by Colin Dexter
“We bloody won’t!” growled Daley. “If you wanna look round ’ere, Inspector, you just bring a search-warrant, OK?”
“I don’t need one. You’ve got a rifle behind the front door, Mr. Daley, and it’s odds-on you’ve got a box of cartridges somewhere lying around. All I need to do to take your floorboards up if necessary is to quote to you—just quote, mind—Statutory Instrument 1991 No. 1531. Do you understand? The pair of you? That’s my only legal obligation.”
But Morse had no further need for inaccurate improvisations regarding the recently enacted legislation on explosives. Margaret Daley rose to her feet and made to leave the lounge.
“You won’t search Philip’s room with my permission, Inspector. But if he has kept them photos I reckon I just might know …”
Morse heard her on the stairs, his heart knocking against his ribs: Please! Please! Please!
No word passed between the two men seated opposite each other as they heard the creak of floorboards in the upstairs rooms. Nor was much said when Margaret Daley returned some minutes later holding seven coloured prints which she handed to Morse—wordlessly.
“Thank you. No others?”
She shook her head.
After Morse was gone, Margaret Daley went into the kitchen where she turned on the kettle and spooned some instant Nescaféinto a mug.
“I suppose you’re out boozing,” she said tonelessly, as her husband came in.
“Why the ’ell didn’t you tell me about them photos?”
“Shut up!” She spat out the two words viciously and turned towards him.
“Where the ’ell did you find ’em, you—”
“Shut up! And listen, will you? If you must know, I’ve been looking in his room, George Daley, because if we don’t soon get to know what’s goin’ on and do something about it he’ll be in bloody jail or something, that’s why! See? There were twelve photos, five of the girl—”
“You stupid bitch!”
“Listen!” she shrieked. “I never gave him them! I’ve hidden ’em; and now I’m gonna get rid of ’em; and I’m not gonna show ’em to you! You don’t give a sod about anything these days, anyway!”
Daley walked tight-lipped to the door. “Stop moaning, you miserable cunt!”
His wife had taken a large pair of kitchen scissors from a drawer. “Don’t you ever talk to me like that again, George Daley!” Her voice was trembling with fury.
A few minutes after hearing the front door slam behind him, she went upstairs to their bedroom and took the five photographs out of her underwear drawer. All of them were of Karin Eriksson, nakedly or semi-nakedly lying in lewdly provocative postures. She could only guess how often her son had ogled these and similar photographs which he kept in a box at the back of his wardrobe, and which she had discovered when spring-cleaning his room the previous April. She took the five photographs to the loo, where standing over the pan she sliced strip after strip from the face, the shoulders, the breasts, the thighs, and the legs of the beautiful Karin Eriksson, intermittently flushing the celluloid slivers down into the Begbroke sewers.
Chapter Thirty
A man’s bed is his resting-place, but a woman’s is often her rack
(James Thurber, Further Fables for Our Time)
The ambulance, its blue light flashing, its siren wailing, finally pulled into the Casualty Bay of the John Radcliffe 2 Hospital at 9:15 P.M. The grey face of the man hurriedly carried through the automatic doors on a stretcher—the forehead clammy with sweat, the breathing shallow and laboured—had told its immediate story to the red-belted senior nurse, who straightaway rang through to the medical houseman on duty, before joining one of her colleagues in taking off the man’s clothes and fastening a hospital gown around his overweight frame. A series of hurried readings—of electrocardiograph, blood pressure, chest X-ray—soon confirmed the fairly obvious: a massive coronary thrombosis, so very nearly an immediately fatal one.
Two porters pushed the trolley swiftly along the corridors to the Coronary Care Unit, where they lifted the heavy man on to a bed; around which curtains were quickly drawn, and five leads connected to the man’s chest and linked to monitors, which now gave continuous details of heart rhythm, blood pressure, and pulse rate, on the screen beside the bed. A very pretty, slightly plump young nurse looked on as the houseman administered a morphine injection.
“Much hope?” she queried quietly a minute or two later, as the two of them stood at the central desk, where the VDU monitors from each of the small ward’s six beds were banked.
“You never know, but …”
“Quite a well-known man, isn’t he?”
“Taught me as a student. Well, I went to his lectures. Blood—that was his speciality, really; and he was a world authority on VD! Police get him in all the time, too—PMs, that sort of thing.”
The nurse looked at the monitor: the readings seemed significantly steadier now, and she found herself earnestly willing the old boy to survive.
“Give him some Frusemide, Nurse—as much as you like. I’m worried about all that fluid on his lungs.”
The houseman watched the monitor for another few minutes, then went over to the bed again, where the nurse had just placed a jug of water and a glass on the bedside locker.
After the houseman had left, Nurse Shelick remained beside the sick man’s bed and looked down at him with that passionate intensity she invariably felt for her patients. Although still in her twenties, she was really one of that old-fashioned school who believed that whatever the advantages of hyper-technology, the virtues of simple human nursing were almost as indispensable. She laid the palm of her right hand across the wet, cold brow, and for the next few minutes wiped his face gently with a warm, damp flannel—suddenly aware that his eyes had opened and were looking up at her.
