by Colin Dexter
Most probably, in the circumstances, Matthew Rodway rooms would not have been re-occupied for the few r. maining weeks at the end of Trinity Term the previo year; and if (as now) only some of the rooms were in u during the Long Vac, it might well be that Mrs. Ewers h: been the very first person to look closely around the st cide's chambers. But no; that was wrong. Mc Clure had a ready gone through things, hadn't he*. Mrs. Rodway hi asked him to. But would he have been half as thorough. this newly appointed woman'?.
He'd questioned her on the point already, he knew thl But he hadn't asked the right questions, perhaps*. Not qui "Just going back a minute, Mrs. Ewers... When yt got Mr. Rodway's old rooms ready for the beginning of ti Michaelmas term, had anyone else been in there--during the summer?"
"I don't think so, no."
"But you still didn't find anything?"
"No, like I just said "
"Oh, I believe you. If there'd been anything to find, you'd have found it."
She looked relieved.
"In his rooms, that is," added Morse slowly. "Pardon?"
"All I'm saying is that you've got a very tidy mind, haven't you? Let's put it this way. I bet I know the i'trst thing you did when you took over here. I bet you gave this room the best spring-clean best auturnn-clean--it's ever had--last September--when you moved in--and the previous scout moved out."
Susan Ewers looked puzzled. "Well, I scrubbed and cleaned the place from top to bottom, yes--filthy, it was. Two whole days it took me. But I never found anything--any drugs honest to God, I didn't!"
Morse, who had been seated on the only chair the room could offer, got to his feet, moved over to the door, and put his penultimate question: "Do you have a mortgage?"
"Yes."
"Big one?"
She nodded miserably.
As they stood there, the three of them, outside Sus's Pantry, Morse's eyes glanced back at the door, now closed again, fitting flush enough with the jambs on either side, but with a two-centimetre gap of parallel regularity showing between the bottom of the turquoise-blue door and the linoed floor of the landing.
Morse asked his last question simply and quietly: "When did the envelopes first start coming, Susan?"
And Susan's eyes jumped up to his, suddenly flashing the unmistakable sign of fear.
Chapter Seventeen
Examination: trial; test of knowledge and, as also may be hoped, capacity; close inspection (especially med.)
(Srnall Enlarged English Dictionary, 1812 Edition)
On Friday, September 2, two days after Julia Stevens's re-mm to Oxford, there were already three items of impor tance on her day's agenda.
First, school.
Not as yet the dreaded restart (three whole days away, praise be!) but a visit to the Secretary's Office to look through the GCSE and A-level results, both lists having been published during her formight's absence abroad. Like every self-respecting teacher, she wanted to discover the relative success of the pupils she herself had taught.
In former days it had often been difficult enough for some pupils to sit examinations, let alone pass them. And even in the comparatively recent years of Julia's girlhood several of her own classmates had been deemed not to pos-sess the requisite acumen even to attempt the 11 Plus. It was a question of the sheep and the goats--just like the di-vision between those who were lost and those who were saved in the New Testament--a work with which the young Julia had become increasingly familiar, through the crusading fervour of a local curate with whom (aged ten and a half) she had fallen passionately in love.
How things had changed.
Now, in 1994, it was an occasion for considerable sur-prise if anyone somehow managed to fail an examination.
;' Indeed, to be recorded in the Unclassified ranks of the GCSE was, in Julia's view, !?petenee, which,.,4,.a.. fet of qu, te astonlshm.
Ul lll Onllrn,
C,,,..s With 1[ a SOrt c L.. lrl doctrine cntm under-achievement An Y°ravura .3adge · iara, ia sin,; Sw C°ncemed, it was becomin far -,. s Cllrlslan asler to cope that Hell was (semi-officially) abolished. She looked hrough $C's English results. Very much as;'sdoxpeeted. Then looked a little mot .... the only nu,,';-, e closely at the ren C." C^d.;gl'2".Y'Y cass Wh OSe name had be u English, "I),, "?, "L:, engous Education sifted"; M. · ms, Unclassified". Ge ea; '4alwork, ',Unclaoor.^.,,;,i .,"g a.pn Y, Unclas-0mer/llng.-c oo, ucu. Well, at least he'd ot ttitt: r twelve years of schooling... thirtygslx . t! rrns. But it was d..... ther than the Job nmuir-t-°lin. agree him getting much fur ' nte r owhere else for him to go, was ere---except to jail, perhaps?
