The Daughters of Cain

Chapter thirty-five

After ringing the emergency number the previous Sunday, it had been a sad sight that confronted Lewis in the bathroom: Morse standing creased over the pedestal basin, his cheeks wholly drained of colour, his vomit streaked with blood forming a chrysanthemum pattern, scarlet on white, across the porcelain.

Dr Paul Roblin had been adamant.

Ambulance!

Lewis had woken up to the truth an hour or so later: for a while at least, he was going to be left alone with a murder investigation.

Such a prospect would normally have daunted him; yet the present case was unusual in that it had already established itself into a pattern. In the past, the more spectacular cases on which he and Morse had worked together had often involved some bizarre, occasionally some almost incredible, twists of fate. But the murder of Dr Felix McClure appeared — surely was — a comparatively straightforward affair. There could be little doubt — none in Morse’s mind — about the identity of the murderer. It was just a question of timing now, and patience: of the accumulation, the aggregation of evidence, against a man who’d had the means, the motive, and the opportunity, to murder McClure. Only concerning the actual commission of the crime was there lack of positive evidence. Lack of any evidence. And what a feather in his cap it would be if he, Lewis, could come up with something on that, during Morse’s reluctant, yet enforced, immobility.

For the present, then, it was he who was sole arbiter of the course of further enquiries; of the most productive deployment of police resources. He had not been born great, Lewis was aware of that; nor did the rank of Detective Sergeant mark him out as a man who had achieved any significant greatness. Yet for a few days now, some measure of vicarious greatness was being thrust upon him; and he would have been encouraged by the Latin proverb (had he known it) that ‘Greatness is but many small littles’, since it was upon a series of ‘small littles’ that he embarked over the following three days — Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, 5, 6, 7 September.

Over these few days many statements were taken from people, both Town and Gown, some fairly closely, some only peripherally, connected with the murdered man and with his putative murderer. And it was Lewis himself who had visited the JR2 on Tuesday afternoon for it to be confirmed, quite unequivocally, that Mr Edward Brooks had been admitted, via Casualty, to the Coronary Care Unit at 2.32 p.m. on Sunday, 28 August; that Brooks had spent twenty-four hours in Intensive Care before being transferred to Level 7, whence he had been discharged three days later.

Whilst in the hospital, Lewis had called in to see Morse (his second visit), but had refused to be drawn into any discussion of new developments in the enquiry. This for two reasons: first, that there were no new developments; and, second, that Superintendent Strange had strongly urged against such a course of action — ‘Start talking about it, and he’ll start thinking about it. And once he starts thinking, he’ll start thinking about drinking, whatever the state of his innards…’ So Lewis stayed only a few minutes that afternoon, taking a ‘Get Well’ card from Mrs Lewis, and a small bunch of seedless white grapes from himself, the latter immediately confiscated by the hawk-eyed ward-sister.

From the JR2, Lewis had gone on to interview the Brooks’s family GP, Dr Philip Gregson, at the Cowley Road Health Centre.

The brief medical report on Edward Brooks which Lewis read there was quite optimistic: ‘Mild heart attack — condition now stable — surprisingly swift recovery. GP appt 1 wk; JR2 out/p appt 2 wk.’

About Brenda Brooks, however, Gregson was more circumspect. She had, yes, suffered a very nasty little injury to her right hand; and, yes, he had referred her to a specialist. But he couldn’t comment in any way upon his colleague’s findings. If further information were considered necessary…

In such fashion was it that Lewis’s queries were concluded late that Tuesday afternoon — with the telephone number of an orthopaedic surgeon, and with the knowledge that he was getting nowhere fairly slowly.

Yet only twenty-four hours were to elapse before the first major breakthrough in the case was destined to occur.

Chapter thirty-six

It took a long time, an inordinately long time, for the penny to drop.

Dr Richard Rayson had been wholly unaware of the great excitement which had been witnessed by the residents of Daventry Avenue over the previous week. Yet his inability to establish any connection between the discovery of a knife and the death of a neighbour is readily explicable. In the first place, the physical police presence around Daventry Court had been withdrawn on the day prior to his return from abroad. Then, too, Rayson had not as yet re-instated his standing-order with the Summertown newsagent for the daily delivery of the Oxford Mail; he had therefore missed the brief item tucked away at the bottom of page 3 on Monday (would probably have missed it anyway). And finally, and most significantly, his communications with his neighbours, on either side, had been almost completely severed of late — this breakdown occasioned by a series of increasingly bitter differences of view over the maintenance of boundary fences, the planting of inter-property trees, an application for planning permission, and (most recently) the dangerous precedent of a teenage party.

Thus, after spending the whole of the Monday and Tuesday with his wife in regrooming their garden, it was only at lunchtime on Wednesday, 7 September, that Rayson was re-introduced into the mainstream of Oxford life and gossip — at a cocktail reception in Trinity College to meet a group of librarians from Oklahoma.

‘Fine drop of claret, what, Richard?’ one of his colleagues had affirmed.

‘Beautifully balanced little wine, George.’

‘By the way, you must have known old McClure, I suppose? Lives only a few doors from you, what? Lived, rather.’

Rayson had frowned. ‘McClure?’

‘You know, the poor sod who got himself knifed?’

McClure. Felix McClure. Knifed.

The knife.

Just after five o’clock that afternoon, Detective Sergeant Lewis stood looking down at the prime exhibit, laid out on the Formica-topped surface of the kitchen in Ray-son’s elegant detached house in Daventry Avenue — seven properties distant, on the Woodstock Road side, from the scene of McClure’s murder. As Rayson had explained over the phone, the knife had been found just inside the front fence, had been picked up, washed, dried, put away, picked up again, used to cut a roll of boiled ham, re-washed, re-dried, put away again — and picked up yet again when Rayson had returned from Trinity in the late afternoon, and examined it with a sort of ghoulish fascination.

With no prospects, therefore, of the exhibit retaining any incriminating fingerprints or blood-stains, Lewis in turn now picked up the black-handled knife, its blade unusually broad at the base, but tapering to a sharp-looking point at the end. And concurrently several thoughts coursed through his mind — exciting thoughts. There was the description, for a start, of the murder weapon — so very similar to this knife — which had appeared in the Oxford Mail, the description which was perhaps worrying Morse somewhat when he’d mentioned his premonition about the possibility of a copycat killing. Then there was the firm likelihood that the second of Morse’s necessary prerequisites had now been met — not only a body, but also a weapon; and this one surely seemed to fit the bill so very nicely. And then — by far the most exciting thought of all — the strong possibility that the knife had come from a set of such knives, one of which Lewis had seen so very recently: that slim, elegant, black-handled little knife with which Mrs Brenda Brooks had sliced the Madeira cake the previous Sunday afternoon.

Chapter thirty-seven

On Thursday, 8 September, as on the previous day, so many things were happening in close sequence that it is difficult for the chronicler to decide upon the most comprehensible way in which to record events, events which were to some degree contemporaneous but which also overlapped and which in their full implications stretched both before and beyond their strict temporal occurrence.

Let the account begin at Morse’s flat in North Oxford.

Morse was due to be discharged at ten o’clock that morning. Lewis had rung through to the ward-sister half an hour earlier to save Morse any wait for an ambulance and to chauffeur him home in style — only to discover that his chief had already discharged himself, getting a lift from one of the consultants there who was on his way out to Bicester.

Lewis rang the door-bell at 9.45 a.m., experiencing a customary qualm of semi-apprehension as he waited outside that lonely flat — until a fully dressed Morse, his cheeks rosy-red, suddenly appeared on the threshold, panting like a breathless bulldog.

‘I’m just starting a new regimen, Lewis. No more nicotine, limited — very limited — alcohol, plenty of fresh fruit and salad, and regular exercise. What about that? I’ve’ — he paused awhile to get his breath — ‘I’ve just done a dozen press-ups. You’d never have thought that possible a week ago, now, would you?’

‘You must be feeling quite, er, elated, sir.’

‘“Knackered” is the word I think you’re looking for, Lewis. But come in! Good to see you. Have a drink.’

Almost as if he were trespassing, Lewis entered the lounge and sat down.

‘Nothing for me, thanks.’

‘I’ll just…’ Morse quickly drained a tumbler of some pale amber liquid that stood on one of the shelves of the book-lined room beside the Deutsche Grammophon cassettes of Tristan und Isolde. ‘A small, celebratory libation, that, Lewis — in gratitude to whatever gods there be that temporarily I have survived the perils and dangers of this mortal life.’

Lewis managed a grin, half sad, half happy — and immediately told Morse about the knife.

‘I don’t believe it! We’d had those gardens searched.’

‘Only up to six either side, sir. If only we’d gone a couple further.’

‘But why didn’t this fellow Rayson find it earlier? Is he blind or something?’

‘He was in Italy.’

‘Oh.’

‘You don’t sound all that pleased about it.’

‘What? Course I am. Well done!’

‘I know you were a bit worried about that Oxford Mail article…’

‘I was?’

‘You know, the premonition you had—’

‘Nonsense! I don’t even know what a premonition is.’

‘Well, if that description’s anywhere near accurate, sir, I think we’ve got the knife that was used to kill McClure. And I think I know where it came from. And I think you do, too.’

The small round-faced clock on the mantelpiece showed two minutes after ten, and for a while Morse sat in silence. Then, of a sudden, he jumped to his feet and, against all the medical advice he’d so meekly accepted over the previous few days, insisted on being driven immediately to police HQ, stopping (as it happened) only briefly along the journey, in a slip-road on the left, just opposite the Sainsbury supermarket in Kidlington, to buy a packet of Dunhill King-Size cigarettes.

Brenda Brooks had spent the previous night not in her own house in Addison Road but in the spare bedroom, the only other bedroom, of Julia Stevens’ house in Baldwin Road. After Mrs Stevens had left for school at 8.15 a.m., Brenda had eaten a bowl of Corn Flakes and a round of toast and marmalade. Her appointment at the hairdresser’s was for 9.15 a.m.; and fairly soon after her breakfast she was closing the Oxford-blue front door behind her, testing (as always) that the lock was firmly engaged, and walking down towards the Cowley Road for her Special Offer Wash-and-Perm.

On her way home, well over an hour and a half later, she bought two salmon fillets, a pack of butter, and a carton of ecologically friendly washing-up liquid.

The sun was shining.

As she turned into Addison Road she immediately spotted the marked police car, parked on the double-yellow lines across the road from her house; spotted a second car, too, the elegant-looking lovingly polished maroon-coloured Jaguar she’d seen the previous Sunday afternoon.

Even as she put her key into the Yale lock, she felt the hand on her shoulder, heard the man’s voice, and heard, too, the ringing of the telephone just inside the hall.

‘Get a move on,’ said Morse quickly. ‘You may just catch it.’

But the ringing stopped just before she could reach the phone; and taking off her lightweight summer coat, and gently patting the back of her blue-rinsed curls, she turned to the two men who stood just outside, the two men she’d seen the previous Sunday afternoon.

‘If it’s Ted you want, you’ll have to come back later, I’m afraid. He’s up at the JR2 — he’s got an Outpatient appointment.’

‘When do you expect him back?’ asked Lewis.

‘I don’t know really. He’ll be back for lunch, I should think, unless he calls in at the Club for a game of snooker.’

‘How did he get to the hospital?’

Mrs Brooks hesitated. ‘I… I don’t know.’ The fingers of her left hand were plucking their way along the invisible rosary she held in her right. ‘You’d better come in, hadn’t you?’

Haltingly, nervously, as they sat again in the lounge, in the same sedentary formation as before, Mrs Brooks sought to explain the situation. She had been to Stratford the previous evening with a friend and hadn’t returned until late — about midnight — as she’d known she would, anyway. And she’d stayed with this person, this friend, at her house — overnight. Ted knew all about the arrangement. He was due at Outpatients the next morning, and she hadn’t wanted to disturb his night’s sleep — hadn’t disturbed his night’s sleep. He was getting along quite nicely and the doctors said how important it was to rest — to have regular rest and sleep. He hadn’t shown her the little blue appointments card from the Oxfordshire Health Authority, but she thought he was due at the hospital somewhere between nine and ten.

‘You haven’t been here, in this house, since — since when?’ asked Morse, rather brusquely.

‘Four o’clock, yesterday afternoon. Or just before. The coach left at five.’

‘You don’t seem to have been too worried about Mr Brooks coping… with meals, that sort of thing?’

‘Don’t you think so, Inspector?’ Her eyes, rather sad and weary now, looked into Morse’s; and it was Morse who was the first to look away.

Lewis sounded a kindlier note. ‘You’ve just come back from the hairdresser’s?’

She nodded the tightly permed hair. ‘The Golden Scissors, in Cowley Road.’

‘Er… what was the play, by the way?’

‘Twelfth Night.’

‘Did you enjoy it?’

She half-smiled. ‘Well, I couldn’t quite follow all the — you know, what they were saying. But I loved it, yes, and I’d love to see it again.’

‘And you went with… with a friend, you say?’

‘Yes, with a school-party.’

‘And this friend…?’

Lewis was noting her name and address when the telephone rang once more; and this time Mrs Brooks reached the hall swiftly. As she did so, Morse immediately pointed in the opposite direction, and Lewis, equally swiftly, stepped quietly into the kitchen where he opened a drawer by the side of the sink.

Morse meanwhile listened keenly to one side of a telephone conversation.

‘Yes?’

‘Is he all right?’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘What’s happened, do you think?’

‘No. I wasn’t here, you see.’

‘Of course I will.’

‘Can you just give me the number again?’

‘All right.’

Brenda Brooks put down the phone slowly, her face anxious as she walked back into the lounge — only a few seconds after Lewis, with a silent thumbs-up sign, had re-appeared from the kitchen and quickly resumed his seat.

‘Anything important?’ asked Morse.

‘It was the hospital. Ted’s not been there. Not yet. So the lady at Appointments says. He was due there at twenty-past nine, it seems.’

‘What do you think’s happened to him?’ asked Morse quietly.

‘That’s what she asked me. I don’t know.’

‘I’m sure everything’s fine,’ continued Morse. ‘He’s probably just got the time wrong.’

‘That’s exactly what she said,’ whispered Brenda Brooks.

‘She’ll ring you back — when he gets there.’

‘That’s… that’s exactly…’

But the tears had started now.

She opened her handbag and took out a handkerchief, and said, ‘Sorry’; said ‘Sorry’ five times. And then, ‘Oh dear! Where’s my purse? I must have…’ She got up and went to the hall where she patted the pockets of her summer coat, and came back and looked rather fecklessly around. ‘I must have…’

‘You did some shopping, didn’t you? You may have left it…?’ suggested Lewis.

A few minutes later, Mrs Brooks was seated in the back of the police car, impatient and worried; but so glad to be away from the two detectives — who now stood in her kitchen.

‘What do you reckon, sir?’

‘About Brooks? Buggered off, hasn’t he — sensible chap! He must have guessed we were on his tail.’

‘What about her? She seemed glad to get away.’

‘She’s worried about her purse — money, cards, keys…’

‘More than that, I think.’

‘Well, you made her feel a bit guilty, didn’t you, checking up on her hairdresser — and Stratford.’

‘What?’

‘Quite right too, Lewis. She was telling us a load of lies, wasn’t she? She knows exactly where he is! He may treat her like a skivvy, but she’s still his missus.’

Lewis opened the drawer again, this time selecting four knives, of different sizes, but of the same basic pattern, of the same make — each with a black handle, one side of which, the side of the cutting-edge, was slightly sinuous, with an indented curve at the top to fit the joint of the index finger, and a similar curve at the lower end for the little finger.

Four knives.

Four from a set of five?

But if so, the fifth was missing… yet not really all that far away, neatly docketed and safely stored as it was in an Exhibits Locker at Thames Valley Police HQ.

Oh, yes!

Lewis nodded to himself, and to Morse.

And Morse nodded to himself, and to Lewis.

It seemed to Morse no great surprise that Mr Edward Brooks, ex-scout of Wolsey, and current assistant-custodian of the Pitt Rivers Collection, had decided to make a bolt for it — once news of the discovery of that fatal fifth knife had leaked out.

Which it hadn’t…

Lewis had seen to that.

Chapter thirty-eight

The details of what was to prove the key discovery in the case — or, to be more accurate, the ‘lack-of-key’ discovery in the case — were not communicated by the City Police to Kidlington HQ until just after 1 p.m. that same day, although the discovery had in fact been made as early as 8.45 a.m.

Janis Lawrence, an unmarried young woman, lived with her mother, an unmarried middle-aged woman, on the Cutteslowe Estate in North Oxford. The household was completed by Janis’s four-year-old son, Jason — a name chosen not to commemorate the intrepid leader of the Argonauts but the lead guitarist of a long-forgotten pop group. Jason found it impossible to pass by any stone or small brick without picking it up and hurling it at anything which moved across his vision — dogs, prams, pedestrians, motor-vehicles, and similar obstructions. Thus it was that Janis Lawrence was ever longing for the time when she could transfer complete responsibility for the child to the hapless teachers of the local Cutteslowe Primary School. And when she had learned of a temporary (August to September) cleaning job at the Pitt Rivers Museum, she had applied for it. And got it.

The Cutteslowe Estate in North Oxford, built in the 1930s, had achieved national notoriety because of the Cutteslowe Wall, a seven-foot high, spiked-topped, brick-built wall, which segregated the upper-middle-class residents of the Banbury Road from the working-class tenants of the Council Estate. But the wall had been demolished in 1959; and on the bright morning of Thursday, 8 September 1994, as on each weekday for the past month, Janis walked without hindrance up to the Banbury Road, where she caught a bus down to Keble Road, thence walking across to Parks Road, and into the museum itself, where from Mondays to Saturdays she began work at 8.30 a.m.

Her first job as always was to clear up any litter, such as the rings of zig-zag shavings often left behind by pupils who had sharpened their pencils the previous afternoon. And for a short while that morning, as she cleaned the floor and dusted the cabinets in the Upper Gallery, she paid little attention to the bright-yellow splinter of wood on the floor below one of the cabinets there — until she noticed that the glass-topped lid was not resting flush upon its base. Then, too, she became aware of the slight disarray of the cabinet’s contents, since there appeared one unfilled space in the ranks of the exhibits there, with both the artefact to the left of this gap, and the artefact to the right of it, knocked somewhat askew on the light-beige hessian material which formed the backing for the display: ‘Knives from Africa and South-East Asia’.

Janis reported her discovery immediately. And just after 9 a.m. Mr Herbert Godwin, attendant with responsibility for the Upper Gallery, was staring down at Cabinet 52.

‘Oh dear!’

‘Somebody’s pinched somethin’, Bert?’

‘I reckon you could say that again.’

‘What’s gone?’

‘Good question.’

‘When could it have been, though?’

‘Dunno. After I checked last night. Must have been. I allus check on these cabinets.’

‘Well, it couldn’t have been this morning. Nobody else’s been here, ’cept me.’

‘Have you got summat hidden in your knicker-pocket, Janis?’

‘I’ve told you before, Bert. I only wear knickers on a Sunday.’

Gently Herbert Godwin patted the not-unattractive Janis on her ample bottom: ‘We’d better go and inform our superiors, my love.’

Paradoxically Jane Cotterell, Administrator of the Museum, was attending a meeting that morning at the Ashmolean on ‘Museum Security’. But straightway she was summoned to the telephone and was soon issuing her orders: the University Marshal was to be informed immediately, as were the police; the lower steps to the Upper Gallery were to be roped across, with the ‘Temporarily Closed’ sign positioned there; Dr Cooper, the Assistant Curator (Documentation) — and only Dr Cooper — should go along and, without touching anything, seek to ascertain, from his inventory lists, which object(s) had been stolen. She herself would be back in the Pitt Rivers as soon as she could possibly manage it.

Which was three-quarters of an hour later, her return coinciding with the arrival of the police from St Aldate’s; and with the production of a sheet of paper on which she found the following sketch:

‘That’s it!’ exclaimed a jubilant-looking Dr Cooper, as if the museum had suddenly acquired a valuable new exhibit, instead of losing one. ‘Forty-seven knives — forty-seven! — there were in that cabinet. And you know how many there are now, Jane?’

‘Forty-six, perhaps?’ suggested the Administrator innocently.

Chapter thirty-nine

At five minutes to two, parked in front of the Radcliffe Science Library, Morse switched off The Archers (repeat).

‘Well, we’d better go and have a look at things, I suppose.’

In retrospect, the linkage (if there were one) appeared so very obvious. Yet someone had to make it first, that someone being Jane Cotterell: the linkage between the earlier visit of the police; the museum’s employment of Edward Brooks; the murder by knifing of Dr McClure; and now the theft of another knife, from one of the museum’s cabinets.

Thus, it was Jane Cotterell herself who had argued that the City Police should link their enquiry into the theft with the Kidlington HQ enquiry into the murder of McClure; and Jane Cotterell herself who greeted Morse and Lewis, in the Pitt Rivers’ Upper Gallery, at 2 p.m.

‘It’s what I was afraid of, though God knows why,’ mumbled Morse to himself as he looked down at Cabinet 52, now dusted liberally with fine aluminium fingerprint-powder.

Ten minutes later, whilst Lewis was taking statements from Janis Lawrence and Herbert Godwin, Morse was seated opposite the Administrator, quickly realizing that he was unlikely to learn (at least from her) more than two fairly simple facts: first, that almost certainly the cabinet had been forced between 4.15 and 4.30 p.m. the previous afternoon; second, since the contents of the cabinet had been fully documented only six months earlier — when exhibits had been re-arranged and cabinets re-lined — it could be stated quite authoritatively that one artefact, and one only, the Northern Rhodesian Knife, had been abstracted.

Yet Morse seemed uneasy.

‘Could one of your own staff have pinched it?’

‘Good Lord, no. Why should any of them want to do that? Most of them have access to the key-cupboard anyway.’

‘I see.’ Morse nodded vaguely; and stood up. ‘By the way, what do you line your cabinets with? What material?’

‘It’s some sort of new-style hessian — supposed to keep its colour for yonks, so the advert said.’

Morse smiled, suddenly feeling close to her. ‘Can I say something? I’d never have expected you to say “yonks”.’

She smiled back at him, shyly. ‘You wouldn’t?’

It seemed a good moment for one of them to say something more, to elaborate on this intimate turn of the conversation. But neither did so. And Morse reverted to his earlier line of enquiry.

‘You don’t think anyone could have hidden himself, after closing time, and spent the night here in the museum?’

‘Or herself? No. No, I don’t. Unless they stood pretty motionless all through the night. You see, the place is positively bristling with burglar alarms. And anyway, it would be far too spooky, surely? I couldn’t do it. Could you?’

‘No. I’ve always been frightened of the dark myself,’ admitted Morse. ‘It’s a bit eerie, this place, even in broad daylight.’

‘Yes,’ she said softly. ‘When you come in here you enter a place where all the lovely myths go when they die.’

Suddenly Morse felt very moved.

After he had left her office, Jane felt guilty about not telling Morse that the ‘myths’ bit was far from original. And indeed she’d looked around to try to find him, to tell him so.

But he had left.

Chapter forty

An hour later, Morse was seated in the black leather chair in his office, still considering the sketch of the knife — when Lewis came back from the canteen carrying two polystyrene cups of steaming coffee.

‘Northern Rhodesia, Lewis. Know where that is? Trouble is they keep changing all these place-names in Africa.’

‘Zambia, sir. You know that.’

Morse looked up with genuine pain in his eyes. ‘I never did any Geography at school.’

‘You get a newspaper every day, though.’

‘Yes, but I never look at the international news. Just the Crossword — and the Letters.’

‘That’s not true. I’ve often seen you reading the Obituaries.’

‘Only to look at the years when they were born.’

Morse unwrapped the cellophane from his cigarettes, took one from the packet, and lit it, inhaling deeply.

‘You’ll be in the obituary columns if you don’t soon pack up smoking. Anyway, you said you had packed it up.’

‘I have, Lewis. It’s just that I need to make a sort of gesture — some sort of sacrifice. That’s it! A sacrifice. All right? You see, I’m only going to smoke this one cigarette. Only one. And the rest of them?’

Morse appeared to have reached a fateful decision. He picked up the packet and flicked it, with surprising accuracy, into the metal waste-bin.

‘Satisfied?’

