The Dead of Jericho Read online

  The phone rang at twenty minutes past one.

  Mrs Murdoch placed her hand tactfully on his shoulder and spoke very quietly. ‘Call for you.’ Her keen eyes had noticed everything, of course; and she was amused and – yes! – quite pleased that things were turning out so sweetly for the pair of them. Pity to interrupt. But, after all, he’d mentioned to her that he might be called away.

  He picked up the receiver in the hallway. ‘What? . . . Lewis? What the hell do you have to . . .? Oh! . . . Oh! . . . All right’ He looked at his wristwatch. ‘Yes! Yes! I said so, didn’t I?’ He banged down the receiver and walked back into the lounge.

  She sat just as he had left her, her eyes questioning him as he stood there. ‘Anything wrong?’

  ‘No, not really. It’s just that I’ve got to be off, I’m afraid. I’m sorry—’

  ‘But you’ve got time to see me home, haven’t you? Please!’

  ‘I’m sorry, I can’t. You see, I’m on, er, on call tonight and—’

  ‘Are you a doctor or something?’

  ‘Policeman.’

  ‘Oh, God!’

  ‘I’m sorry—’

  ‘You keep saying that!’

  ‘Don’t let’s finish up like this,’ he said quietly.

  ‘No. That would be silly, wouldn’t it? I’m sorry, too – for getting cross, I mean. It’s just that . . .’ She looked up at him, her eyes now dull with disappointment. ‘Perhaps the fates—’

  ‘Nonsense! There’s no such bloody thing!’

  ‘Don’t you believe in—?’

  ‘Can we meet again?’

  She took a diary from her handbag, tore out a page from the back, and quickly wrote: 9 Canal Reach.

  ‘The car’s here,’ said Mrs Murdoch.

  The man nodded and turned as if to go. But he had to ask it. ‘You’re married, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes, but—’

  ‘One of the brothers in the company?’

  Was it surprise? Or was it suspicion that flashed momentarily in her eyes before she answered him. ‘No, it wasn’t. I was married long before that. In fact, I was silly enough to get married when I was nineteen, but—’

  A rather thickset man walked into the lounge and came diffidently over to them. ‘Ready, sir?’

  ‘Yes.’ He turned to look at her for the last time, wanting to tell her something, but unable to find the words.

  ‘You’ve got my address?’ she whispered.

  He nodded. ‘I don’t know your name, though.’

  ‘Anne. Anne Scott.’

  He smiled – almost happily.

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘They call me Morse,’ said the policeman.

  Morse fastened his safety belt as the police car crossed the Banbury Road roundabout and accelerated down the hill towards Kidlington.

  ‘Where do you say you’re dragging me to, Lewis?’

  ‘Woodstock Crescent, sir. Chap’s knifed his missus in one of the houses there. No trouble, though. He came into the station a few minutes after he’d killed her.’

  ‘Doesn’t surprise you, Lewis, does it? In the great majority of murder cases the identity of the accused is apparent virtually from the start. You realize that? In about 40 per cent of such cases he’s arrested, almost immediately, at or very near the scene of the crime – usually, and mercifully for the likes of you, Lewis, because he hasn’t made the slightest effort to escape. Now – let me get it right – in about 50 per cent of cases the victim and the accused have had some prior relationship with each other, often a very close relationship.’

  ‘Interesting, sir,’ said Lewis as he turned off left just opposite the Thames Valley Police HQ. ‘You been giving another one of your lectures?’

  ‘It was all in the paper this morning,’ said Morse, surprised to find how soberly he’d spoken.

  The car made its way through a maze of darkened side streets until Morse saw the flashing blue lights of an ambulance outside a mean-looking house in Woodstock Crescent. He slowly unfastened his seat belt and climbed out. ‘By the way, Lewis, do you know where Canal Reach is?’

  ‘I think so, yes, sir. It’s down in Oxford. Down in Jericho.’

