by Colin Dexter
“Except for one thing, Lewis. Owens told me he worked for quite a while in Soho when he started. And if there’s anything suspicious or interesting about that period of his life …”
“You’d like to do that bit of research yourself.”
“Exactly. I’m better at that sort of thing than you are.”
“What’s your program for today, then?”
“Quite a few things, really.”
“Such as?” Lewis looked up quizzically.
“Well, there’s one helluva lot of paperwork, for a start. And filing. So you’d better stay and give me a hand for a while—after you’ve fetched me another orange juice. And please tell the girl not to dilute it quite so much this time. And just a cube or two more ice perhaps.”
“And then?” persisted Lewis.
“And then I’m repairing to the local in Cutteslowe, where I shall be trying to thread a few further thoughts together over a pint, perhaps. And where I’ve arranged to meet an old friend of mine who may possibly be able to help us a little.”
“Who’s that, sir?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Not—?”
“Where’s my orange juice, Lewis?”
Chapter Twenty-six
MARIA: No, I’ve just got the two O-levels—and the tortoise, of course. But I’m fairly well known for some other accomplishments.
JUDGE: Known to whom, may I ask?
MARIA: Well, to the police for a start.
—DIANA DOHERTY, The Re-trial of Maria Macmillan
At ten minutes to noon Morse was enjoying his pint of Brakspear’s bitter. The Chief Inspector had many faults, but unpunctuality had never been one of them. He was ten minutes early.
JJ, a sparely built, nondescript-looking man in his midforties, walked into the Cherwell five minutes later.
When Morse had rung at 8:30 A.M., Malcolm “JJ” Johnson had been seated on the floor, on a black cushion, only two feet away from the television screen, watching a hard-core porn video and drinking his regular breakfast of two cans of Beamish stout—just after the lady of the household had left for her job (mornings only) in one of the fruiterers’ shops in Summertown.
Accepted wisdom has it that in such enlightened times as these most self-respecting burglars pursue their trade by day; but JJ had always been a night man, relying firmly on local knowledge and reconnaissance. And often in the daylight hours, as now, he wondered why he didn’t spend his leisure time in some more purposeful pursuits. But in truth he just couldn’t think of any. At the same time, he did realize, yes, that sometimes he was getting a bit bored. Over the past two years or so, the snooker table had lost its former magnetism; infidelities and fornication were posing too many practical problems, as he grew older; and even darts and dominoes were beginning to pall. Only gambling, usually in Ladbrokes’ premises in Summertown, had managed to retain his undivided attention over the years: for the one thing that never bored him was acquiring money.
Yet JJ had never been a miser. It was just that the acquisition of money was a necessary prerequisite to the spending of money; and the spending of money had always been, and still was, the greatest purpose of his life.
Educated (if that be the word) in a run-down comprehensive school, he had avoided the three Bs peculiar to many public school establishments: beating, bullying, and buggery. Instead, he had left school at the age of sixteen with a delight in a different triad: betting, boozing, and bonking—strictly in that order. And to fund such expensive hobbies he had come to rely on one source of income, one line of business only: burglary.
He now lived with his long-suffering, faithful, strangely influential, common-law wife in a council house on the Cutteslowe Estate that was crowded with crates of lager and vodka and gin, with all the latest computer games, and with row upon row of tasteless seaside souvenirs. And home, after two years in jail, was where he wanted to stay.
No! JJ didn’t want to go back inside. And that’s why Morse’s call had worried him so. So much, indeed, that he had turned the video to “Pause” even as the eager young stud was slipping between the sheets.
What did Morse want?
“Hello, Malcolm!”
Johnson had been “Malcolm” until the age of ten, when the wayward, ill-disciplined young lad had drunk from a bottle of Jeyes Fluid under the misapprehension that the lavatory cleaner was lemonade. Two stomach pumpings and a week in hospital later, he had emerged to face the world once more; but now with the sobriquet “Jeyes”—an embarrassment which he sought to deflect, five years on, by the rather subtle expedient of having the legend “JJ—all the Js” tattooed longitudinally on each of his lower arms.
