Colin Dexter
IN THE TRADITION OF DOROTHY L. SAYERS and Michael Innes, Colin Dexter’s mysteries combine scholarly erudition, well-constructed plots, and humor. His series character, Inspector Morse, appears in all of his novels and inspired an enormously successful British television series, the eponymous Inspector Morse, in which Dexter made a cameo appearance (much as Alfred Hitchcock did) in almost every episode. It may be interesting to note that Dexter is one of the world’s most accomplished solvers of crossword puzzles, winning its top competitions on several occasions. “Morse’s Greatest Mystery” was first collected in Morse’s Greatest Mystery and Other Stories (London, Macmillan, 1993).
Morse’s Greatest Mystery
COLIN DEXTER
“Hallo!” growled Scrooge, in his accustomed voice as near as he could feign it. “What do you mean by coming here at this time of day?”
Dickens, A Christmas Carol
HE HAD KNOCKED DIFFIDENTLY AT Morse’s North Oxford flat. Few had been invited into those book-lined, Wagner-haunted rooms: and even he—Sergeant Lewis—had never felt himself an over-welcome guest. Even at Christmastime. Not that it sounded much like the season of goodwill as Morse waved Lewis inside and concluded his ill-tempered conversation with the bank manager.
“Look! If I keep a couple of hundred in my current account, that’s my look-out. I’m not even asking for any interest on it. All I am asking is that you don’t stick these bloody bank charges on when I go—what? once, twice a year?—into the red. It’s not that I’m mean with money”—Lewis’s eyebrows ascended a centimetre—“but if you charge me again I want you to ring and tell me why!”
Morse banged down the receiver and sat silent.
“You don’t sound as if you’ve caught much of the Christmas spirit,” ventured Lewis.
“I don’t like Christmas—never have.”
“You staying in Oxford, sir?”
“I’m going to decorate.”
“What—decorate the Christmas cake?”
“Decorate the kitchen. I don’t like Christmas cake—never did.”
“You sound more like Scrooge every minute, sir.”
“And I shall read a Dickens novel. I always do over Christmas. Re-read, rather.”
“If I were just starting on Dickens, which one——?”
“I’d put Bleak House first, Little Dorrit second——”
The phone rang and Morse’s secretary at HQ informed him that he’d won a £50 gift-token in the Police Charity Raffle, and this time Morse cradled the receiver with considerably better grace.
“ ‘Scrooge,’ did you say, Lewis? I’ll have you know I bought five tickets—a quid apiece!—in that Charity Raffle.”
“I bought five tickets myself, sir.”
Morse smiled complacently. “Let’s be more charitable, Lewis! It’s supporting these causes that’s important, not winning.”
“I’ll be in the car, sir,” said Lewis quietly. In truth, he was beginning to feel irritated. Morse’s irascibility he could stomach; but he couldn’t stick hearing much more about Morse’s selfless generosity!
Morse’s old Jaguar was in dock again (“Too mean to buy a new one!” his colleagues claimed) and it was Lewis’s job that day to ferry the chief inspector around; doubtless, too (if things went to form), to treat him to the odd pint or two. Which indeed appeared a fair probability, since Morse had so managed things on that Tuesday morning that their arrival at the George would coincide with opening time. As they drove out past the railway station, Lewis told Morse what he’d managed to discover about the previous day’s events …
The patrons of the George had amassed £400 in aid of the Littlemore Charity for Mentally Handicapped Children, and this splendid total was to be presented to the Charity’s Secretary at the end of the week, with a photographer promised from The Oxford Times to record the grand occasion. Mrs. Michaels, the landlady, had been dropped off at the bank in Carfax by her husband at about 10:30 a.m., and had there exchanged a motley assemblage of coins and notes for forty brand-new tenners. After this she had bought several items (including grapes for a daughter just admitted to hospital) before catching a minibus back home, where she had arrived just after midday. The money, in a long white envelope, was in her shopping bag, together with her morning’s purchases. Her husband had not yet returned from the Cash and Carry Stores, and on re-entering the George via the saloon bar, Mrs. Michaels had heard the telephone ringing. Thinking that it was probably the hospital (it was) she had dumped her bag on the bar counter and rushed to answer it. On her return, the envelope was gone.
