Death is now my neighbour - Morse 12 Read online

'Are you?'

  'No.'

  'Do you wish you were?'

  Perhaps Morse didn't hear the question.

  'Did you know Rachel James fairly well?'

  'We had a heart-to-heart once in a while.'

  You weren't aware of any one particular boyfriend?'

  She shook her head.

  'Would you say she was attractive to men?'

  'Wouldn't you?'

  'I only saw her the once.'

  'I'm sorry.' She said it quietly. 'Please, forgive me.'

  'Do you know a man called Storrs? Julian Storrs?'

  'Good gracious, yes! Julian? He's one of our Vice-Presidents. We often meet at do's. In fact, I'm seeing him next week at a fund-raising dinner at The Randolph. Would you like a complimentary ticket?'

  'No, perhaps not,'

  'Shouldn't have asked, should I? Anyway,' she got to her feet, 'I'll have to be off. They'll be starting the count fairly soon.'

  They walked to the front door.

  'Er ... when you rang Mr Owens on Monday morning, just after eight o'clock you say, you did speak to him, didn't you?'

  'Of course.'

  Morse nodded. 'And one final thing, please. My sergeant found some French letters—'

  'French letters? How old are you, Chief Inspector? Condoms, for heaven's sake.'

  'As I say, we found two packets of, er, condoms in one of her bedroom drawers.'

  'Big deal!'

  'You don't know if she ever invited anyone home to sleep with her?' 'No, I don't.'

  'I thought,' said Morse hesitantly, 'most women were on the pill these days?'

  'A lot of them off it, too - after that thrombosis scare.'

  ‘I suppose so, yes. I'm ... I'm not really an expert in that sort of thing.'

  'And don't forget safe sex.'

  'No. I'll... I'll try not to.'

  'Did she keep them under her nighties?'

  Morse nodded sadly, and bade goodnight to Adele Beatrice Cecil.

  ABC.

  As he walked slowly along to the Jaguar, he felt a slight tingling behind the eyes at the thought of Rachel James, and the nightdress she'd been wearing when she was murdered; and the condoms so carefully concealed in her lingerie drawer - along with the hopes and fears she'd had, like everyone. And he thought of Auden's immortal line on A. E. Housman:

  Kept tears like dirty postcards in a drawer.

  As he started the Jaguar, Morse noticed the semi-stroboscopic light inside the lounge; and trusted that PC Brogan had managed to activate the heating system in Number 17 Bloxham Drive.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  O Beer! O Hodgson, Guinness, Allsopp, Bass! Names that should be on every infant's tongue!

  (Charles Stuart Calverly)

  MORSE HEADED SOUTH along the Banbury Road, turning left just after the Cutteslowe Roundabout, and through the adjoining Carlton and Wolsey Roads (why hadn't the former been christened 'Cardinal'?); then, at the bottom of the Cutteslowe Estate, down the steeply sloping entry to the Cherwell, a quietly civilized public house where the quietly civilized landlord kept an ever-watchful eye on the Brakspear and the Bass. The car-phone rang as he unfastened his safety belt. Lewis.

  Speaking from HQ.

  'I thought I'd told you to go home! The eggs and chips are getting cold.'

  Lewis, as Morse earlier, showed himself perfectly competent at ignoring a question.

  'I've had a session on the phone with Ox and Cow Newspapers, sir - still at work there, quite a few of them. Owens' car-park card is number 14922 and it was registered by the barrier contraption there at 7.04 on Monday morning. Seems he's been in fairly early these last couple of months. Last week, for example, Monday to Friday, 7.37, 7.06, 7.11, 7.00, 7.18.'

  'So what? Shows he can't get up that early on Monday mornings.'

  "That's not all, though.'

  'It is, Lewis! It's still the card you're on about - not the car! Can't you see that?'

  'Please listen to me for a change, sir. The personnel fellow who looked out the car-park things for me, he just happened to be in earlyish last Monday morning himself: 7.22. There weren't many others around then, but one of the ones who was ... Guess who, sir?'

  'Oh dear!' said Morse for the second time that evening.

  Yep. Owens! Pony-tail 'n' all.'

  'Oh.'

