by Colin Dexter
'I think I know why you're lookin' at me like that,' she said.
'Pardon?'
In answer, she placed an index finger on each nostril. On each ringless nostril.
And Morse nodded. 'Yes, I prefer you as you are now.'
'So you said.'
'You know that your step-father's still missing?'
'So what? You want me to break out into goose-pimples or something?'
'Why do you hate him so much?'
'Next question.'
'All right. You said you were going to get married. Does all this—the loss of your baby—does it make any difference?'
'Gettin' deep, ain't we? Cigarette?'
Ellie held out the packet; and stupidly, inevitably, Morse capitulated.
'You're still going ahead with getting married?'
'Why not? It's about time I settled down, don't you think?'
'I suppose so.'
'What else can I tell you?'
Well, if she was inviting questions (Morse decided) it was a good opportunity to probe a little more deeply into the heart of the mystery, since he was convinced that the key to the case—the key to both cases—lay somewhere in those late afternoon hours of Wednesday, September 7, when someone had stolen the knife from the Pitt Rivers Museum.
'After your trip to Birmingham, you could have caught an earlier train back?'
She shrugged. 'Dunno. I didn't, though.'
'Do you remember exactly what time you asked your friend up here—when you got back that afternoon?'
'Exactly? Course, I can't. She might. Doubt it, though. We were both tight as ticks later that night.'
Was she lying? And if so, why?
'On that Wednesday—'
But she let him get no further. 'Christ! Give it a rest about Wednesday, will you? What's wrong with Tuesday? Or Monday? I 'aven't a bleedin' clue what I was doin' them days. So why Wednesday? Like I say, I know where I was all the bloody time that day.'
'It's just that there may be a connection between Dr. McClure's murder and the theft of the knife.'
She seemed unimpressed, but mollified again. 'Drop more—'
'No, I must be off.'
'Please yourself.' She poured herself another Scotch, and lit another cigarette. 'Beginnin' to taste better. I hadn't smoked a fag for three days—three days!—before that one in your car. Tasted terrible, that first one.'
Morse rose to his feet and put his empty glass down on the cluttered mantelpiece, above which, on the white chimney-breast, four six-inch squares in different shades of yellow had been painted—with the name of each shade written in thick pencil inside each square: Wild Primrose, Sunbeam, Buttermilk, Daffodil White.
'Which d'you like best?' she asked. 'I'm considering some redecoration.'
There it was again, in the last sentence—the gear-shift from casual slang to elegance of speech. Interesting . . .
'But won't you be leaving here after you're married?
'Christ! You can't leave it alone, can you? All these bloody questions!'
Morse turned towards her now, looking down at her as she sat on the side of the bed.
'Why did you invite me here? I only ask because you're making me feel I'm unwelcome—an intruder—a Nosey Parker. Do you realise that?'
She looked down into her glass. 'I felt lonely, that's all. I wanted a bit of company.'
'Haven't you told Mr. Davies—about your miscarriage?'
'No.'
'Don't you think—'
'Augh, shut up! You wouldn't know what it feels like, would you? To be on your own in life . . .'
'I'm on my own all the time,' said Morse.
'That's what they all say, did you know that? All them middle-aged fellows like you.'
Morse nodded and half smiled; and as he walked to the door he looked at the chimney-breast again.
Yellow's a difficult colour to live with; but I'd go for the Daffodil White, if I were you.'
Leaving her still seated on the bed, he trod down the narrow, squeaking stairs to the Jaguar, where for a few minutes he sat motionless, with the old familiar sensation tingling across his shoulders.
Why hadn't he thought of it before?
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
Given a number which is a square, when can we write it as the sum of two other squares?
(DIOPHANTUS, Arithmetic)
LEWIS WAS EAGER to pass on his news. Appeals on Radio Oxford and Fox FM, an article in the Oxford Mail, local enquiries into the purchase, description, and condition of Brooks's comparatively new bicycle, had proved, it appeared, successful. An anonymous phone-call (woman's voice) had hurriedly informed St. Aldate's City Police that if they were interested there was a 'green bike' chained to the railings outside St. Mary Mags in Cornmarket. No other details.
