by Colin Dexter
'Whis could be very helpful to our enquiries, you realise that, don't you? If you saw her clearly... T'
"My eyesight is not what it was, Inspector. But I had a good view of her, yes." She glanced keenly at Morse. "You see, I'm a nosey old woman with very little ele to do--- that's what you're thinking, anyway." / / "Well, I--we all like to know what's going on. It's only human nature."
"Oh, no. I know several people who aren't in the slightest bit interested in 'what's going on,' as you put it. But I'm glad you're nosey, like me. That's good."
Lewis was enjoying the interview immensely.
"Can you tell us something about this woman? Any-thing?"
"Let's say I found her interesting."
"Why was that?"
"Well, for a start, I envied her. She was less than half his age, you seegood deal less, I shouldn't doubt."
"And he," mused Morse, "was sixty-six.... "
"Sixty-seven, Inspector, if he'd lived to the end of the month."
"How--?"
"I looked him up in Distinguished People of Today. He's a Libra."
Like me, thought Morse. And I wonder how old you are, you old biddy.
"And I'm eighty-three in December," she continued, "just in case you're wondering."
"I was, yes," said Morse, smiling at her, and himself now beginning to enjoy the interview.
"The other thing that struck me was that she wasn't at all nice-looking. Quite the opposite, in fact. Very shabbily dressed---darkish sort of clothes. Sloppy loose blouse, mini-skirt right up to..."
"The top of her tibia," supplied Morse, enunciating the "t" of the last word with exaggerated exactitude.
"Absolutely! And she had a big old shoulder-bag, too."
I wonder what was in that, thought Morse.
"Anything else you can remember?"
"Long--longish--dark hair. Earrings--great brassy-looking things about the size of hula-hoops. And she had a ring in her nose. I could see that. For all I know, she could have had two rings in her nose."
God helps us all, thought Morse.
"But I'm not sure about that. As I say, my eyesight isn't what it used to be."
I wonder what it used to be like, thought Lewis.
"Did she come by car?" asked Morse.
"No. If she did, she left it somewhere else."
"Did she come in from...?" Morse gestured vaguely to his left, towards the Banbury Road.
"Yes. She came from the Banbury Road not the Wood-stock Road."
"Would you recognise her again?"
For the first time the old lady hesitated, robbing the thin ringless fingers of her left hand with her right.
"Oh dear. Do you think she may have murdered him? I only--"
"No, no. I'm sure she didn't." Morse spoke with the bo-gus confidence of a man who was beginning to wonder if she had.
"I only wanted to help. And I'm not at all sure if I would recognise her. Perhaps if she dolled herself up in some decent outfit and..."
Took that bull-ring out of her nose, thought Morse.
"... and took that ring out of her nose."
Phew!
But some of the bounce had gone out of the old girl, Morse could see that. It was time to wind things up.
"Do you think they went to bed when she came?"
"I expect so, don't you?"
"Things must have changed a good deal since your day, Miss Wynne-Wilson.'
"Don't be silly, Inspector! I could teach some of these young flibbertigibbets a few things about going to bed with men. After all, I spent most of my life looking after men in bed, now didn't I? And, by the way, it's Mrs. Wynne Wilson.
I don't wear a wedding ring any longer...."
Phew!
Morse got to his feet. He had only one more question: "Were you looking out of the window on Sunday morning--you know, about the time perhaps when Dr. Mc Clure was murdered?"
"No. On Sunday mornings I always hear the omnibus edition of The Archers on the wireless, that's from ten to eleven. Lovely. I have a really good long soak and hear everything again."
Dangerous thing that having a radio in the bathroom, thought Lewis.
"It's dangerous they tell me--having a wireless propped up on the bath-rail. But I do so enjoy doing silly things, . now that I'm so old."
Phew!
It had not been much of a contest, Lewis appreciated that; but from his scorecard he had little hesitation in de-claring Mrs. W-W the winner, way ahead of Morse on points.
Quite mistakenly, of course.
Chapter Seven
For 'tis in vain to think or guess At women by appearances (SAMUEL BUTLER, Hudibras)
"What did you make of that, then?" asked Lewis, when the two detectives had returned to Mc Clure's apartment.
