The Daughters of Cain

Chapter one

Just after noon on Wednesday, 31 August 1994, Chief Inspector Morse was seated at his desk in the Thames Valley Police HQ building at Kidlington, Oxon — when the phone rang.

‘Morse? You’re there, are you? I thought you’d probably be in the pub by now.’

Morse forbore the sarcasm, and assured Chief Superintendent Strange — he had recognized the voice — that indeed he was there.

‘Two things, Morse — but I’ll come along to your office.’

‘You wouldn’t prefer me—?’

‘I need the exercise, so the wife says.’

Not only the wife, mumbled Morse, as he cradled the phone, beginning now to clear the cluttered papers from the immediate desk-space in front of him.

Strange lumbered in five minutes later and sat down heavily on the chair opposite the desk.

‘You may have to get that name-plate changed.’

Strange and Morse had never really been friends, but never really been enemies either; and some good-natured bantering had been the order of the day following the recommendation of the Sheehy Report six months earlier that the rank of Chief Inspector should be abolished. Mutual bantering, since Chief Superintendents too were also likely to descend a rung on the ladder.

It was a disgruntled Strange who now sat wheezing methodically and shaking his head slowly. ‘It’s like losing your stripes in the Army, isn’t it? It’s… it’s…’

‘Belittling,’ suggested Morse.

Strange looked up keenly. ‘“Demeaning” — that’s what I was going to say. Much better word, eh? So don’t start trying to teach me the bloody English language.’

Fair point, thought Morse, as he reminded himself (as he’d often done before) that he and his fellow police-officers should never underestimate the formidable Chief Superintendent Strange.

‘How can I help, sir? Two things, you said.’

‘Ah! Well, yes. That’s one, isn’t it? What we’ve just been talking about. You see, I’m jacking the job in next year, as you’ve probably heard?’

Morse nodded cautiously.

‘Well, that’s it. It’s the, er, pension I’m thinking about.’

‘It won’t affect the pension.’

‘You think not?’

‘Sure it won’t. It’s just a question of getting all the paperwork right. That’s why they’re sending all these forms around—’

‘How do you know?’ Strange’s eyes shot up again, sharply focused, and it was Morse’s turn to hesitate.

‘I–I’m thinking of, er, jacking in the job myself, sir.’

‘Don’t be so bloody stupid, man! This place can’t afford to lose me and you.’

‘I shall only be going on for a couple of years, whatever happens.’

‘And… and you’ve had the forms, you say?’

Morse nodded.

‘And… and you’ve actually filled ’em in?’ Strange’s voice sounded incredulous.

‘Not yet, no. Forms always give me a terrible headache. I’ve got a phobia about form-filling.’

No words from Morse could have been more pleasing, and Strange’s moon-face positively beamed. ‘You know, that’s exactly what I said to the wife — about headaches and all that.’

‘Why doesn’t she help you?’

‘Says it gives her a headache, too.’

The two men chuckled amiably.

‘You’d like me to help?’ asked Morse tentatively.

‘Would you? Be a huge relief all round, I can tell you. We could go for a pint together next week, couldn’t we? And if I go and buy a bottle of aspirin—’

‘Make it two pints.’

‘I’ll make it two bottles, then.’

‘You’re on, sir.’

‘Good. That’s settled then.’

Strange was silent awhile, as if considering some matter of great moment. Then he spoke.

‘Now, let’s come to the second thing I want to talk about — far more important.’

Morse raised his eyebrows. ‘Far more important than pensions?’

‘Well, a bit more important perhaps.’

‘Murder?’

‘Murder.’

‘Not another one?’

‘Same one. The one near you. The McClure murder.’

‘Phillotson’s on it.’

‘Phillotson’s off it.’

‘But—’

‘His wife’s ill. Very ill. I want you to take over.’

‘But—’

‘You see, you haven’t got a wife who’s very ill, have you? You haven’t got a wife at all.’

‘No,’ replied Morse quietly. No good arguing with that.

‘Happy to take over?’

‘Is Lewis—?’

‘I’ve just had a quick word with him in the canteen. Once he’s finished his egg and chips…’

‘Oh!’

‘And’ — Strange lifted his large frame laboriously from the chair — ‘I’ve got this gut-feeling that Phillotson wouldn’t have got very far with it anyway.’

‘Gut-feeling?’

‘What’s wrong with that?’ snapped Strange. ‘Don’t you ever get a gut-feeling?’

‘Occasionally…’

‘After too much booze!’

‘Or mixing things, sir. You know what I mean: few pints of beer and a bottle of wine.’

‘Yes…’ Strange nodded. ‘We’ll probably both have a gut-feeling soon, eh? After a few pints of beer and a bottle of aspirin.’

He opened the door and looked at the name-plate again. ‘Perhaps we shan’t need to change them after all, Morse.’

Chapter two

It was to be only the second time that Morse had ever taken over a murder enquiry after the preliminary — invariably dramatic — trappings were done with: the discovery of the deed, the importunate attention of the media, the immediate scene-of-crime investigation, and the final removal of the body.

Lewis, perceptively, had commented that it was all a bit like getting into a football match twenty-five minutes late, and asking a fellow spectator what the score was. But Morse had been unimpressed by the simile, since his life would not have been significantly impoverished had the game of football never been invented.

Indeed, there was a sense in which Morse was happier to have avoided any in situ inspection of the corpse, since the liquid contents of his stomach almost inevitably curdled at the sight of violent death. And he knew that the death there had been violent — very violent indeed. Much blood had been spilt, albeit now caked and dirty-brown — blood that would still (he supposed) be much in evidence around the chalk-lined contours of the spot on the saturated beige carpet where a man had been found with an horrific knife-wound in his lower belly.

‘What’s wrong with Phillotson?’ Lewis had asked as they’d driven down to North Oxford.

‘Nothing wrong with him — except incompetence. It’s his wife. She’s had something go wrong with an operation, so they say. Some, you know, some internal trouble… woman’s trouble.’

‘The womb, you mean, sir?’

‘I don’t know, do I, Lewis? I didn’t ask. I’m not even quite sure exactly where the womb is. And, come to think of it, I don’t even like the word.’

‘I only asked.’

‘And I only answered! His wife’ll be fine, you’ll see. It’s him. He’s just chickening out.’

‘And the Super… didn’t think he could cope with the case?’

‘Well, he couldn’t, could he? He’s not exactly perched on the topmost twig of the Thames Valley intelligentsia, now is he?’

Lewis had glanced across at the man seated beside him in the passenger seat, noting the supercilious, almost arrogant, cast of the harsh blue eyes, and the complacent-looking smile about the lips. It was the sort of conceit which Lewis found the least endearing quality of his chief: worse even than his meanness with money and his almost total lack of gratitude. And suddenly he felt a shudder of distaste.

Yet only briefly. For Morse’s face had become serious again as he’d pointed to the right; pointed to Daventry Avenue; and amplified his answer as the car braked to a halt outside a block of flats:

‘You see, we take a bit of beating, don’t we, Lewis? Don’t you reckon? Me and you? Morse and Lewis? Not too many twigs up there above us, are there?’

But as Morse unfastened his safety-belt, there now appeared a hint of diffidence upon his face.

‘Nous vieillissons, n’est-ce pas?’

‘Pardon, sir?’

‘We’re all getting older — that’s what I said. And that’s the only thing that’s worrying me about this case, old friend.’

But then the smile again.

And Lewis saw the smile, and smiled himself; for at that moment he felt quite preternaturally content with life.

The constable designated to oversee the murder-premises volunteered to lead the way upstairs; but Morse shook his head, his response needlessly brusque:

‘Just give me the key, lad.’

Only two short flights, of eight steps each, led up to the first floor; yet Morse was a little out of breath as Lewis opened the main door of the maisonette.

‘Yes’ — Morse’s mind was still on Phillotson — ‘I reckon he’d’ve been about as competent in this case as a dyslexic proofreader.’

‘I like that, sir. That’s good. Original, is it?’

Morse grunted. In fact it had been Strange’s own appraisal of Phillotson’s potential; but, as ever, Morse was perfectly happy to take full credit for the bons mots of others. Anyway, Strange himself had probably read it somewhere, hadn’t he? Shrewd enough, was Strange: but hardly perched up there on the roof of Canary Wharf.

Smoothly the door swung open… The door swung open on another case.

And as Lewis stepped through the small entrance-hall, and thence into the murder room, he found himself wondering how things would turn out here.

Certainly it hadn’t sounded all that extraordinary a case when, two hours earlier, Detective Chief Inspector Phillotson had given them an hour-long briefing on the murder of Dr Felix McClure, former Student — late Student — of Wolsey College, Oxford…

Bizarre and bewildering — that’s what so many cases in the past had proved to be; and despite Phillotson’s briefing the present case would probably be no different.

In this respect, at least, Lewis was correct in his thinking. What he could not have known — what, in fact, he never really came to know — was what unprecedented anguish the present case would cause to Morse’s soul.

Chapter three

Daventry court (Phillotson had begun), comprising eight ‘luxurious apartments’ built in Daventry Avenue in 1989, had been difficult to sell. House prices had tumbled during the ever-deepening recession of the early nineties, and McClure had bought in the spring of 1993 when he’d convinced himself (rightly) that even in the continuing buyers’ market Flat 6 was a bit of a snip at £99,500.

McClure himself was almost sixty-seven years old at the time of his murder, knifed (as Morse would be able to see for himself) in quite horrendous fashion. The knife, according to pathological findings, was unusually broad-bladed, and at least five inches in length. Of such a weapon, however, no trace whatsoever had been found. Blood, though? Oh, yes. Blood almost everywhere. Blood on almost everything. Blood on the murderer too? Surely so.

Blood certainly on his shoes (trainers?), with footprints — especially of the right foot — clearly traceable from the murder scene to the staircase, to the main entrance; but thence virtually lost, soon completely lost, on the gravelled forecourt outside. Successive scufflings by other residents had obviously obliterated all further traces of blood. Or had the murderer left by a car parked close to the main door? Or left on a bicycle chained to the nearest drainpipe? (Or taken his shoes off, Lewis thought.) But intensive search of the forecourt area had revealed nothing. No clues from the sides of the block either. No clues from the rear. No clues at all outside. (Or perhaps just the one clue, Morse had thought: the clue that there were no clues at all?)

Inside? Well, again, Morse would be able to see for himself. Evidence of extraneous fingerprints? Virtually none. Hopeless. And certainly no indication that the assailant — murderer — had entered the premises through any first-floor window.

‘Very rare means of ingress, Morse, as you know. Pretty certainly came in the same way as he went out.’

‘Reminds me a bit of Omar Khayyam,’ Morse had muttered.

But Phillotson had merely looked puzzled, his own words clearly not reminding himself of anyone. Or anything.

No. Entry from the main door, surely, via the Entry-phone system, with McClure himself admitting whomsoever (not Phillotson’s word) — be it man or woman. Someone known to McClure then? Most likely.

Time? Well, certainly after 8.30 a.m. on the Sunday he was murdered, since McClure had purchased two newspapers at about 8 a.m. that morning from the newsagent’s in Summertown, where he was at least a well-known face if not a well-known name; and where he (like Morse, as it happened) usually catered for both the coarse and the cultured sides of his nature with the News of the World and The Sunday Times. No doubts here. No hypothesis required. Each of the two news-sheets was found, unbloodied, on the work-top in the ‘all-mod-con kitchen’.

After 8.30 a.m. then. But before when? Preliminary findings — well, not so preliminary — from the pathologist firmly suggested that McClure had been dead for about twenty hours or so before being found, at 7.45 a.m. the following morning, by his cleaning-lady.

Hypothesis here, then, for the time of the murder? Between 10 a.m., say, and noon the previous day. Roughly. But then everything was ‘roughly’ with these wretched pathologists, wasn’t it? (And Morse had smiled sadly, and thought of Max; and nodded slowly, for Phillotson was preaching to the converted.)

One other circumstance most probably corroborating a pre-noon time for the murder was the readily observable, and duly observed, fact that there was no apparent sign, such as the preparation of meat and vegetables, for any potential Sunday lunch in Flat 6. Not that that was conclusive in itself, since it had already become clear, from sensibly orientated enquiries, that it had not been unusual for McClure to walk down the Banbury Road and order a Sunday lunch — 8oz Steak, French Fries, Salad — only £3.99 — at the King’s Arms, washed down with a couple of pints of Best Bitter; no sweet; no coffee. But there had been no sign of steak or chips or lettuce or anything much else when the pathologist had split open the white-skinned belly of Dr Felix McClure. No sign of any lunchtime sustenance at all.

The body had been found in a hunched-up, foetal posture, with both hands clutching the lower abdomen and the eyes screwed tightly closed as if McClure had died in the throes of some excruciating pain. He was dressed in a short-sleeved shirt, vertically striped in maroon and blue, a black Jaeger cardigan, and a pair of dark-grey flannels — the lower part of the shirt and the upper regions of the trousers stiff and steeped in the blood that had oozed so abundantly.

McClure had been one of those ‘perpetual students in life’ (Phillotson’s words). After winning a Major Scholarship to Oxford in 1946, he had gained a First in Mods, a First in Greats — thereafter spending forty-plus years of his life as Ancient History Tutor in Wolsey College. In 1956 he had married one of his own pupils, an undergraduette from Somerville — the latter, after attaining exactly similar distinction, duly appointed to a Junior Fellowship in Merton, and in 1966 (life jumping forward in decades) running off with one of her own pupils, a bearded undergraduate from Trinity. No children, though; no legal problems. Just a whole lot of heartache, perhaps.

Few major publications to his name — mostly a series of articles written over the years for various classical journals. But at least he had lived long enough to see the publication of his magnum opus: The Great Plague at Athens: Its Effect on the Course and Conduct of the Peloponnesian War. A long title. A long work.

Witnesses?

Of the eight ‘luxurious apartments’ only four had been sold, with two of the others being let, and the other two still empty, the ‘For Sale’ notices standing outside the respective properties — one of them the apartment immediately below McClure’s, Number 5; the other Number 2. Questioning of the tenants had produced no information of any value: the newly-weds in Number 1 had spent most of the Sunday morning abed — sans breakfast, sans newspapers, sans everything except themselves; the blue-rinsed old lady in Number 3, extremely deaf, had insisted on making a very full statement to the effect that she had heard nothing on that fateful morn; the couple in Number 4 had been out all morning on a Charity ‘Save the Whales’ Walk in Wytham Woods; the temporary tenants of Number 7 were away in Tunisia; and the affectionate couple who had bought Number 8 had been uninterruptedly employed in redecorating their bathroom, with the radio on most of the morning as they caught up with The Archers omnibus. (For the first time in several minutes, Morse’s interest had been activated.)

‘Not all that much to go on,’ Phillotson had admitted; yet all the same, not without some degree of pride, laying a hand on two green box-files filled with reports and statements and notes and documents and a plan showing the full specification of McClure’s apartment, with arcs and rulings and arrows and dotted lines and measurements. Morse himself had never been able to follow such house-plans; and now glanced only cursorily through the stapled sheets supplied by Adkinsons, Surveyors, Valuers, and Estate Agents — as Phillotson came to the end of his briefing.

‘By the way,’ asked Morse, rising to his feet, ‘how’s the wife? I meant to ask earlier…’

‘Very poorly, I’m afraid,’ said Phillotson, miserably.

‘Cheerful sod, isn’t he, Lewis?’

The two men had been back in Morse’s office then, Lewis seeking to find a place on the desk for the bulging box-files.

‘Well, he must be pretty worried about his wife if—’

‘Pah! He just didn’t know where to go next — that was his trouble.’

‘And we do?’

‘Well, for a start, I wouldn’t mind knowing which of those newspapers McClure read first.’

‘If either.’

Morse nodded. ‘And I wouldn’t mind finding out if he made any phone-calls that morning.’

‘Can’t we get British Telecom to itemize things?’

‘Can we?’ asked Morse vaguely.

‘You’ll want to see the body?’

‘Why on earth should I want to do that?’

‘I just thought—’

‘I wouldn’t mind seeing that shirt, though. Maroon and blue vertical stripes, didn’t Phillotson say?’ Morse passed the index finger of his left hand round the inside of his slightly tight, slightly frayed shirt-collar. ‘I’m thinking of, er, expanding my wardrobe a bit.’

But the intended humour was lost on Lewis, to whom it seemed exceeding strange that Morse should at the same time apparently show more interest in the dead man’s shirt than in his colleague’s wife. ‘Apparently’ though… that was always the thing about Morse: no one could ever really plot a graph of the thoughts that ran through that extraordinary mind.

‘Did we learn anything — from Phillotson, sir?’

‘You may have done: I didn’t. I knew just as much about things when I went into his office as when I came out.’

‘Reminds you a bit of Omar Khayyam, doesn’t it?’ suggested Lewis, innocently.

Chapter four

THE sitting-cum-dining-room — the murder room — 12' X 17'2" as stated in Adkinsons’ (doubtless accurate) specifications, was very much the kind of room one might expect as the main living-area of a retired Oxford don: an oak table with four chairs around it; a brown leather settee; a matching armchair; TV; CD and cassette player; books almost everywhere on floor-to-ceiling shelves; busts of Homer, Thucydides, Milton, and Beethoven; not enough space really for the many pictures — including the head, in the Pittura Pompeiana series, of Theseus, Slayer of the Minotaur. Those were the main things. Morse recognized three of the busts readily and easily, though he had to guess at the bronze head of Thucydides. As for Lewis, he recognized all four immediately, since his eyesight was now keener than Morse’s, and the name of each of those immortals was inscribed in tiny capitals upon its plinth.

For a while Morse stood by the armchair, looking all round him, saying nothing. Through the open door of the kitchen — 6'10" X 9'6" — he could see the Oxford Almanack hanging from the wall facing him, and finally went through to admire ‘St Hilda’s College’ from a watercolour by Sir Hugh Casson, RA. Pity, perhaps, it was the previous year’s, for Morse now read its date, ‘MDCCCCLXXXXIII’; and for a few moments he found himself considering whether any other year in the twentieth century — in any century — could command any lengthier designation. Fourteen characters required for ‘1993’.

Still, the Romans never knew much about numbers.

‘Do you know how many walking-sticks plus umbrellas we’ve got in the hall-stand here?’ shouted Lewis from the tiny entrance area.

‘Fourteen!’ shouted Morse in return.

‘How the — how on earth—?’

‘For me, Lewis, coincidence in life is wholly unexceptional; the readily predictable norm in life. You know that by now, surely?’

Lewis said nothing. He knew well where his duties lay in circumstances such as these: to do the donkey-work; to look through everything, without much purpose, and often without much hope. But Morse was a stickler for sifting the evidence; always had been. The only trouble was that he never wanted to waste his own time in helping to sift it, for such work was excessively tedious; and frequently fruitless, to boot.

So Lewis did it all. And as Morse sat back in the settee and looked through McClure’s magnum opus, Lewis started to go through all the drawers and all the letters and all the piles of papers and the detritus of the litter-bins — just as earlier Phillotson and his team had done. Lewis didn’t mind, though. Occasionally in the past he’d found some item unusual enough (well, unusual enough to Morse) that had set the great mind scurrying off into some subtly sign-posted avenue, or cul-de-sac; that had set the keenest-nosed hound in the pack on to some previously unsuspected scent.

Two things only of interest here, Lewis finally informed Morse. And Phillotson himself had pointed out the potential importance of the first of these, anyway: a black plastic W. H. Smith Telephone Index, with eighteen alphabetical divisions, the collocation of the less common letters, such as ‘WX’ and ‘YZ’, counting as one. The brief introductory instructions (under ‘A’) suggested that the user might find it valuable to record therein, for speed of reference, the telephone numbers of such indispensable personages as Decorator, Dentist, Doctor, Electrician, Plumber, Police…

Lewis opened the index at random: at the letter ‘M’. Six names on the card there. Three of the telephone numbers were prefixed with the Inner London code, ‘071’; the other three were Oxford numbers, five digits each, all beginning with ‘5’.

Lewis sighed audibly. Eighteen times six? That was a hundred and eight… Still it might be worthwhile ringing round (had Phillotson thought the same?) provided there were no more than half a dozen or so per page. He pressed the index to a couple of other letters. ‘P’: eight names and numbers. ‘C’: just four. What about the twinned letters? He pressed ‘KL’: seven, with six of them ‘L’; and just the one ‘K’ — and that (interestingly enough?) entered as the single capital letter ‘K’. Who was K when he was at home?

Or she?

‘What does “K” stand for, sir?’

Morse, a crossword fanatic from his early teens, knew some of the answers immediately: ‘“King”; “Kelvin” — unit of temperature, Lewis; er, “thousand”; “kilometre”, of course; “Köchel”, the man who catalogued Mozart, as you know; er…’

‘Not much help.’

‘Initial of someone’s name?’

‘Why just the initial?’

‘Girl’s name? Perhaps he’s trying to disguise his simmering passion for a married woman — what about that? Or perhaps all the girls at the local knocking-shop are known by a letter of the alphabet?’

‘Didn’t know you had one up here, sir.’

‘Lewis, we have everything in North Oxford. It’s just a question of knowing where it is, that’s the secret.’

Lewis mused aloud. ‘Karen… or Kirsty…’

‘Kylie?’

‘You’ve heard of her, sir?’

‘Only just.’

‘Kathy…’

‘Well, there’s one pretty simple way of finding out, isn’t there? Can’t you just ring the number? Isn’t that what you’re supposed to be doing? That sort of thing?’

Lewis picked up the phone and dialled the five-digit number — and was answered immediately.

‘Yeah? Wha’ d’ya wan’?’ a woman’s voice bawled at him.

‘Hullo. Er — have I got the right number for “K”?’

‘Yeah. You ’ave. Bu’ she’s no’ ’ere, is she?’

‘No, obviously not. I’ll try again later.’

‘You a dur’y ol’ man, or sump’n?’

Lewis quickly replaced the receiver, the colour rising in his pale cheeks.

Morse, who had heard the brief exchange clearly, grinned at his discomfited sergeant. ‘You can’t win ’em all.’

‘Waste of time, if that’s anything to go by.’

‘You think so?’

‘Don’t you?’

‘Lewis! You were only on the phone for about ten seconds but you learned she was a “she”, probably a she with the name of “Kay”.’

‘I didn’t!’

‘A she of easy virtue who old Felix here spent a few happy hours with. Or, as you’d prefer it, with whom old Felix regularly spent a few felicitous hours.’

‘You can’t just say that—’

‘Furthermore she’s a local lass, judging by her curly Oxfordshire accent and her typical habit of omitting all her “t”s.’

‘But I didn’t even get the woman!’

Morse was silent for a few seconds; then he looked up, his face more serious. ‘Are you sure, Lewis? Are you quite sure you haven’t just been speaking to the cryptic “K” herself?’

Lewis shook his head, grinned ruefully, and said nothing. He knew — knew again now — why he’d never rise to any great heights in life himself. Morse had got it wrong, of course. Morse nearly always got things hopelessly, ridiculously wrong at the start of every case. But he always seemed to have thoughts that no one else was capable of thinking. Like now.

‘Anyway, what’s this other thing you’ve found?’

But before Lewis could answer, there was a quiet tap on the door and PC Roberts stuck a reverential, unhelmeted head into the room.

‘There’s a Mrs Wynne-Wilson here, sir, from one of the other flats. Says she wants a word, like.’

Morse looked up from his Thucydides. ‘Haven’t we already got a statement from her, Lewis?’

But it was Roberts who answered. ‘She says she made a statement, sir, but when she heard someone else was in charge — well, she said Inspector Phillotson didn’t really want to know, like.’

‘Really?’

‘And she’s, well, she’s a bit deaf, like.’

‘Like what?’ asked Morse.

