by Colin Dexter
In mid-afternoon, he wandered slowly up the High to Carfax, and then turned left down past Christ Church and into St Aldates Police Station where he handed the bag over to Lost Property.
‘Where did you find it?’asked the sergeant on duty.
‘Someone must have dropped it—’
‘You better leave your name—’
‘Nah! Don’t fink so.’
‘Might be a reward!’
‘Cheers, mate!’
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Monday, 6th January: p.m.
Wordsworth recalls in ‘The Prelude’ how he was soothed by the sound of the Derwent winding among grassy holms.
(Literary Landscapes of the British Isles)
IT WAS SELDOM that Morse ever asked for more personnel. Indeed, it was his private view that the sight (as so often witnessed on TV) of a hundred or so uniformed policemen crawling in echelon across a tract of heathland often brought the force into something approaching derision. He himself had once taken part in such a massive sweep across a field in North Staffordshire, ending up, as he had done, with one empty packet of Featherlite Durex, one empty can of alcohol-free lager – and (the next morning) a troublesome bout of lumbago.
But he did ask for more personnel on the afternoon of January 6th; and Lewis, for one, was glad that much needed help (in the shape of Sergeant Phillips and two detective constables) had been summoned to follow up all inquiries regarding Margaret Bowman.
Oddly enough (yet almost everything about him was odd, as Lewis knew) Morse had shown no great surprise on hearing the news that the murdered man was Thomas Bowman; indeed, the only emotion he showed – and that of immense relief – was after learning that the other corpse on view that lunchtime was not Margaret Bowman’s. In fact, Morse suddenly seemed much more at peace with himself as he sat with Lewis in the Royal Oak, just opposite the hospital – a circumstance (as Lewis rightly guessed) not wholly unconnected with the fact that after his Herculean efforts over Christmas and the New Year he had finally surrendered and bought himself a packet of cigarettes. At two-thirty, they were once more on the A34 to Chipping Norton, this time with a much firmer mission – to investigate the property at 6 Charlbury Drive, which had now quite definitely become the focus of the murder inquiry.
‘Shall we break one of the front windows or one of the back ones?’ Morse asked as they stood in front of the property, faces at a good many windows in the quiet cul-de-sac now watching the activity with avid curiosity. But such forcible ingress proved unnecessary. Lewis it was who suggested that most people (‘Well, the missus does’) leave a key with the neighbours: and so it proved in this case, with the elderly woman in number 5 promptly producing both a back-door and a front-door key. Mrs Bowman, it appeared, had gone out on Friday evening, saying she wouldn’t be back until Monday after work; hadn’t been back, either – as far as the woman knew.
Finding nothing of immediate interest in the downstairs rooms, Lewis went upstairs where he found Morse in one of the two spare bedrooms looking into a cumbrous dark mahogany wardrobe which (apart from an old-fashioned armchair) was the only item of furniture there.
‘Found anything, sir?’
Morse shook his head. ‘Lots of shoes he had.’
‘Not much help.’
‘No help at all.’
‘Can you smell anything, sir?’
‘Such as?’
‘Whisky?’ suggested Lewis.
Morse’s eyes lit up as he sniffed, and sniffed again.
‘I reckon you’re right, you know.’
There was a stack of white shoe boxes, and they found the half-full bottle of Bell’s in the third box from the bottom.
‘You think he was a secret drinker, sir?’
‘What if he was? I’m a secret drinker – aren’t you?’
‘No, sir. And I wouldn’t have got away with this. The missus cleans all my shoes.’
The other spare room upstairs (little more than a small boxroom) was similarly short on furniture, with three sheets of newspaper spread out across the bare floorboards on which ranks of large, green cooking apples were neatly arranged. ‘They take the Sun,’ observed Lewis, as his eye fell on a young lady leaning forward to maximize the measurements of a mighty bosom. ‘You think he was a secret sex maniac?’
