by Colin Dexter
Standing quite still behind the curtained window of the first-floor front bedroom, she looked down across the drive at the departing policeman. She had a very good idea of what the interview had been about. Of course she had.
She was completely naked except for the dressing-gown (his) draped around a figure which was beginning to wob-ble dangerously between the voluptuous and the over-blown--the beginnings of a pot-belly quite certainly calling for some fairly regular visits to the Temple Cowley pool in East Oxford, to plough through some thirty or forty lengths a time (for she was an excellent swimmer).
The smell of her was seductive though, she knew that.
How else, with that posh eau-de-toilette just squirted every-where about her person? "Mimosa Pour Moi"--the last thing Felix had bought her.
Felix...
Always (above all perhaps?) he'd adored the sight and the smell of her when she'd just finished drying herself af-ter one of her frequent baths. And how she treasured that letter--well, sort of letter--he'd written that morning in a posh London hotel as he'd sat waiting (and waiting and waiting) to go down to breakfast whilst she reclined luxu riously, reluctant to make any decisive move from the b tub.
How she loved a long, hot bath.
Yummy!
And how she loved what he'd written---one of the v, few things she carried around in that scuffed shoulder-I of hers: I ask my darling if she is ready for breakfast; and she stands in front of me; and with a synchronised circular swish of her deodorant-can, she sprays first her left armpit, then her tight.
But she gives no answer.
I ask my darling if she has been thinking of me duff our night together; and she forms her lips into a moue and rocks her tight hand to and fro, as if she was stretching it forward to steady a rickety tabl, on the stone-flagged floor at The Trout.
But she gives no answer.
I ask my darling why she can't occasionally be more punctual for any rendezvous with me; and I wo be so glad if she could speak and dip into a pool of unconvincing excuses.
But she gives no answer.
I ask my darling what she loves most of all in her life; and she smiles (at last, a smile!) and she points behind her to the deep, scented water in which she has just been soaking and poaching, her full breasts seemingly floating on the surface.
It is, I must suppose, the nearest I shall ever come to an answer.
She'd read it many, many times. Above all she enjoy reading about herself in the third person. It was as if s were a key character in some roman-fi-clef (Felix had tc her about that sort of book--told her how to pronounce i a character far more important on the page than in reali Oh, yes. Because in real life she wasn't important at all; n ever would be. After all, she wouldn't exactly be tiding to the abortion clinic that Wednesday in a Roller, nc would she? God, no. Just standing on that perishing Plat-form Number 2, waiting for the early bloody train up to bloody Birmingham.
Ashley Davies opened the bedroom door and walked up be hind her, unloosening the belt of her (his) dressing-gown.
"GOd, am I ready--"
But she slipped away from him--and slipped out of the dressing-gown, fixing first her black suspender-belt, then her black bra; then pulling a thin dark blue dress over her ridic-ulously colourful head before hooking a pair of laddered black stockings up her legs.
Davies had watched her, silently. He felt almost as sex-ually aroused by watching her dress as watching her un-dress.
At last he spoke: "What's the matter? What have I done wrong?"
She made no reply, but stood tip-tilting her chin towards the dressing-table mirror as she applied some transparent substance to her pouting lips.
"Ellie?'
"I'm off."
"What d'you mean, you're off?. I'm taking you out to lunch, remember?"
"I'm off."
"You can't do this to me!"
"Just watch me!"
"Is it the police?"
"Could he."
"But he's gone--it's over--it's all right."
She picked up a small, overnight grip of faded pink can vas, inscribed with the names of pop groups and punk stars.
"I'm off."
"When do I see you again?"
"You don't."
"Eltie!"
"I don't want to see you any more." (It seemed a long sentence.)
Davies sat down miserably on the side of the double bed in which he and Ellie had slept--half slept the previous night.
"You don't love me at all, do you?"
"No."
"Have you ever loved me?"
"No."
"Did you love Matthew?"
"No."
"Don't tell me you loved Mc Clure? Don't tell me you loved that prick?"
"About the only thing about him I did love."
