Inspector Morse 4 - Service Of All The Dead

by Colin Dexter

  'One of 'em must be right.'

  'No.' She took out her own pen and wrote in a single word before 'sometime': the word 'perhaps'.

  Unlike Morse, she didn't sleep that afternoon. She felt fresh and alive, and would have done a few odd jobs in the garden but for the persistent drizzle. Instead she revised the lines for her part in the play. Friday was looming frighteningly near, and the cast was rehearsing at 7.30 p.m. that evening. Not that a tuppenny-ha'penny play at a church social was all that grand; but she was never happy about doing even the smallest things half-heartedly—and they always had a good audience.

  Morse himself woke up with a shudder and a grunt at 3 p.m., and slowly focused upon life once more. The newspaper cuttings still lay on the arm of his chair, and he collected them together and put them back in their envelope. Earlier in the day he had allowed things to get out of perspective. But no longer. He was on holiday, and he was going to have a holiday. From his bookshelf he hooked out a thick volume; and just as the Romans used to do it with the Sibylline Books, just as the fundamentalists still do it with the Holy Scriptures—so did Morse do it with the AA Hotels of Britain. He closed his eyes, opened the book at random, and stuck his index finger half-way down the left-hand page. There she was. Derwentwater: Swiss Lodore Hotel. Keswick, three miles S. along the . . . He rang the number immediately. Yes, they had a single room with private bath. How long for? Four or five nights, Perhaps. All right. He'd be leaving straightaway, and be there about—oh, about nine or ten. Good.

  Evesham—about an hour, if he was lucky. Along the old Worcester Road. M5 and M6-80 m.p.h. in the fast lane. Easy! He'd be there in time for a slap-up meal and a bottle of red wine Lovely. That's what holidays were all about.

  CHAPTER TEN

  THE REVEREND KEITH MEIKLEJOHN exuded a sort of holy enthusiasm as he stood at the door of the church hall. Obviously there was going to be a big audience, and in between the unctuous Good evenings, how nice of you to comes, he debated the wisdom of fetching some of the old chairs from the store-room. It was only 7.20 p.m., but already the hall was two-thirds full. He knew why, of course: it was the Sunday School infant classes' tap-dance troupe, with its gilt-edged guarantee of attracting all the mums and aunts and grandmas. 'Hello, Mrs. Walsh-Atkins. How very nice of you to come. Just a few seats left near the front . . .' He despatched two reluctant choirboys for the extra chairs, and was ready with his beam of ecclesiastical bonhomie for the next arrival. 'Good evening, sir. How nice of you to come. Are you a visitor to Oxford or—?'

  'No, I live here.'

  The newcomer walked into the hall and sat down at the back, a slightly sour expression on his face. He gave five pence to the pretty pig-tailed girl who came up to him and stuck the programme in his pocket. What a day! Almost six hours from Keswick to the Evesham exit: single-lane traffic north of Stoke; a multiple pile-up just after Birmingham, with all lanes closed for almost an hour on the south-bound carriageway; flood warnings flashing for the last thirty miles and the juggernaut lorries churning up spray like speedboats . . . And what a so-called holiday! On fine days (he had little doubt) the view from his bedroom at the Swiss Lodore would have been most beautiful; but the mist had driven down from the encircling hills, and it was as much as he could do to spot the grass on the lawn below his window, with its white chairs and tables—all deserted. Some of his fellow-guests had taken to their cars and driven (presumably) in search of some less-bedraggled scenery; but the majority had just sat around and read paperback thrillers, played cards, gone swimming in the heated indoor pool, eaten, drunk, talked intermittently, and generally managed to look rather less miserable than Morse did. He could find no passably attractive women over-anxious to escape their hovering husbands, and the few who sat unattended in the cocktail-lounge were either too plain or too old. In his bedroom Morse found a leaflet on which was printed Robert Southey's 'How the Waters Come Down at Lodore'; but he felt that even a poet laureate had seldom sunk to such banality. And anyway, after three days, Morse knew only too well how the waters came down at Lodore: they came down in bucketfuls, slanting incessantly in sharp lines from a leaden sky.

