by Colin Dexter
‘Three gin and tonics.’ Tompsett had an incisive, imperative voice, and Gaye wondered if he got his college scout to stir his morning coffee.
‘Hope you’re going to enjoy life with us, young Melhuish!’ Tompsett laid a broad hand on his bearded companion’s shoulder, and was soon engrossed in matters which Gaye was no longer able to follow. A group of American servicemen had come in and were losing no time in quizzing her about the brands of lager, the menu, the recent murder, and her home address. But she enjoyed Americans, and was soon laughing good-naturedly with them. As usual, the lagerpump was producing more froth than liquid substance and Gaye noticed, waiting patiently at the other end of the bar, the bespectacled member of the Oxford triumvirate.
‘Shan’t be a second, sir.’
‘Don’t worry. I’m in no great rush.’ He smiled quietly at her, and she saw the glimmer of a twinkle in his dark eyes, and she hurriedly squared the account with the neighbourly Americans.
‘Now, sir.’
‘We’d all like the same again, please. Three gins and tonics.’ Gaye looked at him with interest. The landlord had once told her that if anyone ordered ‘gins and tonics’ instead of the almost universal ‘gin and tonics’ – he really was a don. She wished he would speak again, for she liked the sound of his voice with its sarft Glarcestershire accent. But he didn’t. Nevertheless, she stayed at his end of the bar and lightly repolished the martini glasses.
‘Whatawe done to you, honeybunch?’ and similar endearing invitations emanated regularly from her other clients, but Gaye quietly and tactfully declined their ploys; she watched instead the man from Gloucestershire. Tompsett was in full flow.
‘He didn’t even go to my inaugural when he was up. What do you think of that, Peter, old boy.’
‘Don’t blame him really,’ said Peter. ‘We all sit and salivate over our own prose, Melhuish, and we kid ourselves it’s bloody marvellous.’
The Professor of Elizabethan Literature laughed good-humouredly and half-drained his glass. ‘Been here before, Melhuish?’
‘No, I haven’t. Rather nice, isn’t it?’
‘Bit notorious now, you know. Murder here last week.’
‘Yes, I read about it.’
‘Young blonde. Raped and murdered, right in the yard out there. Pretty young thing – if the newspapers are anything to go by.’
Melhuish, newly appointed junior fellow at Lonsdale, very bright and very anxious, was beginning to feel a little more at home with his senior colleagues.
‘Raped, too, was she?’
Tompsett drained his glass. ‘So they say. But I’ve always been a bit dubious myself about this rape business.’
‘Confucius, he say girl with skirt up, she run faster than man with trousers down, eh?’
The two older men smiled politely at the tired old joke, but Melhuish wished he hadn’t repeated it: off-key, over-familiar. Gaye heard the clear voice of Tompsett rescuing the conversation. He was no fool, she thought.
‘Yes, I agree with you, Melhuish. We mustn’t get too serious about rape. God, no. Happens every day. I remember a couple of years back there was a young gal here – you’d remember her, Peter – quick, clear mind, good worker, marvellous kid. She was taking Finals and had eight three-hour papers. She’d done her seventh paper on the Thursday morning – no it was the Friday, or was it . . . but that’s beside the point. She took her last but one paper in the morning with just one more fence to jump in the afternoon. Well, she went off to her digs out at Headington for lunch and – begger me! – she got raped on her way back. Just think of the shock for the poor lass. You remember, Peter? Anyway, she insisted on taking the last paper and do you know, Melhuish – she did better on the last paper than she’d done on all the others!’
Melhuish laughed heartily and took the empty glasses.
‘You make it up as you go along,’ muttered Peter.
‘Well, it was a good story, wasn’t it?’ said Tompsett.
Gaye lost the thread of their talk for a few minutes, and when she picked it up again, it was clear that the conversation had taken a slightly more serious turn. They always said that gin was a depressant.
‘. . . not necessarily raped before being murdered, you know.’
‘Oh, shut up, Felix.’
‘Bit revolting, I know. But we all read the Christie business, didn’t we? Wicked old bugger, he was!’
‘Do they think that’s what happened here?’ asked Melhuish.