‘Pardon?’

‘Forget it.’

‘Shall I show her in, sir?’

‘What? In here? You know what happened here, don’t you? She’d probably faint, man.’

‘Doubt it, sir. She says she was sort of in charge of nurses at some London hospital.’

‘Ah, a matron,’ said Morse.

‘They don’t call them “matrons” any longer,’ interposed Lewis.

‘Thank you very much, Lewis! Send her in.’

Chapter five

Julia Stevens had returned home that same afternoon.

The flight had been on time (early, in fact); Customs had been swift and uncomplicated; the Gatwick — Heathrow — Oxford coach had been standing there, just waiting for her, it seemed, welcoming her back to England. From the bus station at Gloucester Green she had taken a taxi (no queue) out to East Oxford, the driver duly helping her with two heavyweight cases right up to the front door of her house — a house which, as the taxi turned into the street, she’d immediately observed to be still standing there, unburned, unvandalized; and, as she could see as she stood inside her own living-room — at long last! — blessedly unburgled.

How glad she was to be back. Almost always, on the first two nights of any holiday away from home, she experienced a weepy nostalgia. But usually this proved to be only a re-adjustment. Usually, too, at least for the last two days of her statutory annual fortnight abroad, she felt a similar wrench on leaving her summer surroundings; on bidding farewell to her newly made holiday friends. One or two friends in particular.

One or two men, as often as not.

But such had not been the case this time on her package tour round the Swiss and Italian lakes. She couldn’t explain why: the coach-driver had been very competent; the guide good; the scenery spectacular; the fellow-tourists pleasantly friendly. But she’d not enjoyed it at all. My god! What was happening to her?

(But she knew exactly what was happening to her.)

Not that she’d said anything, of course. And Brenda Brooks had received a cheerful postcard from a multi-starred hotel on Lake Lucerne:

As Julia walked through her front door that afternoon, her house smelt clean and fragrant; smelt of pine and polish and Windolene. Bless her — bless Brenda Brooks!

Then, on the kitchen table, there was a note — the sort of note that she, Julia, had ever come to expect:

Julia smiled to herself. Brenda invariably appended her (bracketed) surname as though the household boasted a whole bevy of charladies. And always that deferential ‘Mrs S’. Brenda had worked for her for four years now, and at fifty-two was nearly seven years her senior. Again Julia smiled to herself. Then, as she reread the penultimate sentence, for a moment she found herself frowning slightly.

It was a pleasant sunny day, with September heralding a golden finale to what had been a hot and humid summer. Indeed, the temperature was well above the average for an autumn day. Yet Julia felt herself shivering slightly as she unlocked and unbolted the rear door. And if a few moments earlier she may have looked a little sad, a little strained — behold now a metamorphosis! A ginger cat parted the ground-cover greenery at the bottom of the small garden and peered up at his mistress; and suddenly Julia Stevens looked very happy once again.

And very beautiful.

Chapter six

Morse decided to interview Laura Wynne-Wilson, should that good lady allow it, in her own ground-floor apartment. And the good lady did so allow.

She was, she admitted, very doubtful about whether that previous policeman had attended to her evidence with sufficient seriousness. Indeed, she had formed the distinct impression that he had listened, albeit politely, in a wholly perfunctory way to what she had to say. Which was? Which was to do with Dr McClure — a nice gentleman; and a very good neighbour, who had acted as Secretary of the Residents’ Action Committee and written such a splendid letter to that cowboy outfit supposedly responsible for the upkeep of the exterior of the properties.

She spoke primly and quietly, a thin smile upon thin lips.

‘And what exactly have you got to tell us?’ bawled Morse.

‘Please don’t shout at me, Inspector! Deaf people do not require excessive volume — they require only clarity of speech and appropriate lip-movement.’

Lewis smiled sweetly to himself as the small, white-haired octogenarian continued:

‘What I have to tell you is this. Dr McClure had a fairly regular visitor here. A… a lady-friend.’

‘Not all that unusual, is it?’ suggested Morse, with what he hoped was adequate clarity and appropriate lip-movement.

‘Oh, no. After all, it might well have been some female relative.’

Morse nodded. Already he knew that McClure had no living relatives apart from a niece in New Zealand; but still he nodded.

‘And then again, Inspector, it might not. You see, he had no living relatives in the United Kingdom.’

‘Oh.’ Morse decided that, unlike Phillotson, he at least would treat the old girl with a modicum of respect.

‘No. It was his “fancy woman”, as we used to call it. By the way, I quite like that term myself, don’t you?’

‘Plenty of worse words, madam,’ interposed Lewis, though apparently with less than adequate clarity.

‘Pardon?’ Laura W-W turned herself in the approximate direction of the man taking notes, as if he were merely some supernumerary presence.

And now it was Morse’s turn to smile sweetly to himself.

‘As I was saying, this… this woman came to see him several times — certainly three or four times during the last month.’

‘What time of day was that?’

‘Always at about half-past seven.’

‘And you, er, you actually saw her?’

‘“Actually” is a ridiculous word, isn’t it? It’s a weasel word, Inspector. It means nothing whatsoever. It’s a space-filler. Whether I actually saw her, I don’t know. What I do know is that I saw her. All right?’

Touché.

Morse’s eyes wandered over to the wooden-frame casement, where the thin white lace curtains were pulled back in tight arcs at each side, with potted geraniums at either end of the window ledge, and three tasteful pieces of dark-blue and white porcelain positioned between them. But nothing there to clutter the clear view, from where Morse was sitting, over the whole front area of the apartments, especially of the two square, yellow-brick pillars which stood at either side of the entrance drive; and through which, perforce, everyone coming into Daventry Court must surely pass. Everyone except a burglar, perhaps. Or a murderer… And this nosey old woman would delight in observing the visitors who called upon her fellow residents, Morse felt confident of that.

‘This could be very helpful to our enquiries, you realize that, don’t you? If you saw her clearly…?’

‘My eyesight is not what it was, Inspector. But I had a good view of her, yes.’ She glanced keenly at Morse. ‘You see, I’m a nosey old woman with very little else to do — that’s what you’re thinking, anyway.’

‘Well, I — we all like to know what’s going on. It’s only human nature.’

‘Oh, no. I know several people who aren’t in the slightest bit interested in “what’s going on”, as you put it. But I’m glad you’re nosey, like me. That’s good.’

Lewis was enjoying the interview immensely.

‘Can you tell us something about this woman? Anything?’

‘Let’s say I found her interesting.’

‘Why was that?’

‘Well, for a start, I envied her. She was less than half his age, you see — good deal less, I shouldn’t doubt.’

‘And he,’ mused Morse, ‘was sixty-six…’

‘Sixty-seven, Inspector, if he’d lived to the end of the month.’

‘How—?’

‘I looked him up in Distinguished People of Today. He’s a Libra.’

Like me, thought Morse. And I wonder how old you are, you old biddy.

‘And I’m eighty-three in December,’ she continued, ‘just in case you’re wondering.’

‘I was, yes,’ said Morse, smiling at her, and himself now beginning to enjoy the interview.

‘The other thing that struck me was that she wasn’t at all nice-looking. Quite the opposite, in fact. Very shabbily dressed — darkish sort of clothes. Sloppy loose blouse, mini-skirt right up to…’

‘The top of her tibia,’ supplied Morse, enunciating the ‘t’ of the last word with exaggerated exactitude.

‘Absolutely! And she had a big old shoulder-bag, too.’

I wonder what was in that, thought Morse.

‘Anything else you can remember?’

‘Long — longish — dark hair. Earrings — great brassy-looking things about the size of hula-hoops. And she had a ring in her nose. I could see that. For all I know, she could have had two rings in her nose.’

God helps us all, thought Morse.

‘But I’m not sure about that. As I say, my eyesight isn’t what it used to be.’

I wonder what it used to be like, thought Lewis.

‘Did she come by car?’ asked Morse.

‘No. If she did, she left it somewhere else.’

‘Did she come in from…?’ Morse gestured vaguely to his left, towards the Banbury Road.

‘Yes. She came from the Banbury Road — not the Woodstock Road.’

‘Would you recognize her again?’

For the first time the old lady hesitated, rubbing the thin ringless fingers of her left hand with her right.

‘Oh dear. Do you think she may have murdered him? I only—’

‘No, no. I’m sure she didn’t.’ Morse spoke with the bogus confidence of a man who was beginning to wonder if she had.

‘I only wanted to help. And I’m not at all sure if I would recognize her. Perhaps if she dolled herself up in some decent outfit and…’

Took that bull-ring out of her nose, thought Morse.

‘… and took that ring out of her nose.’

Phew!

But some of the bounce had gone out of the old girl, Morse could see that. It was time to wind things up.

‘Do you think they went to bed when she came?’

‘I expect so, don’t you?’

‘Things must have changed a good deal since your day, Miss Wynne-Wilson.’

‘Don’t be silly, Inspector! I could teach some of these young flibbertigibbets a few things about going to bed with men. After all, I spent most of my life looking after men in bed, now didn’t I? And, by the way, it’s Mrs Wynne-Wilson. I don’t wear a wedding ring any longer…’

Phew!

Morse got to his feet. He had only one more question: ‘Were you looking out of the window on Sunday morning — you know, about the time perhaps when Dr McClure was murdered?’

‘No. On Sunday mornings I always hear the omnibus edition of The Archers on the wireless, that’s from ten to eleven. Lovely. I have a really good long soak — and hear everything again.’

Dangerous thing that — having a radio in the bathroom, thought Lewis.

‘It’s dangerous they tell me — having a wireless propped up on the bath-rail. But I do so enjoy doing silly things, now that I’m so old.’

Phew!

It had not been much of a contest, Lewis appreciated that; but from his scorecard he had little hesitation in declaring Mrs W-W the winner, way ahead of Morse on points.

Quite mistakenly, of course.

Chapter seven

‘What did you make of that, then?’ asked Lewis, when the two detectives had returned to McClure’s apartment.

Morse appeared disappointed. ‘I’d begun to think he was a civilized sort of fellow — you know…’ Morse gestured vaguely around the bookshelves.

‘But he wasn’t?’

‘We-ell.’

‘You mean… this woman he was seeing?’

Morse’s features reflected disapproval. ‘Rings in her nose, Lewis? Pretty tasteless, isn’t it? Like drinking lager with roast beef.’

‘For all you know she may be a lovely girl, sir. You shouldn’t really judge people just by appearances.’

‘Oh?’ Morse’s eyes shot up swiftly. ‘And why the hell not?’

‘Well…’ But Lewis wasn’t sure why. He did have a point, though; he knew he did. Morse was always making snap judgements. All right, one or two would occasionally turn out to be accurate; but most of them were woefully wide of the mark — as, to be fair, Morse himself readily acknowledged.

Lewis thought of events earlier in the day; thought of Phillotson’s withdrawal from the present case; thought of Morse’s almost contemptuous dismissal of the man’s excuses. Almost automatically, it seemed, Morse had assumed him to be parading a few phoney pretexts about his wife’s hospitalization in order to avoid the humiliation of failure in a murder case. Agreed, Phillotson wasn’t exactly Sherlock Holmes, Lewis knew that. Yet Morse could be needlessly cruel about some of his colleagues. And why did he have to be so sharp? As he had been just now?

Still, Lewis knew exactly what to do about his own temporary irritation. Count to ten! — that’s what Morse had once told him — before getting on to any high horse; and then, if necessary, count to twenty. Not that there was much sign that Morse ever heeded his own advice. He usually only counted to two or three. If that.

Deciding, therefore, the time to be as yet inopportune for any consideration of the old lady’s testimony, Lewis reverted to his earlier task. There was still a great deal of material to look through, and he was glad to get down to something whose purpose he could readily grasp. The papers there, all the papers in the drawers and those stacked along the shelves, had already been examined — clearly that was the case. Not radically disturbed, though; not taken away to be documented in some dubious filing-system until sooner or later, as with almost everything in life, being duly labelled ‘OBE’.

Overtaken By Events.

Glancing across at Morse, Lewis saw the chief abstracting another book from a set of volumes beautifully bound in golden leather; a slim volume this time; a volume of verse by the look of it. And even as he watched, he saw Morse turning the book through ninety degrees and apparently reading some marginalia beside one of the poems there. For the present, however, the Do Not Disturb sign was prominently displayed, and with his usual competence Lewis resumed his own considerable task.

Thus it was that for the next half-hour or so the two men sat reading their different texts; preparing (as it were) for their different examinations; each conscious of the other’s presence; yet each, for the moment, and for different reasons, unwilling to speak his own immediate thoughts.

Especially Morse.

Yet it was the latter who finally broke the silence.

‘What did you make of her, then? Our Mrs Wynne-Wilson?’

‘“Mrs”, sir?’ asked Lewis slowly.

Morse threw an interested, inquisitive look at his sergeant. ‘Go on!’

‘Well, I’d noticed from the start she wasn’t wearing a wedding ring. As you did, of course.’

‘Of course.’

‘But I couldn’t see any, you know, any mark of any ring like you’d normally have, wouldn’t you? A sort of, you know, pale ring of skin, sort of thing, where the ring had been — before she took it off.’

‘Not a particularly fluent sentence that, Lewis, if I may say so.’

‘But you noticed that too?’

‘Me? Your eyesight’s far better than mine.’

‘Makes you wonder, though.’

‘You reckon she was making it up — about her marriage?’

‘Wouldn’t surprise me, sir.’

‘And apart from that?’

‘She seemed a pretty good witness. Her mind’s pretty sharp. She got you weighed up all right.’

‘Ye-es… So you don’t think she was making anything else up?’

‘No. Do you?’

‘Lew-is! When will you learn. She’s a phoney. She’s a phoney from A to Z.’

Lewis’s look now was one of semi-exasperation. ‘There you go again! I think you’re far too quick—’

‘Let me tell you something. She just about takes the biscuit, that woman — give or take one or two congenitally compulsive liars we’ve had in the past.’

Lewis shook his head sadly as Morse continued:

‘Wedding ring? You’re right. Odds strongly against her having worn one recently. Not necessarily the same as not being married though, is it? Suggestive, though, yes. Suggestive that she might be telling a few other fibs as well.’

‘Such as?’

‘Well, it was obvious she wasn’t deaf at all. She heard everything I said. Easy. Kein Problem.’

‘She didn’t hear me.’

‘She didn’t want to hear you, Lewis.’

‘If you say so, sir.’

‘What about her eyesight? Kept telling us, didn’t she, that she couldn’t see half as well as she used to? But that didn’t stop her giving us a detailed description of the woman who came to visit McClure. She knew she’d got a ring in one of her nostrils — at twenty-odd yards, Lewis! And the only reason she couldn’t tell us if she’d got two rings in her nose was because she saw her in profile — like she sees everyone in profile coming in through that entrance.’

‘Why don’t you think she was making all that up too, sir — that description she gave?’

‘Good point.’ Morse looked down at the carpet briefly. ‘But I don’t think so; that bit rang true to me. In fact, I reckon it was the only thing of any value she did come up with.’

‘What about—?’

‘Lewis! She’s a phoney. She’s not even been a nurse — let alone a matron or whatever you call ’em.’

‘How can you say that?’

‘You heard her — we both heard her. Mini-skirt up to mid-tibia — remember me saying that? Mid-tibia? Your tibia’s below your knee, Lewis. You know that. But she doesn’t.’

‘Unless she’s deaf, and misheard—’

‘She’s not deaf, I told you that. She just doesn’t know her tibia from her fibula, that’s all. Never been near a nursing manual in her life.’

‘And you deliberately tricked her about that?’

‘And, Lewis — most important of all — she claims she’s an Archers addict, but she doesn’t even know when the omnibus edition comes on on a Sunday morning. Huh!’

‘I wouldn’t know—’

‘She’s a Walter Mitty sort of woman. She lives in a world of fantasy. She tells herself things so many times — tells other people things so many times — that she thinks they’re true. And for her they are true.’

‘But not for us.’

‘Not for us, no.’

‘Not even the time she was in the bath?’

‘If she was in the bath.’

‘Oh.’

‘Anyway, I don’t somehow think it’s going to be of much importance to us, what time the murderer made his entrance…’

Morse was whining on a little wearily now; and like Miss (or Mrs) W-W he seemed to be running out of steam.

Both men became silent again.

And soon Lewis was feeling pleased with himself, for he was beginning to realize that the ‘second thing’ he’d found for Morse was looking far more promising.

And Morse himself, with melancholy mien, sat ever motionless, his eyes staring intently at the page before him: that selfsame page in the book of Latin poetry.

Chapter eight

When he was a boy — well, when he was fifteen — Morse had fallen deeply in love with a girl, a year his junior, who like him had won a scholarship to one of the two local grammar schools: one for boys, one for girls. The long relationship between the pair of them had been so formative, so crucial, so wonderful overall, that when, three years later, he had been called up for National Service in the Army, he had written (for the first twelve weeks) a daily letter to his girl; only to learn on his first weekend furlough, to learn quite accidentally, that one of his friends (friends!) had been openly boasting about the sensually responsive lips of his beloved.

Morse told himself that he had finally grown up that weekend: and that was good. But he’d realized too, at the same time, that his capacity for jealousy was pretty nearly boundless.

It was only many years later that he’d seen those deeply wise words, embroidered in multi-coloured silks, in a B&B establishment in Maidstone:

— If you love her, set her free

— If she loves you, she will gladly return to you

— If she doesn’t she never really loved you anyway

Such thoughts monopolized Morse’s mind now as he looked again at Poem LVIII — a poem which his Classics master at school had exhorted the class to ignore, as being totally devoid of artistic merit. Such condemnation was almost invariably in direct proportion to the sexual content of the poem in question; and immediately after the lesson was over, Morse and his classmates had sought to find the meaning of that extraordinary word which Catullus had stuck at the beginning of the last line.

Glubit.

In the smaller Latin dictionary, glubo, — ere was given only as ‘libidinously to excite emotions’. But in the larger dictionary there was a more cryptic, potentially more interesting definition… And here, in the margin of the book he was holding, McClure had translated the same poem.

Morse gave a mental tick to ‘Carfax’ for quadriviis; but thought ‘Palais’ a bit adolescent perhaps. Had his own translation been as good? Better? He couldn’t remember. He doubted it. And it didn’t matter anyway.

Or did it?

In the actual text of the poem, McClure had underlined in red Biro the words Lesbia nostra, Lesbia illa, Illa Lesbia: my Lesbia, that Lesbia of mine, that selfsame Lesbia.

Jealousy.

That most corrosive of all the emotions, gnawing away at the heart with a greater pain than failure or hatred — or even despair. But it seemed that McClure, like Catullus, had known his full share of it, with an ever-flirting, ever-hurting woman with whom he’d fallen in love; a woman who appeared willing to prostitute, at the appropriate price, whatever she possessed.

And suddenly, unexpectedly, Morse found himself thinking he’d rather like to meet the mysterious ‘K’. Then, just as suddenly, he knew he wouldn’t; unless, of course, that ambivalent lady held the key to the murder of Felix McClure — a circumstance which (at the time) he suspected was extremely improbable.

Chapter nine

Morse snapped Catullus to.

‘You didn’t hear what I just said, did you, sir?’

‘Pardon? Sorry. Just pondering — just pondering.’

‘Is it leading us anywhere, this, er, pondering?’

‘We’re learning quite a bit about this girl of his, aren’t we? Building up quite an interesting—’

‘The answer’s “no” then, is it?’

Morse smiled weakly. ‘Probably.’

‘Not like you, that, sir — giving up so quickly.’

‘No. You’re right. We shall have to check up on her.’

‘Find out where she lives.’

‘What? Not much of a problem there,’ said Morse.

‘Really?’

‘She came on foot, we know that. From the Banbury Road side.’

‘I thought you said Mrs Thingummy was making everything up?’

But Morse ignored the interjection. ‘Where do you think she lives?’

‘Just round the corner, perhaps?’

‘Doubt it. Doubt he’d meet any local girl locally, if you see what I mean.’

‘Well, if she did have a car, she couldn’t park it in the Banbury Road, that’s for certain.’

‘So she hasn’t got a car?’

‘Well, if she has, she doesn’t use it.’

‘She probably came by bus then.’

‘If you say so, sir.’

‘Number twenty-something: down the Cowley Road, through the High to Carfax, along Cornmarket and St Giles’, then up the Banbury Road.’

‘Has she got a season-ticket, sir?’

‘Such flippancy ill becomes you, Lewis.’

‘I’m not being flippant. I’m just confused. You’ll be telling me next what colour her eyes are.’

‘Give me a chance.’

‘Which street she lives in…’

‘Oh, I think I know that.’

Lewis grinned and shook his head. ‘Come on, sir, tell me!’

‘Pater Street, Lewis — that’s where she lives. Named after Walter Pater, you know, the fellow who described the Mona Lisa as a woman who’d learned the secrets of the grave.’

‘Pater Street? That’s out in Cowley, isn’t it?’

Morse nodded. ‘McClure mentions Cowley in something he wrote here.’ Morse tapped Catullus. ‘And then there’s this.’

He handed across the postcard he’d found marking the relevant page of notes at the back of the volume — notes including a chicken-hearted comment on Glubit: ‘sensus obscenus’.

Lewis took the card; and after glancing at the coloured photograph, ‘Bluebells in Wytham Woods’, turned to the back where, to the left of McClure’s address, he read the brief message, written boldly in black Biro:

The unsmudged postmark gave the date as 10 August 1994.

‘Ye-es. I see what you mean, sir. They’d arranged to meet at her place, perhaps, P-something Street, on the Saturday; then on the Wednesday something cropped up…’

‘She may have had the decorators in.’

‘… so it had to be “DC”, Daventry Court, or “wherever”.’

‘Probably some hotel room.’

‘Cost him, though. Double room’d be — what? — £70, £80, £90?’

‘Or a B&B.’

‘Even so. Still about £40, £50.’

‘Then he’s got to pay her for her services, don’t forget that.’

‘How much do you think, sir?’

‘How the hell should I know?’

‘Maybe she was worth every penny of it,’ Lewis suggested quietly.

‘Do you know, I very much doubt that,’ asserted Morse with surprising vehemence, now walking over to the phone, consulting the black index, and dialling a number.

‘Could be Princess Street, sir? That’s just off the Cowley Road.’

Morse put his palm over the receiver and shook his head. ‘No, Lewis. It’s Pater Street. Hullo?’

‘Yeah? Wha’ d’ya wan’?’

‘Have I got the right number for “K”, please?’

‘You ’ave. Bu’ she ain’t ’ere, is she?’

‘That’s what I hoped you’d be able to tell me.’

‘You another dur’y ol’ man or somethin’?’

‘If I am, I’m a dirty old police inspector,’ replied Morse, in what he trusted was a cultured, authoritative tone.

‘Oh, sorry.’

‘You say she’s not there?’

‘She’s bin away for a week in Spain. Sent me a topless photo of ’erself from Torremolinos, didn’t she? Only this mornin’.’

‘A week, you say?’

‘Yeah. Went las’ Sa’dy — back this Sa’dy.’

‘Does she have a… a client in North Oxford?’

‘An’ if she does?’

‘You know his name?’

‘Nah.’

‘What about her name?’

‘She in some sort of trouble?’ Suddenly the voice sounded anxious, softer now — with a final ‘t’ voiced upon that ‘sort’.

‘I could get all this information from Kidlington Police HQ — you know that, surely? I just thought it would save a bit of time and trouble if you answered me over the phone. Then when we’ve finished I can thank you for your kind co-operation with the police in their enquiries.’

Hesitation now at the other end of the line.

Then an answer: ‘Kay Blaxendale. That’s “Kay”, K-A-Y. She jus’ signs herself “K” — the letter “K”.’

