by Colin Dexter
Morse knocked on the music-room door and entered.
Mrs. Stewart stood up immediately and made as if to turn off the record-player; but Morse held up his right hand, waved it slightly, and sat down on a chair by the wall. The small class was listening to Fauré's Requiem; and with an almost instant ecstasy Morse closed his eyes and listened again to the ethereal sweep of the 'In Paradisum': aeternam habeas requiem . . . 'that thou mayest have eternal rest' . . . Too quickly the last notes died away into the silence of the room, and it occurred to Morse that rather too many people had all too recently had a premature dose of that eternal rest thrust forcibly upon them. The score stood at three at the minute; but he had a grim foreboding that soon it might be four.
He introduced himself and his purpose, and was soon surveying the seven girls and the three boys who were in the first year of their A-Level music course. He was making enquiries about Mr. Morris; they'd all known Mr. Morris; there were various business matters which had to be cleared up, and the police weren't sure where Mr. Morris had gone to. Did any of them know anything at all about Mr. Morris that might just possibly be of any help? The class shook their heads, and sat silent and unhelpful. So Morse asked them a lot more questions, and still they sat silent and unhelpful. But at least two or three of the girls were decidedly decorative—especially one real honey at the back whose eyes seemed to flash the inner secrets of her soul across the room at him. Morris must have looked at her lustfully just once in a while? Surely so . . .
But he was getting nowhere slowly, that was obvious; and he changed his tactics abruptly. His target was a pallid-looking, long-haired youth in the front row. 'Did you know Mr. Morris?'
'Me?' The boy swallowed hard. 'He taught me for two years, sir.'
'What did you call him?'
'Well, I—I called him "Mr. Morris".' The rest of the class smirked silently to each other, as if Morse must be a potential idiot.
'Didn't you call him anything else?'
'No.'
'You never called him "sir"?'
'Well, of course. But—'
'You don't seem to realise the seriousness of this business, lad. So I'll have to ask you again, won't I? What else did you call him?'
'I don't quite see what you mean.'
'Didn't he have a nickname?'
'Well, most of the teachers—'
'What was his?'
It was one of the other boys who came to the rescue. 'Some of us used to call him "Dapper".'
Morse directed his gaze towards the new voice and nodded wisely. 'Yes. So I've heard. Why was it, do you think?'
It was one of the girls now, a serious-looking soul with a large gap between her front teeth. 'He alwayth drethed very nithely, thir.' The other girls tittered and twittered amongst themselves, and nudged each other knowingly.
'Any more contributions?'
It was the third boy who took up the easy theme. 'He always wore a suit, you see, sir, and most of the staff—well' (more sniggering) 'well, you know, most of 'em have beards, the men, I mean' (a great guffaw from the class now) 'and wear jeans and sweaters and all that. But Mr. Morris, he always wore a suit and looked—well, smart, like.'
'What sort of suits did he wear?'
'Well' (it was the same boy) 'sort of dark, you know. Party suits, sort of thing. So, well, we called him "Dapper"—like we said.'
The bell rang for the end of the lesson, and several members of the class began to gather their books and file-cases together.
'What about his ties?' persisted Morse. But the psychological moment had passed, and the colour of Morris' ties seemed to have faded from the collective memory.
As he walked up the drive to his car, Morse wondered if he ought to talk to some of the staff; but he hadn't quite enough to go on yet, and decided it would be better to wait for the pathologist's report.
He had just started the engine when a young girl appeared at the driving-window. 'Hello, beautiful,' he said. It was the girl from the back row, the girl with the radar eyes, who leaned forward and spoke. 'You know you were asking about ties? Well, I remember one tie, sir. He often wore it. It was a light-blue tie. It sort of went with the suits he used to wear.'
Morse nodded understandingly. 'That's most helpful. Thank you very much for telling me.' He looked up at her and suddenly realised how tall she was. Strange how all of them looked about the same size when they were sitting down, as if height were determined not so much from the bottom to the shoulder as by the length of the legs—in this case by the length of some very beautiful legs.
