by Colin Dexter
A well-tied tie is the first serious step in life.
—OSCAR WILDE
Morse caught a No. 2A bus into the center of Oxford, alighting at Carfax, thence walking down the High and entering Shepherd and Woodward’s, where he descended the stairs to Gerrard’s hairdressing saloon.
“The usual, sir?”
Morse was glad that he was being attended to by Gerrard himself. It was not that the proprietor was gifted with trichological skills significantly superior to those of his attractive female assistants; it was just that Gerrard had always been an ardent admirer of Thomas Hardy, and during his life had acquired an encyclopedic knowledge of the great man’s works.
“Yes, please,” answered Morse, looking morosely into the mirror at hair that had thinly drifted these last few years from ironish gray to purish white.
As Morse stood up to wipe the snippets of hair from his face with a hand towel, he took out the photograph and showed it to Gerrard.
“Has he ever been in here?”
“Don’t think so. Shall I ask the girls?”
Morse considered. “No. Leave it for the present.”
“Remember the Hardy poem, Mr. Morse? ‘The Photograph’?”
Morse did. Yet only vaguely.
“Remind me.”
“I used to have it by heart but …”
“We all get older,” admitted Morse.
Gerrard now scanned the pages of his extraordinary memory.
“You remember Hardy’d just burned a photo of one of his old flames—he didn’t know if she was alive or not—she was someone from the back of beyond of his life—but he felt awfully moved—as if he was putting her to death somehow—when he burned the photo … Just a minute … just a minute, I think I’ve got it:
Well—she knew nothing thereof did she survive,
And suffered nothing if numbered among the dead; Yet—yet—if on earth alive
Did she feel a smart, and with vague strange anguish strive?
If in heaven, did she smile at me sadly and shake her head?
Morse felt saddened as he walked out into the High. Hardy always managed to make him feel sad. And particularly so now, since only a few days earlier he’d consigned a precious photograph to the flames: a photograph hitherto pressed between pages 88–89 of his Collected Poems of A. E. Housman—the photograph of a dark-haired young woman seated on a broken classical column somewhere in Crete. A woman named Ellie Smith; a woman whom he’d loved—and lost.
Morse pondered the probabilities. Had other photographs been burned or torn to little pieces since the murder of Rachel James—photographs hitherto kept in books or secret drawers?
Perhaps Lewis was right. Why not publish the photo in the Oxford Mail? Assuredly, there’d be hundreds of incoming calls: so many of them wrong, of course—but some few of them probably right …
Morse turned left into Alfred Street, and walked down the narrow cobbled lane to the junction with Blue Boar Street, where he tried the saloon-bar door of the Bear Inn.
Locked—with the opening hour displayed disappointingly as midday. It was now 11:20 A.M., and Morse felt thirsty. Perhaps he was always thirsty. That morning, though, he felt preter-naturally thirsty. In fact he would gladly have swallowed a pint or two of ice-cold lager—a drink which at almost any other time would have been considered a betrayal by a real-ale addict like Morse.
He tapped lightly on the glass of the door. Tapped again. The door was opened.
A few minutes later, after offering identification, after a brief explanation of his purpose, Morse was seated with the landlord, Steven Lowbridge, at a table in the front bar.
“Would you like a coffee or something?” asked Sonya, his wife.
Morse turned round and looked toward the bar, where a row of beers paraded their pedigrees on the hand pumps.
“Is the Burton in good nick?”
The landlord (Morse learned) had been at the Bear Inn for five years, greatly enjoying his time there. A drinking house had been on the site since 1242, and undergraduates and undergraduettes were still coming in to crowd the comparatively small pub: from Oriel and Christ Church mostly; from Lincoln and Univ., too.
And the ties?
The Bear Inn was nationally—internationally—renowned for its ties: about five thousand of them at the last count. Showcases of ties covered the walls, covered the ceilings, in each of the bars: ties from Army regiments, sports clubs, schools, and OB associations; ties from anywhere and everywhere. The collection started (Morse learned) in 1954, when the incumbent landlord had invited any customer with an interesting-looking tie to have the last three or four inches of its back end cut off—in exchange for a couple of pints of beer. Thereafter, the snipped-off portions were put on display in cabinets, with a small square of white card affixed to each giving provenance and description.
Morse nodded encouragingly as the landlord told his well-rehearsed tale, occasionally casting a glance at the cabinet on the wall immediately opposite: Yale University Fencing Club; Kenya Police; Welsh Schoolboys’ Hockey Association; Women’s Land Army …
Ye gods!
What a multitude of ties!
Morse’s glass was empty; and the landlady tentatively suggested that the Chief Inspector would perhaps enjoy a further pint?
Morse had no objection; and made his way to the Gents where, as he washed his hands, he wondered whether all the washbasin plugs in the world could have disappeared—plugs from every pub, from every hotel, from every public convenience in the land. Somewhere (Morse mused) there must surely be a prodigious pile of basin plugs, as high as some Egyptian pyramid.
Back in the bar, Morse produced his photograph and pointed to the little patch of tie.
“Do you think there’s anything like that here?”
