'Quite a lot, perhaps. You may have quite a lot to do with it, sweetheart!'
She made no attempt to contradict him. 'In the pub' (she pointed across the street) 'half an hour, OK?'
She watched him go, the man with a five o'clock shadow who said his name was Owens. She'd never seen him before; but she'd recognize him again immediately, the dark hair drawn back above his ears, and tied in a pony-tail about eight or nine inches long.
Apart from the midnight 'milk-float', which gave passengers the impression that it called at almost every hamlet along the line the
11.20
p.m. was the last train from Paddington. And a panting Owens jumped into its rear coach as the Turbo Express suddenly juddered and began to move forward. The train was only half-full, and he found a seat immediately.
He felt pleased with himself. The assignation in the pub had proved to be even more interesting than he'd dared to expect; and he leaned back and closed his eyes contentedly as he pondered the possible implications of what he had just learned
...
He jolted awake at Didcot, wondering where he was -realizing that he had missed the Reading stop completely. Determined to stay awake for the last twelve minutes of the journey, he picked up an
Evening Standard
someone had left on the seat opposite, and was reading the sports page when over the top of the newspaper he saw a man walking back down the carriage -
almost
to where he himself was sitti
ng - before taking his place next to a woman. And Owens recognized him.
Recognized Mr Julian Storrs of Lonsdale.
Well! Well! Well!
At Oxford, his head sull stuck behind the
Evening Standard,
Owens waited until everyone else had left the rear carriage. Then, himself alighting, he observed Storrs arm-in-arm with his companion as they climbed the steps of the footbridge which led over the tracks to Platform One. And suddenly, for the second time that evening, Owens felt a shiver of excitement - for he immediately recognized the woman, too.
How could he fail to recognize her?
She was his next-door neighbour.
Monday,
19
February
Many is the gracious form that is covered with a veil; but on withdrawing this thou discoverest a grandmother
(Musharrif-Uddin,
Gulistan)
Painstakingly
, in block capitals, the Chief Inspector wrote his name, E. MORSE; and was beginning to write his address when Lewis came into the office at 8.35 a.m. on Monday, 19 February. 'What's that, sir?'
Morse looked down at a full page torn from one of the previous day's colour supplements.
'Special offer: two free CDs when you apply to join the Music Club Library.'
Lewis looked dubious. 'Don't forget you have to buy a book every month with that sort of thing. Life's not all freebies, you know.'
'Well, it is in this case. You've just got to have a look at the first thing they send you, that's all - then send it back if you don't like it. I think they even refund the postage.'
Lewis watched as Morse completed and snipped out the application form.
'Wouldn't it be fairer if you agreed to have
some
of the books?'
‘
You think so?'
'At least
one
of them.'
Intense blue eyes, slightly pained, looked innocentl
y across the desk at Sergeant Lewis.
'But I've already got this month's book - I bought
it
for myself for Christmas.'
He inserted the form into an envelope, on which he now wrote the Club's address. Then he took
from his wallet a sheaf of plasti
c cards: Bodleian Library ticket; Lloyds payment card; RAC Breakdown Service; blood donor card; Blackwell's Bookshops; Oxford City Library ticket; phonecard
...
but there appeared to be no booklet of first-class stamps there. Or of second-class.
‘
You don't, by any chance, happen to have a stamp on you, Lewis?'
'What CDs are you going for?'
'I've ordered Janacek, the
Glagolitic Mass
- you may not know it. Splendid work - be
autifully recorded by Simon Rattl
e. And Richard Strauss,
Four Last Songs -
Jessye Norman. I've got several recordings by other sopranos, of course.'
Of course
...
Lewis nodded, and looked for a stamp.
It was not infrequent for Lewis to be reminded of what he had lost in life; or rather, what he'd never had in the first place. The one Strauss he knew was the 'Blue D
anube' man. And he'd only recentl
y learned there were two of
those,
as well - Senior and Junior; and which was which he'd no idea.