/-Iow she Wished that "D" had been a "C," though. t 10 30 ^.1 she hurried fairly quickly away from the SChool prermses and ma. de he way on foot to the Churchill lf0spital where her appomune whereav... ·.. t. attheclimcwasforll^M. a upsta*W minutes anead of schedule she was sei'
' waiting-room, no longer thinking of Kevin C0styn and his former classmates---but of herself.
: w. are.. Y, ot feeling?" asked "gu' ttly stooping South Basil Shepstone, a large, "I'd 1, rne to undress?" African. ¢ r011i;,,'
,[. u, ti to undrress," he said with that characteris I' insi}.6,,"' e "r. No need today, though. Next time, }tis friendly brown e es ,? d across to-1 ....
'Y . w. er. e suddenly sad, and he 'You want , ,, ce ms ngnt hand on her shoulder as! quietly, the good news first?
Or the bad news? he
, i,{'! e good news." news?,, e swallowing hard. "And the bad "Well, it's not exactly bad news. Shall I read it?"
Julia could see the Oxfordshire Health Authority heading on the letter, but no more. She closed her eyes.
"It says.., blah, blah, blah... 'In the event of any de-terioration, however, we regret to have to inform Mrs. Ste-vens that her condition is inoperable.'"
"Ilaey can't operate if it gets worse, they mean?"
Shepstone put down the letter. "I prrefer your English to theirs."
She sighed deeply; then opened her eyes and looked at him, knowing that she loved him for everything he'd tried to do tbr her. He had always been so gentle, so kindly, so professional; and now, watching him, she could understand why his eyes remained downcast as his Biro hatched the "O" of "Oxfordshire."
"How long T' she asked simply.
He shook his head. "Anyone who prredicts something like that--he's a fool."
"A year?"
"Could he."
"Six months?"
He looked defeated as he shrugged his broad shoulders. "Less?"
"As I say---"
"Would you give up work if you were me?"
"Fairly soon, I think, yes."
"Would you tell anyone?"
He hesitated. "Only if it were someone you loved." She smiled, and got to her feet. "There are not many people I love. You, of course--and my cleaning-lady---with whom incidentally"--she consulted her wristwatch---"in exactly one hour's time, I have a slap-up lunch engagement at the Old Parsonage."
"You're not inviting me?"
She shook her head. "We've got some very private things to discuss, I'm afraid."
After Mrs. Stevens had left, the consultant took a handker-chief from his pocket and quickly wiped his eyes. What the dickens was he supposed to say? Because it never really did much good to lie. Or so he believed. He blamed him-self, for example, for lying so blatantly to the womm who'd died only two days previously--lying to Mrs. Phil-lotson.
Not much difference in the case-histories.
No hope in either.
Chapter Eishteen
Dead flies cause the ointment of the apothecary to send forth a stinking savour: so doth a little folly him that is in reputation for wisdom and honour (Ecclesiastes, ch .10, v. I)
Morse now realised that he would have few, if any, further cases of murder to solve during his career with Thames Valley CID. All right, orchestral conductors and High Court judges could pursue their professions into their twilight years, regardless--indeed sometimes completely obliv-ious--of their inevitably deteriorating ta
lents. But more of-ten than not policemen finished long before any incipient senility; and Morse himself was now within a couple of years of normal retirement.
For many persons it was difficult to tell where the dividing line came between latish middle-age and advisable pensionability. Perhaps it had something to do with the point at which nostalgia took over from hope; or perhaps with a sad realisation that it was no longer possible to fall in love again; or, certainly in Morse's case, the time when, as now, he had to sit down on the side of the bed in order to pull his trousers on.
Such and similar thoughts were circulating in Morse's mind as on Saturday, September 3, the morning after his visit with Lewis to Wolsey (and he statement made, imme-diately thereafter, by Mrs. Ewers), he sat in the Summer-town Health Centre.
A mild cold had, as usual with Morse, developed into a fit of intermittently barking bronchitis; but he cornforted himself with the thought that very shortly, after a sermon on the stupidity of cigarette-smoking, he would emerge from the Centre with a slip of paper happily prescribing a dose of powerful antibiotics.