‘I’m a secret—’ But Morse broke off as he saw the broad grin across his sergeant’s face, and he found himself smiling in return.
The main bedroom, though furnished fully (even tastefully, as Morse saw it), seemed at first glance to offer little more of interest than the rest of the house. Twin beds, only a few inches apart, were neatly made, each covered with an olive-green quilt, each with a small bedside table – the feminine accoutrements on the one nearer the window clearly signifying ‘hers’. On the right as one entered the room was a large white-wood wardrobe, again ‘hers’, and on the left a tallboy obviously ‘his’. A composite piece of modern furniture, mirror in the middle, three shelves above (two of them full of books), with drawers below, stood just beyond the tallboy – at the bottom of Margaret Bowman’s bed. Since there seemed about three times as much of her clothing as of his, Morse agreed that Lewis should concentrate on the former, he on the latter. But neither of them was able to come up with anything of value, and Morse soon found himself far more interested in the two shelves of books. The thick spines of four white paperbacks announced a sequence of the latest international best-sellers by Jackie Collins, and beside these stood two apparently unopened Penguins, Brideshead Revisited and A Passage to India. Then two large, lavishly illustrated books on the life and times of Marilyn Monroe; an ancient impression of the Concise Oxford Dictionary; and, a very recent purchase by the look of things, a book in the ‘Hollywood Greats’ series covering the career of Robert Redford (a star – unlike Miss Monroe – who had yet to swim into Morse’s ken). On the wall beside this top shelf of books were two colour photographs cut from sporting periodicals: one of Steve Cram, the great middle-distance runner; the other of Ian Terence Botham, his blond locks almost reaching the top of his England cricket sweater. The title Sex Parties, on the lower shelf, caught Morse’s eye and he took it out and opened a page a random:
Her hand slid across the gear-lever and touched his leg below the tennis shorts. ‘Let’s go to my place – quick!’ she murmured in his ear.
‘I shan’t argue with that, my love!’ he replied huskily as the powerful Maserati swerved across the street . . .
As they lay there together the next morning –
Such anti-climactic pianissimo porn had no attraction whatever for Morse and he was putting the book back in its slot when he noticed that there was something stuck in the middle of the large volume next to it, a work entitled The Complete Crochet Manual. It was a holiday postcard from Derwentwater, addressed to Mrs M. Bowman, the date stamp showing July 29th, the brief message reading:
Morse turned the card over and looked lovingly at the pale-green sweep of the hills before putting the card back in its place. An odd place, perhaps, his brain suggested gently. And not the sort of book, surely, that Tom Bowman would often dip into for amusement or instruction? Edwina was doubtless one of Margaret’s friends – either a local woman or one of her colleagues at Oxford. For the moment, he thought no more about it.
Downstairs once more, Lewis collected up the pile of documents he’d already selected from the mass of letters and bills that appeared to have been stuffed haphazardly into the two drawers of the corner cabinet in the lounge – water, electricity, mortgage, HP, bank statements, car insurance. Morse, for his part, sat down in one of the two armchairs and lit a cigarette.
‘They kept their accounts and things in one hell of a mess, sir!’
Morse nodded. ‘Mm!’
‘Looks almost as if someone has been looking through all this stuff pretty recently.’
Morse shot up in the armchair as if a silken-smooth car driver had suddenly, without warning, decided to practise an emergency stop. ‘Lewis! You’r
e a genius, my son! The paper! There’s a pile of newspapers in the kitchen, and I glanced at them while you were in here. Do you know something? I think today’s copy’s there!’
Lewis felt the blood tingling in his own veins as he followed Morse into the kitchen once more, where beneath a copy of the previous week’s Oxford Times was the Sun, dated January 6th.
‘She must have been here some time today, sir.’
Morse nodded. ‘I think she came back here after we saw her this morning. She must have picked up the paper automatically from the doormat—’
‘But surely somebody would have seen her?’
‘Go and see if you can find out, Lewis.’