'Perhaps you'll be in for a bit of a let-down, sir. Some of these offers - they're not exa
ctly
up to what they promise.'
You're an expert on these things?'
'No
...
but
...
take Sergeant—' Lewis stopped himself in time. Just as well to leave a colleague's weakness cloaked in anonymity. 'Take this chap I know. He read this advert in one of the tabloids about a free video - sex video - sent in a brown envelope with no address to say where it had come from. You know, in case the wife
...'
'No, I don't know, Lewis. But please continue.'
'Well, he sent for one of the choices—'
' Copenhagen Red-Hot Sex?'
'No.
Housewives on the Job
- that was the title; and he expected, you know
Morse nodded. 'Housewives "on the job" with the milkman, the postman, the itinerant button-salesmen
Lewis grinned. 'But it wasn't, no. It just showed all these fully dressed Swedish housewives washing up the plates and peeling the potatoes.'
'Serves Sergeant Dixon right.'
You won't mention it, sir!'
'Of course I won't. And you're probably right. You never really get something for nothing in this life. I never seem to, anyway.'
'Really, sir?'
Morse licked the flap of the white envelope. Then licked the back of the first-class stamp that Lewis had just given him.
The phone had been ringing for several seconds, and
Lewis now took the call, listening briefly but carefully, before putting his hand over the mouthpiece:
"There's been a murder, sir. On the doorstep, really -up in Bloxham Drive.'
In addition to your loyal support on the ballot paper, we shall be grateful if you can agree to display the enclosed sticker in one of your windows
(Extract from a
1994
local election leaflet distributed by the East Oxford Labour Party)
It reminded
Morse of something - that rear window of Number 17.
As a young lad he'd been fascinated by a photograph in one of his junior school text
-books of the apparatus frequentl
y fixed round the necks of slaves in the southern states of America: an iron ring from whose circumference,
at
regular intervals, there emanated lengthy, fearsome spikes, also of iron. The caption, as Morse recalled, had maintained that such a device readily prevented any absconding cotton-picker from passing himself off as an enfranchised citizen.
Morse had never really understood the caption.
Nor indeed, for some considerable while, was he fully to understand the meaning of the neat bullet-hole in the centre of the shattered glass, and the cracks that radiated from it regularly, like a young child's crayoning the rays of the sun.
Looking around him, Morse surveyed the area from the wobbly paving-slabs which formed a pathway at the rear of the row of terraced houses stretching along the northern side of Bloxham Drive, Kidlington, Oxfordshire. About half of the thirty-odd young trees originally planted in a staggered design beside and behind this path had been vandalized to varying degrees: some of them wholly extirpated; some cruelly snapped in the middle of their gradually firming stems; others, with many of their burgeoning branches torn off, standing wounded and forlorn amid the unkempt litter-strewn area, once planned by some Environmental Officer as a small addendum to England's green and pleasant land.
Morse felt saddened.
As did Sergeant Lewis, standing beside him.
Yet it is appropriate here to enter one important qualification. Bloxham Drive, in the view of most of its residents, was showing some few signs of unmistakable improvement. The installation of sleeping-policemen had virtually eliminated the possibilities of joy-riding; many denizens were now lying more peacefully in their beds after the eviction of one notoriously anti-social household; and over the previous two or three years the properties had fallen in price to such an extent as to form an attractive proposition to those few of the professional classes who were prepared to give the street the benefit of the doubt. To be more specific, three such persons had taken out mortgages on properties there: the properties standing at Number
1,
Number
15,
and Number
17.
But - yes, agreed! - Bloxham Drive and the surrounding streets was still an area a league and a league from the peaceful, leafy lanes of Gerrards Cross; and still the scene of some considerable crime.
Crime which now included murder
...
The call had come through to Lewis at 8.40 a.m.
Just over one hour previously, whilst the sky was still unusually dark, Mrs Queenie Norris, from Number
11,
had (as was her wont) taken out her eight-year-old Cavalier King Charles along the rear of the terrace, ignoring (as was her wont) the notices forbidding the fouling of pavements and verges. That was when she'd noticed it: noticed the cracked back window at Number
17
- yet failed to register too much surprise, since (as we have seen) vandalism there had become commonpl
ace, and any missile, be it bottl
e or brick, would have left some similar traces of damage.
