by Colin Dexter
The footsteps had started again, and as they moved slowly up the central aisle she peered over the top of the pew. He looked somehow familiar, but he was half turned away from her and for a while she failed to recognise him: his subfusc suit seemed of good quality cloth, though loose-fitting and shabby; and his face (so far as she could see it) was matted with greyish stubble. He peered vaguely across the pews, first to the left, then to the right, before stopping at the chancel steps. Was he looking for something—or someone? Instinctively Ruth felt it better if he remained unaware of her presence, and very very quietly she wiped the cloth over the winking suds.
The north door clicked and groaned again, and she dipped the soapy cloth more boldly into the dirty water; but almost immediately her body froze over the bucket.
'You came, then?'
'Keep your voice down!'
'There's nobody here.'
The newcomer walked down the central aisle and the two men met half-way. They spoke in hushed voices, but the few snatches of their conversation that carried to Ruth's ears were readily and frighteningly comprehensible.
'. . . given you more than enough already and you're not getting a penny more . . . '
'. . . told you, Mister Morris. It's just to tide me over, that's all. And I'm sure you wouldn't want me to tell my brother . . . ' The voice seemed a curious combination of the cultured and the coarse.
The ugly word 'blackmail' rose to the surface of Ruth's mind; but before she could learn more the door had opened again to admit a small group of tourists, one of whom in a nasal twang was soon admiring 'that cute lil farnt'.
Half of the long school holiday had now passed and the August sun shone gloriously. Brenda and Harry Josephs were in Tenby for a week; Lawson had just come back from a brief holiday in Scotland; Peter Morris was away at scout camp; and his father was decorating the staircase—amongst other things.
It was at 1.30 p.m. that he was sitting in the Old Bull at Deddington and deciding that he oughtn't to drink any more. After all, he had to drive home. And he had the additional responsibility of a passenger.
'I think we ought to go now,' he said.
Carole nodded, and drained her third Babycham. From the start she had felt embarrassment at being with him, and things hadn't been helped much by the way he'd been speaking to her—so naturally! So unendearingly! It wasn't at all what she'd expected. Or hoped. She'd been in a pub before, of course—quite a few times; but only for a giggle round the juke-box with some of the others from school. But this? The whole thing had been a ghastly mistake, somehow; and yet it could have been so very different . . .
The car was parked at the far end of the tarmac behind the pub, and Morris politely unlocked and opened the door for his passenger before getting into the driver's seat and fitting the key into the ignition.
'You won't say anything at all about this, will you?'
'Course I won't.'
'You mustn't tell anyone.'
'I shan't tell a soul,' she said. Her eyes, the lids shaded in a lurid blue, were dull with disappointment.
Morris took a deep breath. 'Put your safety belt on, my girl. Better safe—'
He leaned over to help fix the awkward thing, and was aware of the softness of her breast against his arm. With what seemed almost paternal affection he took her hand in his; and as she turned her head towards him he put his mouth lightly to hers and felt her full lips softly cushioning his own. He had meant no more than that; but he lingered there as the girl's lips gently—yet so perceptibly!—pushed forward against his own. And still he lingered, savouring long the sensual delight. He put his arm along the seat, easing her more closely towards him; and then the tip of her tongue tentatively tried the entrance to his mouth, and the smouldering smoke burst forth in a blazing flame . . . Eagerly she pulled down his hand to her naked thigh, and her legs opened slowly and invitingly, like the arms of a saint in a holy benediction.
They broke away from each other guiltily as a car backed into the space beside them, and Morris drove off to Kidlington, dropping her (where he had picked her up) on the north side of the village.
'Would you like to come to see me sometime?' They were the first words that either of them had spoken on the way back.
'When do you mean?'
'I dunno.' His throat was very dry. 'Now?'
'All right.'
'How long will it take you from here?'
'Ten minutes.'
'You'd better come in the back way.'
'All right.'
'I want you, Carole!'
'I want you, sir.' ('Sir'! My God! What was he doing?)
'Be as quick as you can.'
'I will, don't worry.'
