Morse's Greatest Mystery

by Colin Dexter

  “After the pubs had closed.”

  “She hadn’t been drinking, Inspector.”

  “Oh!”

  Morse placed his hand lightly on the young pathologist’s shoulder and thanked her. Her eyes looked interesting—and interested. Sometimes Morse thought he could fall in love with Laura Hobson; and sometimes he thought he couldn’t.

  It was almost midday before Morse gave the order for the body to be removed. The scene-of-crime personnel had finished their work, and a thick, transparent sheeting had now been laid across the carpet. Lewis, with two DCs, had long since been despatched to cover the preliminary tasks: to check Bayley’s alibi, to question the neighbours, and to discover whatever they could of Sheila Poster’s past. And Morse himself now stood alone, and gazed around the room in which Sheila Poster had been murdered.

  Almost immediately, however, it was apparent that little was likely to be found. The eight drawers of the modern desk which stood against the inside wall were completely empty; with the almost inevitable conclusion to be drawn that the murderer had systematically emptied the contents of each, as well as whatever had stood on the desk-top, into … well, into something—black plastic-bag, say? And then disappeared into the night; in gloves, like as not, for Morse had learned that no extraneous prints had been discovered—only those left almost everywhere by the murdered tenant. The surfaces of the desk, the shelving, the furniture, the window—all had been dutifully daubed and dusted with fingerprint powder; but it seemed highly improbable that such a methodical murderer had left behind any easily legible signature.

  No handbag, either; no documents of any sort; nothing.

  Or was there?

  Above the desk, hanging by a cord from the picture-rail, was a plywood board, some thirty inches square, on which ten items were fixed by multicoloured drawing-pins: five Medici reproductions of well-known paintings (including two Pre-Raphaelites); a manuscript facsimile of Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale”; a postcard showing the death-mask of Tutankhamen; a photograph of a kingfisher, a large fish balanced in its mouth, perched on a “No Fishing” sign; a printed invitation to a St. Hilda’s Old Girls’ evening in March 1993; and a leaflet announcing a crime short-story competition organized by Oxfordshire County Libraries: “First prize £1,000— Judges Julian Symons and H. R. F. Keating—Final date 10 April 1993.”

  Huh! Still seven weeks to go. But there’d now be no entry from Sheila Poster, would there, Morse?

  He methodically unpinned each of the cards and turned them over. Four were blank—obviously purchased for decorative purposes. But two had brief messages written on them. On the Egyptian card, in what Morse took to be a masculine hand, were the words: “Cairo’s bloody hot but wish you were here—B.” And on the back of Collins’s “Convent Thoughts,” in what Morse took to be a feminine hand: “On a weekend retreat! I knew I wouldn’t miss men. But I do!! Susan.”

  On each side of the boarded-up fireplace were five bookshelves, their contents systematically stacked in order: Austen novels, top left, Wordsworth poems, bottom right. Housman’s Collected Poems suddenly caught Morse’s eye, and he extracted his old hero, the book falling open immediately at “Last Poems” XXVI, where a postcard (another one) had been inserted: the front showing a photograph of streets in San Jose (so it said) and, on the back, a couplet written out in black Biro:

  And wide apart lie we, my love,

  And seas between the twain.

  (7.v.92)

  Morse smiled to himself, for the poem from which the lines were taken had been part of his own mental furniture for many moons.

  Yet so very soon the smile had become a frown. He’d seen that same handwriting only a few seconds since, surely? He unpinned the postcard from Cairo again; and, yes, the handwriting was more than a reasonable match.

  So what?

  So what, Morse? Yet for many seconds his eyes were as still as the eyes that stared from the mask of Tutankhamen.

  Lewis came briskly into the room twenty minutes later, promptly reading from his note-book:

  “Sheila Emily Poster; second-class honours degree in English from St. Hilda’s 1990; aged twenty-five—comes from Bristol; Dad died in ’eighty-four—Hodgkin’s disease; Mum in a special home there—Alzheimer’s; only child; worked for a while with the University Geology Department in the reference section; here in this property almost ten months—£490 a month; £207 in the Building Society; £69.40 in her current account at Lloyds.”

  “You can get interest on current accounts these days, did you know that, Lewis?”

  “Useful thing for you to know, sir.”

  “You’ve been quick.”

  “Easy! Bursar of St. Hilda’s, DSS, Lloyds Bank—no problems. Murder does help sometimes, doesn’t it?”

  A sudden splash of rain hatched the front window and Morse stared out at the melancholy day:

  “I know not if it rains, my love,

  In the land where you do lie …”

  “Pardon, sir?”

  But Morse seemed not to hear. “There’s all this stuff here, Lewis …” Morse pointed vaguely to the piles of magazines lying around. “You’d better have a look through.”

  “Can’t we get somebody else—”

  “No!” thundered Morse. “I need help—your help, Lewis. For Chrissake get on with it!”

  Far from any annoyance, Lewis felt a secret contentment. In only one respect was he unequivocally in a class of his own as a police officer, he knew that: for there was only one person with whom the curmudgeonly Morse could ever work with any kind of equanimity—and that was himself, Lewis.