"Christ! You shouldn't say things like that."
"Why ask, then?"
"Have you ever loved anybody?"
"Me mum, yeah."
"Nobody else?"
"Me dad me real dad, I suppose. Can't remember."
With a series of upward brushes she applied some black colouration to her eyelashes.
"Where d'you think you're going now?"
"Oxford."
Davies sighed miserably, stood up, and reached inside his trouser-pocket for his car-keys.
"Come on, then."
"I'm not going with you."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"I'11 hitch a lift."
"You can't do that."
"Course I bloody can. That's all they're lookin' for, most of these lecherous sods. All I gotta do--"
,, Ellie. t,, "First car, like as not. You'll see."
In fact, Ellie Smith's prediction was unduly optimistic, since the first car drove past her with little observable sign of interest, no detectable sign of deceleration. The second car did exactly the same. But not the third.
Chapter Twenty-nine
My predestinated lot in life, alas, has amounted to this: a mens not particularly sana in a corpore not particularly sano (VISCOUN MUMBLES; Reflections on My Life)
On the following day, Sunday, September 4, Ted Brooks was sitting up in bed, two pillows behind his back, reading the more salacious offerings in the News of the Wor M. It was exactly 1t:30 ^.m., he knew that, since he had been looking at his wristwatch every minute or so since 11:15.
Now, for some reason, he began to feel slightly less ag-itated as the minute-hand moved slowly up in the climb to-ward the twelve--the "prick of noon," as Shakespeare has it. His mind, similarly, was moving slowly; perhaps it had never moved all that quickly anyway, Whatever happened, though, he was going to make the most of his heart attack--his "mild" heart attack, as they'd assured him in the Coronary Care Unit. Well, he hoped it was mild. He didn't want to die. Course he bloody didn't.
Paradoxically, however, he found himself wishing it wasn't all that mild. A heart attack--whatever its measurement on the Richter Scale--was still a heart attack; and the maxi-mum sympathy and attention should be extracted from such an affliction, so Brenda'd better bloody understand that.
He shouted downstairs for a cup of Bovril. But before the beverage could arrive, he heard the double-burred ring of the telephone: an unusual occurrence in the Brookses' household at any time; and virtually unprecedented on a Sunday.
He got out of bed, and stood listening beside the bed-room door as Brenda answered the call in the narrow entrance-hall at the bottom of the stairs.
"Oh, I see.... "
"I do understand, yes.... "
"Look, let me try to put him on.... '
She found him sitting on the side of the bed, pulling on his socks.
"Thames Valley Police, Ted. They want to come and talk to you."
"Christ!" he hissed. "Don't they know I've only just got out of 'ospital?"
Brenda's upper lip was trembling slightly, but her voice sounded strangely calm. "Would you like to speak to him yourself?. Or tell me what to say? I don't care--but don't let's ke
ep him waiting."
"What's 'is name, this feller?"
"Lewis. Detective Sergeant Lewis."
Lewis put down the phone.
Like Brooks a few minutes earlier, he was sitting on the side of the bed--Morse's bed.
"That's fixed that up, then, sir. I still feel you'd be better off staying in bed, though."
"Nonsense!"
Lewis looked with some concern across at his chief, lying back against three pillows, in pyjamas striped in ma-roon, pale blue, and white, with an array of bottles and medicaments on the bedside table: aspirin, Alka Seltzer, indigestion tablets, penicillin, paracetamol--and a bottle of The Macallan, almost empty. He looked blotchy. He looked ghastly.
"No rush, is there, sir?" he asked in a kindly manner. "Not much danger of me rushing today." He put down the book he'd been reading, and Lewis saw its rifle: The Anatomy of Melancholy.
'Trying to cheer yourseff up, sir?"
"Oddly enough, I am. Listen to this: 'There is no greater cause of melancholy than idleness; no better cure than busyness'--that's what old Burton says. So tell me all about Bedford."
So Lewis told him, trying so very hard to miss nothing out; and conscious, as always, that Morse would probably consider of vital importance those things he himself had as sumed to be obviously trivial.
