Death Is Now My Neighbor

by Colin Dexter

  As a result of these changes, Owens himself, nominally the group’s senior reporter, had become more and more deskbound, venturing out only for the big stories. Like now. For as he stood on 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 U.S. journal, quoted by Burne-Jones

  in a letter to Lady Horner

  At 11:15 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 neighborhood 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 Mom and Dad and younger sister already on their way up from Torquay. Still, Lewis was wonderfully good at that sort of thing. 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-O-X-H-A-M—

  One of the neighbors (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, Sergeant?”

  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.

  “You’re quite sure?” Lewis had insisted. “It was still a bit dark, you know.”

  “We’ve got some street lamps, haven’t we, Sergeant?”

  “You are sure, then.”

  “Unless she’s got—unless she had a twin sister.”

  “Sure about the time, too? That’s very important.”

  She nodded. “I’d just watched the news headlines on BBC1—I like to do that. Then I turned the telly off. I might have filled the kettle again … but, like I say, it was only a few minutes past seven. Five past, at the outside.”

  It therefore seemed virtually certain that there was a time span of no more than half an hour during which the murder had occurred: between 7:05 A.M., when Mrs. Jacobs had seen her neighbor opposite, and 7:35 A.M. or so, when Mrs. Norris had first noticed the hole in the window. It was unusual—very unusual—for such exactitude to be established at so early a stage in a murder inquiry; and there would be little need in this case for the police to be dependent upon (what Morse always called) those prevaricating pathologists.…

  “About quarter past seven,” answered the prevaricating Lewis.

  “You’re quite sure?” It was exactly the same question Lewis himself had asked.

  “No, not sure at all. Next question?”

  “Why didn’t everybody hear the shot?” (The same young, ginger-headed reporter.)

  “Silencer, perhaps?”

  “There’d be the sound of breaking glass surely?” (A logically minded man from the Oxford Star.)

  A series of hand gestures and silent lip movements from the TV crew urged Lewis to look directly into the camera.

  Lewis nodded. “Yes. In fact several of the neighbors think they heard something—two of them certainly did. But it could have been lots of things, couldn’t it?”

  “Such as?” (The importunate ginger knob again.)

  Lewis shrugged. “Could have been the milkman dropping a bottle—?”

  “No broken glass here, though, Sergeant.”

  “Car backfiring? We don’t know.”

  “Does what the neighbors heard fit in with the time all right?” (The TV interviewer with his fluffy cylindrical microphone.)

  “Pretty well, yes.”

  The senior reporter from the Oxford Mail had hitherto held his peace. But now he asked a curious question, if it was a question:

  “Not the two immediate neighbors, were they?”

  Lewis looked at the man with some interest.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Well, the woman who lives there,” a finger pointed to Number 19, “she was probably still asleep at the time, and she’s stone-deaf without her hearing aid.”

  “Really?”

  “And the man who lives there,” a finger pointed to Number 15, “he’d already left for work.”

  Lewis frowned. “Can you tell me how you happen to know all this, sir?”

  “No problem,” replied Geoffrey Owens. “You see, Sergeant, I live at Number 15.”

  Chapter Ten

  Where lovers lie with ardent glow,

  Where fondly each forever hears

  The creaking of the bed below—

  Above, the music of the sphere
s.

  —VISCOUNT MUMBLES, 1797–1821

  When Lewis returned from his encounter with the media, Morse was almost ready to leave the murder house. The morning had moved toward noon, and he knew that he might be thinking a little more clearly if he were drinking a little—or at least be starting to think when he started to drink.

  “Is there a real-ale pub somewhere near?”

  Lewis, pleasantly gratified with his handling of the Press and TV, was emboldened to sound a note of caution.

  “Doesn’t do your liver much good—all this drinking.”

  Surprisingly Morse appeared to accept the reminder with modest grace.

  “I’m sure you’re right; but my medical advisers have warned me it may well be unwise to give up alcohol at my age.”

  Lewis was not impressed, for he had heard the same words—exactly the same words—on several previous occasions.

  “You’ve had a good look around, sir?”

  “Not really. I know I always find the important things. But I want you to have a look around. You usually manage to find the unimportant things—and often they’re the things that really matter in the end.”

  Lewis made little attempt to disguise his pleasure, and straightway relented.

  “We could go up to the Boat at Thrupp?”

  “Excellent.”

  “You don’t want to stay here any longer?”

  “No. The SOCOs’ll be another couple of hours yet.”

  “You don’t want to see … her again?”

  Morse shook his head. “I know what she looks like—looked like.” He picked up two colored photographs and one postcard, and made toward the front door, handing over the keys of the maroon Jaguar to Lewis. “You’d better drive—if you promise to stick to the orange juice.”

  Once on their way, Lewis reported the extraordinarily strange coincidence of the pressman, Owens, living next door to the murdered woman. But Morse, who always looked upon any coincidence in life as the norm rather than the exception, was more anxious to set forth the firm details he had himself now gleaned about Ms. Rachel James, for there could now be no real doubt of her identity.

  “Twenty-nine. Single. No offspring. Worked as a freelance physiotherapist at a place in the Banbury Road. CV says she went to school at Torquay Comprehensive; left there in 1984 with a clutch of competent O-levels, three A-levels—two Bs, in Biology and Geography, and an E in Media Studies.”

  “Must have been fairly bright.”

  “What do you mean? You need to be a moron to get an E in Media Studies,” asserted Morse, who had never seen so much as a page of any Media Studies syllabus, let alone a question paper.

  He continued:

  “Parents, as you know, still alive, on their way here—”

  “You’ll want me to see them?”

