by Colin Dexter
'Four o'clock, yesterday afternoon. Or just before. The coach left at five.'
'You don't seem to have been too worded 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 tele phone 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 museum has retained much of its Victorian character. Painstakingly hand-written labels can still be found attached to some of the artefacts in the crammed black cases there
(The Pitt Rivers Museum, A Souvenir Guide)
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, spike-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, September 8, 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 stating 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, B
ert. 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 straightaway 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
Yes
You have come upon the fabled lands where myths
Go when they die
(JAMES FENTON, 'The Pitt Rivers Museum')
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 realising 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 soffiy. '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
Thursday is a bad day. Wednesday is quite a good day. Friday is an even better one. But Thursday, whatever the reason, is a day on which my spirit and my resolution, are at their lowest ebb. Yet even worse is any day of the week upon which, after a period of blessed idleness, I come face to face with the prospect of a premature return to my labours
(DIOGENES SMALL, Autobiography)
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! 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 Mr
s. 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 he 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
His failing powers disconcerted him, for what he would do with women he was unsure to perform, and he could rarely accept the appearance of females who thought of topics other than coitus
