by Colin Dexter
'Down the bottom of Hamilton Road, somewhere - ninety-seven, I think it was.' ‘Name?’
'Same name as mine. Huh! Coincidence, eh?' 'I've always liked coincidences.'
'She rang up an' said, you know, take this fellah down to The Randolph.' 'Good! Thanks! Good night then, Mr, er . ..' 'Williams. Jack Williams.'
Lewis had pulled in behind the taxi, and was in time to find Morse slowly - reluctantly? - pushing two £10 notes into the slot of a Charity Bottle. He smiled happily. Morse had a bit of money - he knew that, but the chief's generosity, certainly in pubs, was seldom in evidence; and it was most reassuring to find that there was an unexpectedly munificent side to the chief inspector's soul. So Lewis watched, and said nothing.
22
Duty is what one expects from others; it is not what one does one's self
(Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance)
It was not difficult for Lewis to find his way to the Kemps' home in Cherwell Lodge, the ground-floor flat on the extreme right of the three-storey building, since it was the only window in the whole street, let alone the block of flats, wherein electric light still blazed at a quarter to one that morning. By this time, Lewis had shown Morse the yellow A4 sheet; and Morse had seemed so delighted with it that he'd turned on the car's internal light in transit. He folded the sheet along its original creases, and was putting it inside his breast-pocket as Lewis quietly pulled the car alongside the pavement outside number 6.
'We can ring from there - be easier really,' suggested Morse, pointing to the Kemps' property. We'll need a WPC - there should be one at HQ, don't you think?'
Lewis nodded.
'And a doc,' continued Morse. 'Her doc, if he's not too far sunk in slumber or wine.'
Again Lewis nodded. 'You're right, sir. The more the merrier, isn't it, with this sort of thing? It's about the only time I really hate the job, you know - with accidents and so on . . . having to tell the relatives, and all that.'
It was Morse's turn to nod. 'Always hard, isn't it, Lewis? I hate it too, you know that.' 'Well, at least there are the two of us tonight, sir.' 'Pardon?'
'I said, at least with the two of us—'
'No! Only you, Lewis. We can't waste precious resources at this unearthly hour.' 'You mean you're not—'
'Me? I'm just going to walk round to, er, talk to our other witness.' 'Who's that?'
'That, Lewis, is Mrs Sheila Williams. She could very well have something vital to tell us. It was Mrs Williams, remember, who ordered the taxi—'
‘But she'll be in bed’
By not the merest flicker of an eyebrow did Morse betray the slightest interest in the prospect of interviewing an attractively proportioned and (most probably) scantily clad woman at such an ungodly hour.
'Well, I shall have to wake her up then, Lewis. Our job, as you rightly say, is full of difficult and sometimes distasteful duties.'
Lewis smiled in spite of himself. Why he ever enjoyed working with this strange, often unsympathetic, superficially quite humourless man, well, he never quite knew. He didn't even know if he did enjoy it. But his wife did. For whenever her husband was working with Morse, Mrs Lewis could recognise a curious contentment in his eyes that was not only good for him, but good for her, too. Very good. And in a strange sort of way, she was almost as big an admirer of Morse as that faithful husband of hers - a husband whose happiness had always been her own.
'Perhaps, I'd better run you round there, sir.'
'No, no, Lewis! The walk may do me good.'
'As you say.'
'Er . . . just one more thing, Lewis. About the Jaguar. I left it just outside St John's, I think. If, er . . .' He held up his car-keys between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand, as if saving his nostrils the distress of some malodorous handkerchief. Then he got out of the car.
As Lewis watched him walk away up to Hamilton Road, he wondered, as he'd so often wondered, what exactly Morse
was thinking; wondered about what was going on in Morse's mind at that very moment; the reading of the clues, those clues to which no one else could see the answers; those glimpses of motive that no one else could ever have suspected; those answers to the sort of questions that no one else had even begun to ask . . .