Clutching his prescription, Morse was about to leave when he remembered The Times, left in his erstwhile seat in the waiting-room. Returning, he found that his earlier companions--the anorexic git and the spotty-faced, over-weight youth--had now been joined by a slatternly looking, slackly dressed young woman, with rings in her nostrils; a woman to whom Morse took an immediate and intense dis-like.
Predictably so.
From the chair next to the newcomer he picked up his newspaper, without a word; though not without a hurried glance into the woman's dull-green eyes, the colour of the Oxford Canal along by Wolvercote. And if Morse had waited there only a few seconds longer, he would have heard someone call her name: "Eleanor Smith?"
But Morse had gone.
She'd already got the address of an abortion clinic; but one of her friends, an authority in the field, had informed her that it was now closed. Sol So she'd have to find some other place. And the quack ought to be able to point her somewhere not too far away, surely? That's exactly the sort of thing quacks were there for.
In a marked police car, standing on a Strictly Doctors Only lot in the Center's very restricted parking-area, Lewis sat thinking and waiting; waiting in fact, quite patiently, since the case appeared to be developing in a reasonably satisfac-tory way.
When, the previous afternoon, Susan Ewers had made (and signed) her statement, many things already adum-brated by Morse had dawned at last on Lewis's understanding.
Suspicion, prima facie, could and should now be levelled against Mr. Edward Brooks, the man who had been Mrs. Ewers's immediate predecessor as scout on Staircase G in Drinkwater Quad. Why? Morse's unusually simple and un-spectacular hypothesis had been stated as follows: It should be assumed, in all probability, that Brooks had played a key role, albeit an intermediary one, in supplying a substantial quantity of drugs to the young people living on his staircase--including Matthew Rodway; that Rod-way's suicide had necessarily resulted in some thorough in-vestigation by the college authorities into the goings-on on the staircase; that Mc Clure, already living on the same staircase anyway, had become deeply involved indeed had probably been the prime mover in seeing that Brooks was "removed" from his post (coincidentally at the same time as Mc Clure's retirement); that, as Mrs. Ewers had now tes-tified, the former scout had continued his trafficking in drugs, and that this information had somehow reached Mc Clure's ears; that Mc Clure had threatened Brooks with exposure, disgrace, criminal prosecution, and almost certain imprisonment; that finally, at a showdown in Daventry Court, Brooks had murdered Mc Clure.
Such a hypothesis had the merit of fitting all the known facts; and if it could be corroborated by the new facts which would doubtless emerge from the meeting arranged for that afternoon at the Pitt Rivers Museum...
Yes.
But there was the "one potential fly in the oinmaent," as Lewis had expressed himself half an hour earlier.
And Morse had winced at the phrase. "The clich6's bad enough in itself, Lewis--but what's a 'potential fly' look like when it's on the window-pane?"
"Dunno, sir. But if Brooks was ambulanced off that Sun-day with a heart attack "
"Wouldn't you be likely to have a heart attack if you'd just killed somebody?"
"We can check up straightaway at the hospital."
"All in good time," Morse had said. "You'll have me in hospital if you don't get me down to the Health Centre..."
Still thinking and still waiting, Lewis looked again at the brief supplementary report from the police pathologist, which had been left on Morse's desk that morning.
Attn. De C C. I. Morse.
No more re time of Mc Clure's death--but confn'mafion re probable "within which": 8 ^.M.-12 ^.a. Aug 28. Little more on knife/knife-thrust: blade unusually (?) broad, 4-5 cms and about 14-15 cms in length/penetration. Straight through everything with massive internal and external bleeding (as reported). Blade not really sharp, judging by ugly lacerations round immediate entry-area. Forceful thrust. Man rather than woman? Perhaps woman with good wrist/arm (or angry heart?). Certainly one or two of our weaker (!) sex I met a year ago on a martial arts course.
Full details available if required.
All very technical--but possibly helpful?
Laura Hobson
"At least she understands the full~stop," Morse had said. Never having really mastered the full-stop himself, Lewis had refrained from any comment.