'Did you know Mr. Morris well?'
'Not really, no.'
'What's your name?'
'Carole—Carole Jones.'
'Well, thank you, Carole. And good luck.'
Carole walked thoughtfully back to the front entrance and made her way to the next lesson. She wondered why she so often felt so attracted to the older men. Men like this inspector fellow; men like Mr. Morris…. Her mind went back to the time they'd sat in the car together; when his hand had lightly touched her breasts, and when her own left hand had gently pushed its way between the buttons of his white shirt—beneath the light-blue tie he'd worn that day; the time when he'd asked her to his house, when he'd answered the door and told her that an unexpected visitor had just arrived and that he'd get in touch with her again—very soon.
But he never had.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
MORSE WAS STILL asleep the next morning when his bedside phone rang. It was Superintendent Strange of the Thames Valley Police H.Q.
'I've just had a call from the City Police, Morse. You still in bed?'
'No, no,' said Morse. 'Decorating the lavatory, sir.'
'I thought you were on holiday.'
'A man's got to use his leisure hours profitably—'
'Like clambering over church roofs at the dead of night, you mean.'
'You heard?'
'Heard something else, too, Morse. Bell's got flu. And since you seem to have taken over the case already I just wondered whether you'd like to sort of—take over the case. Officially, I mean.'
Morse shot upright in bed. 'That's good news, sir. When—?'
'From now. It'll be better if you work from St Aldates. All the stuff's there, and you can work from Bell's office.'
'Can I have Lewis?'
'I thought you'd already got him.'
Morse's face beamed with pleasure. 'Thank you, sir. I'll just slip a few clothes on and—'
'Decorating in your pyjamas, Morse?'
'No. You know me, sir. Up with the lark—'
'And to bed with the Wren. Yes, I know. And it wouldn't be a bad thing for morale here if you got to the bottom of things, would it? So what about getting out of bed?'
Five minutes later Morse got through to Lewis and reported the good news. 'What are you doing today, old friend?'
'My day off, sir. I'm going to take the wife over to—'
'Were you?' The change of tense was not lost on Lewis, and he listened cheerfully to his instructions. He'd been dreading another visit to his ancient mother-in-law.
The Jaguar took only one and a half hours to cover the eighty-odd miles to Stamford in Lincolnshire, where the Lawson clan had lived for several generations. The speedometer had several times exceeded 85 m.p.h. as they drove along, up through Brackley, Silserstone and Towcester, then by-passing Northampton and twisting through Kettering before looking down from the top of Easton Hill on to the town of Stamford, its grey stone buildings matching the spires and towers of its many old churches. En route Morse had cheerfully sketched in the background of the St. Frideswide's murders; but the sky had grown overcast and leaden, and the sight of thousands of dead elm-trees along the Northamptonshire roads seemed a sombre reminder of reality.
'They say those trees commit suicide,' Lewis, had ventured at one point. 'They secrete a sort of fluid to try to—'
'It's not always easy to tell suicide from murder,' muttered Morse.
By late
afternoon the two men had uncovered a fairly solid body of information about the late and (it seemed) little-lamented Lionel Lawson. There had been two Lawson brothers. Lionel Peter and Philip Edward, the latter some eighteen months the younger Both had won scholarships to a public school some ten miles distant, and both had been weekly boarders, spending their Saturday evenings and Sundays during term-time with their parents, who ran a small local business specialising in the restoration of ancient buildings. Academically (it appeared) the two boys were more than competent, with Philip potentially the abler—if also the lazier and less ambitious. After leaving school each of them had spent eighteen months on National Service; and it was during his time in the Army that Lionel, always the more serious-minded of the two, had met a particularly persuasive psalm-singing padre, and been led to the conviction that he was called to the ministry. After demobilisation, he had studied hard on his own for a year before gaining acceptance at Cambridge to read theology. During this period Philip had worked for his father for a few years, but seemingly with little enthusiasm; and finally he had drifted away from home, occasionally revisiting his parents, but with no firm purpose in life, no job, and with little prospect of discovering either. Five years ago Mr. Lawson senior and his wife had been killed in the Zagreb air-crash whilst returning from a holiday in southern Yugoslavia, and the family business had been sold, with each of the two sons inheriting about £50,000 net from the estate.
