by Colin Dexter
Commanding more words than she
The outside observer can provide—and yet
Notepad poised and ready
She picks up the receiver.
—HELEN PEACOCKE, Ace Reporter
At 2:25 P.M. that same day, Morse got into the maroon Jaguar and after looking at his wristwatch drove off. First, down to the Cutteslowe Roundabout, then straight over and along Banbury Road to the Martyrs’ Memorial, where he turned right onto Beaumont Street, along Park End Street, and out under the railway bridge onto Botley Road, where just beyond the river bridge he turned left into the Osney Industrial Estate.
There was, in fact, one vacant space in the limited parking lots beside the main reception area to Oxford City and County Newspapers; but Morse pretended not to notice it. Instead he asked the girl at the reception desk for the open sesame to the large staff car park, and was soon watching the black-and-white barrier lift as he inserted a white plastic card into some electronic contraption there. Back in reception, the same young girl retrieved the precious ticket before giving Morse a VISITOR badge, and directing him down a corridor alongside, on his left, a vast open-plan complex, where hundreds of newspaper personnel appeared too preoccupied to notice the “Visitor.”
Owens, as Morse discovered, was one of the few employees granted some independent square-footage there, his small office hived off by wood-and-glass partitions.
“You live, er, she lived next door, I’m told,” began Morse awkwardly.
Owens nodded.
“Bit of luck, I suppose, in a way—for a reporter, I mean?”
“For me, yes. Not much luck for her, though, was it?”
“How did you first hear about it? You seem to have been on the scene pretty quickly, sir.”
“Della rang me. She lives on the Drive—Number 1. She’d seen me leave for work.”
“What time was that?”
“Must have been … ten to seven, five to seven?”
“You usually leave about then?”
“I do now, yes. For the past year or so we’ve been working a fair amount of flexitime and, well, the earlier I leave home the quicker I’m here. Especially in term time when—” Owens looked shrewdly across his desk at Morse. “But you know as much as I do about the morning traffic from Kidlington to Oxford.”
“Not really. I’m normally going the other way—North Oxford to Kidlington.”
“Much more sensible.”
“Yes …”
Clearly Owens was going to be more of a heavyweight than he’d expected, and Morse paused awhile to take his bearings. He’d made a note only a few minutes since of exactly how long the same distance had taken him, from Bloxham Drive to Osney Mead. And even with quite a lot of early afternoon traffic about—even with a couple of lights against him—he’d done the journey in fourteen and a half minutes.
“So you’d get here at about … about when, Mr. Owens?”
The reporter shrugged his shoulders. “Quarter past? Twenty past? Usually about then.”
A nucleus of suspicion was beginning to form in Morse’s brain as he sensed that Owens was perhaps exaggerating the length of time it had taken him to reach work that Monday morning. If he had left at, say, ten minutes to seven, he could well have been in the car park at—what?—seven o’clock? With a bit of luck? So why … why had Owens suggested quarter past—even twenty past?
“You can’t be more precise?”
Again Morse felt the man’s shrewd eyes upon him.
“You mean the later I got here the less likely I am to be a suspect?”
“You realize how important times are, Mr. Owens—a sequence of times—in any murder inquiry like this?”
“Oh yes, I know it as well as you do, Inspector. I’ve covered quite a few murders in my time.… So … so why don’t you ask Della what time she saw me leave? Della Cecil, that is, at Number 1. She’ll probably remember better than me. And as for getting here … well, that’ll be fairly easy to check. Did you know that?”
Owens took a small white rectangular card from his wallet, with a number printed across the top—008 14922—and continued: “I push that in the thing there and the whatsit goes up and something somewhere records the time I get into the car park.”
Clearly the broad-faced, heavy-jowled reporter had about as much specialist knowledge of voodoo technology as Morse, and the latter switched the thrust of his questions.
“This woman who saw you leave, I shall have to see her—you realize that?”
“You wouldn’t be doing your job if you didn’t. Cigarette, Inspector?”
