The Silent World of Nicholas Quinn - Inspector Morse 03

by Colin Dexter

  ‘You all right, Inspector?'

  'Just about, thank you, Sister. But listen. I don't want anyone to talk to Miss Height or to get anywhere near her. All right? And if anyone does try to visit her, I want to know who it is. One of my men will be here in ten minutes.'

  He paced impatiently up and down the corridor waiting for Dickson's arrival. Like Pilgrim he seemed to be making but sluggish progress - up the hill of difficulty and down into the slough of despond. But there was no sign whatsoever of Richard Bartlett. Perhaps Morse was imagining things.

  twenty-one

  Three-quarters of an hour later, with the office clock showing half past two, Morse's irritation with the young philanderer was mounting towards open animosity. What a flabby character Donald Martin was! He admitted most things, albeit with some reluctance. His relationship with Monica had sputtered into sporadic passion, followed by the usual remorse and the futile promises that the affair had got to finish. Certainly it was he who had always tried to force the pace; yet when they were actually making love together (Morse drew the blinds across his imagination) he knew that she was glad. She could surrender herself so completely to physical love; it was wonderful, and he had known nothing like it before. But when the passion was spent, she would always retreat into indifference - callousness, almost

  . Never had she made any pretence about her reasons for letting him take her: it was purely physical. Never had she spoken of love, or even of deep affection ... His wife (he was sure of it) had no suspicions of his unfaithfulness, although she must have sensed (of course she must!) that the careless rapture of their early married days had gone - perhaps for ever.

  How despicable the man was! His dark, lank hair, his hornrimmed glasses, his long, almost effeminate fingers. Ugh! Nor was Morse's dark displeasure dissipated as Martin repeated what he had already told Lewis about his whereabouts the previous evening. He'd been lucky to find a parking space in the Broad, and he'd gone to the King's Arms first, where he thought the barmaid would probably remember him. Then to the White Horse, where he didn't know anyone. Another pint. Then down to the Turf Bar. Another pint. No he didn't often go out for a binge: very rarely in fact. But the last few days had been a nightmarish time. He'd found he couldn't sleep at all well, and beer had helped a bit; it usually did. But why did Morse keep on and on at him about it? He'd gone nowhere near Ogleby's! Why should he? What, for heaven's sake, could he have had to do with Ogleby's murder? He'd not even known him very well. He doubted if anybody in the office knew him very well.

  Morse said nothing to enlighten him. 'Let's come back to last Friday afternoon.'

  ‘Not again, surely! I've told you what happened. All right, I lied for a start, but—'

  ‘You're lying now! And if you're not carefuf you'll be down in the cells until you do tell me the truth.'

  ‘But I'm not lying.' He shook his head miserably. 'Why can't you believe me?'

  ‘Why did you say you spent the afternoon at Miss Height's house?'

  ‘I don't know, really. Monica thought . .' His voice trailed off.

  ‘Yes. She's told me.'

  ‘Has she?' His eyes seemed suddenly relieved.

  ‘Yes,' lied Morse. ‘But if you don't want to tell me yourself, we can always wait, sir. I'm in no great rush myself.'

  Martin looked down at the carpet. ‘I don't know why she didn't want to say we'd been to the pictures. I don't - honestly! But I didn't think it mattered all that much, so I agreed to what she said.'

  'It's a bit odd to say you'd been to bed when all you'd done was sit together in the cinema!'

  Martin seemed to recognize the obvious truth of the assertion, and he nodded. 'But it's the truth, Inspector. It's the honest truth! We stayed in the cinema till about a quarter to four. You've got to believe that! I had nothing at all - nothing! - to do with Nick's death. Nor did Monica. We were together - all the afternoon.'

  Tell me something about the film.'

  So Martin told him, and Morse knew that he could hardly be fabricating such entirely gratuitous obscenities. Martin had seen the film; seen it sometime, anyway. Not necessarily that Friday, not necessarily with Monica, but...

  Martin was convincing him, he knew that. Assume he was there that Friday afternoon. With Monica? Yes, assume that too. Sit them down there on the back row of the rear lounge, Morse. Martin had been waiting for her, and she'd come in. Yes, keep going I She'd come in and... and they had stayed after all! Who, if anyone, had they seen? No. Go back a bit. Who had Martin seen going in? No. Who had Monica seen? Going in? Or...? Yes.Yes!