And vice versa, of course.
Morse listened, with only the occasional interruption.
"So you can see, sir, he's not got much of an alibi, has he?"
"Lew-is! We won't want another suspect. We know who killed Mc Clure: the fellow we're off to see this afternoon.
All we're looking for is a bit more background, a slightly different angle on things. We can't take Brooks in yet--well, we can; but he's not going to run away. We ought to wait for a bit more evidence to accumulate."
"We certainly haven't got much, to be truthful, have we.9'
"You've still got people looking for the knife?"
Lewis nodded. "Eight men on that, sir. Doing the houses Phillotson's lads didn't--along most of the road, both sides."
Morse grunted. "I don't like this fellow Brooks."
"You've not even seen him yet."
"I just don't like this drugs business."
"I doubt if Davies had any part in that. Didn't seem the type at all."
"Just in on the sex."
"He fell for that woman in a pretty big way, no doubt about that."
"Mm. And you say there may have been somebody in the house while you were there?"
"As I say, I heard the loo flushing."
"Well, a trained detective like you would, wouldn't he?" '%Vhen the cat's away..."
"Looks like it."
"I think he's the sort of fellow who just welcomes all the floozies with open arms--"
"And open flies."
"You don't think..." The thought struck Lewis for the first time. "You don't think...?"
'Whe loo-flusher was one and the same as our staircase Lulu? No. Not a chance. Forget it! The really interesting thing is what Davies told you about her--about Ellie Smith, or whatever her name is."
Morse broke off wearily, wiping the glistering perspiration from his forehead with a grabby white handkerchief taken from his pyjama top--top number three, in fact, for he had already sweated his way through two pairs of paja mas since taking to his bed the previous afternoon.
"Did you take your dose this morning, sir?"
Morse nodded. "Double dose, Lewis. That's always been the secret for me."
"I meant the medicine, not the Malt."
Morse grinned weakly, his forehead immediately prickling with moisture once more, like a windscreen in persistent drizzle.
He lit a cigarette; and coughed revoltingly, his chest feeling like a chunk of excoriated flesh. Then spoke: "She said she couldn't see him on a weekday, right? Sat-urday OK, though, and perhaps Sunday. Why? Pretty clearly because she knew somebody there on the staircase; and you thought--be honest, now!--you thought it must be somebody who buggered off to his cottage in the Cotswolds somewhere every weekend, and left the coast clear. You thought it was one of the two Students, didn't you? You thought it was Mc Clure."
"To be honest with you, I didn't, no. I thought it was somebody who didn't work after Saturday lunchtime until starting up again on Monday morning. I thought it was the scout. I thought it was Brooks."
"Oh!"
"Wasn't I supposed to think that?"
Morse wiped his brow yet again. "I'm not really up to things at the minute, am I?"
"No, I don't think you are."
"Oh!"
"I think Brooks wasn't just a pusher; I think he was a pimp as well. And it was probably too risky for him to let any of his girls get into the college--into the House, sir. So, if this particular girl was going to get in, it was going to be at weekends, when he wasn't there, when she could make her own arrangements, take her own risks, and set her own fee without cutting him in at all."
Morse was coughing again. "Why don't I put you in charge of this case, Lewis?"
"Because I couldn't handle it."
"Don't you think you can handle Brooks?"
"No."
"You think we ought to wait a couple of days, don't you--before we see him?"
"Yes."
"And you think I'll agree to that?
"No."
Morse closed Burton's immortal work, and folded the duvet aside.
"Will you do me a quick favour, Lewis, while I get dressed?"
"Course."
"Just nip out and get me the News of the World, will you?"
Chapter Thirty
Randolph, you're not going to like this, but I was in bed with your wife (Murder Ink.' Alibis we never want to hear again)
At 1:15 P.M., on the way to the Brookses' residence in East Oxford, they had called briefly at Daventry Avenue. Still no sign of any murder weapon.
"Give 'em a chance," Lewis had said.