Lewis reached for the phone and rang the JR2 Outpatients department: no news. Then he rang Brenda Brooks: no news.

Edward Brooks was still missing.

‘You don’t think somebody’s murdered him, sir?’

But Morse, as he studied yet again the details of the stolen knife, appeared not to hear. ‘Would you rather be a bishop — or a paramount chief?’

‘I don’t want to be either, really.’

‘Mm. I wouldn’t have minded if they’d made me a paramount chief.’

‘I thought they had, sir.’

‘Where would a paramount chief go from here, Lewis?’

‘I just asked you, sir, whether—’

‘I heard you. The answer’s “no”. Brooks is alive and well. No. He may not be well, of course — but he’s alive. You can bet your Granny Bonds on that.’

‘Where do we go from here, then?’

‘Well, I’m going to spend the rest of the afternoon in bed. I want to feel fresh for this evening. I’ve got a date with a beautiful lady.’

‘Who’s she?’

‘Mrs Stevens — Julia Stevens.’

‘When did you fix that up?’

‘While you were getting the coffee.’

‘You want me to come along?’

‘Lew-is! I just told you. It’s a date.’

‘Didn’t you believe Mrs Brooks? About where she spent last night?’

‘I believed that all right. It’s just that I reckon she knows where her husband is, that’s all. And it’s on the cards that if she does know, she probably told her friend, Mrs Stevens.’

‘What would you like me to do, sir?’

‘I’d like you to go and see Mrs Brooks’s daughter — Ellie Smith, or whatever she calls herself. She’s a key character in this case, don’t you reckon? McClure’s mistress — and Brooks’s step-daughter.’

‘Shouldn’t you be seeing her then?’

‘All in good time. I’m only just out of hospital, remember?’

‘You mean she’s not so attractive as Mrs Stevens.’

‘Purely incidental, that is.’

‘Anything else?’

‘Yes. You’d better get back to the museum for a while. I don’t think we’re going to get very far on the fingerprint front — but you never know.’

Lewis was frowning. ‘I just don’t see the link myself — between the McClure murder, and now this Pitt Rivers business.’

‘She saw a link, though, didn’t she? Jane Cotterell? Clever lass, that one.’

‘But she said whoever else it was, it couldn’t have been Brooks who took the knife.’

‘Exactly.’

‘So?’

‘So what?’

‘So where’s the link?’

Morse’s eyes remained unblinking for several seconds, staring at nothing it seemed, and yet perhaps staring at everything. ‘I’m not at all sure now that there is a link,’ he said quietly. ‘To find some connection between one event and another ensuing event is often difficult; and especially difficult perhaps when they appear to have a connection…’

Morse was aware of feeling worried at the prospect — the actuality, really — of his return to work. For, in truth, he had little real idea of the correct answers to the questions Lewis had just asked. He needed some assistance from somewhere; and as he drove down to North Oxford he patted his jacket-pocket where he felt the reassurance of the square packet he had retrieved from the waste-bin immediately after Lewis had left for the Pitt Rivers Museum.

Chapter forty-one

Now Julia Stevens was very fair to behold, for there was a gentle beauty in the pallor of the skin beneath that Titian hair, and the softest invitation in the redness of her lips. And as he sat opposite her that evening, Morse was immediately made aware of an animal magnetism.

‘Care for a drink, Inspector?’

‘No — er, no thank you.’

‘Does that mean “yes”?’

‘Yes.’

‘Scotch?’

‘Why not?’

‘Say when.’

‘When.’

‘Cheers!’

‘Mind if I smoke?’

‘Yes, I do.’

She left the room, and re-appeared with an ashtray. Perhaps they were beginning to understand each other.

‘Mrs Brooks stayed the night here?’ began Morse.

‘Yes.’

‘You see, her husband’s gone missing — he failed to keep an appointment at the hospital this morning.’

‘I know. Brenda rang me.’

‘You’d both been to Stratford, I understand.’

‘Yes.’

‘Enjoy the play?’

‘No.’

‘Why?’

‘My life will not be significantly impoverished if I never see another Shakespearian comedy.’

‘Mrs Brooks enjoyed it though, I believe?’

Julia nodded, with a slow reminiscence. ‘Bless her! Yes. She’s not had much to smile about recently.’

‘Have you?’

‘Not much, really, no. Why do you ask that?’

But Morse made no direct answer. ‘Isn’t it just a bit odd, perhaps, that Mrs Brooks didn’t call in to see if her husband was all right?’

‘Odd? It’s the most natural thing in the world.’

‘Is it?’

‘She hates him.’

‘And why’s that?’

‘He treats her in such a cruel way — that’s why.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘Brenda’s told me.’

‘You’ve no first-hand evidence?’

‘I’ve always tried to avoid him.’

‘Aren’t you being a bit unfair, then?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Have you any idea where he might be?’

‘No. But I hope somebody’s stuck a knife into him somewhere.’

As he looked across at the school-mistress, Morse found himself wondering whether her pale complexion was due not so much to that inherited colouration so common with the auburn type, as to some illness, possibly; for he had observed, in a face almost completely devoid of any other cosmetic device, some skin-tinted application to the darkened rings beneath her eyes.

‘Did Mrs Brooks go out last night, after you’d got back?’

Julia smiled tolerantly. ‘You mean, did she just nip out for a few minutes and bump him off?’

‘Could she have gone out? That’s all I’m asking.’

‘Technically, I suppose — yes. She’d have a key to get back in here with. I just wonder what you think she did with the body, that’s all.’

‘She didn’t go out — is that what you’re telling me?’

‘Look! The only thing I know for certain is that she was fast asleep when I took her a cup of tea just before seven this morning.’

‘So she’d been with you the whole time since yesterday afternoon?’

‘Since about a quarter-to four, yes. I would have picked her up in the car, but the wretched thing wanted to stay at home in the garage. Suffering from electrical trouble.’

Morse, who didn’t know the difference between brake fluid and anti-freeze, nodded wisely. ‘You should get a car like mine. I’ve got a pre-electrics model.’

Julia smiled politely. ‘We took a bus up to school and, well, that’s about it, really.’

‘Did you actually go into the Brooks’s house?’

‘Well, I suppose I did, yes — only into the hallway, though.’

‘Was Mr Brooks there?’

‘Only just. He was getting ready to go out, but he was still there when we left.’

‘Did you speak to him?’

‘You mean… ask him politely if he was feeling better? You must be joking.’

‘Did his wife speak to him?’

‘Yes. She said “goodbye”.’

‘She didn’t say “cheerio” or “see you soon”?’

‘No. She said “goodbye”.’

‘What about you? Did you go out last night?’

‘Do you suspect me as well?’

‘Suspect you of what, Mrs Stevens?’

Julia’s clear, grey eyes sparkled almost gleefully. ‘Well, if somebody’s bumped off old Brooks—’

‘You look as if you hope someone has.’

‘Didn’t I make that clear from the start, Inspector?’

‘Have you actually seen Mrs Brooks since you left home this morning?’

‘No. I’ve been in school all day. Bad day, Thursday! No free periods. Then we had a staff-meeting after school to try to decide whether we’re all satisfying the criteria for the National Curriculum.’

‘Oh.’

It was a dampener; and for a little while each was silent, with Morse looking around the neatly cluttered room. He saw, on the settee beside Julia, a copy of Ernest Dowson’s Poems. He pointed to it:

‘You enjoy Dowson?’

‘You’ve heard of him?’

‘I’m impressed. Can you go on?’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Morse quietly.

For some reason, and for the first time that evening, Julia Stevens betrayed some sign of discomfiture, and Morse saw, or perhaps he saw, a film of tears across her eyes.

‘Anything else I can do for you, Inspector?’

Yes, you can take me to bed with you. I may feel no love for you, perhaps, but I perceive the beauty and the readiness of this moment, and soon there will be no beauty and no readiness.

‘No, I think that’s all,’ he said.

The phone rang as they walked into the narrow hallway, and Julia quickly picked up the receiver.

‘Hullo? Oh, hullo! Look, I’ll ring you back in five minutes, all right? Just give me the number, will you?’ She wrote down five digits on a small yellow pad beside the phone, and said ‘Bye’ — as did a male voice at the other end of the line (if Morse had heard aright).

As they took leave of each other at the doorway, it seemed for a moment that they might have embraced, however perfunctorily.

But they did not do so.

It might have been possible, too, for Morse to have spotted the true importance of what Julia Stevens had told him.

But he did not do so.

Chapter forty-two

‘Haven’t you got any decent music in this car?’ she asked, as Lewis drove down the Iffley Road towards Magdalen Bridge.

‘Don’t you like it? That’s your Mozart, that is. That’s your slow movement of the Clarinet Concerto. I keep getting told I ought to educate my musical tastes a bit.’

‘Bit miserable, innit?’

‘Don’t you go and say that to my boss.’

‘Who’s he when he’s at home?’

‘Chief Inspector Morse. Chap you’re going to see. You’re getting the VIP treatment this morning.’

‘Don’t you think I’m used to that, Sergeant?’

Lewis glanced across briefly at the young woman beside him in the front seat; but he made no reply.

‘Don’t believe me, do you?’ she asked, a curious smile on her lips.

‘Shall I…?’ Lewis’s left hand hovered over the cassette ‘on-off’ switch.

‘Nah! Leave it.’

She leaned back languorously; and even to the staid Lewis, as he made his way up to Kidlington, she seemed to exude a powerful sexuality.

When he had rung her late the previous afternoon, Lewis had been unable to get an answer; also been unable to get an answer in the early evening, when he had called at the house in Princess Street, off the Iffley Road, where she had her bed-sitter-cum-bathroom, and where he had left a note for her to call him back as soon as possible. Which was not very soon at all, in fact, since it had been only at 9.45 that morning when she’d rung, expressing the preference to be interviewed at Kidlington, and when Morse (sounding, from his home, in adequate fettle) had stated his intention to be present at the interview.

After Lewis had parked outside the HQ building, his passenger eased herself out of the car; and then, standing on the tarmac in full view of a good many interested eyes, stretched out her arms horizontally, slowly pressing them back behind her as far as the trapezius muscles would allow, her breasts straining forward against her thin blouse. Lewis, too, observed the brazen gesture with a gentle smile — and wondered what Morse would make of Ms Eleanor Smith.

In fact the answer would appear to be not very much, for the interview was strangely low-key, with Morse himself clearly deciding to leave everything to Lewis. First, Ms Smith gave what (as both detectives knew) was a heavily censored account of her lifestyle, appearing in no way surprised that for a variety of reasons she should be worthy of police attention — even police suspicion, perhaps. She’d had nothing to do with the murder of poor Dr McClure, of course; and she was confident that she could produce, if it proved necessary, some corroborative witnesses to account for most of her activities on that Sunday, 28 August: thirty-five of them, in fact, including the coach-driver. Yes, she’d known Matthew Rodway — and liked him. Yes, she’d known, still knew, Ashley Davies — and liked him as well; in fact it was with Davies she had been out the previous evening when the police had tried to contact her.

‘You must have been with him a long time?’ suggested Lewis.

Ms Smith made no reply, merely fingering her right (re-ringed) nostril with her right forefinger.

She was dismissive with the series of questions Lewis proceeded to put about drugs, and her knowledge of drugs. Surely the police didn’t need her to tell them about what was going on? The easy availability of drugs. Their widespread use? What century were the police living in, for God’s sake? And Morse found himself quietly amused as Lewis, just a little disconcerted now, persisted with this line of enquiry like some sheltered middle-aged father learning all about sex-parties and the like from some cruelly knowing little daughter of ten.

Last Wednesday? Where had she been then? Well, if they must know, she’d been in Birmingham for most of that day, on… well, on a personal matter. She’d got back to Oxford, back to Oxford station, at about half-past four. The train — surprise, surprise! — had been on time. And then? (Lewis had persisted.) Then she’d invited one of her friends — one of her girlfriends — up to her flat — her bed-sit! — where they’d drunk a bottle of far-from-vintage champers; and this muted celebration (the occasion for which Eleanor failed to specify) was followed by a somewhat louder merrymaking at the local pub; whence she had gone home, whence she’d been escorted home, at closing-time. And if they wanted to know whether she’d woken up with a bad head, the answer was ‘yes’ — a bloody dreadful head.

Why all this interest in Wednesday, though? Why Wednesday afternoon? Why Wednesday evening? That’s what she wanted to know.

Morse and Lewis had exchanged glances then. If she were telling the truth, it was not this woman, not McClure’s former mistress, not Brooks’s step-daughter, who had stolen the knife from Cabinet 52 — or done anything with it afterwards. Not, at least, on the Wednesday evening, for Lewis had been making a careful note of times and places and names; and if Eleanor Smith had been fabricating so much detail, she was doing it at some considerable peril. And after another glance from Morse, and a nod, Lewis told her of the theft from the Pitt Rivers, which had now pretty certainly been pin-pointed to between 4.20 p.m. and 4.30 p.m. on Wednesday, the seventh; told her, too, of the disappearance of her step-father.

Ah, her step-father! Well, she could tell them something about him, all right. He was a pig. She’d buggered off from home because of him; and the miracle was that her mother hadn’t buggered off from home because of him, too. She’d no idea (she claimed) that he was missing. But that wasn’t going to cause her too much grief, was it? She just hoped that he’d remain missing, that’s all; hoped they’d find him lying in a gutter somewhere with a knife — that knife — stuck firmly in his bloody guts.

The Chief Inspector had not spoken a single word to the woman he’d so recently heralded as his key-witness in the case; and the truth was that, like some maverick magnet, he had felt half repelled, half attracted by the strange creature seated there, with her off-hand (deliberately common, perhaps?) manner of speech; with her lack of any respect for the dignity of police procedure; with her contempt concerning the well-being of her step-father, Mr Edward Brooks.

A note had been brought into the room a few minutes earlier and handed to Morse. And now, with the interview apparently nearing its end, Morse jerked his head towards the door and led the way into the corridor. The press, he told Lewis, had got wind of the Pitt Rivers business, and questions were being asked about a possible linkage with the murder enquiry. Clearly some of the brighter news editors were putting two and two together and coming up with an aggregate considerably higher than the sum of the component parts. Lewis had better go and mollify the media, and not worry too much about concealing any confidential information — which shouldn’t be terribly difficult since there was no confidential information. He himself, Morse, would see that Ms Smith was escorted safely home.

Chapter forty-three

She spoke as Morse came up to the first roundabout on his way towards Oxford:

‘Have you got any decent music in this car?’

‘Such as what?’

‘Well, your nice sergeant played me some Mozart. Fellah playin’ the clarinet.’

‘Jack Brymer, was it?’

‘Dunno. He was great, though. It’d pay him to join a jazz group.’

‘You think so?’

‘If he’s lookin’ to the future.’

‘He’s about eighty.’

‘Really? Ah well, you’re no chicken yourself, are you?’

Morse, unsmiling, kept his eyes on the road.

‘Your sergeant said you was tryin’ to educate his musical tastes.’

‘Did he?’

‘You don’t think I need a bit of educatin’?’

‘I doubt it. I’d guess you’re a whole lot better educated than you pretend to be. For all I know, you’re probably quite a sensitive and appreciative lass — underneath.’

‘Yeah? Christ! What the ’ell’s that s’posed to mean?’

Morse hesitated before answering her. ‘I’ll tell you what your trouble is, shall I? You’re suffering from a form of inverted snobbery, that’s all. Not unusual, you know, in girls — in young ladies of… in young ladies like you.’

‘If that’s supposed to be a bloody insult, mister, you couldn’t a’ done much bleedin’ better, could you?’

‘I’m only guessing — don’t be cross. I don’t know you at all, do I? We’ve never even spoken—’

‘Except on the phone. Remember?’

Morse almost managed a weak smile as he waited at the busy Cutteslowe roundabout.

‘I remember.’

‘Great, that was. You know, pretendin’ to be somebody else. I sometimes think I should a’ been an actress.’

‘I think you are an actress — that’s exactly what I was saying.’

‘Well, I’ll tell you somethin’. Right at this minute there’s one thing I’d swap even for an Oscar.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Plate of steak and chips. I’m starvin’.’

‘Do you know how much steak costs these days?’

‘Yeah. £3.99 at the King’s Arms just down the road here: salad and chips chucked in. I saw it on the way up.’

‘It says “French Fries”, though, on the sign outside. You see, that’s exactly what I meant about—’

‘Yeah, you told me. I’m sufferin’ summat chronic from inverted snobbery.’

‘Don’t you ever eat?’ demanded Ellie, wiping her mouth on the sleeve of her blouse, and draining her third glass of red wine.

‘Not very often at meal-times, no.’

‘A fellah needs his calories, though. Got to keep his strength up — if you know what I mean.’

‘I usually take most of my calories in liquid form at lunchtimes.’

‘Funny, isn’t it? You bein’ a copper and all that — and then drinkin’ all the beer you do.’

‘Don’t worry. I’m the only person in Oxford who gets more sober the more he drinks.’

‘How do you manage that?’

‘Years of practice. I don’t recommend it though.’

‘Wouldn’t help you much with a bleedin’ breathalyser, would it?’

‘No,’ admitted Morse quietly.

‘Do you know when you’ve had enough?’

‘Not always.’

‘You had enough now?’

‘Nearly.’

‘Can I buy you something?’

‘You know, nineteen times out of twenty… But I’ve got to drive you home and then get back to give Sergeant Lewis his next music lesson.’

‘What’s all them weasel words s’posed to mean?’

‘Pint of Best Bitter,’ said Morse. ‘If you insist.’

‘Would you ever think of giving me a music lesson?’ she asked, as after a wait at the lights in Longwall Street the Jaguar made its way over Magdalen Bridge.

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘You want me to be honest?’

‘Why not?’

‘I just couldn’t stick looking at those rings in your nose.’

She felt the insult like a slap across the face; and had the car still been queuing at the Longwall lights she would have jumped out of the Jaguar and left him. But they were travelling now quite quickly up the Iffley Road, and by the time they reached Princess Street she was feeling fractionally less furious.

‘Look! Just tell your sergeant somethin’ from me, will you?’

‘I’m in charge of the case,’ said Morse defensively, ‘not Sergeant Lewis.’

‘Well, you could a’ fooled me. You never asked me nothin’ — not at the station, did you? You hadn’t said a single word till we got in the car.’

‘Except on the phone. Remember?’ said Morse quietly.

‘Yeah, well, like I said, that was good fun…’ But the wind had been taken from her sails, and she glanced across at Morse in a slightly new light. In the pub, as she’d noticed, he’d averted his gaze from her for much of the time. And now she knew why… He was a bit different — a lot different, really — from the rest of them; the rest of the men his age, anyway. Felix had once told her that she looked at people with eyes that were ‘interested and interesting’, and she would never forget that: it was the most wonderful compliment anyone had ever paid her. But this man, Morse, hadn’t even looked at her eyes; just looked at his beer for most of the time.

What the hell, though.

Bloody police!

‘Look, somethin’ for you or your sergeant, OK? If he wants to check up about Wednesday, when I went to Brum, I went to an abortion clinic there. Sort o’ consultation. But I decided I wasn’t goin’ to go through with it — not this time, OK? Then, about last night, I went out with Ashley — Ashley Davies — and he asked me to marry him. With or without me bloody noserings, mister, OK?’

With that she opened the near-side door and jumped out.

She slammed it so hard that for a moment Morse was worried that some damage might have been incurred by the Jaguar’s (pre-electrics) locking mechanism.

‘And you can stuff your fuckin’ Mozart, OK?’

Chapter forty-four

It is sometimes maintained, and with some cause, that insomnia does not exist. The argument, put most briefly, is that anyone unable to fall asleep has no real need to fall asleep. But there were several key players in the present drama who would have readily challenged such an argument that night — the night of Friday, 9 September.

Morse himself, who only infrequently had the slightest trouble in falling asleep, often had the contrary problem of ‘falling awake’ during the small hours, either to visit the loo, or to drink some water — the latter liquid figuring quite prominently with him during the night, though virtually never during the day. Yet sleep was as important to Morse as to any other soul; and specifically on the subject of sleep, the Greek poets and the Greek prose-writers had left behind several pieces of their literary baggage in the lumber-room of Morse’s mind. And if, for him, the whole of the classical corpus had to be jettisoned except for one single passage, he would probably have opted for the scene depicting the death of Sarpedon, from Book XVI of the Iliad, where those swift companions, the twin brothers Sleep and Death, bear the dead hero to the broad and pleasant land of Lycia. And so very close behind Homer’s words would have been those of Socrates, as he prepared to drink the hemlock, that if death were just one long and dreamless sleep then mortals could have nought to fear.

That night, though, Morse had a vivid dream — a dream that he was playing the saxophone in a jazz ensemble, yet (even in his dream) ever wondering whence he had acquired such dazzling virtuosity, and ever worried that his skill would at any second desert him in front of his adulatory audience — amongst whom he had spotted a girl with two rings in her nose; a girl who could never be Eleanor Smith, though, since the girl in the dream was disfigured and ugly; and Eleanor Smith could never be that…

Julia Stevens tossed back and forth in her bed that night, repeatedly turning over the upper of her two pillows as she sought to cool her hot and aching head. At half-past midnight, she got up and made herself another cup of Ovaltine, swallowing with it two further Nurofen. A great block of pain had settled this last week at the back of her head, and there was a ceaseless surge of something (blood?) that broke in rhythmic waves inside her ears.

During the daytime, she had so little fear of dying; but recently, in the hours of darkness, Fear had been stalking her bedroom, reporting to her its terrifying tales, and bullying her into confessing (Oh, God!) that, no, she didn’t want to die. In her dream that night, when finally she drifted off into a fitful sleep, she beheld an image of the Pale Horse; and knew that the name of the one who rode thereon was Death…

Covering the space over and alongside the single bed pushed up against the inside wall of the small bedroom, were three large posters, featuring Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, and Kurt Cobain — rock idols who during their comparatively short lives had regularly diced with drugs and death. At 1 a.m., still dressed, Kevin Costyn was sitting on the bed, his back against the creaking headboard, listening on his Walkman to some ear-blasting fury of punk music. In a perverse sort of way, he found it quite soothing. Eroticon IV, a crudely pornographic paperback, lay open on the bed beside him; but for the moment Kevin’s mind was not beset with sexual fantasies.

Surprisingly, in a week of virtually unparalleled excitement, his thoughts were now centred more soberly on the nature of his surroundings: the litter-strewn front gardens along the road, with derelict, disembowelled cars propped up in drives; the shoddy, undusted, threadbare house in which he lived with his feckless mother; above all the sordid state of his own bedroom, and particularly of the dingy, soiled, creased sheets in which he’d slept for the past seven weeks or more. It was the contrast that had caught his imagination — the contrast between all this and the tidy if unpretentious terrace in which Mrs Julia Stevens lived; the polished, clean, sweet-smelling rooms in her house; above all, the snow-white, crisply laundered sheets on her inviting bed.

He thought he’d always known what makes the difference in life.

Money.

And as he took off his socks and trousers and got into bed, he found himself wondering how much money Mrs Stevens might have saved in life.

In the past few weeks Mrs Rodway was beginning to sleep more soundly. Sleeping pills, therapy, exercise, holidays, diet — none of them had been all that much help. But she had discovered something very simple which did help: she counted. One thousand and one; one thousand and two… and after a little while she would stop her counting, and whisper some few words aloud to herself: ‘And — there — was — a — great — calm’… Then she would begin counting again, backwards this time: one thousand and five; one thousand and four…

Sometimes, as she counted, she almost managed not to think of Matthew. On a few nights recently, she didn’t have to count at all. But this particular night was not one of them…

The previous evening, Ashley Davies had taken Ellie Smith to a motel near Buckingham where he, flushed with the success of his marriage proposal, and she, much flushed with much champagne, had slept between pale green sheets — an idyllic introit, one might have thought, to their newly plighted state.

And perhaps it was.

But as Davies lay awake, alone, this following night, he began to doubt that it was so.

His own sexual enjoyment had been intense, for in medio coitu she had surrendered her body to his with a wondrous abandon. Yet before and after their love-making — both! — he had sensed a disturbing degree of reserve in her, of holding back. Twice had she turned her mouth away from him when his lips had craved some full commitment, some deeper tenderness. And in retrospect he knew that there must be some tiny corner in her heart which she’d not unlocked as yet to any man.

