by Colin Dexter
“Yes.”
Lewis took down a white coat from its hook behind the door and looked at the oval badge—CHARTERED SOCIETY OF PHYSIO-THERAPY—printed round a yellow crest. He felt inside the stiffly starched pockets.
Nothing.
Not even Morse (Lewis allowed the thought) could have made much of that.
Each of the two women had a personal drawer in the office desk, and Lewis looked carefully through the items which Rachel had kept at hand during her own working hours: lipstick; lip salve; powder compact; deodorant stick; a small packet of tissues; two Biros, blue and red; a yellow pencil; a pocket English dictionary (OUP); and a library book. Nothing else. No personal diary; no letters.
Again Lewis felt (though wrongly this time) that Morse would have shared his disappointment.
As for Morse, he had called in at his bachelor flat in North Oxford before returning to Police HQ. Always, after a haircut, he went through the ritual of washing his hair—and changing his shirt, upon which even a few stray hairs left clinging seemed able to effect an intense irritation on what, as he told himself (and others), was a particularly sensitive skin.
When he finally returned to HQ he found Lewis already back from his missions.
“You’re looking younger, sir.”
“No, you’re wrong. I reckon this case has put years on me already.”
“I meant the haircut.”
“Ah, yes. Rather nicely done, isn’t it?”
“You had a good morning, sir—apart from the haircut?”
“Well, you know—er—satisfactory. What about you?”
Lewis smiled happily.
“Do you want the good news first or the bad news?”
“The bad news.”
“Well, not ‘bad’—just not ‘news’ at all, really. I don’t think we’re going to get many leads from her workplace. In fact I don’t think we’re going to get any.” And Lewis proceeded to give an account of his visit to the Oxford Physiotherapy Center.
“What time did she get there every morning?”
Lewis consulted his notes. “Five past, ten past eight—about then. Bit early. But if she left it much later she’d hit the heavy Kidlington traffic down into Oxford, wouldn’t she?”
“Mm … The first treatments don’t begin till quarter to nine, you say?”
“Or nine o’clock.”
“What did she do before the place opened?”
“Dunno.”
“Read, Lewis!”
“Well, like I said, there was a library book in her drawer.”
“What was it?”
“I didn’t make a note.”
“Can’t you remember?”
Ye-es, Lewis thought he could. Yes!
“Book called The Masters, sir—by P. C. Snow.”
Morse laughed and shook his head.
“He wasn’t a bloody police constable, Lewis! You mean C. P. Snow.”
“Sorry, sir.”
“Interesting, though.”
“In what way?”
But Morse ignored the question.
“When did she get it from the library?”
“How do I know?”
“You just,” said Morse slowly, sarcastically, “take fourteen days from the date printed for the book’s return, which you could have found, if you’d looked, by gently opening the front cover.”
“Perhaps they let you have three weeks—at the library she borrowed it from.”
“And which library was that?”
Somehow Lewis managed to maintain his good humor.
“Well, at least I can give you a very straight answer to that: I haven’t the faintest idea.”
“And what’s the good news?”
This time, it was Lewis’s turn to make a slow, impressive pronouncement:
“I know who the fellow is—the fellow in the photo.”
“You do?” Morse looked surprised. “You mean he turned up at the station?”
“In a way, I suppose he did, yes. There was no one like him standing around waiting for his girlfriend. But I had a word with this ticket collector—young chap who’s only been on the job for a few weeks. And he recognized him straightaway. He’d asked to look at his rail pass and he remembered him because he got a bit shirty with him—and probably because of that he remembered his name as well.”
“A veritable plethora of pronouns, Lewis! Do you know how many he’s and him’s and his’s you’ve just used?”
“No. But I know one thing—he told me his name!” replied Lewis, happily adding a further couple of potentially confusing pronouns to his earlier tally. “His name’s Julian Storrs.”