Morse appeared disappointed. "I'd begun to think he was a civilised sort of fellow--you know "Morse gestured vaguely around the bookshelves.
"But he wasn't?"
"We-ell."
"You mean... this woman he was seeing.9"
Morse's features reflected disapproval. "Rings in her nose, Lewis? Pretty tasteless, isn't it? Like drinking lager with roast beef."
"For all you know she may be a lovely girl, sir. You shouldn't really judge people just by appearances."
"Oh?"
Morse's eyes shot up swiftly. "And why the hell not?"
"Well ..." But Lewis wasn't sure why. He did have a point, though; he knew he did. Morse was always making snap judgements. All fight, one or two would occasionally mm out to be accurate; but most of them were woefully wide of the mark--as, to be fair, Morse himself readily ac-knowledged.
Lewis thought of events earlier in the day; thought of Phillotson's withdrawal from the present case; thought of Morse's almost contemptuous dismissal of the man's ex-38 cuses. Almost automatically, it seemed, Morse had assumed him to be parading a few phoney pretexts about his wife's hospitalisation in order to avoid the humiliation of failure in a murder case. Agreed, Phillotson wasn't exactly Sherlock Holmes, Lewis knew that. Yet Morse could be needlessly creel about some of his colleagues. And why did he have to be so sharp? As he had been just now?
Still, Lewis knew exactly what to do about his own tem-porary irritation. Count to ten!--that's what Morse had once told him--fore getting on to any high horse; and then, if necessary, count to twenty. Not that there was much sign that Morse ever heeded his own advice. He usually only counted to two or three. If that.
Deciding, therefore, the time to be as yet inopportune for any consideration of the old lady's testimony, Lewis re-verted to his earlier task. There was still a great deal of ma-terial to look through, and he was glad to get down to something whose purpose he could readily grasp. The pa-pers there, all the papers in the drawers and those stacked along the shelves, had already been examined---clearly that was the case. Not radically disturbed, though; not taken away to be documented in some dubious filing-system until sooner or later, as with almost everything in life, being duly labelled "OBE."
Overtaken By Events.
Glancing across at Morse, Lewis saw the chief abstracting another book from a set of volumes beautifully bound in golden leather; a slim volume this time; a volume of verse by the look of it. And even as he watched, he saw Morse turning the book through ninety degrees and appar-ently reading some marginalia beside one of the poems there. For the present, however, the Do Not Disturb sign was prominently displayed, and with his usual competence Lewis resumed his own considerable task.
Thus it was that for the next half-hour or so the two men sat reading their different texts; preparing (as it were) for their different examinations; each conscious of the other's presence; yet each, for the moment, and for different rea-sons, unwilling to speak his own immediate thoughts.
Especially Morse.
Yet it was the latter who finally broke the silence.
"What did you make of her, there? Our Mrs. Wynne-Wilson?"
"'Mrs.,' sir?" asked Lewis slowly.
Morse threw
an interested, inquisitive look at his sergeant. "Go on!"
"Well, I'd noticed from the start she wasn't wearing a wedding ring. As you did, of course."
"Of course."
"But I couldn't see any, you know, any mark of any ring like you'd normally have, wouldn't you? A sort of, you know, pale ring of skin, son of thing, where the ring had been--before she took it off."
"Not a particularly fluent sentence that, Lewis, if I may say so."
"But you noticed that, too?"
"Me? Your eyesight's far better than mine."
"Makes you wonder, though."
"You reckon she was making it op--about her mar-riage?'
"Wouldn't surprise me, sir."
"And apart from that T'
"She seemed a pretty good witness. Her mind's pretty sharp. She got you weighed up all right."
"Yees... So you don't think she was making anything else up T'
"No. Do you?"
"Lew-is! When will you learn. She's a phoney. She's a phoney from A to Z."
Lewis's look now was one of semi-exasperation. "Them you go again! I think you're far too qtfick--"
"Let me tell you something. She just about takes the bis-cuit, that woman--give or take one or two congenitally compulsive liars we've had in the past."