  “Well, you are good at that sort of thing, aren’t you? And if the mother’s like most women she’ll probably smell the beer as soon as I open the door.”

  “Good reason for you to join me on the orange juice.”

  Morse ignored the suggestion. “She bought the property there just over four years ago for £65,000 and the value’s been falling ever since by the look of things, so the poor lass is one of those figuring in the negative equity statistics; took out a mortgage of £55,000—probably Mom and Dad gave her the other £10,000; and the salable value of Number 17 is now £40,000, at the most.”

  “Bought at the wrong time, sir. But some people were a bit irresponsible, don’t you think?”

  “I’m not an economist, as you know, Lewis. But I’ll tell you what would have helped her. Helped so many in her boots.”

  “A win on the National Lottery?”

  “Wouldn’t help many, that, would it? No. What she could have done with is a healthy dose of inflation. It’s a good thing—inflation—you know. Especially for people who’ve got nothing to start with. One of the best things that happened to some of us. One year I remember I had three jumps in salary.”

  “Not many would agree with you on that, though, would they? Conservative and Labor both agree about inflation.”

  “Ah! Messrs. Bull and Thomas, you mean?”

  “You noticed the stickers?”

  “I notice most things. It’s just that some of them don’t register—not immediately.”

  “What’ll you have, sir?”

  “Lew-is! We’ve known each other long enough, surely.”

  As Morse tasted the hostelry’s best bitter, he passed over a photograph of Rachel James.

  “Best one of her I could find.”

  Lewis looked down at the young woman.

  “Real good looker,” he said softly.

  Morse nodded. “I bet she’d have set a few hearts all aflutter.”

  “Including yours, sir?”

  Morse drank deeply on his beer before replying. “She’d probably have a good few boyfriends, that’s all I’m suggesting. As for my own potential susceptibility, that’s beside the point.”

  “Of course.” Lewis smiled good-naturedly. “What else have we got?”

  “What do you make of this? One of the few interesting things there, as far as I could see.”

  Lewis now considered the postcard handed to him. First, the picture on the front: a photograph of a woodland ride, with a sunlit path on the left, and a pool of azured bluebells to the right. Then turning over the card, he read the cramped lines amateurishly typed on the left-hand side:

  Ten Times I beg, dear Heart, let’s Wed!

  (Thereafter long may Cupid reigne)

  Let’s tread the Aisle, where thou hast led

  The fifteen Bridesmaides in thy Traine.

  Then spend our honeyed Moon a-bed,

  With Springs that creake againe—againe!

  —John Wilmot, 1672

  That was all.

  No salutation.

  No valediction.

  And on the right-hand side of the postcard—nothing: no address, with the four dotted, parallel lines devoid of any writing, the top right-hand rectangle devoid of any stamp.

  Lewis, a man not familiar with seventeenth-century love lyrics, read the lines, then read them again, with only semi-comprehension.

  “Pity she didn’t get round to filling in the address, sir. Looks as if she might be proposing to somebody.”

  “Aren’t you making an assumption?”

  “Pardon?”

  “Did you see a typewriter in the house?”

  “She could have typed it at work.”

  “Yes. You must get along there soon.”

  “You’re the boss.”

  “Nice drop o’ beer, this. In good nick.” Morse drained the glass and set it down in the middle of the slightly rickety table, while Lewis took a gentle sip of his orange juice; and continued to sit firmly fixed to his seat.

  Morse continued:

  “No! You’re making a false assumption—I think you are. You’re assuming she’d just written this to somebody and then forgotten the fellow’s address, right? Pretty unlikely, isn’t it? If she was proposing to him.”

  “Perhaps she couldn’t find a stamp.”

  “Perhaps …”

  Reluctantly Morse got to his feet and pushed his glass across the bar. “You don’t want anything more yourself, do you, Lewis?”

  “No thanks.”

  “You’ve nothing less?” asked the landlady, as Morse tendered a twenty-pound note. “You’re the first ones in today and I’m a bit short of change.”

  Morse turned round. “Any change on you, by any chance, Lewis?”

  “You see,” continued Morse, “you’re still assuming she wrote it, aren’t you?”

  “And she didn’t?”

  “I think someone wrote the card to her, put it in an envelope, and then addressed the envelope—not the card.”

  “Why not just address the card?”

  “Because whoever wrote it didn’t want anyone else to read it.”

  “Why not just phone her up?”

&nbs
p; “Difficult—if he was married and his wife was always around.”

  “He could ring her from a phone box.”

  “Risky—if anyone saw him.”

  Lewis nodded without any conviction: “And it’s only a bit of poetry.”

  “Is it?” asked Morse quietly.

  Lewis picked up the card again. “Perhaps it’s this chap called ‘Wilmot,’ sir—the date’s just there to mislead us.”

  “Mislead you, perhaps. John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, was a court poet to Charles II. He wrote some delightfully pornographic lyrics.”

  “So it’s—it’s all genuine?”

  “I didn’t say that, did I? The name’s genuine, but not the poem. Any English scholar would know that’s not seventeenth-century verse.”

  “I’m sure you’re right, sir.”

  “And if I’m right about the card coming in an envelope—fairly recently—we might be able to find the envelope, agreed? Find a postmark, perhaps? Even a bit of handwriting?”

  Lewis looked dubious. “I’d better get something organized, then.”

  “All taken care of! I’ve got a couple of the DCs looking through the wastepaper baskets and the dustbin.”

  “You reckon this is important, then?”

  “Top priority! You can see that. She’s been meeting some man—meeting him secretly. Which means he’s probably married, probably fairly well-known, probably got a prominent job, probably a local man—”

  “Probably lives in Peterborough,” mumbled Lewis.