For many seconds Morse sat completely motionless, feeling the familiar tingling across his shoulders. He picked up his silver Parker pen and wrote some letters on the blotting pad in front of him. Then, in a whispered voice, he spoke:
“I know him, Lewis.”
“You didn’t recognize him, though—?”
“Most people,” interrupted Morse, “as they get older, can’t remember names. For them ‘A name is troublesome’—anagram—seven letters—what’s that?”
“ ‘Amnesia’?”
“Well done! I’m all right on names, usually. But as I get older it’s faces I can’t recall. And there’s a splendid word for this business of not being able to recognize familiar faces—”
“ ‘Pro-sop-a-something,’ isn’t it?”
Morse appeared almost shell-shocked as he looked across at his sergeant. “How in heaven’s name …?”
“Well, as you know, sir, I didn’t do all that marvelously at school—as I told you, we didn’t even have a school tie—but I was ever so good at one thing,” a glance at the blotting pad, “I was best in the class at reading things upside down.”
Chapter Seventeen
Facing the media is more difficult than bathing a leper.
—MOTHER TERESA OF CALCUTTA
There had been little difficulty in finding out information on Julian Charles Storrs—a man to whom Morse (as he now remembered) had been introduced only a few months previously at an exhibition of Thesiger’s desert photography in the Pitt Rivers Museum. But Morse said nothing of this to Lewis as the pair of them sat together that same evening in Kidlington HQ; said nothing either of his discovery that the tie whose provenance he had so earnestly sought was readily available from any Marks and Spencer’s store, priced £6.99.
“We shall have to see this fellow Storrs soon, sir.”
“I’m sure we shall, yes. But we’ve got nothing against him, have we? It’s not a criminal offense to get photographed with some attractive woman.… Interesting, though, that she was reading The Masters.”
“I’ve never read it, sir.”
“It’s about the internal shenanigans in a Cambridge College when the Master dies. And recently I read in the University Gazette that the present Master of Lonsdale is about to hang up his mortarboard—see what I mean?”
“I think I do,” lied Lewis.
“Storrs is a Fellow at Lonsdale—the Senior Fellow, I think. So if he suggested she might be interested in reading that book …”
“Doesn’t add up to much, though, does it? It’s motive we’ve got to look for. Bottom of everything—motive is.”
Morse nodded. “But perhaps it does add up a bit,” he added quietly. “If he wants the top job badly enough—and if she reminded him she could go and queer his pitch …”
“Kiss-and-tell sort of thing?”
“Kiss-and-not-tell, if the price was right.”
“Blackmail?” suggested Lewis.
“She’d have letters.”
“The postcard.”
“Photographs.”
“One photograph.”
“Hotel records. Somebody would use a credit card, and it wouldn’t be her.”
“He’d probably pay by cash.”
“You’re not trying to help me by any chance, are you, Lewis?”
“All I’m trying to do is be honest a
bout what we’ve got—which isn’t much. I agree with you, though: It wouldn’t have been her money. Not exactly rolling in it, that’s for sure. Must have been a biggish layout—setting up the practice, equipment, rent, and everything. And she’d got a mortgage on her own place, and a car to run.”
Yes, a car. Morse, who never took the slightest interest in any car except his own, visualized again the white Mini which had been parked outside Number 17.
“Perhaps you ought to look a bit more carefully at that car, Lewis.”
“Already have. Logbook in the glove compartment, road atlas under the passenger seat, fire extinguisher under the back seat—”
“No drugs or pornography in the boot?”
“No. Just a wheel brace and a Labor party poster.”
Lewis looked at his watch: 8:35 P.M. It had been a long day, and he felt very tired. And so, by the look of him, did his chief. He got to his feet.
“Oh, and two cassettes: Ella Fitzgerald and a Mozart thing.”
“Thing?”
“Clarinet thing, yes.”
“Concerto or Quintet, was it?”
Blessedly, before Lewis could answer (for he had no answer), the phone rang.
