by Colin Dexter
The rattle of the pail brought his airborne fancies down to earth. What possible reason could Morris have had for turning the mirror to such an improbable angle as he played the last hymn? Forget it! He turned on the smooth bench and looked over the curtain. The cleaner was packing up by the look of things, and he hadn't read the other cuttings yet. But before he got off the bench his mind again took wing and was floating as effortlessly as a kittiwake keeling over the cliffs. It was the organ-curtain . . . He was himself a man of just over medium height, but even someone three or four inches taller would be fairly well concealed behind that curtain. The back of the head would be showing, but little else; and if Morris was a small man he would have been almost completely concealed. Indeed, as far as the choir and congregation were concerned, the organist might . . . might not have been Morris at all!
He walked down the chancel steps. 'Mind if I keep these cuttings? I'll post them back to you, of course.'
The woman shrugged. 'All right.' It seemed a matter of little concern to her.
'I don't know your name, I'm afraid,' began Morse, but a small middle-aged man had entered the church and was walking briskly towards them.
'Morning, Miss Rawlinson.'
Miss Rawlinson! One of the witnesses at the inquest. Well, well! And the man who had just come in was doubtless Morris, the other witness, for he had already seated himself at the organ, where a few switches were clicked on and where a whirr of some hidden power was followed by a series of gruff bass blasts, as if the instrument were breaking wind.
'As I say, I can post 'em,' said Morse, 'or pop 'em through your letter-box. 14 Manning Road, isn't it?'
'Manning Terrace.’
'Oh yes.' Morse smiled at her good-naturedly. 'Memory's not what it was, I'm afraid. They tell me we lose about 30,000 brain cells a day once we're past thirty.'
'Just as well we all have plenty to start with, Inspector.' There was perhaps just a hint of mockery in her steady eyes, but Morse's light-heartedness had evoked no reciprocal response.
‘I’ll just have a quick word with Mr. Morris before—'
'That's not Mr. Morris.'
'Pardon?'
'That's Mr. Sharpe. He was deputy organist when Mr. Morris was here.'
'And Mr. Morris isn't here any longer?' said Morse slowly.
She shook her head.
'Do you know where he's gone?'
Did she? Again there seemed some hesitation in the eyes. 'N-no, I don't. He's left the district. He left last October.'
'Surely he must have— '
'He left his post at the school and, well, he just went.'
'But he must have—'
She picked up the bucket and prepared to leave. 'Nobody knows where he went.'
But Morse sensed she was lying. 'It's your duty to tell me, you know, if you've any idea at all where he went.' He spoke now with a quiet authority, and a flush arose in the woman's cheeks.
'It's nothing really. Just that he—he left at the same time as someone else. That's all.'
'And it was fairly easy to put two and two together?'
She nodded. 'Yes. You see, he left Oxford the same week as Mrs. Josephs.'
CHAPTER EIGHT
MORSE LEFT THE church and strolled over to the snack bar.
'One coffee, please,' he said to the girl lounging by the pay-desk.
'If you go an' si' down, one of the girls'll come.'
'Oh.' It all seemed a roundabout business.
He sat and stared abstractedly through the large window, flecked now with drizzle, and watched the people walking to and fro along Cornmarket. Immediately opposite him, fencing in the church and the churchyard, were the sharply pointed, black-painted railings of St. Frideswide's, against which a bearded, damp-looking tramp was leaning uncertainly, a bottle of something hanging loosely in his left hand.
'Order, please?' It was the same waitress.
'You just had it,' snapped Morse.
'Im sorry, sir, bu—'
'Forget it, luv.'
He left and walked back across the street.
'How goes it, brother?'
The tramp looked at Morse warily through an incongruous pair of dark sun-glasses: unsolicited interest in his well-being was quite clearly no everyday occurrence. 'Could do wiv a cup o' tea, guv.'
Morse pushed a couple of ten-pence pieces into a surprisingly clean hand. 'Do you usually stand here?'
'Nah. Usually be'ind Brasenose College. Makes a change, though, don't it?'
'Some nice kind people come out of the church, do they?'
'Sometimes.'
'You know the minister here?'
'Nah. Tell yer to push off, like as not, this one. Knew the other one, though. Real gent he was, guv. Sometimes 'e'd take yer down to the vicarage an' give yer a real square meal, 'e would.'
'Is he the one who died?'
The tramp looked at Morse with what could have been a glint of suspicion behind the dark lenses, and took a swig on the bottle. 'Christ, you can say that again, mister.' He shuffled along the railings towards Carfax, and was gone.
Morse crossed the road yet again, and walked past the snack bar, past a well-stocked bicycle-shop, past the cinema, and then turned left into the curving sweep of Beaumont Street. Momentarily he debated between the Ashmolean, just opposite on his right, and the Randolph, immediately on his left. It wasn't a fair contest.