“Nurse?”
“I can hear you—yes?”
“Will you … will you … get in touch … with someone for me?”
“Of course! Of course!” She bent her right ear towards the purple lips, but without quite making out what he was saying.
“Pardon?”
“Morse!”
“I’m sorry. Please say it again. I’m not quite sure—”
“Morse!”
“I still … I’m sorry … please.”
But the eyes of the man who lay upon the bed had closed again, and there was no answer to her gently repeated queries.
The time was 11:15 P.M.
The head forester’s beautiful young wife was also in bed at this time. She too lay supine; and still lay supine, wakeful and waiting, until finally at 11:35 P.M. she heard the front door being opened, then locked, then bolted.
In spite of four pints of Burton ale and two whiskies at the White Hart, David Michaels knew that he was very sober; far too sober—for there was something sadly amiss when a man couldn’t get drunk, he knew that. After cleaning his teeth, he went into the bedroom, shed his clothes swiftly, and slid under the lightweight duvet. She always slept naked, and after their marriage he had followed her example—often finding himself erotically aroused not so much by the fact or the sight of her nakedness as by the very thought of it. And now as he moved in beside her in the darkened room, he knew that she was suddenly and wonderfully necessary once more. He turned his body towards her and his right hand reached gently across her and fondled her breast. But with her own right hand she grasped his wrist, and with surprising strength moved it from her.
“No. Not tonight.”
“Is there something wrong?”
“I just don’t want you tonight—can’t you understand?”
“I think I understand all right.” Michaels’ voice was dull and he turned to lie on his back.
“Why did you have to tell them?” she asked fiercely.
“Because I know the bloody place better than anyone else, that’s why!”
“But don’t you realize—?”
“I had to tell them something. God! Don’t you see that? I didn�
��t know, did I?”
She sat up in bed and leaned towards him, her right hand on the pillow beside his head. “But they’ll think you did it, David.”
“Don’t be so stupid! I wouldn’t be giving them information if it was me. Can’t you see that? I’m the very last person they’re going to suspect. But if I hadn’t agreed to help …”
She said nothing more; and he wondered for a while whether it would be sensible to go down and make a couple of cups of piping-hot coffee for them, and then perhaps turn on the beside lamp and look upon his lovely bride. But there was no need. Seemingly Cathy Michaels had accepted the logic of his words, and her mind was more at ease; for she now lay down again and turned towards him, and soon he felt the silky caress of her inner thigh against him.
Chapter Thirty-one
The background reveals the true being of the man or thing. If I do not possess the background, I make the man transparent, the thing transparent
(Juan Jiménez, Selected Writings)
It was rather like trying to see the answer to a tricky crossword clue, Morse decided, as at 11 o’clock that same night he sat in his North Oxford lounge, topping up his earlier libations with a few fingers of Glenfiddich, and looking yet again at the photographs that Margaret Daley had given him. The closer he got to the clue—the closer he got to the photograph—the less in fact he saw. It was necessary to stand away, to see things in perspective, to look synoptically at the problem.
As he had just considered the photographs, it was the man himself, pictured in two of them, who had monopolized his interest: a small- to medium-sized man, in his late twenties perhaps, with longish fair hair; a man wearing a white T-shirt and faded blue denims, with a sunburnt complexion and the suggestion of a day’s growth of stubble around his jowls. But the detail was not of sufficient definition or fidelity for him to be wholly sure, as if the cameraman himself—or almost certainly the camerawoman—had scarcely the experience needed to cope with the problems of the bright sunlight that so obviously pervaded the garden in which the snaps had been taken. But although Morse knew little (well, nothing) about photography, he was beginning to suspect that there might be slightly more competence in the arrangement of the “subject” in relation to the “background” than he’d originally supposed.
The man had been photographed at an oblique angle across the garden, with a house clearly shown to the left of the figure: a three-storey, rosy-bricked house, with a french window on the ground floor, slightly ajar, with another window immediately above it, and one above that, all painted white, and with a black drain-pipe reaching down to ground level; and to the figure’s right a smallish tree of some sort with large curly leaves, unidentifiable to Morse who knew little (well, nothing) of such things. But there was even more to learn. Clearly the photographer had been kneeling down, or sitting down, to take the shots, for the man’s head showed some way above the line of the garden wall, which rose clearly behind the shrubs and foliage. Even more to learn though!—Morse decided, as he studied the background yet again. The roof-line of the house stretched away in a slightly convex curve (as it appeared) above the man’s head, and then was cut off in the middle of the top of the photograph; but not before suggesting that the house could be one of a terrace, perhaps?
It was amazing, Morse told himself, how much he’d managed to miss when first he’d considered the photographs; and with the strange conviction that there would certainly be a final solution to the mystery if only he looked at it long enough, he stared and stared until he thought he could see two houses instead of one, although whether this was an advance in insight or in inebriation, he couldn’t be sure. So what, though? So what if it were part of a terrace? The number of three-storeyed, red-bricked terraces in the UK was myriad; and just in Oxford alone it must be … Morse shook his head and shook his thoughts. No. It was going to be almost impossible to locate the house and the garden; so the only thing left was the young man’s face, really.