‘Do you know, I might have been able to tell you that,’ said Tompsett. ‘Old Morse – good chap! – he’s in charge of the case, and we’ve had him at the college guest-evenings. He was invited tonight, but he had to cry off. Had a minor accident.’ Tompsett laughed. ‘Fell off a ladder! Christ, who’d ever believe it? Here’s a chap in charge of a murder inquiry and he falls off a bloody ladder!’ Tompsett was highly amused.
The Americans had renounced all hope and the bar had emptied now. The three men walked across to the table by the window.
‘Well, we’d better see what they can offer us for lunch,’ said Peter. ‘I’ll get the menu.’
Gaye held out a large expensive-looking folder and presented it, already opened, like a neophyte offering the collect for the day to an awesome priest.
Peter looked through quickly, a gentle cynicism showing on his face. He looked up at Gaye and found her watching him. ‘Do you recommend “Don’s Delight” or “Proctor’s Pleasure”?’ He asked it in an undertone.
‘I shouldn’t have the steak if I were you,’ her voice as quiet as his.
‘Are you free this afternoon?’
She weighed up the situation for several seconds before nodding her head, almost imperceptibly.
‘What time shall I pick you up?’
‘Three o’clock?’
‘Where?’
‘I’ll be just outside.’
At four o’clock the two lay side by side in the ample double-bed in Peter’s rooms in Lonsdale College. His left arm was around her neck, his right hand gently caressing her breasts.
‘Do you believe a young girl can get raped?’ he asked.
Gaye considered the problem. Contented in mind and in body, she lay for a while contemplating the ornate ceiling. ‘It must be jolly difficult for the man.’
‘Mm.’
‘Have you ever raped a woman?’
‘I could rape you, any day of the week.’
‘But I wouldn’t let you. I wouldn’t put up any resistance.’
He kissed her full lips again, she turned eagerly towards him.
‘Peter,’ she whispered in his ear, ‘rape me again!’
The phone blared suddenly, shrill and urgent in the quiet room. Blast!
‘Oh, hullo Bernard. What? No. Sitting idling, you know. What? Oh, tonight. Yes. Well, about seven, I think. Why not call in for me? We can have a quick drink together. Yes. Felix? Oh, he’s well tanked-up already. Yes. Yes. Well, look forward to it. Yes. Bye.’
‘Who’s Bernard?’
‘Oh, he’s an English don here. Good chap. Pretty bad sense of timing, though.’
‘Does he have a set of rooms like this?’
‘No, no. He’s a family man is Bernard. Lives up in North Oxford. Quiet chap.’
‘He doesn’t rape young girls then?’
‘What, Bernard? Good lord, no. Well, I don’t think so . . .’
‘You’re a quiet man, Peter.’
‘Me?’ She fondled him lovingly, and abruptly terminated all further discussion of Mr Bernard Crowther, quiet family man of North Oxford.
PART TWO
Search for a man
* * *
CHAPTER ELEVEN
* * *
Wednesday, 6 October
BEGINNING ITS LIFE under a low (Head Room 12 ft) railway bridge, and proceeding its cramped and narrow way for several hundred yards past shabby rows of terraced houses that line the thoroughfare in tight and mean confinement, the Botley Road gradually broadens into a spaciou
s stretch of dual carriageway that carries all west-bound traffic towards Faringdon, Swindon and the sundry hamlets in between. Here the houses no longer shoulder their neighbours in such grudging proximity, and hither several of the Oxford businessmen have brought their premises.
Chalkley and Sons is a sprawling, two-storeyed building, specializing in household fittings, tiling, wallpaper, paint and furniture. It is a well-established store, patronized by many of the carpenters (discount), the interior decorators (discount), and almost all the do-it-yourselfers from Oxford. At the furthest end of the ground floor show rooms there is a notice informing the few customers who have not yet discovered the fact that the Formica Shop is outside, over the yard, second on the left.