Chief Superintendent Strange.
“Morse? In your office? I almost rang the Red Lion.”
“How can I help, sir?” asked Morse wearily.
“TV—that’s how you can help. BBC wants you for the Nine O’Clock News and ITV for News at Ten. One of the crews is here now.”
“I’ve already told ’em all we know.”
“Well, you’d better think of something else, hadn’t you? This isn’t just a murder, Morse. This is a PR exercise.”
Chapter Eighteen
Thursday, February 22
For example, in such enumerations as “French, German, Italian and Spanish,” the two commas take the place of “ands”; there is no comma after “Italian,” because, with “and,” it would be otiose. There are, however, some who favor putting one there, arguing that, since it may sometimes be needed to avoid any ambiguity, it may as well be used always for the sake of uniformity.
—FOWLER, Modern English Usage
Just after lunchtime on Thursday, Morse found himself once again wandering aimlessly around Number 17 Bloxham Drive, a vague, niggling instinct suggesting to him that earlier he’d missed something of importance there.
But he was beginning to doubt it.
In the now-cleared kitchen, he switched on the wireless, finding it attuned to Radio 4. Had it been on when the police had first arrived? Had she been listening to the Today program when just for a second, perhaps, she’d looked down at the gush of blood that had spurted over the front of her nightclothes?
So what if she had been? Morse asked himself, conscious that he was getting nowhere.
In the front living room, he looked again along the single shelf of paperbacks. Women novelists, mostly: Jackie Collins, Jilly Cooper, Danielle Steel, Sue Townsend … He read four or five of the authors’ opening sentences, without once being instantly hooked, and was about to leave when he noticed Craig Raine’s A Choice of Kipling’s Prose—its white spine completely uncreased, as if it had been a very recent purchase. Or a gift? Morse withdrew the book and flicked through some of the short stories that once had meant—still meant—so very much to him. “They” was there, although Morse confessed to himself that he had never really understood its meaning. But genius? Christ, ah! And “On Greenhow Hill”; and “Love-o’-Women”—the latter (Morse was adamant about it) the greatest short story in the English language. He looked at the title page: no words to anyone; from anyone. Then, remembering a book he’d once received from a lovely, lost girl, he turned to the inside of the back cover: and there, in the bottom right-hand corner, he saw the penciled capitals: FOR R FROM J — RML.
“Remember My Love.”
It could have been anyone though—so many names beginning with “J”: Jack, James, Jason, Jasper, Jeremy, John, Joseph, Julian …
So what?
Anyway, these days, Morse, it could have been a woman, could it not?
Upstairs, in the front bedroom, he looked down at the double bed that almost monopolized the room, and noted again the two indented pillows, one atop the other, in their Oxford blue pillowcases, whereon for the very last time Rachel James had laid her pretty head. The winter duvet, in matching blue, was still turned back as she had left it, the under sheet only lightly creased. Nor was it a bed (of this Morse felt certain) wherein the murdered woman had spent the last night of her life in passionate lovemaking. Better, perhaps, if she had …
Standing on the bedside table was a glass of stale-looking water, beside which lay a pair of bluish earrings whose stones (Morse suspected) had never been fashioned from earth’s more precious store.
But the Chief Inspector was forming something of a picture, so he thought.
Picture … Pictures …
Two framed pictures only on the bedroom walls: the statutory Monet; and one of Gustav Klimt’s gold-patterned compositions. Plenty of posters and stickers, though: anti deer hunting; anti export of live animals; anti French nuclear tests; pro the NHS; pro the whales; pro legalized abortion. About par for the course at her age, thought Morse. Or at his age, come to think of it.
He pulled the side of the curtains slightly away from the wall, and briefly surveyed the scene below. An almost reverent hush now seemed to have settled upon Rachel’s side of the street. One uniformed policeman stood at the front gate—but only the one—talking to a representative of the Press—but only the one: the one who had lived next door to the murdered woman, at Number 15; the one with the ponytail; the one whom Morse would have to interview so very soon; the one he ought already to have interviewed.