  BOOK ONE

  CHAPTER ONE

  A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho

  Luke x, 30

  OXFORD’S MAIN TOURIST attractions are reasonably proximate to one another and there are guide books aplenty, translated into many languages. Thus it is that the day visitor may climb back into his luxury coach after viewing the fine University buildings clustered between the High and the Radcliffe Camera with the gratifying feeling that it has all been a compact, interesting visit to yet another of England’s most beautiful cities. It is all very splendid: it is all a bit tiring. And so it is fortunate that the neighbouring Corn-market can offer to the visitor its string of snack bars, coffee bars, and burger bars in which to rest his feet and browse through his recently purchased literature about those other colleges and ecclesiastical edifices, their dates and their benefactors, which thus far have fallen outside his rather arbitrary circumambulations. But perhaps by noon he’s had enough, and quits such culture for the Westgate shopping complex, only a pedestrian precinct away, and built on the old site of St Ebbes, where the city fathers found the answer to their inner-city obsolescence in the full-scale flattening of the ancient streets of houses, and their replacement by the concrete giants of supermarket stores and municipal offices. Solitudinem faciunt: architecturam appellant.

  But further delights there are round other corners – even as the guide books say. From Cornmarket, for example, the visitor may turn left past the Randolph into the curving sweep of the Regency houses in Beaumont Street, and visit the Ashmolean there and walk round Worcester College gardens. From here he may turn northwards and find himself walking along the lower stretches of Walton Street into an area which has, thus far, escaped the vandals who sit on the City’s planning committees. Here, imperceptibly at first, but soon quite unmistakably, the University has been left behind, and even the vast building on the left which houses the Oxford University Press, its lawned quadrangle glimpsed through the high wrought-iron gates, looks bleakly out of place and rather lonely, like some dowager duchess at a discotheque. The occasional visitor may pursue his way even further, past the red and blue lettering of the Phoenix cinema on his left and the blackened-grey walls of the Radcliffe Infirmary on his right; yet much more probably he will now decide to veer again towards the city centre, and in so doing turn his back upon an area of Oxford where gradual renewal, sensitive to the needs of its community, seems finally to have won its battle with the bulldozers.

  This area is called Jericho, a largely residential district, stretching down from the western side of Walton Street to the banks of the canal, and consisting for the most part of mid-nineteenth-century, two-storey, terraced houses. Here, in the criss-cross grid of streets with names like ‘Wellington’ and ‘Nelson’ and the other mighty heroes, are the dwellings built for those who worked on the wharves or on the railway, at the University Press or at Lucy’s iron foundry in Juxon Street. But the visitor to the City Museum in St Aldates will find no Guide to Jericho along the shelves; and even by the oldest of its own inhabitants, the provenance of that charming and mysterious name of ‘Jericho’ is variously – and dubiously – traced. Some claim that in the early days the whistle of a passing train from the lines across the canal could make the walls come tumbling down; others would point darkly to the synagogue in Richmond Road and talk of sharp and profitable dealings in the former Jewish quarter; yet others lift their eyes to read the legend on a local inn: ‘Tarry ye at Jericho until your beards be grown’. But the majority of the area’s inhabitants would just look blankly at their interlocutors, as if they had been asked such obviously unanswerable questions as why it was that men were born, or why they should live or die, and fall in love with booze or women.

  It was on Wednesday, October 3rd, almost exactly six months after M
rs Murdoch’s party in North Oxford, that Detective Chief Inspector Morse of the Thames Valley Police was driving from Kidlington to Oxford. He turned down into Woodstock Road, turned right into Bainton Road, and then straight down into Walton Street. As he drove the Lancia carefully through the narrow street, with cars parked either side, he noticed that Sex in the Suburbs was on at the Phoenix; but almost simultaneously the bold white lettering of a street sign caught his eye and any thoughts of an hour or two of technicolour titillation was forgotten: the sign read ‘Jericho Street’. He’d thought of Anne Scott occasionally – of course he had! – but the prospect of a complicated liaison with a married woman had not, in the comparatively sober light of morning, carried quite the same appeal it had the night before; and he had not pursued the affair. But he was thinking of her now. . .

