by Colin Dexter
Half an hour later, in Princess Street, it became clear tt Ellie Smith had decamped in considerable haste. In bed-sit-cum-bathroom there had been little enough acco mooation for many possessions anyway; yet much had be left behind: the bigger items (perforce)--f-ridge, TV, tecc player, microwave; a selection of clothing and shoes, ran ing from the sedate to the sensational; pictures and post by the score, including a life-sized technicolour photogra of Madlyn Monroe, a framed painting by Paul Klee, a (also framed) a fading Diploma from East Oxford Sero School, Prize for Art, awarded to Kay Eleanor Brook signed by C. P. Taylor (Head), and dated July 1983.
"Not much here in the drawers, sir. An Appointme Book, though, stuck at the back."
"Which I am not particularly anxious to see," sa Morse, sitting himself down on the bed.
"You know if you don't mind me saying so, sk---it w a bit cruel, wasn't it? Her leaving her mum for all tho years and not really getting in touch with her again until--He broke off.
"Sir?
Morse looked up.
"There's a telephone number here for that Tuesday the sixth, with something written after it: 'GL'--and what looks like the figure '.'"
Morse got up, and went to look over Lewis's shoulder.
"It could be a lower-case letter '1.'"
"Shall I give the number a go?"
Morse shrugged his shoulders disinterestedly. "Please yourself."
Lewis dialled the number, and a pleasing, clear Welsh voice answered, with an obviously well-practised formula: "Gareth Llewellyn-Jones. Can I 'elp you?
"Sergeant Lewis, Thames Valley Police, sir. We're inves-tigating a murder, and think you might be able to help us confirm one or two things."
"My goodness me! Well, I can't really, not for the moment, like. I'm in the middle of a tutorial, see?"
"Can you give me a time when you will be free, sir?"
"Could be important," said Lewis, after putting down the phone. "If she was... out all night--"
"Don't you mean 'in' all night?" said Morse bitterly. "In bed with some cock-happy client of hers--that's what you mean, isn't it? So stop being so bloody mealy-mouthed, Lewis counted up to seven. "Well, if she was, she couldn't have had too much of a hand in things with Brooks."
"Of course she did!" snapped Morse. "I don't believe her though when she says she murdered him--she's just trying to shield her mother, that's ail because it was her mother who murdered him."
"Isn't it usually the other way round, though?"
"What do you mean?"
"Isn't it usually mums who try to shield their kids?"
The word "kid" did to Morse what "scenario" did to Ellie Smith; and he was about to remonstrate--when sud-denly he clapped a cupped right hand hard over his fore-head.
"What year did the Brookses marry?'
"Can't remember exactly. Twelve years ago, was it? We can soon check."
"What time are you seeing Armstrong-Jones?"
"Llewellyn-Jones, sir. Haft-past eight. After he's had din-ner in Hall."
"Good. I'm glad you're not letting our own enquiries in terfere with his college routine."
"It wasn't like that--"
"Come on, Lewis!" Morse pointed to the Diploma. "When you said Ellie Smith must have been a bit creel to mn away from her mother, you were right, in a way. But she didn't mn away from her mother at all, Lewis. She ran away from her father, her natural father."
"But she could just have changed her name, surely?"
"Nonsense!"
Morse consulted the directory lying beside the phone: only one C. P. Taylor, with an Abingdon Road address. He rang the number, and learned, yes indeed, that he was speaking to the Former Head of East Oxford Senior School, who would willingly help if he could. That same evening? Why not?
After Lewis had dropped Morse ("I'll find my own way home") at a rather elegant semi-detached property in the Abingdon Road, he himself proceeded to Lonsdale College, where his mission was quietly and quickly productive.
Llewellyn-Jones freely admitted that he'd met the young woman he'd always known as "Kay" fairly regularly for sexual purposes: never in his college rooms; more often than not in a hotel; and twice in her own little place--as was the case on Tuesday, September 6, when he'd spent the evening with her, and would have spent longer but for a phone-call half-past nine? quarter-to ten? which had gal-vanized her into panicky activity. She'd have to leave: he'd have to leave. Obviously some sort of emergency; but he knew no more, except perhaps that he thought the voice on the phone was that of a woman.
