by Colin Dexter
Margaret had found five 10p coins – still one short – and she looked around her with a childlike pleading in her eyes, as though she almost expected her very helplessness to work its own deliverance. A hundred or so yards away, just passing the Taylorian, and coming towards her, she saw a yellow-banded traffic warden, and suddenly a completely new and quite extraordinary thought came to her mind. Would it matter if she were caught? Didn’t she want to be caught? Wasn’t there, after all hope had been cruelly cancelled, a point when even total despair could hold no further terrors? A notice (‘No Change Given’) outside the Eagle and Child informed Margaret that she could expect little help from that establishment; but she walked in and ordered a glass of orange juice.
‘Ice?’
‘Pardon?’
‘You want ice in it?’
‘Oh – yes. Er – no. I’m sorry, I didn’t quite hear . . .’
She felt the hard eyes of the well-coiffeured bar-lady on her as she handed over a £1 coin and received 60p in exchange: one 50p piece, and one 10p. Somehow she felt almost childishly pleased as she put her six 10p pieces together and held the little stack of coins in her left hand. She had no idea how long she stayed there, seated at a table just in front of the window. But when she noticed that the glass in front of her was empty, and when she felt the coins so warmly snug inside her palm, she walked out slowly into St Giles’. It occurred to her – so suddenly! – that there she was, in St Giles’; that she had just come down the Banbury Road; that she must have passed directly in front of the Haworth Hotel; and that she hadn’t even noticed it. Was she beginning to lose control of her mind? Or had she got two minds now? The one which had pushed itself into auto-pilot in the driving seat of the Metro; and the other, logical and sober, which even now, as she walked towards the ticket machine, was seeking to keep her shoes (the ones she had bought for the funeral) out of the worst of crunching slush. She saw the celluloid-covered document under the near-side windscreen-wiper; and caught sight of the traffic warden, two cars further up, leaning back slightly to read a number plate before completing another incriminating ticket.
Margaret walked up to her, pointing to the maroon Metro.
‘Have I committed an offence?’
‘Is that your car?’
‘Yes.’
‘You were parked without a ticket.’
‘Yes, I know. I’ve just been to get the right change.’ Almost pathetically she opened her left palm and held the six warm coins to view as if they might just serve as some propitiatory offering.
‘I’m sorry, madam. It tells you on the sign, doesn’t it? If you haven’t got the right change, you shouldn’t park.’
For a moment or two the two women, so little different in age, eyed each other in potential hostility. But when Margaret Bowman spoke, her voice sounded flat, indifferent almost.
‘Do you enjoy your work?’
‘Not the point, is it?’ replied the other. ‘There’s nothing personal in it. It’s a job that’s got to be done.’
Margaret Bowman turned and the traffic warden looked after her with a marked expression of puzzlement on her face. It was her experience that on finding a parking ticket virtually all of them got into their cars and drove angrily away. But not this tall, good-looking woman who was now walking away from her car, down past the Martyrs’ Memorial; and then, almost out of sight now, but with the warden’s last words still echoing in her mind, across into Cornmarket and up towards Carfax.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Monday, January 6th: noon
Then the devil taketh him up into the holy city, and setteth him on a pinnacle of the temple.
(MATTHEW iv, 5)
MARGARET BOWMAN STOOD beneath Carfax Tower, a great, solid pile of pale-yellowish stone that stands on the corner of Queen Street and Cornmarket, and which looks down, at its east side, on to the High. White lettering on a background of Oxford blue told her that a splendid view of the city and the surrounding district was available from the top of the tower: admission 50p, Mondays to Saturdays, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.; and her heart pounded as she stood there, her eyes ascending to the crenellated balustrade built four-square around the top. Not a high balustrade either; and often in the past she’d noticed people standing there, almost half their bodies visible as they gazed out over Oxford or waved to friends who stood a hundred feet below. She was not one of those acrophobes (as, for example, Morse was) who burst into a clammy sweat of vertiginous panic when forced to stand on the third or the fourth rung of a household ladder. But she was always terrified of being pushed – had been ever since one of the boys on a school party to Snowdon had pretended to push her, and when for a split second she had experienced a sense of imminent terror of falling over the precipitous drop that yawned almost immediately below her feet. People said you always thought of your childhood before you died, and she was conscious that twice already – no, three times – her mind had reverted to early memories. And now she was conscious of a fourth – of the words her father had so often used when she tried to put off writing a letter, or starting her homework: ‘The longer you put things off, the harder they become, my girl!’ Should she put things off now? Defer any fateful decision? No! She pushed the door to the tower. But it was clear that the tower was shut; and it was with a sense of despairing disappointment that she noticed the bottom line of the notice: ‘20th March – 31st October’.