“Er, no, no thanks. Well, er, perhaps I will, yes. Thank you. This woman, as I say, do you know her well?”
“Only twenty houses in the Drive, Inspector. You get to know most people, after a while.”
“You never became, you know, more friendly? Took her out? Drink? Meal?”
“Why do you ask that?”
“I’ve just got to find out as much as I can about everybody there, that’s all. Otherwise, as you say, I wouldn’t be doing my job, would I, Mr. Owens?”
“We’ve had a few dates, yes—usually at the local.”
“Which is?”
“The Bull and Swan.”
“Ah, ‘Brakspear,’ ‘Bass,’ ‘Bishop’s Finger’ …”
“I wouldn’t know. I’m a lager man myself.”
“I see,” said a sour-faced Morse. Then, after a pause, “What about Rachel James? Did you know her well?”
“She lived next door, dammit! Course I knew her fairly well.”
“Did you ever go inside her house?”
Owens appeared to consider the question carefully. “Just the twice, if I’ve got it right. Once when I had a few people in for a meal and I couldn’t find a corkscrew and I knocked on her back door and she asked me in, because it was pissing the proverbials, while she looked around for hers. The other time was one hot day last summer when I was mowing the grass at the back and she was hanging out her smalls and I asked her if she wanted me to do her patch and she said she’d be grateful, and when I’d done it she asked me if I’d like a glass of something and we had a drink together in the kitchen there.”
“Lager, I suppose.”
“Orangeade.”
Orangeade, like water, had never played any significant role in Morse’s dietary, but he suddenly realized that at that moment he would have willingly drunk a pint of anything, so long as it was ice-cold.
Even lager.
“It was a hot day, you say?”
“Boiling.”
“What was she wearing?”
“Not much.”
“She was an attractive girl, wasn’t she?”
“To me? I’m always going to be attracted to a woman with not much on. And, as I remember, most of what she’d got on that day was mostly off, if you follow me.”
“So she’d have a lot of boyfriends?”
“She was the sort of woman men would lust after, yes.”
“Did you?”
“Let’s put it this way, Inspector. If she’d invited me to bed that afternoon, I’d’ve sprinted up the stairs.”
“But she didn’t invite you?”
“No.”
“Did she invite other men?”
“I doubt it. Not on Bloxham Drive, anyway. We don’t just have Neighborhood Watch here; we’ve got a continuous Nosey-Parker Surveillance Scheme.”
“Even in the early morning?”
“As I told you, somebody saw me go to work on Monday morning.”
“You think others may have done?”
“Bloody sure they did!”
Morse switched tack again. “You wouldn’t remember—recognize—any of her occasional boyfriends?”
“No.”
“Have you heard of a man called Julian Storrs?”
“Yes.”
“You know him?”
“Not really, no. But he’s from Lonsdale, and I interviewed him for the Oxford Mail last year—December, I th
ink it was—when he gave the annual Pitt Rivers Lecture. On Captain Cook, as I recall. I’d never realized how much the natives hated that fellow’s guts—you know, in the Sandwich Islands or somewhere.”
“I forget,” said Morse, as if at some point in his life he had known …
At his local grammar school, the young Morse had been presented with a choice of the 3 Gs: Greek, Geography, or German. And since Morse had joined the Greek option, his knowledge of geography had ever been fatally flawed. Indeed, it was only in his late twenties that he had discovered that the Balkan States and the Baltic States were not synonymous. Yet about Captain Cook’s voyages Morse should (as we shall see) have known at least a little—did know a little—since his father had adopted that renowned British navigator, explorer, and cartographer as his greatest hero in life—unlike (it seemed) the natives of those “Sandwich Islands or somewhere.…”
“You never saw Mr. Storrs on Bloxham Drive?”
In their sockets, Owens’ eyes shot from bottom left to top right, like those of a deer that has suddenly sniffed a predator.
“Never. Why?”
“Because,” Morse leaned forward a few inches as he summoned up all his powers of creative ingenuity, “because someone on the Drive—this is absolutely confidential, sir!—says that he was seen, fairly recently, going into, er, another house there.”