For most of the day Morse and Lewis had worked separately, each pursuing a different line of enquiry; and it was only on the last visit, to the ex-headmaster of the Lawson boys' public school, that they came together again.
Doctor Meyer's speech was that of an old schoolmaster, deliberate, over-latinised, with an apparent dread of imprecision. 'He was a clever boy, young Philip. With a modicum of dedication and perseverance—who knows?'
'You've no idea where he is now?'
The old man shook his head. 'But Lionel, now. He worked like a Trojan—although exactly why the Trojans are proverbially accredited with a reputation for industriousness has always been a mystery to me. His ambition was always to win a scholarship to Oxford, but—' He broke off suddenly as if his memory could take him no farther along that avenue of recollection. But Morse was clearly anxious to push him past a few more trees.
'How long was Lionel in the sixth form?'
'Three years, as I recall it. Yes, that's right. He took his Higher School Certificate at the end of his second year, and got it all right. He took the Oxford entrance examination just after that, in the Michaelmas term, but I had little real hope for him. His mind was not quite—not quite alpha potential. They wrote to me about him, of course. They said they were unable to offer him a place, but the boy's work had not been without merit. They advised him to stay on for a further year in the sixth and then to try again.'
'Was he very disappointed?'
The old man eyed Morse shrewdly and relit his pipe before replying. 'What do you think, Inspector?'
Morse shrugged his shoulders as if the matter were barely of consequence. 'You said he was ambitious, that's all.'
'Yes,' replied the old man slowly.
'So he stayed on another year?'
'Yes.'
Lewis shuffled a little uncomfortably in his chair. At this rate of progress they wouldn't be home before midnight. It was as if Morse and Meyer were at the snooker table, each of them playing his safety shots. Your turn, Morse.
'He took his Higher again?'
Meyer nodded. 'He didn't do quite so well as in the previous year, if I remember rightly. But that is not unusual.'
'You mean he was more worried about preparing for his Oxford entrance?'
'That was probably the reason.'
'But he didn't make it to Oxford?'
'Er—no.'
Something seemed to be puzzling Morse, Lewis could see that. Was he on to something? But it appeared not. Morse had got to his feet and was pulling on his coat. 'Nothing else you can tell me about him?'
Meyer shook his head and prepared to see his visitors out. He was a short man, and now well over eighty; yet there was still an air of authority in his bearing, and Lewis could well understand (what he'd heard earlier in the day) that Meyer had ruled his school with a rod of iron, and that pupils and staff alike had trembled at his coming.
'Nothing at all?' repeated Morse as they stood at the door.
'There's nothing more I can tell you, no.'
Was there slightly more emphasis on the 'can' than there need have been? Lewis wasn't sure. He was lost as usual anyway.
For the first part of their return journey, Morse seemed rapt in thought; and when he finally did say something Lewis could only wonder what those thoughts had been.
'What was the exact day when Lionel Lawson left school?'
Lewis looked through his notebook. 'November the eighth.'
'Mm.' Morse nodded slowly. 'Tell me when you spot a phone-box.'
When, ten minutes later, Morse got back into the car, Lewis could see that he was very pleased with himself.
'Are you letting me in on this one, sir?'