The spire of St Mary the Virgin pointed promisingly skywards in front of her as she walked down the High, and into the Mitre.
‘Large Scotch – Bell’s, please – if you have it.’ (How often had she heard her husband use those selfsame words!)
A young barmaid pushed a tumbler up against the bottom of an inverted bottle, and then pushed again.
‘Ice?’
‘Pardon?’
‘Do you want ice?’
‘Er – no. Er – yes – yes please! I’m sorry. I didn’t quite hear . . .’
As she sipped the whisky, a hitherto dormant nerve throbbing insistently along her left temple, the world seemed to her perhaps fractionally more bearable than it had done when she’d left the Delegacy. Like some half-remembered medicine – foul-tasting yet efficacious – the whisky seemed to do her good; and she bought another.
A few minutes later she was standing in Radcliffe Square; and as she looked up at the north side of St Mary’s Church, a strange and fatal fascination seemed to grip her soul. Halfway up the soaring edifice, his head and shoulders visible over the tricuspid ornamentation that marked the intersection of tower and spire, Margaret could see a duffel-coated young man, binoculars to his eyes, gazing out across the northern parts of Oxford. The tower must be open, surely! She walked down the steps towards the main porch of the church and then, for a moment, turned round and gazed up at the dome of the Radcliffe Camera behind her; and noticed the inscription on the top step: Dominus custodiat introitum tuum et exitum tuum. But since she had no Latin, the potential irony of the words escaped her. TOWER OPEN was printed in large capitals on a noticeboard beside the entrance; and just inside, seated behind a table covered with postcards, guidebooks and assorted Christian literature, was a middle-aged woman who had already assumed that Margaret Bowman wished to ascend, for she held out a maroon-coloured ticket and asked for 60p. A few flights of wide wooden stairs led up to the first main landing, where a notice on a locked door to the left advised visitors that here was the Old Library – the very first one belonging to the University – where the few books amassed by the earliest scholars were so precious that they were chained to the walls. Margaret had seldom been interested in old churches, or old anythings for that matter; but she now found herself looking down at the leaflet the woman below had given her:
when Mary became Queen and England reverted to Roman Catholicism, Archbishop Cranmer and two of his fellow bishops, Latimer and Ridley, were tried in St Mary’s for heresy. Latimer and Ridley were burned at the stake. Cranmer himself, after officially recanting, was brought back to St Mary’s
and condemned to death. He was burned at the stake in the town ditch, outside Balliol College, holding his right hand (which had written his recantation) steadily in the flames . . .
Margaret looked at her own right hand – a couple of blue biro marks across the bottom of the thumb – and thought of the tortured atonement that Cranmer had sought, and welcomed, for his earlier weaknesses. A tear ran hurriedly down her cheek, and she took from her handbag a white paper handkerchief to dry her eyes.
The stairs – iron now, and no longer enclosed for the next two flights – led up and over the roof of the Lady Chapel, and she felt a sense of exhilaration in the cold air as she climbed higher still to the Bell Tower, where the man with the binoculars, his hair windswept, had just descended the stone spiral staircase that led to the top.
‘Not much further!’ he volunteered. ‘Bit blowy up there, though. Bit slippery, too. Be careful!’
