The Silent World of Nicholas Quinn

by Colin Dexter

  In Al-jamara itself, the last of the autumn examinations, crowded into just the one week, had finished the previous afternoon, and George Bland relaxed with an iced gin and tonic in his air-conditioned flat. It had taken him only a few weeks to regret his move. Better paid, certainly; but only away from Oxford had he begun fully to appreciate the advantages of his strike-ridden, bankrupt, beautiful homeland. He missed, above all, the feeling of belonging somewhere which, however loosely, he could think of as his home: the pub at night; the Cotswold villages with their greens and ancient churches; the concerts, the plays, the lectures, and the general air of learning; the oddities forever padding their faddish, feckless paths around the groves of the Muses. He’d never imagined how much it all meant to him . . . The climate of Al-jamara was overwhelming, intolerable, endlessly enervating; the people alien – ostensibly hospitable, but secretly watchful and suspicious . . . How he regretted the move now!

  The news had worried him; would have worried anyone. It was for information only, really – no more; and it had been thoughtful of the Syndicate to keep him informed. The International Telegram had arrived on Wednesday morning: TRAGIC NEWS STOP QUINN DEAD STOP MURDER SUSPECTED STOP WILL WRITE STOP BARTLETT. But there had been another telegram, received only that morning; and this time it was unsigned. He had burned it immediately, although he realized that no one could have suspected the true import of the brief, bleak lines. Yet it had always been a possibility, and he was prepared. He walked over to his desk and took out his passport once more. All was in order; and tucked safely inside was his ticket on the scheduled flight to Cairo, due to leave at noon the following day.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  THERE WAS A car outside No 1 Pinewood Close as Frank Greenaway pulled into the crescent; but he didn’t recognize it and gave it no second thought. He could fully understand Joyce’s point of view, of course. He wasn’t too keen to go back there himself, and it wasn’t right to expect her to be there on her own while he was out at work. She’d have the baby to keep her company, but— No. He agreed with her. They would find somewhere else, and in the meantime his parents were being very kind. Not that he wanted to stay with them too long. Like somebody said, fish and visitors began to smell after three days . . . They could leave most of their possessions at Pinewood Close for a week or two, but he had to pick up a few things for Joyce (who would be leaving the John Radcliffe the next morning), and the police had said it would be all right.

  As he got out of his car, he noticed that the street lamp had been repaired, and the house where he and Joyce had lived, and wherein Quinn had been found murdered, seemed almost ordinary again. The front gate stood open, and he walked up to the front door, selecting the correct key from his ring. The garage doors stood open, propped back by a couple of house bricks. Frank opened the front door very quietly. He was not a nervous man, but he felt a slight involuntary shudder as he stepped into the darkened hallway, the two doors on his right, the stairs almost directly in front of him. He would hurry it up a bit; he didn’t much fancy staying there too long on his own. As he put his hand on the banister he noticed the slim line of light under the kitchen door: the police must have forgotten . . . But then he heard it, quite distinctly. Someone was in the kitchen. Someone was quietly moving around in there . . . The demon fear laid its electrifying hand upon his shoulder, and without conscious volition he found himself a few seconds later scurrying hurriedly along the concrete drive towards his car.

  Morse heard the click of the front door, and looked out into the passageway. But no one. He was imagining things again. He returned to the kitchen, and bent down once more beside the back door. Yes, he had been right. There was no mud on the carpets in the other downstairs rooms, and they had been hoovered only an hour or so before Quinn was due to return. But beside the back door there were signs of mud, and Morse knew that someone had taken off his shoes, or her shoes, and left them beside the doormat. And even as he had stood there his own shoes crunched upon the gritty, dried mud with the noise of someone trampling on cornflakes.

  He left the house and got into the Lancia. But then he got out again, walked back, closed the garage doors, and finally the garden gate behind him.

  Ten minutes later he drew up outside the darkened house in Walton Street, where a City constable stood guard before the door.

