Death Is Now My Neighbor

by Colin Dexter

  “That’s exactly why the postmark’s so vital!” countered an unamused Morse. “But if he’s an Oxford man …”

  “Do you know what the population of Oxford is?”

  “I know it to the nearest thousand!” snapped Morse.

  Then, of a sudden, the Chief Inspector’s mood completely changed. He tapped the postcard.

  “Don’t be despondent, Lewis. You see, we know just a little about this fellow already, don’t we?”

  He smiled benignly after draining his second pint; and since no other customers had as yet entered the lounge, Lewis resignedly got to his feet and stepped over to the bar once more.

  Lewis picked up the postcard again.

  “Give me a clue, sir.”

  “You know the difference between nouns and verbs, of course?”

  “How could I forget something like that?”

  “Well, at certain periods in English literature, all the nouns were spelled with capital letters. Now, as you can see, there are eight nouns in those six lines—each of them spelled with a capital letter. But there are nine capitals—forgetting the first word of each line. Now which is the odd one out?”

  Lewis pretended to study the lines once more. He’d played this game before, and he trusted he could get away with it again, as his eyes suddenly lit up a little.

  “Ah … I think—I think I see what you mean.”

  “Hits you in the eye, doesn’t it, that ‘Wed’ in the first line? And that’s what it was intended to do.”

  “Obviously.”

  “What’s it mean?”

  “What, ‘Wed’? Well, it means ‘marry’—you know, get hitched, get spliced, tie the knot—”

  “What else?”

  “Isn’t that enough?”

  “What else?”

  “I suppose you’re going to tell me it’s Anglo-Saxon or something.”

  “Not exactly. Not far off, though. Old English, in fact. And what’s it short for?”

  “ ‘Wednesday?’ ” suggested Lewis tentatively.

  Morse beamed at his sergeant. “Woden’s day—the fourth day of the week. So we’ve got a day, Lewis. And what else do you need, if you’re going to arrange a date with a woman?”

  Lewis studied the lines yet again. “Time? Time, yes! I see what you mean, sir. ‘Ten Times’… ‘fifteen Bridesmaides’… Well, well, well! Ten-fifteen!”

  Morse nodded. “With A.M. likelier than P.M. Doesn’t say where though, does it?”

  Lewis studied the lines for the fifth time.

  “ ‘Traine,’ perhaps?”

  “Well done! ‘Meet me at the station to catch the ten-fifteen A.M. train’—that’s what it says. And we know where that train goes, don’t we?”

  “Paddington.”

  “Exactly.”

  “If only we knew who he was …”

  Morse now produced his second photograph—a small passport-sized photograph of two people: the woman, Rachel James (no doubt of that), turning partially round and slightly upward in order to kiss the cheek of a considerably older man with a pair of smiling eyes beneath a distinguished head of graying hair.

  “Who’s he, sir?”

  “Dunno. We could find out pretty quickly, though, if we put his photo in the local papers.”

  “If he’s local.”

  “Even if he’s not local, I should think.”

  “Bit dodgy, sir.”

  “Too dodgy at this stage, I agree. But we can try another angle, can’t we? Tomorrow’s Tuesday, and the day after that’s Wednesday—Woden’s day.…”

  “You mean he may turn up at the station?”

  “If the card’s fairly recent, yes.”

  “Unless he’s heard she’s been murdered.”

  “Or unless he murdered her himself.”

  “Worth a try, sir. And if he does turn up, it’ll probably mean he didn’t murder her.…”

  Morse made no comment.

  “Or, come to think of it, it might be a fairly clever thing to do if he did murder her.”

  Morse drained his glass and stood up.

  “You know something? I reckon orange juice occasionally germinates your brain cells.”

  As he drove his chief down to Kidlington, Lewis returned the conversation to where it had begun.

  “You haven’t told me what you think about this fellow Owens—the dead woman’s next-door neighbor.”

  “Death is always the next-door neighbor,” said Morse somberly. “But don’t let it affect your driving, Lewis!”