  In that quiet monosyllable Lewis caught the depth of Morse's disappointment Yet he felt far from dismayed himself, knowing full well as he did, after so many murder investigations with the pair of them in harness, that Morse's mind was almost invariably at its imaginative peak when one of his ill-considered, top-of-the-head hypotheses had been razed to the ground - in this case by some lumbering bulldozer like himself. And so he understood the silence at the other end of the line: a long silence, like that at the Cenotaph in commemoration of the fallen.

  Lewis seldom expected (seldom received) any thanks. And in truth such lack of recognition concerned him little, since only rarely did Morse show the slightest sign of graciousness or gratitude to anyone.

  Yet he did so now.

  "Thank you, my old friend.'

  At the bar Morse ordered a pint of Bass and proceeded to drink it speedily.

  At the bar Morse ordered a second pint of Bass and proceeded to drink it even more speedily - before leaving and driving out once more to Bloxham Drive, where no one was abroad and where the evening's TV programmes appeared to be absorbing the majority of the households.

  Including Number 17.

  The Jaguar door closed behind him with its accustomed aristocratic click, and he walked slowly through the drizzle along the street. Still the same count: six for Labour; two for the Tories; and two apparently unprepared to parade their political allegiances.

  Yes! YES!

  Almost everything (he saw it now so clearly) had been pushing his mind towards that crucial clue - towards the breakthrough in the case.

  It had not been Owens who had murdered Rachel James - almost certainly he couldn't have done it, anyway.

  And that late evening, as if matching his slow-paced walk, a slow and almost beatific smile had settled round the mouth of Chief Inspector Morse.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Friday, 23 February

  Thirteen Unlucky: The Turks so dislike the number that the word is almost expunged from their vocabulary. The Italians never use it in making up the numbers of their lotteries. In Paris, no house bears that number

  (Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable)

  As LEWIS PULLED into Bloxham Drive, he was faced with an unfamiliar sight: a smiling, expansive-looking Morse was leaning against the front gate of Number 17, engaged in a relaxed, impromptu press conference with one camera crew (ITV), four reporters (two from national, two from local newspapers - but no Owens), and three photographers. Compared with previous mornings, the turn-out was disappointing. It was 9.05 a.m.

  Lewis just caught the tail-end of things. 'So it'll be a waste of time - staying on here much longer. You won't expect me to go into details, of course, but I can tell you that we've finished our investigations in this house.'

  If the 'this' were spoken with a hint of some audial semi-italicization, it was of no moment, for no one appeared to notice it.

  'Any leads? Any new leads?'

  'To the murder of Rachel James, you mean?' 'Who else?'

  'No. No new leads at all, really ... Well, perhaps one.'

  On which cryptic note, Morse raised his right hand to forestall the universal pleas for clarification, and with a genial - perhaps genuine? - smile, he turned away.

  'Drive me round the block a couple of times, Lewis. I'd rather all these people buggered off, and I don't think they're going to stay much longer if they see us go.'

  Nor did they.

  Ten minutes later the detectives returned to find the Drive virtually deserted.

  'How many houses are there here, Lewis?'

  'Not sure.' From Number 17 Lewis looked along to the end of the row. Two other hou
ses - presumably Numbers 19 and 21, although the figures from the front gate of the latter had been removed. Then he looked across to the other side of the street where the last even-numbered house was 20. The answer, therefore, appeared to be reasonably obvious.

  'Twenty-one.'

  'That's an odd number, isn't it?'

  Lewis frowned. 'Did you think I thought it was an even number?'

  Morse smiled. ‘I didn't mean "odd" as opposed to "even"; I meant "odd" as opposed to "normal".' 'Oh!'

  'Lew-is! You don't build a street of terraced houses with one side having ten and the other side having eleven, now do you? You get a bit of symmetry into things; a bit of regularity.'

  'If you say so.'

  'And I do say so!' snapped Morse, with the conviction of a fundamentalist preacher asserting the divine authority of Holy Writ.

  'No need to be so sharp, sir.'

  'I should have spotted it from day one! From those political stickers, Lewis! Let's count, OK?'

  The two men walked along the odd-numbered side of Bloxham Drive. And Lewis nodded: six Labour; two Tory; two don't-knows.

  Ten.