‘Is that her real name? It sounds a bit posh?’

‘It’s her professional name. Her real name’s Ellie Smith.’

‘What about your name?’

‘Do you have to know?’

‘Yes.’

‘Friday Banks — that’s me.’

‘Have you got another name?’

‘No.’

‘You’ve got another accent though, haven’t you?’

‘Pardon?’

‘When you want to, you can speak very nicely. You’ve got a pleasant voice. I just wonder why you try to sound so cheap and common, that’s all.’

‘Heh! Come off it. I may be common, mista, but I ain’t cheap — I can tell yer tha’.’

‘All right.’

‘Tha’ all?’

‘Er, do you like bluebells, Miss Banks?’

‘Bluebells, you say? Bloody bluebells?’ She snorted her derision. ‘She does, though — Kay does. But me, I’m a red-rose girl, Inspector — if you’re thinkin’ of sendin’ me a bunch of flowers.’

‘You never know,’ said Morse, as he winked across at Lewis.

‘Tha’ all?’ she repeated.

‘Just your address, please.’ ‘Do you have to know?’ (An aspirated ‘have’.) ‘Yes.’

‘It’s 35 Princess Street.’

And now it was Lewis’s turn, as he winked across at Morse.

Chapter ten

Morse’s face, after he had cradled the phone, betrayed a suggestion of satisfaction; but after a short while a stronger suggestion of dissatisfaction.

‘Ever heard of a girl called Friday, Lewis?’

‘I’ve heard of that story — The Man Who Was Thursday.’

‘It’s a diminutive of Frideswide.’

‘Right. Yes. We learnt about her at school — St Frideswide. Patron saint of Oxford. She cured somebody who was blind, I think.’

‘Somebody, Lewis, she’d already herself struck blind in the first place.’

‘Not a very nice girl, then.’

‘Just like our girl.’

‘Anyway, you can cross her off the list of suspects.’

‘How do you make that out, Lewis?’

‘Unless you still think that girl on the phone’s a phoney too.’

‘No. I don’t think that. Not now.’

‘Well, she said McClure’s girlfriend was in Spain when he was murdered, didn’t she?’

‘It’s impolite to eavesdrop on telephone conversations.’

Lewis nodded. ‘Interesting, too. I felt sure you were going to ask her to send you the photo — you know, the topless photo from Torremolinos.’

‘Do you know,’ said Morse quietly, ‘I think, looking back on it, I should have done exactly that. I must be getting senile.’

‘You can still cross her off your list,’ maintained an unsympathetic Lewis.

‘Perhaps she was never on it in the first place. You see, I don’t think it was a woman who murdered McClure.’

‘We shall still have to see her, though.’

‘Oh yes. But the big thing we’ve got to do is learn more about McClure. The more we learn about the murdered man, the more we learn about the murderer.’

Music to Lewis’s ears. ‘But no firm ideas yet, sir?’

‘What?’ Morse walked over to the front window, but his eyes seemed not so much to be looking out as looking in. ‘I once went to hear a panel of writers, Lewis, and I remember they had to answer an interesting question about titles — you know, how important a title is for a book.’

‘The Wind in the Willows — that’s my favourite.’

‘Anyway, the other panellists said it was the most difficult thing of the lot, finding a good title. Then this last woman, she said it was no problem for her at all. Said she’d got half a dozen absolutely dazzling titles — but she just hadn’t got any books to go with them. And it’s the same with me, Lewis, that’s all. I’ve got plenty of ideas already, but nothing to pin ’em to.’

‘Not yet.’

‘Not yet,’ echoed Morse.

‘Do you think Phillotson had any ideas — ideas he didn’t tell us about?’

‘For Christ’s sake, forget Phillotson! He wouldn’t know what to do if some fellow walked into his nearest nick with a knife dripping with blood and said he’d just murdered his missus.’

At least that’s something you’re never likely to do, thought Lewis. But the thought was not translated into words.

‘Now,’ continued Morse, ‘just tell me about this second great discovery of yours.’

‘Just give me ten more minutes — nearly ready.’

Morse ambled somewhat aimlessly around the rooms so splendidly cited by Messrs Adkinson: Sitting/Dining-Room; Fully Fitted Modern Kitchen; Cloaks/Shower Room; Guest Bedroom; Master Bedroom Suite; Luxury Bathroom. But nothing, it appeared, was able to hold his attention for long; and soon he returned to the murder room.

For Lewis, this brief period of time was profitable. His little dossier — well, three items held together by a paper-clip — was now, he thought, complete. Interesting. He was pleased with himself; trusted that Morse would be pleased with him, too.

Not that Morse had looked particularly pleased with anything these last few minutes; and Lewis watched him taking a few more books from the shelves, seemingly in random manner, opening each briefly at the title page, then shaking it quite vigorously from the spine as if expecting something to fall out. And even as Lewis watched, something did fall out from one of them — nothing less than the whole of its pages. But Lewis’s cautious amusement was immediately stifled by a vicious scowl from Morse; and nothing was said.

In fact, over only one of the title pages had Morse lingered for more than a few moments:

Correction.

Late Student of Wolsey College, Oxford…

At 5.45 p.m. PC Roberts knocked, and entered in response to Morse’s gruff behest.

‘Super just rung through, sir—’

‘“Rang” through,’ muttered Morse.

‘—and wanted me to tell you straightaway. It’s Mrs Phillotson, sir. She died earlier this afternoon. Seems she had another emergency op… and well, she didn’t pull through. He didn’t tell me any more. He just wanted you to know, he said.’

Roberts left, and Lewis looked on as Morse slowly sat down in the brown leather armchair, staring, it seemed, at the design on the carpet — the eyes, usually so fierce and piercing, now dull and defeated; a look of such self-loathing on his face as Lewis had never seen before.

It was five minutes later that Lewis made an offer which (as he knew) could hardly be refused.

‘Fancy a beer, sir? The King’s Arms down the road’s open — Open All Day, it says outside.’

But Morse shook his head, and sat there in continued silence.

So for a while Lewis pretended to complete an already completed task. Perhaps he should have felt puzzled? But no. He wasn’t puzzled at all.

Tomorrow was Thursday…

And the next day was Friday…

Strange how they’d both cropped up already that day: the Man Who Was Thursday and the Girl Who Was Friday. Yet at this stage of the case, as they sat together in Daventry Court, neither Morse nor Lewis had the vaguest notion of how crucial one of the two was soon to become.

Chapter eleven

When for a second time she had put down the phone, Eleanor Smith stared at her own carpet, in this case a threadbare, tastelessly floral affair that stopped, at each wall, about eighteen inches short of the chipped skirting-boards.

The calls hadn’t been unexpected. No. Ever since she’d read of McClure’s murder in the Oxford Mail she’d half expected, half feared that the police would be in touch. Twice, at least twice, she remembered sending him a postcard; and once a letter — a rambling, adolescent letter written just after they’d first met when she’d felt particularly lonely on a dark and cloudy day. And knowing Felix, even a bit, she thought he’d probably have kept anything she might have sent him.

Their first meeting for a drink together had been in the Chapters Bar of The Randolph. Good, that had been. No pretences then, on either side. But he’d gently refused to consider her a ‘courtesan’ if only for the reason (as he’d smilingly informed her) that anagrammatically, and appropriately, the word gave rise to ‘a sore—’.

Yes, quite good really, that first evening — that first night, in fact — together. Above all perhaps, from her point of view, it had marked a nascent interest in crossword puzzles, which Felix had later encouraged and patiently fostered…

They’d found her telephone number in his flat — of course they had. Not that it was any great secret. Not exactly an ex-directory, exclusive series of digits. A number, rather, that in the early days had been slipped into half the BT phone-boxes in East Oxford, on a card with an amateurishly drawn outline of a curvaceous brunette with bouncy boobs. Her! But it was there; there in that telephone-thing of his on the desk. She knew that, for she’d seen it there. Odd, really. She’d have expected someone with such a fine brain as Felix to have committed her five-figure number to a permanent place in his memory. Seemingly not, though.

Poor old Felix.

She’d never loved anyone in life really — except her mum. But amongst her clients, that rather endearing, kindly, caring sort of idiot, Felix, had perhaps come nearer than anyone.

He’d never mentioned any enemies. But he must have had at least one — that much was certain. Not that she could help. She knew nothing. If she had known something, she’d have volunteered the information before now.

Or would she?

The very last thing she wanted was to get involved with the police. With her job? Come off it! And in any case there was no point in it. The last time she’d been round to Felix’s apartment had been three weeks ago, when he’d cooked steak for the two of them, with a bottle of vintage claret to wash it down; and two bottles of expensive champagne, one before… things; and one after.

Poor old Felix.

A very nice person in the very nasty world in which she’d lived these last few years.

Easy enough fooling the fuzz! Just said she wasn’t there, hadn’t she? Just said she was in Spain. Just said there’d been this photo of a bare-breasted tourist in Torremolinos. Been a bit of a problem if that second copper’d asked for the photo, though. But he’d sounded all right — they’d both sounded all right. Just not very bright, that’s all. Would they check up on her? But what if they did? They’d soon understand why she’d told a few fibs. It was a joke. Bit of fun. No one wanted to get involved in a murder enquiry.

And whatever happened she couldn’t be a suspect. Felix had been murdered on Sunday 28th August, hadn’t he? And on that same Sunday she’d left Oxford at 6.30 a.m. (yes!) on a coach-trip to Bournemouth. Hadn’t got back, either, until 9.45 p.m. So there! And thirty-four witnesses could testify to that. Thirty-five, if you included the driver.

Nothing to worry about, then — nothing at all.

And yet she couldn’t help worrying: worrying about who, in his senses, would want to murder such an inoffensive fellow as Felix.

Or in her senses…

Was there some history, some incident, some background in Felix’s life about which she knew nothing? Sure to be, really. Not that he’d ever hinted—

Then it struck her.

There was that one thing. Just over a year ago, late May (or was it early June?) when that undergraduate living on Felix’s staircase had jumped out of his third-floor window — and broken his neck.

‘That undergraduate’? Who was she fooling?

Poor Matthew!

Not that she’d had anything to do with that, either. Well, she’d fervently prayed that she hadn’t. After all, she’d only met him once, when Felix had become so furiously jealous.

Jealousy!

At his age — forty-one years older than she was. A grandfather, almost. A father, certainly. Yet one of the very few clients who meant anything to her in that continuum of carnality which passed for some sort of purpose in her present life.

Yes, a father-figure.

A foster-father, perhaps.

Not a bloody step-father, though! Christ, no.

She looked at herself in the mirror of the old-fashioned dressing-table. The pallor of her skin looked ghastly; and her dark hair, streaked with a reddish-orange henna dye, looked lustreless — and cheap. But she felt cheap all over. And as she rested her oval face on her palms, the index finger of each hand stroking the silver rings at either side of her nostrils, her sludgy-green eyes stared back at her with an expression of dullness and dishonesty.

Dishonesty?

Yes. The truth was that she probably hadn’t given a sod for McClure, not really. Come to think of it, he’d been getting something of a nuisance: wanting to monopolize her; pressurizing her; phoning at inconvenient moments — once at a very inconvenient moment. He’d become far too obsessive, far too possessive. And what was worse, he’d lost much of his former gaiety and humour in the process. Some men were like that.

Well, hard luck!

Yes, if she were honest with herself, she was glad it was all over. And as she continued to stare at herself, she was suddenly aware that the streaks of crimson in her hair were only perhaps a physical manifestation of the incipient streaks of cruelty in her heart.

Chapter twelve

Morse had finished the previous evening with four pints of Best Bitter (under an ever-tightening waist-belt) at the King’s Arms in Banbury Road; and had followed this with half a bottle of his dearly beloved Glenfiddich (in his pyjamas) at his bachelor flat in the same North Oxford.

Unsurprisingly, therefore, he had not exactly felt as fit as a Stradivarius when Lewis had called the following morning; and it was Lewis who now drove out to Leicester.

It was Lewis who had to drive out to Leicester.

As the Jaguar reached the outskirts of that city, Morse was looking again through the items (four of them now, not three) which Lewis had seen fit to salvage from McClure’s apartment, and which — glory be! — Morse had instantly agreed could well be of importance to the case. Certainly they threw light upon that murky drink-drugs-sex scene which had established itself in some few parts of Oxford University. First was a cutting from the Oxford Mail dated Tuesday, 8 June 1993 (fourteen months earlier):

Morse turned to the second cutting, taken from the same issue:

Morse now turned again to the third cutting, taken from the Oxford Times of Friday, 18 June 1993: a shorter article, flanked by a photograph of ‘Dr F. F. Maclure’, a clean-shaven, rather mournful-looking man, pictured in full academic dress.

‘You’ll soon know those things off by heart,’ ventured a well-pleased Lewis as he stopped in a leafy lane on the eastern side of the London Road and briefly consulted his street-map, before setting off again.

‘It’s not that. It’s just that I’m a slow reader.’

‘What if you’d been a quick reader, sir? Where would you be now?’

‘Probably been a proofreader in a newspaper office. They could certainly do with one,’ mumbled Morse as he considered ‘Maclure’ and ‘McLure’ and ‘MacClure’ in the last cutting, with still no sign of the genuine article, ‘former Senior Lecturer…’

Interesting, that extra little piece of the jigsaw — that ‘former’…

Lewis braked gently outside Number 14 Evington Road South; then decided to continue into the drive, where the low-profile tyres of the Jaguar crunched into the deep gravel.

Chapter thirteen

Mrs Mary Rodway, a smartly dressed, slim-figured, pleasantly featured woman in her late forties, seemed quite willing to talk about herself — at least for a start.

Four years previously (she told the detectives) her husband, a highly-salaried constructional engineer, had run off with his Personal Assistant. The only contact between herself and her former marriage-partner was now effected via the agency of solicitors and banks. She lived on her own happily enough, she supposed — if anyone could ever live happily again after the death of an only child, especially a child who had died in such dubious circumstances.

She had seen McClure’s murder reported in The Independent; and Morse wasted no time in telling her of the specific reason for his visit: the cuttings discovered among the murdered man’s papers which appeared firmly to underline his keen interest in her son, Matthew, and perhaps in the reasons for his suicide.

‘He was quite wrong — the Coroner. You do realize that?’ Mary Rodway lit another cigarette and inhaled deeply.

‘You don’t believe it was suicide?’

‘I didn’t say that. What I do say is that the Coroner was wrong in making such a big thing about those hard drugs. That’s what they call them: “hard” as opposed to “soft”. It’s just the same with pornography, I believe, Inspector.’

Whilst Morse nodded his head innocently, Mrs Rodway shook her own in vague exasperation. ‘Life’s a far more complicated thing than that — Matthew’s was — and that Coroner, he made it all sound so… uncomplicated.’

‘Don’t be too, er, hard on him, Mrs Rodway. A Coroner’s main job isn’t dealing with right and wrong, and making moral judgements, and all that sort of thing. He’s just there to put the bits and pieces into some sort of pattern, and then to stick some verdict, as best he can, in one of the few slots he’s got available to him.’

If Mrs Rodway was at all impressed by this amalgam of metaphors, she gave no indication of it. Perhaps she hadn’t even been listening, for she continued in her former vein: ‘There were two things — two quite separate things — and they ought to have been considered separately. It’s difficult to put it into words, Inspector, but you see there are causes of things, and symptoms of things. And in Matthew’s case this drugs business was a symptom of something — it wasn’t a cause. I knew Matthew — I knew him better than anyone.’

‘So you think…?’

‘I’ve stopped thinking. What on earth’s the good of churning things over and over again in your mind for the umpteenth time?’

She stubbed out a half-smoked cigarette savagely, and immediately lit another.

‘You don’t mind me smoking?’

‘No, no.’

‘Can I offer you gentlemen one?’ She held out a packet of King-Size Dunhill International, first to Lewis who shook his head with a smile; then to Morse who shook his head with stoical resolve, since only that same morning, when he’d woken up just before six with parched mouth and pounding head, he had decided to forgo — for evermore — the spurious gratification not only of alcohol but of nicotine also.

Perhaps his decision could wait until tomorrow for its full implementation, though; and he relented. ‘Most kind, Mrs Rodway. Thank you… And it’s very valuable, what you’re saying. Please do go on.’

‘There’s nothing more to say.’

‘But if you felt — feel — so strongly, why didn’t you agree to give evidence at the Inquest?’

‘How could I? I couldn’t even bear to switch on the TV or the radio in case there might be something about it. You couldn’t bear that, could you, Inspector? If it had been your child?’

‘I–I take your point,’ admitted Morse awkwardly.

‘You know usually, when things like that happen, you get all the rumour and all the gossip as well. But we didn’t have any of that — at the Inquest.’

Three times now Mary Rodway inhaled on her cigarette with such ferocity that she seemed to Lewis hell-bent on inflicting some irreparable damage to her respiratory tract.

But Morse’s mind for a few seconds was far away, a glimmer of light at last appearing at the far end of a long, black tunnel.

‘So…’ he picked his slow words carefully, ‘you’d hoped that there might be some other evidence given at the Inquest, but you didn’t want to provide any of it yourself?’

‘Perhaps it wasn’t all that important anyway.’

‘Please tell me.’

‘No.’

Morse looked around the large lounge. The day was warm already, yet he suspected (rightly) that the two long radiators were turned up to full capacity. Much space on the walls was devoted to pictures: prints of still-life paintings by Braque, Matisse, Picasso; photographs and watercolours of great buildings and palaces, including Versailles and Blenheim — and Wolsey College, Oxford. But virtually no people were photographed or represented there. It was as if those ‘things’ so frequently resorted to by Mrs Rodway in her conversation were now figuring more prominently than people.

‘You knew Dr McClure, I think,’ said Morse.

‘I met him first when Matthew went up to Oxford. He was Matthew’s tutor.’

‘Didn’t he have rooms on the same staircase as Matthew?’ (Lewis had spent most of the previous evening doing his homework; and Morse’s homework.)

‘The first year, and the third year, yes. He was out of college his second year.’

‘Where was that, do you remember?’

Did Lewis observe a flicker of unease in Mary Rodway’s eyes? Did Morse?

‘I’m not sure.’

‘Oh, it doesn’t matter. Sergeant Lewis here can check up on that easily enough.’

But she had her answer now. ‘It was in East Oxford somewhere. Cowley Road, was it?’

Morse continued his questioning, poker-faced, as if he had failed to hear the tintinnabulation of a bell: ‘What did you think of Dr McClure?’

‘Very nice man. Kindly — genuine sort of person. And, as you say, he took a real interest in Matthew.’

Morse produced a letter, and passed it across to Mrs Rodway: a single handwritten sheet, on the pre-printed stationery of 14 Evington Road South, Leicester, dated 2 June, the day after the Coroner’s verdict on Matthew Rodway’s death.

Morse now accepted a second cigarette; and as Mrs Rodway read through the letter Lewis turned his head away from the exhalation of smoke. He was not overmuch concerned about the health risks supposedly linked with passive smoking, but it must have some effect; had already had its effect on the room here, where a thin patina of nicotine could be seen on the emulsioned walls. In fact the whole room could surely do with a good wash-down and redecoration? The corners of the high ceiling were deeply stained, and just above one of the radiators an oblong of pristinely bright magnolia served to emphasize a slight neglect of household renovation.

‘Did you write that?’ asked Morse.

‘Yes.’

‘Is there anything you want to tell us about it?’

‘Pretty clear, isn’t it?’

‘Did Dr McClure find anything in Matthew’s rooms?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Would he have told you if, let’s say, he’d found some drugs?’

‘I doubt it.’

‘Did he think Matthew was taking drugs?’

It was hard for her to say it. But she said it: ‘Yes.’

‘Did you ever find out where he got his drugs from?’

‘No.’

‘Did he ever say anything about his friends being on drugs?’

‘No.’

‘Do you think they may have been?’

‘I only met one or two of them — on the same staircase.’

‘Do you think drugs were available inside the college?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Would Dr McClure have known, if they were?’

‘I suppose he would, yes.’

‘Was Matthew fairly easily influenced by his friends, would you say?’

‘No, I wouldn’t.’

The answers elicited from Mrs Rodway hardly appeared to Lewis exciting; or even informative, for that matter. But Morse appeared content to keep his interlocution at low key.

‘Do you blame anyone? About the drugs?’

‘I’m in no position to blame anyone.’

‘Do you blame yourself?’

‘Don’t we all blame ourselves?’

‘What about Dr McClure — where did he put the blame?’

‘He did say once… I remember…’ But the voice trailed off as she lit another cigarette. ‘It was very odd really. He was talking about all the pressures on young people these days — you know, about youth culture and all that sort of thing, about whether standards were declining in… well, in everything, I suppose.’

‘What exactly did he say?’ prompted Morse gently.

But Mary Rodway was not listening. ‘You know, if only Matthew hadn’t… killed himself that night, whatever the reason was — reason or reasons — he’d probably have been perfectly happy with life a few days later, a week later… That’s what I can’t… I can’t get over.’

Tears were dropping now.

And Lewis looked away.

But not Morse.

‘What exactly did he say?’ he repeated.

Mrs Rodway wiped her tears and blew her nose noisily. ‘He said it was always difficult to apportion blame in life. But he said… he said if he had to blame anybody it would be the students.’

‘Is that all?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why was that an “odd” thing to say, though?’

‘Because, you see, he was always on the students’ side. Always. So it was a bit like hearing a trade-union boss suddenly siding with the Conservative Party.’

‘Thank you. You’ve been very kind, Mrs Rodway.’

Clearly (as Lewis could see) it was time to depart; and he closed his notebook with what might have passed for a slight flourish — had anyone been interested enough to observe the gesture.

But equally clearly (as Lewis could also see) Morse was momentarily transfixed, the blue eyes gleaming with that strangely distanced, almost ethereal gaze, which Lewis had observed so often before — a gaze which usually betokened a breakthrough in a major case.

As now?

The three of them rose to their feet.

‘Did you get to university yourself?’ asked Morse.

‘No. I left school at sixteen — went to a posh secretarial college — did well — got a good job — met a nice boss — became his PA — and he married me… As I told you, Inspector, he’s got a weakness for his PAs.’

Morse nodded. ‘Just one last question. When did your husband leave you?’

‘I told you, don’t you remember? Four years ago.’ Suddenly her voice sounded sharp.

‘When exactly, Mrs Rodway?’ Suddenly Morse’s voice, too, sounded sharp.

‘November the fifth — Bonfire Night. Not likely to forget the date, am I?’

‘Not quite four years ago then?’

Mrs Rodway made no further reply.

Chapter fourteen

‘Big thing you’ve got to remember is that it’s a great healer — time. Just give it a while, you’ll see.’

It was just before lunchtime that same day, in his office at Kidlington Police HQ, that Chief Superintendent Strange thus sought to convey his commiserations to Detective Chief Inspector Phillotson — going on to suggest that an extended period of furlough might well be a good thing after… well, after things were over. And if anyone could help in any way, Phillotson only had to mention it.

‘Trouble with things like this,’ continued Strange, as he rose from behind his desk and walked round to place a kindly hand on his colleague’s shoulder, ‘is that nothing really helps much at all, does it?’

‘I don’t know about that, sir. People are being very kind.’

‘I know, yes. I know.’ And Strange resumed his seat, contemplating his own kindliness with some gratification.

‘You know, sir, I’ve heard from people I never expected to show much sympathy.’

‘You have?’

‘People like Morse, for instance.’

‘Morse? When did you see Morse? He told me he was off to Leicester this morning.’

‘No. He put a note through the letter-box, that’s all. Must have been latish last night — it wasn’t there when I put the milk-tokens out…’

‘I’d say he probably wrote it in a pub, knowing Morse.’

‘Does it matter where he wrote it, sir?’

