by Colin Dexter
(PETER CHAMPKIN, The Sleeping Life of Aspern Williams)
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 he?'
'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?'
'They are not long, the weeping and the laughter,
Love and desire and hate . . .'
'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
You can lead a whore to culture but you can't make her think
(Attributed to Dorothy Parker)
'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 get ting 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 he 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, August 28: 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 wide-spread 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 merry-making 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
The scenery in the play was beautiful, but the actors got in front of it
(ALEXANDER WOOLLCOTT)
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 ca
lories, 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.
