Death Is Now My Neighbor Page 2

  —DONET, Principles of Elementary Latin Syntax

  It is perhaps unusual to begin a tale of murder with a reminder to the reader of the rules governing conditional sentences in a language that is incontrovertibly dead. In the present case, however, such a course appears not wholly inappropriate.

  If (if) Chief Inspector Morse had been on hand to observe the receptionist’s dress—an irregularly triangled affair in blues, grays, and reds—he might have been reminded of the uniform issued to a British Airways stewardess. More probably, though, he might not, since he had never flown on British Airways. His only flight during the previous decade had occasioned so many fears concerning his personal survival that he had determined to restrict all future travel to those statistically far more precarious means of conveyance—the car, the coach, the train, and the steamer.

  Yet almost certainly the Chief Inspector would have noted, with approval, the receptionist herself, for in Yorkshire she would have been reckoned a bonny lass: a vivacious, dark-eyed woman, long-legged and well-figured; a woman—judging from her ringless, well-manicured fingers—not overtly advertising any marital commitment, and not averse, perhaps, to the occasional overture from the occasional man.

  Pinned at the top left of her colorful dress was a name tag: “Dawn Charles.”

  Unlike several of her friends (certainly unlike Morse) she was quite content with her Christian name. Sometimes she’d felt slightly dubious about it; but no longer. Out with some friends in the Bird and Baby the previous month, she’d been introduced to a rather dashing, rather dishy undergraduate from Pembroke College. And when, a little later, she’d found herself doodling inconsequentially on a Burton beer mat, the young man, on observing her sinistrality, had initiated a wholly memorable conversation.

  “Dawn? That is your name?”

  She’d nodded.

  “Left-handed?”

  She’d nodded.

  “Do you know that line from Omar Khayyam? ‘Dreaming when Dawn’s left hand was in the sky.…’ Lovely, isn’t it?”

  Yes, it was. Lovely.

  She’d peeled the top off the beer mat and made him write it down for her.

  Then, very quietly, he’d asked her if he could see her again. At the start of the new term, perhaps?

  She’d known it was silly, for there must have been at least twenty years’ difference in their ages. If only … if only he’d been ten, a dozen years older …

  But people did do silly things, and hoped their silly hopes. And that very day, January 15, was the first full day of the new Hilary Term in the University of Oxford.

  Her Monday–Friday job, 6–10 P.M., at the clinic on Banbury Road (just north of St. Giles’) was really quite enjoyable. Over three years of it now, and she was becoming a fixture there. Most of the consultants greeted her with a genuine smile; several of them, these days, with her Christian name.

  Nice.

  She’d once stayed at a four-star hotel which offered a glass of sherry to incoming guests; and although the private Harvey Clinic was unwilling (perhaps on medical grounds?) to provide such laudable hospitality, Dawn ever kept two jugs of genuine coffee piping hot for her clients, most of them soberly suited and well-heeled gentlemen. A number of whom, as she well knew, were most seriously ill.

  Yes, there had been several occasions when she had heard a few brief passages of conversation between consultant and client which she shouldn’t have heard; or which, having heard, she should have forgotten; and which she should never have been willing to report to anyone.

  Not even to the police.

  Quite certainly not to the Press …

  As it happened, January 15 was to prove a day unusually easy for her to recall, since it marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the clinic’s opening in 1971. By prior negotiation and arrangement, the clinic was visited that evening, between 7 P.M. and 8:30 P.M., by Radio Oxford, by the local press, and by Mr. Wesley Smith and his crew from the Central TV studios out at Abingdon. And particularly memorable for Dawn had been those precious moments when the camera had focused upon her: first, when (as instructed) she had poured a cup of genuine coffee for a wholly bogus “client”; second, when the cameraman had moved behind her left shoulder as she ran a felt-tipped pen through a name on the appointments list in front of her—but only, of course, after a full assurance that no viewer would be able to read the name itself when the feature was shown the following evening.

  Yet Dawn Charles was always to remember the name:

  Mr. J. C. Storrs.

