by Colin Dexter
'The womb, you mean, sir?'
'I don't know, do I, Lewis? I didn't ask. I'm not even quite sure exactly where the womb is. And, come to think of it, I don't even like the word.'
'I only asked.'
'And I only answered! His wife'll be fine, you'll see. It's him. He's just chickening out.'
'And the Super . . . didn't think he could cope with the case?'
'Well, he couldn't, could he? He's not exactly perched on the topmost twig of the Thames Valley intelligentsia, now is he?'
Lewis had glanced across at the man seated beside him in the passenger seat, noting the supercilious, almost arrogant, cast of the harsh blue eyes, and the complacent-looking smile about the lips. It was the sort of conceit which Lewis found the least endearing quality of his chief: worse even than his meanness with money and his almost total lack of gratitude. And suddenly he felt a shudder of distaste.
Yet only briefly. For Morse's face had become serious again as he'd pointed to the right; pointed to Daventry Avenue; and amplified his answer as the car braked to a halt outside a block of fiats:
'You see, we take a bit of beating, don't we, Lewis? Don't you reckon? Me and you? Morse and Lewis? Not too many twigs up there above us, are there?'
But as Morse unfastened his safety-belt, there now appeared a hint of diffidence upon his face.
'Nous vieillissons, n'est-ce pas?'
'Pardon, sir?'
'We're all getting older—that's what I said. And that's the only thing that's worrying me about this case, old friend.'
But then the smile again.
And Lewis saw the smile, and smiled himself; for at that moment he felt quite preternaturally content with life.
The constable designated to oversee the murder-premises volunteered to lead the way upstairs; but Morse shook his head, his response needlessly brusque:
'Just give me the key, lad.'
Only two short flights, of eight steps each, led up to the first floor; yet Morse was a little out of breath as Lewis opened the main door of the maisonette.
'Yes'—Morse's mind was still on Phillotson—'I reckon he'd've been about as competent in this case as a dyslexic proof-reader.'
'I like that, sir. That's good. Original, is it?'
Morse granted. In fact it had been Strange's own appraisal of Phillotson's potential; but, as ever, Morse was perfectly happy to take full credit for the bons mots of others. Anyway, Strange himself had probably read it somewhere, hadn't he? Shrewd enough, was Strange: but hardly perched up there on the roof of Canary Wharf.
Smoothly the door swung open . . . The door swung open on another case.
And as Lewis stepped through the small entrance-hall, and thence into the murder room, he found himself wondering how things would turn out here.
Certainly it hadn't sounded all that extraordinary a case when, two hours earlier, Detective Chief Inspector Phillotson had given them an hour-long briefing on the murder of Dr. Felix McClure, former Student—late Student—of Wolsey College, Oxford . . .
Bizarre and bewildering—that's what so many cases the past had proved to be; and despite Phillotson's briefing the present case would probably be no different.
In this respect, at least, Lewis was correct in his thinking. What he could not have known—what, in fact, he never really came to know—was what unprecedented anguish the present case would cause to Morse's soul.
CHAPTER THREE
Myself when young did eagerly frequent
Doctor and Saint, and heard great Argument
About it and about: but evermore
Came out by the same Door as in I went
(EDWARD FITZGERALD, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam)
DAVENTRY COURT (Phillotson had begun), comprising eight 'luxurious apartments' built in Daventry Avenue in 1989 had been difficult to sell. House prices had tumbled during the ever-deepening recession of the early nineties, an McClure had bought in the spring of 1993 when he'd convinced himself (rightly) that even in the continuing buyers' market Flat 6 was a bit of a snip at £99,500.
McClure himself was almost sixty-seven years old at the time of his murder, knifed (as Morse would be able to see for himself) in quite horrendous fashion. The knife, according to pathological findings, was unusually broad-bladed, and at least five inches in length. Of such a weapon, however, no trace whatsoever had been found. Blood, though? Oh, yes, Blood almost everywhere. Blood on almost everything. Blood on the murderer, too? Surely so.