“Which house?” Owens’ voice was suddenly sharp.
Morse held up his right hand and got to his feet. “Just a piece of gossip, like as not. But we’ve got to check out every lead, you know that.”
Owens remained silent.
“You’ve always been a journalist?”
“Yes.”
“Which papers …?”
“I started in London.”
“Whereabouts?”
“Soho—around there.”
“When was that?”
“Midseventies.”
“Wasn’t that when Soho was full of sex clubs and striptease joints?”
“And more. Gets a bit boring, all that stuff though, after a time.”
“Yes. So they tell me.”
“I read your piece today in the Oxford Mail,” said Morse as the two men walked toward reception. “You write well.”
“Thank you.”
“I can’t help remembering you said ‘comparatively’ crime-free area.”
“That was in yesterday’s.”
“Oh.”
“Well … we’ve only had one burglary this last year, and we’ve had no joyriders around since the council put the sleeping policemen in. We still get a bit of mindless vandalism, of course—you’ll have seen the young trees we tried to plant round the back. And litter—litter’s always a problem—and graffiti … And someone recently unscrewed most of the latches on the back gates—you know, the things that click as the gates shut.”
“I didn’t know there was a market for those,” muttered Morse.
“And you’re wasting your time if you put up a name for your house, or something like that. I put a little notice on my front gate. Lasted exactly eight days. Know what it was?”
Morse glanced back at the corporate workforce seated in front of VDU screens at desks cluttered with in-trays, out-trays, file cases, handbooks, and copy being corrected and cosseted before inclusion in forthcoming editions of Oxford’s own Times, Mail, Journal, Star.…
“ ‘No Free Newspapers?’ ” he suggested sotto voce.
Morse handed in his Visitor badge at reception.
“You’ll need to give me another thing to get out with.”
“No. The barrier lifts automatically when you leave.”
“So once you’re in …”
She smiled. “You’re in! It’s just that we used to get quite a few cars from the Industrial Estate trying it on.”
Morse turned left onto Botley Road and drove along to the Ring Road junction where he took the northbound A34, coming off at the Pear Tree Roundabout, and then driving rather too quickly up the last stretch to Kidlington HQ—where he looked at his wristwatch again.
Nine and a half minutes.
Only nine and a half minutes.
Chapter Twenty
It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data.
—CONAN DOYLE, Scandal in Bohemia
As Morse climbed the stairs to Lewis’s office he was experiencing a deep ache in each of his calves.
“Hardest work I’ve done today, that!” he admitted as, panting slightly, he flopped into a chair.
“Interview go okay, sir?”
“Owens? I wouldn’t trust that fellow as far as I could kick him.”
“Which wouldn’t be too far, in your present state of health.”
“Genuine journalist he may be—but he’s a phony witness, take it from me!”
“Before you go on, sir, we’ve got the preliminary postmortem report here.”
“You’ve read it through?”
“Tried to. Bullet entry in the left submandibular—”
“Lew-is! Spare me the details! She was shot through the window, through the blind, in the morning twilight. You mustn’t expect much accuracy about the thing! You’ve been watching too many old cowboy films where they mow down the baddies at hundreds of yards.”
“Distance of about eighteen inches to two feet, that’s what it says, judging from—”
“What’s it say about the time?”
“She’s not quite so specific there.”
“Why the hell not? We told her exactly when the woman was shot!”
“Dr. Hobson says the temperature in the kitchen that morning wasn’t much above zero.”
“Economizing everywhere, our Rachel,” said Morse rather sadly.
“And it seems you get this sort of ‘refrigeration factor’—”
“In which we are not particularly interested, Lewis, because we know—” Morse suddenly stopped. “Unless … unless our distinguished pathologist is suggesting that Rachel may have been murdered just a little earlier than we’ve been assuming.”
“I don’t think she’s trying to suggest anything, sir. Just giving us the facts as far as she sees them.”
