by Colin Dexter
Morse: I suppose you could say that. Thanks to Sergeant Lewis.
Marshall: I have no more questions.
Johns: I understand, Inspector, that you heard the conversation between my client and Mr Josephs before the attempt to strangle her was made.
Morse: I did.
Johns: In that conversation, did you hear anything which might be considered by the Court to be mitigating evidence in the case against my client?
Morse: Yes. I heard Miss Rawlinson say that she-
Judge: Will the witness please speak up for the Court?
Morse: I heard Miss Rawlinson say that she had decided to go to the police and make a full statement of all she knew.
Johns: Thank you. No further questions.
Judge: You may stand down, Inspector.
Chapter Forty-three
'What beats me,' said Bell, ‘is how many crooks there are around – in a church, too! I always thought those sort of people walked straight down the middle of the paths of righteousness.'
'Perhaps most of them do,' said Lewis quietly.
They were sitting in Bell's office just after the verdict and sentence had been passed on Miss Ruth Rawlinson. Guilty; eighteen months' imprisonment.
'It still beats me,' said Bell.
Morse was sitting there, too, silently smoking a cigarette. He either smoked addictively or not at all, and had given up the habit for ever on innumerable occasions. He had listened vaguely to the mumbled conversation, and he knew exactly what Bell had meant, but… His favourite Gibbon quotation flashed across his mind, the one concerning the fifteenth-century Pope John XXIII, which had so impressed him as a boy and which he had committed to memory those many years ago: 'The most scandalous charges were suppressed; the vicar of Christ was only accused of piracy, murder, rape, sodomy, and incest.' It was no new thing to realise that the Christian church had a great deal to answer for, with so much blood on the hands of its temporal administrators, and so much hatred and bitterness in the hearts of its spiritual lords. But behind it all, as Morse knew – and transcending it all – stood the simple, historical, unpalatable figure of its founder – an enigma with which Morse's mind had wrestled so earnestly as a youth, and which even now troubled his pervasive scepticism. He remembered his first visit to a service at St Frideswide's, and the woman singing next to him: 'Wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.' Wonderful possibility! The Almighty, as it were, wiping the slate clean and not just forgiving, but forgetting, too. And it was forgetting that was the really hard thing. Morse could find it even in his own cynical soul to forgive – but not to forget. How could he forget? For a few blissful moments on that day in St Frideswide's he had felt such a precious affinity with a woman as he had felt only once before; but their orbits, his and hers, had crossed too late in the day, and she, like all other lost souls, like the Lawsons and Josephs and Morris, had erred and strayed from the ways of acceptable human behaviour. But how could his mind not be haunted by the revelations she had made? Should he go to see her now, as she had asked? If he was to see her, it would have to be very soon.
Dimly and uninterestedly his mind caught up with the conversation once more: 'Doesn't reflect very well on me, does it, Sergeant? I'm in charge of the case for months, and then Morse here comes along and solves it in a fortnight. Made me look a 'proper Charley, if you ask me.' He shook his head slowly. 'Clever bugger!'
Lewis tried to say something but he couldn't find the right words. Morse, he knew, had the maddeningly brilliant facility for seeing his way through the dark labyrinths of human motive and human behaviour, and he was proud to be associated with him; proud when Morse had mentioned his name in court that day. But such matters weren't Lewis' forte; he knew that, too. And it was almost a relief – after Morse – to get back to his usual pedestrian and perfunctory duties.
Morse heard his own name mentioned again and realised that Bell was talking to him.
'You know, I still don't understand- '
'Nor do I,' interrupted Morse. Throughout the case he had made so many guesses that he could find no mental reserve to fabricate more. The words of St Paul to the Corinthians were writ large in his brain: 'There is a manifestation and there is a mystery'; and he felt sure that whatever might be puzzling Bell was not likely to be one of the greater mysteries of life. Wasn't one of the real mysteries the source of that poison which had slowly but inexorably dripped and dripped into Lionel Lawson's soul? And that was almost as old as the seed of Adam himself, when Cain and Abel had presented their offerings before the Lord…
'Pardon?'
'I said the pubs'll soon be open, sir.'
'Not tonight for me, Lewis. I – er – I don't feel much like it.'
He got up and walked out of the office without a further word, Lewis staring after him in some bewilderment.
'Odd bugger!' said Bell; and for the second time within a few minutes Lewis felt he had to agree with him.
Obviously Ruth had been crying, but she was now recovered, her voice dull and resigned. 'I just wanted to thank you, Inspector, that's all. You've been – you've been so kind to me, and – and I think if anyone could ever understand me it might have been you.'
'Perhaps so,' said Morse. It was not one of his more memorable utterances.
'And then- ' She sighed deeply and a film of tears enveloped her lovely eyes. 'I just wanted to say that when you asked me out that time – do you remember? – and when I said – when I- ' Her face betrayed her feelings completely now, and Morse nodded and looked away.
'Don't worry about it. I know what you're going to say. It's all right. I understand.'