  He now settled therefore with his accustomed measure of commitment to the fourth-grade clerical chore of sorting through the piles of women’s magazines, fashion journals, brochures, circulars, and the like, that were stacked on the floor-space in the two alcoves of the living room.

  He was still working when just over an hour later Morse returned from his lunchtime ration of calories, taken entirely in liquid form.

  “Found anything?”

  Lewis shook his head. “One or two amusing bits, though.”

  “Well? Let’s share the joke. Life’s grim enough.”

  Lewis looked back into one of the piles, found a copy of the Oxford Gazette (May 1992), and read from the back page.

  CLEANER REQUIRED

  Three mornings per week

  Hourly rate negotiable

  Graduate preferred

  Morse was unimpressed. “We’re all of us overqualified in Oxford.”

  “Not all of us.”

  “How long will you be?”

  “Another half-hour or so.”

  “I’ll leave you then.”

  “What’ll you be doing, sir?”

  “I’ll still be thinking. See you back at HQ.”

  Morse walked out again, down Cowley Road to the Plain; over Magdalen Bridge, along the High, and then up Catte Street to the Broad; and was standing, undecided for a few seconds, in front of Blackwell’s book shop and the narrow frontage of the adjoining White Horse (“Open All Day”)—when the idea suddenly struck him.

  He caught a taxi from St. Giles’ out to Kidlington. Not to Police HQ though, but to 45 Blenheim Close, the address given on the leaflet advertising the Oxfordshire short-story competition.

  “You’re a bit premature, really,” suggested Rex De Lincto, the short, fat, balding, slightly deaf Chairman of the Oxford Book Association. “There’s still about a couple of months to go and we’ll only receive most of the entries in the last week or so.”

  “You’ve had some already, though?”

  “Nine.”

  De Lincto walked over to a cabinet, took out a handwritten list of names, and passed it across.

  1 IAN BRADLEY

  2 EMMA SKIPPER

  3 VALERIE WARD

  4 JIM MORWOOD

  5 CHRISTINA COLLINS

  6 UNA BROSHOLA

  7 ELISSA THORPE

  8 RICHARD ELVES

 
9 MARY ANN COTTON

  Morse scanned the list, his attention soon focusing on the last name.

  “Odd,” he mumbled.

  “Pardon?”

  “Mary Ann Cotton. Same name as that of a woman hanged in Durham jail in the 1880s.”

  “So?”

  “And look at her!” Morse’s finger pointed to number five, Christina Collins. “She got herself murdered up on the canal in Staffordshire somewhere. Surely!”

  “I’m not quite with you, Inspector.”

  “Do you get phoney names sometimes?”

  “Well, you can’t tell, really, can you? I mean, if you say you’re Donald Duck—”

  Morse nodded. “You are Donald Duck.”

  “You’d perhaps use a nom de plume if you were an established author …”

  “But this competition’s only for first-timers, isn’t it?”

  “You’ve been reading the small print, Inspector.”

  “But how do you know who they are if they’ve won?”

  “We don’t sometimes. Not for a start. But every entrant sends an address.”

  “I see.”

  Morse looked again at the list, and suddenly the blood was running cold in his veins. The clues, or some of them, were beginning to lock together in his mind: the short-story leaflet; the advice of Diogenes Small, that guru of creative writing; the book that young Bayley had borrowed … the translation of Virgil’s Aeneid, in which Dido, the queen of Carthage, had fallen in love with Aeneas and then stabbed herself in her despair … Dido …known also by an alternative name—Elissa!

  Morse took out a pencil and lightly made twelve oblique strokes through each letter of ELISSA THORPE, in what seemed to De Lincto a wholly random order; but an order which in Morse’s mind spelled out in sequence the letters of the name SHEILA POSTER.

  Morse rose to his feet and looked across at the cabinet. “You’d better let me have story number seven, if you will, sir.”

  “Of course. And if I may say so, you’ve made a very good choice, Inspector.”

  Only one message was awaiting Morse when he returned to his office at HQ: Dr. Hobson had called to say that Sheila Poster was about twelve weeks pregnant. But Morse paid scant attention to this new information, for there was something he had to do immediately.

  He therefore sat back comfortably in the old black-leather armchair.

  And read a story.

  Part Two

  Yet always it is those fictional addenda which will effect the true alchemy.

  (Diogenes Small, Reflections on Inspiration and Creativity)

  The story (printed verbatim here) which Morse now began to read was cleanly typed and carefully presented.

  I’d seen the advert in the Gazette.

  She was going to be a woman who walked silent and unsmiling through any door held open for her; a woman who would speak in a loud voice over the counter at a bank; a woman conscious of her congenital superiority over her fellow beings.

  In short she was going to be a North Oxford lady.

  And she was—a double-barrelled one.

  * * *

  I was gratified though surprised that my carefully worded application had been considered and I caught the bus in good time.

  At 10:30 A.M. to the minute I walked along the flagged path that bisected the weedless front lawn and knocked at the door of The Grange in Squitchey Lane.

