by Colin Dexter
“Lewis! This diabetes business is all about balance, that’s all. I’ve got to take all this insulin because I can’t produce any insulin myself—to counteract any sugar intake. But if I didn’t have any sugar intake to counteract, I’d be in one helluva mess. I’d become hypoglycemic, and you know what that means.”
Not having the least idea, Lewis remained silent as Morse took out a black penlike object from his pocket, screwed off one end, removed a white plastic cap from the needle there, twisted a calibrator at the other end, unbuttoned his shirt, and plunged the needle deep into his midriff.
Lewis winced involuntarily.
But Morse, looking up like some young child expecting praise after taking a very nasty-tasting medicine, seemed wholly pleased with himself.
“See? That’ll take care of things. No problem.”
With great care, Lewis walked back from the bar with a pint of Bass and a glass of orange juice.
“I’ve been waiting a long time for this,” enthused Morse, burying his nose into the froth, taking a gloriously gratifying draught of real ale, and showing, as he relaxed back, a circle of blood on his white shirt just above the waist.
After a period of silence, during which Morse several times raised his glass against the window to admire the color of the beer, Lewis asked the key question.
“What have they said about you starting work again?”
“What do you say about us seeing Storrs and Owens this afternoon?”
“You’ll have a job with Storrs, sir. Him and his missus are in Bath for the weekend.”
“What about Owens?”
“Dunno. Perhaps he’s away, too—on another of his personnel courses.”
“One easy way of finding out, Lewis. There’s a telephone just outside the Gents.”
“Look, sir! For heaven’s sake! You’ve been in the hospital a week—”
“Five days, to be accurate, and only for observation. They’d never have let me out unless—”
But he got no further.
The double doors of the Cherwell had burst open and there, framed in the doorway, jowls aquiver, stood Chief Superintendent Strange—looking around, spying Morse, walking across, and sitting down.
“Like a beer, sir?” asked Lewis.
“Large single-malt Scotch—no ice, no water.”
“And it’s the same again for me,” prompted Morse, pushing over his empty glass.
“I might have known it,” began Strange, after regaining his breath. “Straight out of hospital and straight into the nearest boozer.”
“It’s not the nearest.”
“Don’t remind me! Dixon’s already carted me round to the Friar Bacon—the King’s Arms—the Dew Drop—and now here. And it’s about time somebody reminded you that you’re in the Force to reduce the crime level, not the bloody beer level.”
“We were talking about the case when you came in, sir.”
“What case?” snapped Strange.
“The murder case—Rachel James.”
“Ah yes! I remember the case well; I remember the address, too: Number 17 Bloxham Drive, wasn’t it? Well, you’d better get off your arse, matey,” at a single swallow, he drained the Scotch which Lewis had just placed in front of him, “because if you are back at work, you can just forget that beer and get over smartish to Bloxham Drive again. Number 15, this time. Another murder. Chap called Owens—Geoffrey Owens. I think you’ve heard of him?”
PART FOUR
Chapter Forty-one
For now we see through a glass darkly; but then face to face.
—I Corinthians, ch. 13, v. 12
Déjà vu.
The street, the police cars, the crowd of curious onlookers, the SOCOs—repetition almost everywhere, as if nothing was found only once in the world. Just that single significant shift: the shift from one terraced house to another immediately adjacent.
Morse himself had said virtually nothing since Strange had brought the news of Owens’ murder; and said nothing now as he sat in the kitchen of Number 15, Bloxham Drive, elbows resting on the table there, head resting on his hands. For the moment his job was to bide his time, he knew that, during the interregnum between the activities of other professionals and his own assumption of authority: a necessary yet ever frustrating interlude, like that when an in-flight stewardess rehearses the safety drill before takeoff.
By all rights he should have felt weary and defeated; but this was not the case. Physically, he felt considerably fitter than he had the week before; and mentally, he felt eager for that metaphorical takeoff to begin. Some people took little or no mental exercise except that of jumping to conclusions; while Morse was a man who took excessive mental exercise and who still jumped to dubious conclusions, as indeed he was to do now. But as some of his close colleagues knew—and most especially as Sergeant Lewis knew—it was at times like this, with preconceptions proved false and hypotheses undone, that Morse’s brain was wont to function with astonishing speed, if questionable lucidity.