At the time of the theft, there had been about thirty people in the saloon bar, including the regular OAPs, the usual cohort of pool-playing unemployables, and a pre-Christmas party from a local firm. And—yes!—from the very beginning Lewis had known that the chances of recovering the money were virtually nil. Even so, the three perfunctory interviews that Morse conducted appeared to Lewis to be sadly unsatisfactory.
After listening a while to the landlord’s unilluminating testimony, Morse asked him why it had taken him so long to conduct his business at the Cash and Carry; and although the explanation given seemed perfectly adequate, Morse’s dismissal of this first witness had seemed almost offensively abrupt. And no man could have been more quickly or more effectively antagonised than the temporary barman (on duty the previous morning) who refused to answer Morse’s brusque enquiry about the present state of his overdraft. What then of the attractive, auburn-haired Mrs. Michaels? After a rather lopsided smile had introduced Morse to her regular if slightly nicotine-stained teeth, that distressed lady had been unable to fight back her tears as she sought to explain to Morse why she’d insisted on some genuine notes for the publicity photographer instead of a phonily magnified cheque.
But wait! Something dramatic had just happened to Morse, Lewis could see that: as if the light had suddenly shined upon a man that hitherto had sat in darkness. He (Morse) now asked—amazingly!—whether by any chance the good lady possessed a pair of bright green, high-heeled leather shoes; and when she replied that, yes, she did, Morse smiled serenely, as though he had solved the secret of the universe, and promptly summoned into the lounge bar not only the three he’d just interviewed but all those now in the George who had been drinking there the previous morning.
As they waited, Morse asked for the serial numbers of the stolen notes, and Lewis passed over a scrap of paper on which some figures had been hastily scribbled in blotchy Biro. “For Christ’s sake, man!” hissed Morse. “Didn’t they teach you to write at school?”
Lewis breathed heavily, counted to five, and then painstakingly rewrote the numbers on a virginal piece of paper: 773741–773780. At which numbers Morse glanced cursorily before sticking the paper in his pocket, and proceeding to address the George’s regulars.
He was virtually certain (he said) of who had stolen the money. What he was absolutely sure about was exactly where that money was at that very moment. He had the serial numbers of the notes—but that was of no importance whatsoever now. The thief might well have been tempted to spend the money earlier—but not any more! And why not? Because at this Christmas time that person no longer had the power to resist his better self.
In that bar, stilled now and silent as the grave itself, the faces of Morse’s audience seemed mesmerised—and remained so as Morse gave his instructions that the notes should be replaced in their original envelope and returned (he cared not by what means) to Sergeant Lewis’s office at Thames Valley Police HQ within the next twenty-four hours.
As they drove back, Lewis could restrain his curiosity no longer. “You really are confident that——?”
“Of course!”
“I never seem to be able to put the clues together myself, sir.”
“Clues? What clues, Lewis? I didn’t know we had any.”
“Well, those shoes, for example. How do they fit in?”
“Who said they fitted in anywhere? It’s just that I u
sed to know an auburn-haired beauty who had six—six, Lewis!—pairs of bright green shoes. They suited her, she said.”
“So … they’ve got nothing to do with the case at all?”
“Not so far as I know,” muttered Morse.
The next morning a white envelope was delivered to Lewis’s office, though no one at reception could recall when or whence it had arrived. Lewis immediately rang Morse to congratulate him on the happy outcome of the case.
“There’s just one thing, sir. I’d kept that scrappy bit of paper with the serial numbers on it, and these are brand-new notes all right—but they’re not the same ones!”
“Really?” Morse sounded supremely unconcerned.
“You’re not worried about it?”
