by Colin Dexter
"There were a few newspaper articles, that's all, about the lad, among Mcelum's papers. And a letter from mother. She started it off 'Dear Felix'--as if they'd knov each other pretty well, if you sce what I mean." Strange granted.
"Do you think I should mention it to Morse, sir?"
"No. For Christ's sake don't do that. He's got far many ideas already, you can be sure of that."
Chapter Fifteen
Say, for what were hop-yards meant
Or why was Burton built on Trent?
Oh many a peer of England brews
Livelier liquor than the Muse,
And malt does more than Milton can
To justify God's ways to man
(A. E. HOUSM^N, A Shropshire Lad, LXII)
The Turf Tavern, nestling beneath the old walls of N{ College, Oxford, may be approached from Holywell Stre immediately opposite Holywell Music Room, via a narrc irregularly cobbled lane of mediaeval aspect.
A notice above the entrance advises all patrons (althou: Morse is not a particularly tall man) to mind their hca (DUC OR GROUSe) and inside the rough-stoned, blac beamed rooms the tree connoisseur of beers can seat hi self at one of the small wooden tables and enjoy a fin{ cask-conditioned pint; and it is in order to drink and to and to think that patrons frequent this elusively situated em in a blessedly music--Muzak--free environment.
The landlord of this splendid hostelry, a stoutly compa middle-aged ex-Royal Navy man, with a grizzled beard and a gold ring in his left ear, was anticipatorily pulling a pint of real ale on seeing Morse enter, followed by the dutiful Lewis, at 1:50 The latter, in fact, was feeling quite pleased with himself. Only sixty-five minutes from Leicester. A bit over the speed-limit all the way along (agreed); but fast-diving was one of his very few vices, and the jazzy-looking maroon Jaguar had been in a wonderfully slick and silky mood as it sped down the M40 on the last stretch of the journey from Banbury to Oxford.
Morse had resisted several pubs which, en route, had pa-raded their credentialsmat Lutterworth, Rugby, Banbury. But, as Lewis knew, the time of drinking, and of thinking, was surely soon at hand.
In North Oxford, Morse had asked to be dropped off briefly at his flat: "I ought to call in at the bank, Lewis."
And this news had further cheered Lewis, since (on half the salary) it was invariably he who bought about three-quarters of the drinks consumed between the pair of them. Only temporarily cheered, however, since he had wholly misun-derstood the mission: five minutes later it was he himself who was pushing a variety of old soldiers through their ap-propriate holes (White, Green, Brown) in the Summertown Bottle Bank.
Thence, straight down the Banbury Road to the Martyrs' Memorial, where turning left (as instructed) he had driven to the far end of Broad Street. Here, as ever, there appeared no immediate prospect of leaving a car legitimately, and Morse had insisted that he park the Jaguar on the cobble-stone area outside the Old Clarendon building, just opposite Blackwell's.
"Don't worry, Lewis. All the Waffic wardens know my car. They'll think I'm on duty."
"Which you are, sir."
"Which I am."
"How are we, Chief Inspector?"
"Less of the 'Chief.' Sheehy's going to demote me. I'll soon he just an insignificant Inspector."
"The usual?"
Morse nodded.
"And you, Sergeant?"
"An orange juice," said Morse for Lewis.
"Where've you parked?" asked Biff. It was a question which had become of paramount importance in Central Oxford over the past decade. "I only ask because they're having a blitz this week, so Pam says."
"Ah! How is that beautiful lady of yours?"
"I'll tell her you're here. She should be down soon any-way."
Morse stood at the bar searching through his pockets in unconvincing manner. "And a packet of--do you still sell cigarettes T'
Biff pointed to the machine. "You'll need the right change."
"Ah! Have you got any change on you by any chance, Levis...?'
When, at a table in the inner bar, Morse was finally settled behind his pint, his second pint, he took from his in-side jacket-pocket the used envelope on which Lewis had seen him scribbling certain headings on their return to Oxford.
"Did you know that Wolsey College is frequently re-ferred to, especially by those who are in it, as 'The House'?"
"Can't say I did, no."
"Do you know why?"
"Let me concentrate on the orange juice, sir."