Blood certainly on his shoes (trainers?), with footprints—especially of the right foot—clearly traceable from the murder scene to the staircase, to the main entrance; but thence virtually lost, soon completely lost, on the gravelled forecourt outside. Successive scufflings by other residents had obviously obliterated all further traces of blood. Or had the murderer left by a car parked close to the main door? Or left on a bicycle chained to the nearest drainpipe? (Or taken his shoes off, Lewis thought.) But intensive search of the forecourt area had revealed nothing. No clues from the sides of the block either. No clues from the rear. No clues at all outside. (Or perhaps just the one clue, Morse had thought: the clue that there were no clues at all?)
Inside? Well, again, Morse would be able to see for himself. Evidence of extraneous fingerprints? Virtually none. Hopeless. And certainly no indication that the assailant—murderer—had entered the premises through any first-floor window.
'Very rare means of ingress, Morse, as you know. Pretty certainly came in the same way as he went out.'
'Reminds me a bit of Omar Khayyam,' Morse had muttered.
But Phillotson had merely looked puzzled, his own words clearly not reminding himself of anyone. Or anything.
No. Entry from the main door, surely, via the Entryphone system, with McClure himself admitting whomsoever (not Phillotson's word)—be it man or woman. Someone known to McClure then? Most likely.
Time? Well, certainly after 8:30 a.m. on the Sunday he was murdered, since McClure had purchased two newspapers at about 8 a.m. that morning from the newsagents in Summertown, where he was at least a well-known face if not a well-known name; and where he (like Morse, as it happened) usually catered for both the coarse and the cultured sides of his nature with the News of the World and The Sunday Times. No doubts here. No hypothesis required. Each of the two news-sheets was found, unbloodied, on work-top in the 'all-mod-con kitchen.'
After 8:30 a.m. then. But before when? Preliminary findings—well, not so preliminary—from the pathologist firmly suggested that McClure had been dead for about twenty hours or so before being found, at 7:45 a.m. the following morning, by his cleaning-lady.
Hypothesis here, then, for the time of the murder? Between 10 a.m., say, and noon the previous day. Roughly. But then everything was 'roughly' with these wretched pathologists, wasn't it? (And Morse had smiled sadly, and thought of Max; and nodded slowly, for Phillotson was preaching to the converted.)
One other circumstance most probably corroborating a pre-noon time for the murder was the readily observable, duly observed, fact that there was no apparent sign, such the preparation of meat and vegetables, for any potential Sunday lunch in Flat 6. Not that that was conclusive in itself, since it had already become clear, from sensibly orientated enquiries, that it had not been unusual for McClure to walk down the Banbury Road and order a Sunday lunch—8oz Steak, French Fries, Salad—only £3.99—at the King's Arms, washed down with a couple of pints of Best Bitter, no sweet, no coffee. But there had been no sign of steak or chips or lettuce or anything much else when the pathologist had split open the white-skinned belly of Dr. Felix McClure. No sign of any lunchtime sustenance at all.
The body had been found in a hunched-up, foetal posture, with both hands clutching the lower abdomen and the eyes screwed tightly closed as if McClure had died in the throes of some excruciating pain. He was dressed in a short-sleeved shirt, vertically striped in maroon and blue, a black Jaeger cardigan, and a pair of dark-grey flannels—the low part of the shirt and the upp
er regions of the trousers stiff and steeped in the blood that had oozed so abundantly.
McClure had been one of those 'perpetual students in life' (Phillotson's words). After winning a Major Scholarship to Oxford in 1946, he had gained a First in Mods, a First in Greats—thereafter spending forty-plus years of his life as Ancient History Tutor in Wolsey College. In 1956 he had married one of his own pupils, an undergraduate from Somerville—the latter, after attaining exactly similar distinction, duly appointed to a Junior Fellowship in Merton, and in 1966 (life jumping forward in decades) running off with one of her own pupils, a bearded undergraduate from Trinity. No children, though; no legal problems. Just a whole lot of heartache, perhaps.
Few major publications to his name—mostly a series of articles written over the years for various classical journals. But at least he had lived long enough to see the publication of his magnum opus: The Great Plague at Athens: Its Effect on the Course and Conduct of the Peloponnesian War. A long title. A long work.