Lowbridge looked down at the slimly striped maroon tie, shaking his head dubiously.
“Don’t think so … But make yourself at home—please have a look round—for as long as you like.”
Morse experienced disappointment.
If only Lewis were there! Lewis—so wonderfully competent with this sort of thing: checking, checking, checking, the contents of the cabinets.
Help, Lewis!
But Lewis was elsewhere. And for twenty-five minutes or so, Morse moved round the two bars, with increasing fecklessness and irritation.
Nothing was matching …
Nothing.
“Find what you’re after?” It was the darkly attractive Sonya, just returned from a shopping expedition to the Westgate Center.
“No, sadly no,” admitted Morse. “It’s a bit like a farmer looking for a lost contact lens in a plowed field.”
“That what you’re looking for?”
Sonya Lowbridge pointed to the tie in the photograph that still lay on the table there.
Morse nodded. “That’s it.”
“But I can tell you where you can find that.”
“You can?” Morse’s eyes were suddenly wide, his mouth suddenly dry.
“Yep! I was looking for a tie for Steve’s birthday. And you’ll find one just like that on the tie rack in Marks and Spencer’s.”
Chapter Fifteen
A Slave has but one Master; yet ambitious folk have as many masters as there are people who may be useful in bettering their position.
—LA BRUYÈRE, Characters
“Well?”
Julian Storrs closed the front door behind him, hung up his dripping plastic mac, and took his wife into his arms.
“No external candidates—just the two of us.”
“That’s wonderful news!” Angela Storrs moved away from her husband’s brief, perfunctory embrace, and led the way into the lounge of the splendidly furnished property in Polstead Road, a thoroughfare linking the Woodstock Road with Aristotle Lane (the latter, incidentally, Morse’s favorite Oxford street name).
“Certainly not bad news, is it? If the gods just smile on us a little …”
“Drink?”
�
��I think I may have earned a small brandy.”
She poured his drink; poured herself a large dry martini; lit a cigarette; and sat beside him on the brown-leather settee. She clinked her glass with his, and momentarily her eyes gleamed with potential triumph.
“To you, Sir Julian!”
“Just a minute! We’ve got to win the bloody thing first. No pushover, old Denis, you know: good College man—fine scholar—first-class brain—”
“Married to a second-class tart!”
Storrs shook his head with an uneasy smile.
“You’re being a bit cruel, love.”
“Don’t call me ‘love’—as if you come from Rotherham, or somewhere.”
“What’s wrong with Rotherham?” He put his left arm around her shoulders, and forced an affectionate smile to his lips as he contemplated the woman he’d married just over twenty years previously—then pencil-slim, fresh-faced, and wrinkle-free.
Truth to tell, she was aging rather more quickly than most women of her years. Networks of varicose veins marred the long, still-shapely legs; and her stomach was a little distended around the waistband of the elegant trouser-suits which recently she almost invariably wore. The neck had grown rather gaunt, and there were lines and creases round her eyes. Yet the face itself was firmly featured still; and to many a man she remained an attractive woman—as she had appeared to Julian Storrs when first he had encountered her … in those extraordinary circumstances. And few there were who even now could easily resist the invitation of those almond eyes when after some dinner party or drinks reception she removed the dark glasses she had begun to wear so regularly.
Having swiftly swallowed her martini, Angela Storrs got to her feet and poured herself another—her husband making no demur. In fact, he was quite happy when she decided to indulge her more than occasional craving for alcohol, since then she would usually go to bed, go to sleep, and reawaken in a far more pleasant frame of mind.
“What are your chances—honestly?”
“Hope is a Christian virtue, you know that.”
“Christ! Can’t you think of anything better to say than that?”
He was silent awhile. “It means a lot to you, Angela, doesn’t it?”
“It means a lot to you, too,” she replied, allowing her slow words to take their full effect “It does, doesn’t it?”
“Yes,” he replied softly, “it means almost everything to me.”
Angela got up and poured herself another martini.
“I’m glad you said that. You know why? Because it doesn’t just mean almost everything to me—it means literally everything. I want to be the Master’s Wife, Julian. I want to be Lady Angela! Do you understand how much I want that?”
“Yes … yes, I think I do.”
“So … so if we have to engage in any ‘dirty tricks’ business …”
“What d’you mean?”
“Nothing specific.”
“What d’you mean?” he repeated.
“As I say …”
“Come on! Tell me!”
“Well, let’s say if it became known in the College that Shelly Cornford was an insatiable nymphomaniac …?”
“That just isn’t fair!”
Angela Storrs got to her feet and drained the last drop of her third drink:
“Who said it was?”
“Where are you going?”
“Upstairs, for a lie down, if you don’t object. I’d had a few before you got back—hadn’t you noticed? But I don’t suppose so, no. You haven’t really noticed me much at all recently, have you?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
But she was already leaving the room, and seemed not to hear.
Storrs took another small sip of his brandy, and pulled the copy of the previous evening’s Oxford Mail from the lower shelf of the coffee table, its front-page headline staring at him again:
MURDER AT KIDLINGTON
Woman Shot Through Kitchen Window
“What did you tell Denis?”