  ‘No one’s tried to get in, Constable?’

  ‘No, sir. Few sightseers always hanging around, but no one’s been in.’

  ‘Good. I’ll only be ten minutes.’

  Ogleby’s bedroom seemed lonely and bleak. No pictures on the walls, no books on the bedside table, no ornaments on the dressing table, no visible signs of heating. The large double bed monopolized the confined space, and Morse turned back the coverlet. Two head pillows lay there, side by side, and a pair of pale yellow pyjamas were tucked just beneath the top sheet. Morse picked up the nearer pillow, and there he found a neatly folded négligé – black, flimsy, almost transparent, with a label proclaiming ‘St Michael’.

  No one had yet bothered to clean up the other room, and the fire which had blazed merrily the night before was nothing now but cold, fine ash into which some of the detectives had thrown the tipped butts of their cigarettes. It looked almost obscene. Morse turned his attention to the books which lined the high shelves on each side of the fireplace. The vast majority of them were technical treatises on Ogleby’s specialisms, and Morse was interested in only one: Medical Jurisprudence and Toxicology, by Glaister and Rentoul. It was an old friend. A folded sheet of paper protruded from the top, and Morse opened the book at that point: page 566. In heavy type, a quarter of the way down the page, stood the heading ‘Hydrocyanic Acid’.

  At the Summertown Health Clinic, Morse was shown immediately into Dr Parker’s consulting room.

  ‘Yes, Inspector, I’d looked after Mr Ogleby for – oh, seven or eight years now. Very sad really. Something may have turned up, but I very much doubt it. Extremely rare blood disease – nobody knows much about it.’

  ‘You gave him about a year, you say?’

  ‘Eighteen months, perhaps. No longer.’

  ‘He knew this?’

  ‘Oh yes. He insisted on knowing everything. Anyway, it would have been useless trying to keep it from him. Medically speaking, he was a very well-informed man. Knew more about his illness than I did. Or the specialists at the Radcliffe, come to that.’

  ‘Do you think he told anybody?’

  ‘I doubt it. Might have told one or two close friends, I suppose. But I knew nothing about his private life. For all I know, he didn’t have any close friends.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘I don’t know. He was a – a bit of a loner, I think. Bit uncommunicative.’

  ‘Did he have much pain?’

  ‘I don’t think so. He never said so, anyway.’

  ‘He wasn’t the suicidal sort, was he?’

  ‘I don’t think so. Seemed a pretty balanced sort of chap. If he were going to kill himself, he would have done it simply and quickly, I should have thought. He would certainly have been in his right mind.’

  ‘What would you say is the simplest and quickest way?’

  Parker shrugged his shoulders. ‘I think I’d have a quick swig of cyanide, myself.’

  Morse walked thoughtfully to the car: he felt a sadder, if not a much wiser man. Anyway, one more call to make. He just hoped Margaret Freeman hadn’t gone off to a Saturday night hop.

  Although earlier in the evening Lewis had been quite unable to fathom the Inspector’s purposes, he had quite looked forward to the duties assigned to him.

  Joyce Greenaway was pleasantly co-operative, and she tried her best to answer the Sergeant’s strange questions. As she had told Inspector Morse, she couldn’t be certain that the name was Bartlett, and she could see no point whatsoever in trying (although she did try) to remember whether he’d been addressed as Bartlett or Dr Bartlett. She was quite sure, too, that she could never hope to recognize the vo
ice again: her hearing wasn’t all that good at the best of times and – well, you couldn’t recognize a voice again just like that, could you. What were they talking about? Well, as a matter of fact, she did just have the feeling that they were arranging to meet somewhere. But further than that – when, where, why – no. No ideas at all.

  Lewis got it all down in his notebook; and when he’d finished he made the appropriate noises to the little bundle of life that lay beside the bed.

  ‘Have you got any family, Sergeant?’