‘Course not. But I can’t imagine him being much comfort to anybody. He’s a pagan, you know that. Got no time for the Church and… Hope and Faith and all that stuff. Doesn’t even believe in God, let alone in any sort of life after death.’

‘Bit like some of our Bishops,’ said Phillotson sadly.

‘Like some Theology dons in Oxford, too.’

‘I was still glad to get his letter.’

‘What did he say?’

‘Said what you just said really, sir; said he’d got no faith in the Almighty; said I just ought to forget all this mumbo-jumbo about meeting… meeting up again in some future life; told me just to accept the truth of it all — that she’s gone for good and I’ll never see her again; told me I’d probably never get over it, and not to take any notice of people who gave you all this stuff about time healing—’ Phillotson suddenly checked himself, realizing what he’d just said.

‘Doesn’t sound much help to me.’

‘Do you know, though, in an odd sort of way it was. It was sort of honest. He just said that he was sad, when he heard, and he was thinking of me… At the end, he said it was always a jolly sight easier in life to face up to the truths than the half-truths. I’m not quite sure what he meant… but, well, somehow it helps, when I remember what he said.’

Phillotson could trust himself to say no more, and he rose to leave.

At the door he turned back. ‘Did you say Morse went to Leicester this morning?’

‘That’s where he said he was going.’

‘Funny! Odds are I’d have been in Leicester myself. I bet he’s gone to see the parents of that lad who killed himself in Wolsey a year or so ago.’

‘What’s that got to do with things?’

‘There were a few newspaper articles, that’s all, about the lad, among McClure’s papers. And a letter from the mother. She started it off “Dear Felix” — as if they’d known each other pretty well, if you see what I mean.’

Strange grunted.

‘Do you think I should mention it to Morse, sir?’

‘No. For Christ’s sake don’t do that. He’s got far too many ideas already, you can be sure of that.’

Chapter fifteen

The Turf Tavern, nestling beneath the old walls of New College, Oxford, may be approached from Holywell Street, immediately opposite Holywell Music Room, via a narrow, irregularly cobbled lane of mediaeval aspect.

A notice above the entrance advises all patrons (although Morse is not a particularly tall man) to mind their heads (DUCK OR GROUSE) and inside the rough-stoned, black-beamed rooms the true connoisseur of beers can seat himself at one of the small wooden tables and enjoy a finely cask-conditioned pint; and it is in order to drink and to talk and to think that patrons frequent this elusively situated tavern in a blessedly music — Muzak — free environment.

The landlord of this splendid hostelry, a stoutly compact, middle-aged ex-Royal Navy man, with a grizzled beard and a gold ring in his left ear, was anticipatorily pulling a pint of real ale on seeing Morse enter, followed by the dutiful Lewis, at 1.50 p.m.

The latter, in fact, was feeling quite pleased with himself. Only sixty-five minutes from Leicester. A bit over the speed-limit all the way along (agreed); but fast-driving was one of his very few vices, and the jazzy-looking maroon Jaguar had been in a wonderfully slick and silky mood as it sped down the M40 on the last stretch of the journey from Banbury to Oxford.

Morse had resisted several pubs which, en route, had paraded their credentials — at Lutterworth, Rugby, Banbury. But, as Lewis knew, the time of drinking, and of thinking, was surely soon at hand.

In North Oxford, Morse had asked to be dropped off briefly at his flat: ‘I ought to call in at the bank, Lewis.’ And this news had further cheered Lewis, since (on half the salary) it was invariably he who bought about three-quarters of the drinks consumed between the pair of them. Only temporarily cheered, however, since he had wholly misunderstood the mission: five minutes later it was he himself who was pushing a variety of old soldiers through their appropriate holes (White, Green, Brown) in the Summertown Bottle Bank.

Thence, straight down the Banbury Road to the Martyrs’ Memorial, where turning left (as instructed) he had driven to the far end of Broad Street. Here, as ever, there appeared no immediate prospect of leaving a car legitimately, and Morse had insisted that he parked the Jaguar on the cobblestone area outside the Old Clarendon building, just opposite Blackwell’s.

‘Don’t worry, Lewis. All the traffic wardens know my car. They’ll think I’m on duty.’

‘Which you are, sir.’

‘Which I am.’

‘How are we, Chief Inspector?’

‘Less of the “Chief”. Sheehy’s going to demote me. I’ll soon be just an insignificant Inspector.’

‘The usual?’

Morse nodded.

‘And you, Sergeant?’

‘An orange juice,’ said Morse.

‘Where’ve you parked?’ asked Biff. It was a question which had become of paramount importance in Central Oxford over the past decade. ‘I only ask because they’re having a blitz this week, so Pam says.’

‘Ah! How is that beautiful lady of yours?’

‘I’ll tell her you’re here. She should be down soon anyway.’ Morse stood at the bar searching through his pockets in unconvincing manner. ‘And a packet of — do you still sell cigarettes?’

Biff pointed to the machine. ‘You’ll need the right change.’

‘Ah! Have you got any change on you by any chance, Lewis…?’

When, at a table in the inner bar, Morse was finally settled behind his pint, his second pint, he took from his inside jacket-pocket the used envelope on which Lewis had seen him scribbling certain headings on their return to Oxford.

‘Did you know that Wolsey College is frequently referred to, especially by those who are in it, as “The House”?’

‘Can’t say I did, no.’

‘Do you know why?’

‘Let me concentrate on the orange juice, sir.’

‘It’s because of its Latin name, Aedes Archiepiscopi, the House of the Bishop.’

‘Well, that explains it, doesn’t it?’

‘Another peculiarity is that in all the other colleges they call the dons and the readers and the tutors and so on — they call them “Fellows”. You with me? But at Wolsey they call them “Students”.’

‘What do they call the students then?’

‘Doesn’t matter what they call ’em, does it? Look! Let’s just consider where we are. We’ve discovered a couple of possible links in this case so far: McClure’s fancy woman; and the Rodway woman, the mother of one of his former pupils. Now neither of ’em comes within a million miles of being a murderer, I know that; but they’re both adding to what we know of McClure himself, agreed? He’s a respected scholar; a conscientious don—’

‘ “Student”, sir.’

‘A conscientious Student; a man who’s got every sympathy with his stu—’

Lewis looked across.

‘ — with the young people he comes into contact with; a founder member of a society to help dedicated druggies; a man who met Matthew’s mum, and probably slipped in between the sheets with her—’

Lewis shook his head vigorously. ‘You can’t just say that sort of thing.’

‘And why not? How the hell do you think we’re going to get to the bottom of this case unless we make the odd hypothesis here and there? You don’t know? Well, let me tell you. We think of anything that’s unlikely. That’s how. Any bloody idiot can tell you what’s likely.’

‘If you say so, sir.’

‘I do say so,’ snapped Morse. ‘Except that what I say is not particularly unlikely, is it? They obviously got on pretty well, didn’t they? Take that salutation and valediction, for instance.’

Lewis lifted his eyebrows.

‘All Christian-name, palsy-walsy stuff, wasn’t it? Then there’s this business of her husband leaving her — you’ll recall I pressed her on that point? And for a very good reason. It was November, a month or so after her precious Matthew had first gone up to Oxford. And it occurred to me, Lewis — and I’m surprised it didn’t occur to you — that things may well have been the other way round, eh? She may have left him, and it was only then that he started playing around with his new PA.’

‘We could always look at a copy of the divorce proceedings.’

‘What makes you think they’re divorced?’

Lewis surrendered, sipped his orange juice, and was silent.

‘But it doesn’t matter, does it? It’s got bugger-all to do with McClure’s murder. You can make a heap of all the money you’ve got and wager it on that. No risk there!’

Lewis fingered the only money he had left in his pockets — three pound coins — and decided that he was hardly going to become a rich man, however long the odds that Morse was offering. But it was time to mention something. Had Morse, he wondered, seen that oblong patch of pristine magnolia…?

‘There was,’ Lewis began slowly, ‘a light-coloured patch on the wall in Mrs Rodway’s lounge, sir—’

‘Ah! Glad you noticed that. Fiver to a cracked piss-pot that was a picture of him, Lewis — of McClure! That’s why she took it down. She didn’t want us to see it, but something like that’s always going to leave its mark, agreed?’

‘Unless she put something else up there to cover it.’

Morse scorned the objection. ‘She wouldn’t have taken a photo of her son down, would she? Where’s the point of that? Very unlikely.’

‘You just said that’s exactly what we’re looking for, sir — something “unlikely”.’

Morse was spared any possible answer to this astute question by the arrival of the landlady, a slimly attractive brunette, with small, neat features, and an extra sparkle in her eyes as she greeted Morse with a kiss on his cheek.

‘Not seen you for a little while, Inspector.’

‘How’s things, beautiful?’

‘Another beer?’

‘Well, if you insist.’

‘I’m not really insisting—’

‘Pint of the best bitter for me.’

‘You, Sergeant?’

‘He’s driving,’ said Morse.

Biff, the landlord, came over to join them, and the four sat together for the next ten minutes. Morse, after explaining that the word ‘Turf’ had appeared in the margin of one of McClure’s books, asked whether they, either landlord or landlady, would have known the murdered man if they had seen him in the pub (‘No’); whether they’d ever seen the young man from Wolsey who’d committed suicide (‘Don’t think so’); whether they’d ever seen a young woman with rings in her nose and red streaks in her hair (‘Hundreds of ’em’).

Yet the landlady had one piece of information.

‘There’s one of the chaps comes in here sometimes who was a scout on that staircase… when, you know… I heard him talking to somebody about it.’

‘That’s right.’ The landlord was remembering too. ‘Said he used to go to the Bulldog — or was it the Old Tom, Pam?’

‘Can’t remember.’

‘He was a scout, you say?’ asked Morse.

‘Yeah. Only started coming in here after he moved — moved to the Pitt Rivers, I think it was. Well, only just up the road, isn’t it?’

‘He still comes?’

Biff considered. ‘Haven’t seen him for a little while now you come to mention it. Have you, love?’

Pam shook her pretty head.

‘Know his name?’ asked Lewis.

‘Brooks — Ted Brooks.’

‘Just let me get this clear,’ said Lewis, as he and Morse left the Turf Tavern, this time via St Helen’s Passage, just off New College Lane. ‘You’re saying that Mrs Rodway misunderstood what McClure said to her — about the “students”?’

‘You’ve got it. What he meant was that he blamed the dons, the set-up there, the authorities. He wasn’t saying they were a load of crooks — just that they should have known what was going on there, and should have done something about it.’

‘If anything was going on, sir.’

‘Which’ll be one of our next jobs, Lewis — to find out exactly that.’

It was Lewis who spotted it first: the traffic-warden’s notice stuck beneath the near-side windscreen-wiper of the unmarked Jaguar.

By three o’clock that afternoon, Mary Rodway had assembled the new passe-partout for the picture-frame. Like most things in the room (she agreed) it had been getting very dingy. But it looked splendid now, as she carefully replaced the re-mounted photograph, standing back repeatedly and adjusting it, to the millimetre — that photograph of herself and her son which Felix had sent to her as she’d requested.

Nothing further of any great moment occurred that day, except for one thing — something which for Lewis was the most extraordinary, the most ‘unlikely’ event of the past six months.

‘Come in a minute and let me pay you for those cigarettes,’ Morse had said, as the Jaguar came to a stop outside the bachelor flat in North Oxford.

Chapter sixteen

What Morse had vaguely referred to as the ‘authorities’ at Wolsey were immediately co-operative; and at 10 a.m. the following day he and Lewis were soon learning many things about the place: specifically, in due course, about Staircase G in Drinkwater Quad, on which Dr McClure had spent nine years of his university life, from 1984 until his retirement from academe at the end of the Trinity Term, 1993.

From his rooms overlooking the expansive quad (‘Largest in Oxford, gentlemen — 264 by 261 feet’) the Deputy Bursar had explained, rather too slowly and too pedantically for Morse’s taste, the way things, er, worked in the, er, House, it clearly seeming to this former Air-Vice Marshal (‘Often mis-spelt, you know — and more often mis-hyphenated’) that these non-University people needed some elementary explanations.

Scouts?

Interested in scouts, were they?

Well, each scout (‘Interesting word — origin obscure’) looked after one staircase, and one staircase only — with that area guarded as jealously as any blackbird’s territory in a garden, and considered almost as a sort of mediaeval fiefdom (‘If you know what I mean?’). Several of the scouts had been with them, what, twenty, thirty years? Forty-nine years, one of them! What exactly did they do? Well, it would be sensible to go and hear things from the horse’s mouth, as it were. What?

Escorted therefore through Great Quad, and away to the left of it into what seemed to Morse the unhappily named ‘Drinkwater Quad’, the policemen thanked their cicerone, the Air-hyphen-Vice Marshal (‘One “l” ’) and made their way to Staircase G.

Where a surprise was in store for them.

Not really a scout at all — more a girl-guide.

Susan Ewers, too, was friendly and helpful — a married woman (no children yet) who was very happy to have the opportunity of supplementing the family income; very happy, too, with the work itself. The majority of scouts were women now, she explained: only three or four men still doing the job at Wolsey. In fact, she’d taken over from a man — a man who’d left to work at the Pitt Rivers Museum.

‘Mr Brooks, was that?’ asked Morse.

‘Yes. Do you know him?’

‘Heard of him, er… please go on.’

Her duties? Well, everything really. The immediate area outside; the entrance; the porchway; the stairs; the eight sets of rooms, all of them occupied during term-time, of course; and some of them during the vacs, like now, by delegates and visitors to various do’s and conferences. Her first job each morning was to empty all the rubbish-baskets into black bags; then to clean the three WCs, one on each floor (no en suite facilities as yet); same with the wash-basins. Then, only twice a week, though, to Hoover all the floors, and generally to dust around, polish any brasswork, that sort of thing; and in general to see that the living quarters of her charges were kept as neat and tidy as could be expected with young men and young women who would (she felt) probably prefer to live in — well, to live in a bit of a mess, really. No bed-making, though. Thank goodness!

Willingly she showed the detectives the rooms at G4, on the second floor of her staircase, where until fourteen months previously the name ‘Dr F. F. McClure’ had been printed in black Gothic capitals beside the Oxford-blue double doors.

But if Morse had expected to find anything of significance in these rooms, he was disappointed. All fixtures befitting the status of a respected scholar had been replaced by the furniture of standard undergraduate accommodation: a three-seater settee; two armchairs; two desks; two bookcases… It reminded Morse of his own unhappy, unsuccessful days at Oxford; but made no other impact.

It might have been helpful to move quietly around the lounge and the spacious bedroom there, and seek to detect any vibrations, any reverberations, left behind by a cultured and (it seemed) a fairly kindly soul.

But clearly Morse could see little point in such divination.

‘Is G8 free?’ he asked.

‘There is a gentleman there. But he’s not in at the minute. If you want just a quick look inside?’

‘It’s where Matthew Rodway, the man who…’

‘I know,’ said Susan Ewers quietly.

But G8 proved to be equally disappointing: a three-seater settee, two (faded fabric) armchairs… cloned and cleaned of every reminder of the young man who had thrown himself down on to the paved area below the window there — the window at which Morse and Lewis now stood for a little while. Silently.

‘You didn’t know Mr Rodway, either?’ asked Morse.

‘No. As I say, I didn’t come till September last year.’

‘Do people on the staircase still take drugs?’

Mrs Ewers was taken aback by the abruptness of Morse’s question.

‘Well, they still have parties, like, you know. Drink and… and so on.’

‘But you’ve never seen any evidence of drugs — any packets of drugs? Crack? Speed? Ecstasy? Anything? Anything at all?’

Had she?

‘No,’ she said. Almost truthfully.

‘You’ve never smelt anything suspicious?’

‘I wouldn’t know what they smell like, drugs,’ she said. Truthfully.

As they walked down the stairs, Lewis pointed to a door marked with a little floral plaque: ‘Susan’s Pantry’.

‘That where you keep all your things, madam?’

She nodded. ‘Every scout has a pantry.’

‘Can we take a look inside?’

She unlocked the door and led the way into a fairly small, high-ceilinged room, cluttered — yet so neatly cluttered — with buckets, mops, bin-liners, black plastic bags, transparent polythene bags, light bulbs, toilet rolls, towels, sheets, two Hoovers. And inside the white-painted cupboards rows of cleaners and detergents: Jif, Flash, Ajax, Windolene… And everything so clean — so meticulously, antiseptically clean.

Morse had little doubt that Susan Ewers was the sort of housewife to polish her bath-taps daily; the sort to feel aggrieved at finding a stray trace of toothpaste in the wash-basin. If cleanliness were next to saintliness, then this lady was probably on the verge of beatification.

So what?

Apart from mentally extending his lively sympathies to Mr Ewers, Morse was aware that his thought-processes were hardly operating vivamente that morning; and he stood in the slightly claustrophobic pantry, feeling somewhat feckless.

It was Lewis who, as so frequently, was the catalyst.

‘What’s your husband do, Mrs Ewers?’

‘He’s — well, at the minute he’s unemployed, actually. He did work at the old RAC offices in Summertown, but they made him redundant.’

‘When was that?’

‘Last year.’

‘When exactly?’ (If Morse could ask such questions, why not Lewis?)

‘Last, er, August.’

‘Good thing you getting the job then. Help tide things over a bit, like.’

Lewis smiled sympathetically.

And Morse smiled gratefully.

Bless you, Lewis — bless you!

Gestalt — that’s what the Germans call it. That flash of unified perception, that synoptic totality which is more than the sum of the parts into which it may be logically analysable; parts, in this case, like drugs and scouts and a suicide and a murder and a staircase and changing jobs and not having a job and retirement and money and times and dates… Yes, especially times and dates…

Most probably, in the circumstances, Matthew Rodway’s rooms would not have been re-occupied for the few remaining weeks at the end of Trinity Term the previous year; and if (as now) only some of the rooms were in use during the Long Vac, it might well be that Mrs Ewers had been the very first person to look closely around the suicide’s chambers. But no; that was wrong. McClure had already gone through things, hadn’t he? Mrs Rodway had asked him to. But would he have been half as thorough as this newly appointed woman?

He’d questioned her on the point already, he knew that. But he hadn’t asked the right questions, perhaps? Not quite.

‘Just going back a minute, Mrs Ewers… When you got Mr Rodway’s old rooms ready for the beginning of the Michaelmas term, had anyone else been in there — during the summer?’

‘I don’t think so, no.’

‘But you still didn’t find anything?’

‘No, like I just said—’

‘Oh, I believe you. If there’d been anything to find, you’d have found it.’

She looked relieved.

‘In his rooms, that is,’ added Morse slowly.

‘Pardon?’

‘All I’m saying is that you’ve got a very tidy mind, haven’t you? Let’s put it this way. I bet I know the first thing you did when you took over here. I bet you gave this room the best spring-clean — best autumn-clean — it’s ever had — last September — when you moved in — and the previous scout moved out.’

Susan Ewers looked puzzled. ‘Well, I scrubbed and cleaned the place from top to bottom, yes — filthy, it was. Two whole days it took me. But I never found anything — any drugs — honest to God, I didn’t!’

Morse, who had been seated on the only chair the room could offer, got to his feet, moved over to the door, and put his penultimate question:

‘Do you have a mortgage?’

‘Yes.’

‘Big one?’

She nodded miserably.

As they stood there, the three of them, outside Susan’s Pantry, Morse’s eyes glanced back at the door, now closed again, fitting flush enough with the jambs on either side, but with a two-centimetre gap of parallel regularity showing between the bottom of the turquoise-blue door and the linoed floor of the landing.

Morse asked his last question simply and quietly: ‘When did the envelopes first start coming, Susan?’

And Susan’s eyes jumped up to his, suddenly flashing the unmistakable sign of fear.

Chapter seventeen

On Friday, 2 September, two days after Julia Stevens’ return to Oxford, there were already three items of importance on her day’s agenda.

First, school.

Not as yet the dreaded restart (three whole days away, praise be!) but a visit to the Secretary’s Office to look through the GCSE and A-level results, both lists having been published during her fortnight’s absence abroad. Like every self-respecting teacher, she wanted to discover the relative success of the pupils she herself had taught.

In former days it had often been difficult enough for some pupils to sit examinations, let alone pass them. And even in the comparatively recent years of Julia’s girlhood several of her own classmates had been deemed not to possess the requisite acumen even to attempt the 11 Plus. It was a question of the sheep and the goats — just like the division between those who were lost and those who were saved in the New Testament — a work with which the young Julia had become increasingly familiar, through the crusading fervour of a local curate with whom (aged ten and a half) she had fallen passionately in love.

How things had changed.

Now, in 1994, it was an occasion for considerable surprise if anyone somehow managed to fail an examination. Indeed, to be recorded in the Unclassified ranks of the GCSE was, in Julia’s view, a feat of quite astonishing incompetence, which carried with it a sort of bravura badge of monumental under-achievement. And as far as Christian doctrine was concerned, it was becoming far easier to cope with sin, now that Hell was (semi-officially) abolished.

She looked through 5C’s English results. Very much as she’d expected. Then looked a little more closely at the results of the only pupil in the class whose name had begun with ‘C’. Costyn, K: Religious Education, ‘Unclassified’; English, ‘D’; Maths, ‘Unclassified’; Geography, ‘Unclassified’; Metalwork, ‘Unclassified’. Well, at least he’d got something — after twelve years of schooling… thirty-six terms. But it was difficult to imagine him getting much further than the Job Centre. Nowhere else for him to go, was there — except to jail, perhaps?

How she wished that ‘D’ had been a ‘C’, though.

At 10.30 a.m. she hurried fairly quickly away from the school premises and made her way on foot to the Churchill Hospital where her appointment at the clinic was for 11 a.m.; and where a few minutes ahead of schedule she was seated in the upstairs waiting-room, no longer thinking of Kevin Costyn and his former classmates — but of herself.

‘How are you feeling?’ asked Basil Shepstone, a large, balding, slightly stooping South African.

‘You want me to undress?’

‘I’d love you to undrress,’ he said with that characteristic rolling of the ‘r’. ‘No need today, though. Next time, I’ll insist.’

His friendly brown eyes were suddenly sad, and he reached across to place his right hand on her shoulder.

‘You want the good news first? Or the bad news?’ he asked quietly.

‘The good news.’

‘Well, your condition’s fairly stable. And that’s good — that’s very good news.’

Julia found herself swallowing hard. ‘And the bad news?’

‘Well, it’s not exactly bad news. Shall I read it?’

Julia could see the Oxfordshire Health Authority heading on the letter, but no more. She closed her eyes.

‘It says… blah, blah, blah… “In the event of any deterioration, however, we regret to have to inform Mrs Stevens that her condition is inoperable.” ’

‘They can’t operate if it gets worse, they mean?’

Shepstone put down the letter. ‘I prrefer your English to theirs.’

She sighed deeply; then opened her eyes and looked at him, knowing that she loved him for everything he’d tried to do for her. He had always been so gentle, so kindly, so professional; and now, watching him, she could understand why his eyes remained downcast as his Biro hatched the ‘O’ of ‘Oxfordshire’.

‘How long?’ she asked simply.

He shook his head. ‘Anyone who prredicts something like that — he’s a fool.’

‘A year?’

‘Could be.’

‘Six months?’

He looked defeated as he shrugged his broad shoulders.

‘Less?’

‘As I say—’

‘Would you give up work if you were me?’

‘Fairly soon, I think, yes.’

‘Would you tell anyone?’

He hesitated. ‘Only if it were someone you loved.’

She smiled, and got to her feet. ‘There are not many people I love. You, of course — and my cleaning-lady — with whom incidentally’ — she consulted her wristwatch — ‘in exactly one hour’s time, I have a slap-up lunch engagement at the Old Parsonage.’