  On Friday (it was 7 April) The Times was brought into his room with his early-morning tea; and after looking at the week-end weather forecast he decided to leave immediately after breakfast. It was as he was taking out his cheque-book at the reception-desk that the folded white leaflet fluttered to the floor: he had pocketed it absentmindedly from the literature set out on the table at the entrance to St. Frideswide's, but it was only now that he read it.

  CONCERT

  At the Church Hall, St. Aldates

  Friday, April 7th, at 7.30 p.m.

  TAP-DANCE TROUPE (Sunday School)

  GILBERT & SULLIVAN MEDLEY (Church Choir)

  A VICTORIAN MELODRAMA (Drama Group)

  Entrance Fee 20p. Programme 5p.

  ALL WELCOME

  (Proceeds in aid of the Tower Restoration Fund)

  It was that last line, pregnant with possibilities, that had monopolised Morse's thoughts as he drove the Jaguar south. Were the crenellations really crumbling after all? Had they crumbled, when Lawson looked his last over the familiar landmarks of the city? Whenever possible, juries were keen to steer away from 'suicide' verdicts, and if the tower had been at all unsafe the point would have been a crucial one. What Morse really needed was the coroner's report: it would all be there. And it was to the coroner's office that Morse had immediately driven when he finally reached Oxford at 4.30 p.m.

  The report, apart from the detailed descriptions of Lawson's multiple mutilations, was vaguer than Morse had hoped, with no mention whatsoever of the parapet from which Lawson had plummeted to earth. Yet there was one section of the report that firmly gripped his interest, and he read it through again. 'Mrs. Emily Walsh-Atkins, after giving formal evidence of identification, said that she had remained alone for some minutes in the church after the service. She then waited for about five minutes outside the church, where she had arranged to be picked up by taxi: the service had finished slightly earlier than usual. At about 8.10 a.m. she heard a terrible thud in the churchyard and had looked round to find Lawson's body spread-eagled on the railings. Fortunately two police officers had soon appeared on the scene and Mr. Morris' (Morris!) 'had taken her back inside, the church to sit down and recover . . .' Morse knew that he would have little mental rest until he had seen Mrs. W.-A., and it was that lady who was the immediate cause of his attendance at the Church Concert. (Was she the only reason, Morse?) He had just missed her at the Home for Ageing Gentlefolk, but they knew where she had gone.

  Meiklejohn had finished his long-winded, oily introduction, the lights had been switched off, and now the stage-curtains were jerkily wound back to reveal the Tap-Dance Troupe in all its bizarre glory. For Morse the whole thing was embarrassingly amusing; and he was quite unprepared for the wild applause which greeted the final unsynchronised kneelings of the eleven little girls, plumed plastic headgear and all, who for three minutes or so had braved inadequate rehearsal, innate awkwardness, and the appallingly incompetent accompaniment of the pianist. To make matters worse, the troupe had started with a complement of twelve, but one small child had turned left instead of right at a crucial point in the choreography, and had promptly fled to the wings, her face collapsing in tearful misery. Yet still the audience clapped and clapped, and was not appeased until the appearance of the troupe's instructress, alias the piano-player, leading by the hand the unfortunate, but now shyly smiling, little deserter—the latter greeted by all as if she were a prima ballerina from the Sadler's Wells.

  The Gilbert and Sullivan selections were excellently sung, and Morse realised that the St. Frideswide's choir contained some first-rate talent. This time, fortunately, the piano was in the hands of an infinitely more able executant—Mr. Sharpe, no less, former deputy to Mr. Morris (that name again!). Morris . . . the man who had been on the scene when Josephs was murdered; had been on the scene, too, when Lawson was—when
Lawson was found. Surely, surely, it shouldn't be at all difficult to trace him? Or to trace Mrs. Brenda Josephs? They must be somewhere; must be earning some money; must have insurance numbers; must have a house . . . With clinical precision the choir cut off the last chord from the finale of The Mikado, and their turn was complete—greeted by appreciative if comparatively short-lived applause.