Two minutes later, whilst Morse had progressed no further than page three of the Bowmans’ daily, Lewis came back: the woman still peeping at events from the window immediately opposite had seen Margaret Bowman get out of a taxi.
‘A taxi?’
‘That’s what she said – and go into the house, about half-past one.’
‘When we were on the way back to Oxford . . .’
‘I wonder what she wanted, sir?’
‘She probably wanted her building society book or something – get a bit of ready cash. I should think that’s why those drawers are in such a mess.’
‘We can check easily enough – at the building societies.’
‘Like the beauty clinics, you mean?’ Morse smiled. ‘No! Let Phillips and his lads do that – tedious business, Lewis! I’m really more interested to know why she came in a taxi.’
‘Shall we get Sergeant Phillips to check on the taxis, too?’ grinned Lewis, as for the present the two men left 6 Charlbury Drive. The house had been icily cold, and they were glad to get away.
Margaret Bowman’s Metro was located, parking ticket and all, in St Giles’ at 4.45 p.m. that same day, and the news was immediately rung through to Kidlington. But a folding umbrella, a can of de-icing spray, and eight ‘Scrabble’ tokens from Esso garages did not appear to Morse to be of the slightest help in the murder inquiry.
It was not until ten thirty the following morning that Sergeant Vickers rang Kidlington from St Aldates with the quite extraordinary news that Margaret Bowman’s handbag had been found. Morse himself, Vickers learned (not without a steady sinking of his heart), would be coming down immediately to view the prize exhibit.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Tuesday, 7th January: a.m.
JACK (gravely): In a handbag.
LADY BRACKNELL: A handbag?
(OSCAR WILDE)
‘WHAA—?’
Morse’s inarticulate utterance sounded like the death agonies of a wounded banshee, and Lewis felt his sympathy going out to whichever of the officers in St Aldates had been responsible the previous day for the Lost Property inventory.
‘We get a whole lot of lost property in every day, sir—’
‘—and not all of it’ (Morse completed the sentence with withering scorn) ‘I would humbly suggest, Sergeant, a prime item of evidence in a murder inquiry – and if I may say so, not an inquiry of which this particular station is wholly ignorant. In fact, only yesterday afternoon your colleague Sergeant Phillips and two of your own detective constables were specifically seconded from their duties here to assist in that very inquiry. Remember? And do you know who asked for them – me! And do you know why I’m so anxious to show some interest in this inquiry? Because this bloody station asked me to!’
Palely, Sergeant Vickers nodded, and Morse continued.
‘You! – and you’ll do it straight away, Sergeant – you’ll get hold of the bloody nincompoop who sat in that chair of yours yesterday and you’ll tell him I want to see him immediately. Christ! I’ve never known anything like it. There are rules in this profession of ours, Sergeant – didn’t you know that? – and they tell us to get names and addresses and occupations and times and details and all the rest of it – and here we are without a bloody clue who brought it in, where it was found, when it was found – nothing!’
A constable had come through in the midst of this shrill tirade, waiting until the peroration before quietly informing Morse there was a telephone call for him.
After Morse had gone, Lewis looked across at his old pal, Sergeant Vickers.
‘Was it you, Sam?’
Vickers nodded.
‘Don’t worry! He’s always flying off the handle.’
‘He’s right, though. I tell everybody else to fill in the forms and follow the rules but . . .’
‘Do you remember who brought it in?’
‘Vaguely. One of the winos. We’ve probably got him on the books for pinching a bottle of cider from a supermarket or something. Poor sod! But the last thing we can cope with is having the likes of him here! I suppose he nicked the money when he “found” the bag and then just brought it in to square his conscience. I didn’t discover where he found it, though – or when – or what his name was. I just thought – well, never mind!’
‘He can’t shoot you, Sam.’
‘It’s not as if there’s much in it to help, I don’t think.’