  It had been a fairly new name to her—another of those patients, as Dawn suspected correctly, whose influence and affluence afforded the necessary leverage and money to jump the queues awaiting their calls to the hospitals up in Headington.

  There was something else she would always remember, too.…

  By one of those minor coincidences (so commonplace in Morse’s life) it had been just as most of the personnel from the media were preparing to leave, at almost exactly 8:30 P.M., that Mr. Robert Turnbull, the Senior Cancer Consultant, had passed her desk, nodded a greeting, and walked slowly to the exit, his right hand resting on the shoulder of Mr. J. C. Storrs. The two men were talking quietly together for some while—Dawn was certain of that. But certain of little else. The look on the consultant’s face, as far as she could recall, had been neither that of a judge who has just condemned a man to death, nor that of one just granting a prisoner his freedom.

  No obvious grimness.

  No obvious joy.

  And indeed there was adequate cause for such uncertainty on Dawn’s part, since the scene had been partially masked from her by the continued presence of several persons: a ponytailed reporter scribbling a furious shorthand as he interviewed a nurse; the TV crew packing away its camera and tripods; the Lord Mayor speaking some congratulatory words into a Radio Oxford microphone—all of them standing between her and the top of the three blue-carpeted stairs which led down to the double-doored exit, outside which were affixed the vertical banks of well-polished brass plates, ten on each side, the fourth from the top on the left reading:

  ROBERT H. TURNBULL

  If only Dawn Charles could have recalled a little more.

  “If”—that little conjunction introducing those unfulfilled conditions in past time which, as Donet reminds us, demand the pluperfect subjunctive in both clauses—a syntactical rule which Morse himself had mastered early on in an education which had been far more fortunate than that enjoyed by the receptionist at the Harvey Clinic.

  Indeed, over the next two weeks, most people in Oxford were destined to be considerably more fortunate than Dawn Charles: She received no communication from the poetry lover of Pembroke; her mother was admitted to a psychiatric ward out at Littlemore; she was twice reminded by her bank manager of the increasing problems arising from the large margin of negative equity on her small flat; and finally, on Monday morning, January 29, she was to hear on Fox FM Radio that her favorite consultant, Mr. Robert H. Turnbull, MB, ChB, FRCS, had been fatally injured in a car accident on Cumnor Hill.

  Chapter Two

  The Master shall not continue in his post beyond the age of sixty-seven. As a simple rule, therefore, the incumbent Master will be requested to give notice of impending retirement during the University term immediately prior to that birthday. Where, however, such an accommodation does not present itself, the Master is required to propose a particular date no later than the end of the first week of the second full term after the statutory termination (vide supra).

  —Paragraph 2 (a), translated from the Latin, from

  the Founders’ Statutes of Lonsdale College, Oxford

  Sir Clixby Bream would be almost sixty-nine years old when he retired as Master of Lonsdale. A committee of Senior Fellows, including two eminent Latin scholars, had found itself unable to interpret the gobbledegook of the Founders’ Statutes (vide supra); and since no “accommodation” (whatever that was) had presented itself, Sir Clixby had first been persuaded to
stay on for a short while—then for a longer while.

  Yet this involved no hardship.

  He was subject to none of the normal pressures about moving to somewhere nearer the children or the grandchildren, since his marriage to Lady Muriel had been sine prole. Moreover, he was blessedly free from the usual uxorial bleatings about a nice little thatched cottage in Dorset or Devon, since Lady Muriel had been in her grave these past three years.

  The position of Head of House at any of the Oxbridge Colleges was just about the acme of academic ambition; and since three of the last four Masters had been knighted within eighteen months of their appointments, it had been natural for him to be attracted by the opportunity of such pleasing preferment. And he had been so attracted; as, even more strongly, had the late Lady Muriel.