“I suppose so.”
“Do you want to read the report?”
“I shall have to, shan’t I, if you can’t understand it?”
“I didn’t say that—”
But again Morse interrupted him, almost eagerly now recounting his interview with Owens.…
“… So don’t you see, Lewis? He could have done it. Quarter of an hour it took me, to the newspaper offices via Banbury Road; ten minutes back via the Ring Road. So if he left home about ten to seven—clocked into the car park at seven, say—hardly anything on the roads—then drove straight out of the car park—there’s no clocking out there—that’s the system they have—drove hell for leather back to Bloxham Close—”
“Drive, sir.”
“—parks his car up on the road behind the houses,” Morse switched now to the vivid present tense, “—goes through the vandalized fence there—down the grass slope—taps on her window—the thin blinds still drawn,” Morse’s eyes seemed almost mesmerized, “—sees her profile more clearly as she gets nearer—for a second or two scrutinizes the dark outline at the gas-lit window—”
“It’s electric there.”
“—then he fires through the window into her face—and hits her just below the jaw.”
Lewis nodded this time. “The submandibular bit, you’re right about that.”
“Then he goes up the bank again—gets in his car—back to Osney Mead. But he daren’t go into the car park again—of course not! So he leaves his car somewhere near, and goes into the office from the rear of the car park. Nobody much there to observe his comings and goings—most of the people get in there about eightish, so I learn. Quod erat demonstrandum! I know you’re going to ask me what his motive was, and I don’t know. But this time we’ve found the murderer before we’ve found the motive. Not grumbling too much about that,
are you?”
“Yes! It just won’t hold water.”
“And why’s that?”
“There’s this woman from Number 1, for a start. Miss Cecil—”
“Della—Owens called her Della.”
“She saw him leave, didn’t she? About seven o’clock? That’s why she knew he’d be at his desk when she rang him as soon as she saw the police arrive—just after eight.”
“One hour—one whole hour! You can do a lot in an hour.”
“You still can’t put a quart into a pint pot.”
“We’ve now gone metric, by the way, Lewis. Look, what if they’re in it together—have you thought of that? Owens is carrying a torch for that Miss Cecil, believe me! When I happened to mention Julian Storrs—”
“You didn’t do that, surely?”
“—and when I said he’d been seen knocking at one of the other doors there—”
“But nobody—”
“—he was jealous, Lewis! And there are only two houses in the Close,” Lewis gave up the struggle, “occupied by nubile young women: Number 17 and Number 1, Miss James and Miss Cecil, agreed?”
“I thought you just said they were in it together.”
“I said they might be, that’s all. I’m just thinking aloud, for Christ’s sake! One of us has got to think. And I’m a bit weary and I’m much underbeered. So give me a chance!”
Lewis waited a few seconds. Then:
“Is it my turn to speak, sir?”
Morse nodded weakly, contemplating the threadbare state of Lewis’s carpet.
“I don’t know whether you’ve been down the Botley Road in the morning recently—even in the fairly early morning—but it’s one of the worst bottlenecks in Oxford. You drove there and back in midafternoon, didn’t you? But you want Owens to do three journeys between Kidlington and Osney Mead. First he drives to work—perhaps fairly quickly, agreed. Twenty minutes, say? He drives back—a bit quicker? Quarter of an hour, say. He parks his car somewhere—it’s not going to be on Bloxham Drive, though. He murders his next-door neighbor. Drives back into Oxford after that—another twenty, twenty-five minutes at least now. Finds a parking space—and this time it’s not going to be in the car park, as you say. Walks or runs to his office, not going in the front door, either—for obvious reasons. Gets into his office and is sitting there at his desk when his girlfriend—if you’re right about that—rings him up and tells him he’ll be in for a bit of a scoop if he gets out again to Bloxham Drive. It’s just about possible, sir, if all the lights are with him every time, if almost everybody’s decided to walk to work that morning. But it’s very improbable even then. And remember it’s Monday morning—the busiest morning of the week in Oxford.”