'Phone plonked down pronto,' the duty sergeant had said.
'Sure it wasn't a "Green dyke" chained to the railings?' Lewis had asked, in a rare excursion into humour.
Quite sure, since the City Police were now in possession of one bicycle, bright green—awaiting instructions.
The call had come through just after midday, and Lewis felt excitement, and gratification. Somebody—some mother or wife or girlfriend—had clearly decided to push the hot property back into public circulation. Once in a while pro cedure and patience paid dividends. Like now.
If it was Brooks's bike, of course.
Morse, however, on his rather late return from lunch, was to give Lewis no immediate opportunity of reporting his potentially glad tidings.
'Get on all right at the hospital, sir?'
'Fine. No problem.'
'I've got some news—'
'Just a minute. I saw Miss Smith this morning. She'd been in the JR1 overnight.'
'All right, is she?'
'Don't know about that. But she's a mixed-up young girl, is our Eleanor,' confided Morse.
'Not really a girl, sir.'
'Yes, she is. Half my age, Lewis. Makes me feel old.'
'Well, perhaps . . .'
'She gave me an idea, though. A beautiful idea.' Morse stripped the cellophane from a packet of cigarettes, took one out, and lit it from a box of matches, on which his eyes lingered as he inhaled deeply. 'You know the problem we're faced with in this case? We've got to square the first case—the murder of McClure.'
'No argument there.'
'Then we've got to square the second case—the theft of a Northern Rhodesian knife. And the connection betwee these two—'
'But you said perhaps there wasn't any connection.'
'Well, there is and now I know what it is.'
'I see,' said Lewis, unseeing.
'As I say, if we square the first case, and then we square the second case . . . all we've got to do is to work out the sum of the two squares.'
Lewis looked puzzled. 'I'm not quite following you, sir.'
'Have you heard of "Pythagorean Triplets"?'
'We did Pythagoras Theorem at school.'
'Exactly. The most famous of all the triplets, that is—"3, 4, 5": 3² + 4² = 5². Agreed?'
'Agreed,'
'But there are more spectacular examples than that. The Egyptians, for example, knew all about "5961, 6480, 8161''.'
'That's good news, sir. I didn't realise you were up things like that.'
Morse looked down at the desk. 'I'm not. I was just reading from the back of this matchbox here.'
Lewis grinned as Morse continued.
'There was this fellow called Fermat, it seems—I called in at home and looked him up. He knew all about "things like that", as you put it: square-roots, and cube-roots, and all that sort of stuff.'
'Has he got much to do with us, though—this fellow?'
'Dunno, Lewis. But he was a marvellous man. In one of the books on arithmetic he was studying he wrote something like: "I've got a truly marvellous demonstration of this proposition which this margin is too narrow to contain." Isn't that a wonderful sentence?'
'If you say so, si
r.'
'Well, I've worked out the square of three and the square of four and I've added them together and I've come up with—guess what, Lewis!'
'Twenty-five?'
'Much more! You see, this morning I suddenly realised where we've been going wrong in this case. We've been assuming what we were meant to assume . . . No. Let me start again. As you know, I felt pretty certain almost from the beginning that McClure was murdered by Brooks. And I think now, though I can't be certain of course, that Brooks himself was murdered last week. And I know—listen, Lewis!—I now know what Brooks's murderer wanted us to think.'
Lewis looked at the Chief Inspector, and saw that not uncommon, strangely distanced, almost mystical look in the gentian-blue eyes.
'You see, Brooks's body is somewhere where we'll never find it—I feel oddly sure about that. Pushed in a furnace, perhaps, or buried under concrete, or left in a rubbish-dump—'
'Waste Reception Area, sir.'