"It's because of its Latin name, Aedes Archiepiscopi, the House of the Bishop."
"Well, that explains it, doesn't it?"
"Another peculiarity is that in all the other colleges they call the dons and the readers and the tutors and so on--they call them 'Fellows.' You with me? But at Wolsey they call them 'Students.'"
"What do they call the students then?"
"Doesn't matter what they call 'em, does it? Look! Let's just consider where we are. We've discovered a couple of possible links in this case so far: Mc Clure's fancy woman; and the Rodway woman, the mother of one of his former pupils. Now neither of 'em comes within a million miles of being a murderer, I know that; but they're both adding to what we know of Mc Clure himself, agreed7 He's a re spected scholar; a conscientious don--"
"'Student,' sir."
"A conscientious Student; a man who's got every sympa-thy with his stu--"
Lewis looked across.
"--with the young people he comes into contact with; a founder member of a society to help dedicated dmggies; a man who met Matthew's mum, and probably slipped in be-tween the sheets with her--"
Lewis shook his head vigorously. "You can't just say that sort of thing."
"And why not? How the hell do you think we're going to get to the bottom of this case unless we make the odd hypothesis here and there? You don't know? Well, let me tell you. We think of anything that's unlikely. That's how.
Any bloody idiot can tell you what's likely."
"If you say so, sir."
"I do say so," snapped Morse. "Except that what I say is not particularly unlikely, is it? They obviously got on pretty well, didn't they? Take that salutation and valediction, for instance."
Lewis lifted his eyebrows.
"All Christian-name, palsy-walsy stuff, wasn't it? Then there's this business of her husband leaving her--you'll re-call I pressed her on that point? And for a very good rea-son.
It was November, a month or so after her precious Matthew had first gone up to Oxford. And it occurred to me, Lewis---and I'm surprised it didn't occur to you--that things may well have been the other way round, eh? She may have left him, and it was only then that he started playing around with his new PA."
"We could always look at a copy of the divorce proceedings.'
"What makes you think they're divorced T'
Lewis surrendered, sipped his orange juice, and was silent.
"But it doesn't matter, does it? It's got bugger-all to d, with Mc Clure's murder. You can make a heap of all th money you've got and wager it on that. No risk there!"
Lewis fingered the only money he had left in hi pockets--three pound coins--and decided that he wa hardly going to become a rich man, however long the od6 that Morse was offering. But it was time to mention some thing. Had Morse, he wondered, seen that oblong patch o pristine magnolia...?
"There was," Lewis began slowly, "a light-coloured patc' on the wall in Mrs. Rodway's lounge, sir--"
"Ah! Glad you noticed that. Fiver to a cracked piss-pc that was a picture of him, Lewis--of Mc Clure! That's wh. she took it down. She didn't want us to see it, but some thing like that's always going to leave its mark, agreed?"
"Unless she put something else up there to cover it." Morse scorned the objection. "She wouldn't have takel a photo of her son down, would she? Where's the point c that? Very unlikely."
"You just said that's exactly what we're looking for sir--something 'unlikely.'"
Morse was spared any possible answer to this astutl question by the ar
rival of the landlady, a slimly attractiw brunette, with small, neat features, and an extra sparkle ii her eyes as she greeted Morse with a kiss on his cheek. "Not seen you for a little while, Inspector."
"How's things, beautiful?"
"Another beer T' "Well, if you insist."
"I'm not really insisting--"
"Pint of the best bitter for me."
"You, Sergeant?"
"He's driving," said Morse.
Biff, the landlord, came over to join them, and the foul sat together for the next ten minutes. Morse, after ex ' plaining that the word "Tuff" had appeared in the margir of one of Mc Clure's books, asked whether they, either land. lord or landlady, would have known the murdered man if they had seen him in the pub ("No"); whether they'd eve seen the young man from Wolsey who'd committed suicide ("Don't think so"); whether they'd ever seen a young woman with rings in her nose and red streaks in her hair ("Hundreds of 'em").
Yet the landlady had one piece of information.
"There's one of the chaps comes in here sometimes who was a scout on that staircase... when, you know... I heard him talking to somebody about it."
"That's right." The landlord was remembering, too.