  "You see, Lewis, we've perhaps been a little misled by these minor acts of vandalism here. We've got several houses minus the numbers originally screwed into their front gates - and their back gates. So we were understandably confused.'

  Lewis agreed. 'I still am, sir.'

  'How many odd numbers are there between one and twenty-one - inclusive?'

  'I reckon it's ten, sir. So I suppose there must be eleven.'

  Morse grinned. 'Write 'em down!' So Lewis did, in his notebook:

  1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, 15, 17, 19, 21.

  Then counted them. ‘I was right, sir. Eleven.' 'But only ten houses, Lewis.' 'I don't quite follow.'

  'Of course you do. It happens quite often in hotel floors and hotel room numbers ... and street numbers. They miss one of them out.'

  Enlightenment dawned on Lewis's honest features.

  'Number thirteen!'

  'Exactly! Do you know there used to be people in France called "fourteeners" who made a living by going along to dinner parties where the number of guests was thirteen?'

  'Where do you find all these bits and pieces?'

  'Do you know, I think I saw that on the back of a matchbox in a pub in Grimsby. I've learned quite a lot in life from the back of matchboxes.'

  'What's it all got to do with the case, though?'

  Morse reached for Lewis's notebook, and put brackets round the seventh number. Then, underneath the first few numbers, he wrote in an arrow, pointing from left to right.

  'Lewis! If you were walking along the back of the houses, starting from Number 1 - she must be feeling a bit sore about the election, by the way ... Well, let's just go along there.'

  The two men walked to the rear of the terrace, where (as we have seen) several of the back gates had been sadly, if not too seriously, vandalized.

  'Get your list, Lewis, and as we go along, just put a ring round those gates where we haven't got a number, all right?'

  At the end of the row, Lewis's original list, with its successive emendations, appeared as follows:

  1, 3, 5, (7) 9, 11, 13, (15) (17) 19, (2l)

  You see,' said Morse, 'the vandalism gets worse the further you get into the Close, doesn't it? As it gets further from the main road.'

  Yes.'

  'So just picture things. You've got a revolver and you walk along the back here in the half-light. You know the number you want. You know the morning routine, too: breakfast at about seven. All you've got to do is knock on the kitchen window, wait till you see the silhouette behind the thin blind, the silhouette of a face with one distinctive feature - a pony-tail. You walk along the back; you see Number 11; you move along to the next house -Number 13- you think! And so the house after that must be Number 15. And to confirm things, there's the pony-tailed silhouette. You press the trigger - and there you have it, Lewis! The Horseman passes by. But you've got it wrong, haven't you? Your intended victim is living at Number 15, not Number 17!'

  'So,' said Lewis slowly, 'whoever stood at the kitchen window thought he - or she - was firing

  Morse nodded sombrely. Yes. Not at Rachel James, but Geoffrey Owens.'

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Men entitled to bleat BA after their names (D. S. MacColl)

  THE SENIOR COMMON Room at Lonsdale is comparatively small, and for this reason has a rather more intimate air about it than some of the spacious SCRs in the larger Oxford Colleges. Light-coloured, beautifully grained oak-panelling encloses the room on all sides, its colouring complemented by the light-brown leather sofas and armchairs there. Copies of almost all the national dailies, including the Sun and the Mirror, are to be found on the glass-topped coffee-tables; and indeed it is usually these tabloids which are flipped through first - sometimes intently studied - by the majority of the dons.

  Forgathered here on the evening of Friday, 23 February (7.00 for 7.30) was a rather overcrowded throng of dons, accompanied by wives, partners, friends, to enjoy a Guest Night - an occasion celebrated by the College four times per term. A white-coated scout stood by the door with a silver tray holding thinly fluted glasses of sherry: either the pale-amber 'dry' variety or the darker brown 'medium', for it was a basic assumption in such a setting that no one could ever wish for the deeply umbered 'sweet'.

  A begowned Jasper Bradley took a glass of dry, drained it at a swallow, put the glass back on to the tray, and took another. He was particularly pleased with himself that day; and with the Classical Quarterly, whose review of Greek Moods and Tenses (J. J. Bradley, 204 pp, £45.50, Classical Press) contained the wonderful lines which Bradley had now by heart:

  A small volume, but one which plumbs the unfathomed mysteries of the aorist subjunctive with imaginative insights into the very origins of language.

