by Colin Dexter
She stood where she was and still said nothing.
Chief Inspector Morse, too, stood where he was, wondering whether his sergeant had got the wording quite right, as Detective Inspector Briggs and Detective Constable Bott, both of the Avon CID, led Angela Miriam Storrs away.
PART SEVEN
Chapter Sixty-six
’Twas the first and last time that I’d ever known women to use the pistol. They fear the shot as a rule, but Di’mondsan’-Pearls she did not—she did not.
—RUDYARD KIPLING, Love-o’-Women
Being the tape-recorded statement made by Angela Storrs at Thames Valley Police HQ, Kidlington, Oxon, on the morning of March 11, 1996; transcribed by Detective Sergeant Lewis; and subsequently amended—for minor orthographic and punctuational vagaries—by Detective Chief Inspector Morse.
I murdered both of them, Rachel James and Geoffrey Owens. I’m a bit sorry about Rachel.
I was seventeen when I first started working as a stripper in Soho and then as a prostitute and in some porno flicks. Julian Storrs came along several times to the club where I was performing seven or eight times a night, and he arranged to see me, and we had sex a few times in the West End. He was a selfish sod as I knew from the start, especially in those early days, as far as I was concerned. Which was fine by me. He was obsessively jealous about other men and this was something I wasn’t used to. He wanted me body and soul, he said, and soon he asked me to marry him. Which was fine by me too.
I came from no family at all to speak of, but Julian came from a posh family and he had plenty of money. And he was a don at Oxford University and my mum was proud of me. She just wanted me to be somebody important like she’d never been.
I was unfaithful a few times after a few years, especially with some of the other dons who were about as pathetic as the old boys in the Soho basement who used to stick the odd fiver up your panties.
I enjoyed life at Oxford. But nobody took to me all that much. I wasn’t quite in the same bracket as the others and I used to feel awkward when they asked me about where I’d been to university and all that jazz, because I couldn’t even pretend I was one of them. I wanted to be one of them, though—God knows why! Ours wasn’t a tight marriage even from the start. It wasn’t too long before Julian was off with other women, and soon, as I say, I was off with other men. Including the Master. He needs his sheets changed every day, that man, like they do in the posh hotels. But he was going at last and that started things really, or is it finished things? Julian desperately wanted to be Master and only one person wanted that more than he did. Me!
In London I’d lived a dodgy, dangerous sort of life like any woman on the sex circuit does. I’d been mauled about quite a few times, and raped twice, once by a white and once by a black, so I can’t be accused of racial prejudice. One of the other girls had a water pistol that fired gentian blue dye over anybody trying it on. I don’t know why it was that color but I always remember it from the paint box I had when I was a little girl, next to burnt Siena and crimson Lake. But Julian had something far better than that. He’d kept a pistol from his Army days and after I had a bit of trouble late one Saturday night in Cornmarket with some football thugs, he said he didn’t mind me carrying it around sometimes if it made me feel better. Which it did. I had a newfound sense of confidence, and one weekend Julian took me with some of his TA friends out to the shooting range on Otmoor and for the first time ever I actually fired a pistol. I was surprised how difficult it was, with the way it jerked back and upward, but I managed it and I loved it. After that I got used to carrying it around with me—loaded!—when I was out alone late at night. I felt a great sense of power when I held it.
Then came our big opportunity. Julian was always going to be a good bet for the Master’s job, and we only had Cornford to beat. I always quite liked Denis but he never liked me, and to make up for it I detested his American wife. But this one thing that stood in the way suddenly became two things, because we learned that Julian would probably be dead within a year or so although we agreed never to say anything about it to anyone. Then there was that third thing—that bloody man Owens.
He’d written to Julian not to me, and he’d done his homework properly. He knew I’d been a call girl (sounds better, doesn’t it?). He knew about Julian’s latest floozie. And he knew about Julian’s illness and guessed he was hiding it from the College. He said he’d be ringing and he did, and they met in the Chapters’ Bar at The Randolph. All Owens wanted was money, it seems, and Julian’s never been short of that. But Julian played it cool and he went back to the bar later on and had a bit of luck because one of the barmaids knew who Owens was because he’d covered quite a few functions there for the newspapers. We didn’t need to hire a detective to find his address because it was in the phone book!
I knew what I was doing that morning because I’d already driven round the area twice and I’d done my homework too. I parked on the main road above the terrace and got through a gap in the fence down to the back. I don’t think I meant to shoot him but just frighten him to death if I could and let him know that he’d never be able to feel safe in life again if he kept on with his blackmail. Then I saw him behind the kitchen blind, and I suddenly realized how ridiculously easy it would be to solve all our problems. It wouldn’t take more than a single second. I knew he lived alone, and I knew this must be him. His head was only a couple of feet away and I saw the ponytail that Julian had told me about. I’d planned to knock on the door and go in and sort things out. But I didn’t. I just fired point-blank and that was that. There was a huge thud and a splintering noise and lots of smoke, but only for a second it seemed. Next thing I remember I was sitting in the car trembling all over and expecting to see people rushing around and police sirens and all that. But there was nothing. A few cars drove by and a paperboy rode past on his bicycle.