‘You’re not inviting me?’

She shook her head. ‘We’ve got some very private things to discuss, I’m afraid.’

After Mrs Stevens had left, the consultant took a handkerchief from his pocket and quickly wiped his eyes. What the dickens was he supposed to say? Because it never really did much good to lie. Or so he believed. He blamed himself, for example, for lying so blatantly to the woman who’d died only two days previously — lying to Mrs Phillotson.

Not much difference in the case-histories.

No hope in either.

Chapter eighteen

Morse now realized that he would have few, if any, further cases of murder to solve during his career with Thames Valley CID. All right, orchestral conductors and High Court judges could pursue their professions into their twilight years, regardless — indeed sometimes completely oblivious — of their inevitably deteriorating talents. But more often than not policemen finished long before any incipient senility; and Morse himself was now within a couple of years of normal retirement.

For many persons it was difficult to tell where the dividing line came between latish middle-age and advisable pensionability. Perhaps it had something to do with the point at which nostalgia took over from hope; or perhaps with a sad realization that it was no longer possible to fall in love again; or, certainly in Morse’s case, the time when, as now, he had to sit down on the side of the bed in order to pull his trousers on.

Such and similar thoughts were circulating in Morse’s mind as on Saturday, 3 September, the morning after his visit with Lewis to Wolsey (and the statement made, immediately thereafter, by Mrs Ewers), he sat in the Summertown Health Centre.

A mild cold had, as usual with Morse, developed into a fit of intermittently barking bronchitis; but he comforted himself with the thought that very shortly, after a sermon on the stupidity of cigarette-smoking, he would emerge from the Centre with a slip of paper happily prescribing a dose of powerful antibiotics.

Clutching his prescription, Morse was about to leave when he remembered The Times, left in his erstwhile seat in the waiting-room. Returning, he found that his earlier companions — the anorexic girl and the spotty-faced, overweight youth — had now been joined by a slatternly looking, slackly dressed young woman, with rings in her nostrils; a woman to whom Morse took an immediate and intense dislike.

Predictably so.

From the chair next to the newcomer he picked up his newspaper, without a word; though not without a hurried glance into the woman’s dull-green eyes, the colour of the Oxford Canal along by Wolvercote. And if Morse had waited there only a few seconds longer, he would have heard someone call her name: ‘Eleanor Smith?’

But Morse had gone.

She’d already got the address of an abortion clinic; but one of her friends, an authority in the field, had informed her that it was now closed. So! So she’d have to find some other place. And the quack ought to be able to point her somewhere not too far away, surely? That’s exactly the sort of thing quacks were there for.

In a marked police car, standing on a Strictly Doctors Only lot in the Centre’s very restricted parking-area, Lewis sat thinking and waiting; waiting in fact, quite patiently, since the case appeared to be developing in a reasonably satisfactory way.

When, the previous afternoon, Susan Ewers had made (and signed) her statement, many things already adumbrated by Morse had dawned at last on Lewis’s understanding.

Suspicion, prima facie, could and should now be levelled against Mr Edward Brooks, the man who had been Mrs Ewers’ immediate predecessor as scout on Staircase G in Drinkwater Quad. Why? Morse’s unusually simple and unspectacular hypothesis had been stated as follows:

It should be assumed, in all probability, that Brooks had played a key role, albeit an intermediary one, in supplying a substantial quantity of drugs to the young people living on his staircase — including Matthew Rodway; that Rodway’s suicide had necessarily resulted in some thorough investigation by the college authorities into the goings-on on the staircase; that McClure, already living on the same staircase anyway, had become deeply involved — indeed had probably been the prime mover in seeing that Brooks was ‘removed’ from his post (coincidentally at the same time as McClure’s retirement); that, as Mrs Ewers had now testified, the former scout had continued his trafficking in drugs, and that this information had somehow reached McClure’s ears; that McClure had threatened Brooks with exposure, disgrace, criminal prosecution, and almost certain imprisonment; that finally, at a showdown in Daventry Court, Brooks had murdered McClure.

Such a hypothesis had the merit of fitting all the known facts; and if it could be corroborated by the new facts which would doubtless emerge from the meeting arranged for that afternoon at the Pitt Rivers Museum…

Yes.

But there was the ‘one potential fly in the ointment’, as Lewis had expressed himself half an hour earlier.

And Morse had winced at the phrase. ‘The cliché’s bad enough in itself, Lewis — but what’s a “potential fly” look like when it’s on the window-pane?’

‘Dunno, sir. But if Brooks was ambulanced off that Sunday with a heart attack—’

‘Wouldn’t you be likely to have a heart attack if you’d just killed somebody?’

‘We can check up straightaway at the hospital.’

‘All in good time,’ Morse had said. ‘You’ll have me in hospital if you don’t get me down to the Health Centre…’

Still thinking and still waiting, Lewis looked again at the brief supplementary report from the police pathologist, which had been left on Morse’s desk that morning.

‘At least she understands the full-stop,’ Morse had said.

Never having really mastered the full-stop himself, Lewis had refrained from any comment.

Yet they both realized the importance of finding the knife. Few murder prosecutions were likely to get off on the right foot without the finding of a weapon. But they hadn’t found a weapon. A fairly perfunctory search had earlier been made by Phillotson and his team; and Lewis himself had instigated a very detailed search of the area surrounding Daventry Court and the gardens of the adjacent properties. But still without success.

Anyway, Morse was never the man to hunt through a haystack for a needle. Much rather he’d always seek to intensify (as he saw it) the magnetic field of his mind and trust that the missing needle would suddenly appear under his nose. Not much intensification as yet, though; the only thing under Morse’s nose lately — and that under a towel — had been a bowl of steaming Friar’s Balsam.

But here came Morse at last (10.40 a.m.), cum prescription. And Lewis could predict the imminent conversation:

‘Chemist just around the corner, Lewis. If you’d just nip along and… I’d be grateful. Only problem’ — searching pockets — ‘I seem…’

Lewis was half right anyway.

‘There’s a chemist’s just round the corner. If you’d be so good? I don’t know how much these wretched Tories charge these days but’ — searching pockets — ‘here’s a tenner.’

Lewis left him there on the reserved parking lot, just starting The Times crossword; and walked happily up to Boots in Lower Summertown.

What was happening to Morse?

The third item appearing on Julia Stevens’ agenda the previous day had been postponed. On her arrival at the Old Parsonage Hotel, a telephone message was handed to her: Mrs Brooks would not be able to make the lunch; she was sorry; she would ring later if she could, and explain; please not to ring her.

Understandably, perhaps, Julia had not felt unduly disappointed, for her mind was full of other thoughts, especially of herself. And she enjoyed the solitude of her glass of Bruno Paillard Brut Premier Cru (daring!) seated on a high stool at the Parsonage Bar, before walking down to the taxi-rank by the Martyrs’ Memorial and thence being driven home in style and in a taxi gaudily advertising the Old Orleans Restaurant and Cocktail Bar.

It was not until later that evening that her brain began to weave its curious fancies about what exactly could have caused the problem…

Brenda Brooks rang (in a hurry, she’d said) just before the Nine O’Clock News on BBC1. Could they make it the next day, Saturday? A bit earlier? Twelve — twelve noon, say?

After she had put down the phone, Julia sat silently for a while, staring at nothing. A little bit odd, that — Brenda ringing (almost certainly) from a telephone-box when she had a phone of her own in the house. It would be something — everything — to do with that utterly despicable husband of hers. For from the very earliest days of their marriage, Ted Brooks had been a repulsive fly in the nuptial ointment; an ointment which had, over the thirteen increasingly unhappy and sometimes desperate years (as Julia had learned), regularly sent forth its stinking savour.

Chapter nineteen

As Brenda Brooks waited at the bus-stop that Saturday morning, then again as she made her bus journey down to Carfax, a series of videos, as it were, flashed in a nightmare of repeats across her mind; and her mood was an amalgam of anticipation and anxiety.

It had been three days earlier, Wednesday, 31 August, that she’d been seen at the Orthopaedic Clinic…

‘At least it’s not made your fracture.’

‘Pardon, doctor?’ So nervous had she been that so many of his words made little or no sense to her.

‘I said, it’s not a major fracture, Mrs Brooks. But it is a fracture.’

‘Oh deary me.’

But she’d finally realized it was something more than a sprain — that’s why she’d eventually gone to her GP, who in turn had referred her to a specialist. And now she was hearing all about it: about the meta-something between the wrist and the fingers. She’d try to look it up in that big dark-blue Gray’s Anatomy she’d often dusted on one of Mrs Stevens’ bookshelves. Not too difficult to remember: she’d just have to think of ‘met a couple’ — that’s what it sounded like.

‘And you’ll be very sensible, if you can, to stop using your right hand completely. No housework. Rest! That’s what it needs. The big thing for the time being is to give it a bit of support. So before you leave, the nurse here’ll let you have one of those “Tubigrips” — fits over your hand like a glove. And, as I say, we’ll get you in just as soon as, er… are you a member of BUPA, by the way?’

‘Pardon?’

‘Doesn’t matter. We’ll get you in just as soon as we can. Only twenty-four hours, with a bit of luck. Just a little op to set the bone and plaster you up for a week or two.’

‘It’s not quite so easy as that, Doctor. My husband’s been in hospital for a few days. He’s had a bit of a heart attack, and he’s only just home this morning, so…’

‘We can put you in touch with a home-help.’

‘I can do a little bit of housework, can’t I?’

‘Not if you’re sensible. Can’t you get a cleaning-lady in for a couple of days a week?’

‘I am a cleaning-lady,’ she replied, at last feeling that she’d rediscovered her bearings; re-established her identity in life.

She’d hurried home that morning, inserting and turning the Yale key with her left hand, since it was becoming too painful to perform such an operation with her right.

‘I’m back, Ted!’

Walking straight through into the living-room, she found her husband, fully dressed, lounging in front of the TV, his fingers on the black control-panel.

‘Christ! Where the ’ell a’ you bin, woman?’

Brenda bit her lip. ‘There was an emergency — just before my turn. It held everything up.’

‘I thought you were the bloody emergency from all the fuss you’ve bin making.’

‘Baked beans all right for lunch?’

‘Baked beans?’

‘I’ve got something nice in for tea.’

A few minutes later she took a tin of baked beans from a pantry shelf; and holding it in her right hand beneath a tin-opener fixed beside the kitchen door, she slowly turned the handle with her left. Slowly — yes, very slowly, like the worm that was finally turning…

And why?

If ever Brenda Brooks could begin to contemplate the murder of her husband, she would surely acknowledge as her primary, her abiding motive, the ways in which mentally and verbally he had so cruelly abused her for so long.

But no!

Belittlement had been her regular lot in life; and on that score he was, in reality, robbing her at most of a dignity that she had never known.

Would the underlying motive then be found in the knowledge of her husband’s sexual abuse of an adolescent and increasingly attractive step-daughter?

Perhaps.

But it was all so much simpler than that. One thing there had been in her life — just the one thing — in which she could rejoice, in which until so very recently she had rejoiced: the skills she had acquired with her hands. And Edward Brooks had robbed her of them; had robbed her even of the little that she had, which was her all.

And for that she could never forgive him.

Brenda decided she needn’t replay all that last bit to Mrs Stevens; but she did need to explain what had gone wrong the day before. Not that there was much to say, really. What was it he’d said when she’d told him she’d been invited out to lunch with Mrs S?

‘Well if you think you’re going to leave me this lunchtime, you bloody ain’t, see? Not while I’m feeling groggy like this.’

Why had she ever married the man?

She’d known it was a mistake even before that ghastly wedding — as she’d prayed for God to boom down some unanswerable objection from the hammer-beam roof when the vicar had invited any just cause or impediment. But the Voice had been silent; and the invited guests were seated quietly on each side of the nave; and the son of Brenda’s only sister (a sub-postmistress in Inverness), a spotty but mellifluous young soprano, was all rehearsed to render the ‘Pie Jesu’ from the Fauré Requiem.

Often in life it was difficult enough to gird up one’s loins and go through with one’s commitments. On this occasion, though, it had been far more difficult not to do so…

But at least Ted Brooks had relented somewhat, that previous evening — and she knew why. He’d decided he was feeling a whole lot better. He thought he might venture out — would venture out — into the big wide world again: the big wide world in this case being the East Oxford Conservative Club, well within gentle walking distance, where (he said) he’d be glad to meet the lads again, have a pint — even try a frame of snooker, perhaps. And he’d have a bite to eat in the club there; so she needn’t bother ’erself about any more bloody baked beans.

Brenda had almost been smiling to herself that evening, when on the pretext of getting another pint of milk from the corner-shop she’d given Mrs S a quick ring from the nearby BT kiosk, just before nine o’clock.

But what… what about those other two things?

She was a good ten minutes early; and in leisurely, but tremulous, fashion, she crossed the Broad and walked up St Giles’; past Balliol College; past St John’s College; past the Lamb and Flag; and then, waiting for the traffic lights just before Keble Road, she’d quickly checked (yet again) that the letter was there in her handbag.

For a few moments this letter almost assumed as much importance as that second thing — the event which had caught her up in such distress, such fear, since the previous Sunday, when her husband had returned home, the stains on the lower front of his shirt and the top of his grey flannel trousers almost adequately concealed by a beige summer cardigan (new from M&S); but only by the back of this cardigan, since the front of it was saturated with much blood. And it was only later that she’d noticed the soles of his trainers…

Opposite her, the Green Man flashed, and the bleeper bleeped; and Mrs Brenda Brooks walked quickly over to the Old Parsonage Hotel, at Number 1, Banbury Road.

Chapter twenty

The Old Parsonage Hotel, dating back to 1660, and situated between Keble College to the east and Somerville College to the west, stands just north of the point where the broad plane-tree’d avenue of St Giles’ forks into the Woodstock Road to the left and the Banbury Road to the right. Completely refurbished a few years since, and now incorporating such splendid twentieth-century features as en suite, centrally-heated bedrooms, the stone-built hotel has sought to preserve the intimacy and charm of former times.

With success, in Julia Stevens’ judgement.

In the judgement, too, of Brenda Brooks, as she seated herself in a wall-settee, in front of a small, highly polished mahogany table in the Parsonage Bar, lushly carpeted in avocado green with a tiny pink-and-peach motif.

‘Lordy me!’ Brenda managed to say in her soft Oxfordshire burr, gently shaking her tightly curled grey hair.

Whether, etymologically speaking, such an expression of obvious approval was a conflation of ‘Lord’ and ‘Lumme’, Julia could not know. But she was gratified with the reaction, and watched as Brenda’s eyes surveyed the walls around her, the lower half painted in gentle gardenia; the upper half in pale magnolia, almost totally covered with paintings, prints, cartoons.

‘Lordy me!’ repeated Brenda in a hushed voice, her vocabulary clearly inadequate to elaborate upon her earlier expression of delight.

‘What would you like to drink?’

‘Oh, coffee, please — that’ll be fine.’

‘No it won’t. I insist on something stronger than coffee. Please!’

Minutes later, as they sipped their gins and slimline tonics, they read through the menu: Julia with the conviction that this was an imaginative selection of goodies; Brenda with more than a little puzzlement, since many of the imported words therein — Bagel, Couscous, Hummus, Linguini, Mozzarella — had never figured in her own cuisine. Indeed, the sight of such exotic fare might well, a decade or so back, have prompted within her a stab of some sympathy with a husband constantly complaining about baked beans, about sardines, about spaghetti…

In the past, yes.

But no longer.

‘What’s it to be, then?’

Brenda shook her head. ‘I’m sorry, but I just can’t eat anything. I’m all — I’m all full up, Mrs Stevens, if you know what I mean.’

Julia was too sensible to argue; and in any case she understood only too well, for she’d experienced exactly the same the day before when she’d sat on a bar-stool there, alone, feeling… well, feeling ‘all full up’, as Brenda had so economically phrased it.

Half an hour later, as she was finishing her Poached Salmon with Lemon Butter, Salad, and New Potatoes, Julia Stevens had been put in the (latest) picture about Ted Brooks. She’d known all about the verbal abuse which had led to a broken heart; and now she learned of the physical abuse which had led to a broken hand.

‘I’m so wicked — did you know that? You know why? I wished’ (she whispered closely in Julia’s ear) ‘I wished him dead! Can you believe that?’

Most people in your position would have murdered him, you dear old thing, said Julia, but only to herself. And suddenly the realization that such a viciously cruel man should have ruined the life of such a sweet and lovable woman made her so very angry. Yet, at the same time, so very much in control.

Was it perhaps that the simultaneous keeping of her own secret with the hearing of another’s was an unsuspected source of strength? But Julia had no opportunity of pursuing this interesting line of thought, for Brenda now opened her handbag and passed over the letter she’d received the previous Tuesday — not through the post, but pushed by hand through her letter-box.

‘Just read it, please! No need to say anything.’

As Julia put on her school-ma’amish spectacles, she was aware that the woman seated beside her was now in tears.

The silent weeping had subsided into intermittent snuffling as Julia finished reading the agonized and agonizing pages.

‘My God,’ she whispered.

‘But that’s not all. There’s something else — something even worse. I shall just have to tell somebody, Mrs Stevens — if you can bear it.’

Chapter twenty-one

Dear mum — dearest mum!

Its been a long time hasn’t it and I didn’t really want to write but I can’t talk about it, I just can’t. I was never much good with words but I’m going to try. Its about why I left home and how I couldn’t really ever tell you about it. I’m writing now because my friend at the hospital told me about him and she said he’s a lot better and going home soon — and all I want you to do is let him get very much worse again and don’t look after him — just let him die that’s what I want because he bloody deserves it! You thought I left because I hated school and dreamt of boys and sex and got mixed up with drugs and all the punk scene and all that, and you were right in a way because I did. But you got upset about the wrong things, that’s what I’m saying. Why did I leave you mum — tell me that. You can’t think it was much fun for me with sod all to pay for anything and nowhere to bloody go, I’d just got one thing going for me and that was what you and dear old dad gave me, a good pair of thighs and a good pair of tits all the randy buggers wanted to get their hands on and believe me they paid good money for it. All I’m saying mum is I never really had to slum it after those first few weeks in London anyway. I never had the guts to tell you why but I’ve got to tell you now so here goes. Don’t get too upset about it all, well not about me anyway, just about that horny bastard you married thirteen years ago.

I was thirteen when it started and we had the flu together him and me and so you remember we were both in bed when you went off cleaning one Thursday morning, you see I even remember the day of the week, and he came into my bedroom about eleven and brought me a cup of bovril and he said how nice looking I was getting and what a nice little figure I was getting and all that bullshit and how proud he was to have a daughter like me, well a step-daughter. Then he put his arm round me and started rubbing my neck and back a bit through my pajamas and told me to relax because that would do me good and soon I was lying down again with my back to him, and then I’m not sure how it happened but he was lying down and I could feel his hand inside my pajama top and he was feeling me, and I didn’t know what to do because for a start I just thought he was being affectionate and I didn’t want to upset him because we’d both be embarassed if I tried to push him away. Please mum try to understand! Perhaps its difficult to know where the line comes between affection and sex but I knew because I felt something hard against me and I knew what it was. I just felt scared then like that first day in school when I was in a room I shouldn’t have been in and when I just got kept in for what wasn’t my fault at all, but I thought it was my fault. Oh mum I’m not explaining things very well. And then he grabbed my hand and pulled it back behind him and pushed it inside his pajamas and told me to rub him, and I just didn’t know what I was doing. It was the first time I’d ever felt a man like that and he was sort of silky and warm and I felt afraid and fascinated at the same time. All I know is I’d done what he wanted before I had the chance of thinking about what I was doing and suddenly there was all that sticky stuff all over my pajama bottoms, and you won’t remember but when you came home I told you I’d put them in the washing machine because I’d been sweating. Afterwards he kept on saying that it was me who’d agreed to do it, me who’d started it all not him. Mum! He was a wicked liar, but even if it was just one per cent me you’ve got to forgive me. He made the most of everything, my God he did. He said if I told you about what he’d done he’d tell you about what I done, and I got scared stiff you’d find out, and it was like blackmail all the time those next three awful years when he made me do everything he wanted. You could never believe how I loathed him, even the sight of him, I hated him more than I’ve ever hated anybody since. Well that’s it mum, I wonder what your thinking. He’s a shit and I never never never want to see him again unless its to stick a bloody great big knife in his great fat gut and watch him squirm and hear him squeal like the great fat pig he is. And if you want any help with sticking the fucking pig you just let me know because I’ll only be too glad to help. There’s only one other thing to tell you and perhaps its why I’ve written to you now. I’ve always kept in touch with Auntie Beryl, its been a secret but she’s always let me know how you are and she wrote a fortnight ago and told me how he’s been treating you mum — you must have let her know. Your mad to stick it, your a matyr that’s what you are. I’ve just read through all this and I know one thing I said you can do but you can’t — not yet — and that’s get in touch with me, but its better that way though don’t be surprised if you see me. Not just yet though, its been such a long long time and I can’t quite face it, not yet. I love you mum, I shall always love you better than anybody. One last thing and its odd really but I read in the Oxford—

Julia turned over the page but that was the finish: the last part of the letter was missing.

Chapter twenty-two

Lewis, on his way for an appointment with the House Matron of Wolsey, had dropped Morse in the Broad, where the Chief Inspector had swilled down a double dosage of penicillin pills with a pint of Hook Norton in the White Horse, before making his way to the Pitt Rivers Museum of Ethnology and Pre-History — for his own appointment.

Sooner or later, inevitably, a golden afternoon will captivate the visitor to Oxford; and as he walked leisurely up Parks Road, past the front of Wadham on his right, past the blue wrought-iron gates at the back of Trinity on his left, Morse felt deeply grateful that he had been privileged to spend so much of his lifetime there.

And one of those captivated visitors might have noticed a smile of quiet satisfaction around Morse’s lips that early afternoon as he turned right, just opposite Keble, into the grounds of the Oxford University Museum — that monument to the nineteenth-century Gothic Revival, and the home of the Dodo and the Dinosaur. Some clouds there were in the pale blue sky that September day: some white, some grey; but not many.

No, not many, Morse.

Oddly, he’d enjoyed the short walk, although he believed that the delights of walking were often ludicrously exaggerated. Solvitur ambulando, though, as the Romans used to say; and even if the ‘ambulando’ was meant to be a figurative rather than a physical bit of ‘walking’ — well, so much the better. Not that there was anything intrinsically wrong with the occasional bit of physical walking; after all, Housman had composed some of his loveliest lyrics while walking around the Backs at Cambridge, after a couple of lunchtime beers.

Solvitur ambulando, yes.

Walk along then, Morse, since perhaps you are now walking towards the solution.

On the stone steps leading up to the entrance porch, he read the notice:

It was already past noon, and on the grass a large party of visiting schoolchildren were unharnessing ruck-sacks and extracting packed lunches as Morse walked hurriedly by. It wasn’t that he positively disliked schoolchildren; just that he didn’t want to meet any of them.

Inside the glass-roofed, galleried building, Morse continued on his course, quickly past a huge reconstruction of a dinosaur (‘Bipedal, but capable of quad-ripedal locomotion’); quickly past some assembled skeletons of African and Asian elephants. Nor was he long (if at all) detained by the tall show-cases displaying their specimens of the birds and insects of Australasia. Finally, after making his way between a statue of the Prince Consort and a well-stuffed ostrich, Morse emerged from the University Museum into the Pitt Rivers Museum; where he turned right, and knocked on the door of the Administrator.

Capital ‘A’.

‘Coffee?’ she invited.

‘No thanks. I’ve just had some.’

‘Some beer, you mean.’

‘Is it that obvious?’

‘Yes.’

