Death is now my neighbour - Morse 12

by Colin Dexter

  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.'

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  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 frequently 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 commonplace, and any missile, be it bottle 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 quietly, then loudly, against the back door.

  But there had been no reply to her reiterated raps; and only then had she noticed that behind the hole in the kitchen window - immediately behind it - was a corresponding hole in the thin beige-brown material of the blind. It was at that point that 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 quietly.

  Morse said nothing, 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 towards the end of a fairly conventional breakfast. On the side of a wooden kitchen table - the side nearest the window - a brown plastic-topped stool had been moved slightly 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 recently - 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 marginally depressed and predominantly working-class district, the advantage was significantly 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.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  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 hours of the night, often through 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 the railway station along the Botley 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 orthography which blighted not a few of their offerings; and, in addition to these new tasks, to stand in as required when the Personnel Manager was called away on conferences.

  As a result of these changes, Owens himself, nominally the group's senior reporter, had become more and more desk-bound, venturing out only for the big stories. Like now. For as he stood in Bloxham Drive that morning, he was never in doubt that this would be one of those 'big stories' - not just for himself but also for the steadily increasing number of media colleagues who were already joining him.

  All of them waiting ...

  Waiting, in fact, until 11.30 a.m. - well before which time, as if by some sort of collective instinct, each was aware that something grotesque and gruesome had occurred in the house there numbered 17.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Instead of being arrested, as we stated, for kicking his wife down a flight of stairs and hurling a lighted kerosene lamp after her, the Revd James P. Wellman died unmarried four years ago

  (Correction in a US journal, quoted by Burne-Jones in a letter to Lady Horner)

  AT I 1.15 A.M. LEWIS suggested that someone perhaps ought to say something.

  For the past hour and a half a group of police officers had been knocking on neighbourhood doors, speaking to residents, taking brief preliminary statements. But as yet nothing official had been released to the representatives of the media assembled in a street now increasingly crowded with curious onlookers.

  'Go ahead!' said Morse.

  'Shall I tell them all we know?'

  'That won't take you long, will it?'

  'No need to keep anything back?'

  'For Chrissake, Lewis! You sound as if we've got something to hide. If we have, why don't you tell me?

  'Just wondered.'

  Morse's tone softened. 'It won't matter much what you tell 'em, will it?' 'All right.'

  'Just one thing, though. You can remind 'em that we'd all welcome a bit of accuracy for a change. Tell 'em to stick an "h" in the middle of Bloxham Close - that sort of thing.'

  'Bloxham Drive, sir.'

  'Thank you, Lewis.'

  With which, a morose-looking Morse eased himself back in the armchair in the front sitting-room, and continued his cursory examination of the papers, letters, documents, photographs, taken from the drawers of a Queen-Anne-style escritoire - a rather tasteful piece, thought Morse. Family heirloom, perhaps.

  Family...

  Oh dear!

  That was always one of the worst aspects of suicides and murders: the family. This time with Mum and Dad and younger sister already on their way up from Torquay. Still, Lewis was wonderfully good at that sort of tiling. Come to think
of it, Lewis was quite good at several things, really - including dealing with the Press. And as Morse flicked his way somewhat fecklessly through a few more papers, he firmly resolved (although in fact he forgot) to tell his faithful sergeant exactly that before the day was through.

  Immediately on confronting his interlocutors, Lewis was invited by the TV crew to go some way along the street so that he could be filmed walking before appearing in front of the camera talking. Normal TV routine, it was explained: always see a man striding along somewhere before seeing his face on the screen. So, would Sergeant Lewis please oblige with a short perambulation? No, Sergeant Lewis wouldn't.

  What he would do, though, was try to tell them what they wanted to know. Which, for the next few minutes, he did.

  A murder had occurred in the kitchen of Number 17 Bloxham Drive: B-L-OX-H-A-M -

  One of the neighbours (unspecified) had earlier alerted the police to suspicious circumstances at that address -

  A patrol car had been on the scene promptly; forced open the front door; discovered the body of a young woman -

  The woman had been shot dead through the rear kitchen window -

  The body had not as yet been officially identified -

  The property appeared to show no sign - no other sign - of any break-in -

  That was about it, really.

  Amid the subsequent chorus of questions, Lewis picked out the raucous notes of the formidable female reporter from the Oxford Star:

  'What time was all this, Sergeant5'

  As it happened, Lewis knew the answer to that question very well. But he decided to be economical with the details of the surprisingly firm evidence already gleaned ...

  The Jacobs family lived immediately opposite Number 17, where the lady of the house, in dressing-gown and curlers, had opened her front door a few minutes after 7 a.m. in order to pick up her two pints of Co-op milk from the doorstep. Contemporaneously, exactly so, her actions had been mirrored across the street where another woman, also in a dressing-gown (though without curlers), had been picking up her own single pint. Each had looked across at the other; each had nodded a matutinal greeting.