  A quarter of an hour later, after a last mouthful of some bitter-tasting coffee, I’d landed the job.

  How?

  I wasn’t sure, not then. But when she asked me if I’d enjoyed the coffee, I said I preferred a cup of instant, and she’d smiled thinly.

  “That’s what my husband says.”

  I hoped my voice showed an appropriate interest.

  “Your husband?”

  “He’s abroad. The Americans are picking his brains.”

  She stood up.

  “Do you know why I’ve offered you the job?”

  It was a bit risky but I said it: “No one else applied?”

  “I’m not surprised you have a degree. You’re quite bright really.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You need the money, I suppose?”

  I lowered my eyes to the deep Wilton and nodded.

  “Goodbye,” she said.

  I left her standing momentarily there at the front door—slim, elegantly dressed, and young—well, comparatively young.

  And, yes, I ought to admit it, uncommonly attractive.

  The tasks allotted to me could only just be squeezed into the nine hours a week I spent at The Grange.

  But £36 was £36.

  And that was a bonus.

  Can you guess what I’m saying? Not yet?

  You will.

  Two parts of the house I was forbidden to enter: the master bedroom (remember that bedroom!) and the master’s study—the latter by the look of it a large converted bedroom on the upstairs floor whose door was firmly closed.

  Firmly locked, as I soon discovered.

  There was no such embargo on the mistress’s study—a fairly recent addition at the rear of the house in the form of a semi-conservatory, its shelves, surfaces, and floor all crammed with books and littered with loose papers and typescripts. And dozens of house-plants fighting for a little Lebensraum.

  I was invariably fascinated with the place as I carefully (too carefully) watered the plants, replaced the books in alphabetical order, shuffled untidy piles into tidy piles, and carefully (too carefully) hoovered the carpeted floor and dusted around.

  I love charging around with a duster. It’s one of the only jobs I do where I can actually see a result.

  And I like seeing a result …

  There was only one thing wrong with that room.

  The cat.

  I hate all cats but especially this cat, which occasionally looked at me in a mysterious knowing aristocratic potentially ferocious manner.

  Like his mistress.

  A small two-way cat-flap had been cut into the door leading from the conservatory to the rear garden through which the frequently filthy-pawed “Boswell” (huh!) would make his exits and his entrances.

  Ah, but bless you, Boswell!

  I felt confident that Mrs. Spencer-Gilbey could not have taken up my single reference since from the beginning she called me “Virginia” without the slightest hint of suspicion.

  For my part, I called her “ma’am,” to rhyme with “jam.” It was five syllables shorter than any more formal address, and I think the royal connotation was somewhat pleasing to her.

  Early on the Wednesday morning of my third week the amateurish tack-tack-tack of the typewriter in the conservatory stopped and my employer came through into the downstairs lounge to inform me she had to go out for two hours.

  It was at that point I made my first bold move.

  I took a leather-bound volume from the bookshelf beside me and blew a miniature dust-storm along the golden channel at the top of its pages.

  “Would you like me to give the books a wipe with a duster?”

  For a few seconds I thought I saw in those cold grey eyes of hers something very close to hatred.

  “If you can put them all back exactly as you found them.”

  “I’ll try, ma’am.”

  “Don’t try. Do it!”

  It was going to be a big job.

  Bookshelves lined three whole sides of the room, and at mid-morning I had a coffee-break in the kitchen.

  Outside by the garden shed I saw the steatopygous odd-job man who appeared intermittently—usually when I was leaving—to fix a few things as I supposed.

  I held my coffee-cup up to the window and my eyes asked him if he’d care to join me.

  His eyes replied yes and I saw he was younger than I had thought.

  More handsome too.

  I asked him how well he knew her ladyship but he merely shrugged.

  “She’s writing a book, did you know?” I asked.

  “Really?”
<
br />   He took a swallow of his coffee and I saw that his hands though grubby enough were not those of a manual labourer.

  “On Sir Thomas Wyatt,” I continued. “I had a look when I was hoovering.”

  “Really?”

  If his vocabulary seemed rather limited, his eyes ranged over me more widely, and he smiled in a curiously fascinating way.

  “I don’t suppose you know much about Sir Thomas Wyatt?”

  He shrugged again. “Not much. But if you’re going to tell me he died in 1542, you’ll be wasting your time, won’t you?”

  Jesus!

  He smiled again, this time at my discomfiture; then leaned forward and kissed me fully on the lips.

  “Are you on the pill?”

  “It’s all right. You see, I’m pregnant,” I replied.

  Afterwards we dared to have a cigarette together. It was the first I’d smoked for six months and it tasted foul.

  Stupid!

  His lighter was out of fuel and I used one of the extra-long Bryant & May matches kept in the kitchen for various purposes.

  For various purposes …

  I’d almost finished the second wall of bookshelves when milady came back.

  Just after I had turned round to acknowledge her presence a single sheet of paper fluttered to the floor.

  Quickly I bent down to pick it up but she was immediately beside me, snatching it from my hand.

  It was only a brief note and its contents could be read almost at a glance:

  Darling J

  Please do try to keep these few lines

  somewhere as a memento of my love?