couldn’t think of any. At the same time, he did realize, yes, that sometimes he was getting a bit bored. Over the past two years or so, the snooker table had lost its former magnetism; infidelities and fornication were posing too many practical problems, as he grew older; and even darts and dominoes were beginning to pall. Only gambling, usually in Ladbrokes’ premises in Summertown, had managed to retain his undivided attention over the years: for the one thing that never bored him was acquiring money.

Yet JJ had never been a miser. It was just that the acquisition of money was a necessary prerequisite to the spending of money; and the spending of money had always been, and still was, the greatest purpose of his life.

Educated (if that be the word) in a run-down comprehensive school, he had avoided the three Bs peculiar to many public school establishments: beating, bullying, and buggery. Instead, he had left school at the age of sixteen with a delight in a different triad: betting, boozing, and bonking — strictly in that order. And to fund such expensive hobbies he had come to rely on one source of income, one line of business only: burglary.

He now lived with his long-suffering, faithful, strangely influential, common-law wife in a council house on the Cutteslowe Estate that was crowded with crates of lager and vodka and gin, with all the latest computer games, and with row upon row of tasteless seaside souvenirs. And home, after two years in jail, was where he wanted to stay.

No! JJ didn’t want to go back inside. And that’s why Morse’s call had worried him so. So much, indeed, that he had turned the video to “Pause” even as the eager young stud was slipping between the sheets.

What did Morse want?

“Hello, Malcolm!”

Johnson had been “Malcolm” until the age of ten, when the wayward, ill-disciplined young lad had drunk from a bottle of Jeyes Fluid under the misapprehension that the lavatory cleaner was lemonade. Two stomach pumpings and a week in hospital later, he had emerged to face the world once more; but now with the sobriquet “Jeyes” — an embarrassment which he sought to deflect, five years on, by the rather subtle expedient of having the legend “JJ — all the Js” tattooed longitudinally on each of his lower arms.

Morse drained his glass and pushed it over the table.

“Coke, is it, Mr. Morse?”

“Bit early for the hard stuff, Malcolm.”

“Half a pint, was it?”

“Just tell the landlord ‘same again.’ ”

A Brakspear it was — and a still mineral water for JJ.

“One or two of those gormless idiots you call your pals seem anxious to upset the police,” began Morse.

“Look. I didn’t ‘ave nothin’ to do with that—’ onest! You know me.” Looking deeply unhappy, JJ dragged deeply on a king-size cigarette.

“I’m not really interested in that. I’m interested in your doing me a favor.”

JJ visibly relaxed, becoming almost his regular, perky self once more. He leaned over the table, and spoke quietly:

“I’ll tell you what. I got a red-’ot video on up at the country mansion, if you, er...”

“Not this morning,” said Morse reluctantly, conscious of a considerable sacrifice. And it was now his turn to lean over the table and speak the quiet words:

“I want you to break into a property for me.”

“Ah!”

The balance of power had shifted, and JJ grinned broadly to reveal two rows of irregular and blackened teeth. He pushed his empty glass across the table.

“Double vodka and lime for me, Mr. Morse. I suddenly feel a bit thirsty, like.”

For the next few minutes Morse explained the mission; and JJ listened carefully, nodding occasionally, and once making a penciled note of an address on the back of a pink betting slip.

“Okay,” he said finally, “so long as you promise, you know, to see me okay if...”

“I can’t promise anything.”

“But you will?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, then. Gimme a chance to do a bit o’ recce, okay? Then gimme another buzz on the ol’ blower, like, okay? When had you got in mind?”

“I’m not quite sure.”

“Okay — that’s it then.”

Morse drained his glass and stood up, wondering whether communication in the English language could ever again cope without the word “okay.”

“Before you go...” JJ looked down at his empty glass.

“Mineral water, was it?” asked Morse.

“Just tell the landlord ‘same again.’ ”

Almost contented with life once more, JJ sat back and relaxed after Morse had gone. Huh! Just the one bleedin’ door, by the sound of it. Easy. Piece o’ cake!

Morse, too, was pleased with the way the morning had gone. Johnson, as the police were well aware, was one of the finest locksmen in the Midlands. As a teenager he’d held the reputation of being the quickest car thief in the county. But his incredible skills had only really begun to burgeon in the eighties, when all manner of house locks, burglar alarms, and safety devices had surrendered meekly to his unparalleled knowledge of locks and keys and electrical circuits.

In fact “JJ” Johnson knew almost as much about burglary as J. J. Bradley knew about the aorist subjunctive.

Perhaps more.

Chapter twenty-seven

In fact, Morse’s campaign was destined to be launched that very day.

Lewis had called back at HQ at 2 P.M. with a slim folder of photocopied documents — in which Morse seemed little interested; and with the news that Geoffrey Owens had left his home the previous evening to attend a weekend conference on Personnel Management, in Bournemouth, not in all likelihood to be back until late P.M. the following day, Sunday. In this latter news Morse seemed more interested.

“Well done, Lewis! But you’ve done quite enough for one day. You look weary and I want you to go home. Nobody can keep up the hours you’ve been setting yourself.”

As it happened, Lewis was feeling wonderfully fresh; but he had promised that weekend to accompany his wife (if he could) on her quest for the right sort of dishwasher. They could well afford the luxury now, and Lewis himself would welcome some alleviation of his domestic duties at the sink.

“I’ll accept your offer — on one condition, sir. You go off home, too.”

“Agreed. I was just going anyway. I’ll take the folder with me. Anything interesting?”

“A few little things, I suppose. For instance—”

“Not now!”

“Aren’t you going to tell me how your meeting went?”

“Not now! Let’s call it a day.”

As the two detectives walked out of the HQ block, Morse asked his question casually:

“By the way, did you discover which swish hotel they’re at in Bournemouth?”

Back in his flat, Morse made two phone calls: the first to Bournemouth; the second to the Cutteslowe Estate. Yes, a Mr. Geoffrey Owens was present at the conference there. No, Mr. Malcolm Johnson had not yet had a chance to make his recce — of course he hadn’t! But, yes, he would repair the omission forthwith in view of the providential opportunity now afforded (although Johnson’s own words were considerably less pretentious).

“And no more booze today, Malcolm!”

“What me — drink? On business? Never! And you better not drink, neither.”

“Two sober men — that’s what the job needs,” agreed Morse.

“What time you pickin’ me up then?”

“No. You’re picking me up. Half past seven at my place.”

“Okay. And just remember you got more to lose than I ’ave, Mr. Morse.”

Yes, far more to lose, Morse knew that; and he felt a shudder of apprehension about the risky escapade he was undertaking. His nerves needed some steadying.

He poured himself a good measure of Glenfiddich; and shortly thereafter fell deeply asleep in the chair for more than two hours.

Bliss.

Johnson parked his filthy F-reg Vauxhaull in a fairly convenient lay-by on the Deddington Road, the main thoroughfare which runs at the rear of the odd-numbered houses on Bloxham Drive. As instructed, Morse stayed behind, in the murky shadow of the embankment, as Johnson eased himself through a gap in the perimeter fence, where vandals had smashed and wrenched away several of the vertical slats, and then, with surprising agility, descended the steep stretch of slippery grass that led down to the rear of the terrace.

The coast seemed clear.

Morse looked on nervously as the locksman stood in his trainers at the back of Number 15, patiently and methodically doing what he did so well. Once, he snapped to taut attention hard beside the wall as a light was switched on in one of the nearby houses, throwing a yellow rectangle over the glistening grass — and then switched off.

Six minutes.

By Morse’s watch, six minutes before Johnson turned the knob, carefully eased the door open, and disappeared within — before reappearing and beckoning a tense and jumpy Morse to join him.

“Do you want the lights on?” asked Johnson as he played the thin beam of his large torch around the kitchen.

“What do you think?”

“Yes. Let’s ’ave ’em on. Lemme just go and pull the curtains through ’ere.” He moved into the front living room, where Morse heard a twin swish, before the room burst suddenly into light.

An ordinary, somewhat spartan room: settee; two rather tatty armchairs; dining table and chairs; TV set; electric fire installed in the old fireplace; and above the fireplace, on a mantelpiece patinated deep with dust, the only object perhaps which any self-respecting burglar would have wished to take — a small, beautifully fashioned ormolu clock.