She was a tall, slim woman in her mid-forties, with prematurely white hair, and an attractively diffident smile about her lips.

‘Some women,’ began Morse, ‘have an extraordinarily well-developed sense of smell—’ But then he stopped. For a second or two he’d anticipated a little mild flirtation with Jane Cotterell. Clearly it was not to be, though, for he felt her clear, intelligent eyes upon him, and the tone of her voice was unambiguously no-nonsense:

‘How can I help you?’

For the next ten minutes she answered his questions.

Brooks had joined the eight-strong team of attendants at the Pitt Rivers Museum — quite separate from the University Museum — almost exactly a year ago. He worked a fairly regular thirty-five-hour week, 8.30 a.m. to 4.30 p.m., with an hour off for lunch. The attendants had the job of cleaning and maintaining the premises; of keeping a watchful eye on all visitors, in particular on the many school-parties regularly arriving by coach from near and far; sometimes of performing specific tasks, like manning the museum shop; of being helpful and courteous to the public at all times — ‘more friendly than fierce’; and above all, of course, of safeguarding the unrivalled collection of anthropological and ethnographic items housed in the museum…

‘A unique museum, Inspector.’

‘Do you ever get anybody trying to steal things?’

‘Very rarely. Last summer we had someone trying to get into the case with the shrunken heads in it, but—’

‘Hope you caught him.’

‘Her, actually.’

‘I’d rather rob a bank, myself.’

‘I’d rather not rob at all.’

Morse was losing out, he realized that; and reverted to his questioning about Brooks.

The man was, in the Administrator’s view, competent in his job, not frightened of work, punctual, reasonably pleasant with the public; private sort of person, though, something of a loner. There were certainly some of his colleagues with slightly more endearing qualities.

‘If you’d known what you know now, would you have appointed him?’

‘No.’

‘Mind if I smoke?’ asked Morse.

‘I’d rather you didn’t.’

‘Did he smoke?’

‘Not in the museum. No one smokes in the museum.’

‘In the Common Room, or whatever you have?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You don’t associate him with drugs at all?’

She glanced at him keenly before replying. ‘There are no drugs here — not on my staff.’

‘You’d know — if there were?’

‘As you say, some women have a particularly well-developed sense of smell, Inspector.’

Morse let it go. ‘Have you still got his references?’

The Administrator unlocked a filing-cabinet beside her and produced a green folder marked ‘BROOKS, E’; and Morse looked through the half-dozen sheets it contained: Brooks’s CV; a carbon of the letter appointing him wef 1 September 1993; a photocopied page giving details of Salary, National Insurance, Job Specification, Shift-Patterns; two open, blandly worded testimonials; and one hand-written reference, equally bland.

Morse read this last item a second time, slowly.

Well, well.

‘Did you know Dr McClure?’ asked Morse.

‘No. And I shan’t have a chance of knowing him now, shall I?’

‘You heard…?’

‘I read it in the Oxford Mail. I know all about Mr Brooks’s illness too: his wife rang through early on Monday morning. But from what they say he’s on the mend.’

Morse changed tack once more. ‘I know a lot of the exhibits here are invaluable; but… but are there things here that are just plain valuable, if you know what I mean? Commercially valuable, saleable…?’

‘My goodness, yes. I wouldn’t mind getting my fingers on some of the precious stones and rings here. Or do I mean in some of them?’

But Morse appeared to miss the Administrator’s gentle humour.

‘Does Mr Brooks have access to, well, to almost everything here really?’

‘Yes, he does. Each of the attendants has a key to the wall-safe where we keep the keys to all the cabinets and drawers and so on.’

‘So, if he took a fancy to one of your shrunken heads?’

‘No problem. He wouldn’t have to use a crowbar.’

‘I see.’

Jane Cotterell smiled, and thereby melted a little more of Morse’s heart.

‘Do I gather you want me to show you a bit about the security system here?’

‘Not really,’ protested Morse.

She rose to her feet. ‘I’d better show you then.’

Twenty minutes later they returned to her office.

‘Thank you,’ said Morse. ‘Thank you for your patience and your time. You’re a very important person, I can see that.’

‘Really? How—?’

‘Well, you’ve got a capital “A” for a start; then you’ve got a wall-to-wall carpet; and for all I know you’ve not only got a parking space, you’ve probably got one with your name on it.’

‘No name on it, I’m afraid.’

‘Still…’

‘What about you?’

‘I’ve got my name on the door, at least for the present. But I’ve only got a little carpet, with a great big threadbare patch where my megapodic sergeant stands.’

‘Is there such a word — “megapodic”?’

‘I’ll look it up when I get home. I’ve just treated myself to the Shorter Oxford.’

‘Where is your home?’

‘Top of the Banbury Road… Anywhere near you?’

‘No. That’s quite a way from where I live.’ For a few seconds her eyes looked down at the carpet — that old carpet of hers, whose virtues had so suddenly, so unexpectedly expanded.

Only semi-reluctantly, a few minutes earlier, had Brenda Brooks been persuaded to hand over the last sheet of her daughter’s letter. Its content, as Julia saw things, was very much as before. But, yes, it was a bit self-incriminating; especially that rather fine passage just before the end:

Strangely, however, Julia had experienced little sense of shock. A hardening of heart, rather; and a growing conviction that if Brooks were to turn up murdered somewhere his step-daughter would not be figuring alone on any list of possible suspects.

Chapter twenty-three

Morse spent a while wandering vaguely around the galleries. On the ground floor he gave as much of his attention as he could muster to the tall, glass show-cases illustrating the evolution of fire-arms, Japanese Noh masks, the history of Looms and Weaving, old musical instruments, shields, pots, models of boats, bull-roarers, North American dress, and a myriad precious and semiprecious stones…

Then, feeling like a man who in some great picture gallery has had his fill of fourteenth-century crucifixions, he walked up a flight of stone steps to see what the Upper Gallery had to offer; and duly experienced a similar sense of satiety as he ambled aimlessly along a series of black-wood, glass-topped display-cases, severally containing scores of axes, adzes, tongs, scissors, keys, coins, animal-traps, specialized tools… Burmese, Siamese, Japanese, Indonesian…

In one display-case he counted sixty-four Early Medical Instruments, each item labelled in a neat manuscript, in black ink on a white card, with documentation of provenance and purpose (where known). Among these many items, all laid out flat on biscuit-coloured backing-material (clearly recently renovated), his attention was drawn to a pair of primitive tooth-extractors from Tonga; and not for the first time he thanked the gods that he had been born after the general availability of anaesthetics.

But he had seen quite enough, he thought, wholly unaware, at this point, that he had made one extraordinarily interesting observation. So he decided it was time to leave. Very soon Lewis would be at the front waiting for him. Lewis would be on time. Lewis was always on time.

For the moment, however, he was conscious that there was no one else around in the Upper Gallery. And suddenly the place had grown a little forbidding, a little uncanny; and he felt a quick shiver down his spine as he made his way back into the main University Museum.

But even here it was quieter now, more sombre, beneath the glass-roofed atrium, as if perhaps a cloud had passed across the sun outside. And Morse found himself wondering what it would be like to be in this place, be locked in this place, when everyone else had gone; when the schoolchildren were back on their coaches; when the rest of the public, when the attendants, when the Administrator had all left… Then perhaps, in the silent, eerie atmosphere, might not the spirits of the Dodo and the Dinosaur, never suspecting their curious extinction, be calling for their mates again on some primeval shore?

Jane Cotterell sat at her desk for several minutes after the door had closed behind Morse. She shouldn’t really have said that about the beer. Silly of her! Why, she could just do with a drink herself, and it would have been nice if he’d asked her out for a lunchtime gin. She felt herself wishing that he’d forgotten something: a folding umbrella or a notebook or something. But as she’d observed, the Inspector had taken no notes at all; and outside, the sun now seemed to be shining gloriously once more.

Chapter twenty-four

After reading the (now complete) letter, Julia Stevens re-arranged the pages and read them again; whilst beside her, in a semi-distraught state, sat the original addressee; for whom, strangely enough, one of the most disturbing aspects of the letter was the revelation that her sister Beryl had told her niece the events of that terrible night. Had she (Brenda) made too much of everything when Ted had handled her so roughly? Had it been as much an accident as an incident? But no. No, it hadn’t. And whether her account of it had been exaggerated or whether it had been understated — either to her sister over the phone or to her employer in person — certain it was that the recollection of that night in May would remain ever vivid in Brenda’s memory…

‘You’re ever so late, Ted. What time is it?’

‘Twelve, is it?’

‘It’s far later than that.’

‘If you know what the bloody time is, why the ’ell do you ask me in the first place?’

‘It’s just that I can’t get off to sleep when I know you’re still out. I feel worried—’

‘Christ! You want to worry when I start gettin’ in ’alf-past bloody three, woman.’

‘Come to bed now, anyway.’

‘I bloody shan’t — no!’

‘Well, go and sleep in the spare room, then — I’ve got to get some sleep.’

‘All the bloody same to me, innit — if I go in there, or if I stay in ’ere. Might just as well a’ bin in different rooms all the bloody time, you know that. Frigid as a fuckin’ ice-box! That’s what you are. Always ’ave bin.’

‘That’s just not fair — that’s not fair, what you just said!’

‘If the bloody cap fits—’

‘It can’t go on like this, Ted — it just can’t. I can’t stick it any more.’

‘Well, bloody don’t then! Sling your ’ook and go, if you can’t stick it! But just stop moanin’ at me, d’you hear? Stop fuckin’ moanin’! All right?’

She was folding her candlewick dressing-gown round her small figure and edging past him at the foot of the double bed, when he stopped her, grabbing hold of her fiercely by the shoulders and glaring furiously into her face before pushing her back.

‘You stay where you are!’

Twice previously he had physically maltreated her in a similar way, but on neither occasion had she suffered physical hurt. That night, though, she had stumbled — had to stumble — against the iron fireplace in the bedroom; and as she’d put out her right hand to cushion the fall, something had happened; something had snapped. Not that it had been too painful. Not then.

As a young girl Brenda had been alongside when her mother had slipped in the snow one February morning and landed on her wrist; broken her wrist. And passers-by had been so concerned, so helpful, that as she’d sat in the Casualty Department at the old Radcliffe Infirmary, she’d told her daughter that it had almost been worthwhile, the accident — to discover such unsuspected kindness.

But that night Ted had just told her to get up; told her not to be such a bloody ninny. And she’d started to weep then — to weep not so much from pain or shock but from the humiliation of being treated in such a way by the man she had married…

Julia handed back the letter.

‘I think she hates him even more than you do.’

Brenda nodded miserably. ‘I must have loved him once, though, mustn’t I? I suppose he was — well, after Sid died — he was just there really. I suppose I needed something — somebody — and Ted was there, and he made a bit of a fuss of me — and I was lonely. After that… but it doesn’t matter any more.’

For a while there was a silence between the two women.

‘Mrs Stevens?’

‘Yes?’

‘What about this other thing? What am I going to do about it? Please help me! Please!’

It was with anger that Julia had listened to Brenda’s earlier confidences; with anger, too, that she had read the letter. The man was an animal — she might have known it; had known it. But the possibility that he was a murderer? Could Brenda have got it all wrong? Ridiculously wrong?

Julia had never really got to know Ted Brooks. In the early days of Brenda working for her, she’d met him a few times — three or four, no more. And once, only once, had she gone round to the Brooks’s house, when Brenda had been stricken with some stomach bug; and when, as she had left, Ted Brooks’s hand had moved, non-accidentally, against her breasts as he was supposedly helping her on with her mackintosh.

Take your horny hands off me, you lecherous sod, she’d thought then; and she had never seen him since that day. Never would, if she could help it. Yet he was not an ill-looking fellow, she conceded that.

The contents of the letter, therefore, had come as something less of a shock than may have been expected, since she had long known that Brenda had fairly regularly been on the receiving end of her husband’s tongue and temper, and had suspected other things, perhaps…

But Brooks a murderer?

She looked across with a sort of loving distress at the busy, faithful little lady who had been such a godsend to her; a little lady dressed now in a navy-blue, two-piece suit; an oldish suit certainly, yet beautifully clean, with the pleats in the skirt most meticulously pressed for this special occasion. She felt an overwhelming surge of compassion for her, and she was going to do everything she could to help. Of course she was.

What about ‘this other thing’, though? My god, what could she do about that?

‘Brenda? Brenda? You know what you said about… about the blood? Are you sure? Are you sure?’

‘Mrs Stevens?’ Brenda whispered. ‘I wasn’t going to tell you — I wasn’t even going to tell you. But yes, I am sure. And shall I tell you why I’m sure?’

It was twenty-past two when Julia’s taxi dropped Brenda — not immediately outside her house, but very close, just beside the Pakistani grocer’s shop on the corner.

‘Don’t forget, Brenda! Make sure you run out of milk again tonight. Just before nine. And don’t say or do anything before then. Agreed? Bye.’

On her way home, Julia spotted the Oxford Mail placard outside a newsagent’s in the Cowley Road:

and she asked the taxi-driver to stop.

Just before 3 p.m., Ted Brooks was lining up the shot, his eyes coolly assessing the angle between the white cue-ball and the last colour. Smoothly his cue drove through the line of his aim, and the black swiftly disappeared into the bottom right-hand pocket.

His opponent, an older man, slapped a pound coin down on the side of the table.

‘Not done your snooker much harm, Ted.’

‘No. Back at work in a fortnight, so the doc says. With a bit o’ luck.’

Chapter twenty-five

As Morse had expected, Lewis was already sitting waiting for him outside the museum.

‘How did things go, sir?’

‘All right.’

‘Learn anything new?’

‘Wouldn’t go quite so far as that. What about you?’

‘Interesting. That woman, well — she’s a sort of majordomo — Amazonian type, sir. I wouldn’t like her as Chief Constable.’

‘Give it five years, Lewis.’

‘Anyway, it’s about Matthew Rodway. In the autumn term—’

‘We call it the Michaelmas Term here, Lewis.’

‘In the Michaelmas Term, in his third year, when he was back in college again—’

‘In the House.’

‘In the House again, he was sharing rooms with another fellow—’

‘Another undergraduate.’

‘Another undergraduate called Ashley Davies. But not for long, it seems. Davies got himself temporarily booted out of college—’

‘Rusticated.’

‘Rusticated that term. Some sort of personal trouble, she said, but didn’t want to go into it. Said we should see Davies for ourselves, really.’

‘Like me, then, you didn’t learn very much.’

‘Ah! Just a minute, sir,’ smiled Lewis. ‘Mr Ashley Davies, our undergraduate, in the Michaelmas Term 1993, was rusticated from the House on the say-so of one Dr Felix McClure, former Student — capital “S”, sir — of Wolsey College.’

‘The plot thickens.’

‘Bad blood, perhaps, sir? Ruined his chances, certainly — Davies was expected to get a First, she’d heard. And he didn’t return this year, either. Murky circumstances… Drugs, do you think?’

‘Or booze.’

‘Or love.’

‘Well?’

‘I’ve got his address. Living with his parents in Bedford.’

‘Did any good thing ever come out of Bedford?’

‘John Bunyan, sir?’

‘You go and see him, then. I can’t do everything myself.’

‘What’s wrong?’ asked Lewis quietly.

‘I dunno. My chest’s sore. My legs ache. My head’s throbbing. I feel sick. I feel sweaty. It’s the wrong question, isn’t it? You mean, what’s right?’

‘Have you had your pills?’

‘Course I have. Somebody’s got to keep fit.’

‘When were you last fit, sir?’

Morse pulled the safety-belt across him and fumbled for a few seconds to fix the tongue into the buckle.

‘I don’t ever remember feeling really fit.’

‘I’m sure you’ll blast my head off, sir, but—’

‘I ought not to drink so much.’

‘I wouldn’t be surprised if you’d just washed your pills down with a pint.’

‘Would you be surprised if you were quite wrong about that?’

‘Washed ’em down with two pints, you mean?’

Morse smiled and wiped his forehead with a once-white handkerchief.

‘You know the difference between us, sir — between you and me?’

‘Tell me.’

‘I got married, and so I’ve got a missus who’s always tried to look after me.’

‘You’re lucky, though. Most people your age are divorced by now.’

‘You never — never met a woman — you know, the right woman?’

Morse’s eyes seemed focused far away. ‘Nearly. Nearly, once.’

‘Plenty of time.’

‘Nonsense! You don’t start things at my age. You pack ’em up. Like the job, Lewis.’ Morse hesitated. ‘Look, I’ve not told anybody yet — well, only Strange. I’m packing in the job next autumn.’

Lewis smiled sadly. ‘Next Michaelmas, isn’t it?’

‘I could stay on another couple of years after that but…’

‘Won’t you miss things?’

‘Course I bloody won’t. I’ve been very lucky — at least in that respect. But I don’t want to push the luck too far. I mean, we might get put on to a case we can’t crack.’

‘Not this one, I hope?’

‘Oh no, Lewis, not this one.’

‘What’s the programme—?’

But Morse interrupted him: ‘You just asked me if I’ll miss things and I shan’t, no. Only one thing, I suppose. I shall miss you, old friend, that’s all.’

He had spoken simply, almost awkwardly, and for a little while Lewis hardly trusted himself to look up. Somewhere behind his eyes he felt a slight prickling; and somewhere — in his heart, perhaps — he felt a sadness he could barely comprehend.

‘Not getting very far sitting here, Lewis, are we? What’s the programme?’

‘That’s what I just asked you.’

‘Well, there’s this fellow from Bedford, you say?’

‘Former undergraduate, sir.’

‘Yes, well — is he at home?’

‘Dunno. I can soon find out.’

‘Do that, then. See him.’

‘When—?’

‘What’s wrong with now? The way you drive you’ll be back by teatime.’

‘Don’t you want to see him?’

Morse hesitated. ‘No. There’s something much more important for me to do this afternoon.’

‘Go to bed, you mean?’

Slowly, resignedly, Morse nodded. ‘And try to fix something up with Brooks. Time we paid him a little visit, isn’t it?’

‘Monday?’

‘What’s wrong with tomorrow? That’ll be exactly a week after he murdered McClure, won’t it?’

Chapter twenty-six

Brenda Brooks was in a state of considerable agitation when she went through into the kitchen to put the kettle on. But at least she was relieved to be home before him; to have time for a cup of tea; to try to stop shaking. The anguish, the sheer misery of it all, were as strong as ever; with only her growing fear a new element in the tragedy…

After the first inevitable bewilderment — after the uncomprehending questions and the incomprehensible answers — her immediate reaction had been to wash the bloodstained clothing — shirt, trousers, cardigan; but instead, she had followed the fierce instructions given from the invalid’s bed that the clothes be carted off to the rubbish dump, and that the affair never be referred to again.

Yet there the event stood — whatever had happened, whatever it all meant — forming that terrible and terrifying secret between them, between husband and wife. No longer a proper secret, though, for she had shared that secret… those secrets; or would it not be more honest to say that she had betrayed them? Particularly, therefore, did her fear centre on his return now: the fear that when he came in he would only have to look at her — to know. And as she squeezed the tea-bag with the tongs, she could do nothing to stop the constant trembling in her hands.

Automatically almost, between sips of tea, she wiped the tongs clean of any tannin stain and replaced them in the drawer to the right of the sink, in the compartment next to the set of beautifully crafted knives which her sister Beryl had given her for her first wedding — knives of many shapes and sizes, some small and slim, some with much longer and broader blades, which lay there before her in shining and sharpened array.

The phone rang at 2.45 p.m.: the Pitt Rivers Museum.

The phone rang again just before 3 p.m.: Mrs Stevens.

‘Is he home yet?’

‘No.’

‘Good.

Now listen!’

The front door slammed at 3.20 p.m., when, miraculously as it seemed to Brenda, the shaking in her hands had ceased.

Almost invariably, whenever he came in, she would use those same three words: ‘That you, Ted?’ That afternoon, however, there was a change, subconscious perhaps, yet still significant.

‘That you?’ she asked in a firm voice. Just the two words now — as if the query had become depersonalized, as if she could be asking the information of anyone; dehumanized, as if she could be speaking to a dog.

As yet, still holding out on the battle-field, was a small fortress. It was likely to collapse very soon, of course; but there was the possibility that it might hold out for some little time, since it had been recently reinforced. And when the door had slammed shut she had been suddenly conscious — yes! — of just a little power.

‘That you?’ she repeated.

‘Who do you think it is?’

‘Cup o’ tea?’

‘You can get me a can o’ beer.’

‘The museum just rang. The lady wanted to know how you were. Kind of her, wasn’t it?’

‘Kind? Was it fuck! Only wanted to know when I’d be back, that’s all. Must be short-staffed — that’s the only reason she rung.’

‘You’d have thought people would be glad of a job like that, with all this unemployment—’

‘Would be, wouldn’t they, if they paid you decent bloody rates?’

‘They pay you reasonably well, surely?’

He glared at her viciously. ‘How do you know that? You bin lookin’ at my things when I was in ’ospital? Christ, you better not ’a bin, woman!’

‘I don’t know what they pay you. You’ve never told me.’

‘Exackly! So you know fuck-all about it, right? Look at you! You go out for that bloody teacher and what’s ’er rates, eh? Bloody slave-labour, that’s what you are. Four quid an hour? Less? Christ, if you add up what she gets an hour — all those ’olidays and everything.’

Brenda made no answer, but the flag was still flying on the small fortress. And, oddly enough, he was right. Mrs Stevens did pay her less than £4 an hour: £10 for three hours — two mornings a week. But Brenda knew why that was, for unlike her husband her employer had told her exactly where she stood on the financial ladder: one rung from the bottom. In fact, Mrs Stevens had even been talking that lunchtime of having to get rid of her B-registration Volvo, which stood in one of the rundown garages at the end of her road, rented at £15 per calendar month.

As Brenda knew, the protection which that rusting, corrugated shack could afford to any vehicle was minimal; but it did mean that the car had a space — which was more than could be said for the length of road immediately outside Julia’s own front door, where so often some other car or van was parked, with just as much right to do so as she had (so the Council had informed her). It wasn’t that the sale of the old Volvo (‘£340, madam — no, let’s make it £350’) would materially boost her current account at Lloyds; but it would mean a huge saving on all those other wretched expenses: insurance, road tax, servicing, repairs, MOT, garaging… what, about £800 a year?

‘So why keep it?’ that’s what Julia had asked Brenda.

She would have been more honest if she had told Brenda why she was going to sell it. But that lunchtime, at least, the telling of secrets had been all one-way traffic.

After dropping off the drooping Morse, Lewis returned to Kidlington HQ, where before doing anything else he looked at the copy of the Oxford Mail that had been left on Morse’s desk. He was glad they’d managed to get the item in — at the bottom of page 1:

Chapter twenty-seven

Later that afternoon it was to be the B — B — B route: Bicester — Buckingham — Bedford. Fortunately for Lewis the detached Davies’ residence was on the western outskirts of Bedford; and the door of 248 Northampton Road was answered immediately — by Ashley Davies himself.

After only a little skirmishing Davies had come up with his own version of the events which had preceded the showdown between himself and Matthew Rodway… and Dr Felix McClure: an old carcass whose bones Lewis had been commissioned to pick over yet again.

Davies had known Matthew Rodway in their first year together. They’d met in the University Conservative Association (Lewis felt glad that Morse was abed); but apart from such political sympathy, the two young men had also found themselves fellow members of the East Oxford Martial Arts Club.

‘Judo, karate — that sort of thing?’ Lewis, himself a former boxer, was interested.

‘Not so much the physical side of things — that was part of it, of course. But it’s a sort of two-way process, physical and mental; mind and body. Both of us were more interested in the yoga side than anything. You know, “union” — that’s what yoga means, isn’t it?’

Lewis nodded sagely.