"Said he used to go to the Bulldog--or was it the Old Tom, Panl?'
"Can't remember."
"He was a scout, you say?" asked Morse.
"Yeah. Only started coming in here after he moved--moved to the Pitt Rivers, I think it was. Well, only just up the road, isn't it?"
"He still comes?"
Biff considered. "Haven't seen him for a little while now you come to mention it. Have you, love?" Pam shook her pretty head. "Know his name?" asked Lewis.
"Brooks--Ted Brooks."
"Just let me get this clear," said Lewis, as he and Morse · left the Turf Tavern, this time via St. Helen's Passage, just off New College Lane. "You're saying that Mrs. Rodway misunderstood what Mc Clure said to her---about the 'stu-dents'
?"
"You've got it. What he meant was that he blamed the dons, the set-up there, the authorities. He wasn't saying they were a load of crooks--just that they should have known what was going on them, and should have done something about it."
"If anything was going on, sir."
"Which'Il be one of our next jobs, Lewis--to find out exactly that."
It was Lewis who spotted it first: the traffic-warden's notice stuck beneath the near-side windscreen-wiper of the un-marked Jaguar.
By three o'clock that afternoon, Mary Rodway had assem-bled the new passe-partout for the picture-frame. Like most things in the room (she agreed) it had been getting very dingy. But it looked splendid now, as she carefully replaced the mm-mounted photograph, standing back repeatedly and adjusting it, to the millimetre--that photograph of herself and her son which Felix had sent to her as she'd requested.
Nothing further of any great moment occurred that day, ex-cept for one thing--something which for Lewis was the most extraordinary, the most "unlikely" event of the past six months.
"Come in a minute and let me pay you for those ciga-rettes,'
' Morse had said, as the Jaguar came to a stop out-side the bachelor flat in North Oxford. chapter Sixteen And sidelong glanced, as to explore, In meditated flight, the door (SIR WALTER SCOTT, Rokeby)
What Morse had vaguely referred to as the "authorities" at Wolsey were immediately co-operative; and at 10 n.M. the following day he and Lewis were soon learning many things about the place: specifically, in due course, about Staircase G in Drinkwater Quad, on which Dr. Mc Clure had spent nine years of his university life, from 1984 until his retirement from academe at the end of the Trinity Term, 1993.
From his rooms overlooking the expansive quad ("Larg est in Oxford, gentlemen.--264 by 261 feet") the Deputy Bursar had explained, rather too slowly and too pedanti-cally for Morse's taste, the way things, er, worked in the, er, House, it clearly seeming to this former Air-Vice Mar-shal ("Often mis-spelt, you know--and more often mis-hyphenated") that these non-University people needed some elementary explanations.
Scouts?
Interested in scouts, were they?
Well, each scout ("Interesting word---origin obscure") looked after one staircase, and one staircase only--with that area guarded as jealously as any blackbird's territory in a garden, and considered almost as a sort of mediaeval fief-dom ("If you know what I mean?"). Several of the scouts had been with them, what, twenty, thirty years? Forty-nine years, one of them! What exactly did they do? Well, it would be sensible to go and hear things from the horse's mouth, as it were. What?
Escorted therefore through Great Quad, and away to the left of it into what seemed to Morse the unhappily named "Drinkwater Quad," the policemen thanked their cicerone, the Air-hyphen-Vice Marshal ("One 'L'
'3 and made their way to Staircase G.
Where a surprise was in store for them.
Not really a scout at all--more a girl-guide.
Susan Ewers, too, was friendly and helpful--a married woman (no children yet) who was very happy to have the opportunity of supplementing the family income; very happy, too, with the work itself. The majority of scouts were women now, she explained: only three or four men still doing the job at Wolsey. In fact, she'd taken over from a man---a man who'd left to work at the Pitt Rivers Museum. "Mr. Brooks, was that T' asked Morse. "Yes. Do you know him?"
"Heard of him, er... please go on."