In the kitchen he opened a bottle of Beaujolais, fetched two glasses from the living-room, and looked yet again at his watch. Just another five minutes. Come on, Carole! . . . Already in his mind he was unfastening the buttons down the front of her white blouse, and his hands were slipping inside to fondle her breasts . . . He breathed deeply and waited with an almost desperate impatience.
When finally he heard the timid knock, he walked to the back door like a man newly ushered through the gates of Paradise.
'Good afternoon,' said Lawson. 'I hope I've not called at an inconvenient time? I wonder if I can come in and talk to you. It's—er—it's rather important.'
The Second Book
of Chronicles
CHAPTER SIX
BUT FOR HIS DILATORINESS and indecisiveness Detective Chief Inspector Morse would have been cruising among the Greek islands. Three months earlier, in January, he had discussed Easter bookings with the Town and Gown travel agency, taken home a Technicolor brochure, rung up his bank manager to discover the going rate for the drachma, bought a slim Modern Greek phrase-book, and even managed to find his passport again. He had never been to Greece; and now, a bachelor still, forty-seven years old, he retained enough romance in his soul to imagine a lazy liaison with some fading film-star beside the wine-dark waves of the Aegean. But it was not to be. Instead, on this chilly Monday mid-morning in early April, he stood at a bus-stop in north Oxford, with a fortnight's furlough before him, wondering exactly how other people could organise their lives, make decisions, write a letter even.
Still no bus in sight.
A heavily pregnant mother pushed a rickety, collapsible pram into the shelter, unstrapped the infant within it, and then stuck her head out to admonish her slightly older offspring, already exhibiting, as it seemed to Morse, the lively potential of a fully fledged criminal. 'Stop frowin' dem bricks, Jason!'
Jason! Jason and the Argonauts sailing up to the Hellespont . . . Morse felt he could have done without the reminder—the second reminder, in fact, that morning; for Radio Oxford had just broadcast an interview with the new vicar of St. Frideswide's, recently returned from a fortnight in a monastery on the island of Patmos.
Morse stood aside to allow Jason's formidable mother to enter the bus first. She asked for 'St. Frideswide's', and as she fiddled one-handedly in her purse the other passengers watched in helpless silence as the hero of the Argosy wiped his filthy shoes over the nearest seat-cover.
Morse knew where St. Frideswide's was, of course: one of the string of ecclesiastical edifices along Cornmarket . . . where there had been some rather curious occurrences the previous autumn . . . when he himself had been away on an eight-week secondment in west Africa . . .
'Where to, mate?'
'Er' (it was more than a year since Morse had been on a bus) 'St. Frideswide's, please.' It was as good a stop as any for the Ashmolean, and Morse had promised himself an hour or so in the galleries: it would be good to see the Tiepolo again; and the Giorgione.
But he saw neither that morning.
Whilst Mrs. Jason was extricating her push-chair from the luggage-rack, the triumphant young vandal himself was already at large in the street, and very soon the bottom half of a notice affixed to the church railings was torn from its moorings.
' 'Ow man
y times 'ave I told you, Jason?' This rhetorical question was accompanied by a clumping clout across the youngster's ears, and the bawling brat was finally dragged away.
The notice now read: ST. FRIDESWIDE'S EASTER JUMBLE SALE. That was all. Any details of date, time and place had vanished with the passing of Jason.
Morse was a believer neither in the existence of God nor in the fixity of the Fates. About such things he never quite knew what he should think; and, like Hardy's, his philosophy of life amounted to little more than a heap of confused impressions, akin to those of a bewildered young boy at a conjuring show. Yet, as he looked back, it seemed somehow pre-ordained that his steps should take him on only one course that morning; and he took that course now as, in obedience to some strangely compelling impulse, he walked the few steps across the pavement and unlatched the door at the north porch of St. Frideswide's.