In this shop a young man is laying a large sheet of formica upon a wooden table, a table which has a deep, square groove cut longitudinally through its centre. He pulls towards him, along its smoothly running gliders, a small automatic saw, and carefully lines up its wickedly polished teeth against his pencilled mark. Deftly he flicks out a steel ruler and checks his measurement. He appears content with a rapid mental calculation, snaps a switch and, amid a grating whirr, slices through the tough fabric with a clean and deadly swiftness. He enjoys that swiftness! Several times he repeats the process: lengthways, sideways, narrowly, broadly, and stacks the measured strips neatly against the wall. He looks at his watch; it is almost 12.45 p.m. An hour and a quarter. He locks the sliding doors behind him, repairs to the staff wash-room, soaps his hands, combs his hair and, with little regret, temporarily turns his back upon the premises of Mr Chalkley and his sons. He pats a little package which bulges slightly in the right-hand pocket of his overcoat. Still there.
Although his immediate destination is no more than ten minutes’ walk away, he decides to take a bus. He crosses the road and traverses in the process as many lines, continuous, broken, broad, narrow, yellow, white, as one may find in the key to an Ordnance Survey map; for the Oxford City Council has escalated its long war of attrition against the private motorist and has instituted a system of bus lanes along the Botley Road. A bus arrives almost immediately, and the dour Pakistani one-man crew silently discharges his manifold duties. The young man always hopes that the bus is fairly full so that he may sit beside one of the mini-skirted, knee-booted young girls returning to the city; but today it is almost empty. He sits down and looks mechanically around him.
He alights at the stop before the railway bridge (where the bus must make a right-hand detour to avoid a scalping from the iron girders), threads his way to a dingy street behind the shabby rows of houses, and enters a small shop. The legend above the door of Mr Baines’s grimy, peeling shop-front reads ‘Newsagent and Tobacconist’. But such is the nature of Mr Baines’s establishment that he employs no cohorts of cheeky boys and girls to deliver his morning and evening newspapers, nor does his stock of tobacco run to more than half a dozen of the more popular brands of cigarettes. He sells neither birthday cards nor ice-cream nor confectionery. Mr Baines – yes, he is a shrewd man – calculates that he can make as much profit from one swift, uncomplicated transaction as from the proceeds of one day’s paper rounds, or from the sale of a thousand cigarettes. For Mr Baines is a dealer in hard pornography.
Several customers are standing along the right-hand side of the narrow shop. They flick their way through a bewildering variety of gaudy, glossy girlie magazines, with names that ring with silken ecstasies: Skin and Skirt and Lush and Lust and Flesh and Frills. Although the figures of the scantily clad models which adorn the covers of these works are fully and lewdly provocative, the browsers appear to riffle the pages with a careless, casual boredom. But this is the appearance only. A notice, in Mr Baines’s own hand, warns every potential purveyor of these exotic fruits that ‘the books are to be bought’; and Mrs Baines sits on her hard stool behind the counter and keeps her hard eyes upon each of her committed clients. The young man throws no more than a passing glance at the gallery of thrusting nakedness upon his right and walks directly to the counter. He asks, audibly, for a packet of twenty Embassy and slides his package across to Mrs Baines; which lady, in her turn, reaches beneath the counter and passes forward a similar brown-paper parcel to the young man. How Mr Baines himself would approve! It is a single, swift, uncomplicated transaction.
The young man stops at the Bookbinder’s Arms across the road and orders bread and cheese and a pint of Guinness. He feels his usual nagging impatience, but gloats inwardly in expectation. Five o’clock will soon be here and the journey to Woodstock is infinitely quicker now, with the opening of the new stretch of the ring-road complex. His mother will have his cooked meal ready, and then he will be alone. In his own perverted way he has grown almost to enjoy the anticipation of it all, for over the last few months it has become a weekly ritual. Expensive, of course, but the arrangement is not unsatisfactory, with half-price back on everything returned. He drains his Guinness.
Sometimes he still feels guilty (a little) – though not so much as he did. He realizes well enough that his dedication to pornography is coarsening whatever sensibilities he may once have possessed; that his craving is settling like some cancerous, malignant growth upon his mind, a mind crying out with ever-increasing desperation for its instant, morbid gratification. But he can do nothing about it.