Her duties? Well, everything really. This immediate area outside; the entrance; the porchway; the stairs; the eight sets of rooms, all of them occupied during term-time, of course; and some of them during the vacs, like now, by delegates and visitors to various do's and conferences. Her first job each morning was to empty all the rubbish-baskets into black bags; then to clean the three WCs, one on each floor (no en suite facilities as ye0; same with the wash-basins. Then, only twice a week, though, to Hoover all the floors, and generally to dust around, polish any brasswork, that sort of thing; and in general to see that the living quarters of her charges were kept as neat and tidy as could be pected with young men and young women who would (she felt) probably prefer to live in--well, to live in a bit of a mess, really. No bed-making, though. Thank goo4ness!
Willingly she showed the detectives the rooms at G4, on the second floor of her staircase, where until fourteen months previously the name "Dr. F. F. Mc Clure" had been printed in black Gothic capitals beside the Oxford-blue double doors.
But if Morse had expected to find anything of signifi-cance in these rooms, he was disappointed. All fixtures be-fitting the status of a respected scholar had been replaced by the furniture of standard undergraduate accommodation: a three-seater settee; two armchairs; two desks; two book-cases ... It reminded Morse of his own unhappy, unsuc-cessful days at Oxford; but made no other impact.
It might have been helpful to move quietly around the lounge and the spacious bedroom there, and seek to detect any vibrations, any reverberations, left behind by a cultured and (it seemed) a fairy kindly soul.
But clearly Morse could see little point in such divination.
"Is G8 free? he asked.
"There is a gentleman there. But he's not in at the min-ute. If you want just a quick look inside?"
"It's where Matthew Rodway, the man who..."
"I know," said Susan Ewers quietly.
But G8 proved to be equally disappointing: a three-seater settee, two (faded fabric) armchairs... cloned and cleaned of every reminder of the young man who had thrown him-self down on to the paved area below the window there the window at which Morse and Lewis now stood for a little while. Silently.
"You didn't know Mr. Rodway, either?" asked Morse. "No. As I say, I didn't come till September last year."
"Do people on the staircase still take drugs?
Mrs. Ewers was taken aback by the abruptness of Morse's question.
"Well, they still have parties, like, you know. Drink and... and so on."
"But you've never seen any evidence of drugs--any packets of drugs
.'? Crack? Speed? Ecstasy? Anything? Any thing at all?"
Had she?
"No," she said. Almost truthfully.
"You've never smelt anything suspicious?
"I wouldn't know what they smell like, drugs," she said. Truthfully.
As they walked down the stairs, Lewis pointed to a door marked with a little floral plaque: "Susan's Pantry."
"That where you keep all your things, madam? She nodded. "Every scout has a pantry."
"Can we take a look inside?"
She unlocked the door and led the way into a fairly small, high-ceilinged room, cluttered--yet so neatly cluttered--with buckets, mops, bin-linem, black plastic bags, transparent polythene bags, light bulbs, toilet rolls, towels, sheets, two Hoovers. And inside the white-painted cupboards rows of cleaners and detergents: Jif, Flash, Ajax, Windolene... And everything so clean---so meticulously, antiseptically clean.
Morse had little doubt that Susan Ewers was the sort of housewife to polish her bath-taps daily; the sort to feel grieved at finding a stray trace of toothpaste in the wash-basin. If cleanliness were to next to saintliness, then this lady was probably on the verge of beatification.
So what?
Apart from mentally extending his lively sympathies to Mr. Ewers, Morse was aware that his thought-processes were hardly operating vivamente that morning; and he stood in the slightly claustrophobic pantry, feeling somewh, feckless.
It was Lewis who, as so frequently, was the catalyst. "What's your husband do, Mrs. Ewers?"
"He's--well, at the minute he's unemployed, actually. did work at the old RAC offices in Summertown, but th made him redundant."
"When was that?"
"Last year."
"when exactly?" (If Morse could ask such question -' why not Lewis?)
"Last, er, August."
"Good thing you getting the job then. Help fide thin, over a bit, like."
Lewis smiled sympathetically. And Morse smiled gratefully. Bless you, Lewis--bless you!
Gestalt--that's what the Germans call it. That flash of ur fled perception, that synoptic totality which is more th the sum of the parts into which it may be logicall analysable; pans, in this case, like drugs and scouts and suicide and a murder and a staircase and changing jobs u not having a job and retirement and money and times m dates... Yes, especially times and dates...