  ‘Two daughters.’

  ‘We had a name all ready if it had been a girl.’

  ‘There’s a lot of nice boys’ names.’

  ‘Yeah, I suppose so. But somehow— What’s your Christian name, Sergeant?’

  Lewis told her. He’d never liked it much.

  ‘What about the Inspector? What’s his Christian name?’

  Lewis frowned for a few seconds. Funny, really. He’d never thought of Morse as having one. ‘I don’t know. I’ve never heard anyone call him by his Christian name.’

  From the John Radcliffe Lewis drove down to the railway station. There were four taxi firms, and Lewis received conflicting pieces of advice about the best way to tackle his assignment. It really should have been a comparatively easy job to find out who (if anyone) had taken Roope from the station to the Syndicate building at about 4.20 p.m. on the 21st November. But it wasn’t. And when Lewis had finally completed his rounds he doubted whether the answer he’d come up with was the one that Morse had expected or hoped for.

  It was after half-eight before Lewis reached Littlemore Hospital.

  Dr Addison, who was on night duty, had not himself had a great deal to do with Richard Bartlett’s case, although he knew of it, of course. He fetched the file, but refused to let Lewis look through it himself. ‘There are some very personal entries, you know, Officer, and I think that I can give you the information you want without—’

  ‘I don’t really want any details about Mr Bartlett’s mental troubles. Just a list of the institutions that he’s stayed in over the past five years, the clinics he’s been to, the specialists he’s seen – and the dates, of course.’

  Addison looked annoyed. ‘You want all that? Well, I suppose, if it’s really necessary . . .’ The file contained a wadge of papers two inches thick, and Lewis patiently made his notes. It took them almost an hour.

  ‘Well, many thanks, sir. I’m sorry to have taken up so much of your time.’

  Addison said nothing.

  As Lewis finally got up to leave he asked one last question, although it wasn’t on Morse’s list.

  ‘What’s the trouble with Mr Bartlett, sir?’

  ‘Schizophrenia.’

  ‘Oh.’ Lewis thanked him once again, and left.

  Morse was not in his office when Lewis arrived back. They’d arranged to meet again at about ten if each could manage it. Had Morse finished his own inquiries yet? Like as not he had, and gone out for a pint. Lewis looked at his watch: it was just after ten past ten, and he might as well wait. Morse must have been looking up something for his crossword, for the Chambers lay on the cluttered desk. Lewis opened it. ‘Ski-’? No. ‘Sci-’? No. He’d never been much of a hand at spelling. ‘Sch-’? Ah! There it was: ‘ski-zo-freni-a, or skid-zo, n., dementia praecox or kindred form of insanity, marked by introversion and loss of connexion between thoughts, feeling and actions.’

  Lewis had moved on to ‘dementia’ when Morse came in, and it was quite clear that for once in a lifetime he had not been drinking. He listened with great care to what Lewis had to tell him, but seemed neither surprised nor excited in any way.

  It was at a quarter to eleven that he dropped his bombshell. ‘Well, Lewis, my old friend. I’ve got a surprise for you. We’re going to make an arrest on Monday morning.’

  ‘That’s when the inquest is.’

  ‘And that’s when we’re going to arrest him.’

  ‘Can you do that sort of thing at an inquest, sir? Is it legal?’

  ‘Legal? I know nothing about the law. But perhaps you’re right. We’ll make it just after the inquest, just as he’s—’

  ‘What if he’s not there?’

  ‘I think he’ll be there all right,’ said Morse quietly.

  ‘You’re not going to tell me who he is?’

  ‘What? And spoil my little surprise? Now, what do you say we have a pint or two? To celebrate, sort of thing.’

  ‘The pubs’ll be shut, sir.’

  ‘Really?’ Morse feigned surprise, walked over to a wall cupboard, and fetched out half a dozen pint bottles of beer, two glasses, and an opener.