Lewis thanked the dark, dapper little Welshman, and as-sured him that the information given would of course be Ueated with the utmost confidentiality.
But Gareth Llewellyn-Jones appeared little troubled: "I'm a bachelor, Sergeant, see? And I just loved being with her, that's all. In fact, I could'ye... But I don't think she's the sort of woman who could ever really fall arse-orver-tit for any man--certainly not for me."
He smiled, shook his head, and bade farewell to Lewis from the Porters' Lodge.
As Lewis drove up to his home in Headington, he real-ized that Morse had almost certainly been right about Ellie Smith's involvement in the murder.
With a tumbler of most welcome Scotch beside him, Morse sat back to listen.
"Kay Brooks? Oh yes, I remember her," said the ex-headmaster, a thin, mildly drooping man in his early seven-ties. "Who wouldn't...?"
Aged eleven, she'd started at his school as a lively, slightly devil-may-care lass, with long dark hair and a sweet if somewhat cheeky sort of smile. Bright--well above average; and very good at sketching, painting, de-sign, that type of thing. But... well, something must have gone a bit sour somewhere. By her mid-teens, she'd be-come a real handful: playing hookey, surly, inattentive, idle, a bit cruel, perhaps. Trouble at home, like as not? But no one knew. Kay's mother had come along to see him a couple of times but-- Morse intermpted: "That's really what I've come about, sir. It may not be important, but I rather think you probably mean her step-mother, don't you?
"Pardon?" Taylor looked as ff he had mis-heard.
"You see, I think Brooks, Edward Brooks, the man fished out of the Isis, could well have been her real father, not her step-father."
"Nonsense!" (The second time the word had been used in the past half-hour.) "I can understand what you're thinking, Inspector; but you're wrong. She changed her name when her mother got remarried; changed it to her mother's new name. You see, I knew her, knew her mother, well be-fore then."
Morse looked puzzled. "Is that sort of thing usual?"
Taylor smiled. "Depends, doesn't it? Some people would give an arm and a leg to change their names. Take me, for instance. My old mum and dad bless their hearts but... you know what they christened me? 'Cecil Paul.' Would you credit it? I was 'Cesspool' before I'd been at school fortnight. You know the sort of thing I mean?"
Oh, yes, Morse knew exactly the sort of thing he meant "And I'm afraid," continued Taylor, "that Kay got teasec pretty mercilessly about her name--about her surname, tha, is. So it was only natural, really, that when the opportunit3 arose to change it..."
"What was her surname?" asked Morse. Taylor told him. Oh dear! Poor Ellie!
After gladly becoming Eleanor "Brooks" on her mother' remarriage, so very soon, it seemed, had she come to detes her newly-adopted name. And when she had left home, sh had plumped for "Smith"--a good, common-stock, unex ceptionable sort of name that could cause her pain no mort Yes, Morse knew all about being teased because of name--in his own case a Christian name. And he felt s close to Ellie Smith at that moment, so very caring toward her, that he would have sacrificed almost anything in th world to find her there, waiting for him, when he got bac home.
"Ellie Morse"? "Eleanor Morse"?
Difficult to decide.
But gladly would Morse have settled for either as t walked slowly up into Cornmarket, where he stood waitir twenty-five minutes for a bus to take him up to his bacheh flat in North Oxford.
Chapter Seve
nty
Then grief forever after; because forever after nothing less would ever do (J. G. E POTR, Anything to Declare?)
The subject of each of these last two enquiries, the young woman who has been known (principally) in these pages as Ellie Smith, had hurriedly wiped her eyes and for a consid-erable time said nothing after getting into Mike William-son's car. Her thoughts were temporarily concentrated not so much on Morse himself as on what she could have told him; or rather on what she could never have told him....
It had been that terrible Tuesday night, when her mother had phoned, pleading in such deep anguish for her daugh-ter's help; when she'd got rid of that quite likable cock-happy little Welshman; and finally reached the house--a full five minutes before that other woman had arrived in a car--to find her mother standing like a zombie in the eh~ trance hall, continuously massaging a gloved right hand with her left, as if she had inflicted upon it some recent and agonising injury; and when, after going into the kitch-en, she'd looked down on her step-father lying prone on the lino there, a strange-looking, wooden-handled knife stuck--so accurately it had seemed to her--halfway be-tween the shoulder-blades. Strangely enough, there hadn't been too much blood. Perhaps he'd never had all that much blood in him. Not warm blood, anyway.