Upstairs, the double bed in the front room was unmade, an orange bath towel thrown carelessly across the duvet; no sign of pajamas. On the bedside table two items only: Wilbur Smith’s The Seventh Scroll in paperback, and a packet of BiSoDoL Extra indigestion tablets. An old-fashioned mahogany wardrobe monopolized much of the remaining space, with coats/suits/trousers on their hangers, and six pairs of shoes neatly laid in parallels at the bottom; and on the shelves, to the left, piles of jumpers, shirts, pants, socks, and handkerchiefs.

The second bedroom was locked.

“Malcolm!” whispered Morse down the stairwell.

Two and a half minutes later, Morse was taking stock of a smaller but clearly more promising room: a large bookcase containing a best-seller selection from over the years; one armchair; one office chair; the latter set beneath a veneered desk with an imitation leather top, four drawers on either side, and between them a longer drawer with two handles — locked.

“Malcolm!” whispered Morse down the stairwell.

Ninety seconds only this time, and clearly the locksman was running into form.

The eight side drawers contained few items of interest: stationery, insurance documents, car documents, bank statements, pens and pencils — but in the bottom left-hand drawer a couple of pornographic paperbacks. Morse opened Topless in Torremolinos at random and read a short paragraph.

In its openly titillating way, it seemed to him surprisingly well written. And there was that one striking simile where the heroine’s bosom was compared to a pair of fairy cakes — although Morse wasn’t at all sure what a fairy cake looked like. He made a mental note of the author, Ann Berkeley Cox, and read the brief dedication on the title page, “For Geoff From ABC,” before slipping the book into the pocket of his mackintosh.

Johnson was seated in an armchair, in the living room, in the dark, when Morse came down the stairs holding a manila file.

“Got what you wanted, Mr. Morse?”

“Perhaps so. Ready?”

With the house now in total darkness, the two men felt their way to the kitchen, when Morse stopped suddenly.

“The torch! Give me the torch.”

Retracing his steps to the living room, he shone the beam along an empty mantelpiece.

“Put it back!” he said.

Johnson took the ormolu clock from his overcoat pocket and replaced it carefully on its little dust-free rectangle.

“I’m glad you made me do that,” confided Johnson quietly. “I shouldn’t ’a done it in the first place. Anyway, me conscience’ll be clear now.”

There was a streak of calculating cruelty in the man, Morse knew that. But in several respects he was a lovable rogue; even sometimes, as now perhaps, a reasonably honest one. And oddly it was Morse who was beginning to worry — about his own conscience.

He went quickly up to the second bedroom once more and slipped the book back in its drawer.

At last, as quietly as it had opened, the back door closed behind them and the pair now made their way up the grassy gradient to the gap in the slatted perimeter fence.

“You’ve not lost your old skills,” volunteered Morse.

“Nah! Know what they say, Mr. Morse? Old burglars never die — they simply steal away.”

In the darkened house behind them, on the mantelpiece in the front living room, a little dust-free rectangle still betrayed the spot where the beautifully fashioned ormolu clock had so recently stood.

Chapter twenty-eight

Back in his flat, Morse closed the door and shot the bolts, both top and bottom. It was an oddly needless precaution, yet an explicable one, perhaps. As a twelve-year-old boy, he remembered so vividly returning from school with a magazine, and locking all the doors in spite of his certain knowledge that no other member of the family would be home for several hours. And then, even then, he had waited awhile, relishing the anticipatory thrill before daring to open the pages.

It was just that sensation he felt now as he switched on the electric fire, poured a glass of Glenfiddich, lit a cigarette, and settled back in his favorite armchair — not this time, however, with the Naturist Journal which (all those years ago now) had been doing the rounds in Lower IVA, but with the manila file just burgled from the house on Bloxham Drive.

The cover was well worn, with tears and creases along its edges; and maroon rings where once a wine glass had rested, amid many doodles of quite intricate design. Inside the file was a sheaf of papers and cuttings, several of them clipped or stapled together, though not arranged in any chronological or purposeful sequence.

Nine separate items.

• Two newspaper cuttings, snipped from one of the less inhibited of the Sunday tabloids, concerning a Lord Hardiman, together with a photograph of the aforesaid peer fishing in his wallet (presumably for Deutschmarks) outside a readily identifiable sex establishment in Hamburg’s Reeperbahn. Clipped to this material was a further photograph of Lord Hardiman arm-in-arm with Lady Hardiman at a polo match in Great Windsor Park (September 1984).

• A letter (August 1979) addressed to Owens from a firm of solicitors in Cheltenham informing the addressee that it was in possession of letters sent by him (Owens) to one of their clients (unspecified); and that some arrangement beneficial to each of the parties might possibly be considered.

• A glossy, highly defined photograph showing a paunchy elderly man fondling a frightened-looking prepubescent girl, both of them naked. Penciled on the back was an address in St. Albans.

• A stapled sheaf of papers showing the expenses of a director in a Surrey company manufacturing surgical appliances, with double exclamation points against several of the mammoth amounts claimed for foreign business trips.

• A brief, no-nonsense letter (from a woman, perhaps?) in large, curly handwriting, leaning italic-fashion to the right: “If you contact me again I shall take your letters to the police — I’ve kept them all. You’ll get no more money from me. You’re a despicable human being. I’ve got nothing more to lose, not even my money.” No signature but (again) a penciled address, this time in the margin, in Wimbledon.

• Four sets of initials written on a small page probably torn from the back of a diary:

Nothing more — except a small tick in red Biro against the first three.

• Two further newspaper cuttings, paper-clipped together. The first (The Times Diary, 2-2-96) reporting as follows:

The second, a cutting from the Oxford Mail (November 1995) of an article written by Geoffrey Owens; with a photograph alongside, the caption reading, “Mr. Julian Storrs and his wife Angela at the opening of the Polynesian Art Exhibition at the Pitt Rivers Museum.”

• A smudgy photocopy of a typed medical report, marked “Strictly Private and Confidential,” on the notepaper of a private health clinic in the Banbury Road:

Clipped to this was a cutting from the obituary columns of one of the national dailies — The Independent, by the look of it — announcing the death of the distinguished cancer specialist Robert H. Turnbull.

• Finally, three photographs, paper-clipped together:

(i) A newspaper photograph of a strip club, showing in turn (though indistinguishably) individual photographs of the establishment’s principal performers, posted on each side of the narrow entrance; showing also (with complete clarity) the inviting legend: SEXIEST RAUNCHIEST SHOW IN SOHO.

(ii) A full-length, black-and-white photograph of a tallish bottle-blonde in a dark figure-hugging gown, the thigh-slit on the left revealing a length of shapely leg. About the woman there seemed little that was less than genuinely attractive — except the smile perhaps.

(iii) A color photograph of the same woman seated completely naked, apart from a pair of extraordinarily thin stiletto heels, on a bar stool somewhere — her overfirm breasts suggesting that the smile in the former photograph was not the only thing about her that might be semi-artificial. The legs, now happily revealed in all their lengthy glory, were those of a young dancer — the legs of a Cyd Charisse or a Betty Grable, much better than those in the Naturist Journal…

Morse closed the file, and knew what he had read: an agenda for blackmail — and possibly for murder.

Chapter twenty-nine Sunday, February 25

Socrates, on his last day on earth, avowed that death, if it be but one long and dreamless sleep, was a blessing most devoutly to be wished for. Morse, on the morning of Sunday, February 25 — without going quite so far as Socrates — could certainly look back on his own long and dreamless sleep with a rare gratitude, since the commonest features of his nights were regular visits to the loo, frequent draughts of water, occasional doses of Nurofen and Paracetamol, an intake of indigestion tablets, and finally (after rising once more from his crumpled bed linen) a tumbler of Alka-Seltzer.

The Observer was already poking thickly through the letterbox as he hurriedly prepared himself a subcontinental breakfast.

10:30 A.M.

It was 11:15 A.M. when he arrived at HQ, where Lewis had already been at work for three hours, and where he was soon regaling the chief about his visit to the newspaper offices.

A complete picture of Owens — built up from testimonials, references, records, impressions, gossip — showed a competent, hard-working, well-respected employee. That was the good news. And the bad? Well, it seemed the man was aloof, humorless, unsympathetic. In view of the latter shortcomings (Lewis had suggested) it was perhaps puzzling to understand why Owens had been sent off on a personnel management course. Yet (as the editor had suggested) some degree of aloofness, humorlessness, lack of sympathy, was perhaps precisely what was required in such a role.