In the early hours, she had turned fully away from him, seeming to grow colder and colder, as if sleep and the night were best; as if, too, somewhere within her was a secret passion committed already to someone else…

Restless, too, that night was the scout now given responsibility for Staircase G in the Drinkwater Quad at Wolsey. At 2 a.m. she went downstairs to the kitchen to make herself a cup of tea, looking in the mirror there at a neatly featured face, with its auburn hair cut in a fringe across the forehead: getting just a little long now, and almost covering a pair of worried eyes.

Susan had agreed to check and sign (at 10 o’clock the following morning, Saturday) the statement earlier made to Sergeant Lewis. And the prospect worried her. It was like reporting some local vandals to the police, when there was always the fear that those same vandals would return to wreak even greater havoc, precisely for having been reported. In her own case, though — as Susan was too intelligent not to appreciate — the risk was considerably greater. This was not a case of vandalism; but of murder. As such, she’d had little option but to make a full (if guarded) statement; yet she feared she would now be open to some sort of retaliation — to threats of physical violence, perhaps, from a man who, by an almost unanimous verdict, was seen as a very nasty piece of work indeed.

Back in bed, Susan tried a cure she’d once been told: to close one’s eyes gently (yes, gently) and then to look (yes, look) at a point about four or five inches in front of one’s nose. Such a strategy, it was claimed, would ensure that the eyeballs remained fairly still, being focused as they were upon some specific point, however notional that point might be; and since it had been demonstrated that the rapid revolving of the eyeballs in their sockets was a major cause of sleeplessness, insomniacs most certainly should experiment along such lines.

That night, therefore, Mrs Susan Ewers had so experimented, though with only limited success. As it happened, however, her apprehension was wholly groundless, since Edward Brooks was never destined to become a threat to Susan or to any other living person. One of those twins from Morse’s schooldays, the one whose name was Death, had already claimed him for his own; and together with his brother, Sleep, had borne him off, though not perhaps to the broad and pleasant land of Lycia, wherein Sarpedon lies.

Chapter forty-five

A week in a murder enquiry, especially one in which there is virtually no development, can be a wearisome time. And so it was for Sergeant Lewis in the days between Friday 9 and Friday 16 September.

The whereabouts and movements of key characters in the Pitt Rivers enquiry, most particularly on the evening and night of Wednesday the seventh, immediately after the knife had been stolen, had been checked and in every case confirmed, with appropriate statements made and (with the more obvious mis-spellings corrected) duly signed and filed. Nothing else, though.

Nothing else, either, on the murder scene. House-to-house enquiries in Daventry Avenue had come to an end; and come to nothing. Three former undergraduates from Staircase G on Drinkwater Quad had been traced with no difficulty; but with no real consequence either, since apart from confirming the general availability of drugs during their years in Oxford they had each denied any specific knowledge of drug-trafficking on their own staircase.

What worried Lewis slightly was that Morse appeared just as interested in the disappearance of a knife as in the death of a don, as though the connection between the two events (Morse had yet again reversed his views) was both logically necessary and self-evidently true.

But was it?

And on the morning of Thursday, 15 September, he had voiced his growing doubt.

‘Brooks, sir — Brooks is the only real connection, isn’t he? Brooks who’s top of your murder-suspects; and Brooks who’s got a job at the Pitt Rivers.’

‘Have you ever thought, Lewis, that it could have been Brooks who stole the knife?’

‘You can’t be serious?’

‘No. Brooks didn’t steal the knife. Sorry. Go on!’

‘Well, you said so yourself early on: we often get people who do copy-cat things, don’t we? And whoever stole the knife — well, it might not have anything to do with the murder at all. Somebody just read that bit in the Oxford Mail and…’

‘Ye-es. To tell you the truth, I’ve been thinking the same.’

‘It could just be a coincidence.’

‘Yes, it could. Perhaps it was.’

‘I mean, you’ve often said coincidences happen all the time; just that some of us don’t spot ’em.’

‘Yes, I’ve often thought that.’

‘So there may be no causal connection after all—?’

‘Stop sounding like a philosopher, Lewis, and go and get us some coffee.’

Morse, too, was finding this period of inactivity frustrating. And a time of considerable stress, since for three whole days now he had not smoked a single cigarette, and had arrived at that crucial point where his self-mastery had already been demonstrated, his victory over nicotine finally won. So? So it was no longer a question of relapsing, of re-indulging. If he wished to re-start, though… for, in truth, the fourth day was proving even harder than the third.

The earlier wave of euphoria was ebbing still further on the fifth day, when it was his own turn to have a medical check-up, and when ten minutes before his appointment time he checked in at the Outpatients reception at the JR2 and sat down in the appropriate area to await his call, scheduled for 9.20 a.m. By some minor coincidence (yes!) this was the same time that Mr Edward Brooks had been expected for his own designated brand of Outpatient care — an appointment which had not been kept eight days earlier… and which was unkept still.

After undergoing a fairly thorough examination; after skilfully parrying the questions put to him about avoirdupois and alcohol; after politely declining a suggested consultation with a dietitian; after going along the corridor to have three further blood-samples taken — Morse was out again; out into the morning sunshine, with a new date (six whole weeks away!) written into his little blue card, and with the look of a man who feels fresh confidence in life. What was it that the doc had said?

‘You know, I’m not quite sure why, but you’re over things pretty well. You don’t deserve to be, Mr Morse; but, well, you seem surprisingly fit to me.’

Walking along to the southern car park and savouring still the happy tidings, Morse caught sight of a young woman standing at the bus-stop there. By some minor coincidence (yes!) they had earlier been present together in the same waiting-room at the Summertown Health Centre, where neither had known the other. And now, here they were together again, on the same morning, at the same time, at the same hospital, both of them (as it appeared) on their way back home.

‘Good morning, Miss Smith!’ said the cheerful Chief Inspector, taking care to articulate a clear ‘Miss’, and not (as he always saw it) the ugly, pretentious, fuzzy ‘Ms’.

Little that morning could have dampened Morse’s spirits, for the gods were surely smiling on him. Even had she ignored his greeting, he would have walked serenely past, with little sense of personal slight. Yet perhaps he would have felt a touch of disappointment too; for he had seen the sadness in her face, and knew that for a little while he wanted to be with her.

Chapter forty-six

‘There’s no need really,’ she said, manoeuvring herself into the passenger seat. ‘I’m not short o’ money, you know.’

‘How long have you been waiting?’

‘Long enough! Mind if I smoke?’ she asked, as Morse turned left into Headley Way.

‘Go ahead.’

‘You want one?’

‘Er, no thanks — not for me.’

‘You do smoke, though. Else your wife does. Ashtray’s full, innit? Think I’d make a good detective?’

‘Which way’s best?’ asked Morse.

‘Left at the White Horse.’

‘Or in the White Horse, perhaps?’

‘Er, no thanks — not for me,’ she mimicked.

‘Why’s that?’

‘They’re not bloody open yet, that’s why.’ It was meant to be humorous, no doubt, but her voice was strained; and glancing sideways, Morse guessed that something was sorely wrong with her.

‘Want to tell me about it?’

‘Why the ’ell should I tell you?’

Morse breathed in deeply as she stubbed out her cigarette with venom. ‘I think you’ve been in hospital overnight. I could see a bit of a white nightie peeping out of the hold-all. The last time we met you told me you were expecting a baby, and the JR1 is where they look after babies, isn’t it? They wouldn’t normally take a mum who’s had a miscarriage, though — that’d be the Churchill. But if you had a threatened miscarriage, with some internal bleeding, perhaps, then they might well get you into the JR1 for observation. That’s the sort of thing a policeman gets to know, over the years. And please remember,’ he added gently, ‘I only asked if you wanted to tell me about it.’

Tears coursed down cheeks that were themselves wholly devoid of make-up; washing down with them, though, some of the heavy eye-shadow from around her dull-green eyes.

‘I lost it,’ she said, finally.

For a moment or two Morse considered placing his hand very gently, very lightly on hers, but he feared that his action would be misconstrued.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said simply, not speaking again until he reached Princess Street.

She got out of the car and picked up her hold-all from the back. ‘Thank you.’

‘I wasn’t much help, I’m afraid. But if I can ever be of any help, you’ve only got to give me a ring.’ He wrote down his ex-directory telephone number.

‘Well, you could help now, actually. It’s a lousy little place I live in — but I’d be quite glad if you’d come in and have a drink with me.’

‘Not this morning.’

‘Why the ’ell not, for Christ’s sake? You just said to give you a ring if I needed any help — and I bloody do, OK? Now.’

‘All right. I’ll come in and have one quick drink. On one condition, though.’

‘What’s that?’

‘You don’t slam the car-door. Agreed?’

‘Doesn’t seem too lousy a little place?’ suggested Morse as, whisky in hand, he leaned back in the only armchair in the only room — the fairly large room, though — which was Eleanor Smith’s bed-sitter-cum-bathroom.

‘I can assure you it is. Crawling with all those microscopic creatures — you’ve seen photographs of them?’

Morse looked at her. Was he imagining things? Hadn’t she just spoken to him with a degree of verbal and grammatical fluency that was puzzlingly at odds with her habitual mode of speech. ‘Crawlin’ wiv all them little bugs an’ things’ — wasn’t that how she’d normally have expressed herself?

‘I think I know why you’re lookin’ at me like that,’ she said.

‘Pardon?’

In answer, she placed an index finger on each nostril. On each ringless nostril.

And Morse nodded. ‘Yes, I prefer you as you are now.’

‘So you said.’

‘You know that your step-father’s still missing?’

‘So what? You want me to break out into goose-pimples or something?’

‘Why do you hate him so much?’

‘Next question.’

‘All right. You said you were going to get married. Does all this — the loss of your baby — does it make any difference?’

‘Gettin’ deep, ain’t we? Cigarette?’

Ellie held out the packet; and stupidly, inevitably, Morse capitulated.

‘You’re still going ahead with getting married?’

‘Why not? It’s about time I settled down, don’t you think?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘What else can I tell you?’

Well, if she was inviting questions (Morse decided) it was a good opportunity to probe a little more deeply into the heart of the mystery, since he was convinced that the key to the case — the key to both cases — lay somewhere in those late afternoon hours of Wednesday, 7 September, when someone had stolen the knife from the Pitt Rivers Museum.

‘After your trip to Birmingham, you could have caught an earlier train back?’

She shrugged. ‘Dunno. I didn’t, though.’

‘Do you remember exactly what time you asked your friend up here — when you got back that afternoon?’

‘Exactly? Course, I can’t. She might. Doubt it, though. We were both tight as ticks later that night.’

Was she lying? And if so, why?

‘On that Wednesday—’

But she let him get no further. ‘Christ! Give it a rest about Wednesday, will you? What’s wrong with Tuesday? Or Monday? I ’aven’t a bleedin’ clue what I was doin’ them days. So why Wednesday? Like I say, I know where I was all the bloody time that day.’

‘It’s just that there may be a connection between Dr McClure’s murder and the theft of the knife.’

She seemed unimpressed, but mollified again. ‘Drop more?’

‘No, I must be off.’

‘Please yourself.’ She poured herself another Scotch, and lit another cigarette. ‘Beginnin’ to taste better. I hadn’t smoked a fag for three days — three days! — before that one in your car. Tasted terrible, that first one.’

Morse rose to his feet and put his empty glass down on the cluttered mantelpiece, above which, on the white chimney-breast, four six-inch squares in different shades of yellow had been painted — with the name of each shade written in thick pencil inside each square: Wild Primrose, Sunbeam, Buttermilk, Daffodil White.

‘Which d’you like best?’ she asked. ‘I’m considering some redecoration.’

There it was again, in that last sentence — the gearshift from casual slang to elegance of speech. Interesting…

‘But won’t you be leaving here — after you’re married?’

‘Christ! You can’t leave it alone, can you? All these bloody questions!’

Morse turned towards her now, looking down at her as she sat on the side of the bed.

‘Why did you invite me here? I only ask because you’re making me feel I’m unwelcome — an intruder — a Nosey Parker. Do you realize that?’

She looked down into her glass. ‘I felt lonely, that’s all. I wanted a bit of company.’

‘Haven’t you told Mr Davies — about your miscarriage?’

‘No.’

‘Don’t you think—’

‘Augh, shut up! You wouldn’t know what it feels like, would you? To be on your own in life…’

‘I’m on my own all the time,’ said Morse.

‘That’s what they all say, did you know that? All them middle-aged fellows like you.’

Morse nodded and half-smiled; and as he walked to the door he looked at the chimney-breast again.

‘Yellow’s a difficult colour to live with; but I’d go for the Daffodil White, if I were you.’

Leaving her still seated on the bed, he trod down the narrow, squeaking stairs to the Jaguar, where for a few minutes he sat motionless, with the old familiar sensation tingling across his shoulders.

Why hadn’t he thought of it before?

Chapter forty-seven

Lewis was eager to pass on his news. Appeals on Radio Oxford and Fox FM, an article in the Oxford Mail, local enquiries into the purchase, description, and condition of Brooks’s comparatively new bicycle, had proved, it appeared, successful. An anonymous phone-call (woman’s voice) had hurriedly informed St Aldate’s City Police that if they were interested there was a ‘green bike’ chained to the railings outside St Mary Mags in Cornmarket. No other details.

‘Phone plonked down pronto,’ the duty sergeant had said.

‘Sure it wasn’t a “Green dyke” chained to the railings?’ Lewis had asked, in a rare excursion into humour.

Quite sure, since the City Police were now in possession of one bicycle, bright green — awaiting instructions.

The call had come through just after midday, and Lewis felt excitement, and gratification. Somebody — some mother or wife or girlfriend — had clearly decided to push the hot property back into public circulation. Once in a while procedure and patience paid dividends. Like now.

If it was Brooks’s bike, of course.

Morse, however, on his rather late return from lunch, was to give Lewis no immediate opportunity of reporting his potentially glad tidings.

‘Get on all right at the hospital, sir?’

‘Fine. No problem.’

‘I’ve got some news—’

‘Just a minute. I saw Miss Smith this morning. She’d been in the JR1 overnight.’

‘All right, is she?’

‘Don’t know about that. But she’s a mixed-up young girl, is our Eleanor,’ confided Morse.

‘Not really a girl, sir.’

‘Yes, she is. Half my age, Lewis. Makes me feel old.’

‘Well, perhaps…’

‘She gave me an idea, though. A beautiful idea.’ Morse stripped the cellophane from a packet of cigarettes, took one out, and lit it from a box of matches, on which his eyes lingered as he inhaled deeply. ‘You know the problem we’re faced with in this case? We’ve got to square the first case — the murder of McClure.’

‘No argument there.’

‘Then we’ve got to square the second case — the theft of a Northern Rhodesian knife. And the connection between these two—’

‘But you said perhaps there wasn’t any connection.’

‘Well, there is and now I know what it is.’

‘I see,’ said Lewis, unseeing.

‘As I say, if we square the first case, and then we square the second case… all we’ve got to do is to work out the sum of the two squares.’

Lewis looked puzzled. ‘I’m not quite following you, sir.’

‘Have you heard of “Pythagorean Triplets”?’

‘We did Pythagoras Theorem at school.’

‘Exactly. The most famous of all the triplets, that is — “3, 4, 5”: 3² + 4² = 5². Agreed?’

‘Agreed. ’

‘But there are more spectacular examples than that. The Egyptians, for example, knew all about “5961, 6480, 8161”.’

‘That’s good news, sir. I didn’t realize you were up in things like that.’

Morse looked down at the desk. ‘I’m not. I was just reading from the back of this matchbox here.’

Lewis grinned as Morse continued.

‘There was this fellow called Fermat, it seems — I called in at home and looked him up. He knew all about “things like that”, as you put it: square-roots, and cube-roots, and all that sort of stuff.’

‘Has he got much to do with us, though — this fellow?’

‘Dunno, Lewis. But he was a marvellous man. In one of the books on arithmetic he was studying he wrote something like: “I’ve got a truly marvellous demonstration of this proposition which this margin is too narrow to contain.” Isn’t that a wonderful sentence?’

‘If you say so, sir.’

‘Well, I’ve worked out the square of three and the square of four and I’ve added them together and I’ve come up with — guess what, Lewis!’

‘Twenty-five?’

‘Much more! You see, this morning I suddenly realized where we’ve been going wrong in this case. We’ve been assuming what we were meant to assume… No. Let me start again. As you know, I felt pretty certain almost from the beginning that McClure was murdered by Brooks. And I think now, though I can’t be certain of course, that Brooks himself was murdered last week. And I know — listen, Lewis! — I now know what Brooks’s murderer wanted us to think.’

Lewis looked at the Chief Inspector, and saw that not uncommon, strangely distanced, almost mystical look in the gentian-blue eyes.

‘You see, Brooks’s body is somewhere where we’ll never find it — I feel oddly sure about that. Pushed in a furnace, perhaps, or buried under concrete, or left in a rubbish-dump—’

‘Waste Reception Area, sir.’

‘Wherever, yes. But consider the consequences of the body never being found. We all jump to the same conclusion — the conclusion our very intelligent Administrator at the Pitt Rivers jumped to: that there was a direct link between the murder of Brooks and the theft of the knife. Now, there was a grand deception here. The person who murdered Brooks wanted us to take one fact for granted, and almost — almost! — he succeeded.’

‘Or she.’

‘Oh, yes. Or she… But as I say the key question is this: why was the knife stolen? So let me tell you. That theft was a great big bluff! For what purpose? To convince us that Brooks was murdered after 4.30 p.m. on that Wednesday the seventh. But he wasn’t,’ asserted Morse slowly. ‘He was murdered the day before — he was murdered on Tuesday the sixth.’

‘But he was seen alive on the Wednesday, sir. His wife saw him — Mrs Stevens saw him—’

‘Liars!’

‘Both of ’em?’

‘Both of them.’

‘You mean… you mean they murdered Brooks?’

‘That’s exactly what I do mean, yes. As I see things, it must have been Julia Stevens who supplied the brains, who somehow arranged the business with the knife. But what — what, Lewis — if Brooks was murdered by another knife — a household knife, let’s say — a knife just like the one McClure was murdered with, the knife that was found in Daventry Avenue, the knife that was missing from the Brooks’s kitchen.’

Lewis shook his head slowly. ‘Why all this palaver, though?’

‘Good question. So I’ll give you a good answer. To give the murderer — murderers — watertight alibis for that Wednesday. I sensed something of the sort when I interviewed Julia Stevens; and I suddenly knew it this morning when I was interviewing our punk-wonder.’

‘She’s in it, too, you reckon?’

Morse nodded. ‘All three of them have been telling us the same thing, really. In effect they’ve been saying: “Look! I don’t mind being suspected of doing something on Tuesday — but not on the Wednesday.” They’re happy about not having an alibi for the day Brooks was murdered. It was for the day afterwards — the Wednesday — that for some reason they figured an alibi was vital. And — surprise, surprise! — they’ve each of ’em got a beautiful alibi for then. It’s been very clever of them — this sort of casual indifference they’ve shown for the actual day of the murder, the Tuesday. You see, they all knew they’d be the likely suspects, and they’ve been very gently, very cleverly, pushing us all along in the direction they wanted.’

‘All three of them, you think?’

‘Yes. They’d all have gladly murdered Brooks, even if they hadn’t known he was a murderer himself: the wife he’d treated so cruelly; the step-daughter he’d probably abused; and Julia Stevens, who could see how her little cleaner was being knocked about by the man she’d married. So they hatch a plot. They arrange for the knife to be stolen, having made sure that none of them could have stolen it—’

‘Ellie Smith could have stolen it,’ interposed Lewis quietly.

‘Yes… perhaps she could, yes. But I don’t think so. Didn’t the attendant think it was more likely to have been a man? No. My guess is that they bribed someone to steal it — someone they could trust… someone one of them could trust.’

‘Ashley Davies?’

‘Why not? He’s got his reward, hasn’t he?’

‘You think that’s a reward, sir, marrying her?’

Morse was silent awhile. ‘Do you know, Lewis, it might be. It might be…’

‘What did they do with the knife?’

‘That’s the whole point. That’s what I’m telling you. They didn’t use the stolen knife at all. They just got rid of it.’

‘But you can’t just get rid of things like that.’

‘Why not? Stick it in a black bag and leave it for the dustmen. You could leave a dismembered corpse in one of those and get away with it. Kein Problem. The only thing the dustmen won’t take is garden-refuse — that’s a well-known fact, isn’t it?’

‘You seem to be assuming an awful lot of brains somewhere.’

‘Look, Lewis! There seems to be a myth going round these days that criminals are a load of morons and that CID personnel are all members of Mensa.’

‘Perhaps I should apply then,’ said Lewis slowly.

‘Pardon?’

‘Well, I’ve been very clever, sir, while you were away. I think I’ve found Brooks’s bike.’

‘You have? Why the hell didn’t you tell me before?’

Chapter forty-eight

AT THE Proctor Memorial School that Friday afternoon the talk was predominantly of a ram-raid made on an off-licence in the Blackbird Leys Estate the previous evening, when by some happy chance a routine police patrol-car had been cruising round the neighbourhood just as three youths were looting the smashed shop in Verbena Avenue; when, too, a little later, the same police car had been only fifty or so yards behind when the stolen getaway car had crashed at full speed into a juggernaut lorry near the Horspath roundabout on the Eastern Ring Road…

When the chase was over one of the three was seated dead in the driving seat, his chest crushed by the collapsed steering-wheel; another, the one in the front passenger seat, had his right foot mangled and trapped beneath the engine-mounting; the third, the one seated in the back, had severe lacerations and contusions around the head and face and was still unconscious after the firemen had finally cut free his colleagues in crime from the concertina’ed Escort.

The considerable interest in this incident — accident — is readily explicable, since two of the youths, the two who survived the crash, had spent five years at the Proctor Memorial School; had spent fifteen terms mocking the attempts of their teachers to instil a little knowledge and a few of the more civilized values into their lives. Had they received their education at one of the nation’s more prestigious establishments — an Eton, say, or a Harrow, or a Winchester — the youths would probably have been designated ‘Old Boys’ instead of the ‘former pupils’ printed in the late afternoon edition of the Oxford Mail. And the former pupil who had been seated in the back of the car had left his Alma Mater only the previous term.

His name was Kevin Costyn.

Julia Stevens walked round to her former pupil’s house during the lunch-break that Friday, wishing, if she could, to speak to Kevin’s mother. But the door-bell, like most of the other fixtures there by the look of things, was out of order; and no one answered her repeated knockings. As she slowly turned and walked back through the neglected, litter-strewn front garden, a young woman, with two small children in a pushchair, stopped for a moment by the broken gate, and spoke to her.

‘The people in there are usually out.’

That was all.

Perhaps, thought Julia Stevens, as she made her way thoughtfully back to school — perhaps that brief, somewhat enigmatic utterance could explain more about her former pupil than she herself had ever learned.

In the Major Trauma Ward, on Level 5 of the JR2 in Headington, she explained to the ward-sister that she had rung an hour earlier, at 6 p.m., and been told that it would be all right for her to visit Mr Kevin Costyn.

‘How is he?’

‘Probably not quite so bad as he looks. He’s had a CT test — Computerized Tomography — and there doesn’t seem to be any damage but we’re a little bit worried about his brain, yes. And he looks an awful mess, I’m afraid. Please prepare yourself, Mrs Stevens.’

He was awake, and recognized her immediately.

‘I’m sorry,’ he whispered, speaking through a dreadfully lop-sided mouth, like one who has just received half a dozen injections of local anaesthetic into one half of the jaw.

‘Sh! I’ve just come to see how you’re getting on, that’s all.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Listen! I’m the teacher, remember? Just let me do the talking.’

‘That were the worst thing I ever done in my life.’

‘Don’t talk about it now! You weren’t driving.’

He turned his face towards her, revealing the left cheek, so terribly bloodied and stitched and torn.

‘It’s not that, Mrs Stevens. It’s when I asked you for the money.’ His eyes pleaded with her. ‘I should never a’ done that. You’re the only person that was ever good to me, really — and then I go and…’

His words were faltering further, and there was a film of tears across his eyes.

‘Don’t worry about that, Kevin!’

‘Will you promise me something? Please?’

‘If I can, of course I will.’ ‘You won’t worry if I don’t worry.’ ‘I promise.’