“Good Lord, no! You just get that money back to ginger-knob at the George, and tell her to settle for a jumbo cheque next time! Oh, and one other thing, Lewis. I’m on leave. So no interruptions from anybody—understand?”
“Yes, sir. And, er … Happy Christmas, sir!”
“And to you, old friend!” replied Morse quietly.
The bank manager rang just before lunch that same day. “It’s about the four hundred pounds you withdrew yesterday, Inspector. I did promise to ring about any further bank charges——”
“I explained to the girl,” protested Morse. “I needed the money quickly.”
“Oh, it’s perfectly all right. But you did say you’d call in this morning to transfer——”
“Tomorrow! I’m up a ladder with a paint brush at the moment.”
Morse put down the receiver and again sank back in the armchair with the crossword. But his mind was far away, and some of the words he himself had spoken kept echoing around his brain: something about one’s better self … And he smiled, for he knew that this would be a Christmas he might enjoy almost as much as the children up at Littlemore, perhaps. He had solved so many mysteries in his life. Was he now, he wondered, beginning to glimpse the solution to the greatest mystery of them all?
MORE THAN FLESH AND BLOOD
Susan Moody
SUSAN MOODY HAS CREATED several memorable characters for her mystery fiction, notably the jet-setting Penny Wanawake, who is tall, gorgeous, and “black and shiny as a licorice-stick.” Her lover is a jewel thief whose loot is fenced, the proceeds sent to the poor in Africa by Penny. She is a powerful crime-fighter, though she does not regard stealing from the rich as a crime. Moody’s other series detective is the somewhat more traditional Cassandra Swann, a businesswoman and bridge instructor. “More Than Flesh and Blood” was first published in A Classic Christmas Crime, edited by Tim Heald (London, Pavilion, 1995).
More Than Flesh and Blood
SUSAN MOODY
LOOKING BACK, HE WAS ALWAYS TO remember the place as like a honeycomb, full of golden light. The walls of the houses, made of some yellowish local stone, were glazed with it. Roofs, covered in ochre-edged rings of lichen, dripped it back into the single narrow street, where the front doors opened straight into what would once have been called the parlour.
After the long journey through the barren hills, the village welcomed him. Driving across the humped stone bridge, he knew at once that he’d found what he was looking for. He stopped the car and got out. There were no shops, no pub, no one to ask the way. At the far end of the street there were cows, creamy-gold in the fierce light of the starting-to-set sun, sauntering towards an open farm gate. Beyond it, stone buildings, mud and hay, metal churns, indicated a dairy. He followed them.
A woman was already clamping the first cow to the nozzles of an electric milking-machine. She looked up at him without straightening, her face strong from confronting the weather unprotected for fifty or sixty years.
“I’m trying to find this house,” he said, city-diffident in the presence of elemental sources. He showed her the photograph, thumb and fourth finger grasping the edges of the thick cardboard.
“Aye,” she said.
“Beckwith House, I believe it’s called.”
“Aye.”
“Is it here? In the village?”
“Noo.” Her voice was soft, rounded as the cows she tended. “Noo, it’s not.”
That shook him a little. He had been so sure it would be here, friendly with other houses, neighboured.
“Where then?”
“It’s up t’dale a way.” She nodded towards the road behind him and the deep hills into which it led. Already, shadows were tumbling down the slopes, only the higher crests fully daylit, though he could still see the outlines of the dry-stone walls which criss-crossed the lower slopes, and the occasional brooding bulk of a barn.
“How far?”
“Two, three miles. Mebbe four. It’s right on t’road.”
“Thank you.”
As she moved back towards the gate, she called after him: “Does she know you’re coming?”
He stopped. “Does who know I’m coming?”
“The missus.”
He smiled and shook his head. “No,” he said. “She doesn’t.”
Back in the open again, after the temporary closing in of the village, he could feel wind sweeping down from the high fells, gusting the car towards the edge of the black road. Now that he was close to where he had been heading for most of his life, he felt none of the excitement he had anticipated, merely a sense of a waiting void about to be filled.