She forced herself to speak through her tears. 'But I want to say it to you, Inspector. I want you to know that- 'Again, she was unable to go on; and Morse touched her shoulder lightly, just as Paul Morris had touched Brenda Josephs lightly on the shoulder on the night of Philip Lawson's murder. Then he got up and made his way quickly out along the corridor. Yes, he understood – and he forgave her, too. But, unlike the Almighty, he was unable to forget.
Mrs Emily Walsh-Atkins had been called upon to identify the battered corpse of Harry Josephs. (It was Morse's idea.) She had done so willingly, of course. What an exciting time this last year had been! And the goldfish flashed its tail almost merrily in her mind as she recalled her own part in the tragic events which had centred upon her chosen church. Her name had appeared once more in the Oxford Mail - in the Oxford Times, too – and she had cut out the paragraphs carefully, just as Ruth Rawlinson before her, and kept them in her handbag with the others. One Sunday morning during the hot summer which followed these events, she prayed earnestly for forgiveness for her sins of pride, and the Reverend Keith Meiklejohn, standing benignly beside the north porch, was kept waiting even longer than usual until she finally emerged into the bright sunshine.
Mrs Alice Rawlinson had been taken to the Old People's Home in Cowley immediately after her daughter's arrest. When Ruth was freed, after serving only eleven of her eighteen months' sentence, the old lady returned to 14A Manning Terrace, still going strong and looking good for several years to come. As she was helped into the ambulance on her way home, one of the young housemen was heard to murmur that anyone who predicted how long a patient had got to live was nothing but a bloody fool.
A few books had been found in Harry Josephs' upstairs flat at 14B Manning Terrace; and after the case was over these had been given to Oxfam, and were slowly sold, at ridiculously low prices, at the second-hand chanty bookshop in north Oxford. A seventeen-year-old boy (by some curious coincidence, a boy named Peter Morris) bought one of them for five pence in the early summer. He had always been interested in crime, and the large, fat, glossy volume entitled Murder Ink had immediately attracted his attention. That same night whilst browsing through the assorted articles, he came to a piece about suicides on page 349, heavily underlined in red biro: Myopic jumpers invariably remove their eyeglasses and put them in a pocket before jumping.
Chapter Forty-four<
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Morse took his holidays later the following year and decided, again, to go to the Greek islands. Yet somehow his passport remained unrenewed in its drawer, and one sunny morning in mid-June the chief inspector caught a bus down from north Oxford into the city. For an hour he wandered contentedly around the Ashmolean where amongst other delights he stood for many minutes in front of the Giorgione and the Tiepolo. Just before midday he walked across to the cocktail-bar at the Randolph and bought a pint of beer, for he would never lend his lips to anything less than that measure. Then another pint. He left at half-past twelve, crossed Cornmarket, and walked into St Frideswide's, The north door creaked no longer, but inside the only sign of life was the flickering candles that burned around the statue of the Virgin. The woman he was seeking was not there. As once before, he decided to walk up to north Oxford, although this time he witnessed no accident at the Marston Ferry cross-roads. Reaching the Summertown shops, he called into the Dew Drop, drank two further pints of beer, and continued on his way. The carpet-shop, from which Brenda Josephs had once observed her husband, had now been taken over by an insurance firm, but otherwise little seemed to have changed. When he came to Manning Terrace, Morse turned into it, paused at one point for a second or two, and then continued along it. At number 14A he stopped, knocked briskly on the door, and stood there waiting.
'You!'
'I heard you'd come home.'
'Well! Come in! Come in! You're the first visitor I've had.'
'No, I won't do that. I just called by to tell you that I've been thinking a lot about you since you've been – er – away, and you'd blush if I told you what happened in my dreams.'
'Of course I wouldn't!'
'Don't take any notice of me – I've had too much beer.'
'Please come in.'
'Your mother's there.'
'Why don't you take me to bed?'
Her large eyes held his, and in that moment a sparkling mutual joy was born.
'Can I use your "gents"?'
'There's one upstairs – it's a "ladies", too.'
'Upstairs?'
'Just a minute!'
She was back almost immediately with a Yale key labelled 14B in her hand.
'Hadn't you better tell your mother-?'
'I don't think so,' she said, and a slow smile spread across her lips as she closed the door of 14A quietly behind her and inserted the key into 14B.
Morse's eyes followed her slim ankles as she climbed the carpeted stairs ahead of him.
'Bedroom or lounge?'
'Let's go into the lounge a few minutes first,' said Morse.
'There's some whisky here. Do you want a drink?'
'I want you.'
'And you can have me. You know that, don't you?'
Morse took her in his arms as they stood there, and kissed her tenderly on her sweet, full lips. Then, as if the moment were too unbearably blissful to be prolonged, he pressed her body tightly to him and laid his cheek against hers, 'I dreamed about you, too,' she whispered in his ear.
'Did I behave myself?'
'I'm afraid so. But you're not going to behave yourself now are you?'
'Certainly not.'
'What's your Christian name?' she asked.
'I'll tell you afterwards,' said Morse quietly, as his fingers lingered lightly on the zip at the back of her brightly patterned summer dress.
Colin Dexter
Colin Dexter lives in Oxford. He has won many awards for his novels and in 1997 was presented with the CWA Cartier Diamond Dagger for outstanding services to crime literature.
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