‘There’s no need, you see. I won’t ever tell anybody what I done for you — honest to God, I won’t.’

A few minutes later, Julia was aware of movement behind her, and she turned to see the nurse standing there with a uniformed policeman, the latter clutching his flat hat rather awkwardly to his rib-cage.

It was time to go; and laying her hand for a few seconds on Kevin’s right arm, an arm swathed in bandages and ribbed with tubes, she took her leave.

As she waited for the lift down to the ground floor, she smiled sadly to herself as she recalled the nurse’s words: ‘But we’re a little bit worried about his brain’… just like almost all the staff at the Proctor Memorial School had been, for five years… for fifteen terms.

And then, as she tried to remember exactly where she’d parked the Volvo, she found herself, for some reason, thinking of Chief Inspector Morse.

Chapter forty-nine

Of the four separate operas which comprise Der Ring des Nibelungen (an achievement which in his view ranked as one of the seven great wonders of the modern world), Siegfried had always been Morse’s least favourite. And on the evening of Saturday, 17 September, he decided he would seek again to discover whether the fault lay with himself or with Wagner. But the evening was destined not to pass without its interruptions.

At 7.35 p.m. Lewis had rung through with the dramatic news that the handle-bars and the saddle on the bicycle recovered from the railings outside the parish church of St Mary Magdalene still bore traces of blood, and that preliminary tests pointed strongly to its being McClure’s blood. Such findings, if confirmed, would provide the police with their first physical link between Felix McClure and Edward Brooks, since the latter’s wife, Brenda, had now identified the bike as her husband’s; as had one of the assistants at Halford Cycles on the Cowley Road, where Brooks had purchased the bike four months previously. A warrant, therefore, should be made out asap for the arrest of Mr Edward Brooks — with Morse’s say-so.

And Morse now said so.

The fact that the person against whom the warrant would be issued was nowhere to be found had clearly taken some of the cream from Lewis’s éclair. But Morse seemed oddly content: he maintained that Lewis was doing a wonderful job, but forbad him to disturb him again that evening, barring some quite prodigious event — such as the birth of another Richard Wagner.

So Morse sat back again, poured himself another Scotch, lit another cigarette, and turned Siegfried back on.

Paradise enow.

Very few people knew Morse’s personal (ex-directory) telephone number, and in fact he had changed it yet again a few months earlier. When, therefore, forty minutes further into Siegfried, the telephone rang once more, Morse knew that it must be Lewis again; and thumping down his libretto with an ill grace, he answered tetchily.

‘What do you want this time?’

‘Hullo? Chief Inspector Morse?’ It was a woman’s voice, and Morse knew whose. Why had he been such a numbskull as to give his private number to the pink-haired punk-wonder?

‘Yes?’

‘Hi! You told me if ever I wanted any help, all I’d got to do was pick up the phone, remember?’

‘How can I help?’ asked Morse wearily, a hint of exasperation in his voice.

‘You don’t sound overjoyed to hear from me.’

‘Just a bit tired, that’s all.’

‘Too tired for me to treat you to a pint?’

Morse wasn’t quite sure at that moment whether his spirits were rising or falling. ‘Sometime next week, perhaps?’ he suggested.

‘No. I want to see you tonight. Now. Right now.’

‘I’m sorry, I can’t see you tonight—’

‘Why not?’

‘Well, to tell you the truth, I’m in the bath.’

‘Wiggle the water a bit so I can hear.’

‘I can’t do that — I’d get the phone wet.’

‘So you didn’t really mean what you said at all.’

‘Yes, I did. I’ll be only too glad to help. What’s the trouble?’

‘It’s no good — not over the phone.’

‘Why on earth not?’

‘You’ll see.’

‘I don’t follow you.’

‘I’m just going out to catch a bus to the City Centre. With a bit of luck I’ll be there in twenty minutes — outside Marks and Sparks — that’s where it stops, and then I’m going to walk up St Giles’, and I’m goin’ in the Old Parsonage for a drink. I’ll stay there half an hour. And if you’ve not turned up by then, I’ll just take a taxi up to your place — OK with you?’

‘No, it’s not. You don’t know where I live anyway—’

‘Nice fellah, Sergeant Lewis. I could fall for ’im.’

‘He’s never told you my address!’

‘Why don’t you ring and ask ’im?’

Morse looked at his wristwatch: almost half-past eight.

‘Give me half an hour.’

‘Won’t you need a bit longer?’

‘Why’s that?’

‘Well, you’ve got to get yourself dried and then get dressed and then make sure you can find your wallet and then catch a bus—’

‘Make it three-quarters of an hour, then,’ said Morse, wondering, in fact, where his wallet was, for he seldom used it when Lewis was around.

Lewis himself rang again that evening, about ten minutes after Morse had left. The path lab had confirmed that the blood found on the recovered bicycle was McClure’s; and on his way home (a little disappointed) he pushed a note to that effect through the front door of Morse’s bachelor flat — together with the newspaper cutting from the previous week’s Oxford Times received from one of his St Aldate’s colleagues:

Ashley Davies also had repeatedly rung an Oxford number that Saturday evening, but with similar lack of success; and he (like Sergeant Lewis) felt some disappointment. Ellie had told him that she would be out all day, but suggested that he gave her a ring in the evening. His news could wait — well, it wasn’t really ‘news’, at all. He just wanted her to know how efficient he’d been.

He’d visited the plush, recently opened Register Office in New Road, where he’d been treated with courtesy and competence. In the circumstances ‘Notice by Certificate’ (he’d been informed) would be the best procedure — with Saturday, 15 October a possible, probable, marriage date, giving ample time for the requisite notices to be posted both at Bedford and at Oxford. He’d agreed to ring the Registrar the following Monday with final confirmation.

A few ‘family’ to witness the ceremony would have been nice. But, as Ashley was sadly aware, his own mother and father had long since distanced themselves from ‘that tart’; and although Ellie’s mum could definitely be counted upon, no invitation would ever be sent to her step-father — and that not just because he had left no forwarding address, but because Ellie would never allow even the mention of his name.

Only one wedding guest so far then. But it would be easy to find a few others; and anyway the legal requirement (Ellie, oddly enough, had known all about this) was only for two.

Ashley rang her number again at 10 p.m. Still no answer. And for more than a few minutes he felt a surge of jealousy as he wondered where she was, and with whom she was spending the evening.

Chapter fifty

She was nowhere to be seen in the area known as the Parsonage Bar, which (as we know) served as a combined bar and restaurant. There were, however, two temporarily unescorted young women there, one blonde, the other brunette. The former, immaculately coiffured, and dressed in a white suit, would attract interest wherever she went; the latter, her hair cut stylishly short, and dressed in a fold-over Oxford-blue creation, would perhaps attract her own fair share of attention too, but her face was turned away from Morse, and it was difficult for him to be certain.

With no real ale on offer, he ordered a glass of claret, and stood at the bar for a couple of minutes watching the main door; then sat on one of the green bar-stools for a further few minutes, still watching the main door.

But Miss Smith made no entrance.

‘Are you on your own?’

The exaggeratedly seductive voice had come from directly behind him, and Morse swivelled to find one of the two women, the brunette, climbing somewhat inelegantly on to the adjoining stool.

‘For the moment I am, yes. Er, can I buy —?’

He had been looking at her hair, a rich dark brown, with bottled-auburn highlights. But it was not her hair that had caused the mid-sentence hiatus, for now he was looking into her eyes — eyes that were sludgy-green, like the waters of the Oxford Canal.

‘Ye gods!’ he exclaimed.

‘Didn’t recognize me, did you? I’ve been sittin’ waitin’. Good job I’ve got a bit of initiative.’

‘What will you have to drink?’

‘Champagne. I fancy some champagne.’

‘Oh.’ Morse looked down at the selection of ‘Wines available by the Glass’.

‘Can’t we stretch to a bottle?’ she asked.

Morse turned over the price-list and surveyed ‘A Selection of Vintage Champagnes’, noting with at least partial relief that most of them were available in half-bottles. He pointed to the cheapest (cheapest!) of these, a Brut Premier Cru: £18.80.

‘That should be all right, perhaps?’

She smiled at him slyly. ‘You look a little shell-shocked, Inspector.’

In fact Morse was beginning to feel annoyed at the way she was mocking him, manipulating him. He’d show her!

‘Bottle of Number 19, waiter.’

Her eyebrows lifted and the green eyes glowed as if the sun were shining on the waters. She had crossed her legs as she sat on the bar-stool, and Morse now contemplated a long expanse of thigh.

‘“Barely Black” they’re called — the stockings. Sort of sexy name, isn’t it?’

Morse drained his wine, only newly aware of why Eleanor Smith could so easily have captivated (inter alios) Dr Felix McClure.

They sat opposite each other at one of the small circular-topped tables.

‘Cheers, Inspector.’

‘Cheers.’

He noticed how she held the champagne glass by the stem, and mentally awarded her plus-one for so doing; at the same time cancelling it with minus-one for the fingernails chewed down to the quicks.

‘It’s OK — I’m workin’ on it.’

‘Pardon?’

‘Me fingernails — you were lookin’ at ’em, weren’t you? Felix used to tell me off about ’em.’ She speared first a green, then a black olive.

‘You can’t blame me for not recognizing you. You look completely different — your hair…’

‘Yeah. Got one o’ me friends to cut it and then I washed it out — four times! — then I put some other stuff on, as near me own colour as I could get. Like it?’

She pushed her hair back from her temples and Morse noticed the amethyst earrings in the small, neat ears.

‘Is your birthday in February?’

‘I say! What a clever old stick you are.’

‘Why this… this change of heart, though?’

She shook her head. ‘Just change of appearance. You can’t change your heart. Didn’t you know that?’

‘You know what I mean,’ said Morse defensively.

‘Well, like I told you, I’m gettin’ spliced — got to be a respectable girl now — all that sort o’ thing.’

Morse watched her as she spoke and recalled from the first time he’d seen her the glossy-lipsticked mouth in the powder-pale face. But everything had changed now. The rings had gone too, at least temporarily, from her nose; and from fingers, too, for previously she had worn a whole panoply of silverish rings. Now she wore just one, a slender, elegant-looking thing, with a single diamond, on the third finger of her left hand.

‘How can I help you?’ asked Morse.

‘Well, I thought you might like to see me for starters — that wouldn’t ’ave bin no good over the blower, would it?’

‘Why do you have to keep talking in that sort of way? You’ve got a pleasant voice and you can speak very nicely. But sometimes you deliberately seem to try to sound like a…’

‘A trollop?’

‘Yes.’

Neither of them spoke for a while. Then it was Ellie:

‘I wanted to ask you two things really.’

‘I’m all ears.’

‘Actually you’ve got quite nice ears, for a man. Has anyone ever told you that?’

‘Not recently, no.’

‘Look. You think my step-father’s dead, don’t you?’

‘I’m not sure what I think.’

‘If he is dead, though, when do you think…?’

‘As I say — I just don’t know.’

‘Can’t you guess?’

‘Not to you, Miss Smith, no.’

‘Can’t you call me “Ellie”?’

‘All right.’

‘What do I call you?’

‘They just call me Morse.’

‘Yes — but your Christian name?’

‘Begins with “E”, like yours.’

‘No more information?’

‘No more information.’

‘OK. Let me tell you what’s worrying me. You think Mum’s had something to do with all this, don’t you?’

‘As I say—’

‘I agree with you. She may well have had, for all I know — and good luck to her if she did. But if she did, it must have been before that Wednesday. You know why? Because — she doesn’t know this — but I’ve been keeping an eye on her since then, and there’s no way — no way — she could have done it after…’

‘After what?’ asked Morse quietly.

‘Look, I’ve read about the Pitt Rivers business — everybody has. It’s just that… I just wonder if something has occurred to you, Inspector.’

‘Occasionally things occur to me,’ said Morse.

‘Have you got any cigarettes, by the way?’

‘No, I’ve given up.’

‘Well, as I was saying, what if the knife was stolen on the Wednesday afternoon to give everybody the impression that the murder — if there is a murder — was committed after that Wednesday afternoon? Do you see what I mean? OK, the knife was stolen then — but what if it wasn’t used? What if the murder was committed with a different knife?’

‘Go on.’

‘That’s it really. Isn’t that enough?’

‘You realize what you’re saying, don’t you? If your step-father has been murdered; if he was murdered before the theft of the knife, then your mother is under far more suspicion, not less. As you say, quite rightly, she’s got a continuous alibi from the time she left for Stratford with Mrs Stevens on that Wednesday, but she hasn’t got much of one for the day before. In fact she probably hasn’t got one at all.’

Ellie looked down at the avocado-coloured carpet, and sipped the last of her champagne.

‘Would you like me to go and get a packet of cigarettes, Inspector?’

Morse drained his own glass.

‘Yes.’

Whilst she was gone (for he made no effort to carry out the errand himself) Morse sat back and wondered exactly what it was that Ellie Smith was trying to tell him… or what it was that she was trying not to tell him. The point she had just made was exactly the one which he himself (rather proudly) had made to Sergeant Lewis, except that she had made it rather better.

‘Now, second thing,’ she said as each of them sat drinking again and (now) smoking. ‘I want to ask you a favour. I said, didn’t I, that me and Ashley—’

‘Ashley and I.’

‘Ashley and I are getting married, at the Registry Office—’

‘Register Office,’ corrected the pedantic Inspector.

‘—and we wondered — I wondered — if you’d be willing to come along and be a witness.’

‘Why me?’

‘Because… well, no reason really, perhaps, except I’d like you to be there, with me mum. It’d make me… I’d be pleased, that’s all.’

‘When is it — the wedding?’

‘“Wedding”? Sounds a bit posh, doesn’t it? We’re just getting married: no bridesmaids, no bouquets — and not too much bloody confetti, I hope.’

An avuncular Morse nodded, like an understanding senior citizen.

‘Not like all the razzmatazz you probably had at your wedding,’ she said.

Morse looked down at the carpet, as she had done earlier; then looked up again. For a second or two it was as though an electric current had shot across his forehead, and for some strange reason he found himself wanting to reach out across the table and just for a moment touch the hand of the young woman seated opposite.

‘How are you getting home, Ellie?’

In the taxi (‘Iffley Road — then the top of the Banbury Road,’ Morse had instructed), Ellie had interlaced her fingers into his; and Morse felt moved and confused and more than a little loving.

‘Did you see that watercolour?’ she asked. ‘The one just by our table? Our table?’

‘No.’

‘It was lovely — with fields and sheep and clouds. And the clouds…’

‘What about them?’ asked Morse quietly.

‘Well, they were white at the top and then a sort of middling, muddy grey, and then a darker grey at the bottom. Clouds are like that, aren’t they?’

‘Are they?’ Morse, the non-Nephologist, had never consciously contemplated a cloud in his life, and he felt unable to comment further.

‘It’s just that — well, all I’m tryin’ to say is that I enjoyed bein’ with you, that’s all. For a little while I felt I was on the top o’ one o’ them clouds, OK?’

After the taxi had dropped her off, and was making its way from East Oxford to North Oxford, Morse realized that he too had almost been on top of one of ‘them clouds’ that evening.

Back in his flat, he looked with some care at the only watercolour he had. The clouds there had been painted exactly as Ellie Smith had said. And he nodded to himself, just a little sadly.

Chapter fifty-one

In the waiting area of the Churchill Hospital, immediately Mrs Stevens had been called in to see her specialist, at 10.35 a.m. on Tuesday, 20 September, Brenda Brooks picked up a surprisingly recent issue of Good Housekeeping, and flicked through its glossy pages. But she found it difficult to concentrate on any particular article.

Brenda was a person who took much pleasure in the simple things of life. Others, she knew, had their yearnings for power or wealth or knowledge, but two of her own greatest delights were cleanliness and tidiness. What a joy she felt each week, for example, when she watched the dustmen casually hurl her black bags into the back of the yellow rubbish-cart — then seeing them no more. It seemed like Pilgrim finally ridding himself of his burden of sin.

For her own part, she had seldom made any mess at all in her life. But there was always an accumulation of things to be thrown away: bits of cabbage-leaves, and empty tins, and cigarette stubs from her husband’s ashtrays… Yes. It was always good to see the black bags, well, disappear really. You could put almost anything in them: bloodstained items like shirts, shoes, trousers — anything.

There were the green bags, too — the bags labelled ‘Garden Waste’, issued by Oxford City Council, at 50p apiece. Householders were permitted to put out two such bags every week; but the Brooks’s garden was small, and Brenda seldom made use of more than one a fortnight.

Then there were those strong, transparent bags which Ted had brought home a couple of years ago, a heavy stack of them piled in the garden shed, just to the left of the lawn-mower. Precisely what purpose her husband had envisaged for such receptacles had been unclear, but they had occasionally proved useful for twigs and small branches, because the material from which they were manufactured was stout, heavy-duty stuff, not easily torn.

But the real joy of Brenda’s life had ever centred on the manual skills — knitting, needlework, embroidery — for her hands had always worked confidently and easily with needles and crochet-hooks and bodkins and such things. Of late, too, she had begun to extend the area of her manual competence by joining a cake-icing class, although (as we have seen) it had been only with considerable and increasing pain that she had been able to continue the course, before finally being compelled to pack it up altogether.

She was still able, however, to indulge in some of her former skills; had, in fact, so very recently indulged in them when, wearing a leather glove instead of the uncomfortable Tubigrip, she had stitched the ‘body-bag’ (a word she had heard on the radio) in which her late and unlamented husband was destined to be wrapped. Never could she have imagined, of course, that the disposal of a body would cause a problem in her gently undemanding life. But it had, and she had seen to it. Not that the task had been a labour of love. Far from it. It had been a labour of hate.

She had watched, a few months earlier, some men who had come along and cut down a branch overarching the road there, about twelve feet long and about nine inches across. (Wasn’t a human head about nine inches across?) The men had got rid of that pretty easily: just put it in that quite extraordinary machine they had — from which, after a scream of whirring, the thick wood had come out the other end… sawdust.

Then there was the furnace up at the Proctor Memorial School — that would have left even less physical trace perhaps. But (as Mrs Stevens had said) there was a pretty big problem of ‘logistics’ associated with such waste-disposal. And so, although Brenda had not quite understood the objection, this method had been discounted.

The Redbridge Waste Reception Area had seemed to her a rather safer bet. It was close enough, and there was no one there to ask questions about what you’d brought in your bags — not like the time she and Ted had come through Customs and the man with the gold on his hat had discovered all those cigarettes… No, they didn’t ask you anything at the rubbish dump. You just backed the car up to the skip, opened the boot, and threw the bags down on to the great heap already there, soon to be carted away, and dumped, and bulldozed into a pit, and buried there.

But none of these methods had found favour.

Dis aliter visum.

The stiffish transparent bags measured 28¹⁄₂ inches by 36 inches, and Brenda had taken three. After slitting open the bottoms of two of them, she had stitched the three together cunningly, with a bodkin and some green garden string. She had then repeated the process, and prepared a second envelope. Then a third.

It was later to be recorded that at the time of his murder Mr Edward Brooks was 5 feet 8 inches in height, and 10¹⁄₂ stones in weight. And although the insertion of the body into the first, the second, and the third of the winding-sheets had been a traumatic event, it had not involved too troublesome an effort physically. Not for her, anyway.

Edward Brooks had been almost ready for disposal.

Almost.

By some happy chance, the roll of old brown carpet which had stood for over two years just to the right of the lawn-mower, measured 6 feet by 6 feet.

Ideal.

With some difficulty the body had been manipulated into its container, and four lengths of stout cord were knotted — very neatly! — around the bundle. The outer tegument made the whole thing a bit heavier, of course — but neater, too. And neatness, as we have seen, was an important factor in life (and now in death) for Brenda Brooks. The parcel, now complete, was ready for carriage.

It might be expected perhaps — expected certainly? — that such an experience would permanently have traumatized the soul of such a delicate woman as Mrs Brenda Brooks. But, strangely enough, such was not the case; and as she thought back on these things, and flicked through another few pages of Good Housekeeping, and waited for Mrs Stevens to re-emerge, she found herself half-smiling — if not with cruelty at least with a grim satisfaction…

There was an empty Walkers crisp-packet on the floor, just two seats away; and unostentatiously Brenda rose and picked it up, and placed it in the nearest wastepaper basket.

Mrs Stevens did not come out of the consulting-room until 11.20 a.m. that morning; and when she finally did, Brenda saw that her dearest friend in life had been weeping…

It had been that last little bit really.

‘You’ve got some friends coming over from California, you say?’

‘Yes. Just after Christmas. I’ve not seen them for almost ten years. I went to school with her — with the wife.’

‘Can I suggest something? Please?’ He spoke quietly.

‘Of course.’ Julia had looked up into the brown eyes of Basil Shepstone, and seen a deep and helpless sadness there. And she’d known what he was going to say.

‘If it’s possible… if it’s at all possible, can you get your friends to come over, shall we say, a month earlier? A month or two earlier?’

Chapter fifty-two

The case was not progressing speedily.

That, in his own words, is what Lewis felt emboldened to assert the following morning — the morning of Wednesday, 21 September — as he sat in Morse’s office at HQ.

‘Things are going a bit slow, sir.’

‘That,’ said Morse, ‘is a figure of speech the literati call “hyperbole”, a rhetorical term for “exaggeration”. What I think you’re trying to tell me is that we’re grinding to a dead halt. Right?’

Lewis nodded.

And Morse nodded.

They were both right…

Considerable activity had centred on the Brooks’s household following the finding of the bicycle, with Brenda Brooks herself gladly co-operating. Yet there seemed little about which she was able to co-operate, apart from the retraction of her earlier statement that her husband had been at home throughout the morning of Sunday, 28 August. In a nervous, gentle recantation, she was now willing (she’d said) to tell the police the whole truth. He had gone out on his bike, earlyish that morning; he had returned in a taxi, latish that morning — with a good deal of blood on his clothing. Her first thought, naturally enough, was that he’d been involved in a road accident. Somehow she’d got him into his pyjamas, into bed — and then, fairly soon afterwards, she’d called the ambulance, for she had suddenly realized that he was very ill. The bloodstained clothing she had put into a black bag and taken to the Redbridge Waste Reception Area the following morning, walking across the Iffley Road, then via Donnington Bridge Road to the Abingdon Road.

Not a very heavy load, she said.

Not so heavy as Pilgrim’s, she thought.

That was almost all, though. The police could look round the house — of course, they could. There was nothing to hide, and they could take away whatever they liked. She fully understood: murder, after all, was a serious business. But no letters, no receipts, no addresses, had been found; few photographs, few mementos, few books; no drugs — certainly no drugs; nothing much at all apart from the pedestrian possessions of an undistinguished, unattractive man, whose only memorable achievement in life had been the murder of an Oxford don.

There had been just that one discovery, though, which had raised a few eyebrows, including (and particularly) the eyebrows of Brenda Brooks. Although only £217 was in Brooks’s current account at Lloyds Bank (Carfax branch), a building society book, found in a box beside Brooks’s bed, showed a very healthy balance stashed away in the Halifax — a balance of £19,500. The box had been locked, but Brenda Brooks had not demurred when Lewis had asked her permission to force the lid — a task which he had accomplished with far more permanent damage than had been effected by the (still unidentified) thief at the Pitt Rivers Museum…

‘You think he’s dead?’ asked Lewis.

‘Every day that goes by makes it more likely.’

‘We need a body, though.’

‘We do. At least — with McClure — we had a body.’

‘And a weapon.’

‘And a weapon.’

‘But with Brooks we’ve still not got a body.’

‘And still not got a weapon,’ added Morse rather miserably.

Ten minutes later, without knocking, Strange lumbered into the office. He had been on a week’s furlough to the west coast of Scotland and had returned three days earlier. But this was his first day back at HQ, having attended a two-day Superintendents’ Conference at Eastbourne.

He looked less than happy with life.

‘How’re things going, Morse?’

‘Progressing, sir,’ said Morse uneasily.

Strange looked at him sourly. ‘You mean they’re not progressing, is that it?’

‘We’re hoping for some developments—’

‘Augh, don’t give me that bullshit! Just tell me where we are — and don’t take all bloody day over it.’

So Morse told him.