  Chapter Eleven

  Wednesday, February 21

  Orandum est ut sit mens sana in corpore sano.

  (Our aim? Just a brain that’s not addled with pox,

  And a guaranteed clean bill-of-health from the docs.)

  —JUVENAL, Satires X

  The next meeting of the Lonsdale Fellows had been convened for 10 A.M.

  In the Stamper Room.

  William Leslie Stamper, b. 1880, had graduated from Oxford University in 1903 with the highest marks (it is said) ever recorded in Classical Moderations. The bracketed caveat in the previous sentence would be unnecessary were it not that the claim for such distinction was perpetuated, in later years, by one person only—by W. L. Stamper himself. And it is pointless to dwell upon the matter since no independent verification is available: The relevant records had been removed from Oxford to a safe place, thereafter never to be seen again, during the First World War—a war in which Stamper had not been an active participant, owing to an illness which was unlikely to prolong his eminently promising career as a don for more than a couple of years or so. Such nonparticipation in the great events of 1914–18 was a major sadness (it is said) to Stamper himself, who was frequently heard to lament his own failure to figure among the casualty lists from the fields of Flanders or Passchendaele.

  Now, the reader may readily be forgiven for assuming from the preceding paragraph that Stamper had been a timeserver; a dissembling self-seeker. Yet such an assumption is highly questionable, though not necessarily untrue. When, for example, in 1925, the Mastership of Lonsdale fell vacant, and nominations were sought amid the groves of Academe, Stamper had refused to let his name go forward, on the grounds that if ten years earlier he had been declared unfit to fight in defense of his country he could hardly be considered fit to undertake the governance of the College; specifically so, since the Statutes stipulated a candidate whose body was no less healthy than his brain.

  Thereafter, in his gentle, scholarly, pedantic manner, Stamper had passed his years teaching the esoteric skills of Greek Prose and Verse Composition—until retiring at the age of sixty-five, two years before the statutory limit, on the grounds of ill health. No one, certainly not Stamper himself (it is said), anticipated any significant continuation of his life, and the College Fellows unanimously backed a proposal that the dear old boy should have the privilege, during the few remaining years of his life, of living in the finest set of rooms that the College had to offer.

  Thus it was that the legendary Stamper had stayed on in Lonsdale as an honorary Emeritus Fellow, with full dining rights, from the year of his retirement, 1945, to 1955; and then to 1965 … and 1975; and almost indeed until 1985, when he had finally died at the age of 104—and then not through any dysfunction of the bodily organs, but from a fall beside his rooms in the front quad after a heavy bout of drinking at a Gaudy, his last words (it is said) being a whispered request for the Madeira to be passed round once again.

  The agenda which lay before Sir Clixby Bream and his colleagues that morning was short and fairly straightforward:

  (i) To receive apologies for absence

  (ii) To approve the minutes of the previous meeting (already circulated)

  (iii) To consider the Auditors’ statement on College expenditure, Michaelmas 1995

  (iv) To recommend appropriate procedures for the election of a new Master

  (v) AOB

  Items (i)-(iii) took only three minutes, and would have taken only
one, had not the Tutor for Admissions sought an explanation of why the “Stationery, etc.” bill for the College Office had risen by four times the current rate of inflation. For which increase the Domestic Bursar admitted full responsibility, since instead of ordering 250 Biros he had inadvertently ordered 250 boxes of Biros.

  This confession put the meeting into good humor, as it passed on to item (iv).

  The Master briefly restated the criteria to be met by potential applicants: first, that he be not in Holy Orders; second, that he be mentally competent, and particularly so in the “Skills of the Arithmetick” (as the original Statute had it); third, that he be free from serious bodily infirmity. On the second criterion, the Master suggested that since it was now virtually impossible (a gentle glance here at the innumerate Professor of Arabic) to fail GCSE Mathematics, there could be little problem for anyone. As far as the third criterion was concerned however (the Master grew more solemn now) there was a sad announcement he had to make. One name previously put forward had been withdrawn—that of Dr. Ridgeway, the brilliant microbiologist from Balliol, who had developed serious heart trouble at the comparatively youthful age of forty-three.