When Morse opened the ramshackle gate to number 97, his mind was anticipating a potentially most interesting encounter. If a diabetic patient was in need of so-called 'balance' -namely, the appropriate injection of human insulin for the control of blood-sugar levels - equally so did Morse require the occasional balance of some mildly erotic fancy in order to meet the demands of what until recently he had diagnosed as a reasonably healthy libido. Earlier that very week, in fact, as he'd filled up the Jaguar with Gulf-inflated gasoline, he'd found himself surveying the display of the semi-pornographic magazines arranged along the highest shelf above the dailies; and re-acquainted himself with such reasonably familiar titles as Men Only, Escort, Knave, Video XXXX, and so many others, each of them enticing the susceptible motorist with its cover of some provocatively posed woman, vast-breasted and voluptuous. And it was just after he'd flicked through one of them that Detective Constable Hodges (blast his eyes!) had come in, walked over to the newspaper stall, and picked up the top copy but one from the Daily Mirror pile. Morse had immediately picked up a copy of The Times, and proceeded to hold this newspaper like a crusader flaunting his emblazoned shield as he'd stood beside Hodges at the check-out.
'Nice day, sir?'
'Very nice.'
It had seemed to Morse, at that moment, that the dull eyes of Hodges had betrayed not the slightest suspicion of Morse's susceptibility. But even Morse - especially Morse! - was sometimes wholly wrong.
23
Yet the first bringer of unwelcome news
Hath but a losing office
{Shakespeare, King Henry IV, Part 2)
Lewis watched the silhouette gradually form behind the opaque glass in the upper half of the front door.
'Hullo? Who is it?' The voice sounded sharp, and well educated.
'Police, Mrs Kemp. You rang—'
'All right! All right! You took your time. Let me take mine!'
With much clicking of locks and a final scrabbling of a chain, the door was opened, and Lewis looked down with ill-disguised surprise.
'For Heaven's sake! Didn't they tell you I was a cripple?' And before Lewis could reply: "Where's the policewoman?'
'Er, what policewoman, Mrs Kemp?'
‘Well, I'm not going to be put to bed by you - let's get that straight for a start!'
Lewis might almost have been amused by the exchanges thus far, were it not for the heavy burden of the news he was bearing.
'If I could just come in a minute—'
Marion Kemp turned her chair through one hundred and eighty degrees with a couple of flicks of her sinewy wrists, then wheeled herself swiftly and expertly into the front room. 'Close the door behind you, will you? Who are you by the way?'
Lewis identified himself, though Marion Kemp appeared but little interested in the proffered warranty.
'Have you found him yet?' The voice which Lewis had earlier thought well under control now wavered slightly, and with her handkerchief she quickly wiped away the light film of sweat that had formed on her upper lip. 'I'm afraid—' began Lewis.
But for the moment Marion simulated a degree of hospitality. 'Do sit down, Sergeant! The settee is quite comfortable - though I have little first-hand experience of it myself, of course. Now, the only reason I rang - the chief reason - was that I need a little help, as you can see.'
'Yes, I do see. I'm, er, sorry . . .'
'No need! My husband managed to crash into another car on the Ring Road down near Botley.'
'Er, I'll just, er . . .' Lewis had seen the phone in the entrance-hall and with Mrs Kemp's permission he now quickly left the room and rang HQ for a WPC. He felt profoundly uneasy, for he'd known the same sort of thing on several previous occasions: surviving relatives rabbiting on, as if so fearful
of hearing the dreaded information.
'She'll be along soon, madam,' reported Lewis, seating himself again. 'Very dangerous that stretch by the Botley turn . . .’
'Not for the driver, Sergeant! Not on this occasion. One broken collar-bone, and a cut on the back of his shoulder - and even that refused to bleed for more than a couple of minutes.' The bitterness in her voice had become 'so intense that Lewis couldn't think of anything, even anything inadequate, to say. 'It would have been better if he'd killed me, and had done with the whole thing! I'm sure he thinks that. You see, he can't get rid of me - not the way he could get rid of any normal wife. He has to keep coming back all the time to look after my needs when . . . when he'd much rather be out having his needs looked after. You do know what I'm talking about, don't you, Sergeant?'
Lewis knew, yes; but he waited a little, nodding his sympathy to a woman who, for the moment, had said her immediate say.