Lewis pointed to the cellophane folder in which his carefully paginated photocopies were assembled.

“And one more thing. He’s obviously a bit of a hit with some of the girls there — especially the younger ones.”

“In spite of his ponytail?”

“Because of it, more likely.”

“You’re not serious?”

“And you’re never going to catch up with the twentieth century, are you?”

“One or two possible leads?”

“Could be.”

“Such as?”

“Well, for a start, the Personnel Manager who saw Owens on Monday. I’ll get a statement from him as soon as he gets back from holiday — earlier, if you’d like.”

Morse looked dubious. “Ye-es. But if somebody intended to murder Owens, not Rachel James... well, Owens’ alibi is neither here nor there really, is it? You’re right, though. Let’s stick to official procedure. I’ve always been in favor of rules and regulations.”

As Lewis eyed his superior officer with scarce disguised incredulity, he accepted the manila file handed to him across the desk; and began to read.

Morse himself now opened the “Life” section of The Observer and turned to the crossword set by Azed (for Morse, the Kasparov of cruciverbalists) and considered 1 across: “Elephant man has a mouth that’s deformed (6).” He immediately wrote in MAHOUT, but then put the crossword aside, trusting that the remaining clues might pose a more demanding challenge, and deciding to postpone his hebdomadal treat until later in the day. Otherwise, he might well have completed the puzzle before Lewis had finished with the file.

“How did you come by this?” asked Lewis finally.

“Yours not to reason how.”

“He’s a blackmailer!”

Morse nodded. “We’ve found no evidential motive for Rachel’s murder, but...”

“… dozens of ’em for his.”

“About nine, Lewis — if we’re going to be accurate.”

Morse opened the file, and considered the contents once more. Unlike that of the obscenely fat child fondler, neither photograph of the leggy blonde stripper was genuinely pornographic — certainly not the wholly nude one, which seemed to Morse strangely unerotic; perhaps the one of her in the white dress, though... “Unbuttoning” had always appealed to Morse more than “unbuttoned”; “undressing” than “undressed”; “almost naked” to completely so. It was something to do with Plato’s idea of process; and as a young classical scholar Morse had spent so many hours with that philosopher.

“Quite a bit of legwork there, sir.”

“Yes. Lovely legs, aren’t they?”

“No! I meant there’s a lot of work to do there — research, going around.”

“You’ll need a bit of help, yes.”

“Sergeant Dixon — couple of his lads, too — that’d help.”

“Is Dixon still eating the canteen out of jam doughnuts?”

Lewis nodded. “And he’s still got his pet tortoise—”

“—always a step or two in front of him, I know.”

For half an hour the detectives discussed the file’s explosive material. Until just after noon, in fact.

“Coffee, sir?”

“Not for me. Let’s nip down to the King’s Arms in Summertown.”

“Not for me,” echoed Lewis. “I can’t afford the time.”

“As you wish.” Morse got to his feet.

“Do you think you should be going out quite so much — on the booze, I mean, sir?” Lewis took a deep breath and prepared for an approaching gale, force ten. “You’re getting worse, not better.”

Morse sat down again.

“Let me just tell you something, Lewis. I care quite a bit about what you think of me as a boss, as a colleague, as a detective — as a friend, yes! But I don’t give two bloody monkeys about what you think of me as a boozer, all right?”

“No, it’s not all right,” said Lewis quietly. “As a professional copper, as far as solving murders are concerned—”

“Is concerned!”

“—it doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter to me at all.” Lewis’s voice grew sharper now. “You do your job — you spend all your time sorting things out — I’m not worried about that. And if the Chief Constable told me you weren’t doing your job, I’d resign myself. But he wouldn’t say that— never. What he’d say — what others would say — what others are saying — is that you’re ruining yourself. Not the Force, not the department, not the murder inquiries — nothing! — except yourself.”

“Just hold on a second, will you?” Morse’s eyes were blazing.

“No! No, I won’t. You talked about me as a friend, didn’t you, just now? Well, as a friend I’m telling you that you’re buggering up your health, your retirement, your life — everything!”

“Listen!” hissed Morse. “I’ve never myself tried to tell any other man how to live his life. And I will not be told, at my age, how I’m supposed to live mine. Even by you.”

After a prolonged silence, Lewis spoke again.

“Can I say something else?”

Morse shrugged indifferently.

“Perhaps it doesn’t matter much to most people whether you kill yourself or not. You’ve got no wife, no family, no relatives, except that aunt of yours in Alnwick—”

“She’s dead, too.”

“So, what the hell? What’s it matter? Who cares? Well, I care, sir. And the missus cares. And for all I know that girl Ellie Smith, she cares.”

Morse looked down at his desk. “Not any longer, no.”

“And you ought to care — care for yourself — just a bit.”

For some considerable while Morse refrained from making any answer, for he was affected by his sergeant’s words more deeply than he would ever be prepared to admit.

Then, finally:

“What about that coffee, Lewis?”

“And a sandwich?”

“And a sandwich.”

By early afternoon Morse had put most of his cards on the table, and he and Lewis had reached an agreed conclusion. No longer could either of them accept that Rachel James had been the intended victim: each of them now looked toward Geoffrey Owens as by far the likelier target. Pursuance of the abundant clues provided by the Owens file would necessarily involve a great deal of extra work; and fairly soon a strategy was devised, with Lewis and Dixon allocated virtually everything except the Soho slot.

“You know, I could probably fit that in fairly easily with the Wimbledon visit,” Lewis had volunteered.

But Morse was clearly unconvinced:

“The Soho angle’s the most important of the lot.”

“Do you honestly believe that?”

“Certainly. That’s why—”

The phone rang, answered by Morse.

Owens (he learned) had phoned HQ ten minutes earlier, just after 3 P.M., to report that his property had been burgled over the weekend, while he was away.

“And you’re dealing with it?... Good... Just the one item you say, as far as he knows?... I see... Thank you.”

Morse put down the phone; and Lewis picked up the file, looking quizzically across the desk.

But Morse shook his head. “Not the file, no.”

“What, then?”

“A valuable little ormolu clock from his living room.”

“Probably a professional, sir — one who knows his clocks.”

“Don’t ask me. I know nothing about clocks.”

Lewis grinned. “We both know somebody who does though, don’t we, sir?”

Chapter thirty

No knock. The door opened. Strange entered.

“Haven’t they mentioned it yet, Morse? The pubs are open all day on Sundays now.”

As Strange carefully balanced his bulk on the chair opposite, Morse lauded his luck that Lewis had taken the Owens material down the corridor for photocopying.

“Just catching up on a bit of routine stuff, sir.”

“Really?”

“Why are you here?”

“It’s the wife,” confided Strange. “Sunday afternoons she always goes round the house dusting everything. Including me!”

Morse was smiling dutifully as Strange continued: “Making progress?”

“Following up a few things, yes.”

“Mm... Is your brain as bright as it used to be?”

“I’m sure it’s not.”

“Mm... You don’t look quite so bright, either.”

“We’re all getting older.”

“Worse luck!”

“Not really, surely? ‘No wise man ever wished to be younger.’ ”

“Bloody nonsense!”

“Not my nonsense — Jonathan Swift’s.”

Elbows on the desk, Strange rested his large head on his large hands.

“I’m probably finishing in September, I suppose you’d heard.”

Morse nodded. “I’m glad they’re letting you go.”

“What the ’ell’s that supposed to mean?”

“Well, I should think Mrs. Strange’ll be pleased to have you around, won’t she? Retirement, you know... Getting up late and watching all the other poor sods go off to work, especially on Monday mornings. That sort of thing. It’s what we all work for, I suppose. What we all wait for.”

“You mean,” muttered Strange, “that’s what I’ve been flogging me guts out all this time for — thirty-two years of it? I used to do your sort of job, you know. Caught nearly as many murderers as you in me day. It’s just that I used to do it a bit different, that’s all. Mostly used to wait till they came to me. No problem, often as not: jealousy, booze, sex, next-door neighbor between the sheets with the missus. Motive — that’s what it’s all about.”

“Not always quite so easy, though, is it?” ventured Morse, who had heard the sermon several times before.

“Certainly not when you’re around, matey!”

“This case needs some very careful handling, sir. Lots of sensitive inquiries—”

“Such as?”

“About Owens, for a start.”

“You’ve got some new evidence?”

“One or two vague rumors, yes.”