  ‘You’ve got to plan for all contingencies in our sort of job, Lewis.’

  Margaret Freeman had been tossing and turning since she went to bed at eleven, and she finally got up at 1.30 a.m. She tiptoed past her parents’ room, made her way silently to the kitchen, and put the kettle on. It was no longer a matter of being frightened, as it had been earlier in the week, when she had blessed the fact that she didn’t live on her own like some of the girls did; it was more a matter of being puzzled now: puzzled about what Morse had asked her. The other girls thought that the Inspector was a bit dishy; but she didn’t. Too old – and too vain. Combing his hair when he’d come in, and trying to cover up that balding patch at the back! Men! But she’d like Mr Quinn – liked him rather more than she should have done . . . She poured herself a cup of tea and sat down at the kitchen table. Why had Morse asked her that question? It made it seem as if she held the secret to something important; it was important, he’d said. But why did he want to know? She had lain awake thinking and thinking, and asking herself just why he should have asked her that. Why was it so important for him to know if Mr Quinn had put her own initials on the little notes he left? Of course he had! She was the one who most needed to know, wasn’t she? After all, she was his confidential secretary. Had been, rather . . . She poured herself a second cup of tea, took it back to her room, and turned on the bedside reading lamp. Menacing shadows seemed to loom against the far wall as she settled herself into bed. She tried to sit very still, and suddenly felt very frightened again.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  ON MONDAY MORNING Lewis was waiting outside as the door of Superintendent Strange’s office opened, and he caught the tail-end of the conversation.

  ‘. . . cock-eyed, but—’

  ‘Have I ever let you down, sir?’

  ‘Frequently.’

  Morse winked at Lewis and closed the door behind him. It was 10.30 a.m. and the inquest was due to start at eleven. Dickson was waiting outside with the car, and together the three policemen drove down into Oxford.

  The inquest was to be held in the courtroom behind the main Oxford City Police HQ in St Aldates, and a small knot of people was standing outside, waiting for the preceding hearing to finish. Lewis looked at them. He had written (as Morse had carefully briefed him) to all those concerned in any way with Quinn’s murder: some would have to take the stand anyway; others (‘but your presence will be appreciated’) would not. The Dean of the Syndicate stood there, his hands in his expensive dark overcoat, academically impatient; the Secretary, looking duly grave; Monica Height looking palely attractive; Martin prowling around the paved yard like a nervous hyaena; Roope, smoking a cigarette and staring thoughtfully at the ground; Mr Quinn senior, lonely, apart, staring into the pit of despair; and Mrs Evans and Mrs Jardine, leagues apart in the social hierarchy, yet managing to chat away quite merrily about the tragic events which had brought them together.

  It was ten minutes past eleven before they all filed into the court, where the coroner’s sergeant, acting as chief usher, quietly but firmly organized the seating to his liking, before disappearing through a door at the back of the court, and almost immediately reappearing with the coroner himself. All rose to their feet as the sergeant intoned the judicial ritual. The proceedings had begun.

  First the identification of the deceased was established by Mr Qu
inn senior; then Mrs Jardine took the box; then Martin; then Bartlett; then Sergeant Lewis; then Constable Dickson. Nothing was added to, nothing subtracted from, the statements the coroner had before him. Next the thin humpbacked surgeon gave evidence of the autopsy, reading from a prepared script at such a breakneck speed and with such a wealth of physiological detail that he might just as well have been reciting the Russian creed to a class of the educationally subnormal. When he had reached the last full stop, he handed the document perfunctorily to the coroner, stepped carefully down, and walked briskly out of the courtroom and out of the case. Lewis wondered idly what his fee would be . . .

  ‘Chief Inspector Morse, please.’

  Morse walked to the witness box and took the oath in a mumbled gabble.

  ‘You are in charge of the investigation into the death of Mr Nicholas Quinn.’

  Morse nodded. ‘Yes, sir.’