  Think of it the other way for a minute. Ogleby had gone into the cinema at about quarter to five, say. But he must have known all about Quinn's ticket, mustn't he? In fact he must have seen it. When? Where? Why had he made a careful freehand drawing of that ticket? Ogleby must have known, or at least suspected, that the ticket was vitally important. All right. Agree that Monica and Martin had seen the film together. But had Quinn gone? Or had someone just wished to make everyone else think that he'd gone? Who? Who knew of the ticket? Who had drawn it? Where had he found it, Morse? My God, yes! What a stupid blind fool he'd been!

  Martin had stopped talking minutes before, and was looking curiously at the man in the black-leather chair, sitting there smiling serenely to himself. It had all happened, as it always seemed to do with Morse, in the twinkling of an eye. Yes, as he sat there, oblivious to everything about him, Morse felt he knew when Nicholas Quinn had met his death.

  HOW?

  twenty-two

  Early on Saturday evening Mr Nigel Denniston decided to begin. He found that the majority of his O-level English Language scripts had been delivered, and he began his usual preliminary task of putting the large buff-coloured envelopes into alphabetical order, and of checking them against his allocated schedule. The examiners' meeting was to be held in two days' time, and before then he had to look at about twenty or so scripts, mark them provisionally in pencil, and present them for scrutiny to the senior examiner, who would be interviewing each of his panel after the main meeting. Al-jamara was the first school on his list, and he slit open the carefully-sealed envelope and took out the contents. The attendance sheet was placed on top of the scripts, and Denniston's eyes travelled automatically and hopefully down to the 'Absentee' column. It was always a cause of enormous joy to him if one or two of his candidates had been smitten with some oriental malady; but Al-jamara was a disappointment. According to the attendance sheet there were five candidates entered, and all five were duly registered as 'present’ by the distant invigilator. Never mind. There was always the chance of finding one or two of those delightful children who knew nothing and who wrote nothing; children for whom the wells of inspiration ran dry after only a couple of laboured sentences. But no. No luck there, either. None of the five candidates had prematurely given up the ghost. Instead, it was the usual business: page after page of ill-written, unidiomatic, irrelevant twaddle, which it was his assignment to plough through (and almost certainly to plough), marking in red ink the myriad errors of grammar, syntax, construction, spelling and punctuation. It was a tedious chore, and he didn't really know why year after year he took it on. Yet he did know. It was a bit of extra cash; and if he didn't mark, he would only be sitting in front of the TV, forever arguing with the family about which of the channels they should watch ... He flicked through the first few sheets. Oh dear! These foreigners might be all right at Mathematics or Economics or that sort of thing. But they couldn't write English - that was a fact. Still, it wasn't really surprising. English was their second language, poor kids; and he felt a little less jaundiced as he took out his pencil and started.

  An hour later he had finished the first four scripts. The candidates had tried - of course they had. But he felt quite unjustified in awarding the sort of marks that could bring them anywhere near the pass range. Tentatively he had written his own provisional percentages at the top right-hand corner of each script: 27%, 34%, 35%, 19%. He decided to finish o
ff the last one before supper.

  This was a better script. My goodness, it was! And as he read on he realized that it was very good indeed. He put aside his pencil and read through the essay with genuine interest, bordering on delight. Whoever the boy was, he'd written beautifully. There were a few awkward sentences, and a sprinkling of minor errors; but Denniston doubted whether he himself could have written a better essay under examination conditions. He had known the same sort of thing before, though. Sometimes a candidate would memorize a whole essay and trot it out: beautiful stuff, lifted lock, stock and paragraph from one of the great English prose stylists; but almost invariably in such cases, the subject matter was so wildly divorced from the strict terms of the question set as to be completely irrelevant. But not here. Either the lad was quite exceptionally able, or else he had been extraordinarily fortunate. That wasn't for Denniston to decide, though; his job was to reward what was on the script. He pencilled in 90%; and then wondered why he hadn't given it 95%, or even 99%. But like almost all examiners, he was always frightened of using the full range of marks. The lad would fly through, anyway. Wonderful lad! Perfunctorily Denniston looked at the name: Dubai. It meant nothing to him at all.