The cocktail-bar was already quite full as Morse waited rather impatiently for a group of Americans to sort out their gins and tarnics. The barmaid wore a low-cut dress and Morse watched with what he told himself was a fascinated indifference as she finally leaned forward over the beer-pump to pull his order. She was too young, though—no more than twenty-odd—and Morse was beginning to formulate the philosophy that men were attracted to women of roughly their own age—well, give or take ten years or so either way.
He sat down, savoured his beer, and took out cutting number three from his pocket. It was dated Wednesday, 19 October.
* * *
TRAGIC FALL FROM CHURCH TOWER
Yesterday morning the Reverend Lionel Lawson fell to his death from the tower of St. Frideswide's Church in Cornmarket. Only ten minutes earlier he had conducted the regular 7.30 a.m. Communion Service, and two members of the congregation were among the first to discover the tragedy.
The church tower, formerly a favourite viewing-point for tourists, has been closed to the public for the last two years as signs of crumbling have become evident in the stone fabric on the north side. But the tower was not considered unsafe, and only a week ago workmen had been up to check the leads.
Mr. Lawson, a bachelor, aged 41, had been vicar of St. Frideswide's for almost eleven years. He will be remembered above all, perhaps, for his social work, since in addition to his deep involvement with the church's flourishing youth activities he invariably took a compassionate interest in the plight of the homeless, and there can be few regular down-and-outs in Oxford who have not at some time or another enjoyed his hospitality.
As a churchman he made no apologies for his High Anglican views, and although his strongly voiced hostility towards the ordination of women was not universally popular his large and loyal congregation will mourn the death of a dear friend and pastor. He studied theology at Christ's College, Cambridge, and later at St Stephen's House, Oxford.
Only last month Mr. H. A. Josephs, churchwarden of St. Frideswide's, was found stabbed to death in the church vestry.
* * *
Mm. Morse looked at the last sentence again and wondered why the reporter had deemed it his duty to stick it in. Wasn't there a bit too much of that post hoc, propter hoc suspicion about it? Yet a murder followed very shortly afterwards by a suicide was by no means uncommon, and the reporter would hardly have been the only one to suspect some causal connection. For if Lawson had somehow managed to murder Josephs, then it was surely only honourable and proper for a servant of the Lord to be stricken so sorely in conscience as to chuck himself off the ne
arest or most convenient pinnacle, was it not?
Morse drained his beer, fiddled in his pockets for some more change, and looked vaguely around him. A woman had just walked up to the bar and he studied her back view with growing interest. A good deal nearer his own age than the barmaid, certainly: black-leather, knee-length boots; slim figure; tight-belted, light-fawn raincoat; spotted red headscarf. Nice. On her own, too.
Morse sauntered up beside her and heard her order a dry Martini; and the thought crossed his mind that all he had to do was to pay for her drink, ask her over to his lonely corner, and talk of this and that in a quiet, unassuming, intelligent, fascinating, masterly way. And then—who knows? But a middle-aged customer had risen from his seat and clapped a hand on her shoulder.
'I’ll get that Ruth, love. You sit down.'
Miss Rawlinson unfastened her headscarf and smiled. Then, as she appeared to notice Morse for the first time, the smile was gone. She nodded—almost curtly, it seemed—and turned away.
After his third pint, Morse left the cocktail-bar and from the foyer rang through to the City Police Station. But Chief Inspector Bell was on holiday, he was told—in Spain.
It was a long time since Morse had undertaken any extended exercise, and he decided on impulse to walk up to north Oxford. Only half an hour, if he stepped it out. As if to deride his decision, bus after bus passed him: Cutteslowe buses, Kidlington buses, and the eternally empty Park and Ride buses, subsidised at huge cost by the City Fathers in the vain hope of persuading shoppers to leave their cars on the outskirts. But Morse kept walking.
As he came up to the Marston Ferry cross-roads he watched, almost mesmerised, as a north-bound car pulled out of the inside lane into the path of an overtaking motor-cycle. The rider was thrown slithering to the other side of the road where his white helmet hit the kerb with a sickening thwack, and where the near-side wheel of a south-bound lorry, for all its squealing brake-power, ran over the man's pelvis with an audible crunch.
Others on that scene showed, perhaps for the first time in their lives, a desperate courage born of the hour: figures knelt by the dying man, and coats were laid over his crushed body; a young man with greasy shoulder-length hair took upon himself the duties of a traffic policeman; a doctor was on his way from the Summertown Health Centre on the corner; the ambulance and police were already being summoned.
But Morse felt his stomach tighten and twist in a spasm of pain. A light sweat had broken out on his forehead, and he thought he was going to vomit as he averted his eyes and hurried away. The sense of his inadequacy and cowardice disgusted him, but the physical sickness prowling in his bowels drove him on, farther and farther up the road, past the Summertown shops, and at last to his home. Even the Levite had taken a quick look before passing by on the other side.