“Mm... I heard a vague rumor myself this afternoon. I heard Owens’ place got burgled. I suppose you’ve heard that, too?” He peered at Morse over his half-lenses.

“Yes.”

“Only one thing pinched. Hm! A clock, Morse.”

“Yes.”

“We’ve only got one or two clock specialists on the patch, as far as I remember. Or is it just the one?”

“The one?”

“You’ve not seen him — since they let him out again?”

“Ah, Johnson! Yes. I shall have to call round to see him pretty soon, I suppose.”

“What about tomorrow? He’s probably your man, isn’t he?”

“I’m away tomorrow.”

“Oh?”

“London. Soho, as a matter of fact. Few things to check out.”

“I don’t know why you don’t let Sergeant Lewis do all that sort of tedious legwork.”

Morse felt the Chief Superintendent’s small, shrewd eyes upon him.

“Division of labor. Someone’s got to do it.”

“You know,” said Strange, “if I hadn’t got a Supers’ meeting in the morning, I’d join you. See the sights... and everything.”

“I don’t think Mrs. Strange’d approve.”

“What makes you think I’d tell her?”

“She’s— she’s not been all that well, has she?”

Strange slowly shook his head, and looked down at the carpet.

“What about you, sir?”

“Me? I’m fine, apart from going deaf and going bald and hemorrhoids and blood pressure. Bit overweight, too, perhaps. What about you?”

“I’m fine.”

“How’s the drinking going?”

“Going? It’s going, er...”

“ ‘Quickly?’ Is that the word you’re looking for?”

“That’s the word.”

Strange appeared about to leave. And — blessedly! — Lewis, Morse realized, must have been aware of the situation, since he had put in no appearance.

But Strange was not quite finished: “Do you ever worry how your liver’s coping with all this booze?”

“We’ve all got to die of something, they say.”

“Do you ever think about that — about dying?”

“Occasionally.”

“Do you believe in life after death?”

Morse smiled. “There was a sign once that Slough Borough Council put up near one of the churches there: NO ROAD BEYOND THE CEMETERY.”

“You don’t think there is, then?”

“No,” answered Morse simply.

“Perhaps it’s just as well if there isn’t — you know, rewards and punishments and all that sort of thing.”

“I don’t want much reward, anyway.”

“Depends on your ambition. You never had much o’ that, did you?”

“Early on, I did.”

“You could’ve got to the top, you know that.”

“Not doing a job I enjoyed, I couldn’t. I’m not a form filler, am I? Or a committeeman. Or a clipboard man.”

“Or a procedure man,” added Strange slowly, as he struggled to his feet.

“Pardon?”

“Bloody piles!”

Morse persisted. “What did you mean, sir?”

“Extraordinary, you know, the sort of high-tech stuff we’ve got in the Force these days. We’ve got a machine here that even copies color photos. You know, like the one— Oh! Didn’t I mention it, Morse? I had a very pleasant little chat with Sergeant Lewis in the photocopying room just before I came in here. By the look of things, you’ve got quite a few alternatives to go on there.”

“Quite a lot of ‘choices,’ sir. Strictly speaking, you only have ‘alternatives’ if you’ve just got the two options.”

“Fuck off, Morse!”

That evening Morse was in bed by 9:45 P.M., slowly reading but a few more pages of Juliet Barker’s The Brontës, before stopping at one sentence, and reading it again:

It seemed as good a place to stop as any; and Morse was soon nodding off, in a semiupright posture, the thick book dropping onto the duvet, the whiskey on his bedside table (unprecedentedly) unfinished.

Chapter thirty-one

The result of one election had already been declared, with Mr. Ivan Thomas, the Labor candidate, former unsuccessful aspirant to municipal honors, now preparing to assume his duties as councillor for the Gosforth ward at Kidlington, near Oxford.

At Lonsdale College, five miles further south, in the golden heart of Oxford, the likely outcome of another election was still very much in the balance, with the wives of the two nominees very much — and not too discreetly, perhaps — to the fore in the continued canvasing. As it happened, each of them (like Morse) was in bed — or in a bed — comparatively early that Sunday evening.

Shelly Cornford was always a long time in the bathroom, manipulating her waxed flossing-ribbon in between and up and down her beautifully healthy teeth. When finally she came into the bedroom, her husband was sitting up against the pillows reading the Sunday Times Books Section. He watched her as she took off her purple Jaeger dress, and then unfastened her black bra, her breasts bursting free. So very nearly he said something at that point; but the back of his mouth was suddenly dry, and he decided not to. Anyway, it had been only a small incident, and his wife was probably completely unaware of how she could affect some other men — with a touch, a look, a movement of her body. But he’d never been a jealous man.

Not if he could help it.

She got into bed in her Oxford blue pajamas and briefly turned toward him.

“Why wasn’t Julian at dinner tonight?”

“Up in Durham — some conference he was speaking at. He’s back tonight — Angela’s picking him up from the station, so she said.”

“Oh.”

“Why do you ask?”

“No reason, darling. Night-night! Sweet dreams, my sweetie!”

She blew a kiss across the narrow space between their beds, turned her back toward him, and snuggled her head into the green pillows.

“Don’t be too long with the light, please.”

A few minutes later she was lying still, breathing quite rhythmically, and he thought she was asleep.

As quietly as he could, he maneuvered himself down beneath the bedclothes, and straightway turned off the light. And tried, tried far too hard, to go to sleep himself...

... After evensong earlier that same evening in the College Chapel, the Fellows and their guests had been invited (as was the custom) to the Master’s Lodge, where they partook of a glass of sherry before dining at 7:30 P.M. at the top table in the main hall, the students seated on the long rows of benches below them. It was just before leaving the Master’s Lodge that Denis had looked round for his wife and found her by the fireplace speaking to David Mackenzie, one of the younger dons, a brilliant mathematician, of considerable corpulence, who hastily folded the letter he had been showing to Shelly and put it away.

Nothing in that, perhaps? Not in itself, no. But he, Denis Cornford, knew what was in the letter. And that, for the simplest of all reasons, since Mackenzie had shown him the same scented purple sheets in the SCR the previous week; and Cornford could recall pretty accurately, though naturally not verbatim, the passage he’d been invited to consider. Clearly the letter had been, thus far, the highlight of Mackenzie’s term:

Surely it was ridiculous to worry about such a thing. But there was something else. The two of them had been giggling together like a pair of adolescents, and looking at each other, and she had put a hand on his arm. And it was almost as if they had established a curious kind of intimacy from which he, Denis Cornford, was temporarily excluded.

Could be naughty.

Could be perfectly innocent...

“Would you still love me if I’d got a spot on my nose?”

“Depends how big it was, my love.”

“But you still want my body, don’t you,” she whispered, “in spite of my varicose veins?”

Metaphorically, as he lay beside her, Sir Clixby sidestepped her full-frontal assault as she turned herself toward him.

“You’re a very desirable woman, and what’s more you know it!” He moved his hands down her naked shoulders and fondled the curves of her bosom.

“I hope I can still do something for you,” she whispered.

“After all, you’ve promised to do something for me, haven’t you?”

Perhaps Sir Clixby should have been a diplomat:

“Do you know something? I thought the Bishop was never going to finish tonight, didn’t you? I shall have to have a word with the Chaplain. God knows where he found him?”

She moved even closer to the Master. “Come on! We haven’t got all night. Julian’s train gets in at ten past ten.”

Two of the College dons stood speaking together on the cobblestones outside Lonsdale as the clock on Great Saint Mary’s struck ten o’clock; and a sole undergraduate passing through the main gate thought he heard a brief snatch of their conversation:

“Having a woman like her in the Lodge? The idea’s unthinkable!”

But who the woman was, the passerby was not to know.

Chapter thirty-two Monday, February 26

At 8:45 A.M. there were just the two of them, Morse and Lewis, exchanging somewhat random thoughts about the case, when the young blonde girl (whom Strange had already noticed) came in with the morning post. She was a very recent addition to the typing pool, strongly recommended by the prestigious Marlborough College in the High, her secretarial skills corroborated by considerable evidence, including a Pitman Shorthand Certificate for 120 wpm.

“Your mail, sir. I’m...” (she looked frightened) “I’m terribly sorry about the one on top. I just didn’t notice.”

But Morse had already taken the letter from its white envelope, the latter marked, in the top left-hand corner, “Strictly Private and Personal.”

No address.

Of course, there was no address.

“Did you read this?” Morse spoke in level tones, looking up at his secretary with unblinking eyes.