  In Al-jamara itself, the last of the Autumn examinations, crowded into just the one week, had finished the previous afternoon, and George Bland relaxed with an iced gin and tonic in his air-conditioned flat. It had taken him only a few weeks to regret his move. Better paid, certainly; but only away from Oxford had he begun fully to appreciate the advantages of his strike-ridden, bankrupt, beautiful homeland. He missed, above all, the feeling of belonging somewhere which, however loosely, he could think of as his home: the pub at night; the Cotswold villages with their greens and ancient churches; the concerts, the plays, the lectures, and the general air of learning; the oddities forever padding their faddish, feckless paths around the groves of the Muses. He'd never imagined how much it all meant to him... The climate of Al-jamara was overwhelming, intolerable, endlessly enervating; the people alien - ostensibly hospitable, but secretly watchful and suspicious ... How he regretted the move now!

  The news had worried him; would have worried anyone. It was for information only, really - no more; and it had been thoughtful of the Syndicate to keep him informed. The International Telegram had arrived on Wednesday morning: TRAGIC

  NEWS STOP QUINN DEAD STOP MURDER SUSPECTED STOP WILL

  WRITE STOP BARTLETT. But there had been another telegram, received only that morning; and this time it was unsigned. He had burned it immediately, although he realized that no one could have suspected the true import of the brief, bleak lines. Yet it had always been a possibility, and he was prepared. He walked over to his desk and took out his passport once more. All was in order; and tucked safely inside was his ticket on the scheduled flight to Cairo, due to leave at noon the following day.

  twenty-three

  There was a car outside No 1 Pinewood Close as Frank Greenaway pulled into the crescent; but he didn't recognize it and gave it no second thought. He could fully understand Joyce's point of view, of course. He wasn't too keen to go back there himself, and it wasn't right to expect her to be there on her own while he was out at work. She'd have the baby to keep her company, but— No. He agreed with her. They would find somewhere else, and in the meantime his parents were being very kind. Not that he wanted to stay with them too long. Like somebody said, fish and visitors began to smell after three days ... They could leave most of their possessions at Pinewood Close for a week or two, but he had to pick up a few things for Joyce (who would be leaving the John Radcliffe the next morning), and the police had said it would be all right.

  As he got out of his car, he noticed that the streetlamp had been repaired, and the house where he and Joyce had lived, and wherein Quinn had been found murdered, seemed almost ordinary again. The front gate stood open, and he walked up to the front door, selecting the correct key from his ring. The garage doors stood open, propped back by a couple of house bricks. Frank opened the front door very quietly. He was not a nervous man, but he felt a slight involuntary shudder as he stepped into the darkened hallway, the two doors on his right, the stairs almost directly in front of him. He would hurry it up a bit; he didn't much fancy staying there too long on his own. As he put his hand on the banister he noticed the slim line of light under the kitchen door: the police must have forgotten ... But then he heard it, quite distinctly. Someone was in the kitchen. Someone was quietly moving around in there ... The demon fear laid its electrifying hand upon his shoulder, and without conscious volition he found himself a few seconds later scurrying hurriedly along the concrete drive towards his car.

  Morse heard the click of the front door, and looked out into the passageway. But no one. He was imagining things again. He returned to the kitchen, and bent down once more beside the back door. Yes, he had been right. There was no mud on the carpets in the other downstairs rooms, and they had been hoovered only an hour or so before Quinn was due to return. But beside the back door there were signs of mud, and Morse knew that someone had taken off his shoes, or her shoes, and left them beside the doormat. And even as he had stood there his own shoes crunched upon the gritty, dried mud with the noise of someone trampling on corn flakes.

  He left the house and got into the Lancia. But then he got out again, walked back, closed the garage doors, and finally the garden gate behind him.

  Ten minutes later he drew up outside the darkened house in Walton Street, where a City constable stood guard before the door.

  ‘No one's tried to get in, Constable?'