  That morning, in Kidlington, his lecture on Homicide Procedures to a group of earnest, newly fledged detectives (Constable Walters amongst them) had been received with a polite lack of enthusiasm, and Morse knew that he had been far from good. How glad he was to have the afternoon free! Furthermore, for the first time in many months he had every reason to be in the precincts of Jericho. As a member of the Oxford Book Association he had recently received advanced notice of a talk (Oct. 3rd, 8 p.m.) by Dame Helen Gardner on The New Oxford Book of English Verse; and the prospect of hearing that distinguished Oxford academic was quite sufficient in itself to stir an idle Morse to his first attendance of the year. But, in addition, the Association’s committee had appealed to all members for any old books that might be finished with, because before Dame Helen’s talk a sale of secondhand books had been arranged in aid of the Association’s languishing funds. The previous night, therefore, Morse had decimated his shelves, selecting those thirty or so paperbacks which now lay in a cardboard box in the boot of the Lancia. All books were to be delivered to the Clarendon Press Institute in Walton Street (where the Association held its meetings) between 3 p.m. and 5 p.m. that day. It was now twenty-five minutes past three.

  For very good reasons, however, the delivery of Morse’s offerings was temporarily postponed. Just before the OUP building, Morse turned right and drove slowly down Great Clarendon Street, crossed a couple of intersections, and noticed Canal Street on his right. Surely she must live somewhere very close? It had been raining intermittently all day, and heavy spots were spattering his windscreen as he turned into the deserted street and looked around for parking space. Difficult, though. Double yellow lines on one side of the street, with a row of notices on the other – a series of white Ps set against their blue backgrounds: ‘Resident Permit Holders Only’. True, there was a gap or two here and there; but with a stubborn law-abiding streak within him – and with the added risk of a hefty parking fine – Morse drove on slowly round the maze of streets. Finally, beneath the towering Italianate campanile of St Barnabas’ Church, he found an empty space in a stretch of road by the canal, marked off with boxed white lines: ‘Waiting limited to 2 hours. Return prohibited within 1 hour’. Morse backed carefully into the space and looked around him. Through an opened gate he glimpsed the blues, browns, and reds of a string of houseboats moored alongside the canal, whilst three unspecified ducks, long-necked and black against the late-afternoon sky, flapped away noisily towards a more northerly stretch of water. He got out of the car and stood in the rain a while, looking up at the dirtyish yellow tower that dominated the streets. A quick look inside, perhaps? But the door was locked, and Morse was reading the notice explaining that the regrettable cause of it all was adolescent vandalism when he heard the voice behind him.

  ‘Is this your car?’

  A young, very wet traffic warden, the yellow band round her hat extremely new, was standing beside the Lancia, trying bravely to write down something on a bedrenched page of her notebook.

  ‘All right, aren’t I?’ mumbled Morse defensively, as he walked down the shallow steps of the church towards her.

  ‘You’re over the white line and you’ll have to back it up a bit. You’ve plenty of room.’

  Morse dutifully manoeuvred the Lancia until it stood more neatly within its white box, and then wound down the window. ‘Better?’

  ‘You ought to lock your doors if you’re going to stay here – two hours, remember. A lot of cars get stolen, you know.’

  ‘Yes, I always lock—’

  ‘It wasn’t locked just now!’

  ‘I was only seeing if. . .’

  But the young lady had walked on, apparently unwilling to discuss her edicts further, and was writing out a sodden ticket for one of the hapless non-permit holders just a little way up the street when Morse called out to her.

  ‘Canal Reach? Do you know it?’

  She pointed back up to Canal Street. ‘Round the corner. Third on the left.’

  In Canal Street itself, two parking tickets, folded in cellophane containers, and stuck beneath the windscreen wipers, bore witness to the conscientious young warden’s devotion to her duties; and just across the road, on the corner of Victor Street, Morse thought he saw a similar ticket on the windscreen of an incongruously large, light blue Rolls Royce. But his attention was no longer focused on the problems of parking. A sign to his left announced ‘Canal Reach’; and he stopped and wondered. Wondered why exactly he was there and what (if anything) he had to say to her . . .