“Only till... you know, I realized...”

“You shouldn’t have opened it.”

“No, sir,” she whispered.

“You can type all right?”

She nodded.

“And you can take shorthand?”

She nodded, despairingly.

“But you can’t read?”

“As I said, sir...” The tears were starting.

“I heard what you said. Now just you listen to what I’m saying. This sort of thing will never happen again!”

“I promise, sir, it’ll—”

“Listen!” Morse’s eyes suddenly widened with an almost manic gleam, his nostrils flaring with suppressed fury as he repeated in a slow, soft voice: “It won’t happen again — not if you want to work for me any longer. Is that clear? Never. Now get out,” he hissed, “and leave me, before I get angry with you.”

After she had left, Lewis too felt almost afraid to speak.

“What was all that about?” he asked finally.

“Don’t you start poking your bloody nose—” But the sentence went no further. Instead, Morse picked up the letter and passed it over, his saddened eyes focused on the wainscoting.

After reading the letter, Lewis said nothing.

“I don’t have much luck with the ladies, do I?”

“She’s still obviously wearing the pendant.”

“I hope so,” said Morse; who might have said rather more, but there was a knock on the door, and DC Learoyd was invited into the sanctum.

Morse handed over the newspaper cuttings concerning Lord Hardiman, together with the photograph, and explained Learoyd’s assignment:

“Your job’s to find out all you can. It doesn’t look all that promising, I know. Hardly blackmail stuff these days, is it? But Owens thinks it is. And that’s the point. We’re not really interested in how many times he’s been knocking on the doors of the knocking shops. It’s finding the nature of his connection with Owens.”

Learoyd nodded his understanding, albeit a little unhappily.

“Off you go, then.”

But Learoyd delayed. “Whereabouts do you think would be a good place to start, sir?”

Morse’s eyeballs turned ceilingward.

“What about looking up His Lordship in Debrett’s Peerage, mm? It might just tell you where he lives, don’t you think?”

“But where can I find a copy?”

“What about that big building in the center of Oxford — in Bonn Square. You’ve heard of it? It’s called the Central Library.”

Item 2 in the manila file, as Lewis had discovered earlier that morning, was OBE (Overtaken By Events, in Morse’s shorthand). The Cheltenham firm of solicitors had been disbanded in 1992, its clientele dispersed, to all intents and purposes now permanently incommunicado.

Item 3 was to be entrusted into the huge hands of DC Elton, who now made his entrance; and almost immediately his exit, since he passed no observations, and asked no questions, as he looked down at the paunchy pedophiliac from St. Albans.

“Leave it to me, sir.”

“And while you’re at it, see how the land lies here.” Morse handed over the documentation on Item 4 — the accounts sheets from the surgical appliances company in Croydon.

“Good man, that,” commented Lewis, as the door closed behind the massive frame of DC Elton.

“Give me Learoyd every time!” confided Morse. “At least he’s got the intelligence to ask a few half-witted questions.”

“I don’t quite follow you.”

“Wouldn’t you need a bit of advice if you called in at some place selling surgical appliances? With Elton’s great beer gut they’ll probably think he’s called in for a temporary truss.”

Lewis didn’t argue.

He knew better.

Also OBE, as Lewis had already discovered, was Item 5. The address Owens had written on the letter was — had been — that of a home for the mentally handicapped in Wimbledon. A Social Services inspection had uncovered gross and negligent malpractices; and the establishment had been closed down two years previously, its management and nursing staff redeployed or declared redundant. Yet no prosecutions had ensued.

“Forlorn hope,” Lewis had ventured.

And Morse had agreed. “Did you know that ‘forlorn hope’ has got nothing to do with ‘forlorn’ or ‘hope’? It’s all Dutch: ‘Verloren hoop’ — ‘lost troop.’ ”

“Very useful to know, sir.”

Seemingly oblivious to such sarcasm, Morse contemplated once more the four sets of initials that comprised Item 6:

with those small ticks in red Biro set against the first three of them.

“Any ideas?” asked Lewis.

“ ‘Jonathan Swift,’ obviously, for ‘JS.’ I was only talking about him to the Super yesterday.”

“Julian Storrs?”

Morse grinned. “Perhaps all of ’em are dons at Lonsdale.”

“I’ll check.”

“So that leaves Items seven and eight — both of which I leave in your capable hands, Lewis. And lastly my own little assignment in Soho, Item nine.”

“Coffee, sir?”

“Glass of iced orange juice!”

After Lewis had gone, Morse reread Ellie’s letter, deeply hurt, and wondering whether people in the ancient past had found it quite so difficult to cope with disappointments deep as his. But at least things were over; and in the long run that might make things much easier. He tore the letter in two, in four, in eight, in sixteen, and then in thirty-two — would have torn it in sixtyfour, had his fingers been strong enough — before dropping the little square pieces into his wastepaper basket.

“No ice in the canteen, sir. Machine’s gone kaput.”

Morse shrugged indifferently and Lewis, sensing that the time might be opportune, decided to say something which had been on his mind:

“Just one thing I’d like to ask...”

Morse looked up sharply. “You’re not going to ask me where Lonsdale is, I hope!”

“No. I’d just like to ask you not to be too hard on that new secretary of yours, that’s all.”

“And what the hell’s that got to do with you?”

“Nothing really, sir.”

“I agree. And when I want your bloody advice on how to handle my secretarial staff, I’ll come and ask for it. Clear?”

Morse’s eyes were blazing anew. And Lewis, his own temperature now rising rapidly, left his superior’s office without a further word.

Just before noon, Jane Edwards was finalizing an angry letter, spelling out her resignation, when she heard the message over the intercom: Morse wanted to see her in his office.

“Si’ down!”

She sat down, noticing immediately that he seemed tired, the whites of his eyes lightly veined with blood.

“I’m sorry I got so cross, Jane. That’s all I wanted to say.”

She remained where she was, almost mesmerized.

Very quietly he continued: “You will try to forgive me— please?”

She nodded helplessly, for she had no choice.

And Morse smiled at her sadly, almost gratefully, as she left.

Back in the typing pool Ms. Jane Edwards surreptitiously dabbed away the last of the slow-dropping tears, tore up her letter (so carefully composed) into sixty-four pieces; and suddenly felt, as if by some miracle of St. Anthony, most inexplicably happy.

Chapter thirty-three

Until the age of twelve, Morse’s reading had comprised little beyond a weekly diet of the Dandy comic, and a monthly diet of the Meccano Magazine — the legacy of the latter proving considerably the richer, in that Morse had retained a lifelong delight in model train sets and in the railways themselves. Thus it was that as he stood on Platform One at Oxford Station, he was much looking forward to his journey. Usually, he promised himself a decent read of a decent book on a trip like this. But such potential pleasures seldom materialized; hadn’t materialized that afternoon either, when the punctual 2:15 P.M. from Oxford arrived fifty-nine minutes later at Paddington, where Morse immediately took a taxi to New Scotland Yard.

Although matters there had been prearranged, it was purely by chance that Morse happened to meet Paul Condon, the Metropolitan Commissioner, in the main entrance foyer.

“They’re ready for you, Morse. Can’t stay myself, I’m afraid. Press conference. It’s not just the ethnic minorities I’ve upset this time — it’s the ethnic majorities, too. All because I’ve published a few more official crime statistics.”

Morse nodded. He wanted to say something to his old friend: something about never climbing in vain when you’re going up the Mountain of Truth. But he only recalled the quotation after stepping out of the lift at the fourth floor, where Sergeant Rogers of the Porn Squad was awaiting him.

Once in Rogers’ office, Morse produced the photograph of the strip club. And immediately, with the speed of an experienced ornithologist recognizing a picture of a parrot, Rogers had identified the premises.

“Just off Brewer Street.” He unfolded a detailed map of Soho. “Here— let me show you.”

The early evening was overcast, drizzly and dank, when like some latter-day Orpheus Morse emerged from the depths of Piccadilly Circus Underground; when, after briefly consulting his A-Z, he proceeded by a reasonably direct route to a narrow, seedy-looking thoroughfare, where a succession of establishments promised XXXX videos and magazines (imported), sex shows (live), striptease (continuous) — and a selection of freshly made sandwiches (various).

And there it was! Le Club Sexy. Unmistakably so, but prosaically and repetitively now rechristened Girls Girls Girls. It made the former proprietors appear comparatively imaginative.