Then the red-headed woman had arrived, and taken over--so coolly competent she'd been, so organised. It was as if the plot of the drama had already been written, for clearly the appropriate props had been duly prepared, waiting only to be fetched from the back-garden shed. Just the timing, it appeared, had gone wrong, as if a f'mal rehearsal had suddenly turned into a first-night pefformanee. And it was her mother surely who'd been responsible for that: jumping the starting-gate and seizing the reins in her own hands--her own hand, rather (singular).
Then, ten minutes later, following a rapidly spoken tele-phone conversation, the young man had appeared, to whom the red-headed woman had spoken in hushed tones in the hallway; a young man whom, oddly enough, she knew by sight, since the two of them had attended the same Mmial Arts classes together. But she said nothing to him. Nor he to her. Indeed he seemed hardly aware of her presence as he began to manoeuvre the awkward corpse into its poly-thene winding sheet--sheets, rather (plural).
She'd even found herself remembering his name. Kevin something...
As the car turned right from Park End Street into the rail-way station, Ellie's mind jerked back to the present, aware that Williamson's left hand had crept above the top of her suspenderod fight-stocking. But she would always be able to handle people like WLIliamson, who now reminded her of their proposed agreement as he humped the two large suitcases from the boot.
"You ring me, like you said, OK.'?"
Ellie nodded, adding a verbal gloss to her unspoken promise as she took his business card from her handbag and mechanically recited the telephone number.
"Right, then. And don't forget we can do real business with a body like yours, kid."
It would have been a nice gesture if he had offered to carry her case up the steps to the automatic doors; or ever as h- as the ticket window. But he didn't; and of that she was glad. Had he done so she would probably have fel obliged to buy a ticket for Paddington, for she had spoker to him vaguely of "friends in London." As it was, once hz had driven off, she bought a single ticket to Liverpool, ant with aching arms crossed over the foot-bridge to Platform Two--where she stood for twenty-five minutes, forgetting for a while the futura plight of her mother; forgetting the minor role she herself had played in the murder of a man she had learned to hate; yet remembering again now, as she fingered the gold pendant, the man who had given it to her, the man for whom she would have sacrificed anything. If only he could have loved her.
Epilogue
Life is a progress from want to want, not from enjoyment to enjoyment (S^MUEL JOUNSON, in Boswell's The Life of Samuel Johnson)
It is now Friday, October 28, 1994, the Feast of St. Simor and St. Jude, and this chronicle has to be concluded, wis brief space only remaining to record a few marginal notes on some of the characters who played their roles in these pages.
On Thursday, October 20, Mrs. Brenda Brooks was re arrested, additionally charged with the murder of her hus band, Mr. Edward Brooks, and remanded in custody a Holloway Prison. From which institution, four days late she was granted temporary leave of (escorted) absence t attend a midday funeral service at the Oxford Crematorium where many teachers from the Proctor Memorial Schoo were squeezed into the small chapel there, together with few relatives, and a few friends though the couple fi.on California were unable to make the journey at such shot notice.
Two others completed (almost completed) the saddene congregation: the facially scarred Kevin Costyn and a pale looking Chief Inspector Morse, neither of whom partic pared in (what seemed to the latter) the banal revision c Archbishop Cranmer's noble words for the solemn servic of the dead.
And one other mourner: a dark-suited, prosperom looking, middle-aged man, who went last of all into the chapel; and sat down, as it happened, next to Morse, on the back row of the left-hand side of the aisle. A minute earlier, wholly unobserved, he had added his own floral tribute to the many others laid out in the Garden of Remembrance there: a wreath of white lilies. The card attached bore no salutation, no valediction--just the same words that Julia Stevens had read on a birthday card some eighteen months before: "Don't forget we had some good times too!"
St. Giles's (enforced) new home is some little way from Oxford. Yet that aristocratic cat is not displeased with his environment--particularly with the wildlife opportunities offered in the open field just behind Number 22, Kingfisher Way, Bicester; and with the soft, beige leather settee on which he now sleeps for long stretches of the day until his attractive young mistress returns from her duties at the Ox-ford University Press.