He knew (he said) — well, was ninety-nine per cent certain — that Brooks had murdered McClure: they’d got the knife from Brooks’s kitchen, without any blood on it, agreed — but now they’d got his bike, with blood on it — McClure’s blood on it. The only thing missing was Brooks himself. No news of him. No trace of him. Not yet. He’d last been seen by his wife, Brenda Brooks, and by Mrs Stevens — by the two of them together — on the afternoon of Wednesday, 7 September, the afternoon that the knife was stolen from the Pitt Rivers.

‘Where does that leave us then?’ asked Strange. ‘Sounds as if you might just as well have taken a week’s holiday yourself.’

‘For what it’s worth, sir, I think the two women are lying to us. I don’t think they did see him that Wednesday afternoon. I think that one of them — or both of them — murdered Brooks. But not on that Wednesday — and not on the Thursday, either. I think that Brooks was murdered the day before, on the Tuesday; and I think that all this Pitt Rivers thingummy is a blind, arranged so that we should think there was a link-up between the two things. I think that they got somebody, some accomplice, to pinch the African knife — well, any knife from one of the cabinets there—’

‘All right. You think — and you seem to be doing one helluva lot of “thinking”, Morse — that the knife was stolen the day after Brooks was murdered.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Go on.’

Morse was very conscious that he had scarcely thought through his conclusions with any definitive clarity, but he ploughed on:

‘It’s all to do with their alibis. They couldn’t have stolen the knife themselves — they were on a school bus going to Stratford. And so if we all make the obvious link, which we do, between the murder of Brooks and the theft, then they’re in the clear, pretty well. You see, if Brooks’s body is ever found, which I very strongly doubt—’

‘What makes you say that?’

‘Because if he’s found, he won’t have the Pitt Rivers knife stuck in him at all. It’ll be another knife — like as not another kitchen knife. But they’re certainly never going to let us find the body. That would mean the alibis they’ve fixed up for themselves have gone for a Burton.’

‘What’s the origin of that phrase?’

Morse shook his head. ‘Something to do with beer, is it?’

Strange looked at his watch: just after midday. ‘You know I was a bit surprised to find you here, Morse. I thought you’d probably gone for a Burton yourself.’

Morse smiled dutifully, and Lewis grinned hugely, as Strange continued: ‘It’s all too fanciful, mate. Stop thinking so much — and do something. Let’s have a bit of action.’

‘There’s one other thing, sir. Lewis here got on to it…’

Morse gestured to his sergeant, the latter now taking up the narrative.

‘Fellow called Davies, Ashley Davies. He’s got quite a few connections with things, sir. He was on Staircase G in Drinkwater Quad when Matthew Rodway was there — had a fight with him, in fact, and got himself kicked out’ — he looked at Morse — ‘rusticated. The fight was about a girl, a girl called Eleanor Smith; and she was the girl who was Dr McClure’s mistress. And now, Davies has got himself engaged to be married to her — and she’s Brooks’s step-daughter.’

‘That’s good, Lewis. That’s just the sort of cumulative evidence I like to hear. Did he murder Brooks?’

‘It’s not that so much, sir. It’s just that the Chief Inspector here…’

Lewis tailed off, and Morse took over.

‘It’s just that I’d been wondering why Miss Smith had agreed to marry him, that’s all. And I thought that perhaps he might have done some favour for her. Lewis here found that he was in Oxford that Wednesday afternoon, and if it was Davies who went to the Pitt Rivers—’

‘What! You’re bringing her into it now? The daughter?’

‘Step-daughter, sir.’

Strange shook his head. ‘That’s bad, Morse. You’re in Disneyland again.’

Morse sighed, and sat back in the old black leather chair. He knew that his brief résumé of the case had been less than well presented; and, worse than that, realized that even if he’d polished it all up a bit, it still wouldn’t have amounted to much. Might even have amounted to less.

Strange struggled to his feet.

‘Hope you had a good holiday, sir,’ remarked Lewis.

‘No, I didn’t. If you really want to know it was a bloody awful holiday. I got pissed off with it — rained all the bloody time.’

Strange waddled over to the door and stood there, offering a final piece of advice to his senior chief inspector: ‘Just let’s get cracking, mate. Find that body — or get Lewis here to find it for you. And when you do — you mark my words, Morse! — you’ll find that thingummy knife o’ yours stuck right up his rectum.’

After he was gone, Lewis looked across at a subdued and silent Morse.

‘You know that “all the bloody time”, sir? That’s what they call — what the literati call — “hyperbole”.’

Morse nodded, grinning weakly.

‘And he wasn’t just pissed off on his holiday, was he?’

‘He wasn’t?’

‘No, sir. He was pissed on as well!’

Morse nodded again, grinning happily now, and looking at his watch.

‘What about going for a Burton, Lewis?’

Chapter fifty-three

We must now briefly record several apparently disparate events which occurred between 21 and 24 September.

On Wednesday, 21, Julia Stevens was one of four people who rang the JR2 to ask for the latest bulletin on Kevin Costyn, who the previous day had been transferred to the Intensive Care Unit. His doctors had become increasingly concerned about a blood-clot in the brain, and a decision would very shortly be taken about possible surgery. For each of the four (including Kevin’s mother) the message, couched in its conventionally cautious terms, was the same: ‘Critical but stable’.

Not very promising, Julia realized that. Considerably better, though, than the prognosis on her own condition.

As she lay in bed that night, she would gladly have prayed for herself, as well as for Kevin, had she managed to retain any residual faith in a personal deity. But she had not so managed. And as she lay staring up at the ceiling, knowing that she could never again look forward to any good nights, quite certainly not to any cheerful awakenings, she pondered how very much more easy such things must be for people with some comfortable belief in a future life. And for just a little while her resolution wavered sufficiently for her to find herself kneeling on the Golden Floor and quietly reciting the opening lines of the Lord’s Prayer.

Photographs of the three young men involved in the Eastern Ring Road accident had appeared on page 2 of The Star (22 September), a free newspaper distributed throughout Oxford each Thursday. Below these photographs, a brief article had made no mention whatsoever of the concomitant circumstances of the ‘accident’. But it was the dolichocephalic face of Kevin Costyn, appropriately positioned between his dead partner-in-crime, to the left, and his amputee partner-in-crime, to the right, that had caught the attention of one of the attendants at the Pitt Rivers Museum. In particular it had been the sight of the small crucifix earring that had jerked his jaded memory into sudden overdrive. Earlier the police had questioned all of them about whether they could remember anything unusual, or anyone unusual, on that Wednesday afternoon when Cabinet 52 had been forced. Like each of his colleagues, he’d had to admit that he couldn’t.

But now he could.

Just before the museum closed, on Thursday, 22 September, he walked along the passage, up the stone steps, and diffidently knocked on the door of the Administrator (capital ‘A’).

Late that same afternoon Morse asked Lewis an unusual question.

‘If you had to get a wedding present, what sort of thing would you have in mind — for the bride?’

‘You don’t do it that way, sir. You buy a present for both of them. They’ll have a list, like as not — you know, dinner-service, saucepans, set of knives—’

‘Very funny!’

‘Well, if you don’t want to lash out too much you can always get her a tin-opener or an orange-squeezer.’

‘Not exactly much help in times of trouble, are you?’

‘Ellie Smith, is it?’

‘Yes.’ Morse hesitated. ‘It’s just that I’d like to buy her something… for herself.’

‘Well, there’s nothing to stop you giving her a personal present — just forget the wedding bit. Perfume, say? Scarf? Gloves? Jewellery, perhaps? Brooch? Pendant?’

‘Ye-es. A nice little pendant, perhaps…’

‘So long as her husband’s not going to mind somebody else’s present hanging round her neck all the time.’

‘Do people still get jealous these days, Lewis?’

‘I don’t think the world’ll get rid of jealousy in a hurry, sir.’

‘No. I suppose not,’ said Morse slowly.

Five minutes later the phone rang.

It was the Administrator.

In the Vaults Bar at The Randolph at lunchtime on Friday, 23 September, Ellie Smith pushed her half-finished plate of lasagne away from her and lit a cigarette.

‘Like I say, though, it’s nice of him to agree, isn’t it?’

‘Oh, give it a rest, Ellie! Don’t start talking about him again.’

‘You jealous or something?’

Ashley Davies smiled sadly.

‘Yeah, I suppose I am.’

She leaned towards him, put her hand on his arm, and gently kissed his left cheek.

‘You silly noodle!’

‘Perhaps everybody feels a bit jealous sometimes.’

‘Yeah.’

‘You mean you do?’

Ellie nodded. ‘Awful thing — sort of corrosive. Yuk!’

There was a silence between them.

‘What are you thinking about?’ he asked.

Ellie stubbed out her cigarette, and pushed her chair back from the table. ‘Do you really want to know?’

‘Please tell me.’

‘I was just wondering what she’s like that’s all.’

‘Who are you talking about?’

‘Mrs Morse.’

The sun had drifted behind the clouds, and Ashley got up and paid the bill.

A few minutes later, her arm through his, they walked along Cornmarket, over Carfax, and then through St Aldate’s to Folly Bridge, where they stood and looked down at the waters of the Thames.

‘Would you like to go on a boat trip?’ he asked.

‘What, this afternoon?’

‘Why not? Up to Iffley Lock and back? Won’t take long.’

‘No. Not for me.’

‘What would you like to do?’

She felt a sudden tenderness towards him, and wished to make him happy.

‘Would you like to come along to my place?’

The sun had slipped out from behind the clouds, and was shining brightly once more.

Chapter fifty-four

The two rivers, the Thames (or Isis) and the Cherwell, making their confluence just to the south of the City Centre, have long provided enjoyable amenities for Oxford folk, both Town and Gown: punting, rowing, sculling, canoeing, and pleasure-boating. For the less athletic, and for the more arthritic, the river-cruise down from Folly Bridge via the Iffley and Sandford locks to Abingdon, has always been a favourite.

For such a trip, Mr Anthony Hughes, a prosperous accountant now living out on Boar’s Hill, had booked two tickets on a fifty-passenger steamer, the Iffley Princess, timetabled to sail from Folly Bridge at 9.15 a.m. on Sunday, 25 September.

The previous evening he had slowly traced the course of the river on the Ordnance Survey Map, pointing out to his son such landmarks as the Green Bank, the Gut, the concrete bridge at Donnington, Haystacks Corner, and the rest, which they would pass before arriving at Iffley Lock.

For young James, the morrow’s prospects were magical. He was in several ways an attractive little chap — earnest, bespectacled, bright — with his name down for the Dragon School in North Oxford, a preparatory school geared (indeed, fifth-geared) to high academic and athletic excellence. The lad was already exhibiting an intelligent and apparently insatiable interest both in his own locality and in the Universe in general. Such Aristotelian curiosity was quite naturally a great delight to his parents; and the four-and-a-half year old young James was picking up, and mentally hoarding, bits of knowledge with much the same sort of regularity that young Jason was picking up, and physically hurling, bits of brick and stone around the Cutteslowe Estate.

Spanning the fifty-yard-wide Isis, and thus linking the Iffley Road with Abingdon Road, Donnington Bridge was a flattish arc of concrete, surmounted by railings painted, slightly incongruously, a light Cambridge-blue. And as the Iffley Princess rounded the Gut, young James pointed to the large-lettered SOMERVILLE, followed by two crossed oars, painted in black on a red background, across the upper part of the bridge, just below the parapet railings.

‘What’s that, Dad?’

But before the proud father could respond, this question was followed by another:

‘What’s that, Dad?’

Young James pointed to an in-cut, on the left, where a concrete slipway had been constructed to allow owners of cars to back the boats they were towing directly down into the river. There, trapped at the side of the slipway, was what appeared to be an elongated bundle, a foot or so below the surface of the nacre-green water. And several of the passengers on the port side now spotted the same thing: something potentially sinister; something wrapped up; but something no longer wholly concealed.

Fred Andrews, skipper of the Iffley Princess, pulled over into Salters’ Boat Yard, only some twenty yards below the bridge. He was an experienced waterman, and decided to dial 999 immediately. It was only after he had briefly explained his purpose to his passengers that an extraordinarily ancient man, seated in the bow of the boat, and dressed in a faded striped blazer, off-white flannels, and a straw boater, produced a mobile telephone from somewhere about his person, and volunteered to dial the three nines himself.

Chapter fifty-five

From Donnington Bridge Road, Lewis turned right into Meadow Lane, then almost immediately left, along a broad track, where wooden structures on the right housed the Sea Cadet Corps and the Riverside Centre. Ahead of him, painted in alternate bands of red and white, was a barrier, open now and upright; and beyond the barrier, four cars, one Land-Rover, and one black van; and a group of some fifteen persons standing round something — something covered with greyish canvas.

Forty or fifty other persons were standing on the bridge, just to the left, leaning over the railings and surveying the scene some fifty feet below them, like members of the public watching the Boat Race on one of the bridges between Mortlake and Putney. And seated silently beside Lewis, Morse himself would willingly have allowed any one of these ghoulish gawpers to look in his stead beneath the canvas, at the body just taken from the Thames.

Events had moved swiftly after the first emergency call to St Aldate’s. PC Carter had arrived within ten minutes in a white police car and had been more than grateful for the advice of the Warden of the Riverside Centre, a dark, thick-set man, who had dealt with many a body during his twenty-five years’ service there. The Underwater Search Unit had been summoned from Sulham-stead; and in due course a doctor. The body, that of a man, still sheeted in plastic, but now in danger of slithering out of its wrapping of carpet, had been taken from the water, placed at the top of the slipway — and promptly covered up, untouched. St Aldate’s CID had been contacted immediately, and Inspector Morrison had arrived to join a scene-of-crimes officer, and a police photographer. With the arrival of a cheerful young undertaker, just before noon, the cast was almost complete.

Apart from Morse and Lewis.

The reasons for such a sequence of events was clear enough to those directly and closely involved; clear even to a few of the twitchers, with their powerful binoculars, who had swelled the ranks of the bridge spectators. For this was clearly not a run-of-the-mill drowning. Even through the triple layers of plastic sheeting in which the body was wrapped, one thing stood out clearly (literally stood out clearly): the broad handle of a knife which appeared to be wedged firmly into the dead man’s back. And when, under Morrison’s careful directions — after many photographic flashings, from many angles — the stitching at the top of the improvised body-bag had been painstakingly unpicked, and one pocket of the corpse had been painstakingly picked (as it were), the identity of the man was quickly established.

On the noticeboard in the foyer of St Aldate’s station was pinned a photograph of a ‘Missing Person’ whom the police were most anxious to trace; and beneath the photograph there appeared a name, together with a few physical details. But it was not the corpse’s blackened features which Morrison had recognized; it was the name he found in the sodden wallet.

The name of Edward Brooks.

Thus was a further relay of telephone-calls initiated. Thus was Morse himself now summoned to the scene.

Sometimes procedures worked well; and sometimes (as now) there was every reason for the police to be congratulated on the way situations were handled. On this occasion one thing only (perhaps two?) had marred police professionalism.

PC Carter, newly recruited to the Force, had been reasonably well prepared for the sight of a body, particularly one so comparatively well preserved as this one. What he had been totally unprepared for was the indescribable stench which had emanated from the body even before the Inspector had authorized the opening of the envelope: a stench which was the accumulation, it seemed, of the dank depths of the river, of blocked drains, of incipient decomposition — of death itself. And PC Carter had turned away, and vomited rather noisily into the Thames, trusting that few had observed the incident.

But inevitably almost everyone, including the audience in the gods, had noticed the brief, embarrassing incident.

It was Morse’s turn now.

Phobias are common enough. Some persons suffer from arachnophobia, or hypsophobia, or myophobia, or pterophobia… Well-nigh everyone suffers occasionally from thanatophobia; many from necrophobia — although Morse was not really afraid of dead bodies at all, or so he told himself. What he really suffered from was a completely new phobia, one that was all his own: the fear of being sick at the sight of bodies which had met their deaths in strange or terrible circumstances. Even Morse, for all his classical education, was unable to coin an appropriately descriptive, or etymologically accurate, term for such a phobia: and even had he been so able, the word would certainly have been pretentiously polysyllabic.

Yet, for all his weakness, Morse was a far more experienced performer than PC Carter; and hurriedly taking the Warden to one side, he had swiftly sought directions to the nearest loo. It was not, therefore, into the Thames, but into a lone lavatory-pan in the Riverside Centre, that Chief Inspector Morse vomited, late that Sunday morning.

‘Been in the river about a fortnight, they reckon,’ ventured Lewis when Morse finally emerged.

‘Good! That fits nicely,’ replied the pale-faced Morse.

‘You OK, sir?’

‘Course I’m bloody OK, man!’ snapped Morse.

But Lewis was not in the least offended, for he and Morse were long acquainted; and Lewis knew all his ways.

Chapter fifty-six

If a few minutes earlier it had been his stomach that was churning over, it was now the turn of Morse’s brain; and somehow he managed, at least for a while, to look down again at the semi-sealed body. Heavy condensation between the plastic layers was preventing any close inspection of the knife stuck into the corpse’s back. But Morse was determined to be patient: better than most, he knew the value of touching nothing further there; and to be truthful he had been more than a little surprised that Morrison had gone as far as he had.

Nothing further, therefore, was touched until the arrival of the police pathologist, Dr Laura Hobson, whose bright-red Metro joined the little convoy of vehicles half an hour later. Briefly she and Morse conversed. After which, with delicate hands, she performed a few delicate tasks; whilst Morse walked slowly from the scene, along a track between a line of trees and the riverbank, up to a building housing the Falcon Rowing Club, some seventy yards upstream to his right. Here he stood looking around him, wondering earnestly what exactly he should be looking for.

After returning to the slipway, he took the Warden to one side and put to him some of the questions that were exercising his mind. Where perhaps might the corpse have been pushed into the river? How could the corpse have been conveyed to such a spot? In which direction, and how far, could the corpse have been conveyed by the prevailing flow of the waters?

The Warden proved to be intelligent and informative. After stressing the importance, in all such considerations, of time of year, weather conditions, river-temperature, volume of water, and frequency of river-traffic; after giving Morse a clear little lesson on buoyancy and flotation, he suggested a few likely answers. As follows.

The strong probability was that the body had not been shifted all that far by the prevailing flow; indeed, if it had been slightly more weighted down, the body might have rested permanently on the bottom; as things were, the body could well have been put into the river at a point just beside the Falcon Rowing Club; certain it was that the body would not have drifted against the north — south movement of the tide. The only objection to such a theory was that it would have been an inordinately long way for anyone to carry such a weighty bundle. With the barrier locked down across the approach road to the slipway, no car (unless authorized) could even have reached the river at that point, let alone turned right there and deposited a body sixty, seventy yards upstream.

Unless…

Well, there were just over a hundred members of the Riverside Club who possessed boats, who used the slipway fairly regularly, and who were issued with a key to the barrier. Not infrequently (the Warden confessed) a boat-owner neglected to close the barrier behind him; or deliberately left it open for a colleague known to be sailing up behind. And so… if the barrier happened to be left open — well, not much of a problem, was there?

‘You know what I’d’ve done, Mr Holmes, if I’d had to dispose of a body here?’ Morse’s eyes slowly rose to the top of Donnington Bridge, where public interest was, if anything, increasing, in spite of the makeshift screen which had now been erected around the body.

‘You tell me.’

‘I’d have driven here, about two o’clock in the morning, and pushed it over the bridge.’

‘Helluva splash, you’d make,’ said the Warden.

‘Nobody around to hear it, though.’

‘A few people around then, Inspector. You know who they are?’

Morse shook his head.

‘Three lots o’ people, really: lovers, thieves, police.’

‘Oh!’ said Morse.

Twenty minutes later the young pathologist got to her feet — the grim, grisly preliminary examination over.

‘Mustn’t do much more here,’ she reported. ‘Been in the river between a week and a fortnight, I’d guess. Difficult to say — he’s pretty well preserved. Neat little job of packaging somebody did there. But we’ll sort him out later. All right?’

Morse nodded. ‘We’re in your hands.’

‘Not much doubt he’s been murdered, though — unless he died, then somebody stuck a knife in him, then wrapped him all up and put him in the river here.’

‘Seems unlikely,’ conceded Morse.

Dr Hobson was packing up her equipment when Morse spoke again:

‘You’ll be sure not to touch the knife until—?’

‘You’ve not got much faith in some of your colleagues, have you?’

She was an attractive young woman; and when first she had taken over from the sadly missed Max, Morse had felt he could almost have fallen a little in love with her. But now he dreamed of her no longer.

Morse had taken the sensible (almost unprecedented) precaution of refraining from a few pints of beer on a Sunday lunchtime; and at 3.15 p.m. he and Lewis stood in the path lab beside the prone body of Edward Brooks, the plastic bags in which he had been inserted lying folded neatly at his feet, like the linen wraps at the Resurrection. Apart from Dr Hobson herself, two further forensic assistants and a fingerprint expert stood quite cheerfully around the body, in which the handle of a broad knife stood up straight.

Yet it was not the handle itself, so carefully dusted now with fingerprint-powder, which had riveted Morse’s attention. It was the label attached to the side of the handle; a label whose lettering, though washed and smudged by the waters of the Thames, was still partially legible on its right-hand side:

‘I just do not believe this,’ whispered Morse slowly.

‘Pardon, sir?’

But Morse was not listening. He touched Laura Hobson lightly on the shoulder of her starched white coat, and for the second time that day asked for the quickest way to the nearest Gents.

Chapter fifty-seven

The following day, Monday, 26 September, both Morse and Lewis arrived fairly early, just after 7 a.m., at Thames Valley HQ.

Morse himself had slept poorly, his eyeballs ceaselessly circling in their sockets throughout the night as the dramatic new development in the case had gradually established itself into the pattern of his thinking; for in truth he had been astonished at the discovery that Brooks had been murdered after the theft of the Rhodesian knife; murdered in fact by the Rhodesian knife.

As he had hitherto analysed the case, assessing motive and opportunity and means, Morse had succeeded in convincing himself that two or perhaps three persons, acting to some degree in concert, had probably been responsible for Brooks’s murder. Each of the three (as Morse saw things) would have regarded the death of Brooks, though for slightly different reasons, as of considerable benefit to the human race.

Three suspects.

Three women: the superficially gentle Brenda Brooks, who had suffered sorely in the role of the neglected and maltreated wife; the enigmatic Mrs Stevens, who had developed a strangely strong bond between herself and her cleaning-lady; and the stepdaughter, Eleanor Smith, who had left home in her mid-teens, abused (how could Morse know?) mentally, or verbally, or physically, or sexually even…

Women set apart from the rest of their kind by the sign of the murderer — by the mark of Cain.

A confusing figuration of ‘if’s’ had permutated itself in Morse’s restless brain that previous night, filtering down to exactly the same shortlist as before, since the Final Arbiter had handed to Morse the same three envelopes. In the first, as indeed in the second, the brief verdict was typed out in black letters: ‘Not Guilty’; but in the third, Morse had read the even briefer verdict, typed out here in red capitals: ‘guilty’. And the name on the front of the third envelope was — Eleanor Smith.

For almost an hour, Morse and Lewis had spoken together that morning: spoken of thoughts, ideas, hypotheses. And when he returned from the canteen with two cups of coffee at 8 a.m., Lewis stated, starkly and incontrovertibly, the simple truth they both had to face:

‘You know, I just don’t see — I just can’t see — how Brenda Brooks, or this Mrs Stevens — how either of them could have done it. We’ve not exactly had a video-camera on them since the knife was stolen — but not far off. All right, they’d got enough motive. But I just don’t see when they had the opportunity.’

‘Nor do I,’ said Morse quietly. And Lewis was encouraged to continue.

‘I know what you mean about Mrs Stevens, sir. And I agree. There’s somebody pretty clever behind all this, and she’s the only one of the three who’s got the brains to have thought it all out. But as I say…’

Morse appeared a little pained as Lewis continued:

‘… she couldn’t have done it. And Mrs Brooks couldn’t have done it either, could she? She’s got the best motive of any of them, and she’d probably have the nerve as well. But she couldn’t have planned it all, surely, even if somehow she had the opportunity — that night, say, after she got back from Stratford. I just don’t see it.’

‘Nor do I,’ repeated Morse, grimacing as he sipped another mouthful of weak, luke-warm coffee.