Then, from the window, he saw his colleague, Sergeant Lewis, getting out of a marked police car; and thoughtfully he walked down the stairs. Odd—very odd, really—that with all those stickers around the bedroom, the one for the party the more likely (surely?) to further those advertised causes had been left in the boot of her car, where earlier Lewis had found it. Why hadn’t she put it up, as so many other householders in the terrace had done, in one of her upper or lower windows?
Aware that whatever had been worrying him had still not been identified, Morse turned the Yale lock to admit Lewis, the latter carrying the lunchtime edition of the Oxford Mail.
“I reckon it’s about time we interviewed him,” began Lewis, pointing through the closed door.
“All in good time,” agreed Morse, taking the newspaper where, as on the previous two days, the murder still figured on page one, although no longer as the lead story.
POLICE PUZZLED BY KIDLINGTON KILLING
The brutal murder of the physiotherapist Rachel James, which has caused such a stir in the local community, has left the police baffled, according to Inspector Morse of the Thames Valley CID.
The murdered woman was seen as a quietly unobtrusive member of the community with no obvious enemies, and as yet the police have been unable to find any plausible motive for her murder.
Neighbors have been swift to pay their tributes. Mrs. Emily Jacobs, who waved a greeting just before Rachel was murdered, said she was a friendly, pleasant resident who would be sadly missed.
Similar tributes were paid by other local inhabitants who are finding it difficult to come to terms with their neighborhood being the scene of such a terrible murder and a center of interest for the national media.
For the present, however, Bloxham Drive has been sealed off to everyone except local residents, official reporters and a team of police officers carefully searching the environs of No. 17.
But it seems inevitable that the street will soon be a magnet for sightseers, drawn by a ghoulish if natural curiosity, once police activity is scaled down and restrictions are lifted.
A grim-faced Sergeant Lewis, after once again examining the white Mini still parked outside the property, would make no comment other than confirming that various le
ads were being followed.
Rachel’s parents, who live in Devon, have identified the body as that of their daughter, and a bouquet of white lilies bearing the simple inscription “To our darling daughter” lies in cellophaned wrapping beside the front gate of No. 17.
The tragedy has cast a dark cloud over the voting taking place today for the election of a councillor to replace Terry Burgess who died late last year following a heart attack.
“Nicely written,” conceded Morse. “Bit pretentious, perhaps … and I do wish they’d all stop demoting me!”
“No mistakes?”
Morse eyed his sergeant sharply. “Have I missed something?”
Lewis said nothing, smiling inexplicably, as Morse read through the article again.
“Well, I’d’ve put a comma after ‘reporters’ myself. Incidentally, do you know what such a comma’s called?”
“Remind me.”
“The ‘Oxford Comma’.”
“Of course.”
“Why are you grinning?”
“That’s just it, sir. It’s that ‘grim-faced.’ Should be ‘grin-faced,’ shouldn’t it? You see, the missus rang me up half an hour ago: She’s won fifty pounds on the Premium Bonds. Bond, really. She’s only got one of ’em.”
“Congratulations!”
“Thank you, sir.”
For a final time Morse looked through the article, wondering whether the seventeenth word from the beginning and the seventeenth word from the end had anything to do with the number of the house in which Rachel James had been murdered. Probably not. Morse’s life was bestrewn with coincidences.
“Is that ponytailed ponce still out there?” he asked suddenly.
Lewis looked out of the front window.
“No, sir. He’s gone.”
“Let’s hope he’s gone to one of those new barbers’ shops you were telling me about?” Morse’s views were beset with prejudices.
Chapter Nineteen
She is disturbed
When the phone rings at 5 A.M.
And with such urgency
Aware that one of these calls
Will summon her to witness another death