by Colin Dexter
'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 nose-rings, 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
No small art is it to sleep: it. is necessary to keep awake all day for that purpose
(FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE)
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, September 9.
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 moming, 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
Keep careful watch too on the moral faults of your patients, which may cause them to tell untruths about things prescribed—and things proscribed
(Corpus Hippocraticum)
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, September 9 and Friday, September 16.
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 misspellings 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, September 15, 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 them 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 skillfully 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
I once knew a person who spoke in dialect with an accent
(IRVIN COBB)
'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 lime 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, whiskey in hand, he leaned back in the only armchair in the only room—the fairly large room, though—which was Eleanor Smith's bedsitter-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?.