  The short, narrow street, with five terraced houses on either side, was rendered inaccessible to motor traffic by three concrete bollards across the entrance, and was sealed off at its far end by the gates of a boat-builder’s yard, now standing open. Bicycles were propped beside three of the ten front doors, but there was little other sign of human habitation. Although it was now beginning to grow dark, no light shone behind any of the net-curtained windows, and the little street seemed drab and uninviting. These were doubtless some of the cheaper houses built for those who once had worked on the canal: two up, two down – and that was all. The first house on the left was number 1, and Morse walked down the narrow pavement, past number 3, past number 5, past number 7 – and there he was, standing in front of the last house and feeling strangely nervous and undecided. Instinctively he patted the pocket of his raincoat for a packet of cigarettes, but found he must have left them in the car. Behind him, a car splashed its way along Canal Street, its sidelights already switched on.

  Morse knocked, but there was no answer. Just as well, perhaps? Yet he knocked again, a little louder this time, and stood back to look at the house. The door was painted a rust-red colour, and to its right was the one downstairs window, its crimson curtains drawn across; and just above it, the window of the first floor bedroom where— Just a minute! There was a light. There was a light here. It seemed to Morse that the bedroom door must be open, for he could see a dull glow of light coming from somewhere: coming from the other room across the landing, perhaps? Still he stood there in the drizzling rain and waited, noting as he did so the attractive brickwork of the terrace, with the red stretchers alternating in mottled effect with the grey-blue contrast of the headers.

  But no one answered at the rust-red door.

  Forget it? It was stupid, anyway. He’d swallowed rather too much beer at lunch-time, and the slight wave of eroticism which invariably washed over him after such mild excess had no doubt been responsible for his drive through Jericho that day . . . And then he thought he heard a noise from within the house. She was there. He knocked again, very loudly now, and after waiting half a minute he tried the door. It was open.

  ‘Hello? Anyone there?’ The street door led directly into the surprisingly large downstairs room, carpeted and neatly decorated, and the camera in Morse’s mind clicked and clicked again as he looked keenly around.

  ‘Hello? Anne? Anne?’

  A staircase faced him at the far left-hand corner of the room, and at the foot of the stairs he saw an expensive-looking, light brown leather jacket, lined with sheep’s wool, folded over upon itself, and flecked with recent rain.

  But even leaning slightl
y forward and straining his ears to the utmost, Morse could hear nothing. It was strange, certainly, her leaving the door unlocked like that. But then he’d just done exactly the same with his own car, had he not? He closed the door quietly behind him and stepped out on to the wet pavement. The house immediately opposite to him was number 10, and he was reflecting vaguely on the vagaries of those responsible for the numbering of street houses when he thought he saw the slightest twitch of the curtains behind its upper-storey window. Perhaps he was mistaken, though . . . Turning once more, he looked back at the house he had come to visit, and his thoughts lingered longingly on the woman he would never see again . . .

  It was many seconds later that he noticed the change: the light on the upstairs floor of number 9 was now switched off – and the blood began to tingle in his veins.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Towards the door we never opened

  T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets

  SHE SEEMED ON nodding terms with all the great, and by any standards the visit of Dame Helen, emeritus Merton Professor of English Literature, to the Oxford Book Association was an immense success. She wore her learning lightly, yet the depths of scholarship and sensitivity became immediately apparent to the large audience, as with an assurance springing from an infinite familiarity she ranged from Dante down to T. S. Eliot. The texture of the applause which greeted the end of her lecture was tight and electric, the crackling clapping of hands seeming to constitute a continuous crepitation of noise, the palms smiting each other as fast as the wings of a hummingbird. Even Morse, whose applause more usually resembled the perfunctory flapping of a large crow in slow flight, was caught up in the spontaneous appreciation, and he earnestly resolved that he would make an immediate attempt to come to terms with the complexities of the Four Quartets. He ought, he knew, to come along more often to talks such as this; keep his mind sharp and fresh – a mind so often dulled these days by cigarettes and alcohol. Surely that’s what life was all about? Opening doors; opening doors and peering through them – perhaps even finding the rose gardens there . . . What were those few lines that Dame Helen had just quoted? Once he had committed them to memory, but until tonight they had been almost forgotten: