'A veritable plethora of pronouns, Lewis! Do you know how many
he's
and
him
's
and
his's
you've just used?'
'No. But I know
one
thing - he told me his name!' replied Lewis, happily adding a further couple of potentially confusing pronouns to his earlier tally. 'His name's
Julian Storrs.'
For many seconds Morse sat completely motionless, feeling the familiar tingling across his shoulders. He picked up his silver Parker pen and wrote some letters on the blotting pad in front of him. Then, in a whispered voice, he spoke:
'I
know him, Lewis.'
'You
didn't recognize him, though—?'
'Most people,' interrupted Morse, 'as they get older, can't remember names. For them "A name is troublesome" - anagram - seven letters - what's that?'
'"Amnesia"?'
'Well done!
I
'm all right on names, usually. But as
I
get older it's
faces
I
can't recall. And there's a splendid word for this business of not being able to recognize familiar faces—'
' "Pro-sop-a-something", isn't it?'
Morse appeared almost shell-shocked as he looked across at his sergeant. 'How in heaven's name
...
?'
'Well, as you know, sir,
I
didn't do all that marvellously at school - as
I
told you, we didn't even have a school
tie
- but
I
was ever so good at o
ne thing' (a glance at the blotti
ng pad)
‘I
was best in the class at reading things upside-down.'
Facing the media is more difficult than bathing a leper (Mother Teresa of Calcutta)
There had been
little difficulty in finding out information on Julian Charles Storrs - a man to whom Morse (as he now remembered) had been introduced only a few months previously at an exhibition of Thesiger's desert photography in the Pitt Rivers Museum. But Morse said nothing of this to Lewis as the pair of them sat together that same evening in Kidlington
HQ;
said nothing either of his discovery
that
the tie whose provenance he had so earne
stly
sought was readily available from any Marks & Spencer's store, priced £6.99.
'We shall have to see this fellow Storrs soon, sir.'
'I'm sure we shall, yes. But we've got nothing against him, have we? It's not a criminal offence to get photographed with some attractive woman
...
Interesting, though, that she was reading
The Masters.'
'I've never read it, sir.'
'It's about the internal shenanigans in a Cambridge College when the Master dies. And rece
ntly
I read in the
University Gazette
that the present Master of Lonsdale is about to hang up his mortar-board - see what I mean?'
'I think I do,' lied Lewis.
'Storrs is a Fellow at Lonsdale - the Senior Fellow, I think. So if he suggested she might be interested in reading that book
'Doesn't add up to much, though, does it? It's
motive
we've got to look
for. Bottom of everything - moti
ve is.'
Morse nodded. 'But perhaps it does add up a bit,' he added qui
etly
. 'If he wants the top job badly enough -and if she reminded him she could go and queer his pitch
...'
'Kiss-and-tell sort of thing?'
'Kiss-and-not
-tell, if
the
price was right.'
'Blackmail?' suggested Lewis.
'She'd have letters.'
'The postcard.'
'Photographs.'
' One
photograph.'
'Hotel records. Somebody would use a credit card, and it wouldn't be
her.'
'He'd probably pay by cash.'
You're not trying to
help
me by any chance, are you, Lewis?'
'All I'm trying to do is be honest about what we've got - which isn't much. I agree with you, though: it wouldn't have been
her
money. Not exa
ctly
rolling in it, that's for sure. Must have been a biggish lay-out - setting up the practice, equipment, rent, and everything. And she'd got a mortgage on her own place, and a car to run.'
Yes, a car. Morse, who never took the slightest interest in any car except his own, visualized again the white Mini which had been parked outside Number
17.
'Perhaps you ought to look a bit more carefully at
that
car, Lewis.'
'Already have
. Log-book in the glove-compartment, road atl
as under the passenger seat, fire-extinguisher under
the
back seat—'
'No drugs or pornography in
the
boot?'
'No. Just a wheel-brace and a Labour Party poster.'
Lewis looked at his watch: 8.35 p.m. It had been a long day, and he felt very tired. And so, by the look of him, did his chief. He got to his feet.
'Oh, and two cassettes: Ella Fitz
igerald and a Mozart thing.'
' Thing?’
'Clarinet thing, yes.' 'Concerto or Quintet, was it?'
Blessedly, before Lewis could answer (for he had no answer), the phone rang.
Chief Superintendent Str
ange.
'Morse? In your office? I almost rang the Red Lion.'
'How can I help, sir?' asked Morse wearily.
"TV -
that
's how you can help. BBC want you for
the
Nine O'clock News
and ITV for
News at Ten.
One of the crews is here now.'
'I've already told 'em all we know.'
'Well, you'd better think of something else, hadn't you? This isn't just a murder, Morse. This is a
PR exercise.'