CHAPTER SEVEN
AS A SCHOOLBOY, Morse had once paid a few shillings for a book on architecture and had traipsed around a good many churches, earnestly tracing the development of Early English into Gothic. But the enthusiasm, like so many, had been short-lived. And as he stood in the vaulted silence, looking down the central aisle towards the altar, with the heavily curtained vestry to the right behind him, few of the architectural features were familiar any longer; and his mind, whilst not uninformed, remained maddeningly blank—like that of an amnesic ornithologist at a duck-pond. A ring of candles burned around the effigy of some saint or other, and an occasional elongated asterisk of light was reflected in a gleaming flash from an adjacent crucifix. The air was heavy with incense.
As he walked slowly towards the chancel, Morse realised that he'd been wrong about the silence, though. Somewhere he could hear a quiet, rhythmic scratching noise, like that of a church mouse scampering about in the wainscoting. But the noise was too regular for that; and suddenly Morse knew that he was not alone. A grey head rose above the level of the front pew and nodded neutrally as the visitor stopped alongside. She wiped her pale forehead with the back of her wrist and blew a stray hair from her vision before bending over her work once more, the concentric rings of soap on the wooden floor dissolving beneath her wiping-cloth, the bucket rattling as she moved to the next rectangle.
'Good morning.' Morse smiled amiably as he looked down at her. 'You don't seem to have got any of those brochure things—you know, telling people what to look at.'
'No. We ran out last week, but the Vicar's having some more printed.'
'The Vicar? That's Mr. Lawson, isn't it?'
'No, it isn't.' Her large brown eyes looked up at him cautiously, and she suddenly seemed a good deal younger than he'd thought. 'It's Mr. Meiklejohn. He's been here since last November.'
'I must have been thinking of one of the other churches.'
'No. Mr. Lawson was here.' She hesitated. 'He—he died last October.'
'Oh dear. I'm sorry about that.'
For a few seconds there was silence between them.
'I think you knew he was dead,' said the woman quietly.
Morse blinked at her happily. 'Did I?'
'You're another one of those reporters, aren't you?'
Morse shook his head and told her. He was a police officer attached to the Thames Valley Police H.Q. in Kidlington—not to the City Police in St Aldates; he'd heard vaguely about the case but had never been on it himself; in fact, he'd been out of the country at the time.
'Were you involved in any way?' he asked.
'As a matter of fact I was, yes.'
'Pardon?' She spoke so very quietly now that Morse took a step nearer to her.
'I was here in the church on the night of the murder.'
'I see. Do you mind telling me something about it?'
She dried her hands along her faded blue jeans, worn almost threadbare at the knees, and stood up. 'Wait a minute.'
There was a natural elegance about her walk, and Morse's eyes followed her with a slightly quickened interest as she disappeared somewhere at the back of the church, and re-emerged a minute later carrying a brown handbag. She had taken the opportunity to arrange her straggling hair, and Morse began to realise that she must once have been an attractive woman.
'Here you are.' She handed him a cheap brown envelope containing several cuttings from the Oxford Mail, and Morse sat down in the pew opposite her and carefully unfolded the thin sheets. The first cutting was dated Tuesday, 27 September of the previous year:
* * *
CHURCHWARDEN MURDERED
DURING SERVICE
Whilst the congregation was singing the last hymn, Mr. H.A, Josephs was last night stabbed to death in the vestry of St. Frideswide's Church, Cornmarket. Chief Inspector Bell of the Oxford City Police, who is in charge of the murder enquiries, told our reporter that Mr. Josephs, one of the two churchwardens at St. Frideswide's, had just taken the collection and was almost certainly counting it as he was attacked.
When the police arrived there was no sign of the collection-plate itself or of the money. Inspector Bell said that if robbery had been the sole motive the murder was doubly tragic, since only a dozen or so people had attended the evening service, and the offertory could have amounted at most only to about two or three pounds.
Several members of the congregation had heard sounds of some disturbance at the back of the church, but no one suspected that anything was seriously wrong until Mr. Josephs had shouted for help. The vicar, the Reverend L. Lawson, immediately suspended the service and summoned the police and the ambulance, but Mr. Josephs died before either could arrive.
The knife used by the murderer was of a dull, golden colour, cast in the shape of a crucifix, with the blade honed to a razor sharpness. Police are anxious to hear from anyone who has knowledge of such a knife.