Witnesses?
Of the eight 'luxurious apartments' only four had been sold, with two of the others being let, and the other two still empty, the 'For Sale' notices standing outside the respective properties—one of them the apartment immediately below McClure's, Number 5; the other Number 2. Questioning of the tenants had produced no information of any value: the newly-weds in Number 1 had spent most of the Sunday morning a-bed—sans breakfast, sans newspapers, sans everything except themselves; the blue-rinsed old lady in Number 3, extremely deaf, had insisted on making a very full statement to the effect that she had heard nothing on that fateful morn; the couple in Number 4 had been out all morning on a Charity 'Save the Whales' Walk in Wytham Woods; the temporary tenants of Number 7 were away in Tunisia; and the affectionate couple who had bought Number 8 had been uninterruptedly employed in redecorating their bathroom, with the radio on most of the morning as they caught up with The Archers omnibus. (For the first time in several minutes, Morse's interest had been activated.)
'Not all that much to go on,' Phillotson had admitted; yet all the same, not without some degree of pride, laying a hand on two green box-files filled with reports and statements and notes and documents and a plan showing the full specification of McClure's apartment, with arcs and rulings and arrows and dotted lines and measurements. Morse himself had never been able to follow such house-plans; and now glanced only cursorily through the stapled sheets supplied by Adkinsons, Surveyors, Valuers, and Estate Agents—as Phillotson came to the end of his briefing.
'By the way,' asked Morse, rising to his feet, 'how's the wife? I meant to ask earlier . . .'
'Very poorly, I'm afraid,' said Phillotson, miserably.
'Cheerful sod, isn't he, Lewis?'
The two men had been back in Morse's office then, Lewis seeking to find a place on the desk for the bulging box-files.
'Well, he must be pretty worried about his wife if—'
'Pah! He just didn't know where to go next—that was his trouble.'
'And we do?'
'Well, for a start, I wouldn't mind knowing which of those newspapers McClure read first?'
'If either.'
Morse nodded. 'And I wouldn't mind finding out if he made any phone-calls that morning.'
'Can't we get British Telecom to itemise things?'
'Can we?' asked Morse vaguely.
'You'll want to see the body?'
'Why on earth should I want to do that?'
'I just thought—'
'I wouldn't mind seeing that shirt, though. Maroon and blue vertical stripes, didn't Phillotson say?' Morse passed the index finger of his left hand round the inside of his slightly tight, slightly frayed shirt-collar. 'I'm thinking of, er, expanding my wardrobe a bit.'
But the intended humour was lost on Lewis, to whom it seemed exceeding strange that Morse should at the same time apparently show more interest in the dead man's shirt than in his colleague's wife. 'Apparently' though . . . that was always the thing about Morse: no one could ever really plot a graph of the thoughts that ran through that extraordinary mind.
'Did we learn anything—from Phillotson, sir?'
'You may have done: I didn't. I knew just as much about things when I went into his office as when I came out.'
'Reminds you a bit of Omar Khayyam, doesn't it?' suggested Lewis, innocently.
CHAPTER FOUR
Krook chalked the letter upon the wall—in a very curious manner, beginning with the end of the letter, and shaping it backward. It was a capital letter, not a printed one.
'Can you read it?' he asked me with a keen glance
(CHARLES DICKENS, Bleak House)
THE SITTING-CUM-DINING-ROOM—the murder room—12' x 17' 2" as stated in the Adkinsons' (doubtless accurate) specifications, was very much the kind of room one might expect as the main living-area of a retired Oxford don: an oak table with four chairs around it; a brown leather settee; a matching armchair; TV; CD and cassette player; books almost everywhere on floor-to-ceiling shelves; busts of Homer, Thucydides, Milton, and Beethoven; not enough space really for the many pictures—including the head, in the Pittura Pompeiana series, of Theseus, Slayer of the Minotaur. Those were the main things. Morse recognised three of the busts readily and easily, though he had to guess at the bronze head of Thucydides. As for Lewis, he recognized all four immediately, since his eyesight was now keener than Morse's, and the name of each of those immortals was inscribed in tiny capitals upon its plinth.