Yet they both realised the importance of finding the knife. Few murder prosecutions were likely to get off on the right foot without the finding of a weapon. But they hadn't found a weapon. A fairly perfunctory search had earlier been made by Phillotson and his team; and Lewis himself had instigated a very detailed search of the area surrounding Daventry Court and the gardens of the adjacent properties. But still without success.
Anyway, Morse was never the man to hunt through a haystack for a needle. Much rather he'd always seek to in-tensify (as he saw it) the magnetic field of his mind and trust that the missing needle would suddenly appear under his nose. Not much intensification as yet, though; the only thing under Morse's nose lately--and that under a towel--had been a bowl of steaming Friar's Balsam.
But here came Morse at last (10:40 A.M.), cum prescription.
And Lewis could predict the imminent conversation: "Chemist just around the comer, Lewis. If you'd just nip along and... I'd be grateful. Only problem"--searching pockets--"I seem..."
Lewis was half fight anyway.
"There's a chemist's just round the comer. If you'd be so good? I don't know how much these wretched Tories charge these days but"--searching pockets "here's a ten-ner."
Lewis left him there on the reserved parking lot, just starting The Times crossword; and walked happily up to Boots in Lower Summertown.
What was happening to Morse?
The third item appearing on Julia Stevens's agenda the pre-vious day had been postponed. On her arrival at the Old Parsonage Hotel, a telephone message was handed to her: Mrs. Brooks would not be able to make the lunch; she was sorry; she would ring later if she could, and explain; please not to ring her.
Understandably, perhaps, Julia had not felt unduly disap-pointed, for her mind was full of other thoughts, especially of herself. And she enjoyed the solitude of her glass of Bruno Paillard Brat Premier Cm (dating!) seated on a high stool at the Parsonage Bar, before walking down to the taxi-rank by the Martyrs' Memorial and thence being driven home in style and in a taxi gaudily advertising the Old Or-leans Restaurant and Cocktail Bar.
It was not until later that evening that her brain began to weave its curious fancies about what exactly could have caused the problem....
Brenda Brooks rang (in a hurry, she'd said) just before the Nine O'Clock News on BBC1. Could they make it the next day, Saturday? A bit earlier? Twelvetwelve noon, say?
After she had put down the phone, Julia sat siiently for a while, stating at nothing. A little bit odd,
that--Brenda ringing (almost certainly) from a telephone-box when she had a phone of her own in the house. It would be something--everything--to do with that utterly despicable husband of hers. For from the very earliest days of their marriage, Ted Brooks had been a repulsive fly in the nup-tial ointment; an ointment which had, over the thirteen in-creasingly unhappy and sometimes desperate years (as Julia had learned), regularly sent forth its stinldng savour.
Chapter Nineteen
The true index of a man's character is the health of his wife (Cyme. Coto..¥)
As Brenda Brooks waited at the bus-stop that Saturday morning, then again as she made her bus-journey down to Carfax, a series of videos, as it were, flashed in a nightmare of repeats across her mind; and her mood was an amalgam of anticipation and anxiety.
It had been three days earlier, Wednesday, August 31, that she'd been seen at the Orthopaedic Clinic....
"At least it's not made your fracture."
"Pardon, Doctor?" So nervous had she been that so many of his words made little or no sense to her.
"I said, it's not a major fracture, Mrs. Brooks. But it is a fracture."
"Oh deary me."
Coll. n Dexter
But she'd finally realised it was something more than a sprain--that's why she'd eventually gone to her GP, who in mm had referred her to a specialist. And now she was hearing all about it: about the meta-something between the wrist and the fingers. She'd u'y to look it up in that big dark-blue Grey Ly Atmtomy she'd often dusted on one of Mrs. Stevens's bookshelves. Not too difficult to remember: she'd just have to think of "inet a couple"--that's what it sounded like.
"And you'll be very. sensible, if you can, to stop using your fight hand completely. No housework. Rest! That's what it needs. The big thing for the time being is to give it a bit of support. So before you leave, the nurse here'll let you have one of those 'Tubigrips'--fits over your hand like a glove. And, as I say, we'll get you in just as soon as, er... are you a member of BUPA, by the wa),?"
"Pardon?"
"Doesn't matter. We'll get you in just as soon as we can. Only twenty-four hours, with a bit of luck. Just a little op to set the bone and plaster you up for a week or two."