Or was it …?
Suddenly an exciting thought occurred to him. A straight line could be seen as a curve, so he’d been supposing, either because the camera had looked at it in a particular way, or because in a larger view the line began to bend in a sort of rounded perspective. But such explanations were surely far less probable than the utterly obvious fact that was staring him, literally staring him, in the face; the fact that the roof-line of the terraced houses which formed the backdrop here might look as if it was curving in a convex fashion for one supremely simple and wholly adequate reason: it was curving!
Could it be …? Could it be …? Did Morse, even now, think he knew where it was? He felt the old familiar tingle across his shoulders, and the hairs at the nape of his neck were suddenly erect. He rose from his armchair and went over to his bookshelves, whence he extracted the thick Penguin Oxfordshire, in the “Buildings of England” series; and his right hand shook slightly as he traced “Park Town” in the index—page 320. On which page he read:
Laid out in 1853–5. This was North Oxford’s first development, built on land originally intended for a workhouse. The trust created for its developments promised elegant villas and [Morse’s eyes snatched at the next word] terraces. What it became is this: two crescents [the blood tingled again] N and S of an elliptical central garden, with stone frontages in late-classical style, and bricked at the rear [!] with attractive french windows [!] leading on to small walled [!] gardens.
Phew!
Ye gods!
Bloody hell!
If he were so disposed (Morse knew) he could go and identify the house at that very moment! It must be in Crescent S—the sunshine would rule out Crescent N; and with that tree with its big, furry, splayed (beautiful!) leaves; and the drain-pipe, and the windows, and the wall, and the grass …
As he sat down again in the black leather settee, Morse’s face was betraying a high degree of self-gratification—when the phone rang. It was now a quarter to midnight, and the voice was a woman’s—husky, slightly timid, north-country.
She identified herself as Dr. Laura Hobson, one of the new girls in the path labs; one of Max’s protegées. She had been working late with Max—on Morse’s bones—when just before 9 P.M. she’d found him lying there on the floor of the lab. Heart attack—severe heart attack. He’d been unconscious most of the time since they’d got him to hospital … but the sister had rung her (Dr. Hobson) and the possibility was that he (Max) had been trying to ask for him (Morse)—if he (Morse) knew what she (Dr. Hobson) was trying to say …
Oh dear!
“Which ward’s he in?”
“Coronary Care Unit—”
“Yes! But where?”
“The JR2. But it’s no good trying to see him now. Sister says—”
“You want to bloody bet?” snapped Morse.
“Please! There’s something else, Inspector. He’d been working on the bones all day and—”
“Bugger the bones!”
“But—”
“Look. I’m most grateful to you, Dr, er …”
“Hobson.”
“… but please forgive me if I hang up. You see,” suddenly Morse’s voice was more controlled, more gentle, “Max and I—well, we … let’s say we don’t either of us have too many friends and … I want to see the old sod again if he’s going to die.”
But Morse had already put down the phone, and Dr. Hobson heard nothing of the last five words. She too felt very sad. She had known Max for only six weeks. Yet there was something basically kindly about the man; and only a week before she’d had a mildly erotic dream about that ugly, brusque, and arrogant pathologist.
At least for the present, however, the pathologist appeared to have rallied quite remarkably, for he was talking to Nurse Shelick rationally, albeit slowly and quietly, when he learned of his visitor; and threatened to strike the houseman off the medical register unless Morse (for such it was) were admitted forthwith.
But one patient newly admitted to the JR2 had not rallied that night. Ma
rion Bridewell, an eight-year-old little West Indian girl, had been knocked down by a stolen car on the Broadmoor Lea estate at seven o’clock that evening. She had been terribly badly injured.
She died just after midnight.
Chapter Thirty-two
And Apollo gave Sarpedon dead to be borne by swift companions, to Death and Sleep, twin brethren, who bore him through the air to Lycia, that broad and pleasant land
(Homer, Iliad, xvi)
“How are you, old friend?” asked Morse with spurious cheerfulness.
“Dying.”
“You once told me that we’re all moving towards death—at the standard rate of twenty-four hours per diem.”
“I was always accurate, Morse. Not very imaginative, agreed; but always accurate.”
“You’ve still not told me how—”
“Somebody said … somebody said, ‘Nothing matters very much … and in the end nothing really matters at all’.”
“Lord Balfour.”
“You always were a knowledgeable sod.”
“Dr. Hobson rang—”
“Ah! The fair Laura. Don’t know how men ever keep their hands off her.”
“Perhaps they don’t.”
“I was thinking of her just now … Still have any erotic daydreams yourself, Morse?”
“Most of the time.”
“Be nice—be nice if she was thinking of me …”
“You never know.”
Max smiled his awkward, melancholy smile, but his face looked tired and ashen-grey. “You’re right. Life’s full of uncertainties. Have I ever told you that before?”
“Many a time.”
“I’ve always … I’ve always been interested in death, you know. Sort of hobby of mine, really. Even when I was a lad …”
“I know. Look, Max, they said they’d only let me in to see you if—”
“No knickers—you know that?”
“Pardon? Pardon, Max?”
“The bones, Morse!”