  'No, sir. Few sightseers always hanging around, but no one's been in.' 'Good. I’ll only be ten minutes.'

  Ogleby's bedroom seemed lonely and bleak. No pictures on the walls, no books on the bedside table, no ornaments on the dressing table, no visible signs of heating. The large double-bed monopolized the confined space, and Morse turned back the coverlet. Two head pillows lay there, side by side, and a pair of pale-yellow pyjamas were tucked just beneath the top sheet Morse picked up the nearer pillow, and there he found a neatly-folded neglige - black, flimsy, almost transparent, with a label proclaiming 'St Michael'.

  No one had yet bothered to clean up the other room, and the fire which had blazed merrily the night before was nothing now but cold, fine ash into which some of the detectives had thrown the dropped butts of their cigarettes. It looked almost obscene. Morse turned his attention to the books which lined the high shelves on each side of the fireplace. The vast majority of them were technical treatises on Ogleby's specialisms, and Morse was interested in only one: Medical Jurisprudence and Toxicology, by Glaister and Rentoul. It was an old friend. A folded sheet of paper protruded from the top, and Morse opened the book at that point: page 566. In heavy type, a quarter of the way down the page, stood the heading 'Hydrocyanic Acid'.

  At the Summertown Health Clinic, Morse was shown immediately into Dr Parker's consulting room.

  '''Yes, Inspector, I'd looked after Mr Ogleby for - oh, seven or eight years now. Very sad really. Something may have turned up, but I very much doubt it. Extremely rare blood disease -nobody knows much about it.'

  ‘You gave him about a year, you say?' ‘Eighteen months, perhaps. No longer.' ‘He knew this?'

  'Oh yes. He insisted on knowing everything. Anyway, it would have been useless trying to keep it from him. Medically speaking, he was a very well-informed man. Knew more about bis illness than I did. Or the specialists at the Radcliffe, come to that.'

  'Do you think he told anybody?'

  'I doubt it. Might have told one or two close friends, I suppose. But I knew nothing about his private life. For all I know, he didn't have any close friends.'

  ‘Why do you say that?'

  ‘I don't know. He was a - a bit of a loner, I think. Bit uncommunicative.' ‘Did he have much pain?' 'I don't think so. He never said so, anyway.' 'He wasn't the suicidal sort, was he?'

  ‘I don't think so. Seemed a pretty balanced sort of chap. If
he were going to kill himself, he would have done it simply and quickly, I should have thought. He would certainly have been in his right mind.'

  ‘What would you say is the simplest and quickest way?'

  Parker shrugged his shoulders. 'I think I'd have a quick swig of cyanide, myself.'

  Morse walked thoughtfully to the car: he felt a sadder, if not a much wiser man. Anyway, one more call to make. He just hoped Margaret Freeman hadn't gone off to a Saturday night hop.

  Although earlier in the evening Lewis had been quite unable to fathom the Inspector's purposes, he had quite looked forward to the duties assigned to him.

  Joyce Greenaway was pleasantly cooperative, and she tried her best to. answer the Sergeant's strange questions. As she had told Inspector Morse, she couldn't be certain that the name was Bartlett, and she could see no point whatsoever in trying (although she did try) to remember whether he'd been addressed as Bartlett or Dr Bartlett. She was quite sure, too, that she could never hope to recognize the voice again: her hearing wasn't all that good at the best of times and - well, you couldn't recognize a voice again just like that, could you. What were they talking about? Well, as a matter of fact, she did just have the feeling that they were arranging to meet somewhere. But further than that - when, where, why - no. No ideas at all.

  Lewis got it all down in his notebook; and when he'd finished he made the appropriate noises to the little bundle of life that lay beside the bed.

  ‘Have you got any family, Sergeant?'

  Two daughters.'

  ‘We had a name all ready if it had been a girl.' There's a lot of nice boys' names.'

  ‘Yeah, I suppose so. But somehow— What's your Christian name, Sergeant?'

  Lewis told her. He'd never liked it much.

  'What about the Inspector? What's his Christian name?'

  Lewis frowned for a few seconds. Funny, really. He'd never thought of Morse as having one. 'I don't know. I've never heard anyone call him by his Christian name.'