‘So unless we’re looking in completely the wrong direction, sir, that only leaves…’

But Morse was only half listening. ‘Unless’, Lewis had just said… the same word the Warden had used the previous day when he’d been talking of the red-and-white striped barrier. In Morse’s mind there’d earlier been a logical barrier to his hypothesis that Brooks’s body must have been taken to the Thames in some sort of vehicle — as well as that literal barrier. But the Warden had merely lifted that second barrier, hadn’t he? Just physically lifted it out of the way.

So what if he, Morse, were now to lift that earlier barrier too?

‘Lewis! Get the car, and nip along and have a word with the headmaster of the Proctor Memorial. Tell him we’d like to see Mrs Stevens again. We can either go round to her house or, if she prefers, she can come here.’

‘Important, is it, sir?’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Morse. ‘And while you’re at it, you can drop me off at the path lab. I want another quick word with the lovely Laura.’

Chapter fifty-eight

Coming out of her lab to greet Morse, Dr Laura Hobson appeared incongruously contented with her work. She pointed to the door behind her.

‘You’d better not go in there, Chief Inspector. Not for the minute. We’ve nearly finished, though — the main bits, anyway.’

‘Anything interesting?’

‘Do you call stomach contents interesting?’

‘No.’

‘Looks as if they’ve got some vague prints all right, though — on the knife. I’ll keep my fingers crossed for you. We’re all hoping, you know that.’

‘Thank you.’ Morse hesitated. ‘It may sound a bit far-fetched I know, but…’

‘Yes?’

‘The knife — I’m doing a little bit of hoping myself — the knife used to murder McClure was very similar to’ — Morse nodded towards the main lab — ‘to the knife that was stolen from the Pitt Rivers.’

‘Yes, I knew that.’

‘What I was wondering is this. Is there any possibility — any possibility at all — that Brooks was murdered with another knife — one of the same type, one with the same sort of blade — then for the knife you’ve got in there — the one with the possible prints on it — to be stuck in him… afterwards?’

Laura Hobson looked at him curiously.

‘Have two knives, you mean? Stick one in him, take it out, then stick the other in?’

Morse looked uneasy, yet there was still some flicker of hope in his face. ‘When I said “afterwards”, I meant, well, a few hours later — a day even?’

With a sad smile, she shook her head. ‘No chance. Unless your murderer’s got the luck of the devil and the skill of a brain-surgeon—’

‘Or a boy with a model-aeroplane kit?’

‘—you’d have some clear external evidence of the two incisions — and don’t forget he was stabbed through his clothes.’

‘And there aren’t…?’

‘No. No signs at all. Besides that, though, you’d have all the internal evidence: the two separate termini of the knife-points; two distinct sets of lacerations on either side of—’

‘I see, yes,’ mumbled Morse.

‘I don’t know whether you do, though. Look! Let me explain. Whenever you have a knife-wound—’

‘Please, not!’ said Morse. ‘I believe all you say. It’s just that I’ve never been able to follow all these physiological labellings. They didn’t teach us any of that stuff at school.’

‘I know,’ said Laura quietly. ‘You did Greek instead. You told me once, remember, in our… in our earlier days, Chief Inspector?’

Feeling more than a little embarrassed, Morse avoided her eyes.

‘How would it have helped, anyway?’ continued Laura, in a more business-like tone.

‘Well, I’ve been assuming all along that the theft of the knife from the Pitt Rivers was a blind: a blind to establish an alibi, or alibis; to try to establish the fact that Brooks wasn’t murdered until after the knife was stolen.’

She nodded, appreciating the point immediately. ‘You mean, if he’d been murdered on a particular day with one knife, and then, the day after, a second knife was stolen; and if the first knife was subsequently removed from the body, and the second knife inserted into the wound — people like the police, like you, could well have been misled about the time of death.’

‘That’s a splendidly constructed sentence,’ said Morse.

‘Waste of breath, though, really. I wouldn’t have been misled.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘Ninety-nine per cent sure.’

‘Could you just rule out the other one per cent — for me? Please?’

‘Waste of time. But I will, yes, if that’s what you want.’

‘I’m very grateful.’

‘Don’t you want to see the contents of his pockets? His clothes?’

‘I suppose I ought to, yes.’

Again she looked at him curiously. ‘It’s as if you’ve been putting your… well, your faith in something, isn’t it? And I feel I’ve let you down.’

‘I lost all my faith a long time ago, I’m afraid.’

‘Much better to have evidence, in our job.’

Morse nodded; and followed Laura Hobson’s shapely legs into a side-room, where she gestured to a table by the window.

‘I’ll leave you to it, Chief Inspector.’

Morse sat down and first looked through the official ‘In Possession Property’ form, listing the items found on Brooks’s person.

The wallet which had been removed at the river-side to establish identity (and which Morse had already looked through, anyway) was among the items, and he quickly examined its few (now dry) contents once more: one £10 note; one £5 note; a Lloyds Bank plastic card; an ID card for the Pitt Rivers Museum; a card showing official membership of the East Oxford Conservative Club. Nothing else. No photographs; no letters.

Nor were the other items listed and laid out there in small transparent bags of any obvious interest: a black comb; a white handkerchief; £2.74 in assorted coinage; what had once been a half-packet of now melted indigestion tablets; and a bunch of seven keys. It was this latter item only which appeared to Morse worthy of some brief consideration.

The biggest key, some 3 inches in length, was grimy dark-brown in colour, and looked like a door-key; as perhaps did the two Yale keys, one a khaki colour, the other shinily metallic. The other four keys were (possibly?) for things like a garden shed or a bicycle-lock or a briefcase or a box or… But Morse’s brain was suddenly engaged now: the fourth small key, a sturdy, silvery key, had the number ‘X10’ stamped upon it; and Morse gazed through the window, and wondered. Was it one of a set of keys? A key to what? A key to where? Would it help to spend a few hours sorting out these seven keys and matching them to their locks? Probably not. Probably a waste of time. But he ought to do it, he knew that. So he would do it. Or rather he’d get Lewis to do it.

From the dead man’s clothing Morse quickly decided that nothing could be gleaned which could further the investigation one whit; and he was standing up now, preparing to leave, when Laura came back into the small room.

Phone-call for Morse. Sergeant Lewis. In her office.

Lewis was ringing from the Head’s office of the Proctor Memorial School. Mrs Julia Stevens had been granted temporary leave from her duties. Well, indefinite leave really — but the terminological inexactitude had avoided any difficult embarrassment all round. She would not be returning to school, ever; she had only a few months to live; and a supply teacher had already taken over her classes. Soon everyone would have to know, of course; but not yet. She wasn’t at home, though; she’d gone away on a brief holiday, abroad — the Head had known that, too. Gone off with a friend, destination unknown.

‘Do we know who the friend is?’ asked Morse.

‘Well, you do, don’t you?’

‘I could make a guess.’

‘Makes you wonder if they’re guilty after all, doesn’t it?’

‘Or innocent,’ suggested Morse slowly.

The condition of Kevin Costyn was markedly improved. With no surgery now deemed necessary, he had been removed from the ICU the previous lunchtime; and already the police had been given permission to interview him — at least about the accident.

Very soon he would be interviewed about other matters, too. But although he was reluctantly willing to talk about ram-raiding and stolen vehicles, he would say nothing whatsoever about the murder of Edward Brooks. He may have lied and cheated his way through life, but there was one promise, now, that he was never going to break.

Seated in the sunshine outside a small but fairly expensive hotel overlooking La Place de la Concorde, Julia reached out and clinked her friend’s glass with her own; and both women smiled.

‘How would you like to live here, Brenda?’

‘Lordy me! Lovely. Lovely, isn’t it, Mrs Stevens?’

‘Anywhere you’d rather be?’

‘Oh no. This is the very best place in the whole world — apart from Oxford, of course.’

Since she’d arrived, Julia had felt so very tired; but so very happy, too.

Chapter fifty-nine

At 9.30 a.m. on Tuesday, 27 September, Morse walked down the High from Carfax. There were several esteemed jewellers’ shops there, he knew that; and he looked in their windows. He was somewhat uncertain, however, of what exactly to purchase — and wholly uncertain about whether his present errand was being made easier, or more difficult, by his strong suspicion now that it had been Eleanor Smith who had murdered her step-father (the same Eleanor who had formally identified the body the previous day). Perhaps in a sense it was going to be easier, though, since in all probability he wasn’t looking for a wedding present any longer, the prospect of an imminent marriage now seeming increasingly remote. Yet for some reason he still wanted to buy the girl a present: a personal present.

Something like Lewis had suggested.

‘How much is that?’ he asked a young female assistant in the shop just across from the Covered Market.

‘Nice little pendant, isn’t it, sir? Delicate, tasteful, and quite inexpensive, really.’

‘How much is it?’ repeated Morse.

‘Only £35, sir.’

Only!

Morse looked down at the representation on the tiny oval pendant of — of somebody? ‘St Christopher, is it?’

‘St Anthony, sir. A well-known Christian saint.’

‘I thought he was the patron saint of Lost Property.’

‘Perhaps you’re thinking of a later St Anthony?’

But Morse wasn’t. He thought there’d only been one St Anthony.

‘If… if I bought this, I’d need a chain as well, wouldn’t I?’

‘It would be difficult to wear without a chain, yes.’

She was laughing at him, Morse knew that; but it hadn’t been a very bright question. And very soon he was surveying a large selection of chains: chains with varied silver- or gold-content; chains of slightly larger or slightly smaller links; chains of different lengths; chains of differing prices.

So Morse made his purchase: pendant plus chain (the cheapest).

Then, after only a few steps outside the jeweller’s up towards Carfax Tower, he performed a sudden U-turn, returning to the shop and asking if he could please exchange the chain (not the pendant) for something a little more expensive. The assistant (still smiling at him?) was happily co-operative; and five minutes later Morse started walking once again up towards Carfax. With a different chain.

With the most expensive chain there.

He was ready for the interview.

When earlier he had rung Eleanor Smith, she had sounded in no way surprised that the police should wish to take her fingerprints — for ‘elimination purposes’, as Morse had emphasized. And when he’d explained that it was against the rule-book for anyone who had been at the scene of the river-side discovery (as he had been) to go anywhere near the homes of those who might possibly be involved with the, er, the investigation, she’d agreed to go along to Thames Valley HQ. A car would pick her up. At 11.15 a.m.

Morse just had time to call in at Sainsbury’s supermarket, on the Kidlington roundabout, where he made his few purchases swiftly, and found himself the only person at the ‘small-basket’ check-out. Just the four items, in fact: two small tins of baked beans; one small brown loaf; and a bottle of Glenfiddich.

Chapter sixty

‘What line are you going to take with her, sir?’

‘I’m not at all sure. All I know is that if any of our three ladies actually murdered Brooks — and pretty certainly one of them did — we can forget the other two, wherever they’re sunning themselves at the minute. It’s odds on that one of them, or both of them, had some part to play in the plot; but I’m sure that neither of them could have murdered Brooks. It’s a physical impossibility, knowing what we do about dates and times. But she could have done. Ellie Smith could have done — if only just. She went to Birmingham that Wednesday — you’ve checked on that. But we can’t be sure when she came back, can we? You see, if she’d come back an hour, even half an hour earlier…’

‘She could have stolen the knife, you mean?’

‘Or she could have got someone to steal it for her.’

‘Ashley Davies.’

‘Yes. Could well have been. Then he gets his reward: he gets the hand of the increasingly desirable Miss Smith — a young woman he’s had his lecherous eyes on even when she was a sleep-around-with-anybody girl.’

‘What about the attendant at the Pitt Rivers, though? He says he probably saw this young fellow Costyn there.’

‘It’s always dodgy though — this identification business. We can’t rely on that.’

Lewis nodded. ‘He doesn’t seem to have any real link with the case, anyway.’

‘Except with Mrs Stevens. She taught him, remember. And I suppose if he’s on drugs or something — got a regular habit to feed — short of cash — and if she was prepared to pay—’

‘You mean she got him to steal the knife — for somebody else? For Ellie Smith, say?’

‘Who else?’

‘But you’ve always thought—’

‘Give it a bloody rest, Lewis, will you?’ snarled Morse. ‘Do you think I get any pleasure from all this? Do you think I want to get Ellie Smith in here this morning and take her prints and tell her that she’s a bloody liar and that she knifed her sod of a step-father?’

He got up and walked to the window.

‘No, I don’t think that,’ said the ill-used Lewis quietly. ‘It’s just that I’m getting confused, that’s all.’

‘And you think I’m not?’

No, Lewis didn’t think that. And he wondered whether his next little item of news was likely to clarify or further to befuddle the irascible Chief Inspector’s brain.

‘While you were shopping, I went down to Wolsey and had another look in Mrs Ewers’ pantry.’

‘And?’

‘Well, something rang a bit of a bell when we found Brooks’s body: those plastic bags. Do you remember when we first went to the Staircase?’

‘The pile of them there in the pantry, yes.’

Lewis sought to hide his disappointment. ‘You never said anything.’

‘There’s no end of those around.’

‘I just thought that if Brooks used to take a few things home occasionally, unofficially — toilet-rolls, cartons of detergent, that sort of thing…’

‘We could have a look in Brooks’s place, yes. Where do you reckon he’d keep them?’

‘Garden shed?’

‘We’d need a search warrant… unless, Lewis—’

‘Oh no! I’m not forcing any more locks, sir. Look what a mess I made of the box in his bedroom.’

‘Perhaps you won’t need to.’ Morse opened a drawer of his desk and took out the bunch of keys. ‘I’d like to bet one of these fits the garden shed; but I doubt we’re going to find any bags there. They’ll have been too careful for that.’

‘What are you thinking of exactly?’

‘Well, you’d have expected a few prints on the plastic bags, don’t you think? But there aren’t any, it seems. The water wouldn’t have washed them off completely, I’m told. So they wore gloves all the time. And then they took good care to make sure the body wouldn’t float, agreed? There’s a gash in the bags, through all three layers — I don’t think that was caused accidentally in the river. I think it was made deliberately, to let the air out, and get the body to sink… at least, temporarily. That’s what the Warden thought, too.’

Yes, Lewis remembered. Holmes had claimed that unless any body was weighted down it would almost certainly have come up towards the surface sooner or later because of the body’s natural gases.

‘Why do you think they — somebody — went to all that trouble with the bags, sir? It’s almost as if…’

‘Go on, Lewis!’

‘As if somebody wanted the body to be found.’

‘Ye-es.’ Morse was gazing across the yard once more. ‘You know what’s buggering us up the whole time, don’t you? It’s simply that we’re going to have one helluva job making out a case against anybody. If somebody like Helena Kennedy, QC, was hired for the defence, she’d make mincemeat of us: we’ve got all the motive in the world; and all the means — but we just can’t find any bloody opportunity… except at about teatime on that Wednesday afternoon. They’ve been too clever for us. But it’s not just cleverness: it’s ruthlessness too. Not a blatant ruthlessness, but certainly a latent ruthlessness — latent in all three of them. Something that suddenly hardened into a cold-blooded resolve to get rid of Brooks — not just because they knew, must have known, that he was a murderer himself, but for an even better reason. Hatred.’

There was a knock at the door, and a WPC announced that Ms Smith was now seated in Reception.

‘Bring her up, please,’ said Morse, quickly opening a small, square black box, lined with white satin, and passing it across to Lewis.

‘What d’you think?’

Lewis, like Dr Hobson the previous day, looked across at Morse most curiously.

‘But if what you say’s right, sir, she’s going to have to postpone the happy day indefinitely — for quite a few years, perhaps.’

‘She can still sit in a cell and twiddle it in her fingers. No law against that, is there?’

But before Lewis could remind Morse of the very strict and very sensible prison regulations regarding necklaces and the like, there was another knock at the door, and Morse swiftly took back the pendant of St Anthony — plus his golden chain.

Chapter sixty-one

After rolling the little finger of her left hand across the pad, after pressing it firmly on to the fingerprint-form, Eleanor Smith had finished; and Lewis now asked her to add her signature to the form.

‘That didn’t take very long, did it?’ said Morse patronizingly.

‘Does all this mean you’ve found some fingerprints on the knife?’ she asked.

Morse was slightly hesitant. ‘We think so, yes. Unidentified prints — unidentified as yet. As I explained, though, it’s just a matter of elimination.’

She looked rather weary; gone was the sparkle that had characterized the latter part of that champagne evening at the Old Parsonage.

‘You think they could be mine?’

Rather weary too was Morse’s smile.

‘We’ve got to have some suspects, haven’t we? In fact my sergeant here’s got a long list of ’em.’

She turned to Lewis. ‘Whereabouts am I on the list?’

‘We always try to put the most attractive at the top, don’t we, sir?’

Morse nodded his agreement, wishing only that he’d thought of such a splendid rejoinder himself.

‘And when exactly am I supposed to have murdered that shithouse?’

She looked from one to the other, and Morse in turn looked to Lewis the Interlocutor.

‘Perhaps,’ said the latter slowly, ‘when you got back from Birmingham that Wednesday?’

‘I see… And did I pinch the knife as well?’

‘I — we don’t think you could have done that because, as you told us, you didn’t get back into Oxford until after the museum had closed. We checked up on the train time: it got into Oxford Station at 16.35 — just three minutes late.’

‘You still don’t sound as if you believe me.’

‘We don’t think you took the knife,’ said Morse.

The slight but perceptible stress on the ‘you’ was clearly not lost on Suspect Number One.

‘You suggestin’ somebody else pinched it — then slipped it to me on the way home from the railway station? Then I just called in to have a chat with him and decided to murder the old bugger there and then — is that what you’re thinking?’

‘There are more unlikely scenarios than that,’ said Morse quietly.

‘Oh, not you! How I hate that bloody word “scenario”.’

She had touched a raw spot, for Morse hated the word too. Yet he’d not been able to come up with anything better; and he made no protest as Ellie Smith continued, changing down now into her lower-gear register of speech.

‘And what am I s’posed to ’ave done with ’im then?’

‘Well, we were hoping you could give us a few ideas yourself.’

‘Is this turnin’ into a bleedin’ interview or something?’

‘No,’ said Morse simply. ‘You’re under no obligation to answer anything. But sooner or later we’re going to have to ask all sorts of questions. Ask you, ask your mother… Where is your mother, by the way?’

‘Abroad somewhere.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘She sent me a postcard.’

‘Where from?’

‘The postmark was smudged — I couldn’t read it.’

‘Must have had a stamp on it?’

‘Yeah. I’m no good at them names of foreign countries, though.’

‘Some of them aren’t very difficult, you know. “France”, for instance?’

She made no reply.

‘Have you still got the postcard?’

‘No. Threw it away, didn’t I?’

‘What was the picture on it?’

‘A river, I think.’

‘Not the Thames?’

‘Not the Thames.’

‘You’re not being much help, you know.’

‘That’s where you’re wrong, though.’

She produced a small pasteboard business card and handed it to Morse.

‘You were asking me about that Wednesday, weren’t you? Well, I met a fellow on the train, and he got a bit, you know, a bit friendly and flirty, like; said if I ever wanted any, you know, work or anything…’

Morse looked at the white card: ‘Mike Williamson, Modelling and Photographic Agency’, with a Reading address and telephone number.

‘He’ll remember me — for sure, Inspector. I can promise you that.’

She smiled, her eyes momentarily recapturing the sparkle that Morse could recall so well.

‘Better check, Lewis.’

But as Lewis got up and moved towards the phone, Morse held up his hand: ‘Office next door, please.’

‘Why did you want him out of the way?’

Morse ignored the question, feeling quite irrationally jealous. ‘What did this fellow offer you?’

‘Oh, Christ, come off it!’ Her eyes flashed angrily now. ‘What the ’ell d’you think? He just thought I was an intelligent, ill-educated, expensive prostitute — which I am.’

‘Which you were.’

‘Which I am, Morse. By the way, you don’t mind me calling you “Morse”, do you? I did ask you — remember? — if I could call you something more pally and civilized but…’

‘What about Mr Davies? When you’re married—’

‘To Ashley? That’s all off. He came last night and we stayed up till God knows when, talking about it — going round and round in the same old circles. But I just can’t go through with it. I like him — he’s nice. But I just… I just don’t fancy him, that’s all; and I could never love him — never. So it’s not fair, is it? Not fair on him. Not fair on me, either, really.’

‘So you won’t be needing me any more — for the wedding,’ said Morse slowly.

‘’Fraid not, no. There wouldn’t have been a wedding anyway, though, would there — not if you’re going to arrest me?’

For a brief while the two looked at each other across the desk, their eyes locked together with a curiously disturbing intimacy.

The phone rang.

It was Strange; and Ellie got to her feet.

‘Please, stay!’ whispered Morse, his hand over the mouthpiece. ‘Yes, sir. Yes… Can you just give me five minutes…? I’ll be straight along.’

‘Why d’you want me to stay?’ she asked, after Morse had put down the receiver.

He took the little black box from the drawer and handed it to her.

‘It’s not wrapped up, I’m afraid. I’m not much good at that sort of thing.’

‘Wha—?’ She held the box in her left hand and opened it with her right, taking hold of the gold chain lovingly and gently, and slowly lifting up St Anthony.

‘Wha’s this for?’

‘I bought it for you.’

‘But like I say—’

‘I want you to have it, that’s all. I’ve never bought anything like that for anybody — and, as I say, I just want you to have it.’

Ellie had been looking down at the pendant and suddenly the tears began. ‘Oh God!’ she whispered.

‘Do you like it?’

‘It’s… it’s the most wonderful…’ But she could get no further. She stood up and walked round the desk, and kissed Morse fully and softly on the mouth; and Morse felt the wetness of her cheek against his own.

‘I must go,’ said Morse. ‘My boss’ll be getting impatient.’

She nodded. ‘You know what I just said — about Ashley? That I couldn’t marry him because I didn’t love him? Well, that wasn’t really the reason why I broke it off.’

In his brain Morse had become convinced that Eleanor Smith must be guilty of her step-father’s murder; but in his heart he felt grieved as he awaited her words, for he knew exactly what they would be.

Yet he was wrong.

Spectacularly wrong.

‘The real reason is I’ve… I’ve fallen in love with somebody else.’

Morse wondered if he’d heard correctly. ‘What?’

‘You gettin’ deaf or something?’

‘Not — not with that charlatan from the modelling agency, surely?’

She shook her head crossly, like some unhappy, exasperated little girl who will stamp her foot until she can get her own way, her own selfish way. Now.

‘Are you going to listen to me, or not? Can’t you guess? Can’t you see? Can’t you see?’ She was standing beside the door, her head held high, her sludgy-green eyes closed, trying so hard to hold back the brimming tears. ‘I’ve fallen in love with you, you stupid sod!’

Chapter sixty-two

Always had Morse been a reluctant dactyloscopist, and throughout his police career all the arches and whorls and loops, all the peaks and the troughs and the ridges, had ever remained a deep mystery to him — like electricity, and the Wheatstone Bridge. He was therefore perfectly happy, on Friday, 30 September, to delegate the fingerprinting of Mesdames Brooks and Stevens to Sergeant Lewis — for the two overseas travellers had returned to Oxford early that afternoon. Immigration officials at Heathrow, Gatwick, and Stansted airports had been alerted about them; and the phone-call from Heathrow had been received at Thames Valley HQ just after midday: the two had boarded the Oxford City Link coach, scheduled to arrive at its Gloucester Green terminus in Oxford at 2.30 p.m.

Neither had appeared to show any undue surprise or discomfiture when Lewis, accompanied by a fingerprint officer, had taken them into the manager’s office there, and trotted out the ‘purely for elimination’ line.

After his colleague had left for the fingerprint bureau at St Aldate’s (where there was now a computerized search facility) Lewis had returned to Kidlington HQ, to find Morse dispiritedly scanning some of the documents in the case.

But the Chief Inspector perked up with the return of his sergeant.

‘No problems?’

‘No problems, sir.’

‘You’re a betting man, Lewis?’

‘Only very occasionally: Derby, Grand National…’

‘Will you have a bet with me?’

‘50p?’

‘Can’t we be devils, and make it a quid?’

‘All right. I’ve got to be careful with the money, though — we’ve got the decorators in.’

Morse appeared surprised. ‘I thought you did all that sort of stuff yourself?’

‘I used to, sir, when I had the time and the energy. Before I started working for you.’

‘Well, take your pick!’

‘Pardon?’

‘The fingerprints. Brenda Brooks or Julia Stevens — who do you go for?’