For several seconds as she emerged at the top of the tower, Margaret was conscious of a terrifying giddiness as her eyes glimpsed, just below her feet, the black iron ring that circled the golden-painted Roman numerals of the great clock adorning the north wall of the church. But the panic was soon gone, and she looked out across at the Radcliffe Camera; and then to the left of the Camera at the colleges along Broad Street; then the buildings of Balliol where Cranmer had redeemed his soul amid the burning brushwood; then she could see the leafless trees along St Giles’, and the roads that led off from there into North Oxford; and then the giant yellow crane that stood at the Haworth Hotel in the Banbury Road. She took a few steps along the high-walk towards the north-western corner of the tower, and she suddenly felt a sense of elation, and the tears welled up again in her eyes as the wind blew back her hair, and as she held her head up to the elements with the same joyous carelessness she had shown as a young girl when the rain had showered down on her tip-tilted face . . .
At a point on the corner, her wholly inadequate and unsuitable shoes had slipped along the walkway, and a man standing below watched the black handbag as it plummeted to the earth and landed, neatly erect, in a drift of snow beneath the north-west angle of the tower.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Monday, January 6th: p.m.
Everything comes to him who waits – among other things, death.
(F. H. BRADLEY)
MORSE WAS DISSATISFIED and restless – that much was obvious as they sat outside the Bowmans’ house in Charlbury Drive. Ten minutes they waited, Morse just sitting there in the passenger seat, his safety-belt still on, staring out of the window. Then another ten minutes, with Morse occasionally clicking his tongue and taking sharp audible breaths of impatient frustration.
‘Think she’s coming back?’ said Lewis.
‘I dunno.’
‘How long are we going to wait?’
‘How do I know!’
‘Just asked.’
‘I tell you one thing, Lewis. I’m making one bloody marvellous mess of this case!’
‘I don’t know about that, sir.’
‘Well you should know! We should never have let her out of our sight.’
Lewis nodded, but said nothing; and for a further ten minutes the pair of them sat in silence.
But there was no sign of Margaret Bowman.
‘What do you suggest we do, Lewis?’ asked Morse finally.
‘I think we ought to go to the post office: see if we can find some of Bowman’s handwriting – there must be something there; see if any of his mates know anything about where he is or where he’s gone; that sort of thing.’
‘And you’d like to get somebody from there to go and look at the body, wouldn’t you? You think it is Bowman!’
‘I’d just like to check, that’s all. Check it isn’t Bowman, if you like. But we haven’t done anything at all yet, sir, about identification.’
‘And you’re telling me it’s about bloody time we did!’
‘Yessir.’
‘All right. Let’s do it your way. Waste of time but—’ His voice was almost a snarl.
‘Are you feeling all right, sir?’
‘Course I’m not feeling all right! Can’t you see I’m dying for a bloody cigarette, man?’
The visit to the post office produced little information that was not already known. Tom Bowman had worked on the Thursday, Friday and Saturday following Christmas Day, and then had taken a week’s holiday. He should have been back at work that very day, the 6th; but as yet no one had seen or heard anything of him. It seemed he was a quiet, punctual, methodical sort of fellow, who had been working there for six years now. No one knew his wife Margaret very well, though it was common knowledge that she had a job in Oxford and took quite a bit of trouble over her clothes and her personal appearance. There were two handwritten letters from Bowman in the personnel file: one dating back to his first application to join the PO; the second concerning itself with his options under the PO pension provisions. Clearly there had been little or no calligraphic variance in Bowman’s penmanship over the years, and here seemed further evidence – if any were required – that the letter Margaret Bowman had produced from her handbag that morning was genuinely in her husband’s hand. Mr Jeacock, the co-operative and neatly competent postmaster, could tell them little more; but, yes, he was perfectly happy for one of Bowman’s colleagues to follow the police officers down into Oxford to look at the unidentified body.
‘Let’s hope to God it’s not Tom! he said as Morse and Lewis got up and left his small office.
‘I honestly don’t think you need to worry about that, sir,’ said Morse.