'Wherever, yes. But consider the consequences of the body never being found. We all jump to the same conclusion—the conclusion our very intelligent Administrator at the Pitt Rivers jumped to: that there was a direct link tween the murder of Brooks and the theft of the knife, Now, there was a grand deception here. The person who murdered Brooks wanted us to take one fact for granted, and almost—almost!—he succeeded.'
'Or she.'
'Oh, yes. Or she . . . But as I say the key question this: why was the knife stolen? So let me tell you. That theft was a great big bluff! For what purpose? To convince us that Brooks was murdered after 4:30 p.m. on that Wednesday the seventh, But he wasn't,' asserted Morse slowly. 'He was murdered the day before—he was murdered on Tuesday the sixth.'
'But he was seen alive on the Wednesday, sir. His wife saw him—Mrs. Stevens saw him—'
'Liars!'
'Both of 'em?'
'Both of them.'
'You mean . . . you mean they murdered Brooks?'
'That's exactly what I do mean, yes. As I see things, it must have been Julia Stevens who supplied the brains, who somehow arranged the business with the knife. But what—what, Lewis—if Brooks was murdered by another knife—a household knife, let's say—a knife just like the one McClure was murdered with, the knife that was found in Daventry Avenue, the knife that was missing from the Brooks's kitchen.'
Lewis shook his head slowly. 'Why all this palaver though?'
'Good question. So I'll give you a good answer. To give the murderer—murderers—watertight alibis for that Wednesday. I sensed something of the sort when I interviewed Julia Stevens; and I suddenly knew it this morning when I was interviewing our punk-wonder.'
'She's in it, too, you reckon?'
Morse nodded. 'All three of them have been telling us the same thing, really. In effect they've been saying: "Look! I don't mind being suspected of doing something on Tuesday—but not on the Wednesday." They're happy about not having an alibi for the day Brooks was murdered. It was for the day afterwards—the Wednesday—that for some reason they figured an alibi was vital. And—surprise, surprise!—they've each of 'em got a beautiful alibi for then. It's been very clever of them—this sort of casual indifference they've shown for the actual day of the murder, the Tuesday. You see, they all knew they'd be the likely suspects, and they've been very gently, very cleverly, pushing us all along in the direction they wanted.'
'All three of them, you think?'
'Yes. They'd all have gladly murdered Brooks, even if they hadn't known he was a murderer himself: the wife he'd treated so cruelly; the step-daughter he'd probably abused; and Julia Stevens, who could see how her little cleaner was being knocked about by the man she'd married. So they hatch a plot. They arrange for the knife to be stolen, having made sure that none of them could have stolen it—'
'Ellie Smith could have stolen it,' interposed Lewis quietly.
'Yes . . . perhaps she could, yes. But I don't think so. Didn't the attendant think it was more likely to have been a man? No. My guess is that they bribed someone to steal it—someone they could trust . . . someone one of them could trust.'
'Ashley Davies?'
'Why not? He's got his reward, hasn't he?'
'You think that's a reward, sir, marrying her?'
Morse was silent awhile. 'Do you know, Lewis, it might be. It might be . . .'
'What did they do with the knife?'
'What's the whole point. That's what I'm telling you. They didn't use the stolen knife at all. They just got rid of it.'
'But you can't just get rid of things like that.'
'Why not? Stick it in a black bag and leave it for the dustmen. You could leave a dismembered corpse in one of those and get away with it. Kein Problem. The only thing the dustmen won't take is garden-refuse—that's a well-known fact, isn't it—'
'You seem to be assuming an awful lot of brains somewhere.'
'Look, Lewis! There seems to be a myth going round these days that criminals are a load of morons and that CID personnel are all members of Mensa.'
'Perhaps I should apply then,' said Lewis slowly.
'Pardon?'
'Well, I've been very clever, sir, while you were away. I think I've found Brooks's bike.'
'You have? Why the hell didn't you tell me before?'