  Indeed, the incumbent Master, a distinguished mathematician in his earlier days, had never enjoyed living anywhere as much as in Oxford—ten years of it now. He’d learned to love the old city more and more the longer he was there: It was as simple as that. Of course he was somewhat saddened by the thought of his imminent retirement: He would miss the College—miss the challenges of running the place—and he knew that the sight of the furniture van outside the wisteria-clad front of the Master’s Lodge would occasion some aching regret. But there were a few unexpected consolations, perhaps. In particular, he would be able (he supposed) to sit back and survey with a degree of detachment and sardonic amusement the infighting that would doubtless arise among his potential successors.

  It was the duty of the Fellows’ Appointments Committee (its legality long established by one of the more readily comprehensible of the College Statutes) to stipulate three conditions for those seeking election as Master: first, that any candidate should be “of sound mind and in good health”; second, that the candidate should “not have taken Holy Orders”; third, that the candidate should have no criminal record within “the territories administered under the governance of His (or Her) Most Glorious Majesty.”

  Such stipulations had often amused the present Master.

  If one judged by the longevity of almost all the Masters appointed during the twentieth century, physical well-being had seldom posed much of a problem; yet mental stability had never been a particularly prominent feature of his immediate predecessor, nor (by all accounts) of his predecessor’s predecessor. And occasionally Sir Clixby wondered what the College would say of himself once he was gone.… With regard to the exclusion of the clergy, he assumed that the Founders (like Edward Gibbon three centuries later) had managed to trace the source of all human wickedness back to the Popes and the Prelates, and had rallied to the cause of anticlericalism.… But it was the possibility of the candidate’s criminality which was the most amusing. Presumably any convictions for murder, rape, sodomy, treason, or similar misdemeanors, were to be discounted if shown to have taken place outside the jurisdiction of His (or Her) Most Glorious Majesty. Very strange.

  Strangest of all, however, was the absence of any mention in the original Statute of academic pedigree; and, at least theoretically, there could be no bar to a candidate presenting himself with only a Grade E in GCSE Media Studies. Nor was there any stipulation that the successful candidate should be a senior (or, for that matter, a junior) member of the College, and on several occasions “outsiders” had been appointed. Indeed, he himself, Sir Clixby, had been imported into Oxford from “the other place,” and then (chiefly) in recognition of his reputation as a resourceful fund-raiser.

  On this occasion, however, outsiders seemed out of favor. The College itself could offer at least two candidates, each of whom would be an admirable choice; or so it was thought. In the Senior Common Room the consensus was most decidedly in favor of such “internal” preferment, and the betting had hardened accordingly.

  By some curious omission no entry had hitherto been granted to either of these ante-post favorites in the pages of Who’s Who. From which one may be forgiven for concluding that the aforesaid work is rather more concerned with the third cousins of secondary aristocrats than with eminent academics. Happily, however, both of these personages had been considered worthy of mention in Debrett’s People of Today 1995:

  STORRS, Julian Charles; b. July 9, 1935; Educ. Christ’s Hosp., Emmanuel Coll., Cambridge (BA, MA); m. Angela Miriam Martin March 31, 1974; Career Capt. RA (Indian Army Reserve); Pitt Rivers Reader in Social Anthropology and Senior Fellow Lonsdale Coll., Oxford; Recreations taking taxis, playing bridge.

  CORNFORD, Denis Jack; b. April 23, 1942; Educ. Wyggeston GS Leicester, Magdalen Coll., Oxford (MA, DPhil); m. Shelly Ann Benson May 28, 1994; Career University Reader in Medieval History and Fellow Lonsdale Coll., Oxford; Recreations kite flying, cultivation of orchids.

  Each of these entries may appear comparatively uninformative. Yet perhaps in the more perceptive reader they may provoke one or two interesting considerations.

  Was, for example, the Senior Fellow of Lonsdale so affluent that he could afford to take a taxi everywhere? Did he never travel by car, coach, or train? Well, quite certainly on special occasions he would travel by train.

  Oh, yes.

  As we shall see.

  And why was Dr. Cornford, soon to be fifty-four years old, so recently converted to the advantages of latter-day matrimony? Had he met some worthy woman of comparable age?

  Oh, no.

  As we shall see.