Back from her walk, Mrs Norris, as she was later to explain to the police, had felt increasingly uneasy. And just before the weather forecast on Radio 4, she had stepped out once again, now minus the duly defecated Samson, and seen that the light in the kitchen of Number
17
was still on, the blind still drawn down to the bottom of the casement
This time she had knocked quietl
y, then loudly, against the back door.
But there had been no reply to her reiterated raps; and only then had she noticed that behind
th
e hole in the kitchen window -
immediately
behind it - was a corresponding hole in the thin beige-brown material of th
e blind. It was at that point th
at she'd felt the horrid crawl of fear across her skin. Her near-neighbour worked in North Oxford, almost invariably leaving home at about a quarter to eight. And now it was coming up to the hour. Had reached the hour.
Something was wrong.
Something, Mrs Norris suspected, was seriously wrong; and she'd rung 999 immediately.
It had been ten minutes later when PCs Graham and Swift had finally forced an entry through
the
front door of the property to discover the grim truth awaiting them in the back kitchen: the body of a young woman lying dead upon her side,
the
right cheek resting on the cold red tiles, the light brown hair of her pony-tail soaked and stiffened in a pool of blood. Indeed it was not only the dreams of the two comparatively inexperienced constables, but also those of the hardened Scenes-of-Crime Officers, that would be haunted by the sight of so much blood; such a copious outpouring of blood.
And now it was Morse's turn.
'Oh dear,' said Lewis very quietl
y.
Morse said noth
ing, holding back (as ever) from any close inspection of a corpse, noting only the bullet wound, somewhere at the bottom of the neck, which clearly had been the cause of death, the cause of all the blood. Yet (as ever, too) Morse, who had never owned a camera in his life, had already taken several mental flashes of his own.
It seemed logical to assume that the murder had occurred tow
ards the end of a fairly conventi
onal breakfast. On the side of a wooden kitchen table - the side nearest the window - a brown plastic-to
pped stool had been moved slightl
y askew. On the table itself was a plate, a small heap of salt sprinkled with pepper at its edge, on which lay a brown egg-shell beside a wooden egg-cup; and alongside, on a second plate, half a round of toasted brown bread, buttered, and amply spread from a jar of Frank Cooper's Oxford Marmalade. And one other item: a white mug bearing the legend
greetings from guernsey
; bearing, too, the remains of some breakfast coffee, long since cold and muddily brown.
That was what Morse saw. And for the present
that
was enough; he wished to be away from the dreadful scene.
Yet before he left, he forced himself to look once more at the woman who lay there. She was wearing a white nightdress,
with
a faded-pink floral motif, over which was a light blue dressing-gown, reaching about hallway down the shapely, slim, unstockinged legs. It was difficult to be sure about things, of course; but Morse suspected that the twisted features of the face
had been - until so very recentl
y - just as comely as the rest of her. And for a few seconds his own face twisted, too, as if in sympathy with the murdered woman lying at his feet.
The SOCOs had now arrived; and after brief, perfunctory greetings, Morse was glad to escape and leave them to it. Bidding Lewis to initiate some immediate house-to-house enquiries, on both sides of the street, he himself stepped out of the front door into Bloxham Drive, now the scene of considerable police activity, with checkered-capped officers, the flashing blue lights of their cars, and a cordon of blue-and-white tape being thrown round the murder-house. A knot of local inhabitants, too, stood whispering there, shivering occasionally in the early morning cold, yet determined to witness the course of events unfolding.
And the media.
Recognizing the Chief Inspector, two press-men (how so early there?) pleaded for just the briefest interview-a sentence even; a TV crew from Abingdon had already covered Morse's exit from the house; and a Radio Oxford reporter waved a bulbous microphone in front of his face.