‘Then you get into TM, of course.’

‘TM, sir?’

‘Transcendental Meditation. You know, towards spiritual well-being. You sit and repeat this word to yourself — this “mantra” — and you find yourself feeling good, content… happy. Everything was OK, between Matthew and me, until this girl, this woman, joined. I just couldn’t take my eyes off her. I just couldn’t think of anything else.’

‘The TM wasn’t working properly?’ suggested Lewis helpfully.

‘Huh! It wasn’t even as if she was attractive, really. Well, no. She was attractive, that’s the whole point. Not beautiful or good-looking, or anything like that. But, well, she just had to look at you really, just look into your eyes, and your heart started melting away.’

‘Sounds a bit of a dangerous woman.’

‘You can say that again. I took her out twice — once to the Mitre, once to The Randolph — and she was quite open about things. Said she’d be willing to have sex and so on: fifty quid a time; hundred quid for a night together. No emotional involvement, though — she was very definite about that.’

‘You agreed?’

‘Well, I couldn’t afford that sort of money. Hundred? Plus a B&B somewhere? But I did ask her about coming up to my room one evening — that was just after I’d started sharing with Matthew — when he had to go home for a family funeral. But it was a Tuesday, I

remember, and she said she had to be very careful which day of the week it was. She could only do Saturday or perhaps Sunday because she knew somebody on the staircase and she wasn’t prepared to take any risks.’

‘What risks?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘One of the other students — undergraduates there?’

For the first time the casually dressed, easy-mannered Davies hesitated. ‘She didn’t say.’

‘Who else could it have been?’

Davies shrugged, but made no reply.

‘There were two dons on the staircase, I understand — “Students” don’t you call them?’

‘Only a bloody pedant would call ’em Students these days.’

‘I see. And, er, Dr McClure was one of those dons.’

‘You’ve done your homework.’

‘Go on please, sir.’

‘Well, I had to go up for a Civil Service Selection thing on November the fifth, Bonfire Night, in Whitehall. Whole weekend of it — Friday, Saturday, Sunday. Anyway, I got so pissed off with all the palaver that I didn’t stay for the Sunday session. I caught the ten-something from Paddington back to Oxford on Saturday night and when I got back to the staircase — well, there they were. We had two single beds in the one room, you see; and she was in his bed, and he was in mine. I don’t quite know why, but it just made me see red and…’

‘You’d tried to do the same yourself, though, so you said?’

‘I know, yes.’

‘You were just jealous, I suppose?’

‘It was more than that. It’s difficult to explain.’

‘You mean, perhaps, if she’d been in your bed…?’

‘I don’t know. You’d have to ask Freud. Anyway, I went berserk. I just went for him, that’s all. He’d got nothing on — neither of ’em had — and soon we were wrestling and punching each other and knocking everything all over the bloody place, and there must have been one helluva racket because there was this great banging on the door and, well, we quietened down and I opened the door and there — there he was: that stuffed prick McClure. Well, that’s about it, really. Matthew’d got a cut on his mouth and one of his eyes was badly bruised; I’d got a gash on my left arm but… no great damage, not considering. McClure wanted to know all about it, of course: who the girl was—’

‘Who was she?’

‘She called herself Ellie — Ellie Smith.’

‘Then?’

‘Well, they put me in one of the guest rooms in Great Quad, and Ellie went off — I think McClure put her in a taxi — and that was that. The Senior Tutor sent for me the next morning, and you know the rest.’

‘Why didn’t Mr Rodway get rusticated too?’

‘Well, I’d started it. My fault, wasn’t it?’

‘Wasn’t he disciplined at all?’

‘Warned, yes. You get a warning in things like that. Then, if it happens again…’

Lewis thought he was beginning to get the picture. ‘And perhaps you’d already had a warning yourself, sir?’ he asked quietly.

Unblinking, the thickset Davies looked for several seconds into Lewis’s eyes before nodding. ‘I’d had a fight in a pub in my first year.’

‘Much damage done then?’

‘He broke his jaw.’

‘Don’t you mean you broke his jaw, sir?’

It was a pleasant little rejoinder, and perhaps Davies should have smiled. But Lewis saw no humour, only what he thought may have been a hint of cruelty, in the young man’s eyes.

‘You’ve got it, Sergeant.’

‘Was that over a woman as well?’

‘Yeah, ’fraid so. There was this other guy and he kept, you know, messing around a bit with this girl of mine.’

‘Which pub was that?’

‘The Grapes — in George Street. I think this guy thought it was called The Gropes.’

‘And you hit him.’

‘Yeah. I’d told him to fuck off.’

‘And he hadn’t.’

‘Not straightaway, no.’

‘But later he wished he had.’

‘You could say that.’

‘How did it get reported?’

‘The landlord called the police. Bit unlucky, really. Wasn’t all that much of a fight at all.’

Lewis consulted his notes. ‘You wouldn’t say you “went berserk” on that occasion?’

‘No.’

‘Why do you reckon you got so violent with Mr Rodway, then?’

Davies stared awhile at the carpet, then answered, though without looking up. ‘It’s simple, really. I was in love with her.’

‘And so was Mr Rodway?’

Davies nodded. ‘Yeah.’

‘Have you seen her since?’

‘A few times.’

‘Recently?’

‘No.’

‘Can you tell me why you didn’t go back to Oxford — to finish your degree? You were only rusticated for a term, weren’t you?’

‘Rest of the Michaelmas and all the Hilary. And by the time I was back, what with Finals and everything… I just couldn’t face it.’

‘How did your parents feel about that?’

‘Disappointed, naturally.’

‘Have you told them why I’m here today?’

‘They’re on a cruise in the Aegean.’

‘I see.’ Lewis stood up and closed his notebook and walked over to the window, enviously admiring the white Porsche that stood in the drive. ‘They’ve left you the car, I see?’

‘No, that’s mine.’

Lewis turned. ‘I thought you — well, you gave me the impression, sir, that fifty pounds might be a bit on the expensive side…’

‘I came into some money. That’s perhaps another reason I didn’t go back to Oxford. Rich aunt, bless her! She left me… well, more than enough, let’s say.’

Lewis asked a final question as the two men stood in the front porch: ‘Where were you last Sunday, sir?’

‘Last Sunday?’

‘Yes. The day Dr McClure was murdered.’

‘Oh dear! You’re not going to tell me…? What possible reason could I have—’

‘I suppose you could say it was because of Dr McClure that…’

‘That they kicked me out? Yes.’

‘You must have hated him for that.’

‘No. You couldn’t really hate him. He was just an officious bloody bore, that’s all.’

‘Did you know that he fell in love with Ellie Smith too?’

Davies sighed deeply. ‘Yes.’

‘Last Sunday, then?’ repeated Lewis.

‘I went bird-watching.’

‘On your own?’

‘Yes. I went out — must’ve been about nine, half-nine? Got back about three.’

‘Whereabouts did you go?’

Davies mentioned a few names — woods or lakes, as Lewis assumed.

‘Meet anyone you knew?’

‘No.’

‘Pub? Did you call at a pub? Hotel? Snackbar? Shop? Garage?’

‘No, don’t think so.’

‘Must have been quite a lot of other bird-watchers around?’

‘No. It’s not the best time of year for bird-watching. Too many leaves still on the trees in late summer. Unless you know a bit about flight, song, habitat — well, you’re not going to spot much, are you? Do you know anything about bird-watching, Sergeant?’

‘No.’

As Lewis left, he noticed the RSPB sticker on the rear window of a car he would have given quite a lot to drive. Perhaps not so much as fifty pounds, though.

Chapter twenty-eight

Standing quite still behind the curtained window of the first-floor front bedroom, she looked down across the drive at the departing policeman. She had a very good idea of what the interview had been about. Of course she had.

She was completely naked except for the dressing-gown (his) draped around a figure which was beginning to wobble dangerously between the voluptuous and the overblown — the beginnings of a pot-belly quite certainly calling for some fairly regular visits to the Temple Cowley pool in East Oxford, to plough through some thirty or forty lengths a time (for she was an excellent swimmer).

The smell of her was seductive though, she knew that. How else, with that posh eau-de-toilette just squirted everywhere about her person? ‘Mimosa Pour Moi’ — the last thing Felix had bought her.

Felix…

Always (above all perhaps?) he’d adored the sight and the smell of her when she’d just finished drying herself after one of her frequent baths. And how she treasured that letter — well, sort of letter — he’d written that morning in a posh London hotel as he’d sat waiting (and waiting and waiting) to go down to breakfast whilst she reclined luxuriously, reluctant to make any decisive move from the bath-tub.

How she loved a long, hot bath.

Yummy!

And how she loved what he’d written — one of the very few things she carried around in that scuffed shoulder-bag of hers:

She’d read it many, many times. Above all she enjoyed reading about herself in the third person. It was as if she were a key character in some roman-à-clef (Felix had told her about that sort of book — told her how to pronounce it): a character far more important on the page than in reality. Oh, yes. Because in real life she wasn’t important at all; nor ever would be. After all, she wouldn’t exactly be riding up to the abortion clinic that Wednesday in a Roller, now would she? God, no. Just standing on that perishing Platform Number 2, waiting for the early bloody train up to bloody Birmingham.

Ashley Davies opened the bedroom door and walked up behind her, unloosening the belt of her (his) dressing-gown.

‘God, am I ready—’

But she slipped away from him — and slipped out of the dressing-gown, fixing first her black suspender-belt, then her black bra; then pulling a thin dark blue dress over her ridiculously colourful head before hooking a pair of laddered black stockings up her legs.

Davies had watched her, silently. He felt almost as sexually aroused by watching her dress as watching her undress.

At last he spoke:

‘What’s the matter? What have I done wrong?’

She made no reply, but stood tip-tilting her chin towards the dressing-table mirror as she applied some transparent substance to her pouting lips.

‘Ellie!’

‘I’m off.’

‘What d’you mean, you’re off? I’m taking you out to lunch, remember?’

‘I’m off.’

‘You can’t do this to me!’

‘Just watch me!’

‘Is it the police?’

‘Could be.’

‘But he’s gone — it’s over — it’s all right.’

She picked up a small, overnight grip of faded pink canvas, inscribed with the names of pop groups and punk stars.

‘I’m off.’

‘When do I see you again?’

‘You don’t.’

‘Ellie!’

‘I don’t want to see you any more.’ (It seemed a long sentence.)

Davies sat down miserably on the side of the double bed in which he and Ellie had slept — half slept — the previous night.

‘You don’t love me at all, do you?’

‘No.’

‘Have you ever loved me?’

‘No.’

‘Did you love Matthew?’

‘No.’

‘Don’t tell me you loved McClure? Don’t tell me you loved that prick?’

‘About the only thing about him I did love.’

‘Christ! You shouldn’t say things like that.’

‘Why ask, then?’

‘Have you ever loved anybody?’

‘Me mum, yeah.’

‘Nobody else?’

‘Me dad — me real dad, I suppose. Can’t remember.’

With a series of upward brushes she applied some black colouration to her eyelashes.

‘Where d’you think you’re going now?’

‘Oxford.’

Davies sighed miserably, stood up, and reached inside his trouser-pocket for his car-keys.

‘Come on, then.’

‘I’m not going with you.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘I’ll hitch a lift.’

‘You can’t do that.’

‘Course I bloody can. That’s all they’re lookin’ for, most of these lecherous sods. All I gotta do—’

‘Ellie!’

‘First car, like as not. You see.’

In fact, Ellie Smith’s prediction was unduly optimistic, since the first car drove past her with little observable sign of interest, no detectable sign of deceleration.

The second car did exactly the same.

But not the third.

Chapter twenty-nine

On the following day, Sunday 4 September, Ted Brooks was sitting up in bed, two pillows behind his back, reading the more salacious offerings in the News of the World. It was exactly 11.30 a.m., he knew that, since he had been looking at his wristwatch every minute or so since 11.15.

Now, for some reason, he began to feel slightly less agitated as the minute-hand moved slowly up in the climb towards the twelve — the ‘prick of noon’, as Shakespeare has it. His mind, similarly, was moving slowly; perhaps it had never moved all that quickly anyway.

Whatever happened, though, he was going to make the most of his heart attack — his ‘mild’ heart attack, as they’d assured him in the Coronary Care Unit. Well, he hoped it was mild. He didn’t want to die. Course he bloody didn’t. Paradoxically, however, he found himself wishing it wasn’t all that mild. A heart attack — whatever its measurement on the Richter Scale — was still a heart attack; and the maximum sympathy and attention should be extracted from such an affliction, so Brenda’d better bloody understand that.

He shouted downstairs for a cup of Bovril. But before the beverage could arrive, he heard the double-burred ring of the telephone: an unusual occurrence in the Brooks’s household at any time; and virtually unprecedented on a Sunday.

He got out of bed, and stood listening beside the bedroom door as Brenda answered the call in the narrow entrance-hall at the bottom of the stairs.

‘Oh, I see…’

‘I do understand, yes…’

‘Look, let me try to put him on…’

She found him sitting on the side of the bed, pulling on his socks.

‘Thames Valley Police, Ted. They want to come and talk to you.’

‘Christ!’ he hissed. ‘Don’t they know I’ve only just got out of ’ospital?’

Brenda’s upper lip was trembling slightly, but her voice sounded strangely calm. ‘Would you like to speak to him yourself? Or tell me what to say? I don’t care — but don’t let’s keep him waiting.’

‘What’s ’is name, this feller?’

‘Lewis. Detective Sergeant Lewis.’

Lewis put down the phone.

Like Brooks a few minutes earlier, he was sitting on the side of the bed — Morse’s bed.

‘That’s fixed that up, then, sir. I still feel you’d be better off staying in bed, though.’

‘Nonsense!’

Lewis looked with some concern across at his chief, lying back against three pillows, in pyjamas striped in maroon, pale blue, and white, with an array of bottles and medicaments on the bedside table: aspirin, Alka Seltzer, indigestion tablets, penicillin, paracetamol — and a bottle of The Macallan, almost empty.

He looked blotchy.

He looked ghastly.

‘No rush, is there, sir?’ he asked in a kindly manner.

‘Not much danger of me rushing today.’ He put down the book he’d been reading, and Lewis saw its title: The Anatomy of Melancholy.

‘Trying to cheer yourself up, sir?’

‘Oddly enough, I am. Listen to this: “There is no greater cause of melancholy than idleness; no better cure than busyness” — that’s what old Burton says. So tell me all about Bedford.’

So Lewis told him, trying so very hard to miss nothing out; and conscious, as always, that Morse would probably consider of vital importance those things he himself had assumed to be obviously trivial.

And vice versa, of course.

Morse listened, with only the occasional interruption.

‘So you can see, sir, he’s not got much of an alibi, has he?’

‘Lew-is! We won’t want another suspect. We know who killed McClure: the fellow we’re off to see this afternoon. All we’re looking for is a bit more background, a slightly different angle on things. We can’t take Brooks in yet — well, we can; but he’s not going to run away. We ought to wait for a bit more evidence to accumulate.’

‘We certainly haven’t got much, to be truthful, have we?’

‘You’ve still got people looking for the knife?’

Lewis nodded. ‘Eight men on that, sir. Doing the houses Phillotson’s lads didn’t — along most of the road, both sides.’

Morse grunted. ‘I don’t like this fellow Brooks.’

‘You’ve not even seen him yet.’

‘I just don’t like this drugs business.’

‘I doubt if Davies had any part in that. Didn’t seem the type at all.’

‘Just in on the sex.’

‘He fell for that woman in a pretty big way, no doubt about that.’

‘Mm. And you say there may have been somebody in the house while you were there?’

‘As I say, I heard the loo flushing.’

‘Well, a trained detective like you would, wouldn’t he?’

‘When the cat’s away…’

‘Looks like it.’

‘I think he’s the sort of fellow who just welcomes all the floozies with open arms—’

‘And open flies.’

‘You don’t think…’ The thought struck Lewis for the first time. ‘You don’t think…?’

‘The loo-flusher was one and the same as our staircase Lulu? No. Not a chance. Forget it! The really interesting thing is what Davies told you about her — about Ellie Smith, or whatever her name is.’

Morse broke off, wearily, wiping the glistering perspiration from his forehead with a grubby white handkerchief taken from his pyjama top — top number three, in fact, for he had already sweated his way through two pairs of pyjamas since taking to his bed the previous afternoon.

‘Did you take your dose this morning, sir?’

Morse nodded. ‘Double dose, Lewis. That’s always been the secret for me.’

‘I meant the medicine, not the Malt.’

Morse grinned weakly, his forehead immediately prickling with moisture once more, like a windscreen in persistent drizzle.

He lit a cigarette; and coughed revoltingly, his chest feeling like a chunk of excoriated flesh. Then spoke:

‘She said she couldn’t see him on a weekday, right? Saturday OK, though, and perhaps Sunday. Why? Pretty clearly because she knew somebody there on the staircase; and you thought — be honest, now! — you thought it must be somebody who buggered off to his cottage in the Cotswolds somewhere every weekend, and left the coast clear. You thought it was one of the two Students, didn’t you? You thought it was McClure.’

‘To be honest with you, I didn’t, no. I thought it was somebody who didn’t work after Saturday lunchtime until starting up again on Monday morning. I thought it was the scout. I thought it was Brooks.’

‘Oh!’

‘Wasn’t I supposed to think that?’

Morse wiped his brow yet again. ‘I’m not really up to things at the minute, am I?’

‘No, I don’t think you are.’

‘Oh!’

‘I think Brooks wasn’t just a pusher; I think he was a pimp as well. And it was probably too risky for him to let any of his girls get into the college — into the House, sir. So, if this particular girl was going to get in, it was going to be at weekends, when he wasn’t there, when she could make her own arrangements, take her own risks, and set her own fee — without cutting him in at all.’

Morse was coughing again. ‘Why don’t I put you in charge of this case, Lewis?’

‘Because I couldn’t handle it.’

‘Don’t you think you can handle Brooks?’

‘No.’

‘You think we ought to wait a couple of days, don’t you — before we see him?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you think I’ll agree to that?’

‘No.’

Morse closed Burton’s immortal work, and folded the duvet aside.

‘Will you do me a quick favour, Lewis, while I get dressed?’

‘Course.’

‘Just nip out and get me the News of the World, will you?’

Chapter thirty

At 1.15 p.m., on the way to the Brooks’s residence in East Oxford, they had called briefly at Daventry Avenue. Still no sign of any murder weapon.

‘Give ’em a chance,’ Lewis had said.

Morse had insisted on taking the Jaguar, with Lewis driving: he thought the finale of Die Walküre might well refresh his drooping spirits, and the tape (he said) was already in position there. But strangely enough he hadn’t turned it on; even more strangely he appeared ready to engage in conversation in a car.

Most unusual.

‘You ought to invest in a bit of Wagner, Lewis. Do you far more good than all that rubbish you play.’

‘Not when you’re there, I don’t.’

‘Thank God!’

‘I don’t get on to you, for what you like.’

‘What do you like best?’

Lewis came up to the roundabout at the Plain, and took the second exit, the one after St Clements, into the Cowley Road.

‘I’ll tell you what I can’t stand, sir — the bagpipes.’

Morse smiled. ‘Somebody once said that was his favourite music — the sound of bagpipes slowly fading away into the distance.’

It was a quarter-to two when Ted and Brenda Brooks, side by side on the living-room settee, sat facing the two detectives: Morse in the only armchair there, Lewis on an upright chair imported for the occasion from the kitchen.

Brooks himself, in his late forties, dressed in a white, short-sleeved shirt and well-pressed grey slacks, looked pale and strained. But soon he appeared to relax a little, and was confirming, with an occasional nod of his greying head, the background details which Morse now briefly rehearsed: his years as a scout at Wolsey, where he had got to know Matthew Rodway (‘Yup’); and Dr McClure (‘Yup’); his present employment at the Pitt Rivers Museum (‘Yup’).

The skirmishing had been very civilized, and Mrs Brooks asked them all if they’d like a cup of tea.

But Morse declined, speaking, as it appeared, for all three of them, and turning back to Brooks and to the trickier part of the examination paper.

‘Do you want your wife to be here, sir, while I ask you — I’m sorry — some rather awkward questions?’

‘She stays. You stay, don’t you, Bren? Nothing she shouldn’t know about, Inspector.’

Lewis watched the man carefully, but could see no greater signs of nervousness than was normal among witnesses being interviewed by the police. Wasn’t she, Mrs Brooks, the more obviously nervous of the two?

‘Mr Brooks,’ Morse began. ‘I know you’ve been in hospital, but please bear with me. We have evidence that there was some trading in drugs on your old staircase over the last three or four years.’

‘Nothin’ to do wi’ me if there was.’

‘You knew nothing of it?’

‘No.’

‘It’s difficult for us, you see, because we have a statement to the effect that you did know something about it.’

‘Christ! I’d like to know who it was as told you that. Load o’ bloody lies!’

‘You’d have no objections to coming along to HQ and going through that statement with us?’

‘I can’t — not just now, I can’t — but I will — I’ll be ’appy to — when I’m better. You don’t want to give me another bloody ’eart attack, do you?’

Brooks’s manner of speaking, which had begun in a gentle Oxfordshire burr, had suddenly switched into the coarse articulation with which he was wont to address his wife.

‘Would you have known, Mr Brooks, if there had been drugs?’

‘No job o’ mine to interfere. Everybody’s got their own lives to live.’

‘There were parties there, on the staircase?’

‘You try an’ stop ’em!’

‘Did you try?’

‘If you talk to people they’ll all tell you I were a good scout. That’s all that worried me.’

‘I’m afraid we shan’t be able to talk to Dr McClure, shall we?’

‘There’s others.’

‘Did you like Dr McClure?’

‘OK, yeah.’

‘You both left at the same time, I believe.’

‘So wha’?’

‘I just wondered if you had a farewell drink together, that’s all.’

‘Don’t know much about Town and Gown, do you?’

Morse turned to Lewis. ‘Sergeant?’

‘We’ve obviously got to interview anyone, sir, who had a link with Dr McClure. That’s why we’re here, as I told you on the phone. So I shall have to ask you where you were last Sunday — Sunday the twenty-eighth of August.’

‘Huh! Last Sunday?’ He turned to his wife. ‘Hear that, Bren? Not bloody difficult, that one, is it? You tell ’em. You remember better ’an I do. Bloody ’ell! If you reckon I ’ad anything to do wi’ that — last Sunday? Christ!’

Brenda Brooks folded her hands nervously in her lap, and for the first time Morse noticed that the right hand, beneath an elastic support, might be slightly deformed. Perhaps she held them to stop them shaking? But there was nothing she could do about her trembling upper-lip.

‘Well… Ted woke me about three o’clock that Sunday morning—’

‘More like ’alf-two.’

‘—with this awful pain in his chest, and I got up to find the indigestion tablets and I made a cup o’ tea and you seemed better, didn’t you, Ted? Well, a bit better anyway and I slept a bit and he did, just a bit, but it was a bad night.’

‘Terrible!’

‘I got up at six and made some more tea and asked Ted if he wanted any breakfast but he didn’t and the pain was still there, and I said we ought to ring the doctor but Ted said not yet, well, you know, it was Sunday and he’d have to come out special, like. Anyway he got up about ten because I remember we sat in the kitchen listening to The Archers at quarter-past while I got the meat ready — lamb and mint sauce — but Ted couldn’t face it. Then about half-past one, quarter-to two, it got so bad, well, it was no good hanging on any longer and I rang the ambulance and they came in about… well, it was only about ten minutes — ever so quick. He was on a machine at half-past two — about then, weren’t you, Ted?’

‘Intensive Care,’ said the ex-scout, not without a touch of pride. ‘The pain ’ad got t’rific — I knew it were summat serious. Told you so at the time, didn’t I, Bren?’