As it did now.
Lewis walked through just before 2 P.M.
“Anything I can do for the minute, sir?”
“Just nip out and get me the Independent on Sunday, will you? And a packet of Dunhill.”
“Do you think—?” But Lewis stopped and waited as Morse reluctantly took a five-pound note from his wallet.
For the next few minutes Morse was aware that his brain was still frustrated and unproductive. And there was something else, too. For some reason, and for a good while now, he had been conscious that he might well have missed a vital clue in the case (cases!) which so far he couldn’t quite catch. It was a bit like going through a town on a high-speed train when the eyes had almost caught the name of the station as it flashed so tantalizingly across the carriage window.
Lewis returned five minutes later with the cigarettes, which Morse put unopened into his jacket pocket; and with the newspaper, which Morse opened at the Cryptic Crossword (“Quixote”), glanced at 1 across: “Some show dahlias in the Indian pavilion (6)” and immediately wrote in “HOWDAH.”
“Excuse me, sir—but how do you get that?”
“Easiest of all the clue types, that. The letters are all there, in their proper, consecutive order. It’s called the ‘hidden’ type.”
“Ah, yes!” Lewis looked and, for once, Lewis saw. “Shall I leave you for two or three minutes to finish it off, sir?”
“No. It’ll take me at least five. And it’s time you sat down and gave me the latest news on things here.”
Owens’ body Morse had already viewed, howsoever briefly, sitting back, as it had been, against the cushions of the living room settee, the green covers permeated with many pints of blood. His face unshaven, his long hair loose down to the shoulders, his eyes open and staring, almost (it seemed) as if in permanent disbelief; and two bullet wounds showing raggedly in his chest. Dead four to six hours, that’s what Dr. Laura Hobson had already suggested—a margin narrower than Morse had expected, though wider than he’d hoped; death, she’d claimed, had fairly certainly been “instant,” or “instantaneous,” as Morse would have preferred. There were no signs of any forcible entry to the house: the front door had been found still locked and bolted; the tongue of the Yale on the back door still engaged, though not clicked to the locked position from the inside. On the mantelpiece above the electric fire (not switched on) was a small oblong virtually free of the generally pervasive dust.
The body would most probably not have been discovered that day had not John Benson, a garage mechanic from Hartwell’s Motors, agreed to earn himself a little untaxed extra income by fixing a few faults on Owens’ car. But Benson had been unable to get any answer when he called just after 11:15 A.M.; had finally peered through the open-curtained front window; had rapped repeatedly, and increasingly loudly, against the pane when he saw Owens lying asleep on the settee there.
But Owens was not asleep. So much had become gradually apparent to Benson, who had dialed 999 at about 11
:30 A.M. from the BT phone box at the entrance to the Drive.
Thus far no one, it appeared, had seen or heard anything untoward that morning between seven and eight o’clock, say. House-to-house inquiries would soon be under way, and might provide a clue or two. But concerning such a possibility Morse was predictably (though, as it happened, mistakenly) pessimistic. Early Sunday morning was not a time when many people were about, except for dog owners and insomniacs: the former, judging from the warnings on the lampposts concerning the fouling of verges and footpaths, not positively encouraged to parade their pets along the street; the latter, if there were any, not as yet coming forward with any sightings of strangers or hearings of gunshots.
No. On the face of it, it had seemed a typical, sleepy Sunday morning, when the denizens of Bloxham Drive had their weekly lie-in, arose late, walked around their homes in dressing gowns, sometimes boiled an egg, perhaps, and settled down to read in the scandal sheets about the extramarital exploits of the great and the not-so-good.
But one person had been given no chance to read his Sunday newspaper, for the News of the World lay unopened on the mat inside the front door of Number 15; and few of the others in the Drive that morning were able to indulge their delight in adulterous liaisons, stunned as they were by disbelief and, as the shock itself lessened, by a growing sense of fear.