'Of course!' Morse looked sideways at his sergeant in mild surprise. 'We're partners, aren't we? We do things together, you and me. Or "you and I", as I've no doubt old man Meyer would say. You see, young Lionel Lawson was an ambitious little swot, right? He's not been over-endowed by the Almighty with all that much up top, but he makes up for it by sheer hard work. More than anything else he wants to go up to Oxford. And why not? It's a fine ambition. Let's just recap on Master Lionel, then. He tries once—and he fails. But he's a sticker. He stays on for another year—another year of grind on his set books and the rest of it, and all the time he's being groomed by his masters for his entrance exam. I shouldn't think he's too bothered about not doing so well in his other exams that summer—he's set his sights on higher things. Remember he's already done three years in the sixth form, and he goes back in the autumn term because that's when the entrance exams are always taken. He's all ready for the final furlong—agreed?'
'But he didn't make it.'
'No, you're right. But he didn't fail to get in, Lewis—and that's the interesting point. Lawson, L., left school on November the eighth, you tell me. And I'll tell you something. That year the entrance papers were sat in the first week of December—I just rang up the Registry at Oxford—and Lawson, L., didn't sit the examination.'
'Perhaps he changed his mind.'
'And perhaps somebody changed it for him!'
A light flickered dimly in the darkness of Lewis' mind. 'He was expelled, you mean?'
'That's about it, I reckon. And that's why old man Meyer was so cagey. He knew a good deal more than he was prepared to tell us.'
'But we have no real evidence—'
'Evidence? No, we haven't. But you've got to use a bit of imagination in this job, Lewis, haven't you? So let's use a bit. Tell me. Why do boys usually get expelled from public schools?'
'Drugs?'
'They had no drugs in those days.'
'I don't know, sir. I never went to a public school, did I? There was none of that Greek and Latin stuff for me. We had enough trouble with the three Rs.'
'It's not the three Rs we're worried about now, Lewis. It's the three Bs: bullying, beating and buggery! And Lawson, L., from what we've learned of him, was a quietly behaved little chap, and I doubt he got expelled for bullying or beating. What do you think?'
Lewis shook his head sadly: he'd heard this sort of thing before. 'You can't just—you can't just make up these things as you go along, sir. It's not fair!'
'As you wish.' Morse shrugged his shoulders, and the needle on the speedometer touched 90 m.p.h. as the Jaguar skirted Northampton on the eastern by-pass.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
BACK IN OXFORD AT about 4.30 p.m. that same afternoon, two men were walking slowly down Queen Street from Carfax. The elder, and slightly the taller of the two, a growth of greyish stubble matting his long vacant
face, was dressed in an old blue pin-striped suit which hung loosely on his narrow frame. In his right hand he carried a bull-necked flagon of Woodpecker cider. The younger man, bearded and unkempt, anywhere in age (it seemed) between his mid-forties and mid-fifties, wore a long army-issue greatcoat, buttoned up to the neck, its insignia long since stripped off or lost. He carried nothing.
At Bonn Square they turned into the circle of grass that surrounds the stone cenotaph, and sat down on a green-painted bench beneath one of the great trees girdling the tiny park. Beside the bench was a wire waste-paper basket, from which the younger man pulled out a copy of the previous day's edition of the Oxford Mail. The elder man unscrewed the liquor with great deliberation and, having taken a short swig of its contents, wiped the neck of the bottle on his jacket sleeve before passing it over. 'Anything in the paper?'
'Nah.'
Shoppers continuously criss-crossed one another in the pedestrian precinct in front of the park, many of them making their way down the covered arcade between the light-beige brickwork of the Selfridges building and the duller municipal stone of the public library. A few casual glances swept the only two people seated on the park-benches—glances without pity, interest or concern. Lights suddenly blazed on in the multi-storeyed blocks around and the evening was ushered in.
'Let's look at it when you've finished,' said the elder man, and immediately, without comment, the paper changed hands. The bottle, too, was passed over, almost rhythmically, between them, neither man drinking more than a mouthful at a time.
'This is what they were talking about at the hostel.' The elder man pointed a thin grubby finger at an article on the front page, but his companion made no comment, staring down at the paving-stones.
'They've found some fellow up the top of that tower, you know, just opposite—' But he couldn't quite remember what it was opposite to, and his voice trailed off as he slowly finished the article. 'Poor sod!' he said finally.