Morse had insisted on taking the Jaguar, with Lewis driving: he thought the finale of Die Walkiire might well refresh his drooping spirits, and the tape (he said) was already in position there. But strangely enough he hadn't turned it on; even more strangely he appeared ready to engage in con versation in a car.
Most unusual.
"You ought to invest in a bit of Wagner, Lewis. Do you far more good than all that rubbish you play."
"Not when you're there, I don't."
"Thank god!"
"I don't get on to you, for what you like."
"What do you like best?"
Lewis came up to the roundabout at the Plain, and took the second exit, the one after St. Clements, into the Cowley Road.
'Tll tell you what I can't stand, sir the bagpipes." Morse smiled. "Somebody once said that was his favourite music--the sound of bagpipes slowly fading away into the distance."
It was a quarter-to two when Ted and Brenda Brooks, side by side on the living-room settee, sat facing the two detec-tives: Morse in the only armchair there, Lewis on an up-right chair imported for the occasion from the kitchen.
Brooks himself, in his late forties, dressed in a white, short-sleeved shirt and well-pressed grey slacks, looked pale and strained. But soon he appeared to relax a little, and was confirming, with an occasional nod of his greying head, the background details which Morse now briefly re-hearsed: his years as a scout at Wolsey, where he had got to know Matthew Rodway ("Yup"); and Dr. Mc Clure ("Yup"); his present employment at the Pitt Rivers Museum ("Yup").
The skirmishing had been very civilised, and Mrs. Brooks asked them all if they'd like a cup of tea.
But Morse declined, speaking, as it appeared, for all three of them, and turning back to Brooks and to the trick-ier part of the examination paper.
"Do you want your wife to be here, sir, while I ask you--I'm sorry--some rather awkward questions?"
"She stays. You stay, don't you, Bren? Nothing she shouldn't know about, Inspector."
Lewis watched the man carefully, but could see no grea
ter signs of nervousness than was normal among wit-nesses being interviewed by the police. Wasn't she, Mrs.
Brooks, the more obviously nervous of the two?
"Mr. Brooks," Morse began. "I know you've been in hospital, but please bear with me. We have evidence that there was some trading in drugs on your old staircase over the last three or four years."
"Nothin' to do wi' me if there was."
"You knew nothing of it T'
"No."
"It's difficult for us, you see, because we have a statement to the effect that you did know something about it."
"Christ! I'd like to know who it was as told you that. Load o' bloody lies!"
"You'd have no objections to coming along to HQ and going through that statement with us?"
"I can't--not just now, I can't--but I will--I'll be 'appy to--when I'm better. You don't want to give me another bloody 'eart attack, do you?"
Brooks's manner of speaking, which had begun in a gen-tle Oxfordshire burr, had suddenly switched into the coarse articulation with which he was wont to address his wife.
"Would you have known, Mr. Brooks, if there had been drugs?"
"No job o' mine to interfere. Everybody's got their own lives to live."
"There were parties there, on the staircase?"
"You try an' stop 'em!"
"Did you try?"
"If you talk to people they'll all tell you I were a good scout. That's all that worried me."
"I'm afraid we shan't be able to talk to Dr. Mc Clure, shall we?"
"There's others."
"Did you like Dr. Mc Clure?"
"OK, yeah."
"You both left at the same time, I believe."
"So wha'?"
"I just wondered if you had a farewell drink together, that's all."
"Don't know much about Town and Gown, do you?" Morse turned to Lewis. "Sergeant?"
"We've obviously got to interview anyone, sir, who had a link with Dr. Mc Clure. That's why we're here, as I told you on the phone. So I shall have to ask you where you were last Sunday--Sunday the twenty-eighth of August."
"Huh! Last Sunday?" He turned to his wife. "Hear that, Bren? Not bloody difficult, that one, is it? You tell 'em. You remember better 'an I do. Bloody 'ell! If you reckon I 'ad anything to do wi' that last Sunday? Christ!" Brenda Brooks folded her hands nervously in her lap, and for the first time Morse noticed that the right hand, be-neath an elastic support, might be slightly deformed. Per-haps she held them to stop them shaking? But there was nothing she could do about her trembling upper-lip.