Janis Lawrence, only temporarily she trusts, is now unem-ployed once more; and her familiar, exasperated "Stop frowin' them bricks, Jason!" is still often to be heard in the streets of the Cutteslowe Estate.
On the whole, Mrs. Lewis is well pleased with the work of the decorators; and extremely pleased with her husband's present to her of a new set of five black-handled knives, in-cluding one (Number 4) whose blade, unusually broad at its base, curves to a dangerous-looking point.
The former dwelling of Dr. Felix Mc Clure has now been on the market for two weeks, its lounge completely re-carpeted. But Mrs. (Miss?) Laura Wynne-Wilson, though maintaining a dedicated vigil behind her carefully parted lace curtains, has yet to spot any prospective client arriving to view the property. And Messrs. Adkinson, renowned for their meticulous room-measurements, are a little worded that the vicious murder enacted in Number 6 has, quite un derstandably, postponed the prospect of any immediate pur-chase.
And what of Morse?
His proposed lunchtime meeting with Strange, with a view to launching a twin assault on the complexities of form-filling, has not yet been arranged; and Morse is not pursuing the matter with any sense of great urgency, since he is undecided about the "sooner or later" of his own eventual retirement, and curiously unsettled about the im-mediate months ahead of him....
He knew, of course, that it would be utterly hopeless to ring Ellie Smith, and therefore he rang her number only three times in the week following her disappearance; only twice in the second week. After all, as Morse recalled from his believing days, Hope is one of the greatest of all the Christian virtues.
In the third week, his normal routine in life appeared to reassert itself; and at about 9:30,.M. he was again regularly to be observed walking fairly purposefully down the Ban-bury Road to one of the local hostelries. He has promised himself most faithfully that he will dramatically curtail his consumption of alcohol wef November 1; which same day will also mark his permanent renunciation of nicotine.
In the meantime there is much work still to be done in the aftermath of the case--the aftermath of both cases, rather. And above all else in Morse's life there remains the searching out of Ellie Smith, sinc
e as a police officer that is his professional duty and, as a man, his necessary pur Coming soon to a bookstore near you, the original Inspector Morse mystery: LAST BUS TO WOODSTOCK The richly drawn novel that introduced readers to the inimitable Inspector Morse. Published by Ivy Books.
Look for it in bookstores everywhere.
Turn the page for a sneak peak into LAST BUS TO WOODSTOCK....
I Wednesday, September 29
From St. Giles' in the centre of Oxford two parallel roads run due north, like the prongs of a tuning fork. On the northern perimeter of Oxford, each must first cross the busy northern ring-road, along which streams of frenetic motorists speed by, gladly avoiding the delights of the old universi-ty city. The eastern branch eventually leads to the town of Banbury, and thence continues its rather unremarkable course towards the hear of the industrial midlands; the western branch soon brings the motorist to the small town of Woodstock, some eight miles north of Oxford, and thence to Stratford-upon-Avon.
The journey from Oxford to Woodstock is quietly attractive. Broad grass verges afford a pleasing sense of spaciousness, and at the village of Yarnton, after only a couple of miles, a dual carriageway, with a tree-lined central reservation, finally sweeps the accelerating traffic past the airport and away from its earlier paralysis. For half a mile immediately before Woodstock, on the left-hand side, a grey stone wall marks the eastern boundary of the extensive and beautiful grounds of Blenheim Palace, the mighty mansion built by good Queen Anne for her brilliant general, John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough. High and imposing wrought-iron gates mark the main entrance to the Palace drive, and hither flock the tourists in the summer season to walk amidst the dignified splendour of the great rooms, to stand before the vast Flemish tapestries of Malplaquet and Oudenarde, and to see the room in which was born that later scion of the Churchill line, the great Sir Winston himself, now lying in the once-peace-ful churchyard of nearby Bladon village.
Today Blenheim dominates the old town. Yet it was not always so.
The strong grey houses which line the main street have witnessed older times and could tell their older tales, though now the majority are sprucely converted into gift, antique and souvenir shops--and inns. There was always, it appears, a goodly choice of hostelries, and several of the hotels and inns now clustered snugly along the streets can boast not only an ancient lineage but also a cluster of black AA stars on their bright yellow signs.