Lewis shook his head sadly as Morse continued: "Wedding ring? You're right. Odds strongly against her having worn one recently. Not necessarily the same as not being married though, is it? Suggestive, though, yes. Sug-gestive that she might be telling a few other fibs as well."
"Such as?"
"Well, it was obvious she wasn't deaf at all. She heard everything I said. Easy. Kein Problem."
"She didn't hear me."
"She didn't want to hear you, Lewis."
"If you say so, sir."
"What about her eyesight? Kept telling us, didn't she, that she couldn't see half as well as she used to? But that didn't stop her giving us a detailed description of the woman who came to visit Mc Clure. She knew she'd got a ring in one of her nostrils--at twenty-odd yards, Lewis! And the only reason she couldn't tell us if she'd got two rings in her nose was because she saw her in profite like she sees everyone in profile coming in through that trance."
"Why don't you think she was making all that up, too, sir that description she gave?"
"Good point." Morse looked down at the carpet briefly. "But I don't think so; that bit rang Irue to me. In fact, I reckon it was the only thing of any value she did come up with."
"What about--?"
"Lewis! She's a phoney. She's not even been a nurse-- let alone a matron or whatever you call 'em."
"How can you say that?"
"You heard her--we both heard her. Mini-skirt up to mid-tibia--remember me saying that? Mid-tibia? Your tib-ia's below your knee, Lewis. You know that. But she doesn't."
"Unless she's deaf, and misheard--"
"She's not deaf,! told you that. She just doesn't know her tibia from her fibula, that's all. Never been near a nursing manual in her life."
"And you deliberately tricked her about that?"
"And, Lewis--most important of all--she claims she's an Archers addict, but she doesn't even know when the omni bus edition comes on on a Sunday morning. Huh!"
"I wouldn't know--"
"She's a Walter Mitty sort of woman. She lives in a world of fantasy. She tells herself things so many times-- tells other people things so many times---at she thinks they're true. And for her they are true."
"But not for us."
"Not for us, no."
"Not even the time she was in the bath?"
"if she was in the bath."
"Oh."
"Anyway, I don't somehow think it's going to be of much importance to us, what time the murderer made his entrance. "
Morse was whining on a little wearily now; and like Miss (or Mrs.) W-W he seemed to he running out of steam. Both men became silent again.
And soon Lewis was feeling pleased with himself, for he was beginning to realise that the "second thing" he'd found for Morse was looking far more promising.
And Morse himself, with melancholy mien, sat ever motionless, his eyes staring intently at the page before him: that selfsame page in the book of Latin poetry.
Chapter Eight
Caeli, Lesbia nostra, Lesbia ill llla Lesbia, quam Catullus unam Plus quam se atque suos amavit omnes, Nunc in quadriviis et angiportis Glubit magnanimi Remi nepotes (CATULLUS, Poems LVIII)
When he was a boy--well, when he was fifteen--Morse had fallen deeply in love with a girl, a year his junior, who like him had won a scholarship to one of the two local grammar schools: one for boys, one for girls. The long re-lationship between the pair of them had been so formative, so crucial, so wonderful overall, that when, three years later, he had been called up for National Service in the Army, he had written (for the first twelve weeks) a daily letter to his girl; only to learn on his first weekend fur-lough, to learn quite accidentally, that one of his friends (friends!) had been openly boasting about the sensually re-sponsive lips of his beloved.
Morse told himself that he had finally grown up that weekend: and that was good. But he'd realised, too, at the same time, that his capacity for jealousy was pretty nearly boundless.
It was only many years later that he'd seen those deeply wise words, embroidered in multi-coloured silks, in a B&B establishmt in Maidstone: --If you love her, set her free --If she loves you, she will gladly return to you --If she doesn't she never really loved you anyway Such thoughts monopolised Morse's mind now as he looked again at Poem LVIII--a poem which his Classics master at school had exhorted the class to ignore, as being totally devoid of artistic merit. Such condemnation was al-most invariably in direct proportion to the sexual content of the poem in question; and immediately after the lesson was over, Morse and his classmates had sought to find the meaning of that extraordinary word which Catullus had stuck at the beginning of the last line.