'What time did your husband leave this morning?' he
asked quietly, noting a pair of nervous eyes suddenly flash across at him.
'Seven-twenty. A taxi called. My husband was banned for three years after he'd killed me.'
Lewis shook his head helplessly: 'He didn't kill you, madam—'
'Yes he did! He killed the woman in the other car - and he killed me, too!'
Lewis it was who broke the long silence between them, and took out his note-book: 'You knew where he was going?'
'His publishers. He's just finished a book and now he's doing some chapters for the new Cambridge History of Early Britain.'
'And he actually - went, did he?'
'Don't be silly! Of course he went. He rang me up from London. The post hadn't come when he left, and he wanted to know if some proofs had arrived.'
'What time did you expect him back?'
'I wasn't sure. There'd been some trouble at The Randolph. You know all about that?'
Lewis nodded - ever dreading that inexorable moment when she, too, would have to know all about something else.
'They'd changed the programme - I forget exactly what he said. But he'd have been home by half-past ten. He's never later than that. . .'
The slim, dark-haired, rather plain woman in the wheelchair was beginning to betray the symptoms of panic. Talk on, Lewis! Write something in that little book of yours. Do anything!
'You've no idea where he might have gone to when he came back from London?'
'No, no, no, Sergeant! How could I? He'd hardly even have the time to see his precious Sheila bloody Williams, would he? That over-sexed, pathetic, alcoholic . . .'
Talk on, Lewis!
'He must have been pretty upset about the Wolvercote Jewel.'
'He'd been waiting long enough to see it.' 'Why didn't he go over to America to see it?' 'I wouldn't let him.’
Lewis looked down at the uncarpeted floor-boards and put his note-book away.
'Oh no! I wasn't going to be left here on my own. Not after what he did to me!'
'Mrs Kemp, I'm afraid I've got—'
But Marion was staring down into some bleak abyss. Her voice, so savagely vindictive just a moment since, was suddenly tremulous and fearful - almost as if she already knew. 'I wasn't very nice to him about if, was I?'
Blessedly the front-door bell rang, and Lewis rose to his feet. 'That'll be the policewoman, Mrs Kemp. I'll - if it's OK - I'll go and . . . Look, there's something we've got to tell you. I'll just go and let her in.'
'He's dead. He's dead, Sergeant, isn't he?'
'Yes, Mrs Kemp. He's dead.'
She made no sound but the tips of her taut and bloodless fingers dug into her temples as if seeking to sever the nerves that carried the message from ears to brain.
24
There are several good protections against temptations, but the surest is cowardice
(Mark Twain, Following the Equator)
'Sit down, Inspector! Can I get you a drink?'
Sheila Williams, fairly sober and fully respectable, was drinking a cup of black coffee.
'What - coffee?'
Sheila shrugged: 'Whatever you like. I've got most things - if you know what I mean.' 'I drink too much as it is.' 'So do I.'
'Look, I know it's late—'
'I'm never in bed before about one - not on my own!' She laughed cruelly at herself. 'You've had a long day.'
'A long boozy day, yeah.' She took a few sips of the hot coffee. 'There's something in one of Kipling's stories about a fellow who says he knows his soul's gone rotten because he can't get drunk any more. You know it?'
Morse nodded. ' "Love o' Women".'
'Yeah! One of the greatest stories of the twentieth century.'
'Nineteenth, I think you'll find.'
'Oh, for Christ's sake! Not a literary copper!' She looked down miserably at the table-top; then looked up again as Morse elaborated:
'It was Mulvaney, wasn't it? "When the liquor does not take hold, the soul of a man is rotten in him." Been part of my mental baggage for many a year.'
'Jesus!' whispered Sheila.
The room in which they sat was pleasantly furnished, with
some good quality pieces, and several interesting and unusual reproductions of Dutch seventeenth-century paintings. A few touches of good taste all round, thought Morse; of femininity, too - with a beribboned teddy-bear seated upright on the settee beside his mistress. And it was in this room, quietly and simply, that Morse told her of the death of Theodore Kemp, considering, in his own strange fashion, that it was perhaps not an inappropriate time for her to know.