Lewis frowned. ‘I can’t really see his wife doing it, you know that. I just don’t think she’d have the strength for one thing.’

‘Really?’ Morse seemed almost to be enjoying himself.

‘Mrs Stevens, though… Well, she’s a much stronger person, a much stronger character, isn’t she? And she’s got the brains—’

‘And she’s got nothing to lose,’ added Morse more sombrely.

‘Not much, no.’

‘So your money’s on her, is it?’

Lewis hesitated. ‘You know, sir, in detective stories there are only two rules really, aren’t there? It’s never the butler; and it’s never the person you think it is. So — so I’ll go for Mrs Brooks.’

‘Leaving me with Mrs Stevens.’

‘You’d have gone for her anyway, sir.’

‘You think so?’

But Lewis didn’t know what he was thinking, and changed the subject.

‘Did you have any lunch earlier, sir?’

‘Not even a pint,’ complained Morse, lighting a cigarette.

‘You’re not hungry?’

‘A bit.’

‘What about coming back and having a bite with us? The missus’d be only too glad to knock something up for you.’

Morse considered the proposition. ‘What do you normally have on Fridays? Fish?’

‘No. It’s egg and chips on Fridays.’

‘I thought that was on Wednesdays.’

Lewis nodded. ‘And Mondays.’

‘You’re on,’ decided Morse. ‘Give her a ring and tell her to peel another few spuds.’

‘Only one thing, sir — as I said. We’re in a bit of a pickle at home, I’m afraid — with the decorators in.’

‘Have you got the beer in, though? That’s more to the point, surely.’

It was Lewis himself who took the call from the fingerprint bureau half an hour later. No match. No match anywhere. Whoever it was who had left some fingerprints on the Rhodesian knife, it had not been Mrs Brenda Brooks or Mrs Julia Stevens; nor, as they’d already learned, Ms Eleanor Smith. One other piece of information. Classifying and identifying fingerprints was an immensely complicated job and they couldn’t be absolutely sure yet; but it was looking almost certain now that the fingerprints on the knife-handle didn’t match those of any known criminals either — well over two million of them — in the Scotland Yard library.

‘So you see what it means, Sarge? Whoever murdered your fellow doesn’t look as if he had any previous conviction.’

‘Or she,’ added Lewis, after putting down the phone.

There was no need to relay the message, since a glum-looking Morse had heard it all anyway.

In silence.

A silence that persisted.

The report that Lewis had written on the visit to Matthew Rodway’s mother was on the top of Morse’s pile.

‘Hope I didn’t make too many spelling mistakes, sir?’ ventured Lewis finally.

‘What? No, no. You’re improving. Slowly.’

‘I don’t suppose she gives tuppence really — Mrs Rodway, I mean — about who killed Brooks. So long as somebody did.’

Morse grunted inarticulately. His thoughts drifted back to their meeting with Mrs Rodway. It seemed an age ago now; but as his eyes skimmed through the report once again he could clearly visualize that interview, and the room, and the slim and still embittered Mrs Rodway…

‘I know it’s probably nonsense, sir, but you don’t think that she could have murdered Brooks, do you?’

‘She had as good a motive as anybody,’ admitted Morse.

‘Perhaps we ought to have another little ride out there and take her fingerprints.’

‘Not today, Lewis. I’m out for a meal, if you remember.’

‘I’ll see you there, sir, if you don’t mind. About six, is that all right?’

‘What are you going to do?’

‘Lots of little things. Make a bit more progress with the keys, for a start. I’m expected at the Pitt Rivers in twenty minutes.’

After Lewis had left, Morse lit yet another cigarette and leaned back in the black leather chair, looking purposelessly around his office. He noticed the thin patina of nicotine on the emulsioned walls. Yes, the place could do with a good wash-down and redecoration: the corners of the ceiling especially were deeply stained…

Suddenly, he felt a brief frisson of excitement as if there were something of vital importance in what he’d just read, or what he’d just thought, or what he’d just seen. But try as he might, he was unable to isolate the elusive clue; and soon he knew it was of no use trying any more.

It had gone.

Chapter sixty-three

Her first sentence, spoken with an attractive Welsh lilt, was a perfect anapaestic pentameter:

‘We shall have to eat here in the kitchen, Inspector, all right?’

‘Wherever, Mrs Lewis. Have no fears.’

‘We’ve got the decorators in, see? But just go and sit down in the lounge — where I’ve put out some beer and a glass.’ (Anapaestic hexameter.)

As he passed the dining-room, Morse stopped to look inside. The decorators had finished for the day; almost finished altogether, it seemed, for only around the main window were some paint-stained white sheets still lying across the salmon-pink carpet, with all of the furniture now pushed back into place except for a bookcase, which stood awkwardly in mid-room, a wooden step-ladder propped up against it. Clearly, though, there would be no problem about its own relocation, either, for the site of its former habitation was marked by an oblong of strawberry-red carpet to the left of the window.

Mrs Lewis was suddenly behind him.

‘You like the colour?’

‘Very professionally painted,’ said Morse, a man with no knowledge whatsoever of professionalism in painting and decorating.

‘You were looking at the carpet, though, weren’t you now?’ she said shrewdly. ‘Only had it five years — and they told us the colours in all of their carpets would last till eternity.’ (Anapaests everywhere.)

‘I suppose everything fades,’ said Morse. It hardly seemed a profound observation — not at the time.

‘It’s the sun really, see. That’s why you get most of your discolouration. In the cupboards — on the lining for the cupboards — you hardly get fading at all.’

Morse moved on into the lounge where he opened a can of Cask Flow Beamish, sat contentedly back in an armchair, and was watching the Six o’Clock News when Lewis came in.

‘You look pleased with yourself,’ said Morse.

‘Well, that’s two more of the keys accounted for: that second Yale opens the staff entrance door at the back of the Pitt Rivers, just off South Parks Road; and that little “X 10” key — remember? — that’s a Pitt Rivers key, too: it’s a key to a wall-safe there that’s got rows and rows of little hooks in it, with a key on each of ’em — keys to all the display-cabinets.’

Morse grunted a perfunctory ‘Well done!’ as he reverted his attention to the news.

Mrs Lewis produced a slightly unladylike whistle a few minutes later: ‘On the table, boys!’

Morse himself had acquired one culinary skill only — that of boiling an egg; and he was not infrequently heard to boast that such a skill was not nearly so common as was generally assumed. But granted that Morse (in his own estimation) was an exemplary boiler of eggs, Mrs Lewis (omnium consensu) was a first-class frier; and the milkily opaque eggs, two on each plate, set beside their mountains of thick golden chips, were a wonderful sight to behold.

As Morse jolted out some tomato sauce, Lewis picked up his knife and fork. ‘You know, sir, if they ever find a body with an empty plate of eggs and chips beside it—’

‘I think you mean a plate empty of eggs and chips, Lewis.’

‘Well, I reckon if the fingerprints on the knife don’t match any of those in our criminal library, the odds are they’ll probably be mine.’

Morse nodded, picked up his own knife and fork, found (blessedly!) that the plate itself was hot — and then he froze, as if a frame on the family video had suddenly been switched to ‘Pause’.

‘Everything all right, sir?’

Morse made no reply.

‘You — you’re feeling all right, sir?’ persisted a slightly anxious Lewis.

‘Bloody ’ell!’ whispered Morse tremulously to himself in a voice just below audial range. Then, louder: ‘Bloody ’ell! You’ve done it again, Lewis. You’ve done it again!’

Unprecedentedly Lewis was moved to lay down both knife and fork.

‘You know we had a little bet…’ Morse’s voice was vibrant now.

‘When we both lost.’

‘No. When to be more accurate neither of us won.

Well, I’d like to bet you something else, Lewis. I’d like to bet you that I know whose fingerprints are on that knife in Brooks’s back!’

‘That’s more than the fingerprint-boys do.’

Morse snorted. ‘I’m very tempted to report them for professional incompetence.’ Then his voice softened. ‘But I can forgive them. Yes, I can understand them.’

‘I’m lost, sir, I’m afraid.’

‘Shall I tell you,’ asked Morse, ‘whose fingerprints we found on that knife?’

His blue eyes looked so fiercely across the kitchen table that for a few moments Lewis wondered whether he was suffering from some slight stroke or seizure.

‘Shall I tell you?’ repeated Morse. ‘You see, there’s a regular procedure which you know all about; which every CID man knows all about. A procedure that wasn’t — couldn’t have been — followed in this case: that when you take fingerprints from the scene of any murder you take everybody’s — including the corpse’s.’

Lewis felt the blood in his veins growing cold — like the plate in front of him.

‘You can’t mean…?’

‘But I do, Lewis. That’s exactly what I do mean. The prints are those of Edward Brooks himself.’

Chapter sixty-four

As Morse well knew, it was difficult enough to describe to someone else such a comparatively simple physical action as walking, say — let alone something considerably more complicated such as serving a ball in a game of tennis. How much more difficult then, later that same evening, for him to answer Lewis’s direct question about the cerebral equivalent of such a process.

‘What put you on to it, sir?’

What indeed?

It was perhaps perfectly possible to describe the mental gymnastics involved in the solving of a cryptic crossword clue. But how did one explain those virtually inexplicable convolutions of the mind which occasionally led to some dramatic, some penny-dropping moment, when the answers to a whole series of cryptic clues — and those not of the cruciverbalist but of the criminological variety — combined to cast some completely new illumination on the scene? How did one begin to explain such a sudden, almost irrational, psychological process?

‘With difficulty,’ was the obvious answer; but Morse was trying much harder than that, as he now sought to identify the main constituents which had led him to his quite extraordinary conclusion.

It was all to do with the fortuitous collocation of several memories, several recollections, which although occurring at disparate points in the case — and before — had suddenly come together in his mind, and coalesced.

There had been the report (Lewis’s own) on the interview with Mrs Rodway, when he had so easily been able to re-visualize some of the smallest details of the room in which they had spoken with her, and particularly that oblong patch above the radiator where a picture had been hanging.

Then there had been (only that very evening) a second oblong, prompting memory further, when he had looked down at the pristine strawberry-red in the lounge there, and when Mrs Lewis had spoken of the unfading linings in her cupboards.

And then, working backwards (or was it forwards?) there had been the visit to the Pitt Rivers Museum, when the Administrator had pointed with pride to the fine quality of the hessian lining for her cabinet-exhibits, with its optimistic guarantee of Tithonian immortality.

Then again, a much more distant memory from his childhood of a case of cutlery, a family heirloom, where over the years each knife, each fork, each spoon, had left its own imprint, its own silhouette, on the blue plush-lining of the case. Things always left their impressions, did they not?

Or did they?

Perhaps in the Pitt Rivers cabinets, in those slightly sombre, sunless galleries, the objects displayed there — the artefacts, the relics from the past — were leaving only very faint impressions, like the utensils in Mrs Lewis’s kitchen-cupboards.

No impressions at all, possibly…

Then, and above all, the discrepancy between the pathologist’s report on the knife used to murder McClure, and the statement given by the Raysons about the knife found in their own front garden: the ‘blade not really sharp’, in the former; the ‘blade in no immediate need of sharpening’, in the latter. Not a big discrepancy, perhaps; but a hugely significant one — and one which should never, never have passed unnoticed.

Yes, all the constituents were there: separate, though, and unsynthesized — waiting for a catalyst.

Lewis!

Lewis the Catalyst.

For it was Lewis who had returned from his p.m. investigations with the information that one of the small keys found in Brooks’s pocket fitted a wall-safe in the museum; in which, in turn, were to be found row upon row of other keys, including the key to Cabinet 52. It was Lewis, too, who so innocently had asserted, as he picked up a knife with which to eat his meal, that his own fingerprints would soon be found thereon…

And whither had such ratiocination finally led the Chief Inspector, as, like Abraham, he had made his way forth from his tent in the desert knowing not whither he went? To that strangest of all conclusions: that on Wednesday, 7 September, from Cabinet 52 in the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford — nothing whatsoever had been stolen.

Chapter sixty-five

A council of war was called in Caesar’s tent two days later, on Sunday, 2 October, with three other officers joining Chief Superintendent Strange in the latter’s Kidlington HQ office at 10 a.m.: Chief Inspector Morse, Chief Inspector Phillotson, and Sergeant Lewis. Morse, invited to put a case for a dramatic intensification of enquiries, for a series of warrants, and for a small cohort of forensic specialists, did so with complete conviction.

He knew now (or so he claimed) what had been the circumstances of each of the murders, those of McClure and Brooks; and he would, with his colleagues’ permission, give an account of those circumstances, not seeking to dwell on motives (not for the present) but on methods — on modi operandi.

Strange now listened, occasionally nodding, occasionally lifting his eyebrows in apparent incredulity, to the burden of Morse’s reconstructions.

McClure lived on a staircase where Brooks was the scout. The latter had gained access to drugs and became a supplier to several undergraduates, one of whom, Matthew Rodway, had become very friendly with McClure — probably not a homosexual relationship, though — before committing suicide in tragic and semi-suspicious circumstances. As a result of this, McClure had insisted that Brooks resign from his job; but agreed that he, McClure, would not report the matter to the Dean, and would even provide a job-testimonial, provided that Brooks forswore his dealings in drugs.

Feelings between the two men were bitter.

Things settled down, though.

Then it came to McClure’s notice that Brooks had not finished with his drug-dealing after all; that some of the junkies were still in touch with him. A furious McClure threatened disclosure to Brooks’s new employers and to the police, and a meeting between the two was arranged (or not arranged — how could one know?). Certain it was, however, that Brooks went to visit McClure. And murdered him.

On the way home, on his bicycle, Brooks suddenly became aware that he was seriously ill. He managed to get as far as St Giles’, but could get no further. He left his bicycle outside St Mary Mags, without even bothering to lock it, perhaps, and covering himself as best he could, got a taxi from the rank there up to East Oxford — and very soon got an ambulance up to the JR2, minus the bloodstained clothing which his wife disposed of.

One thing above all must have haunted Brooks’s mind once he knew he would recover from his heart attack: he was still in possession of the knife he’d used to murder McClure, because whatever happened he couldn’t throw it away. He ordered his wife to lock it up somewhere, probably in the box in his bedroom, and she did as he asked, surely having enough common sense to handle the knife — both then and later — with the greatest delicacy, pretty certainly wearing the glove she’d taken to using to protect her injured right hand. She was terrified — certainly at that point — of incurring the anger of a fearsomely cruel man who had physically maltreated her on several occasions, and who in earlier years had probably abused his step-daughter — the latter now putting in an appearance after many moons away from home, no doubt after somehow learning of Brooks’s illness.

Brenda Brooks had an ally.

Two allies, in fact: because we now become increasingly aware of the unusually strong bond of friendship and affection between her and the woman for whom she cleaned, Mrs Julia Stevens, a schoolma’am who, although this fact has only recently become known to us, was suffering from an inoperable brain-tumour.

A plot was hatched, an extraordinarily clever plot, designed to throw the police on to the wrong track; a plot which succeeded in so doing.

‘Let me explain.’

‘At last,’ mumbled Strange.

Brenda Brooks took Mrs Stevens wholly into her confidence, with both now knowing perfectly well not only who had murdered McClure but also exactly where the knife had come from — and why Brooks was unable to get rid of it.

On the Saturday before McClure’s murder, the very last thing in the afternoon, Brooks had taken the knife from Cabinet 52 in the Pitt Rivers Museum, fully intending to replace it the very first thing on the following Monday morning, when he planned to turn up for work half an hour or so early and to restore it to its position amongst the fifty-odd other knives there. Nobody would have missed it; nobody could have missed it, since the museum was closed on Sundays.

‘Why—?’ Strange had begun. But Morse had anticipated the question.

Why Brooks should have acted in such a devious way, or whether he had taken the knife with the deliberate intention of committing murder, it was now only possible to guess. The only slight clue (thus far) was that one of the few books found in the Brooks’s virtually illiterate household was a library copy of The Innocence of Father Brown, in which Chesterton suggested a battlefield as the safest place to conceal a corpse… with the possible implication that a cabinet of weapons might be the safest place to conceal a knife.

But Brooks couldn’t restore the knife. Not yet.

His great hope was that no one would notice its absence. And no one did. Apart from the attendant circumstance of so many other knives, one further factor was greatly in his favour: the cabinet had been recently re-lined, and there was no outwardly physical sign that any object could be missing. The normal routine, when anything was taken out, was for a printed white card — ‘Temporarily Removed’ — to be inserted over the space left vacant. But there was no space left vacant, since Brooks had only to move two or three other knives along a little to effect a balanced row of exhibits. And as day followed day, no one in fact noticed that anything at all was missing.

But, apart from Brooks, two other persons now knew of all this.

One of whom was Julia Stevens.

And the beautifully clever idea was born: if… if Brooks were to be murdered with the very same knife which he himself had stolen…

Ah, yes!

Two things only were required.

First, a knife, a different but wholly similar knife, would have to be planted — somewhere in, or near, Daventry Avenue. For when it was found — as surely sooner or later it would be — the police, with a little luck, would discover that it had been taken from one of the Brooks’s kitchen drawers.

Second, the cabinet from which the actual murder weapon had been taken (‘Cabinet 52’ was clearly marked on the tag) would have to be broken into so that its contents would inevitably be checked. For then, and then only, would the pedigree of the missing knife become known.

Someone was therefore delegated to break open that cabinet, to ruffle around a few of the knives there — exactly the opposite of what Brooks had done earlier — and the deception was launched. The ‘theft’ was duly spotted, and reported; the missing knife was fairly quickly identified; and, above all, the crucial alibis were established.

How so?

Because of the wholly incontestable fact that any person found murdered by means of that stolen knife must have been murdered after that knife was stolen.

But the truth was that Brooks was murdered before the knife was stolen — probably murdered the day before, since the two women lied about seeing him alive on the afternoon when they set off with the school-party for Stratford.

The only thing now calling for some sort of explanation was the curious circumstance of Brooks’s body being so elaborately wrapped up in plastic, then wrapped up again in a brown carpet, before being dumped into the Isis, just upstream from Donnington Bridge, almost certainly driven there in the boot of a car. Mrs Stevens’ car? Most probably, since she was the only one of them to own such a means of transport.

Well (as Morse saw it) the reason was fairly obvious: if and when (and when rather than if) the body was found, such wrapping would ensure one vital thing: that the knife would still be found with the body — still be found in the body, it could be hoped. There would be no danger of it being lost; and thereby no danger that the alibis so cunningly, so painstakingly, devised would be discounted or destroyed.

‘So you see,’ finished Detective Chief Inspector Morse, ‘the two women we assumed could never have murdered Brooks have overnight moved up to the top of the list.’ He looked up with a fairly self-satisfied smile to Chief Superintendent Strange. ‘And with your permission, sir, we shall go ahead immediately, apply for a couple of search warrants—’

‘Why only two warrants?’ asked Detective Chief Inspector Phillotson.

Chapter sixty-six

The following day, a call was put through to Morse (‘Must be Morse’) from Mr Basil Shepstone, Senior Neurologist at Oxford’s Churchill Hospital; and twenty minutes later the two men were seated together in Shepstone’s consulting-room.

Mrs Julia Stevens (Morse learned) had been admitted at midday, having earlier been discovered unconscious at the side of her bed by her cleaning-lady. Some speedy deterioration in her mental condition had been expected; but the dramatic (the literal) collapse in her physical condition had come as some surprise. A recent biopsy (Morse learned) had confirmed glioblastoma multiforma, a fast-growing tumour of the neuroglia in the brain: wholly malignant, sadly inoperable, rapidly fatal.

When Julia had been admitted, it was immediately apparent that, somewhere on the brain, pressure had become intolerably severe: she had been painfully sick again in the ambulance; clearly she was experiencing some considerable difficulty with both sight and speech; showing signs too of spatial disorientation. Yet somehow she had managed to make it clear that she wished to speak to the policeman Morse.

Twice during the early afternoon (Shepstone reported), her behaviour had grown disturbingly aggressive, especially towards one of the young nurses trying to administer medication. But that sort of behaviour — often involving some fairly fundamental personality change — was almost inevitable with such a tumour.

‘Had you noticed any “personality change” before?’ asked Morse.

Shepstone hesitated. ‘Yes, perhaps so. I think… well, let’s put it this way. The commonest symptom would be a general loss of inhibition, if you know what I mean.’

‘I don’t think I do.’

‘Well, I mean one obvious thing is she probably wouldn’t be over-worried about the reactions and opinions of other people — other professional colleagues, in her case. Let’s say she’d be more willing than usual to speak her mind in a staff-meeting, perhaps. I don’t think she was ever too shy a person; but like most of us she’d probably always felt a bit diffident — a bit insecure — about life and… and things.’

‘She’s an attractive woman, isn’t she?’

Shepstone looked across at Morse keenly.

‘I know what you’re thinking. And the answer’s probably “yes”. I rather think that if over these past few months someone had asked… to go to bed with her…’

‘When you say “someone” — you mean some man?’

‘I think I do, yes.’

‘And you say she’s been a bit violent today.’

‘Aggressive, certainly.’

Morse nodded.

‘It’s really,’ continued Shepstone, ‘the unexpectedness rather than the nature of behaviour that always sticks out in these cases. I remember at the Radcliffe Infirmary, for example, a very strait-laced old dear with a similar tumour getting out of her bed one night and dancing naked in the fountain out the front there.’

‘But she isn’t a strait-laced old dear,’ said Morse slowly.

‘Oh, no,’ replied the sad-eyed Consultant. ‘Oh, no.’

For a while, when Julia had regained some measure of her senses in the hospital, she knew that she was still at home in her own bed, really. It was just that someone was trying to confuse her, because the walls of her bedroom were no longer that soothing shade of green, but this harsher, crueller white.

Everything was white.

Everyone was wearing white…

But Julia felt more relaxed now.

The worry at the beginning had been her complete disorientation: about the time of day, the day, the month — the year, even. And then, just as the white-coated girl was trying to talk to her, she’d felt a terrible sense of panic as she realized that she was unaware of who she was.

Things were better now, though; one by one, things were clicking into place; and some knowledge of herself, of her life, was slowly surfacing, with the wonderful bonus that the dull, debilitating headache she’d lived with for so many months was gone. Completely gone.

She knew the words she wanted to say — about seeing Morse; or at least her mind knew. Yet she was aware that those words had homodyned little, if at all, with the words she’d actually used:

‘One thousand and one, one thousand and two…’

But she could write.

How could that be?

If she couldn’t speak?

No matter.

She could write.

As he looked down at her, Morse realized that even in her terminal illness Julia Stevens would ever be an attractive woman; and he placed a hand lightly on her right arm as she lay in her short-sleeved nightdress, and smiled at her. And she smiled back, but tightly, for she was willing herself to make him understand what so desperately she wished to tell him.

At the scene of the terrible murder that had taken place in Brenda’s front room, when she, Julia, had stood there, helpless at first, a spectator of a deed already done, she had vowed, if ever need arose, to take all guilt upon herself. And the words were in her mind: words that were all untrue, but words that were ready to be spoken. She had only to repeat repeat repeat them to herself: ‘I murdered him I murdered him I murdered him…’ And now she looked up at Morse and forced her mouth to speak those self-same words:

‘One thousand and three, one thousand and four, one thousand and five…’

Aware, it seemed, even as she spoke, of her calamitous shortcomings, she looked around her with frenzied exasperation as she sought to find the pencil with which earlier she’d managed to write down ‘MORSE’. Her right arm flailed about her wildly, knocking over a glass of orange juice on the bedside table, and tears of frustration sprang in her eyes.

Suddenly three nurses, all in white, were at her side, two of them seeking to hold her still as the third administered a further sedative. And Morse, who had intended to plant a tender kiss upon the Titian hair, was hurriedly ushered away.

Chapter sixty-seven

Events were now moving quickly towards their close. There was much that was wanting to be found — was found — although Lewis was not alone in wondering exactly what Morse himself wanted to be found. Certainly one or two minor surprises were still in store; but in essence it was only the corroborative, substantiating detail that remained to be gleaned — was gleaned — by the enquiry team from their painstaking forensic investigations, and from one or two further painful encounters.

Morse was reading a story when just after 3 p.m. on Tuesday, 4 October, Lewis returned from the JR2 where he had interviewed a rapidly improving Costyn — to whom, as it happened, he had taken an instant dislike, just as earlier in the case Morse had felt an instinctive antipathy towards Ms Smith.