It was all a bit like a nightmare I’ve often had—standing on top of some high building with no rail in front of me and knowing it would be so easy to jump off, and if I did jump off, that would be the end of everything. In the nightmare I was always just about going to jump off when I woke up sweating and terrified. It was the same sort of thing at that window. It was like somebody saying “Do it!” And I did it. Julian knew what happened but he didn’t have anything to do with it.
We planned the second murder together, though. Nothing to lose, was there?
Julian knew someone must have shopped him down at the clinic and he soon found out it was Dawn Charles. So we had the hold on her now and it wasn’t difficult to get her to cooperate. She’d got money problems and Julian promised to help if she did what we wanted. Which wasn’t much really.
Things went as we planned them. Julian drove down to Bath in the BMW and I followed in my car. He went M4. I went Burford way. He booked in and left his car in the hotel garage. I left my car in one of the side streets behind the hotel. Dawn Charles went by train to Bath changing at Didcot, so Julian told me. She booked into the hotel as herself of course. After we got back from the Abbey, Julian and I had dinner together, and then I left. Julian rang Dawn Charles on the internal phone system and all she had to do was to walk across the garden. I drove back to Oxford and then up to Bicester where I’d got the key to Dawn’s flat. It would have been far too risky to go back to Polstead Road.
Unless Julian persuaded her to sleep in the raw, Dawn wore my pajamas, and the hotel girl took them breakfast in bed the next morning. Mistake about all that sugar, I agree! Dawn Charles is my sort of height and shape, so Julian tells me, and if she wore something that was obviously mine there wouldn’t be much of a problem. The whole thing was very neat really. It didn’t matter if she was seen round the hotel or if I was, because both of us were staying there officially.
I’d phoned Owens to arrange everything and last Sunday morning I drove round to Bloxham Drive again. Probably he’d have been more wary if I’d been a man instead of a woman but I told him I’d have the money with me. So he said he’d meet me a
nd have a signed letter ready promising he wouldn’t try any more blackmail. I went down the slope at the back like before and knocked on the right door this time. It was about a quarter past seven when he let me in and we went through to his front room. I don’t think either of us spoke. He was standing there in front of the settee and I took the pistol out of my shopping bag and shot him twice and left him there for dead.
Angela Storrs
3-11-96
As it happened, Lewis was not to read this final version. Had he done so, he might have felt rather surprised—and a little superior?—to notice that his own “burnt sienna” had been amended to “burnt Siena,” since he had taken the trouble to look up that color in Chambers, and had spelled it accordingly.
Chapter Sixty-seven
Belbroughton Road is bonny, and pinkly burst the spray
Of prunus and forsythia across the public way,
For a full spring-tide of blossom seethed and departed hence,
Leaving land-locked pools of jonquils by a sunny garden fence.
—JOHN BETJEMAN, May-Day Song for North Oxford
Spring was particularly beautiful, if late, in North Oxford that year, and even Morse, whose only potential for floral exhibitionism was a small window box, much enjoyed the full-belled daffodils and the short-lived violets, though not the crocuses.
Sir Clixby Bream received a letter from Julian Storrs on Tuesday, March 12. Both contestants had now withdrawn from the Mastership Stakes. At an Extraordinary General Meeting held the next day in the Stamper Room, the Fellows of Lonsdale had little option but to extend yet again the term of the incumbent Master; and by a majority vote to call in the “Visitor,” that splendidly titled dignitary (usually an archbishop) whose right and duty it was, and is, periodically to inspect and to report on College matters, and to advise and to intervene in any such disputatious circumstances as Lonsdale, omnium consensu, now found itself in. An outside appointment seemed a certainty. But Sir Clixby accepted the situation philosophically, as was his wont … and the College lawns were beginning to look immaculate again. Life had to go on, even if Denis Cornford was now a broken man, with Julian Storrs awaiting new developments—and death.
Adèle Beatrice Cecil had recently learned that the membership of the Young Conservatives had fallen from 500,000 twenty years earlier to 5,000 in January 1996; and anyway she had for several weeks been contemplating a change in her lifestyle. Morse may have been right in one way, she thought—only one way, though—in suggesting that it was the personnel rather than the policies which were letting the Party down. Yes, it might be time for a change; and on Wednesday, March 13, she posted off her resignation to Conservative Central Office. She did so with deep regret, yet she knew she was never destined to be idle. She could write English competently, she knew that; as indeed did Morse; as did also her publishers, Erotica Press, who had recently requested an equally sexy sequel to Topless in Torremolinos. And already a nice little idea was burgeoning in her brain almost as vigorously as the wallflowers she’d planted the previous autumn: an idea about an older man—well, say a whitish-haired man who wasn’t quite so old as he looked—and a woman who was considerably younger, about her own age, say. Age difference, in heterosexual encounters, was ever a guaranteed “turn-on,” so her editor confided.