  Amid murmurs of commiseration round the table, the Master continued:

  “Therefore, gentlemen, we are left with two nominations only … unless we … unless anyone …? No?”

  No.

  Well, that was pleasing, the Master declared: He had always wished his successor to be appointed from within the College. And so it would be. Voting would take place in the time-honored way: A single sheet of paper bearing the handwritten name of the preferred candidate, with the signature of the Voting Fellow beneath it, must be delivered to the Master’s Lodge before noon on the nineteenth of March, one month away.

  The Master proceeded to wish the two candidates well; and Julian Storrs and Denis Cornford, by chance seated next to each other, shook hands smilingly, like a couple of boxers before the weigh-in for a bruising fight.

  That was not quite all.

  Under AOB, the Tutor for Admissions was moved to make his second contribution of the morning.

  “Perhaps it may be possible, Master, in view of the current plethora of pens in the College Office, for the Domestic Bursar to send us each a free Biro with which we can write down our considered choices for Master?”

  It was a nice touch, typical of an Oxford SCR; and when at 10:20 A.M. they left the Stamper Room and moved outside into the front quad, most of the Fellows were grinning happily.

  But not the Domestic Bursar.

  Nor Julian Storrs.

  Nor Denis Cornford.

  Chapter Twelve

  The virtue of the camera is not the power it has to transform the photographer into an artist, but the impulse it gives him to keep on looking—and looking.

  —BROOKS ATKINSON, Once Around the Sun

  Earlier that same morning Morse and Lewis had been sitting together drinking coffee in the canteen at Kidlington Police HQ.

  “Well, that’s them!” said an unwontedly ungrammatical Morse as he pointed to the photograph which some darkroom boy had managed to enlarge and enhance. “Our one big clue, that; one small clue, anyway.”

  As Lewis saw things, the enlargement appeared to have been reasonably effective as far as the clothing was concerned; yet to be truthful, the promised “enhancement” of the two faces, those of the murdered woman and of the man so close beside her, seemed to have blurred rather than focused any physiognomical detail.

  “Well?” asked Morse.

  “Worse than the original.”

  “Nonsense! Look at that.” Morse pointed to the tight triangular knot of the man’s tie, which appeared—just—above a high-necked gray sweater.

  Yes. Lewis acknowledged that the color and pattern of the tie were perhaps a little clearer.

  “I think I almost recognize that tie,” continued Morse slowly. “That deepish maroon color. And that,” he pointed again, “that narrow white stripe …”

  “We never had ties at school,” ventured Lewis.

  But Morse was too deeply engrossed to bother about his sergeant’s former school uniform, or lack of it, as with a magnifying glass he sought further to enhance the texture of the small relevant area of the photograph.

  “Bit o’ taste there, Lewis. Little bit o’ class. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s the tie of the Old Wykehamists’ Classical Association.”

  Lewis said nothing.

  And Morse looked at him almost accusingly. “You don’t seem very interested in what I’m telling you.”

  “Not too much, perhaps.”

  “All right! Perhaps it’s not a public school tie. So what tie do you think it is?”

  Again Lewis said nothing.

  After a while, a semi-mollified Morse picked up the photograph, returned it to its buff-colored Do-Not-Bend envelope, and sat back in his seat.

  He looked tired.

  And, as Lewis knew, he was frustrated too, since necessarily the whole of the previous day had been spent on precisely those aspects of detective work that Morse disliked the most: administration, organization, procedures—with as yet little opportunity for him to indulge in the things he told himself he did the best: hypotheses, imaginings, the occasional leap into the semidarkness.

  It was now 9 A.M.

  “You’d better get off to the station, Lewis. And good luck!”

  “What are you planning to do?”

  “Going down into Oxford for a haircut.”