For a while Sheila Williams sat quite motionless, her large, brown eyes gradually moistening like pavements in a sudden shower.
'But how . . . why . . . ?'
‘We don't know. We were hoping you might be able to help us. That's why I'm here.' Sheila gaped at him. 'Me?'
'I'm told you had a - well, a bit of a row with him.' ‘Who told you that?' (The voice sharp.) 'One of the group.' That Roscoe bitch!' 'Have another guess.'
'Ugh, forget it! We had a row, yes. God, if anyone was going to kill themselves after that, it was me - me, Inspector - not him.'
'Look! I'm sorry to have to ask you at a time like this—'
'But you want to know what went on between us -between Theo and me.'
'Yes. Yes, I do, Mrs Williams.'
'Sheila! My name's Sheila. What's yours?'
'Morse. They just call me Morse.'
'All bloody "give" on my part, this, isn't it?'
'What did pass between you and Dr Kemp, Mrs - er, Sheila?'
'Only my life - that's what! That's all!' 'Go on.'
'Oh, you wouldn't understand. You're married, I'm sure, with a lovely wife and a couple of lovely kids—' 'I'm a bachelor.'
'Oh, well. That's all right then, isn't it? All right for men.' She drained her coffee and looked, first wildly, then sadly around her.
'G and T?' suggested Morse.
'Why not?'
As Morse poured her drink (and his), he heard her speaking in a dreamy, muted sort of voice, as though dumbfounded by the news she'd heard.
'You know, I was married once, Morse. That's how I got most of this' (gesturing around the room).
'It's nice - the room,' said Morse, conscious that the shabby exterior of the property belied its rather graceful interior, and for a second or two he wondered whether a similar kind of comment might not perhaps be passed on Mrs Williams herself . . .
'Oh, yes. He had impeccable taste. That's why he left me for some other woman - one who didn't booze and do embarrassing things, or get moody, or stupid, or passionate.'
'And Dr Kemp - he'd found another woman, too?' asked Morse, cruelly insistent. Yet her answer surprised him.
'Oh, no! He'd already found her; found her long before he found me!'
'Who—'
'His wife - his bloody wife! He was always looking at his watch and saying he'd have to go and—'
She burst into tears and Morse walked diffidently over to the
settee, where he temporarily displaced the teddy-bear, put his right arm along her shoulder, and held her to him as she sobbed away the storm.
'I don't know whether I'm in shock or just suffering from a hangover.'
'You don't get hangovers at this time of night.'
'Morning!'
'Morning.'
She nuzzled her wet cheek against his face: 'You're nice.' 'You've no idea why Dr Kemp—?' 'Might kill himself? No!'
'I didn't say "kill himself''.’
'You mean—?' For a few seconds she recoiled from him, her eyes dilated with horror. 'You can't mean that he was murdered?'
'We can't be sure, not yet. But you must be honest with me, please. Did you know anyone who might have wanted to kill him?'
'Yes! Me, Inspector. Kill his wife as well while I was at it!'
Morse sedately disentangled himself from Mrs Williams. 'Look, if there's anything at all you think I ought to know . . .'
'You don't really think I had anything to do with -with whatever's happened?'
'You were seen walking up St Giles' towards North Oxford, just after lunch yesterday. And it wasn't Mrs Roscoe this time, either. It was Sergeant Lewis.'
'I was going - ' replied Sheila slowly, 'I went - to the Bird and Baby. Would you like a guess, this time? A guess about what I went for?'
'You were on your own there, in the pub?'
'Ye-es.' She had hesitated sufficiently, though.
'But you saw someone in there?'
'No. But - but I saw someone cycling past; cycling up towards Banbury Road. It was Cedric - Cedric Downes. And he saw me. I know he did.'
Morse was silent.
'You do believe me, don't you?'
'One of the secrets of solving murders is never to believe anybody - not completely - not at the start.'
'You don't really see me as a suspect, surely!'
Morse smiled at her: 'I promise to take you off the list as soon as possible.'
'You know, I've never been suspected of murder before. Thank you for being so civilised about it.'
'It'll be just as well if you don't say anything to the group about it. Not till we're a bit further forward.'