Brenda nodded dutifully.

It had immediately become clear to Morse that there was now a very considerable obstacle between him and any decision to arrest Edward Brooks on suspicion of murder; a considerable objection even to leaving his name on the list of suspects — which indeed would be a dramatic set-back for the whole case, since Brooks’s name was the only one appearing on Morse’s list.

He looked across now at the faithful little lady sitting there in her skirt and summer blouse next to her husband. If she persisted in her present lies (for Morse was convinced that such they were) it was going to be extremely difficult to discredit her testimony, appearing, as she did, to possess that formidable combination of nervousness and innocence. Any jury would strongly sympathize.

Morse changed tack completely.

‘Do you know, I’m beginning to feel a bit thirsty, Mrs Brooks. Does that offer of a cuppa still stand?’

After Mrs Brooks had put the kettle on and taken the china cups from the dresser, she stood close to the kitchen door. Her hearing was still good. It was the white-haired one who was speaking…

‘Have you got a car, sir?’

‘Not ’ad one for ten year or more.’

‘How do you get to work?’

‘Still go on the bus, mostly.’

‘You don’t bike?’

‘Why d’you ask that?’

‘I saw your cycling helmet in the hall, that’s all.’

‘So?’

‘Didn’t mind me asking, did you?’

‘Why the ’ell should I?’

‘Well, Dr McClure was knifed to death, as you know, and there was an awful lot of blood all over the place — and all over the murderer, like as not. So if he’d driven off in a car, well… these clever lads in the labs, they can trace the tiniest speck of blood…’

‘As I said, though, I ’aven’t got a car.’

‘I still think we’d quite like to have a look at your bike. What do you think, Sergeant Lewis?’

‘Not a question of “liking”, sir. I’m afraid we shall have to take it away.’

‘Well, that’s where you’re wrong, ’cos I ’aven’t got no bike no longer, ’ave I? Bloody stolen, wasn’t it? Sat’day lunchtime, that were — week yesterday. Just went to the Club for a pint and when I got out — there it was, gone! Lock ’n’ all on the back wheel. Ten bloody quid, that fancy lock cost me.’

‘Did you report the theft, sir?’

‘Wha’? Report a stolen bike? In Oxford? You must be jokin’.’

Mrs Brooks came in with a tray.

‘I must ask you to report the theft of your bike, sir,’ said Lewis quietly. ‘To St Aldate’s.’

‘Milk and sugar, Inspector?’

For the first time her eyes looked unflinchingly straight into his, and suddenly Morse knew that behind the nervousness, behind the fear, there lay a look of good companionship. He smiled at her; and she, fleetingly, smiled back at him.

And he felt touched.

And he felt poorly again.

And he felt convinced that he was sitting opposite the man who had murdered Felix McClure; felt it in his bones and in his brains; would have felt it in his soul, had he known what such a thing was and where it was located.

When ten minutes later Mrs Brooks was about to show them out, Morse asked about the two photographs hanging on the wall of the entrance-hall.

‘Well, that one’ — she pointed to a dark, broody-looking girl in her mid-teens or so — ‘that’s my daughter. That’s Ellie. Her first name was Kay, really, but she likes to be called Ellie.’

Phew!

With an effort, Lewis managed not to exchange glances with Morse.

‘That one’ — she pointed to a photograph of herself arm-in-arm, in front of a coach, with a younger, taller, strikingly attractive woman — ‘that’s me and Mrs Stevens, when we went on a school-party to Stratford last year. Lovely, it was. And with a bit of luck I’ll be going with her again this next week. She teaches at the Proctor Memorial School. I clean for her… Well, as I say… I clean for her.’

It seemed for a few seconds that she was going to add a gloss to that last repeated statement. But her husband had shouted from within, and Morse managed not to look down at that disfigured palm again as Brenda Brooks’s hands indulged in a further spasm of floccillation.

Chapter thirty-one

‘Well, well! What do you make of all that?’

The Jaguar was gently negotiating half a dozen traffic-calming humps, before reaching the T-junction at the Cowley Road.

‘Not now, Lewis!’

‘How’re you feeling, sir?’

‘Just change the first letter of my name from “M” to “W”.’

‘You should be in bed.’

Morse looked at his wristwatch. ‘Nearest pub, Lewis. We need to think a little.’

Morse was comparatively unfamiliar with the part of Oxford in which he now found himself. In his own undergraduate days, it had seemed a long way out, being dubbed a ‘Bridge Too Far’ — on the farther side, the eastern side, the wrong side, of Magdalen Bridge — beyond the pale, as it were. Yet even then, three decades earlier, it had been (as it still was) a cosmopolitan, commercial area of fascinating contrasts: of the drab and the delightful; of boarded-up premises and thriving small businesses; of decay and regeneration — a Private Sex Shop at the city-centre end, and a police station at the far Ring Road end, with almost everything between, including (and particularly) a string of highly starred Indian restaurants. Including too (as Morse now trusted) a local pub selling real ale.

Lewis himself knew the area well; and after turning right at the T-junction, he almost immediately turned left into Marsh Road, pulling up there beside the Marsh Harrier.

Ashley Davies, he thought, would almost certainly have approved.

The Good Pubs of Oxford guide always reserved its highest praise for those hostelries where conversation was not impeded (let alone wholly precluded) by stentorian juke-boxes. And certainly Morse was gratified to find no music here. Yet he appeared to Lewis clearly ill-at-ease as he started — well, almost finished really — his first swift pint of Fuller’s ‘London Pride’.

‘What’s worrying you, sir?’

‘I dunno. I’ve just got a sort of premonition—’

‘Didn’t know you believed in them.’

‘—about this copy-cat-crime business. You know, you get a crime reported in the press — somebody pinching a baby from outside a supermarket, say — and before you can say “Ann Robinson” somebody else’s having a go at the same thing.’

Lewis followed the drift of Morse’s thought. ‘The article we placed in the Oxford Mail?’

‘Perhaps.’

‘You mean, we shouldn’t perhaps…?’

‘Oh, no! It was our duty to print that. And for all we know it could still produce something. Though I doubt it.’

Morse drained his beer before continuing: ‘You know, that knife’s somewhere, isn’t it? The knife that someone stuck into McClure. The knife that Brooks stuck into McClure. That’s the infuriating thing for me. Knowing that the bloody thing’s somewhere, even if it’s at the bottom of the canal.’

‘Or the Cherwell.’

‘Or the Isis.’

‘Or the gravel-pits…’

But the conversation was briefly interrupted whilst Lewis, on the landlord’s announcement of Last Orders, was now despatched to the bar for the second round.

Perhaps it was Morse’s bronchial affliction which was affecting his short-term memory, since he appeared to be suffering under the misapprehension that it was he who had purchased the first.

Whatever the case, however, Morse quite certainly looked happier as he picked up his second pint, and picked up the earlier conversation.

‘Brooks wouldn’t have been too near any water, would he?’

‘Not that far off, surely. And he’d have to go over Magdalen Bridge on his way home, anyway.’

‘On his blood-saddled bike…’

‘All he’d need to do was drop his knife over the bridge there — probably be safe till Kingdom Come.’

Morse shook his head. ‘He’d have been worried about being seen.’

Lewis shrugged. ‘He could have waited till it was dark.’

‘It was bloody morning, Lewis!’

‘He could’ve ditched it earlier. In a garden or somewhere.’

‘No! We’d have found it by now, surely.’

‘We’re still trying,’ said Lewis, quietly.

‘You know’ — Morse sounded weary — ‘it’s not quite so easy as you think — getting rid of things. You get a guilt-complex about being seen. I remember a few weeks ago trying to get rid of an old soldier in a rubbish-bin in Banbury Road. And just after I’d dropped it in, somebody I knew drove past in a car, and waved…’

‘He’d seen you?’

‘What makes you think it was a “he”?’

‘You felt a bit guilty?’

Morse nodded. ‘So it’s vitally important that we find the knife. I just can’t see how we’re going to make a case out against Brooks unless we can find the murder weapon.’

‘Have you thought of the other possibility, sir?’

‘What’s that?’ Morse looked up with the air of a Professor of Mathematics being challenged by an innumerate pupil.

‘He took the knife home with him.’

‘No chance. We’re talking about instinctive behaviour here. You don’t stab somebody — and then just go back home and wash your knife up in Co-op detergent with the rest of the cutlery — and put it back in the kitchen drawer.’

‘There’d be a knife missing, though — from a set, perhaps.’

‘So what? Knives get lost, broken…’

‘So Mrs Brooks would probably know?’

‘But she’s not going to tell us, is she?’

Morse seemed to relax as he leaned back against the wall-seat, and looked around him.

‘You sure it was Brooks?’ asked Lewis quietly.

‘Too many coincidences, Lewis. All right, they play a far bigger part in life than most of us are prepared to admit. But not in this case. Just think! Brooks left Wolsey, for good, on exactly the same day as the man who was murdered — McClure. Not only that, the pair of them had been on the same staircase together — exactly the same staircase — for several years. Then, a year later, Brooks has a heart attack on exactly the same day as McClure gets murdered. Just add all that up — go on, Lewis!’

‘Like I say, though, you’ve always believed in coincidences.’

‘Look! I could stomach two, perhaps — but not three.’

Lewis, who’d believed that Morse could easily stomach at least four, was not particularly impressed; and now, looking around him, he saw that he and Morse were the only clients left in the Marsh Harrier.

It was 3.10 p.m.

‘We’d better be off, sir.’

‘Nonsense! My turn, isn’t it?’

‘It’s way past closing time.’

‘Nonsense!’

But the landlord, after explaining that serving further drinks after 3 p.m. on Sundays was wholly against the law, was distinctly unimpressed by Morse’s assertion that he, the latter, was the law. And a minute or so later it was a slightly embarrassed Lewis who was unlocking the passenger door of the Jaguar — before making his way back to North Oxford.

Chapter thirty-two

Perpetually, on the drive back to North Oxford, Morse had been wiping the perspiration from his forehead; and Lewis was growing increasingly worried, especially when, once back home, Morse immediately poured himself a can of beer.

‘Just to replace the moisture,’ Morse had averred.

‘You ought to get the doc in, you know that. And you ought not to be drinking any more, with all those pills.’

‘Lewis!’ Morse’s voice was vicious. ‘I appreciate your concern for my health. But never again — never! — lecture me about what I drink. Or if I drink. Or when I drink. Is — that — clear?’

In a flush of anger, Lewis rose to his feet. ‘I’ll be getting back—’

‘Siddown!’

Morse took out a cigarette, and then looked up at the still-standing Lewis. ‘You don’t think I ought to smoke, either?’

‘It’s your life, sir. If you’re determined to dig yourself an early grave…’

‘I don’t want to die, not just yet,’ said Morse quietly.

And suddenly, as if by some strange alchemy, Lewis felt his anger evaporating; and, as bidden, he sat down.

Morse put the cigarette back in its packet. ‘I’m sorry — sorry I got so cross. Forgive me. It’s just that I’ve always valued my independence so much — too much, perhaps. I just don’t like being told what to do, all right?’

‘All right.’

‘Well, talk to me. Tell me what you thought about Brooks.’

‘No, sir. You’re the thinker — that’s why you get a bigger pay-packet than me. You tell me.’

‘Well, I think exactly the same as I did before. After young Rodway’s suicide, McClure found out about the availability of drugs on the staircase there — cannabis, amphetamines, cocaine, crack, ecstasy, LSD, heroin, whatever — and he also found out that it was Brooks who was supplying them, and making a pretty penny for himself in the process. Then, at some point, McClure told Brooks he’d got two options: either he packed up his job as a scout and left; or else he’d be reported to the University authorities — and probably the police — and faced with criminal proceedings. So Brooks had just about enough nous to read the writing on the wall: he resigned, and got another job, with a reluctant McClure providing a luke-warm testimonial to the Pitt Rivers Museum. But there were too many links with his former clients — and not just on the old staircase; and he kept up his lucrative little sideline after he’d left Wolsey — until McClure somehow got wind of the situation — and confronted him — and told him that this time it wasn’t just an empty threat. I suspect Brooks must have had some sort of hold on McClure, I don’t know. But Brooks said he was ready to step into line, and do whatever McClure wanted. And he arranged a meeting with McClure — at McClure’s place in Daventry Court, a week ago today. That’s the way I see it.’

‘So you don’t believe a word of his alibi?’

‘No. And it isn’t his alibi at all — it’s hers. Mrs Brooks’s alibi for him.’

‘And you think he biked up to see McClure?’

‘He biked, yes. Whether he’d already decided to murder McClure then, I don’t know. But he took a murder weapon with him, a knife from his wife’s kitchen drawer; and I’ve not the slightest doubt he took as many precautions as he could to keep himself from being recognized — probably wrapped a scarf round his face as if he’d got the toothache. And with his cycling helmet—’

‘You’re making it all up, sir.’

Morse wiped his brow once more. ‘Of course I am! In a case like this you’ve got to put up some… some scaffolding. You’ve got to sort of take a few leaps in the dark, Lewis. You’ve got to hypothesize…’

‘Hypothesize about the knife then, sir.’

‘He threw it in the canal.’

‘So we’re not going to find it?’

‘I’m sure we’re not. We’d have found it by now.’

‘Unless, as I say, he took it home with him — and washed it up and wiped it dry and then put it back in the kitchen drawer.’

‘Ye-es.’

‘Probably he did mean to throw it in the canal, or somewhere. But something could have stopped him, couldn’t it?’

‘Such as?’

‘Such as a heart attack,’ suggested Lewis gently.

Morse nodded. ‘If he suddenly realized he hadn’t got any time to… if he suddenly felt a terrible pain…’

‘“T’rific”, that’s what he said.’

‘Mm.’

‘What about the bike, though? He must have ridden it up to Daventry Court, mustn’t he? So if he’d felt the pain starting, you’d have thought he’d get back home as fast as he could.’

Morse shook his head. ‘It doesn’t add up, does it? He must have ditched his bike somewhere on the way back.’

‘Where, though?’

Morse pondered the problem awhile. Then, remembering Brooks’s contempt for anyone taking the trouble to report a bicycle-theft in Oxford, he suddenly saw that it had ceased to be a problem at all.

‘Do you know a poem called “Five Ways to Kill a Man”?’

‘No.’

Wearily Morse rose to his feet, fetched an anthology of modern verse from his shelves, looked up Brock in the index, turned to the poem — and read the last stanza aloud.

But Lewis, though not unaccustomed to hearing Morse make some apposite quotation from the poets between draughts of real ale, could see no possible connexion in logic here.

‘I’m not with you.’

Morse looked down at the stanza again; then slowly recited his own parody of the lines:

‘You ought to have been a poet, sir.’

‘I am a poet, Lewis.’

Morse now coughed violently, expectorating into a tissue a disgusting gobbet of yellowish-green phlegm streaked with bright blood.

Lewis, although he saw it, said nothing.

And Morse continued:

‘First thing is to get Brooks in, and go through Susan Ewers’ statement with him. She’s a good witness, that one — and he’ll have to come up with something better than he gave us this afternoon.’

‘When shall we bring him in, though? He’s got a point, hasn’t he? We don’t want to give him another heart attack.’

‘Don’t we?’

‘Day or two?’

‘Day or three.’

Morse finished his beer. It had taken that swift drinker an inordinately long time to do so; and if Morse had experienced a premonition earlier, Lewis himself now sensed that his chief was seriously ill.

‘What about the photograph, sir? Mrs Brooks’s daughter?’

‘Interesting question. I wonder. I wonder where that young lady fits into the picture.’

‘Pretty well everywhere, wouldn’t you say?’

‘Ye-es. “Kay” — “K” — “Eleanor” — “Ellie” — we’ve got to assume she’s the same girl, I suppose: Mrs B’s daughter — Mr B’s step-daughter — staircase-tart for Messrs Rodway and Davies — mistress for Dr McClure…’

‘She must be quite a girl.’

‘But what about that other photograph, Lewis? The school-mistress? D’you know, I’ve got a feeling she might be able to shed a little light—’

But Morse was coughing uncontrollably now, finally disappearing into the bathroom, whence was heard a series of revolting retches.

Lewis walked out into the entrance hall, where he flicked open Morse’s black plastic telephone-index to the letter ‘S’. He was lucky. Under ‘Summertown Health Centre’ he found an ‘Appointments’ number; and an ‘Emergency’ number.

He rang the latter.

That same afternoon, just after four o’clock, Dr Richard Rayson, Chaucerian scholar, and fellow of Trinity College, Oxford, strolled round his garden in Daventry Avenue. For almost three weeks he had been away with his family in the Dolomites. Gardening, in truth, had never been the greatest passion of his life; and as he stood surveying the state of his neglected front lawn, the epithet which sprang most readily to his literate mind was ‘agrestal’: somewhat overgrown; run to seed; wild, as the Shorter Oxford might define it.

Yet strangely, for such an unobservant man, he’d spotted the knife almost immediately — a couple of feet or so inside the property, between an untrimmed laurel bush and the vertical slats of a front fence sorely in need of some re-creosoting. There it was, lying next to a semi-squashed tin of Coca Cola.

Nina Rayson, a compensatingly practical sort of partner, had welcomed her husband’s discovery, promptly washing it in Sainsbury’s ‘Economy’ washing-up liquid, and forthwith adding it to her own canteen of cutlery. A good knife, it was: a fairly new, sturdy, unusually broad-bladed instrument, in no immediate need of any further sharpening.

That same evening, at nine-thirty, Brenda Brooks was aware that her jangled nerves could stand very little more that day. Paradoxically, though, she felt almost competent about coping with the loathsome man she’d just seen to bed, with a cup of tea, two digestive biscuits, and one sleeping tablet. At least she knew him: knew the worst about him — for there was nothing but the worst to know. It was now the unknown that was worrying her the more deeply: that strange technical jargon of the doctors and nurses at the hospital; the brusque yet not wholly unsympathetic questions of the two policemen who had earlier called there.

She found herself neurotically dreading any phone-call; any ringing of the door-bell. Anything.

What was that?

What was that?

Was she imagining things — imagining noises?

There it was again: a muffled, insistent, insidious, tapping…

Fearfully, she edged towards the front door.

And there, behind the frosted glass, she saw a vaguely human silhouette; and she turned the Yale lock, and opened the door, her heart fluttering nervously.

‘You!’ she whispered.

Chapter thirty-three

Oxford’s St Giles’ Fair is held annually on the first Monday and Tuesday after the first Sunday every September, with the whole area of St Giles’ brought into use, from the Martyrs’ Memorial up to (and beyond) St Giles’ Church at the northern end, where the broad, tree-lined avenue bifurcates to form the Woodstock Road to the left and the Banbury Road to the right.

In mid-afternoon on Tuesday, 6 September (two days after Lewis had telephoned the Summertown Health Centre), Kevin Costyn was sauntering under the plane trees there, along the various rides and amusements and candy-floss stalls. Nothing could really kindle his imagination or interest, for the Naked Lady of earlier years, in her rat-infested cage, no longer figured in the fair’s attractions. And as Kevin considered the jazzy, jolty, vertiginous cars and carriages, he felt no real wish to part with any of his limited money.

That day the children in the state schools in Oxfordshire had returned to their classrooms; and for the first time in twelve years Costyn himself was not one of them. No more school. But no job yet, either. He’d signed on at the Job Centre. Even taken away some literature on Youth Employment Schemes and Opportunities. Not that he was going to read that bumf. He wasn’t interested in jobs. Just money. Well, not just money, no.

Smugly he grinned to himself as he stood outside the Bird and Baby and watched the gigantic, gyrating structure of the Big Wheel.

The previous month he’d been part of a three-man ram-raid at a Summertown supermarket, but it hadn’t proved the windfall they’d expected. Shop windows — replaced shop windows — were being made of tougher glass; and several regular, and formerly profitable, targets were now protected by concrete frontal pillars. That wasn’t the real trouble, though. It was getting rid of the stuff that was getting trickier all the time. Cigarettes had usually been the best bet: lightweight, handy to stack, easy to sell. But booze was becoming one helluva job to sell; and the cases of whisky, gin, and vodka they’d got away with then had changed hands for a miserly £850, though according to Costyn’s (admittedly less than competent) calculation their street-value would have been four times that amount. It was the police — becoming far cannier at tracking down the wholesale-market contacts — they were the real trouble.

There must be easier ways of being able to afford the life of Riley, surely?

Yes, occasionally there were…

It had been Kevin Costyn himself who had answered the door the previous afternoon, to find Mrs Stevens standing there — a subtly scented Mrs Stevens, with a moist, red beauty at her lips.

Could she come in? She’d come in.

Would he listen to what she had to say? He’d listened.

Would he be willing to do as she asked? He’d be willing.

Would he be able to do what she wanted? He’d be able.

Payment? What about payment? Did he understand she had very little money? He’d understood.

How would he like her to pay him, then?

Well…

‘What time’s your mother back?’ she’d asked.

No one over the past few years had deemed it necessary, or deemed it wise, to challenge Costyn’s minority; nor did the young barmaid now, as she pulled him a pint of Burton Ale in the Bird and Baby (‘Open All Day’).

Ten minutes later he made his way to the Gents, where he spat a globule of phlegm on to the tiled floor, and where his left hand was directing his urination whilst his right hand was seeking, wholly ineffectually, to spell out fuck in red Biro on the corrugated surface of the wall in front of him.

‘Fuck’ was a key word in Costyn’s limited vocabulary. Had already been so for many years, ever since, night after night, his mum and dad (perhaps, his dad) had bawled their mutual ‘fuck-off’s at each other. Until the day when his dad had apparently interpreted the injunction rather too literally — and just, well, ‘fucked off’. Indeed, so significant had the word become to the sole son of that hapless, unhappy union, that he regularly inserted it, in its present-participial form, into any lengthy-ish word which seemed to invite some internal profanation. Such a process is known, in the Homeric epics, as ‘tmesis’ — although, in truth, Costyn knew of ‘Homer’ only as a breed of pigeon; for his father had once kept such a pigeon, trained (once released) to find its way home from the most improbable distances. Which is more than its owner had done, once he had left his home, and his wife, and his son… and his pigeon.

Before leaving the Gents, Costyn made a purchase. The condom machine looked, even to him, pretty theft-proof; and he decided for once to pay for his potential pleasures. For a few seconds he mentally debated the respective merits of ‘lubrication’, ‘sensitivity’, and ‘silkiness’; finally plumping for the latter as he thought — yet again! — of the blouse that he’d slowly eased down over the suntanned shoulders of Mrs Julia Stevens.

At 4 p.m., standing waiting for a Cowley Road bus outside Marks and Spencer in Queen’s Street, Costyn recognized an ex-pupil of the Proctor Memorial immediately in front of him; and he put a hand on her untanned shoulder.

‘Bin ’avin’ a ride, darlin’?’

She turned round. ‘Wha’ d’you want?’

‘What about a little ride with me, darlin’? I got the necessaries.’

‘Fuck off!’

Few girls ever spoke to him in such a fashion. But Costyn felt little resentment as he fingered the two packets of Silken Dalliance in his pocket…

Payment for his services?

‘Half now; half later,’ that’s what Mrs Stevens had promised. And as he sat upstairs on the Cowley Road bus, Costyn savoured yet again that intoxicating cocktail of excitement and sensuality.

Half later… when the job was done; when the jobs (plural, perhaps), were done.

Was it terribly risky, what he’d so willingly agreed to do? Especially since she wasn’t exactly sure of when she’d be calling on him. So what? Much riskier for her than for him. Not that she’d ever need to worry about him: he’d never breathe a word of it to any living soul.

Never.

And anyone who thought he would was suffering under a misapprefuckinhension.

Chapter thirty-four