At 2:30 P.M. Morse was informed that few if any of the neighbors were likely to be helpful witnesses—except the old lady in Number 19. Morse should see her himself, perhaps?
“Want me to come along, sir?”
“No, Lewis. You get off and try to find out something about Storrs—and his missus. Bath, you say? He probably left details of where he’d be at the Porters’ Lodge—that’s the usual drill. And do it from HQ. Better keep the phone here free.”
Mrs. Adams was a widow of some eighty summers, a small old lady who had now lost all her own teeth, much of her wispy white hair, and even more of her hearing. But her wits were sharp enough, Morse sensed that immediately; and her brief evidence was of considerable interest. She had slept poorly the previous night; got up early; made herself some tea and toast; listened to the news on the radio at seven o’clock; cleared away; and then gone out the back to empty her wastebasket. That’s when she’d seen him!
“Him?”
“Pardon?”
“You’re sure it was a man?”
“Oh yes. About twenty … twenty-five past seven.”
The case was under way.
“You didn’t hear any shots or bangs?”
“Pardon?”
Morse let it go.
But he managed to convey his thanks to her, and to explain that she would be asked to sign a short statement. As he prepared to leave, he gave her his card.
“I’ll leave this with you, Mrs. Adams. If you remember anything else, please get in touch with me.”
He thought she’d understood; and he left her there in her kitchen, holding his card about three or four inches from her pale, rheumy eyes, squinting obliquely at the wording.
She was not, as Morse had quickly realized, ever destined to be called before an identity parade; for although she might be able to spot that all of them were men, any physiognomical differentiation would surely be wholly beyond the capacity of those tired old eyes.
Poor Mrs. Adams!
Sans teeth, sans hair, sans ears, sans eyes—and very soon, alas, sans everything.
Seldom, in any investigation, had Morse so badly mishandled a key witness as now he mishandled Mrs. Arabella Adams.
Chapter Forty-two
Alibi (adv.): in another place, elsewhere.
—Small’s Latin-English Dictionary
Some persons in life eschew all sense of responsibility, and are never wholly at ease unless they are closely instructed as to what to do, and how and when to do it. Sergeant Lewis was not such a person, willing as he was always to shoulder his share of responsibility and, not infrequently, to face some apportionment of blame. Yet to be truthful, he was ever most at ease when given some specific task, as he had been now; and he experienced a pleasing sense of purpose as he drove up to Police HQ that same afternoon.
One thing only disturbed him more than a little. For almost a week now Morse had forgone, been forced to forgo, both beer and cigarettes. And what foolishness it was to capitulate, as Morse had done, to both, within the space of only a couple of hours! But that’s what life was all about—personal decisions; and Morse had clearly decided that the long-term disintegration of his liver and his lungs was a price well worth paying, even with diabetes, for the short-term pleasures of alcohol and nicotine.
Yet Morse was still on the ball. As he had guessed, Storrs had left details of his weekend whereabouts at the Porters’ Lodge. And very soon Lewis was speaking to the Manager of Bath’s Royal Crescent Hotel—an appropriately cautious man, but one who was fully cooperative once Lewis had explained the unusual and delicate nature of his inquiries. The Manager would ring back, he promised, within half an hour.
Lewis picked up the previous day’s copy of the Daily Mirror, and sat puzzling for a few minutes over whether the answer to 1 across—“River (3)”—was CAM, DEE, EXE, FAL, and so on through the alphabet; finally deciding on CAM, when he saw that it would fit neatly enough with COD, the fairly obvious answer to 1 down—“Fish (3).” He had made a firm start. But thereafter he had proceeded little, since the combination which had found favor with the setter of the crossword (EXE/EEL) had wholly eluded him. His minor hypothesis, like Morse’s earlier major one, was sadly undone.