Thursday,
22
February
For example, in such enumerations as 'French, German, Italian and Spanish', the two commas take the place of 'ands'; there is no comma after 'Italian', because, with 'and', it would be otiose. There are, however, some who favour putting one there, arguing that, since it may sometimes be needed to avoid any ambiguity, it may as well be used always for the sake of uniformity
(Fowler,
Modern English Usage)
Just after lunchtime
on Thursday, Morse found himself once again wandering aimlessly around Number 17 Bloxham Drive, a vague, niggling instinct suggesting to him that earlier he'd missed something of importance there.
But he was beginning to doubt it.
In the (now-cleared) kitchen, he switched on the wireless, finding it attuned to Radio 4. Had it been
on
when the police had first arrived? Had she been listening to
the
Today
programme when just for a second, perhaps, she'd looked down at the gush of blood that had spurted over the front of her night-clothes?
So what if she had been? - Morse asked him
self, conscious that he was getti
ng nowhere.
In the front living-room, he looked again along the single shelf of paperbacks. Women novelists, mo
stly
: Jackie Collins, Jilly Cooper, Danielle Steel, Sue Town-send
...
He read four or five of the authors' opening sentences, without once being insta
ntly
hooked, and was about to leave when he noticed Craig Raine's
A Choic
e of Kipling's Prose
- its white spine completely uncreased, as if it had been a very recent purchase. Or a gift? Morse withdrew the book and flicked through some of the short stories that once had meant - still meant - so very much to him. 'They' was there, although Morse confessed to himself that he had never really understood its meaning. But genius? Christ, ah! And 'On Greenhow Hill'; and 'Love-o'-Women' - the latter (Morse was adamant about it) the greatest short story in the Englis
h language. He looked at the titl
e page: no words
to
anyone;
from
anyone. Then, remembering a book he'd once received from a lovely, lost girl, he turned to the inside of the back cover: and there, in the bottom right-hand corner, he saw the pencilled capitals:
for r from j - rml.
'Remember My Love.'
It could have been anyone though - so many names beginning with 'J': Jack, James, Jason, Jasper, Jeremy, John, Joseph, Julian
...
So what?
Anyway, these days, Morse, it could have been a woman, could it not?
*
Upstairs, in the front bedroom, he looked down at the double-bed that almost monopolized the room, and noted again the two indented pillows, one atop
the
other, in their Oxford blue pillowcases, whereon for the very last
time
Rachel James had laid her pretty head. The winter duvet, in matching blue, was
still
turned back as she had left it, the under-sheet only li
ghtly
creased. Nor was it a bed (of this Morse felt certain) wherein the murdered woman had spent the last night of her life in passionate lovemaking. Better, perhaps, if she had
...
Standing on the bedside table was a glass of stale-looking water, beside which lay a pair of bluish earrings whose stones (Morse suspected) had never been fashioned from earth's more precious store.
But the Chief Inspector was forming something of a picture, so he thought.
Picture
...
Pictures
...
Two framed pictures only on the bedroom walls: the statutory Monet; and one of Gustav
Klimt's gold-patterned compositi
ons. Plenty of posters and suckers, though:
and deer-hunti
ng; and export of live animals; and French nuclear tests; pro the NHS; pro
the whales; pro legalized aborti
on. About par for the course at her age, thought Morse. Or at
his
age, come to think of it.
He pulled the side of the curtains sli
ghtly
away from the wall, and briefly surveyed the scene below. An almost rever
ent hush now seemed to have settl
ed upon Rachel's side of the street. One uniformed policeman stood at the front gate - but only the one - talking to a representative of the Press - but only the one: the one who had lived next-door to the murdered woman, at Number 15; the
one with the pony-tail; the one whom Morse would have to interview so very soon; the one he ought already to have interviewed.
Then, from the window, he saw his colleague, Sergeant Lewis, getting out of a marked police car; and thoughtfully he walked down the stairs. Odd - very odd, really - that with all those stickers around the bedroom, the one for the party the more likely (surely?) to further those advertised causes had been left in the boot of her car, where earlier Lewis had found it. Why hadn't she put it up, as so many other householders in the terrace had done, in one of her upper or lower windows?
Aware that whatever had been worrying him had still not been identified, Morse turned the Yale lock to admit Lewis, the latter carrying the lunchtime edition of the
Oxford Mail
'I reckon it's about time we interviewed
him,'
began Lewis, pointing through the closed door.
'All in good time,' agreed Morse, taking the newspaper where, as on the previous two days, the murder still figured on page one, although no longer as the lead story.
POLICE PUZZLED BY KIDLINGTON KILLING
The brutal
murder of the
physiotherapist
Rachel James,
which has
caused such a stir in the local
community, has left
the
police baffled, according to
Inspector Morse of the
Thames Valley CID.
The murdered woman was seen as a quietly unobtrusive member of the community
with no obvious enemies, and as yet the police have been unable to find any plausible motive for her murder.
Neighbours have been swift to pay their tributes. Mrs Emily Jacobs, who waved a greeting just before Rachel was murdered, said she was a friendly, pleasant resident who would be sadly missed.
Similar tributes were paid by other local inhabitants who are finding it difficult to come to terms with their neighbourhood being the scene of such a terrible murder and a centre of interest for the national media.