“He’s got a tutorial, anyway. I just said I’d be out shopping.”
“He told you about the College Meeting?”
She nodded.
“You pleased?”
“Uh, uh!”
“It’ll be a bit of a nerve-racking time for you.”
“You should know!”
“Only a month of it, though.”
“What d’you think his chances are?”
“Difficult to say.”
“Will you vote for him?”
“I don’t have a vote.”
“Unless it’s a tie.”
“Agreed. But that’s unlikely, they tell me. Arithmetically quite impossible—if all twenty-three Fellows decide to vote.”
“So you won’t really have much say in things at all.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t say that. I’ll be a bit surprised if one or two of the Fellows don’t ask me for a little advice about, er, about their choice.”
“And?”
“And I shall try to be helpful.”
“To Denis, you mean?”
“Now I didn’t say that, did I?”
The great cooling towers of Didcot power station loomed into view on the left, and for a while little more was said as the two of them continued the drive south along the A34, before turning off, just before the Ridgeway, toward the charming little village of West Ilsley.
“I feel I’m letting poor old Denis down a bit,” he said, as the dark blue Daimler pulled up in front of the village pub.
“Don’t you think I do?” she snapped. “But I don’t keep on about it.”
At the bar, he ordered a dry white wine for Shelly Cornford and a pint of Old Speckled Hen for himself; and the pair of them studied the Egon Ronay menu chalked up on a blackboard before making their choices, and sitting down at a window table overlooking the sodden village green.
“Do you think we should stop meeting?” He asked it quietly.
She appeared to consider the question more as an exercise in logical evaluation than as any emotional dilemma.
“I don’t want that to happen.”
She brushed the back of her right wrist down the front of his dark gray suit.
“Pity we’ve ordered lunch,” he said quietly.
“We can always give it a miss.”
“Where shall we go?”
“Before we go anywhere, I shall want you to do something for me.”
“You mean something for Denis?”
She nodded decisively.
“I can’t really promise you too much, you know that.”
She looked swiftly around the tables there, before moving her lips to his ear. “I can, though. I can promise you everything, Clixby,” she whispered.
From his room in College, Denis Cornford had rung Shelly briefly just before 11 A.M. She’d be out later, as she’d mentioned, but he wanted to tell her about the College Meeting as soon as possible.
He told her.
He was pleased—she could sense that.
She was pleased—he could sense that.
Cornford had half an hour to spare before his next tutorial with a very bright first-year undergraduette from Nottingham who possessed one of the most astonishingly retentive memories he had ever encountered, and a pair of the loveliest legs that had ever folded themselves opposite him. Yet he experienced not even the mildest of erotic daydreams as now, briefly, he thought about her.
He walked over to the White Horse, the narrow pub between the two Blackwell’s shops just opposite the Sheldonian; and soon he was sipping a large Glenmorangie, and slowly coming to terms with the prospect that in a month’s time he might well be the Master of Lonsdale College. By nature a diffident man, he was for some curious reason beginning to feel a little more confident about his chances. Life was a funny business—and the favorite often failed to win the Derby, did it not?
Yes, odd things were likely to happen in life.
Against all the odds, as it were.
> His black-stockinged student was sitting cross-legged on the wooden steps outside his room, getting to her feet as soon as she saw him. Being with Cornford, talking with him for an hour every week—that had become the highlight of her time at Oxford. But History was the great fascination in his life—not her.
She knew that.
Chapter Sixteen
Prosōpagnoia (n.): the failure of any person to recognize the face of any other person, howsoever recently the aforementioned persons may have mingled in each other’s company.
—Small’s Enlarged English Dictionary,
13th Edition, 1806
From Oxford railway station, at 10:20 A.M., Lewis had tried to ring Morse at HQ. But to no avail. The dramatic news would have to wait awhile, and at least Lewis now had ample time to execute his second order of the day.
There had been just the two of them at the Oxford Physiotherapy Center—although “Center” seemed a rather grandiloquent description of the ground-floor premises of the large, detached redbrick house halfway down the Woodstock Road (“1901” showing on the black drainpipe): the small office, off the spacious foyer; the single treatment room, to the right, its two beds separated by mobile wooden screens; and an inappropriately luxurious loo, to the left.
Rachel James’s distressed partner, a plain-featured, muscular divorcée in her midforties, could apparently throw little or no light on the recent tragedy. Each of them a fully qualified physiotherapist, they had gone freelance after a difference of opinion with the Hospital Trust, and two years earlier had decided to join forces and form their own private practice: women for the most part, troubled with ankles and knees and elbows and shoulders. The venture had been fairly successful, although they would have welcomed a few more clients—especially Rachel, perhaps, who (as Lewis learned for a second time) had been wading deeper and deeper into negative equity.
Boyfriends?—Lewis had ventured.
Well, she was attractive—face, figure—and doubtless there had been a good many admirers. But no specific beau; no one that Rachel spoke of as anyone special; no incoming calls on the office phone, for example.
“That hers?” Lewis had asked.