As always, the cars coming up in the immediate rear had all decelerated to the statutory speed limit; and by the time the police car reached the dual carriageway just after Blenheim Palace, with Mr Frederick Norris, sorter of Her Majesty’s mail in Chipping Norton, immediately behind, there was an enormous tailback of vehicles. Morse, who had told Lewis to take things quietly, sat silent throughout the return journey, and Lewis too held his peace. At the bottom of the Woodstock Road he turned right into a narrow road at the Radcliffe Infirmary and stopped on an ‘Ambulances Only’ parking lot outside the mortuary to which the body found in the Haworth annexe had now been transferred. Norris got out of the car that pulled up behind them.
‘You coming, sir?’ asked Lewis.
But Morse shook his head.
Fred Norris stood stock-still for a few seconds, and then – somewhat to Lewis’s bewilderment – nodded slowly, his own pallor only a degree less ghastly than the skin that backed the livid bruising of the murdered man’s features. No words were spoken; but as the mortuary attendant replaced the white sheet, Lewis put a kindly, understanding hand on Norris’s shoulder, and then gently urged him out of the grim building into the bright January air.
An ambulance had pulled in just ahead of the police car, and Lewis, as he stood fixing a time with Norris for an official statement, saw the ambulance driver unhurriedly get out and speak to one of the porters at the Accident entrance. From the general lack of urgency, Lewis gathered that the man was probably delivering some fussy octogenarian for her weekly dose of physiotherapy. But the back doors were suddenly opened to reveal the body of a woman covered in a red blanket, with only the shoeless stockinged feet protruding. Lewis’s throat was dry as he walked past the police car, and saw Morse (the latter still unaware of the dramatic news that Lewis was about to impart) point to the back of the ambulance.
‘Who is she?’ asked Lewis as the two ambulancemen prepared to fix the runners for the stretcher.
‘Are you . . .?’ The driver jerked his thumb towards the police car.
‘Chief Inspector Morse – him! Not me!’
‘Accident. They found her—’
‘How old?’
The man shrugged. ‘Forty?’
‘You know who she is?’
The man shook his head. ‘No one knows yet. No purse. No handbag.’
Lewis drew back the blanket and looked at the woman’s face, his heart
pounding in anticipatory dread – for such an eventuality, as he well knew, was exactly what Morse had feared.
But the ambulance driver was right in suggesting that no one knew who she was: Lewis didn’t know, either. For the dead woman in the back of the ambulance was certainly not Mrs Margaret Bowman.
That same lunch-hour, some fifty minutes before Norris had positively identified the man murdered at the Haworth Hotel as Mr Thomas Bowman, Ronald Armitage, an idle, dirty, feckless, cold, hungry, semi-drunken sixty-three-year-old layabout – unemployed and unemployable – experienced a remarkable piece of good fortune. He had spent the previous night huddled up on a bench in the passage that leads from Radcliffe Square to the High, and had spent most of the morning on the same bench, with an empty flagon of Bulmer’s Cider at his numbed feet, and one dirty five-pound note and a few 10p coins in the pocket of the ankle-length greatcoat that for many years had been his most treasured possession. When he had first seen the black handbag as it plummeted to the ground, and came to rest in a cushion of deep snow at the corner of the church, his instinctive reaction was to look sharply and suspiciously around him. But for the moment the square was empty; and he quickly grabbed the handbag, putting it beneath the front of his coat, and walked hurriedly off over the snow-covered cobbles outside Brasenose into the lane on the left that led through to the Turl. Here – with none of his cronies in sight – like a wolf which grabs a great gobbet of meat from the kill and takes it away from the envious eyes of the rest of the pack, he examined his exciting discovery. Inside the handbag he found a lipstick, a powder compact, a comb, a cheap cigarette lighter, a packet of white paper handkerchiefs, a leaflet about St Mary the Virgin, a small pair of nail scissors, a bunch of car keys, two other keys – and a brown leather purse-cum-wallet. The plastic cards – Visa, Access, Lloyds – he ignored, but he quickly pocketed the two beautifully crisp ten-pound notes and the three one-pound coins he found therein.