But he had no time to return (quite literally) to square one, since the phone rang. It had taken the Manager only fifteen minutes to assemble his fairly comprehensive information …
Mr. and Mrs. J. Storrs had checked into the hotel at 4 P.M. the previous afternoon, Saturday, March 2: just the one night, at the special weekend-break tariff of £125 for a double room. The purpose of the Storrs’ visit (almost certainly) had been to hear the Bath Festival Choir, since one of the reception staff had ordered a taxi for them at 7 P.M. to go along to the Abbey, where the Fauré Requiem was the centerpiece of the evening concert. The couple had been back in the hotel by about half past nine, when they had immediately gone into the restaurant for a late, prebooked dinner, the only extra being a bottle of the house red wine.
If the sergeant would like to see the itemized bill …?
No one, it appeared, had seen the couple after about 11 P.M., when they had been the last to leave the restaurant. Before retiring, however, Mr. Storrs had rung through to room service to order breakfast for the two of them, in their room, at 7:45 A.M.: a full English for himself, a Continental one for his wife.
Again, the itemized order was available if the sergeant…
Latest checkout from the hotel (as officially specified in the brochure) was noon. But the Storrs had left a good while before then. As with the other details (the Manager explained) some of the times given were just a little vague, since service personnel had changed. But things could very soon be checked. The account had been settled by Mr. Storrs himself on a Lloyds Bank Gold Card (the receptionist recalled this clearly), and one of the porters had driven the Storrs’ BMW round to the front of the hotel from the rear garage—being tipped (it appeared) quite liberally for his services.
So that was that.
Or almost so—since Lewis was very much aware that Morse would hardly be overjoyed with such findings; and he now asked a few further key questions.
“I know it’s an odd thing to ask, sir, but are you completely sure that these people were Mr. and Mrs. Storrs?”
“Well, I …” The Manager hesitated long enough for Lewis to jam a metaphoric foot inside the door.
“You knew them—know them—personally?”
“I’ve only been Manager here for a couple of years. But, yes—they were here twelve months or so ago.”
“People change, though, don’t they? He might have changed quite a bit, Mr. Storrs, if he’d be
en ill or … or something?”
“Oh, it was him all right. I’m sure of that. Well, almost sure. And he signed the credit card bill, didn’t he? It should be quite easy to check up on that.”
“And you’re quite sure it was her, sir? Mrs. Storrs? Is there any possibility at all that he was spending the night with someone else?”
The laugh at the other end of the line was full of relief and conviction.
“Not—a—chance! You can be one hundred percent certain of that. I think everybody here remembers her. She’s, you know, she’s a bit sharp, if you follow my meaning. Nothing unpleasant—don’t get me wrong! But a little bit, well, severe. She dressed that way, too: white trouser-suit, hair drawn back high over the ears, beauty-parlor face. Quite the lady, really.”
Lewis drew on his salient reminiscence of Angela Storrs:
“It’s not always easy to recognize someone who’s wearing sunglasses, though.”
“But she wasn’t wearing sunglasses. Not when I saw her, anyway. I just happened to be in reception when she booked in. And it was she recognized me! You see, the last time they’d been with us, she did the signing in, while Mr. Storrs was sorting out the luggage and the parking. And I noticed the registration number of their BMW and I mentioned the coincidence that we were both ‘188J.’ She reminded me of it yesterday. She said they’d still got the same car.”
“You can swear to all this?”
“Certainly. We had quite a little chat. She told me they’d spent their honeymoon in the hotel—in the Sarah Siddons suite.”
Oh.
So that was that.
An alibi—for both of them.
Lewis thanked the Manager. “But please do keep all this to yourself, sir. It’s always a tricky business when we’re trying to eliminate suspects in a case. Not suspects, though, just … just people.”
A few minutes later Lewis again rang the Storrs’ residence in Polstead Road; again listening to Mrs. Storrs on the answer phone: “If the caller will please speak clearly after the long tone …” The voice was a little—what had the Manager said?—a little “severe,” yes. And quite certainly (Lewis thought) it was a voice likely to intimidate a few of the students if she became the new Master’s wife. But after waiting for the “long tone,” Lewis put down the phone without leaving any message. He always felt awkward and tongue-tied at such moments; and he suddenly realized that he hadn’t got a message to leave in any case.