Something — some aspiration to the higher things in life, perhaps — prompted Morse to raise his eyes from the ground-floor level of the gaudily lurid fronts there to the architecture, some of it rather splendid, above.

Yet not for long.

“Come in out of the drizzle, sir! Lovely girls here.”

Morse showed his ID card, and moved into the shelter of the tiny entrance foyer.

“Do you know her?”

The young woman, black stockings and black miniskirt meeting at the top of her thighs, barely glanced at the photograph thrust under her eyes.

“No.”

“Who runs this place? I want to see him.”

“Her. But she ain’t ’ere now, is she? Why don’t you call back later, handsome?”

A helmeted policeman was ambling along the opposite pavement, and Morse called him over.

“Okay,” the girl said quickly. “You bin ’ere before, right?”

“Er— one of my officers, yes.”

“Me mum used to know her, like I told the other fellah. Just a minute.”

She disappeared down the dingy stairs.

“How can I help you, sir?”

Morse showed his ID to the constable.

“Just keep your eyes on me for a few minutes.”

But there was no need.

Three minutes later, Morse had an address in Praed Street, no more than a hundred yards from Paddington Station where earlier, at the entrance to the Underground, he had admired the bronze statue of one of his heroes, Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

So Morse now took the Tube back. It had been a roundabout sort of journey.

She was in.

She asked him in.

And Morse, from a moth-eaten settee, agreed to sample a cup of Nescafé.

“Yeah, Angie Martin! Toffee-nosed little tart, if you know wo’ I mean.”

“Tell me about her.”

“You’re the second one, encha?”

“Er— one of my officers, yes.”

“Nah! He wasn’t from the fuzz. Couldna bin! Giv me a couple o’ twennies ’e did.”

“What did he want to know?”

“Same as you, like as not.”

“She was quite a girl, they say.”

“Lovely on ’er legs, she was, if you know wo’ I mean. Most of ’em, these days, couldn’t manage the bleedin’ Barn Dance.”

“But she was good?”

“Yeah. The men used to love ’er. Stick fivers down ’er boobs and up ’er suspenders, if you know wo’ I mean.”

“She packed ’em in?”

“Yeah.”

“And then?”

“Then there was this fellah, see, and he got to know ’er and see ’er after the shows, like, and ’e got starry-eyed, the silly sod. Took ’er away. Posh sort o’ fellah, if you know wo’ I mean. Dresses, money, ’otels — all that sort o’ thing.”

“Would you remember his name?”

“Yeah. The other fellah—’e showed me his photo, see?”

“His name?”

“Julius Caesar, I fink it was.”

Morse showed her the photograph of Mr. and Mrs. Julian Storrs.

“Yeah. That’s ’im an’ ’er. That’s Angie.”

“Do you know why I’m asking about her?”

She looked at him shrewdly, an inch or so of gray roots merging into a yellow mop of wiry hair.

“Yeah, I got a good idea.”

“My, er, colleague told you?”

“Nah! Worked it out for meself, dint I? She was tryin’ to forget wo’ she was, see? She dint want to say she were a cheap tart who’d open ’er legs for a fiver, if you know wo’ I mean. Bi’ o’ class, tho’, Angie. Yeah. Real bi’ o’ class.”

“Will you be prepared to come up to Oxford — we’ll pay your expenses, of course — to sign a statement?”

“Oxford? Yeah. Why not? Bi’ o’ class, Oxford, innit?”

“I suppose so, yes.”

“Wo’ she done? Wo’ sort of inquiry you workin’ on?”

“Murder,” said Morse softly.

Mission accomplished, Morse walked across Praed Street and into the complex of Paddington Station, where he stood under the high Departures Board and noted the time of the next train: Slough, Maidenhead, Reading, Didcot, Oxford.

Due to leave in forty minutes.

He retraced his steps to the top of the Underground entrance, crushed a cigarette stub under his heel, and walked slowly down toward the ticket office, debating the wisdom of purchasing a second Bakerloo line ticket to Piccadilly Circus — from which station he might take the opportunity of concentrating his attention on the ground-floor attractions of London’s Soho.

Chapter thirty-four

With a lecture A.M. and a Faculty Meeting early P.M., Julian Storrs had not been able to give Lewis much time until late P.M.; but he was ready and waiting when, at 4 o’clock precisely, the front doorbell rang at his home, a large redbricked property on Polstead Road, part of the Victorian suburb that stretches north from St. Giles’ to Summertown.

Lewis accepted the offer of real coffee, and the two of them were soon seated in armchairs opposite each other in the high-ceilinged living room, its furniture exuding a polished mahogany elegance, where Lewis immediately explained the purpose of his call.

As a result of police investigations into the murder of Rachel James, Storrs’ name had moved into the frame; well, at least his photograph had moved into the frame.

Storrs himself said nothing as he glanced down at the twin passport photograph that Lewis handed to him.

“That is you, sir? You and Ms. James?”

Storrs took a deep breath, then exhaled. “Yes.”

“You were having an affair with her?”

“We... yes, I suppose we were.”

“Did anybody know about it?”

“I’d hoped not.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

Storrs talked. Though not for long...

He’d first met her just over a year earlier when he’d pulled a muscle in his right calf following an ill-judged decision to take up jogging. She was a physiotherapist, masseuse, manipulator — whatever they called such people now; and after the first two or three sessions they had met together outside the treatment room. He’d fallen in love with her a bit — a lot; must have done, when he considered the risks he’d taken. About once a month, six weeks, they’d managed to be together when he had some lecture to give or meeting to attend. Usually in London, where they’d book a double room, latish morning, in one of the hotels behind Paddington, drink a bottle or two of champagne, make love together most of the afternoon and — well, that was it.

“Expensive sort of day, sir? Rail fares, hotel, champagne, something to eat...”

“Not really expensive, no. Off-peak day returns, one of the cheaper hotels, middle-range champagne, and we’d go to a pub for a sandwich at lunchtime. Hundred and twenty, hundred and thirty pounds — that would cover it.”

“You didn’t give Ms. James anything for her services?”

“It wasn’t like that. I think — I hope — she enjoyed being with me. But, yes, I did sometimes give her something. She was pretty short of money — you know, her mortgage, HP commitments, the rent on the clinic.”

“How much, sir?”

“A hundred pounds. Little bit more sometimes, perhaps.”

“Does Mrs. Storrs know about this?”

“No— and she mustn’t!” For the first time Lewis was aware of the sharp, authoritative tone in the Senior Fellow’s voice.

“How did you explain spending so much?”

“We have separate accounts. I give my wife a private allowance each month.”

Lewis grinned diffidently. “You could always have said they were donations to Oxfam.”

Storrs looked down rather sadly at the olive-green carpet. “You’re right. That’s just the sort of depths I would have sunk to.”

“Why didn’t you get in touch with us? We made several appeals for anybody who knew Rachel to come forward. We guaranteed every confidence.”

“You must understand, surely? I was desperately anxious not to get drawn into things in any way.”

“Nothing else?”

“What do you mean?”

“Was someone trying to blackmail you, sir, about your affair with her?”

“Good God, no! What on earth makes you think that?”

Lewis drank the rest of his never-hot now-cold real coffee, before continuing quietly:

“I don’t believe you, sir.”

And slowly the truth, or some of it, was forthcoming.

Storrs had received a letter about a fortnight earlier from someone — no signature — someone giving a P.O. Box address; someone claiming to have “evidence” about him which would be shouted from the rooftops unless a payment was duly made.

“Of?” asked Lewis.

“Five thousand pounds.”

“And you paid it?”

“No. But I was stupid enough to send a thousand, in fifty-pound notes.”

“And did you get this ‘evidence’ back?”

Storrs again looked down at the carpet, and shook his head.

“You didn’t act very sensibly, did you, sir?”

“In literary circles, Sergeant, that is what is called ‘litotes.’ ”

“Did you keep the letter?”

“No,” lied Storrs.

“Did you keep a note of the P.O. Box number?”

“No,” lied Storrs.

“Was it care of one of the local newspapers?”

“Yes.”

“Oxford Mail?”

“Oxford Times.”

The living room door opened, and there entered a darkly elegant woman, incongruously wearing a pair of sunglasses, and dressed in a black trouser-suit — “Legs right up to the armpits,” as Lewis was later to report.

Mrs. Angela Storrs briefly introduced herself, and picked up the empty cups.