Lewis opened the expensive-looking handbag and looked through its contents: as Vickers had said, there seemed little enough of obvious interest. He pulled out the small sheaf of cards from the front compartment of the wallet: the usual bank and credit cards, two library tickets, two creased first-class stamps, a small rectangular card advertising the merits of an Indian restaurant in Walton Street, Oxford, and an identity pass-card for the Locals, with a coloured photograph of Margaret Bowman on the left. One by one, Lewis picked them up and examined them, and was putting them back into the wallet when he noticed the few words written in red biro on the back of the white restaurant card:
M. I love you
darling. T.
Obviously, thought Lewis, a memory from happier days, probably their first meal together, when Tom and Margaret Bowman had sat looking dreamily at each other over a Bombay curry, holding hands and crunching popadums.
A brighter-looking Morse returned.
An intelligent and resourceful Phillips, it appeared, had discovered that Margaret Bowman had gone back – not in her own car, of course – to Chipping Norton the previous lunchtime, and had withdrawn £920 of her savings in the Oxfordshire Building Society there – leaving only a nominal £10 in the account.
‘It’s all beginning to fit together, Lewis,’ said Morse. ‘She was obviously looking for her pay-in book when she got a taxi back there. And this clinches things of course’ – he gestured to the handbag. ‘Car keys there, I’d like to bet. But she must have had an extra house key on her . . . Yes! Cheque card, I see, but I’d be surprised if she kept that and her chequebook together. Most people have more sense these days.’
Lewis, not overjoyed by the high praise bestowed upon his fellow sergeant, ventured his own comments on the one item in the handbag which had puzzled him – the (obviously very recently acquired) leaflet on St Mary the Virgin. ‘I remember when I was a lad, sir, somebody jumped from the tower there, and I was wondering—’
‘Nonsense, Lewis! You don’t do that sort of thing these days. You take a couple of boxes of pills, don’t you, Sergeant Vickers?’
The latter, so unexpectedly appealed to, decided to take this opportunity of putting the record straight. ‘Er, about the handbag, sir. I wasn’t exactly telling you the whole truth earlier—’
But Morse was not listening. His eyes were staring at the small oblong card which Lewis had just examined and which lay on top of the little pile of contents, the handwritten message uppermost.
‘What’s that?’ he asked with such quietly massive authority in his voice that Vickers found the hairs rising up on his brawny forearms.
But neither of the two sergeants could answer, for neither knew what it was that the chief inspector had asked, nor why it was that his eyes were gleaming with such triumphant intensity.
Morse looked cursorily through the other items from the handbag, quickly deciding that nothing
merited further attention. His face was still beaming as he clapped a hand on Lewis’s shoulder. ‘You are – not for the first time in your life – a bloody genius, Lewis! As for you, Vickers, we thank you for your help, my friend. Forget what I said about that idiot colleague of yours! Please, excuse us! We have work to do, have we not, Lewis?’
‘The Indian restaurant, is it?’ asked Lewis as they got into the car.
‘You hungry, or something?’
‘No, sir, but—’
‘I wouldn’t say no to a curry myself, but not just for the time being. Put your foot down, my son!’
‘Er – where to, sir?’
‘Chipping Norton! Where else?’
Lewis saw that the fascia clock showed a quarter past twelve as the car passed through Woodstock.
‘Fancy a pint?’ asked a cheerful Lewis.
Morse looked at him curiously. ‘What’s the matter with you this morning? I hope you’re not becoming an alcoholic?’
Lewis shook his head lightly.
‘You want to be like me, Lewis. I’m a dipsomaniac.’
‘What’s the difference?’
Morse pondered for a while. ‘I think an alcoholic is always trying to give up drink.’
‘Whereas such a thought has never crossed your mind, sir?’
‘Well put!’ said Morse, thereafter lapsing into the silence he habitually observed when being driven in a car.
As they neared the Chipping Norton turning off the A34, a woman driving a very ancient Ford Anglia passed them on her way down from Birmingham to spend a night at the Haworth Hotel.