Glubit.
In the smaller Latin dictionary, glubo, -ere was given only as "libidinously to excite emotions." But in the larger dictionary there was a more cryptic, potentially more interesting definition.... And here, in the margin of the book he was holding, Mc Clure had translated the same poem.
To totters and toffs in a levelish ratio My darling K offers her five-quid fellatio.
Near Carfax, perhaps, or at Cowley-Road Palais, Or just by the Turf, up any old alley: Preferring (just slightly) some kerb-crawling gent High in the ranks of Her Majesty's Government.
Morse gave a mental tick to "Carfax" for quadriviis; but thought "Palais" a bit adolescent perhaps. Had his own translation been as good? Better? He couldn't remember.
He doubted it. And it didn't matter anyway.
Or did it?
In the actual text of the poem, Mc Clure had underlined in red Biro the words Lesbia nostra, Lesbia ilia, llla Lesbia: my Lesbia, that Lesbia of mine, that selfsame Lesbia.
Jealousy.
That most corrosive of all the emotions, gnawing away at the heart with a greater pain than failure or hatred---or even despair. But it seemed that Mc Clure, like Catullus, had known his full share of it, with an ever-flirting, ever-hurting woman with whom he'd fallen in love; a woman who appeared willing to prostitute, at the appropriate price, whatever she possessed.
And suddenly, unexpectedly, Morse found himself thinking he'd rather like to meet the mysterious "K." Then, just as suddenly, he knew he wouldn't; unless, of course, that ambivalent lady held the key to the murder of Felix Mc Clure--a circumstance which (at the time) he suspected was extremely improbable.
Chapter Nine
And like a skytit water stood
The bluebells in the azured wood
(A. E. HOUSM^N, A Shropshire Lad, XLI)
Morse snapped Catullus to.
"You didn't hear what I just said, did you, sir?"
"Pardon? Sorry. Just pondering--just pondering."
"Is it leading us anywhere, this, er, pondering?"
>
"We're learning quite a bit about this girl of his, aren't we? Building up quite an interesting--" 'qhe answer's 'no' then, is it?" Morse smiled weakly. "Probably."
"Not like you, that, sir--giving up so quickly."
"No. You're right. We shall have to check up on her."
"Find out where she lives."
"What? Not much of a problem there," said Morse. "Really?"
"She came on foot, we know that. From the Banbury Road side."
"I thought you said. Mrs. Thingummy was making every-thing up?"
But Morse ignored the interjection. "Where do you think she lives?"
"Just round the comer, perhaps?"
"Doubt it. Doubt he'd meet any local girl locally, if you see what! mean."
"Well, if she did have a car, she couldn't park it in the Banbury Road, that's for certain."
"So she hasn't got a car?"
"Well, if she has she doesn't use it."
"She probably came by bus then."
"If you say so, sir."
"Number twenty-something: down the Cowley Road, through the High to Carfax, along Cornmarket and St. Giles's, then up the Banbury Road."
"Has she got a season-ticket, sir?"
"Such flippancy ill becomes yoa, Lewis."
"I'm not being flippant. I'm just confused. You'll be tell ing me next what colour her eyes are."
'3ive me a chance."
"Which street she lives in..."
"Oh, I think I know that."
Lewis grinned and shook his head. "Come on, sir, tell me!"
"Pater Street, Lewis--that's where she lives. Named after Walter Pater, you know, the fellow who described the Mona Lisa as a woman who'd learned the secrets of the grave."
"Pater Street? That's out in Cowley, isn't it?"
Morse nodded. "Mc Clure mentions Cowley in something he wrote here." Morse tapped Catullus. "And then there's this."
He handed across the postcard he'd found marking the relevant page of notes at the back of the volume--notes in-cluding a chicken-hearted comment on Glubit: "sensus obscenus. "
Lewis took the card; and after glancing at the coloured photograph, "Bluebells in Wytham Woods," turned to the back where, to the left of Mc Clure's address, he read the brief message, written boldly in black Biro: P St. out this Sat--either DC or wherever K The unsmudged postmark gave the date as August 10, 1994.