Morse drained his glass and pushed it over the table.
“Coke, is it, Mr. Morse?”
“Bit early for the hard stuff, Malcolm.”
“Half a pint, was it?”
“Just tell the landlord ‘same again.’ ”
A Brakspear it was—and a still mineral water for JJ.
“One or two of those gormless idiots you call your pals seem anxious to upset the police,” began Morse.
“Look. I didn’t ‘ave nothin’ to do with that—’ onest! You know me.” Looking deeply unhappy, JJ dragged deeply on a king-size cigarette.
“I’m not really interested in that. I’m interested in your doing me a favor.”
JJ visibly relaxed, becoming almost his regular, perky self once more. He leaned over the table, and spoke quietly:
“I’ll tell you what. I got a red-’ot video on up at the country mansion, if you, er …”
“Not this morning,” said Morse reluctantly, conscious of a considerable sacrifice. And it was now his turn to lean over the table and speak the quiet words:
“I want you to break into a property for me.”
“Ah!”
The balance of power had shifted, and JJ grinned broadly to reveal two rows of irregular and blackened teeth. He pushed his empty glass across the table.
“Double vodka and lime for me, Mr. Morse. I suddenly feel a bit thirsty, like.”
For the next few minutes Morse explained the mission; and JJ listened carefully, nodding occasionally, and once making a penciled note of an address on the back of a pink betting slip.
“Okay,” he said finally, “so long as you promise, you know, to see me okay if …”
“I can’t promise anything.”
“But you will?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, then. Gimme a chance to do a bit o’ recce, okay? Then gimme another buzz on the ol’ blower, like, okay? When had you got in mind?”
“I’m not quite sure.”
“Okay—that’s it then.”
Morse drained his glass and stood up, wondering whether communication in the English language could ever again cope without the word “okay.”
“Before you go …” JJ looked down at his empty glass.
“Mineral water, was it?” asked Morse.
“Just tell the landlord ‘same again.’ ”
Almost contented with life once more, JJ sat back and relaxed after Morse had gone. Huh! Just the one bleedin’ door, by the sound of it. Easy. Piece o’ cake!
Morse, too, was pleased with the way the morning had gone. Johnson, as the police were well aware, was one of the finest locksmen in the Midlands. As a teenager he’d held the reputation of being the quickest car thief in the county. But his incredible skills had only really begun to burgeon in the eighties, when all manner of house locks, burglar alarms, and safety devices had surrendered meekly to his unparalleled knowledge of locks and keys and electrical circuits.
In fact “JJ” Johnson knew almost as much about burglary as J. J. Bradley knew about the aorist subjunctive.
Perhaps more.
Chapter Twenty-seven
The faults of the burglar are the qualities of the financier.
—BERNARD SHAW, Major Barbara
In fact, Morse’s campaign was destined to be launched that very day.<
br />
Lewis had called back at HQ at 2 P.M. with a slim folder of photocopied documents—in which Morse seemed little interested; and with the news that Geoffrey Owens had left his home the previous evening to attend a weekend conference on Personnel Management, in Bournemouth, not in all likelihood to be back until late P.M. the following day, Sunday. In this latter news Morse seemed more interested.
“Well done, Lewis! But you’ve done quite enough for one day. You look weary and I want you to go home. Nobody can keep up the hours you’ve been setting yourself.”
As it happened, Lewis was feeling wonderfully fresh; but he had promised that weekend to accompany his wife (if he could) on her quest for the right sort of dishwasher. They could well afford the luxury now, and Lewis himself would welcome some alleviation of his domestic duties at the sink.
“I’ll accept your offer—on one condition, sir. You go off home, too.”
“Agreed. I was just going anyway. I’ll take the folder with me. Anything interesting?”
“A few little things, I suppose. For instance—”
“Not now!”
“Aren’t you going to tell me how your meeting went?”