Prompt at 2.00 p.m on Wednesday, 6 October, Mr John Sanders is back in the formica shop, and once more the gyrating saw, whining in agony, can be heard behind the sliding doors.
On Wednesday evenings during term-time the Crowther household was usually deserted from 7.00 p.m to 9.00 p.m. Mrs Margaret Crowther joined a small group of earnest middle-aged culture-vultures in a WEA evening class on Classical Civilization; weekly the children, James and Caroline, swelled the oversubscribed membership of the Wednesday disco at the nearby Community Centre; Mr Bernard Crowther disliked both pop and Pericles.
On the night of Wednesday, 6 October, Margaret left the house at her usual time of 6.30 p.m. Her classes were held about three miles away in the Further Education premises on Headington Hill, and she was anxious to secure a safe and central parking-lot for the proudly sparkling Mini 1000 which Bernard had bought for her the previous August. Diffidently she backed out of the garage (Bernard had agreed to leave his own 1100 to face the winter’s elements in the drive) and turned into the quiet road. Although still nervous about her skills, especially in the dark, she relished the little drive. There was the freedom and independence of it all – it was her car, she could go wherever she wanted. On the by-pass she took her usual deep breath and concentrated inordinately hard. Car after car swished by her on the outside lane, and she fought back her instinctive reaction to raise her right foot from its gentle pressure on the accelerator and to cover the brake pedal. She was conscious of the headlights of all the oncoming cars, their drivers, she was sure, brashly confident and secure. She fiddled with her safety belt and daringly glanced at the dashboard to ensure that her lights were dipped. Not that she ever had them on full anyway, for fear that in the sudden panic of dipping them she would press the switch the wrong way and turn them off altogether. At the Headington roundabout she negotiated the lanes competently, and uneventfully covered the remainder of her journey.
When she had first considered committing suicide, the car had seemed a very real possibility. But she now knew that she could never do it that way. Driving brought out all her primitive instincts for safety and self-preservation. And anyway, she couldn’t smash up her lovely new Mini. There were other ways . . .
She parked carefully, getting in and out of the car several times before she was perfectly happy that it was as safely ensconced and as equidistanced from its neighbours as she could manage, and entered the large, four-storeyed, glass-fronted building that ministered to the needs of the city’s maturer students. She saw Mrs Palmer, one of her classmates, starting up the stairs to Room C26.
‘Hullo, Mrs Crowther! We all missed you last week. Were you poorly?’
‘What’s wrong
with those two?’ asked James.
A quarter of an hour after Margaret’s departure, Bernard Crowther had caught the bus down to Lonsdale College, where he dined one or two nights a week. The children were alone.
‘Not unusual, is it?’ said Caroline.
‘They hardly talk to one another.’
‘I ’spect all married people get like that.’
‘Didn’t used to be like that.’
‘You don’t help much.’
‘Nor do you.’
‘Wha’ do you mean?’
‘Ah – shut up!’
‘You misery.’
‘F – off!’
These days their conversation seldom lasted longer. With a few minor permutations and, in the presence of mum and dad, a few concessions to conventional middle-class morality, their parents had heard it many times. It worried Margaret deeply and infuriated Bernard, and each wondered secretly if all children were as vicious, ill-tempered and uncooperative as their own. Not that James and Caroline were uppermost in either parent’s mind this Wednesday evening.
As one of the senior fellows of his college, Bernard had naturally been invited to the memorial jamboree for the ex-vice-principal who had retired the previous summer. The dinner was to begin at 7.30 p.m., and Bernard arrived in Peter’s room with half an hour to spare. He poured himself a gin and vermouth and sat back in a faded armchair. He thought he liked Felix Tompsett – the old sod! Certainly he ate too much, and drank too much and, if many-tongued rumour could be believed (why not?), he had done a lot of other things too much. But he was a good ‘college man’; it was on his advice that the college had bought up a lot of property in the early sixties and his understanding of interest rates and investment loans was legendary. Odd really, thought Bernard. He finished his gin and shrugged into his gown. Preprandial sherry would be flowing in the Senior Common Room, and the two friends made their way thither.