One man was to continue his officially unemployed status for the remainder of the spring; and probably indefinitely thereafter, although he was a little troubled by the rumor that the Social Security system was likely to be less sympathetic in the future. For the moment, however, he appeared to be adequately funded, judging from his virtually permanent presence in the local pubs and betting shops. It was always going to be difficult for any official down in the Job Center to refute his claim that the remuneration offered for some of their “employment opportunities” could never compensate for his customary lifestyle: He was a recognized artist; and if anyone doubted his word, there was a man living in North Oxford who would always be willing to give him a reference.…
On the mantelpiece in his bedroom, the little ormolu clock ticked on, keeping excellent time.
In the immediate aftermath of Mrs. Storrs’ arrest, Sergeant Lewis found himself extremely busy, happily i/c the team of companionable DCs assigned to him. So many inquiries remained to be made; so many statements to be taken down and duly typed; so many places to be visited and revisited: Soho, Bloxham Drive, the newspaper offices, the Harvey Clinic, Polstead Road, Lonsdale College, Woodpecker Way, The Randolph, the Royal Crescent Hotel.… He had met Morse for lunch on the Wednesday and had listened patiently as a rather self-congratulatory Chief Inspector remembered a few of the more crucial moments in the case: when, for example, he had associated that photograph of the young Soho stripper with that of the don’s wife at Lonsdale; when the elegantly leggy Banbury Road receptionist had so easily slipped alongside that same don’s wife in a chorus line at the Windmill. That lunchtime, however, Lewis’s own crucial contributions to such dramatic developments were never even mentioned, let alone singled out for special praise.
Late on Thursday evening, Morse was walking home from the Cotswold House after a generous measure of Irish whiskey when a car slowed down beside him, the front passenger window electronically lowered.
“Can I give you a lift anywhere?”
“Hello! No, thank you. I only live …” Morse gestured vaguely up toward the A40 roundabout.
“Everything okay with you?”
“Will be—if you’d like to come along and inspect my penthouse suite.”
“I thought you said it was a flat.”
Though clearly surprised to find Morse in his office over the Friday lunch period, Strange refrained from his usual raillery.
“Can you nip in to see me a bit later this afternoon about these retirement forms?”
“Let’s do it now, sir.”
“What’s the rush?”
“I’m off this afternoon.”
“Official, is that?”
“Yes, sir.”
Strange eyed Morse shrewdly. “Why are you looking so bloody cheerful?”
“Well, another case solved …?”
“Mm. Where’s Lewis, by the way?”
“There’s still an awful lot of work to do.”
“Why aren’t you helping him then?”
“Like I say, sir, I’m off for the weekend.”
“You’re lucky, matey. The wife’s booked me for the lawn mower.”
“I’ve just got the window box myself.”
“Anything in it?”
Morse shook his head, perhaps a little sadly.
“You, er, going anywhere special?” asked Chief Superintendent Strange.
Chapter Sixty-eight
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
—PHILIP LARKIN, This Be the Verse
For several seconds after she opened her eyes, Janet McQueen had no idea whatsoever about where she was or what she’d been doing. Then, as she lay there in the green sheets, gradually it flooded back.…
“Ah! Can I perhaps begin to guess our destination?” she’d asked, as the car turned left at Junction 18 and headed south along A46. “B&B in Bath—is that what it’s going to be?”
“You’ll see.”
As she had seen, for soon the Jaguar turned onto the Circus, onto Brock Street, and finally straight across a cobbled road, where it stopped beside a large magnolia tree. She looked at the hotel, and her green eyes widened as she brought her ringless, manicured fingers together in a semblance of prayer.
“Beautiful!”
Morse had turned toward her then, as she sat beside him in her navy pin-striped suit; sat beside him in her V-necked emerald-silk blouse.
“You’re beautiful, too, Janet,” he said simply, and quietly.
“You’ve booked rooms for us here?”
Morse
nodded. “Bit over the top, I know—but, yes, I’ve booked the Sarah Siddons suite for myself.”
“What have you booked for me?”
“That’s also called the Sarah Siddons suite.”
She was smiling contentedly as the Concierge opened the passenger-seat door.
“Welcome to the Royal Crescent Hotel, madam!”
She’d felt important then.
And she’d loved it.
Morse was already up—dressed, washed, shaved—and sitting only a few feet from her, reading The Times.
“Hello!” she said, softly.
He leaned over and kissed her lightly on the mouth. “Headache?”
“Bit of one!”
“You know your trouble? You drink too much champagne.”
She smiled (she would always be smiling that weekend) as she recalled the happiness of their night together. And throwing back the duvet, she got out of bed and stood beside him for several seconds, her cheek resting on the top of his head.
“Shan’t be long. Must have a shower.”
“No rush.”
“Why don’t you see if you can finish the crossword before I’m dressed? Let’s make it a race!”
But Morse said nothing—for he had already finished the crossword, and was thinking of the Philip Larkin line that for so many years had been a kind of mantra for him:
Waiting for breakfast while she brushed her hair.
It was late morning, as they were walking arm-in-arm down to the city center, following the signs to the Roman Baths, that she asked him the question:
“Shall I just keep calling you ‘Morse’?”
“I’d prefer that, yes.”
“Whatever you say, sir!”
“You sound like Lewis. He always calls me ‘sir.’ ”