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
It'll do him good to lie there unconscious for a bit. Give his brain a rest
(N. F. SIMPSON, One-Way Pendulum)
AT THE PROCTOR Memorial School that Friday afternoon the talk was predominantly of a ram-raid made on an off-licence in the Blackbird Leys Estate the previous evening, when by some happy chance a routine police patrol-car had been cruising round the neighbourhood just as three youths were looting the smashed shop in Verbena Avenue; when, too, a little later, the same police car had been only fifty or so yards behind when the stolen getaway car had crashed at full speed into a juggernaut lorry near the Horspath round-about on the Eastern Ring Road . . .
When the chase was over one of the three was seated dead in the driving seat, his chest crushed by the collapsed steering-wheel; another, the one in the front passenger seat, had his right foot mangled and trapped beneath the engine-mounting; the third, the one seated in the back, had severe lacerations and contusions around the head and face and was still unconscious after the firemen had finally cut free his colleagues in crime from the concertina'ed Escort.
The considerable interest in this incident—accident—is readily explicable, since two of the youths, the two who survived the crash, had spent five years at the Proctor Memorial School; had spent fifteen terms mocking the attempts of their teachers to instil a little knowledge and a few of the more civilised values into their lives. Had they received their educafon at one of the nation's more prestigious establishments—an Eton, say, or a Harrow, or a Winchester—the youths would probably have been designated 'Old Boys' instead of the 'former pupils' printed in the late afternoon edition of the Oxford Mail. And the former pupil who had been seated in the back of the car had left his Alma Mater only the previous term.
His name was Kevin Costyn.
Julia Stevens walked round to her former pupil's house during the lunch-break that Friday, wishing, if she could, to speak to Kevin's mother. But the door-bell, like most of the other fixtures there by the look of things, was out of order; and no one answered her repeated knockings. As she slowly turned and walked back through the neglected, litter-strewn front garden, a young woman, with two small children in a push-chair, stopped for a moment by the broken gate, and spoke to her.
'The people in there are usually out.'
That was all.
Perhaps, thought Julia Stevens, as she made her way thoughtfully back to school—perhaps that brief, somewhat enigmatic utterance could explain more about her former pupil than she herself had ever learned.
In the Major Trauma Ward, on Level 5 of the JR2 in Headington, she explained to the ward-sister that she had rung an hour earlier, at 6 p.m., and been told that it would be all right for
her to visit Mr. Kevin Costyn.
'How is he?'
'Probably not quite so bad as he looks. He's had a CT test—Computerised Tomography—and there doesn't seem to be any damage but we're a little bit worried about brain, yes. And he looks an awful mess, I'm afraid. Please prepare yourself, Mrs. Stevens.'
He was awake, and recognised her immediately.
'I'm sorry,' he whispered, speaking through a dreadfully lop-sided mouth, like one who has just received half a dozen injections of local anaesthetic into one half of the jaw.
'Sh! I've just come to see how you're getting on, that's all.'
'I'm sorry.'
'Listen! I'm the teacher, remember? Just let me do the talking.'
'That were the worst thing I ever done in my life.'
'Don't talk about it now! You weren't driving.'
He turned his face towards her, revealing the left cheek, so terribly bloodied and stitched and torn.
'It's not that, Mrs. Stevens. It's when I asked you for the money.' His eyes pleaded with her. 'I should never a' done that. You're the only person that was ever good to me, really—and then I go and . . .'
His words were faltering further, and there was a film of tears across his eyes.
'Don't worry about that, Kevin!'
'Will you promise me something? Please?'
'If I can, of course I will.'
'You won't worry if I don't worry.'
'I promise.'
'There's no need, you see. I won't ever tell anybody what I done for you—honest to God, I won't.'
A few minutes later, Julia was aware of movement behind her, and she turned to see the nurse standing there with a uniformed policeman, the latter clutching his flat hat rather awkwardly to his rib-cage.
It was time to go; and laying her hand for a few seconds on Kevin's right arm, an arm swathed in bandages and ribbed with tubes, she took her leave.