  It took a good five minutes for the Victorian melodrama to materialise; minutes during which could be heard the squeaking and bumping of furniture, during which the curtains were twice prematurely half opened, and during which Morse once more looked through the coroner's digest on Lawson's death. There was this fellow Thomas's evidence, for example: 'He had just parked his car in St Giles' and was walking down towards Broad Street when he noticed someone on the tower of St. Frideswide's. He could not recall seeing anyone standing there before, but it was not unusual to see people looking out over Oxford from St Mary's in the High, or from Carfax tower. He thought that the figure was dressed in black, looking down, his head leaning over the parapet . . .' That was all, really. Only later had he heard of the morning's tragedy and had reluctantly rung up the police—at his wife's suggestion. Not much there, but the man must have been the very last person (Morse supposed) to see Lawson alive. Or was he? He might just have been the first—no, the second—person to see Lawson dead. Morse found the key words again: 'looking down, his head leaning over the parapet . . .' How high were those parapets? No more than three feet or so, surely. And why bring Lawson's head into it? Why not just 'leaning over the parapet'? And why 'looking down'? Was a man about to leap to his death likely to be all that worried about the place he was going to land? A minister, surely—more than most of his fellow-mortals—might be expected to seek a little consolation from more ethereal realms, whatever the depths of his despair. But if . . . if Lawson had been dead already; if someone had—

  The melodrama was under way at last, and in Morse's view a more crudely amateurish production could seldom have merited a public presentation. The play appeared to have been chosen to embrace the largest possible cast, and to allow to all of it's participants the briefest possible exposure on the boards, in order to minimise their breathtaking incompetences. The bearded one-armed hero, who at least had learned his lines and spoke them audibly, clumped around in a pair of squeaky army boots, and at one point conducted a crucial telephone conversation by speaking into the ear-piece—of an incongruously modern-looking instrument at that; whilst one of the numerous housemaids was every other line reduced to referring to a copy of her part pasted on the underside of her dustpan. The only feature which prevented the whole thing from degenerating into a farcical shambles was the performance of the heroine herself, a young blonde who acted with a charm and sophistication hopelessly at variance with the pathetically inadequate crew around her. She appeared to know everyone else's part, and covered their lapses and stumbles with impressive aplomb. She even managed, at one stage, to prevent one of the butlers (blind fool! thought Morse) from tripping over an intervening chair as he carried in her ladyship's tea. Mercifully many of the lines (as originally written) must have been extremely amusing, and even voiced by these clowns could elicit a little polite laughter; and when the final curtain drew its veil over the proceedings there seemed to Morse not the slightest sign of embarrassed relief amongst the audience. Perhaps all church concerts were the same.

  The Vicar had earlier announced that tea would be served at the end of the entertainment, and Morse felt certain that Mrs. W.-A. would not be leaving without a cup. All he had to do was find out which one she was. He looked around in vain for Miss Rawlinson, but it seemed clear that she'd given the evening a miss—enough of a penance, no doubt, her scrubbing the pews. But he felt a certain disappointment . . . People were leaving the hall fairly quickly now, but Morse decided to wait a minute or two. He took out his programme and looked at it vaguely, but with no real purpose other than that of seeming not to be lonely.

  'I hope you'll have a cup of tea with us?' Even at this late stage Meiklejohn was not neglecting his pastoral duties.

  Tea? It had never occurred to Morse that he might be drinking tea at 9 p.m. 'Yes; thank you. I wonder if you happen to know a Mrs. Walsh-Atkins. I want—'

  'Yes, yes. This way. Wonderful concert, wasn't it?'

  Morse mumbled inaudibly and followed his guide into the crowded vestibule where a stout lady was coaxing a dark-brown liquid from a formidable urn. Morse took his place in the queue and listened to the conversation of the two women in front of him.

  'You know, it's the fourth time now he's been in one of them. His dad would have been ever so proud of him.'

  'No one would ever suspect he was blind, would they? Coming on the way he does and all that.'

  'It's lots of rehearsal that does it, you know. You have to sort of picture where everything is—'

  'Yes. You really must be proud of him, Mrs. Kinder.'

  'They've asked him to be in the next one, anyway, so he must be all right, mustn't he?'