“Not now! Let’s call it a day.”
As the two detectives walked out of the HQ block, Morse asked his question casually:
“By the way, did you discover which swish hotel they’re at in Bournemouth?”
Back in his flat, Morse made two phone calls: the first to Bournemouth; the second to the Cutteslowe Estate. Yes, a Mr. Geoffrey Owens was present at the conference there. No, Mr. Malcolm Johnson had not yet had a chance to make his recce—of course he hadn’t! But, yes, he would repair the omission forthwith in view of the providential opportunity now afforded (although Johnson’s own words were considerably less pretentious).
“And no more booze today, Malcolm!”
“What me—drink? On business? Never! And you better not drink, neither.”
“Two sober men—that’s what the job needs,” agreed Morse.
“What time you pickin’ me up then?”
“No. You’re picking me up. Half past seven at my place.”
“Okay. And just remember you got more to lose than I ’ave, Mr. Morse.”
Yes, far more to lose, Morse knew that; and he felt a shudder of apprehension about the risky escapade he was undertaking. His nerves needed some steadying.
He poured himself a good measure of Glenfiddich; and shortly thereafter fell deeply asleep in the chair for more than two hours.
Bliss.
Johnson parked his filthy F-reg Vauxhaull in a fairly convenient lay-by on the Deddington Road, the main thoroughfare which runs at the rear of the odd-numbered houses on Bloxham Drive. As instructed, Morse stayed behind, in the murky shadow of the embankment, as Johnson eased himself through a gap in the perimeter fence, where vandals had smashed and wrenched away several of the vertical slats, and then, with surprising agility, descended the steep stretch of slippery grass that led down to the rear of the terrace.
The coast seemed clear.
Morse looked on nervously as the locksman stood in his trainers at the back of Number 15, patiently and methodically doing what he did so well. Once, he snapped to taut attention hard beside the wall as a light was switched on in one of the nearby houses, throwing a yellow rectangle over the glistening grass—and then switched off.
Six minutes.
By Morse’s watch, six minutes before Johnson turned the knob, carefully eased the door open, and disappeared within—before reappearing and beckoning a tense and jumpy Morse to join him.
“Do you want the lights on?” asked Johnson as he played the thin beam of his large torch around the kitchen.
“What do you think?”
“Yes. Let’s ’ave ’em on. Lemme just go and pull the curtains through ’ere.” He moved into the front living room, where Morse heard a twin swish, before the room burst suddenly into light.
An ordinary, somewhat spartan room: settee; two rather tatty armchairs; dining table and chairs; TV set; electric fire installed in the old fireplace; and above the fireplace, on a mantelpiece patinated deep with dust, the only object perhaps which any self-respecting burglar would have wished to take—a small, beautifully fashioned ormolu clock.
Upstairs, the double bed in the front room was unmade, an orange bath towel thrown carelessly across the duvet; no sign of pajamas. On the bedside table two items only: Wilbur Smith’s The Seventh Scroll in paperback, and a packet of BiSoDoL Extra indigestion tablets. An old-fashioned mahogany wardrobe monopolized much of the remaining space, with coats/suits/trousers on their hangers, and six pairs of shoes neatly laid in parallels at the bottom; and on the shelves, to the left, piles of jumpers, shirts, pants, socks, and handkerchiefs.
The second bedroom was locked.
“Malcolm!” whispered Morse down the stairwell.
Two and a half minutes later, Morse was taking stock of a smaller but clearly more promising room: a large bookcase containing a best-seller selection from over the years; one armchair; one office chair; the latter set beneath a veneered desk with an imitation leather top, four drawers on either side, and between them a longer drawer with two handles—locked.
“Malcolm!” whispered Morse down the stairwell.
Ninety seconds only this time, and clearly the locksman was running into form.
The eight side drawers contained few items of interest: stationery, insurance documents, car documents, bank statements, pens and pencils—but in the bottom left-hand drawer a couple of pornographic paperbacks. Morse opened Topless in Torremolinos at random and read a short paragraph.