For a while Morse stood by the armchair, looking all round him, saying nothing. Through the open door of the kitchen—6' 10" x 9' 6"—he could see the Oxford Almanack hanging from the wall facing him, and finally went through to admire 'St. Hilda's College' from a watercolour by Sir Hugh Casson, RA. Pity, perhaps, it was the previous year's, for Morse now read its date, 'MDCCCCLXXXXIII'; and for a few moments he found himself considering whether any other year in the twentieth century—in any century—could command any lengthier designation. Fourteen characters required for '1993.'
Still, the Romans never knew much about numbers.
'Do you know how many walking-sticks plus umbrellas we've got in the hall-stand here?' shouted Lewis from the tiny entrance area.
'Fourteen!' shouted Morse in return.
'How the—how on earth—?'
'For me, Lewis, coincidence in life is wholly unexceptional; the readily predictable norm in life. You know that by now, surely?'
Lewis said nothing. He knew well where his duties lay in circumstances such as these: to do the donkey-work; to look through everything, without much purpose, and often without much hope. But Morse was a stickler for sifting the evidence; always had been. The only trouble was that he never wanted to waste his own time in helping to sift it, for such work was excessively tedious; and frequently fruitless, to boot.
So Lewis did it all. And as Morse sat back in the settee and looked through McClure's magnum opus, Lewis started to go through all the drawers and all the letters and all the piles of papers and the detritus of the litter-bins—just as earlier Phillotson and his team had done. Lewis didn't mind, though. Occasionally in the past he'd found some item unusual enough (well, unusual enough to Morse) that had set the great mind scurrying off into some subtly sign-posted avenue, or cul-de-sac; that had set the keenest-nosed hound in the pack on to some previously unsuspected scent.
Two things only of interest here, Lewis finally informed Morse. And Phillotson himself had pointed out the potential importance of the first of these, anyway: a black plastic W. H. Smith Telephone Index, with eighteen alphabetical divisions, the collocation of the less common letters, such as 'WX' and 'YZ,' counting as one. The brief introductory instructions (under 'A') suggested that the user might find it valuable to record therein, for speed of reference, the telephone numbers of such indispensable personages as Decorator, Dentist, Doctor, Electrician, Plumber, Police . . .
Lewis opened the index at random: at the letter 'M.' Six names on the card there. Three of the telephone
numbers were prefixed with the Inner London code, '071'; the other three were Oxford numbers, five digits each, all beginning with '5.'
Lewis sighed audibly. Eighteen times six? That was a hundred and eight . . . Still it might be worthwhile ringing round (had Phillotson thought the same?) provided there were no more than half a dozen or so per page. He pressed the index to a couple of other letters. 'P': eight names and numbers. 'C': just four. What about the twinned letters? He pressed 'KL': seven, with six of them 'L'; and just one 'K'—and that (interestingly enough?) entered as the single capital letter 'K.' Who was K when he was at home?
Or she?
'What does 'K' stand for, sir?
Morse, a crossword fanatic from his early teens, knew some of the answers immediately: ' ''King"; "Kelvin"—unit of temperature, Lewis; er, "thousand"; "kilometer," of course; "Köchel," the man who catalogued Mozart, as you know; er . . .'
'Not much help.'
'Initial of someone's name?'
'Why just the initial?'
'Girl's name? Perhaps he's trying to disguise his simmering passion for a married woman—what about that? Or perhaps all the girls at the local knocking-shop are known by a letter of the alphabet?'
'Didn't know you had one up here, sir.'
'Lewis, we have everything in North Oxford. It's just a question of knowing where it is, that's the secret.'
Lewis mused aloud. 'Karen . . . or Kirsty . . .'
'Kylie?'
'You've heard of her, sir?'
'Only just.'
'Kathy . . .'
'Well, there's one pretty simple way of finding out, isn't there? Can't you just ring the number? Isn't that what you're supposed to be doing? That sort of thing?'