  So the poor devil had been blind after all. And learning a part and stepping out on to the stage had probably been about as much of an ordeal as for a sighted person walking through a swamp of crocodiles. Morse suddenly felt very moved, and very humbled. When it came to his turn, he slipped a fifty-pence piece on to the tea-money plate, and hoped that nobody had noticed. He felt oddly out of place there. These were good people, who rejoiced in the simple ties of family and Christian fellowship; who thought of God as a father, and who never in a month of Sabbaths could begin to understand the aberrations of the new theology which thought of Him (if it thought of Him at all) as the present participle of the verb 'to be'. Morse sipped his tea self-consciously, and once more took out his programme and looked for the name of Her Ladyship's butler, whose mother (with what sweet justification!) was feeling so happy and proud. But once again he was interrupted. Meiklejohn was at his shoulder, and with him a diminutive old lady munching a digestive biscuit.

  'Mr.—er?'

  'Morse.'

  'You said you wanted to meet Mrs. Walsh-Atkins?'

  Morse stood above her, acutely conscious of her smallness, and suggested they should sit down back in the hall. He explained who he was, why he was there, and what he wanted to know; and she readily told him of her own part in that dreadful day's events when she'd found Lawson dashed to pieces from the tower, repeating virtually verbatim the words she had used at the inquest.

  Nothing! Morse had learned nothing. Yet he thanked her politely and asked if he could fetch her another cup of tea.

  'One's enough for me these days, Inspector. But I must have left my umbrella somewhere. If you would be kind enough to . . .'

  Morse felt his scalp tingling in the old familiar way. They were seated at a small table at the back of the hall, and there was the umbrella, large as life, lying diagonally across it. There could be little doubt about it: the old lady must be going blind.

  'Do you mind me asking how old you are, Mrs. Walsh-Atkins?'

  'Can you keep a secret, Inspector?'

  'Yes.'

  'So can I,' she whispered.

  Whether Morse's decision to patronise the cocktail-lounge of the Randolph was determined by his thirst, or by some wayward wish to find out if Miss Rawlinson might be there, he didn't stop to think. But he recognised no one, left after only one pint, and caught a bus outside the Taylorian. Back home, he poured himself a large neat whisky and put on Vier Letzte Lieder. Marvellous. 'Melismatic', as it said on the sleeve . . .

  It was time for an early night, and he hung up his jacket in the hallway. The programme stuck out of one of the pockets and, third time lucky, he opened it and read it.

  'Her Ladyship's Butler—Mr. John Kinder.' And then his pulse raced as he looked at the top of the cast: 'Her Ladyship, the Hon. Amelia Barker-Barker—Miss Ruth Rawlinson.'

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  MEDIUMS AND CLAIRVOYANTS claim enhanced scope for their talents if they can be physically present in
a room where the absent ones—the missing or the plain dead—may have left a few stray emanations behind. Murderers, likewise, have the reputation of nursing an uncontrollable urge to revisit the scene of death, and on Sunday morning Morse found himself wondering whether the murderer of Josephs had ever set foot in St. Frideswide's again since the day of his crime. He thought that the answer was probably 'yes', and it was one of the very few positive thoughts he had managed to generate since Friday evening. Somehow his mind had gone completely stale, and on the Saturday he had firmly resolved to abandon all idea of further investigation into a mysterious affair which was none of his business anyway. In the morning he had consulted the Sibyl once more, but had drawn the line at Inverness. In the afternoon he had wasted two idle hours in front of the television set watching the racing from Doncaster. He was restless and bored: there were so many books he could read, so many records he could play—and yet he could summon up no enthusiasm for anything. What did he want? His listless mood persisted through to Sunday morning, when not even the few erotic titbits in the News of the World could cheer him. He sprawled gloomily in his armchair, his eyes vaguely scanning the multi-coloured spines along the bookshelves. Baudelaire might match his mood, perhaps? What was that line about the prince in 'Les Fleurs du Mal'? 'Riche, mais impuissant, jeune et pourtant très vieux . . .' And quite suddenly Morse felt better. Bloody nonsense! He was neither impotent nor senile—far from it! It was time for action.

  He rang the number and she answered.

  'Hello?'

  'Miss Rawlinson?'

  'Speaking.'

  'You may not remember me. I—I met you in St. Frideswide's last Monday.'