  Yes. He felt decidedly chuffed.

  'How's tricks?' he asked, looking up at Donald Franks, a very tall astrophysicist, recently head-hunted from Cambridge, whose dark, lugubrious features suggested that for his part he'd managed few imaginative insights that week into the origins of the universe.

  'So-so.'

  'Who d'you fancy then?' 'What - of the women here?' 'For the Master's job.' 'Dunno.'

  'Who'll you vote for?' 'Secret ballot, innit?'

  Mr and Mrs Denis Cornford now came in, each taking a glass of the medium sherry. Shelly looked extremely attractive and perhaps a little skimpily dressed for such a chilly evening. She wore a lightweight white two-piece suit; and as she bent down to pick up a cheese-nibble her low-cut, bottle-green blouse gaped open to reveal a splendid glimpse of her beautiful breasts. 'Je-sus!' muttered Bradley.

  'She certainly flouts her tits a bit,' mumbled the melancholy Franks.

  ‘You mean "flaunts" 'em, I think.'

  'If you say so,' said Franks, slightly wounded.

  Bradley moved to the far end of the room where Angela Storrs stood talking to a small priest, clothed all in black, with buckled shoes and leggings.

  'All, Jasper! Come and meet Father Dooley from Sligo.’

  Clearly Angela Storrs had decided she had now done her duty; for soon she drifted away - tall, long-legged, wearing a dark-grey trouser-suit with a white high-necked jumper. There was about her an almost patrician mien, her face high-cheekboned and pale, with the hair swept back above her ears and fastened in a bun behind. It was obvious to all that she had been a very attractive woman. But she was aging a little too quickly perhaps; and the fact that over the last two or three years she had almost invariably worn trousers did little to discourage the belief that her legs had succumbed to an unsightly cordage of varicose veins. If she were on sale in an Arab wife-market (in the cruel words of one of the younger dons) she would have passed her best-before date several years earlier.

  ‘I knew the Master many years ago - and his poor wife. Yes ... that was long ago,' mused the little priest.

  Bradley was ready with the a
ppropriate response of scholarly compassion.

  'Times change, yes. Tempora mutantur: et nos mutamur in illis.'

  'I think,' said the priest, 'that the line should read: Tempora mutantur: nos et mutamur in illis. Otherwise the hexameter won't scan, will it?'

  'Of course it won't, sorry.'

  The scout now politely requested dons - wives -partners - guests - to proceed to the Hall. And Jasper Bradley, eminent authority on the aorist subjunctive in Classical Greek, walked out of the SCR more than slightly wounded.

  Sir Clixby Bream brought up the rear as the room emptied, and lightly touched the bottom of Angela Storrs standing just in front of him.

  Sotto voce he lied into her ear "You're looking ravishing tonight. And I'll tell you something else - I'd far rather be in bed with you now than face another bloody Guest Night,'

  'So would I!' she lied, in a whisper. 'And I've got a big favour to ask of you, too.'

  'We'll have a word about it after the port.'

  'Before the port, Clixby! You're usually blotto after it'

  Sir Clixby banged his gavel, mumbled Benedictus benedicat, and the assembled company seated themselves, the tableplan having positioned Julian Storrs and Denis Cornford at diagonally opposite ends of the thick oak table, with their wives virtually opposite each other in the middle.

  ‘I love your suit!' lied Shelly Cornford, in a not unpleasing Yankee twang.

  You look very nice, too,' lied Angela Storrs, smiling widely and showing such white and well-aligned teeth that no one could be in much doubt that her upper plate had been disproportionately expensive.

  After which preliminary skirmish, each side observed a dignified truce, with neither a further word nor a further glance between them during the rest of the dinner.

  At the head of the table, the little priest sat on the Master's right.

  Just the two candidates, I hear?' he said quietly.

  Just the two: Julian Storrs and Denis Cornford.'

  'The usual shenanigans, I assume? The usual horse-trading? Clandestine cabals?'

  'Oh no, nothing like that. We're all very civilized here.'

  'How do you know that?'

  'Well, you've only got to hear what people say - the way they say it'

  The little priest pushed away his half-eaten guinea-fowl.