In its openly titillating way, it seemed to him surprisingly well written. And there was that one striking simile where the heroine’s bosom was compared to a pair of fairy cakes—although Morse wasn’t at all sure what a fairy cake looked like. He made a mental note of the author, Ann Berkeley Cox, and read the brief dedication on the title page, “For Geoff From ABC,” before slipping the book into the pocket of his mackintosh.
Johnson was seated in an armchair, in the living room, in the dark, when Morse came down the stairs holding a manila file.
“Got what you wanted, Mr. Morse?”
“Perhaps so. Ready?”
With the house now in total darkness, the two men felt their way to the kitchen, when Morse stopped suddenly.
“The torch! Give me the torch.”
Retracing his steps to the living room, he shone the beam along an empty mantelpiece.
“Put it back!” he said.
Johnson took the ormolu clock from his overcoat pocket and replaced it carefully on its little dust-free rectangle.
“I’m glad you made me do that,” confided Johnson quietly. “I shouldn’t ’a done it in the first place. Anyway, me conscience’ll be clear now.”
There was a streak of calculating cruelty in the man, Morse knew that. But in several respects he was a lovable rogue; even sometimes, as now perhaps, a reasonably honest one. And oddly it was Morse who was beginning to worry—about his own conscience.
He went quickly up to the second bedroom once more and slipped the book back in its drawer.
At last, as quietly as it had opened, the back door closed behind them and the pair now made their way up the grassy gradient to the gap in the slatted perimeter fence.
“You’ve not lost your old skills,” volunteered Morse.
“Nah! Know what they say, Mr. Morse? Old burglars never die—they simply steal away.”
In the darkened house behind them, on the mantelpiece in the front living room, a little dust-free rectangle still betrayed the spot where the beautifully fashioned ormolu clock had so recently stood.
Chapter Twenty-eight
When you have assembled what you call your “facts” in logical order, it is like an oil lamp you have fashioned, filled, and trimmed; but which will shed no illumination unless first you light it.
—SAINT-EXUPÉRY, The Wisdom of the Sands
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br /> Back in his flat, Morse closed the door and shot the bolts, both top and bottom. It was an oddly needless precaution, yet an explicable one, perhaps. As a twelve-year-old boy, he remembered so vividly returning from school with a magazine, and locking all the doors in spite of his certain knowledge that no other member of the family would be home for several hours. And then, even then, he had waited awhile, relishing the anticipatory thrill before daring to open the pages.
It was just that sensation he felt now as he switched on the electric fire, poured a glass of Glenfiddich, lit a cigarette, and settled back in his favorite armchair—not this time, however, with the Naturist Journal which (all those years ago now) had been doing the rounds in Lower IVA, but with the manila file just burgled from the house on Bloxham Drive.
The cover was well worn, with tears and creases along its edges; and maroon rings where once a wine glass had rested, amid many doodles of quite intricate design. Inside the file was a sheaf of papers and cuttings, several of them clipped or stapled together, though not arranged in any chronological or purposeful sequence.
Nine separate items.
Two newspaper cuttings, snipped from one of the less inhibited of the Sunday tabloids, concerning a Lord Hardiman, together with a photograph of the aforesaid peer fishing in his wallet (presumably for Deutschmarks) outside a readily identifiable sex establishment in Hamburg’s Reeperbahn. Clipped to this material was a further photograph of Lord Hardiman arm-in-arm with Lady Hardiman at a polo match in Great Windsor Park (September 1984).
A letter (August 1979) addressed to Owens from a firm of solicitors in Cheltenham informing the addressee that it was in possession of letters sent by him (Owens) to one of their clients (unspecified); and that some arrangement beneficial to each of the parties might possibly be considered.
A glossy, highly defined photograph showing a paunchy elderly man fondling a frightened-looking prepubescent girl, both of them naked. Penciled on the back was an address in St. Albans.