  “We’ve got a couple of new barbers’ shops opened here. No need to—”

  “I—am—going—down—into—Oxford, all right? A bit later, I’m going to meet a fellow who’s an expert on ties, all right?”

  “I’ll give you a lift, if you like.”

  “No. It only takes one of those shapely lasses in Shepherd and Woodward’s about ten minutes to trim my locks—and I’m not meeting this fellow till eleven.”

  “King’s Arms, is it?”

  “Ah! You’re prepared to guess about that.”

  “Pardon?”

  “So why not have a guess about the tie? Come on!”

  “I dunno.”

  “Nor do I bloody know. That’s exactly why we’ve got to guess, man.”

  Lewis stood by the door now. It was high time he went.

  “I haven’t got a clue about all those posh ties you see in the posh shops in the High. For all I know he probably got it off the tie rack in Marks and Spencer’s.”

  “No. I don’t think so.”

  “Couldn’t we just cut a few corners? Perhaps we ought to put the photo in the Oxford Mail. We’d soon find out who he was then.”

  Morse considered the possibility anew.

  “Ye-es … and if we find he’s got nothing to do with the murder …”

  “We can eliminate him from inquiries.”

  “Ye-es. Eliminate his marriage, too—”

  “—if he’s married—”

  “—and ruin his children—”

  “—if he’s got any.”

  “You just get off to the railway station, Lewis.” Morse had had enough.

  Chapter Thirteen

  It is the very temple of discomfort.

  —JOHN RUSKIN, The Seven Lamps of Architecture—

  referring to the building of a railway station

  At 9:45 A.M. Lewis was seated strategically at one of the small round tables in the refreshment area adjacent to Platform One. Intermittently an echoing loudspeaker announced arrivals or apologies for delays; and, at 9:58, recited a splendid litany of all the stops on the slow train to Reading: Radley, Culham, Appleford, Didcot Parkway, Cholsey, Goring and Streatley …

  Cholsey, yes.

  Mrs. Lewis was a big fan of Agatha Christie, and he’d often promised to take her to Cholsey churchyard where the great crime novelist was buried. But one way or another he’d never got round to it.

  The complex was busy, with passengers constantly leaving the station through the two automatic
doors to Lewis’s right, to walk down the steps outside to the taxi rank and buses for the city center; passengers constantly entering through those same doors, making for the ticket windows, the telephones, the Rail Information office; passengers turning left, past Lewis, in order to buy newspapers, sweets, paperbacks, from the Menzies shop—or sandwiches, cakes, coffee, from the Quick Snack counter alongside.

  From where he sat, Lewis could just read one of the display screens: The 10:15 train to Paddington, it appeared, would be leaving on time—no minutes late. But he had seen no one remotely resembling the man whose photograph he’d tucked inside his copy of the Daily Mirror.

  At 10:10 A.M. the train drew in to Platform One, and passengers were now getting on. But still there was no one to engage Lewis’s attention; no one standing around impatiently as if waiting for a partner; no one sitting anxiously consulting a wristwatch every few seconds, or walking back and forth to the exit doors and scanning the occupants of incoming taxis.

  No one.

  Lewis got to his feet and went out on to the platform, walking quickly along the four coaches which comprised the Turbo Express for Paddington, memorizing as best he could the face he’d so earnestly been studying that morning. But, again, he could find no one resembling the man who had once sat beside the murdered woman in a photographic booth.

  No one.

  It was then, at the last minute (quite literally so), that the idea occurred to him.

  A young-looking ticket collector was leaning out of one of the rear windows while a clinking refreshment trolley was being lifted awkwardly aboard. Lewis showed him his ID; showed him the photograph.

  “Have you ever seen either of these two on the Paddington train? Or any other train?”

  The acne-faced youth examined the ID card as if suspecting, perchance, that it might be a faulty ticket; then, equally carefully, looked down at the photograph before looking up at Lewis.

  Someone blew a whistle.

  “Yes, I have. Seen him, anyway. Do you want to know his name, Sergeant? I remember it from his Railcard.”

  Chapter Fourteen