  Chapter Three

  How right

  I should have been to keep away, and let

  You have your innocent-guilty-innocent night

  Of switching partners in your own sad set:

  How useless to invite

  The sickening breathlessness of being young

  Into my life again.

  —PHILIP LARKIN, The Dance

  Denis Cornford, omnium consensu, was a fine historian. Allied with a mind both sharp and rigorously honest was a capacity for the assemblage and interpretation of evidence that was the envy of the History Faculty at Oxford. Yet in spite of such qualities, he was best known for a brief monograph on the Battle of Hastings, in which he maintained that the momentous conflict between Harold of England and William of Normandy had taken place one year earlier than universally acknowledged. In 1065.

  In the Trinity Term of 1994, Cornford—a slimly built, smallish, pleasantly featured man—had taken sabbatical leave at Harvard; and there—somehow and somewhere, in Cambridge, Massachusetts—something quite extraordinary had occurred. For six months later, to the amazement and amusement of his colleagues, the confirmed bachelor of Lonsdale had returned to Oxford with a woman who had agreed to change her name from Shelly Benson to Shelly Cornford: a student from Harvard who had just gained her Master’s degree in American History, twenty-six years old—exactly half the age of her new husband (for this was her second marriage).

  It is perhaps not likely that Shelly would have reached the semifinal heats of any Miss Massachusetts beauty competition: her jawline was slightly too square, her shoulders rather too strong, and her legs perhaps a little on the sturdy side. Yet there were a good many in Lonsdale College—both dons and undergraduates—who were to experience a curious attraction to the woman now putting in fairly regular appearances in Chapel, at Guest Nights, and at College functions during the Michaelmas Term of 1994. Her wavy, shoulder-length brown hair framed a face in which the widely set dark brown eyes seemed sometimes to convey the half-promise of a potential intimacy, while her quietly voiced New England accent could occasionally sound as sweetly sensual as some enchantress’s.

  Many were the comments made about the former Shelly Benson during those first few terms. But no one could ever doubt what Denis Cornford had seen in her, for it was simply what others could now so clearly see for themselves. So from the start Shelly Cornford was regularly lusted after; her husband secretly envied. But the couple themselves appeared perfectly happy: no hint of infidelity on her part; no cause for jealousy on his.

  Not yet.

  Frequently during those day
s they were to be seen walking hand-in-hand the short distances from their rooms in Holywell Street to the King’s Arms, or the Turf Tavern (“Find Us If You Can!”), where in bars blessedly free from jukebox and fruit-machine Shelly had quickly acquired a taste for real ale and a love for the ambience of the English public house.

  Occasionally the two of them ventured farther afield in and around Oxford; and one evening, just before Christmas 1994, they had taken the No. 2 bus from Cornmarket up to another King’s Arms, the one in the Banbury road, where amid many unashamedly festive young revelers Cornford watched as his (equally young) wife, with eyes half-closed, had rocked her shoulders sensuously to the thudding rhythm of some pop music, her black-stockinged thighs alternately lifted and lowered as though she were mentally disco dancing. And at that point he was conscious of being the oldest person in the bar, by about twenty years; inhabiting alien territory there; wholly excluded from the magic circle of the night; and suddenly sadly aware that he could never even begin to share the girlish animality of the woman he had married.

  Cornford had said nothing that evening.

  Nor had he said anything when, three months later, at the end-of-term Gaudy, he had noticed, beneath the table, the left hand of Julian Storrs pressed briefly against Shelly’s right thigh as she sat drinking rather a lot of Madeira, after drinking rather a lot of red wine at dinner, after drinking rather a lot of gin at the earlier reception … her chair perhaps unnecessarily close to the Senior Fellow seated on her right, the laughing pair leaning together in some whispered, mutual, mouth-to-ear exchange. Perhaps it was all perfectly harmless; and Cornford sought to make little of it. Yet he ought (he knew it!) to have said a few words on that occasion—lightly, with a heavy heart.

  It was only late in the Michaelmas Term 1995 that Cornford finally did say something to his wife.…