Mr. Josephs, aged 50, was married and lived in Port Meadow Drive, Wolvercote. He came to Oxford after
serving as a regular officer in the Royal Marine Commandos and saw active service in Malaya. Until two years ago he worked for the Inland Revenue Department. There are no children. The inquest is to be held next Monday.
* * *
Morse quickly read through the article again, for there were a couple of things, quite apart from the extraordinary typography of the last paragraph, that puzzled him slightly.
'Did you know him very well?'
'Pardon?' The woman stopped her scrubbing and looked across at him.
'I said did you know Josephs well.'
A flicker of unease in those brown eyes? Had she heard him the first time?
'Yes, I knew him quite well. He was a churchwarden here. It says so, doesn't it?'
Morse let it go and turned his attention to the second cutting, dated Tuesday, 4 October:
* * *
INQUEST RIDDLE
The inquest on Mr. H.A. Josephs, who was stabbed to death last week at St. Frideswide's Church, was adjourned yesterday after a twenty-minute hearing, but not before the court had heard some startling new evidence. The post-mortem report on Mr. Josephs showed that a lethal quantity of morphine was present in the stomach, but it seemed clear that it was the stab-wound which had been the immediate cause of death.
Earlier, Mr. Paul Morris, of 3 Home Close, Kidlington, had given evidence of formal identification. He had been the organist during the service and was in fact playing the last hymn when Mr. Josephs was murdered.
Another witness. Miss Ruth Rawlinson, of 14 Manning Terrace, Summertown, said that she heard noises coming from the vestry during the singing of the last hymn, and had turned to see Mr. Josephs call out and slump beside the vestry curtains.
Chief Inspector Bell, of the Oxford City Police, informed the Coroner that he was as yet unable to report on any firm developments in the case but that enquiries were proceeding. The Coroner extended his deepest sympathy to Mrs. Brenda Josephs, the deceased's wife.
The funeral service will be held at St. Frideswide's on Thursday at 2.30 p.m.
* * *
The narrative was bald, but
interesting enough, wasn't it? What was morphine doing in the poor beggar's innards? Somebody must have wanted him out of the way pretty badly, and that somebody had so far got away with it and was still walking around—probably walking around the streets of Oxford—a free man. Or a free woman perhaps, he reminded himself, as he glanced across the aisle.
Morse looked about him with renewed interest. He was actually sitting a few yards from the scene of the crime, and he tried to imagine it all: the organ playing, the few members of the congregation standing, heads bowed over their hymn-books—one minute, though! Where was the organ? He got to his feet and walked up the broad, shallow steps of the chancel. Yes. There it was, on the left-hand side behind two rows of choir-stalls, with a blue curtain stretched across in front of it to hide the body of the organist; and a mirror, too, fixed just above the high top manual, so that, however much he was concealed from the view of all others, the organist himself could keep an observant eye on the minister and the choir—and on the congregation as well, if he wanted to. If you swung the mirror round a bit . . . Morse sat himself behind the curtain on the organ-seat and looked into it. He could see the choir-stalls behind him and the main body of the chancel. Mm. Then, like a nervous learner before starting off on a driving test, he began adjusting the mirror, finding that it moved easily and noiselessly: up and down, right and left—wherever he wanted it. First, to the right and slightly down, and he found himself looking straight at the intricately woven gold design on the front of the green altar-cloth; then to the left and down, and he could see the head and shoulders of the cleaning woman, her elbows circling sedulously over the soap-suds; then further still to the left and up slightly, almost as far as the mirror would go—and Morse suddenly stopped, a needle-sharp sensation momentarily flashing across his temples. So very clearly he could now see the front curtains of the vestry, could even see the fold where they would swing back to let the choir on its way; the fold where they had once opened—perhaps only slightly?—to reveal the figure of a man shouting desperately above the swell of the organ notes, a man with a knife stuck firm and deep through his back, a man with only a moment or two to live . . . What if the organist—Morris, wasn't it?—had actually been looking at the vestry curtains during those fateful, fatal seconds? What if he'd seen something? Something like . . .