“… somewhere …” she used to say, cruelly. But where? Until today, he had not known. Now, the place, the time, the night edging down on him from above, fitted round him as though tailor-made.
The road began to wind. In the bend of a turn, he saw stone gateposts, iron gates twice as tall as he was, laurels massed behind walls. He parked on the verge, tucking the car in close. Behind the gates was a short drive curving towards a house, square and two-storied. Though he had never been here before, he knew precisely how the path led round behind the house, past deep-silled windows to a porched side door. He knew it would come out on to a flag-stoned terrace looking over an enclosed garden. He knew the view from the windows at the rear of the house, and where the plums and apples would stand on either side of the wrought-iron gate set in the garden wall, through which, like a photograph, could be seen a segment of landscape. There would be a pond, too, beside the terrace, and a rockery full of alpines, little crawling plants that overflowed and spilled down the edges of white stones. On one of the gateposts there was a round slate plaque. Beckwith House. He traced the two meniscal curves of the B with his finger. He turned the handle of the right-hand gate. It whimpered metallically. The iron bars resisted as he pushed, then opened, following a deep groove in the gravelled earth behind it.
“ … somewhere …”
Here. He’d found it at last, been drawn to it, almost, though perhaps that was a trifle fanciful. He had had so little to go on, just the whispered, half-heard word—“Garthway …” Garthway? The more he tried to re-run the sequence in his head, the dying eyes filming even as they looked at him, the huge body heaving, the lips puckering as they tried to form the word while one hand twitched slowly on the turndown of the linen sheet with the border of drawn-thread work, the less he could remember what exactly had been said.
His feet made no sound on the earth. The gravel had long since sunk into the soil and now lay embedded in it like the eyes of drowning men below the surface of the water. Neglect entombed the house. He walked between the leaves of dark unpruned laurels. There was a faint light in one of the windows, its dirt-streaked panes almost hidden by creeper long left untended.
There was a glow, too, from the ornate fanlight above the front door. He banged the knocker and felt the house pause, listening, questioning. Footsteps came along the passage towards him, brisk, almost eager.
The woman who opened the door stared at him for a time. Later he could not have said for how long. Two or three seconds? Or had they been minutes? Her mouth moved towards a welcoming smile, then let it be. She brushed her hand against the side of her head, even though
her hair was neatly tidy.
“Martin,” she said. Not a question.
“Yes.”
“I knew you’d come.”
“Yes.”
“It’s taken you long enough.”
“I wasn’t sure where to look.” Even with the help of the police computers, it had taken weeks of work to pinpoint this place, this woman.
She nodded, as if she knew what the difficulties in tracing her had been.
“You’d best come in, then.” She stood aside, flat against the wall of the narrow hall to let him pass in front of her.
“Straight through. I’m in the kitchen.”
The kitchen was warm, pined, full of good smells. They were part of the things which had been denied him. He saw that the room had been redecorated: the wallpaper had been changed and there was shelving that had not been there before.
In the fuller light, he was able to see her properly. She was younger than he had expected. And much less sad. It seemed to him that she ought to have been sad.
“What are you now?” she said. “Thirty-two?”
“Next birthday,” he said.
“Early June, isn’t it?”
He nodded, not minding that she had forgotten the precise date; though they had not met for over thirty years, she knew the month, just as he knew that behind the door to the left of the range was the larder, that although there were only five brass dish-covers hanging above it, there had once been seven. She leaned back against the warm curves of the Aga and shook her head. “I’d have known you anywhere,” she said.
“Yes.” Of course she would.
She frowned. “You’re with the police, aren’t you?” she said.
“Am I?”
She frowned. “That’s what she said, last time I heard. That you were with the police.”
Was he? Sometimes, he could scarcely remember who he was or where he came from. Sometimes he could scarcely remember that he didn’t really know the answer to the question. Which was why he was here now.
The Big Book of Christmas Mysteries Page 14