But Morse ignored them all with a look of vacuous incomprehension worthy of some deaf-mute, and proceeded to walk slowly to
the
end of the street (observing, all the time
observing),
where he turned left down one side of the terraced row, then left again, retracing his earlier steps along the uneven paring slabs behind the houses, stopping briefly where he and Lewis had stopped before; then completing the circuit and again curtly dismissing the converging reporters
with
a wave of his right hand as he walked back along
the
front of the terrace.
It would be untrue to
say that Morse's mind had been
particularly acute on this peripatetic reconnaissance. Indeed, only one single feature of the neighbourhood had made much of an impression upon him. A political impression.
Very soon (the evidence was all around him) there was to be an election for one of the local council seats -death of an incumbent, perhaps? - and clearly, if unusually, there appeared to be considerable interest in the matter. Stickers were to be observed in all but two of
the
front windows of the north-side terrace: green stickers with the red lettering of the Labour candidate's name; white stickers with the royal blue lettering of the Conservative's. With little as yet upon which his mind could fix itself, Morse had taken a straw-poll of the support shown, from Number
1
to Number
21.
And hardly surprisingly, perhaps, in this marg
inally depressed and predominantl
y working-class distric
t, the advantage was significantl
y with the Labour man, with six stickers to
the
Tory's two.
One of the stickers favouring the latter cause was displayed in the ground-floor window of Number
15.
And for some reason Morse had found himself standing and wondering for a while outside
the
only other window in the Drive parading its confidence in the Conservative Party - and in a candidate with the splendidly patriotic name of Jonathan Bull; standing and wondering outside Number
1,
at the main entrance to Bloxham Drive.
Oft have we seen him at the peep of dawn Brushing with hasty steps the dews away
(Thomas Gray,
Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard)
In his earlier
years Geoffrey Owens had been an owl, preferring to pursue whatever tasks lay before him into the late ho
urs of the night, often th
rough into the still, small hours. But now, in his mid-forties, he had metamorphosed into a lark, his brain seeming perceptibly clearer and fresher in the morning. It had been no hardship, therefore, when he was invited, under the new flexi-time philosophy of his employers, to start work early and finish work early - thereby receiving a small bonus into the bargain. And, since the previous September, Owens had made
it
his regular practice to leave his home in Bloxham Drive just before 7 a.m., incidentally thus avoiding the traffic jams which began to build up in the upper reaches of the Banbury Road an hour or so later; and, on his return journey, missing the corresponding jams the other way, as thousands of motorists left the busy heart of Oxford for the comparative peace of the northern outskirts, and the neighbouring villages - such as Kidlington.
It was, all in all, a happy enough arrangement. And one which had applied on Monday, 19 February.
Ovens had left his house at about ten minutes to seven that morning, when he had, of course, passed the house on the corner, Number
1,
where a woman had watched him go. But if he in turn had spotted her, this was in no way apparent, for he had passed without a wave of recognition, and driven up to the junction, where he had turned right, on his way down into Oxford. But if he had not seen her, quite definitely she had seen him.
Traffic had been unusually light for a Monday (more often than not the busiest morning of the week) even at such a comparatively early hour; and without any appreciable hold-up Owens soon reached the entrance barrier of the large car park which serves the Oxfordshire Newspapers complex down in Osney Mead, just past t
he railway station along the Botl
ey Road.
Owens had come to Oxford three years previously
with
an impressive-looking CV, in which the applicant asserted his 'all-round experience in
the
fields of reporting, copy-editing, advertising, and personnel management'. And he had been the unanimous choice of the four members of the interviewing panel. Nor had there been the slightest reason since for them to rue their decision. In fact, Owens had proved a profitable investment. With his knowledge of English grammar way above average, his job description had quickly been modified, with an appropriate increase in salary, to include responsibility
for recasting the frequently ill-constructed paragraphs of his junior colleagues, and for correcting the heinous errors in orthograph
y which blighted not a few of th
eir offerings; and, in addition to these new tasks, to stand in as required when the Personnel Manager was called away on conferences.