Colin Dexter - The Dead of Jericho

'He learned, for instance, that the bridge evening happened to be its first anniversary, and whatsername had laid on some sherry for the occasion; and if you want to get non-boozers a bit relaxed fairly quickly, a few glasses of sherry isn't a bad bet. Doubtless tongues began to wag a bit more freely than usual, and we know a couple of the things that cropped up. Vietnam and Cambodia did, for a start, and I suspect that the only aspect of those human tragedies that directly impinges on your bourgeois North Oxford housewife is the question of adopting one or two of the poor little blighters caught up in refugee camps. All right, Lewis? I reckon adoption was a topic of conversation that night. Then Bell got to know something else-and bless his heart for sticking it down! They were talking about birthdays -and not unnaturally so, in view of the fact they were celebrating their own first birthday; and as I've just said, Lewis, there's one thing no mother's ever going to forget-and that's when her only baby was born! So this is how I reckon things were. That night at the bridge party, somebody who knew Mrs. Murdoch pretty well got a fraction indiscreet, and let it be known to a few people-including, alas, Anne Scott-that Mrs. Murdoch's elder son was an adopted boy. And then, in the changing circles of conversation, Anne must have heard Mrs. Murdoch herself volunteering the information that her elder son, Michael, was celebrating his nineteenth birthday on that very day! What a quirk of fate it all was!'

'I thought you didn't believe in fate, sir.'

But Morse was oblivious to the interjection, and continued his fantastic tale. 'When Laius, Jocasta's husband, was killed, it had been on the road between Thebes and Corinth-a road accident, Lewis! When Anne Scott's husband died, it had also been in a road accident, and I'm pretty sure that she knew all about it. After all, she'd known the elder Murdoch boy-and Mrs. Murdoch herself, of course-for more than a couple of years. But, in itself, that couldn't have been a matter of great moment. It had been an accident: the inquest had found neither party predominantly to blame. If experience in driving means anything, it means that you have to expect learner drivers-like Michael Murdoch-to do something daft occasionally; and in this case, Anne Scott's husband wasn't careful enough to cope with the other fellow's inexperience. But do you see how things are beginning to build up and develop, Lewis? Everything is beginning to assume a menacing and sinister importance. Young Michael Murdoch was visiting Anne Scott once a week for special coaching; and as they sat next to each other week after week in Canal Reach I reckon that sheer physical proximity got a bit too much for both of 'em. The young lad must have become infatuated by a comparatively mature and attractive woman-a woman with a full and eminently feelable figure; and the woman herself, who had probably only been in love once in her life-and that with a married man who'd never been willing to run off with her-must surely have felt the attraction of a young, virile lad who worshipped whatever ground she chose to tread. She must have led him on a bit, Lewis; and sure as eggs are eggs, the springs on the old charpoy in the bedroom are soon beginning to creak pretty steadily. Then? Well, then the trouble starts. She misses a period-and then another; and she goes off to the Jericho Clinic-where they tell her they'll let her know as soon as they can. It must have been then that she wrote to Charles Richards pleading for a bit of help: a bit of friendly guidance, at the very least-and perhaps for a bit of money so that she could go away and have a quiet, private abortion somewhere. But, as we know, the letter never got through to Charles Richards at all. By some freakish mischance the letter was intercepted by Celia Richards-and that, Lewis, was the source of all the trouble. As the days pass-and still no reply from her former lover-Anne Scott must have felt that the fates were conspiring against her. Michael Murdoch was the very last person in the world she was going to tell her troubles to: he'd finished his schooling, anyway, and so there was no longer any legitimate reason for them seeing each other. Perhaps they met again once or twice after that-I just don't know. What is perfectly clear is that Anne Scott was growing increasingly depressed as the days dragged on. Life hadn't been very kind to her, and looking back on things she saw evidence only of her failures: her hasty adolescent marriage that had been short-lived and disastrous; her love for Charles Richards which had blossomed for a good many years but which had always been doomed to disappointment; other lovers, no doubt, who'd given her some physical gratification, but little else; and then Michael Murdoch…'

Morse's voice trailed off, and his eyes drifted along the other tables in the lounge bar where groups of people sat exchanging the amusing ephemera of a happier, if somewhat shallower, life than Anne Scott could ever have known. His glass was empty, and Lewis, as he picked it up and walked over to the bar, decided on this occasion not to remind Morse whose turn it was.

'So,' resumed Morse, lapping his lips into the level of his pint without a word of gratitude, 'Anne Scott's making a bit of a mess of her life. She's still attractive enough to middle-aged men like you and me, Lewis; but most of those are already bespoke, like you, and the ones that are left, like me, are a load of old remaindered books-out of date and going cheap. But her real tragedy is that she's still attractive to some of the young pupils who come along to that piddling little property of hers in Jericho. She's got no regular income except for the fees from a succession of halfwits whose parents are rich enough and stupid enough to cough up and keep hoping. She goes out quite a bit, of course, and occasionally she meets a nice enough chap but… No! Things don't work out, and she begins to think-she begins to believe -that they never will. She's got a deeply pessimistic and fatalistic streak in her make-up, and in the end, as you know, she abandons all hope. Charles Richards, as she thinks, doesn't give a sod about her any longer: just at the time when she desperately needs a friend, he can't even fork out an envelope and stamp. But she was a pretty tough girl, I should think, and she'd have been able to cope with her problems-if it hadn't been for that shattering revelation at the bridge evening.'

'She'd been reading the Oedipus story again in the Penguin translation-probably with one of her pupils-and the ground's all naked and ready for the seeds that were sown that fateful evening. Adoption and birthdays-they were the seeds, Lewis, and it must have been the most traumatic shock of her whole life when the terrible truth dawned on her: Michael Murdoch was her own son . And as the implications whirled round in her mind, she must have seen the whole thing in terms of the fates marking her out as another Jocasta. Everything fitted. Her husband had been killed-killed in a road accident-killed by her own son-a son with whom she'd been having sex-a son who was the father of the child she was expecting. She must have felt utterly powerless against the workings of what she saw as the preordained tragedy of her own benighted life. And so she decides to do the one thing that was left open to her: to stop all the struggling and to surrender to her fate; to co-operate with the forces that were now driving her inexorably to her own death-a death she slowly determines, as she sits through that long and hopeless night, will be the death that Queen Jocasta chose. And so, my old friend, she hanged herself… And had she but known it, the curse had still not finally worked itself out. Michael Murdoch is in the Intensive Care Unit at the J.R.2, and he's blinded himself, Lewis-just as Oedipus did. The whole wretched thing's nothing less than a ghastly re-enactment of the old myth as you can read it in Sophocles. And as I told you, if there was one man guilty of Anne Scott's death, that man was Sophocles.'