“Another coffee, Sergeant?”

Her voice was Home Counties, rather deep, rather pleasing.

“No thanks. That was lovely.”

Her eyes smiled behind the sunglasses — or Lewis thought they smiled. And as she closed the living room door softly behind her, he wondered where she’d been throughout the interview. Outside the door, perhaps, listening? Had she heard what her husband had said? Or had she known it all along?

Then the door quietly opened again.

“You won’t forget you’re out this evening, darling? You haven’t all that much time, you know.”

Lewis accepted the cue and hurried on his questioning apace:

“Do you mind telling me exactly what you were doing between seven A.M. and eight A.M. last Monday, sir?”

“Last Monday morning? Ah!” Lewis sensed that Julian Storrs had suddenly relaxed — as if the tricky part of the examination was now over — as if he could safely resume his wonted donnish idiom.

“How I wish every question my students asked were susceptible to such an unequivocal answer! You see, I was in bed with my wife and we were having sex together. And why do I recall this so readily, Sergeant? Because such an occurrence has not been quite so common these past few years; nor, if I’m honest with you, quite so enjoyable as once it was.”

“Between, er, between seven and eight?” Lewis’s voice was hesitant.

“Sounds a long time, you mean? Huh! You’re right. More like twenty past to twenty-five past seven. What I do remember is Angela — Mrs. Storrs — wanting the news on at half past She’s a great Today fan, and she likes to know what’s going on. We just caught the tail end of the sports news — then the main headlines on the half-hour.”

“Oh!”

“Do you believe me?”

“Would Mrs. Storrs remember... as clearly as you, sir?”

Storrs gave a slightly bitter-sounding laugh. “Why don’t you ask her? Shall I tell her to come through? I’ll leave you alone.”

“Yes, I think that would be helpful.”

Storrs got to his feet and walked toward the door.

“Just one more question, sir.” Lewis too rose to his feet. “Don’t you think you were awfully naive to send off that money? I think anyone could have told you you weren’t going to get anything back — except another blackmail note.”

Storrs walked back into the room.

“Are you a married man, Sergeant?”

“Yes.”

“How would you explain — well, say a photograph like the one you showed me?”

Lewis took out the passport photo again.

“Not too difficult, surely? You’re a well-known man, sir — quite a distinguished-looking man, perhaps? So let’s just say one of your admiring undergraduettes sees you at a railway station and says she’d like to have a picture taken with you. You know, one of those ‘Four color photos in approximately four minutes’ places. Then she could carry the pair of you around with her, like some girls carry pictures of pop stars around.”

Storrs nodded. “Clever idea! I wish I’d thought of it. Er... can I ask you a question?”

“Yes?”

“Why are you still only a sergeant?”

Lewis made no comment on the matter, but asked a final question:

“You’re standing for the Mastership at Lonsdale, I understand, sir?”

“Ye-es. So you can see, can’t you, why all this business, you know...?”

“Of course.”

Storrs’ face now suddenly cleared.

“There are just the two of us: Dr. Cornford — Denis Cornford — and myself. And may the better man win!”

He said it lightly, as if the pair of them were destined to cross swords in a mighty game of Scrabble — and called through to Angela, his wife.

Chapter thirty-five

In Oxford that same early evening the clouds were inkily black, the forecast set for heavy rain, with most of those walking along Broad Street or around Radcliffe Square wearing raincoats and carrying umbrellas. The majority of these people were students making their way to College Halls for their evening meals, much as their predecessors had done in earlier times, passing through the same streets, past the same familiar buildings, and later returning to the same sort of accommodation, and in most cases doing some work for the morrow, when they would be listening to the same sort of lectures. Unless, perhaps, they were students of Physics or some similar discipline where breakthroughs (“Breaksthrough, if we are to be accurate, dear boy”) were as regular as inaccuracies in the daily weather forecasts.

But that evening the forecast was surprisingly accurate; and at 6:45 P.M. the rains came.

Denis Cornford looked out through the window at Holywell Street where the rain bounced off the surface of the road like arrowheads. St. Peter’s (Dinner, 7:00 for 7:30 P.M.) was only ten minutes’ walk away but he was going to get soaked in such a downpour.

“What do you think, darling?”

“Give it five minutes. If it keeps on like this, I should get a cab. You’ve got plenty of time.”

“What’ll you be doing?” he asked.

“Well, I don’t think I’ll be venturing out too far, do you?” She said it in a gentle way, and there seemed no sarcasm in her voice. She came up behind him and placed her hands on his shoulders as he stood indecisively staring out through the sheeted panes.

“Denis?”

“Mm?”

“Do you really want to be Master all that much?”

He turned toward her and looked directly into her dazzlingly attractive dark eyes, with that small circular white light in the center of their irises — eyes which had always held men, and tempted them, and occasioned innumerable capitulations.

“Yes, Shelly. Yes, I do! Not quite so badly as Julian, perhaps. But badly enough.”

“What would you give — to be Master?”

“Most things, I suppose.”

“Give up your work?”

“A good deal of that would go anyway. It would be different work, that’s all.”

“Would you give me up?”

He took her in his arms. “Of course, I would!”

“You don’t really mean—?”

He kissed her mouth with a strangely passionate tenderness.

A few minutes later they stood arm-in-arm at the window looking out at the ceaselessly teeming rain.

“I’ll ring for a cab,” said Shelly Cornford.

On Mondays the dons’ attendance at Lonsdale Dinner was usually fairly small, but Roy Porter would be there, Angela Storrs knew that: Roy Porter was almost always there. She rang him in his room at 6:55 P.M.

“Roy?”

“Angela! Good to hear your beautiful voice.”

“Flattery will get you exactly halfway between nowhere and everywhere.”

“I’ll settle for that.”

“You’re dining tonight?”

“Yep.”

“Would you like to come along afterward and cheer up a lonely old lady.”

“Julian away?”

“Some Brains Trust at Reading University.”

“Shall I bring a bottle?”

“Plenty of bottles here.”

“Marvelous.”

“Nine-ish?”

“About then. Er... Angela? Is it something you want to talk about or is it just...?”

“Why not both?”

“You want to know how things seem to be going with the election?”

“I’m making no secret of that.”

“You do realize I don’t know anything definite at all?”

“I don’t expect you to. But I’d like to talk. You can understand how I feel, can’t you?”

“Of course.”

“And I’ve been speaking to Julian. There are one or two little preferments perhaps in the offing, if he’s elected.”

“Really?”

“But like you, Roy, I don’t know anything definite.”

“I understand. But it’ll be good to be together again.”

“Oh, yes. Have a drink or two together.”

“Or three?”

“Or four?” suggested Angela Storrs, her voice growing huskier still.

The phone rang at 7:05 P.M.

“Shelly?”

“Yes.”

“You’re on your own?”

“You know I am.”

“Denis gone?”

“Left fifteen minutes ago.”

“One or two things to tell you, if we could meet?”

“What sort of things?”

“Nothing definite. But there’s talk about a potential benefaction from the States, and one of the trustees met Denis — met you, I gather, too — and, well, I can tell you all about it when we meet.”

“All about it?”

“It’s a biggish thing, and I think we may be slightly more likely to pull it off, perhaps, if Denis...”

“And you’ll be doing your best?”

“I can’t promise anything.”

“I know that.”

“So?”

“So?”

“So you’re free and I’m free.”

“On a night like this? Far too dangerous. Me coming to the Master’s Lodge? No chance.”

“I agree. But, you see, one of my old colleagues is off to Greece — he’s left me his key — just up Banbury Road — lovely comfy double bed — crisp clean sheets — central heating — en suite facilities — mini bar. Tariff? No pounds, no shillings, no pence.”

“You remember predecimalization?”

“I’m not too old, though, am I? And I’d just love to be with you now, at this minute. More than anything in the world.”

“You ought to find a new variation on the theme, you know! It’s getting a bit of a cliché.”

“Cleesháy,” she’d said; but however she’d pronounced it, the barb had found its mark; and Sir Clixby’s voice was softer, more serious as he answered her.

“I need you, Shelly. Please come out with me. I’ll get a taxi round to you in ten minutes’ time, if that’s all right?”

There was silence on the other end of the line.

“Shelly?”

“Yes?”

“Will that be all right?”

“No,” she replied quietly. “No it won’t. I’m sorry.”

The line was dead.