Lewis had learned nothing of any substance. About the ram-raid, Costyn had been perkily co-operative, partly no doubt because he had little option in the matter. But about any (surely most probable?) visit to the Pitt Rivers Museum; about his relations (relationship?) with Mrs Stevens; about any (possible?) knowledge of, implication in, co-operation with, the murder of Edward Brooks, Costyn had been cockily dismissive.

He had nothing to say.

How could he have anything to say?

He knew nothing.

If Lewis was ninety-five per cent convinced that Costyn was lying, he had been one hundred per cent convinced that Ashley Davies, whom he’d interviewed the day before, could never have been responsible for the prising open of Cabinet 52. In fact Davies had been in Oxford that afternoon; and for some considerable while, since between 3.45 p.m. and 4.45 p.m. he had been sitting in the chair of Mr J. Balaguer-Morris, a distinguished and unimpeachable dental-surgeon practising in Summertown.

Quod erat demonstrandum.

Lewis sensed therefore (as he knew Morse did) that the two young men had probably always been peripheral to the crime in any case. But someone had gone along to the Pitt Rivers; someone’s services could well have been needed for the disposal of the body in the Isis. For although Brooks had not been a heavy man, it would have been quite extraordinarily difficult for one woman to have coped alone; rather easier for two, certainly; and perhaps not all that difficult for three of them. Yet the help of a strong young man would have been a godsend, surely?

With the Magistrates finding no objections, the three search warrants had been immediately authorized, and the spotlight was now refocusing, ever more closely, on the three women in the case:

Brenda Brooks

Julia Stevens

Eleanor Smith…

The previous afternoon, great activity at the Brooks’s residence had proved dramatically productive. At the back of the house, one of the small keys from Lewis’s bunch had provided immediate, unforced access to the garden shed. No transparent plastic bags were found there; nor any damning snippet of dark green garden-twine like that which had secured the bundle of the corpse. Yet something had been found there: fibres of a brown material which looked most suspiciously similar — which later proved to be identical — to the carpeting that had covered the body of Edward Brooks.

Brenda Brooks, therefore, had been taken in for questioning the previous evening, on two separate occasions being politely reminded that anything she said might be taken down in writing and used as evidence. But there seemed hardly any valid reason for even one such caution, since from the very start she had appeared too shocked to say anything at all. Later in the evening she had been released on police bail, having been formally charged with conspiracy to murder. As Morse saw things the decision to grant bail had been wholly correct. There was surely little merit in pressing for custody, since it was difficult to envisage that gentle little lady, once freed, indulging in any orgy of murder in the area of the Thames Valley Police Authority.

In any case, Morse liked Mrs Brooks.

Just as he liked Mrs Stevens — in whose garage earlier that same day a forensic team had made an equally dramatic finding, when they had examined the ancient Volvo, in situ, and discovered, in the boot, fibres of a brown material which looked most suspiciously similar — which later proved to be identical — to the carpeting that had covered the body of Edward Brooks…

Morse had nodded to himself with satisfaction on receiving each of these reports. So careful, so clever, they’d been — the two women! Yet even the cleverest of criminals couldn’t think of everything: they all made that one little mistake, sooner or later; and he should be glad of that.

He was glad.

He himself had taken temporary possession of the long-overdue library book found in the Brooks’s bedroom, noticing with some self-congratulation that the tops of two pages in the story entitled ‘The Broken Sword’ had been dog-eared. By Brooks? Were the pages worth testing for fingerprints? No. Far too fanciful a notion. But Morse told himself that he would re-read the story once he got the chance; and indeed his eye had already caught some of the lines he remembered so vividly from his youth:

Yes. Things were progressing well — and quickly. There was that third search warrant, of course: one that had been granted, though not yet served. The one to be served on Ms Smith… Of whom, as it happened, Morse had dreamed the previous night — most disturbingly. He had watched her closely (how on earth?) as semi-dressed in a plunging Versace creation she had exhibited herself erotically to some lecherous Yuppie in the back of a BMW. And when Morse had awoken, he had felt bitterly angry with her; and sick; and heartachingly jealous.

He had known better nights; known better dreams.

Yet life is a strange affair; and only ten minutes after Lewis had returned that Tuesday afternoon Morse received a call from Reception which quickened his heart-beat considerably.

Chapter sixty-eight

She closed the passenger-seat door, asking the man to wait there, in the slip-road, for ten minutes — no longer; then to drive in and pick her up.

She walked quite briskly past the blue sign, with its white lettering, ‘Thames Valley Police HQ’; then up the longish gradient to the brick-and-concrete building.

At Reception she quickly made her errand clear.

‘Is he expecting you, Miss?’ asked the man seated there.

‘No.’

‘Can I ask what it’s in connection with?’

‘A murder.’

The grey-haired man looked up at her with some curiosity. He thought he might have seen her before; then decided that he hadn’t. And rang Morse.

‘Let her in, Bill. I’ll be down to collect her in a couple of minutes.’

After entering her name neatly in the Visitors’ Log, Bill pressed the mechanism that opened the door to the main building. She was carrying a small package, some 5 inches by 3 inches, and he decided to keep a precautionary eye on her. Normally he would not have let her through without some sort of check. But he’d always been encouraged to use his discretion, and in truth she looked more like a potential traveller than a potential terrorist. And Chief Inspector Morse had sounded happy enough.

He pointed the way. ‘If you just go and sit and wait there, Miss…?’

So Ellie Smith walked over the darkly marbled floor to a small, square waiting-area, carpeted in blue, with matching chairs set against the walls. She sat down and looked around her. Many notices were displayed there, of the ‘Watch Out’, ‘Burglars Beware’ variety; and photographs of a police car splashing through floods, and a friendly bobby talking to a farmer’s wife in a local village; and just opposite her a large map…

But her observations ceased there.

To her left was a flight of white-marbled stairs, down which the white-haired Morse was coming towards her.

‘Good to see you. Come along up.’

‘No, I can’t stay. I’ve got a car waiting.’

‘But we can take you home. I can take you home.’

‘No. I’m… I’m sorry.’

‘Why have you come?’ asked Morse quietly, seating himself beside her.

‘You’ve had Mum in. She told me all about it. She’s on bail, isn’t she? And I just wondered where it all leaves her — and me, for that matter?’

Morse spoke gently. ‘Your mother has been charged in connection with the murder of your step-father. Please understand that for the present—’

‘She told me you might be bringing me in — is that right?’

‘Look! We can’t really talk here. Please come up—’

She shook her head. ‘Not unless you’re arresting me. Anyway, I don’t trust myself in that office of yours. Remember?’

‘Look, about your mother. You’ll have to face the fact — just like we have to — that… that it seems very likely at the minute that your mother was involved in some way in the murder of your step-father.’ Morse had chosen his hesitant words carefully.

‘All right. If you’re not going to tell me, never mind.’

She stood up; and Morse stood up beside her. She held out the small parcel she had been carrying in her right hand and offered it to him.

‘For you,’ she said simply.

‘What is it?’

‘Promise me one thing?’

‘If I can.’

‘You won’t open it till you get home tonight.’

‘If you say so.’

Morse suddenly felt very moved; felt very lost, very helpless, very upset.

‘Well — that’s it then. That’s all I came for… really.’

‘I’ll ring you when I’ve opened it, I promise.’

‘Only when you get home.’

‘Only when I get home.’

‘You’ve got a note of my number, haven’t you?’

‘I have it by heart.’

‘I have to go. Hope you’ll like it.’ She managed to speak the words; but only just as she picked up St Anthony and fondled him between the thumb and forefinger of her left hand. And almost, for a moment or two, as they stood there, it was as if they might embrace; but the Assistant Chief Constable suddenly came through Reception, raising his hand to Morse in friendly greeting.

She turned away; and left.

As she stepped out of the building, a red BMW was beside her immediately; and she got in, casting one lingering look behind her as she locked her safety-belt.

‘I was rather hoping you’d bring her up, sir. She’s getting a bit of a smasher, that one, don’t you think?’

But Morse, reclosing the door quietly behind him, made no reply. Suddenly his life seemed joyless and desolate.

‘Coffee, sir?’ asked Lewis in a low voice, perhaps understanding many things.

Morse nodded.

After Lewis was gone, he didn’t wait.

He couldn’t wait.

Inside the bluebell-patterned wrapping-paper was a small, silver, delicately curving hip-flask.

Oh God!

The letter enclosed with it bore no salutation:

Unmanned with anguish, Morse turned away as Lewis came back with the coffee, folded the letter carefully, and put it in a drawer of his desk.

Neither man spoke.

Then Morse opened the drawer, took out the letter, and passed it over to Lewis.

The silence persisted long after Lewis had read it.

Finally Morse got to his feet. ‘If I ever see her again, Lewis, I shall have to tell her that “rang” is the more correct form of the past tense of the verb “to ring”, when used transitively.’

‘I don’t think she’d mind very much what you told her,’ said Lewis very quietly.

Morse said nothing.

‘Mind if I have a look at the present, sir?’

Morse passed over the hip-flask.

‘Remember that crossword clue, Lewis? “Kick in the pants?” — three-hyphen-five?’

Lewis nodded and smiled sadly.

Hip-flask.

Chapter sixty-nine

‘You must admit what a trusting, stupid brain I’ve got, Lewis. “Don’t open it till you get home,” she said, and I just thought that…’

‘Numquam animus, sir, as you tell me the ancient Romans used to say.’

‘We’d better get along there.’

‘You think she’s done a bunk?’

‘Sure she has.’

‘With Davies?’

‘Has Davies got a red BMW?’

‘Not unless he’s changed his car.’

‘I wonder if it’s that randy sod from Reading. Where’s his card?’

‘The traffic boys’ll be able to tell us in a couple of ticks.’

‘Can’t wait that long.’

He found the card, the number — and dialled, informing the woman who answered that he was ringing from police HQ about a stolen car, a red BMW, and he was just checking to make sure…

Mr Williamson was out, Morse learned. But there was no need to worry. He did have a red BMW all right, but it hadn’t been stolen. In fact, she’d seen him get into it earlier that afternoon. Going to Oxford, he’d said.

Half an hour later, in Princess Street, it became clear that Ellie Smith had decamped in considerable haste. In her bed-sit-cum-bathroom there had been little enough accommodation for many possessions anyway; yet much had been left behind: the bigger items (perforce) — fridge, TV, record player, microwave; a selection of clothing and shoes, ranging from the sedate to the sensational; pictures and posters by the score, including a life-sized technicolour photograph of Marilyn Monroe, a framed painting by Paul Klee, and (also framed) a fading Diploma from East Oxford Senior School, Prize for Art, awarded to Kay Eleanor Brooks, signed by C. P. Taylor (Head), and dated July 1983.

‘Not much here in the drawers, sir. An Appointments’ Book, though, stuck at the back.’

‘Which I am not particularly anxious to see,’ said Morse, sitting himself down on the bed.

‘You know — if you don’t mind me saying so, sir — it was a bit cruel, wasn’t it? Her leaving her mum for all those years and not really getting in touch with her again until—’

He broke off.

‘Sir!’

Morse looked up.

‘There’s a telephone number here for that Tuesday the sixth, with something written after it: “GL” — and what looks like the figure “1”.’

Morse got up, and went to look over Lewis’s shoulder. ‘It could be a lower-case letter “l”.’

‘Shall I give the number a go?’

Morse shrugged his shoulders disinterestedly. ‘Please yourself.’

Lewis dialled the number, and a pleasing, clear Welsh voice answered, with an obviously well-practised formula:

‘Gareth Llewellyn-Jones. Can I ’elp you?’

‘Sergeant Lewis, Thames Valley Police, sir. We’re investigating a murder, and think you might be able to help us confirm one or two things.’

‘My goodness me! Well, I can’t really, not for the moment, like. I’m in the middle of a tutorial, see?’

‘Can you give me a time when you will be free, sir?’

‘Could be important,’ said Lewis, after putting down the phone. ‘If she was… out all night—’

‘Don’t you mean “in” all night?’ said Morse bitterly. ‘In bed with some cock-happy client of hers — that’s what you mean, isn’t it? So stop being so bloody mealy-mouthed, man.’

Lewis counted up to seven. ‘Well, if she was, she couldn’t have had too much of a hand in things with Brooks.’

‘Of course she did!’ snapped Morse. ‘I don’t believe her though when she says she murdered him — she’s just trying to shield her mother, that’s all — because it was her mother who murdered him.’

‘Isn’t it usually the other way round, though?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Isn’t it usually mums who try to shield their kids?’

The word ‘kid’ did to Morse what ‘scenario’ did to Ellie Smith; and he was about to remonstrate — when suddenly he clapped a cupped right hand hard over his forehead.

‘What year did the Brooks marry?’

‘Can’t remember exactly. Twelve years ago, was it? We can soon check.’

‘What time are you seeing Armstrong-Jones?’

‘Llewellyn-Jones, sir. Half-past eight. After he’s had dinner in Hall.’

‘Good. I’m glad you’re not letting our own enquiries interfere with his college routine.’

‘It wasn’t like that—’

‘Come on, Lewis!’ Morse pointed to the Diploma. ‘When you said Ellie Smith must have been a bit cruel to run away from her mother, you were right, in a way. But she didn’t run away from her mother at all, Lewis. She ran away from her father, her natural father.’

‘But she could just have changed her name, surely?’

‘Nonsense!’

Morse consulted the directory lying beside the phone: only one C. P. Taylor, with an Abingdon Road address. He rang the number, and learned, yes indeed, that he was speaking to the Former Head of East Oxford Senior School, who would willingly help if he could. That same evening? Why not?

After Lewis had dropped Morse (‘I’ll find my own way home’) at a rather elegant semi-detached property in the Abingdon Road, he himself proceeded to Lonsdale College, where his mission was quietly and quickly productive.

Llewellyn-Jones freely admitted that he’d met the young woman he’d always known as ‘Kay’ fairly regularly for sexual purposes: never in his college rooms; more often than not in a hotel; and twice in her own little place — as was the case on Tuesday, 6 September, when he’d spent the evening with her, and would have spent longer but for a phone-call — half-past nine? quarter-to ten? — which had galvanized her into panicky activity. She’d have to leave: he’d have to leave. Obviously some sort of emergency; but he knew no more, except perhaps that he thought the voice on the phone was that of a woman.

Lewis thanked the dark, dapper little Welshman, and assured him that the information given would of course be treated with the utmost confidentiality.

But Gareth Llewellyn-Jones appeared little troubled:

‘I’m a bachelor, Sergeant, see? And I just loved being with her, that’s all. In fact, I could’ve… But I don’t think she’s the sort of woman who could ever really fall arse-orver-tit for any man — certainly not for me.’

He smiled, shook his head, and bade farewell to Lewis from the Porters’ Lodge.

As Lewis drove up to his home in Headington, he realized that Morse had almost certainly been right about Ellie Smith’s involvement in the murder.

With a tumbler of most welcome Scotch beside him, Morse sat back to listen.

‘Kay Brooks? Oh yes, I remember her,’ said the ex-headmaster, a thin, mildly drooping man in his early seventies. ‘Who wouldn’t…?’

Aged eleven, she’d started at his school as a lively, slightly devil-may-care lass, with long dark hair and a sweet if somewhat cheeky sort of smile. Bright — well above average; and very good at sketching, painting, design, that type of thing. But… well, something must have gone a bit sour somewhere. By her mid-teens, she’d become a real handful: playing hookey, surly, inattentive, idle, a bit cruel, perhaps. Trouble at home, like as not? But no one knew. Kay’s mother had come along to see him a couple of times but—

Morse interrupted:

‘That’s really what I’ve come about, sir. It may not be important, but I rather think you probably mean her step-mother, don’t you?’

‘Pardon?’ Taylor looked as if he had mis-heard.

‘You see, I think Brooks, Edward Brooks, the man fished out of the Isis, could well have been her real father, not her step-father.’

‘Nonsense!’ (The second time the word had been used in the past half-hour.) ‘I can understand what you’re thinking, Inspector; but you’re wrong. She changed her name when her mother got remarried; changed it to her mother’s new name. You see, I knew her, knew her mother, well before then.’

Morse looked puzzled. ‘Is that sort of thing usual?’

Taylor smiled. ‘Depends, doesn’t it? Some people would give an arm and a leg to change their names. Take me, for instance. My old mum and dad — bless their hearts but… you know what they christened me? “Cecil Paul”. Would you credit it? I was “Cesspool” before I’d been at school a fortnight. You know the sort of thing I mean?’

Oh, yes, Morse knew exactly the sort of thing he meant.

‘And I’m afraid,’ continued Taylor, ‘that Kay got teased pretty mercilessly about her name — about her surname, that is. So it was only natural, really, that when the opportunity arose to change it…’

‘What was her surname?’ asked Morse.

Taylor told him.

Oh dear!

Poor Ellie!

After gladly becoming Eleanor ‘Brooks’ on her mother’s remarriage, so very soon, it seemed, had she come to detest her newly-adopted name. And when she had left home, she had plumped for ‘Smith’ — a good, common-stock, unexceptionable sort of name that could cause her pain no more.

Yes, Morse knew all about being teased because of a name — in his own case a Christian name. And he felt so close to Ellie Smith at that moment, so very caring towards her, that he would have sacrificed almost anything in the world to find her there, waiting for him, when he got back home.

‘Ellie Morse’?

‘Eleanor Morse’?

Difficult to decide.

But gladly would Morse have settled for either as he walked slowly up into Cornmarket, where he stood waiting twenty-five minutes for a bus to take him up to his bachelor flat in North Oxford.

Chapter seventy

The subject of each of these last two enquiries, the young woman who has been known (principally) in these pages as Ellie Smith, had hurriedly wiped her eyes and for a considerable time said nothing after getting into Mike Williamson’s car. Her thoughts were temporarily concentrated not so much on Morse himself as on what she could have told him; or rather on what she could never have told him…

It had been that terrible Tuesday night, when her mother had phoned, pleading in such deep anguish for her daughter’s help; when she’d got rid of that quite likable cock-happy little Welshman; and finally reached the house — a full five minutes before that other woman had arrived in a car — to find her mother standing like a zombie in the entrance hall, continuously massaging a gloved right hand with her left, as if she had inflicted upon it some recent and agonizing injury; and when, after going into the kitchen, she’d looked down on her step-father lying prone on the lino there, a strange-looking, wooden-handled knife stuck — so accurately it had seemed to her — halfway between the shoulder-blades. Strangely enough, there hadn’t been too much blood. Perhaps he’d never had all that much blood in him. Not warm blood, anyway.

Then the red-headed woman had arrived, and taken over — so coolly competent she’d been, so organized. It was as if the plot of the drama had already been written, for clearly the appropriate props had been duly prepared, waiting only to be fetched from the back-garden shed. Just the timing, it appeared, had gone wrong, as if a final rehearsal had suddenly turned into a first-night performance. And it was her mother surely who’d been responsible for that: jumping the starting-gate and seizing the reins in her own hands — her own hand, rather (singular).

Then, ten minutes later, following a rapidly spoken telephone conversation, the young man had appeared, to whom the red-headed woman had spoken in hushed tones in the hallway; a young man whom, oddly enough, she knew by sight, since the two of them had attended the same Martial Arts classes together. But she said nothing to him. Nor he to her. Indeed he seemed hardly aware of her presence as he began to manoeuvre the awkward corpse into its polythene winding sheet — sheets, rather (plural).

She’d even found herself remembering his name.

Kevin something…

As the car turned right from Park End Street into the railway station, Ellie’s mind jerked back to the present, aware that Williamson’s left hand had crept above the top of her suspendered right-stocking. But she would always be able to handle people like Williamson, who now reminded her of their proposed agreement as he humped the two large suitcases from the boot.

‘You ring me, like you said, OK?’

Ellie nodded, adding a verbal gloss to her unspoken promise as she took his business card from her handbag and mechanically recited the telephone number.

‘Right, then. And don’t forget we can do real business with a body like yours, kid.’

It would have been a nice gesture if he had offered to carry her cases up the steps to the automatic doors; or even as far as the ticket window. But he didn’t; and of that she was glad. Had he done so she would probably have felt obliged to buy a ticket for Padding-ton, for she had spoken to him vaguely of ‘friends in London’. As it was, once he had driven off, she bought a single ticket to Liverpool, and with aching arms crossed over the footbridge to Platform Two — where she stood for twenty-five minutes, forgetting for a while the future plight of her mother; forgetting the minor role she herself had played in the murder of a man she had learned to hate; yet remembering again now, as she fingered the gold pendant, the man who had given it to her, the man for whom she would have sacrificed anything. If only he could have loved her.

Epilogue

It is now Friday, 28 October 1994, the Feast of St Simon and St Jude, and this chronicle has to be concluded, with brief space only remaining to record a few marginal notes on some of the characters who played their roles in these pages.

On Thursday, 20 October, Mrs Brenda Brooks was re-arrested, additionally charged with the murder of her husband, Mr Edward Brooks, and remanded in custody at Holloway Prison. From which institution, four days later, she was granted temporary leave of (escorted) absence to attend a midday funeral service at the Oxford Crematorium, where many teachers from the Proctor Memorial School were squeezed into the small chapel there, together with a few relatives, and a few friends — though the couple from California were unable to make the journey at such short notice.

Two others completed (almost completed)the saddened congregation: the facially scarred Kevin Costyn and a pale-looking Chief Inspector Morse, neither of whom participated in (what seemed to the latter) the banal revision of Archbishop Cranmer’s noble words for the solemn service of the dead.

And one other mourner: a dark-suited, prosperous-looking, middle-aged man, who went last of all into the chapel; and sat down, as it happened, next to Morse, on the back row of the left-hand side of the aisle. A minute earlier, wholly unobserved, he had added his own floral tribute to the many others laid out in the Garden of Remembrance there: a wreath of white lilies. The card attached bore no salutation, no valediction — just the same words that Julia Stevens had read on a birthday card some eighteen months before:

‘Don’t forget we had some good times too!’

St Giles’s (enforced) new home is some little way from Oxford. Yet that aristocratic cat is not displeased with his environment — particularly with the wildlife opportunities offered in the open field just behind Number 22, Kingfisher Way, Bicester; and with the soft, beige leather settee on which he now sleeps for long stretches of the day until his attractive young mistress returns from her duties at the Oxford University Press.

Janis Lawrence, only temporarily she trusts, is now unemployed once more; and her familiar, exasperated ‘Stop frowin’ them bricks, Jason!’ is still often to be heard in the streets of the Cutteslowe Estate.

On the whole, Mrs Lewis is well pleased with the work of the decorators; and extremely pleased with her husband’s present to her of a new set of five black-handled knives, including one (Number 4) whose blade, unusually broad at its base, curves to a dangerous looking point.

The former dwelling of Dr Felix McClure has now been on the market for two weeks, its lounge completely re-carpeted. But Mrs (Miss?) Laura Wynne-Wilson, though maintaining a dedicated vigil behind her carefully parted lace curtains, has yet to spot any prospective client arriving to view the property. And Messrs Adkinson, renowned for their meticulous room-measurements, are a little worried that the vicious murder enacted in Number 6 has, quite understandably, postponed the prospect of any immediate purchase.

And what of Morse?

His proposed lunchtime meeting with Strange, with a view to launching a twin assault on the complexities of form-filling, has not yet been arranged; and Morse is not pursuing the matter with any sense of great urgency, since he is undecided about the ‘sooner or later’ of his own eventual retirement, and curiously unsettled about the immediate months ahead of him…

He knew, of course, that it would be utterly hopeless to ring Ellie Smith, and therefore he rang her number only three times in the week following her disappearance; only twice in the second week. After all, as Morse recalled from his believing days, Hope is one of the greatest of all the Christian virtues.

In the third week, his normal routine in life appeared to reassert itself; and at about 9.30 p.m. he was again regularly to be observed walking fairly purposefully down the Banbury Road to one of the local hostelries. He has promised himself most faithfully that he will dramatically curtail his consumption of alcohol wef 1 November; which same day will also mark his permanent renunciation of nicotine.

In the meantime there is much work still to be done in the aftermath of the case — the aftermath of both cases, rather. And above all else in Morse’s life there remains the searching out of Ellie Smith, since as a police officer that is his professional duty and, as a man, his necessary purpose.