What it was about road accidents that threw him so completely off balance, Morse had never quite been able to understand. Many a time he had been on the scene of a murder, and examined a brutally mutilated corpse. With an ugly distaste, certainly; but with nothing worse. Why was it, then? Perhaps it was something to do with the difference between death and the process of dying, certainly of dying in a writhing agony after a road accident. Yes, it was the accidental angle of things; the flukey, fortuitous nature of it all; the 'if only' of being just a few yards, just a few inches even, from safety; of being just a second, just a fraction of a second, earlier—or later, it was all that Lucretian business about the random concourse of the atoms, hurtling headlong through the boundless void, colliding occasionally like billiard balls, colliding like a car against a motor-bike. All so pointless, somehow; all so cruelly haphazard. Occasionally Morse considered the ever-decreasing possibility of having a family himself, and he knew that he might be able to face some terrible illness in those he loved; but never an accident.
In the distance sounded the urgent two-toned siren of an ambulance, like some demented mother wailing for her children.
Morse picked up his one pint of milk and shut the door of his bachelor flat behind him. Not the best of starts to a holiday! He selected Richard Strauss's Vier Letzte Lieder; but a sudden thought flashed through his mind, and he put the record down again. In the Randolph he had quickly read through cutting number four, the newspaper account of the inquest on Lawson; little of interest there, he'd thought. But had he been right? He read it through again now. The poor fellow had obviously been a terrible sight, his body violently crushed by his fall, his skull—Yes! That is what had clicked in Morse's mind as he had lifted the lid of the record-player. If he himself had been unwilling to look at the face of a dying motor-cyclist, had those two witnesses looked as closely as they should have done at that sadly shattered skull? All he needed now was a little information from the official report of the coroner's hearing; and, knowing the coroner very well, he could get that little information straightaway—that very afternoon.
Ten minutes later he was asleep.
CHAPTER NINE
AVOIDING THE MAN'S LOOK, Ruth Rawlinson finished her second Martini and stared at the slice of lemon at the bottom of her glass.
'Another?'
'No, I mustn't. Really. I've had two already.'
'Go on! Enjoy yourself! We only live once, you know.'
Ruth smiled sadly. It was just the sort of thing her mother kept saying: 'You're missing out on life, Ruthie dear. Why don't you try to meet more people? Have a good time?' Her mother! Her grumbling, demanding, crippled mother. But still her mother; and she, Ruth, her only child: forty-one years old (almost forty-two), a virgin until so recently, and then not memorably deflowered.
'Same again, then?' He was on his feet, her glass held high in his hand.
Why not? She felt pleasantly warm somewhere deep down inside her, and she could always go to bed for a few hours when she got home. Monday afternoon was her mother's weekly bridge session, and nothing short of a nuclear attack on north Oxford could ever disturb those four mean old women as they grubbed for penalty points and overtricks at the small green-baize table in the back room.
'You'll have me drunk if you're not careful,' she said.
'What do you think I'm trying to do?'
She knew him fairly well now, and she watched him as he stood at the bar in his expensively cut suit: a few years older than herself, with three teenage children and a charming, intelligent, trusting wife. And he wanted her.
Yet for some reason she didn't want him. She couldn't quite bear the thought of being intimate with him—not (she reminded herself) that she really knew what intimacy was all about . . .
Her eyes wandered round the room once more, in particular to a point in the farthest corner of the room. But Morse had gone now, and for some unfathomable reason she knew she had wanted him to stay—just to be there. She'd recognised him, of course, as soon as she'd walked in, and she had been conscious of his presence all the time. Could she get into bed with him? It was his eyes that fascinated her; bluey-grey, cold—and yet somehow vulnerable and lost. She told herself not to be so silly; told herself she was getting drunk.
As she slowly sipped the third Martini, her companion was busily writing something on the back of a beer-mat.
'Here we are, Ruth. Be honest with me—please!'
She looked down at what he had written:
Tick the box which
in your opinion is nearest
to your inclinations. Will
you let me take you to bed
this week? ❑
next week? ❑
this year? ❑
next year? ❑
sometime? ❑
never? ❑
It made her smile, but she shook her head slowly and helplessly. 'I can't answer that. You know I can't.'
'You mean it's "never"?'
'I didn't say that. But—but you know what I mean. You're married, and I know your wife. I respect her. Surely—'
'Just tick one of the boxes. That's all.'
'But—'
'But you'll disappoi
nt me if you tick the last one, is that it? Go on, then. Disappoint me. But be honest about it, Ruth. At least I shall know where I stand.'
'I like you—you know that. But—'
'You've got plenty of choice.'
'What if none of the answers is the right one?'