Just before nine o’clock, Cornford rang home from St. Peter’s:

“Shelly? Denis. Look, darling, I’ve just noticed in my diary... You’ve not had a call tonight, have you?”

Shelly’s heart registered a sudden, sharp stab of panic.

“No, why?”

“It’s just that the New York publishers said they might be ringing. So, if they do, please make a note of the number and tell ’em I’ll ring them back. All right?”

“Fine. Yes.”

“You having a nice evening?”

“Mm. It’s lovely to sit and watch TV for a change. No engagements. No problems.”

“See you soon.”

“I hope so.”

Shelly put down the phone slowly. “I’ve just noticed in my diary,” he’d said. But he hadn’t, she knew that. She’d looked in his diary earlier that day, to make sure of the time of the St. Peter’s do. That had been the only entry on the page for 2–26–96.

Just before ten o’clock, Julian Storrs rang his wife from Reading; rang three times.

The number was engaged.

He rang five minutes later.

The number was still engaged.

He rang again, after a further five minutes.

She answered.

“Angie? I’ve been trying to get you these last twenty minutes.”

“I’ve only been talking to Mom, for Christ’s sake!”

“It’s just that I shan’t be home till after midnight, that’s all. So I’ll get a taxi. Don’t worry about meeting me.”

“Okay.”

After she had hung up, Angela Storrs took a Thames Trains timetable from her handbag and saw that Julian could easily be catching an earlier train: the 22:40 from Reading, arriving Oxford 23:20. Not that it mattered. Perhaps he was having a few drinks with his hosts? Or perhaps — the chilling thought struck her — he was checking up on her?

Hurriedly she rang her mother in South Kensington. And kept on talking. The call would be duly registered on the itemized BT lists and suddenly she felt considerably easier in her mind.

Morse had caught the 23:48 from Paddington that night, and at 01:00 sat unhearing as the Senior Conductor made his lugubrious pronouncement: “Oxford, Oxford. This train has now terminated. Please be sure to take all your personal possessions with you. Thank you.”

From a deeply delicious cataleptic state, Morse was finally prodded into consciousness by no less a personage than the Senior Conductor himself.

“All right, sir?”

“Thank you, yes.”

But in truth things were not all right, since Morse had been deeply disappointed by his evening’s sojourn in London. And as he walked down the station steps to the taxi rank, he reminded himself of what he’d always known — that life was full of disappointments: of which the most immediate was that not a single taxi was in sight.

Chapter thirty-six Tuesday, February 27

An unshaven Morse was still dressed in his mauve and Cambridge blue pajamas when Lewis arrived at 10 o’clock the following morning. Over the phone half an hour earlier he had learned that Morse was feeling “rough as a bear’s arse” — whatever that was supposed to mean.

For some time the two detectives exchanged information about their previous day’s activities; and fairly soon the obvious truth could be simply stated: Owens was a blackmailer. Specifically, as far as investigations had thus far progressed, with the Storrs’ household being the principal victims: he, for his current infidelity; she, for her past as a shop-soiled Soho tart. One thing seemed certain: that any disclosure was likely to be damaging, probably fatally damaging, to Julian Storrs’ chances of election to the Mastership of Lonsdale.

Morse considered for a while.

“It still gives us a wonderful motive for one of them murdering Owens — not much of a one for murdering Rachel.”

“Unless Mrs. Storrs was just plain jealous, sir?”

“Doubt it.”

“Or perhaps Rachel got to know something, and was doing a bit of blackmailing herself? She needed the money all right.”

“Yes.” Morse stroked his bristly jaw and sighed wearily. “There’s such a lot we’ve still got to check on, isn’t there? Perhaps you ought to get round to Rachel’s bank manager this morning.”

“Not this morning, sir — or this afternoon. I’m seeing his lordship, Sir Clixby Bream, at a quarter to twelve; then I’m going to find out who’s got access to the photocopier and whatever at the Harvey Clinic.”

“Waste o’ time,” mumbled Morse.

“I dunno, sir. I’ve got a feeling it may all tie in together somehow.”

“What with?”

“I’ll know more after I’ve been to Lonsdale. You see, I’ve already learned one or two things about the situation there. The present Master’s going to retire soon, as you know, and the new man’s going to be taking up the reins at the start of the summer term—”

“Trinity term.”

“—and they’ve narrowed it down to two candidates: Julian Storrs and a fellow called Cornford, Denis Cornford — he’s a Lonsdale man, too. And they say the odds are fairly even.”

“Who’s this ‘they’ you keep talking about?”

“One of the porters there. We used to play cricket together.”

“Ridiculous game!”

“What’s your program today, sir?”

Put Morse appeared not to hear his sergeant’s question.

“Cup o’ tea, Lewis?”

“Wouldn’t say no.”

Morse returned a couple of minutes later, with a cup of tea for Lewis and a pint glass of iced water for himself. He sat down and looked at his wristwatch: twenty-five past ten.

“What’s your program today?” repeated Lewis.

“I’ve got a meeting at eleven-thirty this morning. Nothing else much. Perhaps I’ll do a bit of thinking — it’s high time I caught up with you.”

As Lewis drank his tea, talking of this and that, he was aware that Morse seemed distanced — seemed almost in a world of his own. Was he listening at all?

“Am I boring you, sir?”

“What? No, no! Keep talking! That’s always the secret, you know, if you want to start anything — start thinking, say. All you’ve got to do is listen to somebody talking a load of nonsense, and somehow, suddenly, something emerges.”

“I wasn’t talking nonsense, sir. And if I was, you wouldn’t have known. You weren’t listening.”

Nor did it appear that Morse was listening even now — as he continued: “I wonder what time the postman comes to Polstead Road. Storrs usually caught the ten-fifteen train from Oxford, you say?... So he’d leave the house about a quarter to ten — bit earlier, perhaps? He’s got to get to the station, park his car, buy a ticket — buy two tickets... So if the postman called about then... perhaps Storrs met him as he left the house and took his letters with him, and read them as he waited for Rachel, then stuffed ’em in his jacket pocket.”

“So?”

“So if... What do most couples do after they’ve had sex together?”

“Depends, I suppose.” Lewis looked uneasily at his superior. “Go to sleep?”

Morse smiled waywardly. “It’s as tiring as that, is it?”

“Well, if they did it more than once.”

“Then she — she, Lewis — stays awake and goes quietly through his pockets and finds the blackmail letter. By the way, did you ask him when he received it?”

“No, sir.”

“Well, find out! She sees the letter and she knows she can blackmail him. Not about the affair they’re having, perhaps — they’re both in that together — but about something else she discovered from the letter... You know, I suspect that our Ms. James was getting a bit of a handful for our Mr. Storrs. What do you think?” (But Lewis was given no time at all to think.) “What were the last couple of dates they went to London together?”

“That’s something else I shall have to check, sir.”

“Well, check it! You see, we’ve been coming round to the idea that somebody was trying to murder Owens, haven’t we? And murdered Rachel by mistake. But perhaps we’re wrong, Lewis. Perhaps we’re wrong.”

Morse looked flushed and excited as he drained his iced water and got to his feet.

“I’d better have a quick shave.”

“What else have you got on your program—?”

“As I say, you see what happens when you start talking nonsense! You’re indispensable, old friend. Absolutely indispensable!”

Lewis, who had begun to feel considerable irritation at Morse’s earlier brusque demands, was now completely mollified.

“I’ll be off then, sir.”

“No you won’t! I shan’t be more than a few minutes. You can run me down to Summertown.”

(Almost completely mollified.)

“You still haven’t told me what—” began Lewis as he waited at the traffic lights by South Parade.

But a clean-shaven Morse had suddenly stiffened in his safety belt beside him.

“What did you say the name of that other fellow was, Lewis? The chap who’s standing against Storrs?”

“Cornford, Denis Cornford. Married to an American girl.”

“ ‘DC,’ Lewis! Do you remember in the manila file? Those four sets of initials?”

Lewis nodded, for in his mind’s eye he could see that piece of paper as clearly as Morse:

“There they are,” continued Morse, “side-by-side in the middle — Denis Cornford and Julian Storrs, flanked on either side by Angela Martin — I’ve little doubt! — and — might it be? — Sir Clixby Bream.”

“So you think Owens might have got something on all—?”

“Slow down!” interrupted Morse. “Just round the corner here.”

Lewis turned left at the traffic lights onto Marston Ferry Road and stopped immediately outside the Summertown Health Center.

“Wish me well,” said Morse as he alighted.