Colin Dexter - The Daughters of Cain

Lewis fingered the only money he had left in his pockets — three pound coins — and decided that he was hardly going to become a rich man, however long the odds that Morse was offering. But it was time to mention something. Had Morse, he wondered, seen that oblong patch of pristine magnolia…?

‘There was,’ Lewis began slowly, ‘a light-coloured patch on the wall in Mrs Rodway’s lounge, sir—’

‘Ah! Glad you noticed that. Fiver to a cracked piss-pot that was a picture of him , Lewis — of McClure! That’s why she took it down. She didn’t want us to see it, but something like that’s always going to leave its mark, agreed?’

‘Unless she put something else up there to cover it.’

Morse scorned the objection. ‘She wouldn’t have taken a photo of her son down, would she? Where’s the point of that? Very unlikely.’

‘You just said that’s exactly what we’re looking for, sir — something “unlikely”.’

Morse was spared any possible answer to this astute question by the arrival of the landlady, a slimly attractive brunette, with small, neat features, and an extra sparkle in her eyes as she greeted Morse with a kiss on his cheek.

‘Not seen you for a little while, Inspector.’

‘How’s things, beautiful?’

‘Another beer?’

‘Well, if you insist.’

‘I’m not really insisting—’

‘Pint of the best bitter for me.’

‘You, Sergeant?’

‘He’s driving,’ said Morse.

Biff, the landlord, came over to join them, and the four sat together for the next ten minutes. Morse, after explaining that the word ‘Turf’ had appeared in the margin of one of McClure’s books, asked whether they, either landlord or landlady, would have known the murdered man if they had seen him in the pub (‘No’); whether they’d ever seen the young man from Wolsey who’d committed suicide (‘Don’t think so’); whether they’d ever seen a young woman with rings in her nose and red streaks in her hair (‘Hundreds of ’em’).

Yet the landlady had one piece of information.

‘There’s one of the chaps comes in here sometimes who was a scout on that staircase… when, you know… I heard him talking to somebody about it.’

‘That’s right.’ The landlord was remembering too. ‘Said he used to go to the Bulldog — or was it the Old Tom, Pam?’

‘Can’t remember.’

‘He was a scout, you say?’ asked Morse.

‘Yeah. Only started coming in here after he moved — moved to the Pitt Rivers, I think it was. Well, only just up the road, isn’t it?’

‘He still comes?’

Biff considered. ‘Haven’t seen him for a little while now you come to mention it. Have you, love?’

Pam shook her pretty head.

‘Know his name?’ asked Lewis.

‘Brooks — Ted Brooks.’

‘Just let me get this clear,’ said Lewis, as he and Morse left the Turf Tavern, this time via St Helen’s Passage, just off New College Lane. ‘You’re saying that Mrs Rodway misunderstood what McClure said to her — about the “students”?’

‘You’ve got it. What he meant was that he blamed the dons, the set-up there, the authorities. He wasn’t saying they were a load of crooks — just that they should have known what was going on there, and should have done something about it.’

‘ If anything was going on, sir.’

‘Which’ll be one of our next jobs, Lewis — to find out exactly that.’

It was Lewis who spotted it first: the traffic-warden’s notice stuck beneath the near-side windscreen-wiper of the unmarked Jaguar.

By three o’clock that afternoon, Mary Rodway had assembled the new passe-partout for the picture-frame. Like most things in the room (she agreed) it had been getting very dingy. But it looked splendid now, as she carefully replaced the re-mounted photograph, standing back repeatedly and adjusting it, to the millimetre — that photograph of herself and her son which Felix had sent to her as she’d requested.

Nothing further of any great moment occurred that day, except for one thing — something which for Lewis was the most extraordinary, the most ‘unlikely’ event of the past six months.

‘Come in a minute and let me pay you for those cigarettes,’ Morse had said, as the Jaguar came to a stop outside the bachelor flat in North Oxford.

What Morse had vaguely referred to as the ‘authorities’ at Wolsey were immediately co-operative; and at 10 a.m. the following day he and Lewis were soon learning many things about the place: specifically, in due course, about Staircase G in Drinkwater Quad, on which Dr McClure had spent nine years of his university life, from 1984 until his retirement from academe at the end of the Trinity Term, 1993.

From his rooms overlooking the expansive quad (‘Largest in Oxford, gentlemen — 264 by 261 feet’) the Deputy Bursar had explained, rather too slowly and too pedantically for Morse’s taste, the way things, er, worked in the, er, House, it clearly seeming to this former Air-Vice Marshal (‘Often mis-spelt, you know — and more often mis-hyphenated’) that these non-University people needed some elementary explanations.

Scouts?

Interested in scouts , were they?

Well, each scout (‘Interesting word — origin obscure’) looked after one staircase, and one staircase only — with that area guarded as jealously as any blackbird’s territory in a garden, and considered almost as a sort of mediaeval fiefdom (‘If you know what I mean?’). Several of the scouts had been with them, what, twenty, thirty years? Forty-nine years, one of them! What exactly did they do? Well, it would be sensible to go and hear things from the horse’s mouth, as it were. What?

Escorted therefore through Great Quad, and away to the left of it into what seemed to Morse the unhappily named ‘Drinkwater Quad’, the policemen thanked their cicerone, the Air-hyphen-Vice Marshal (‘One “l” ’) and made their way to Staircase G.

Where a surprise was in store for them.

Not really a scout at all — more a girl-guide.

Susan Ewers, too, was friendly and helpful — a married woman (no children yet) who was very happy to have the opportunity of supplementing the family income; very happy, too, with the work itself. The majority of scouts were women now, she explained: only three or four men still doing the job at Wolsey. In fact, she’d taken over from a man — a man who’d left to work at the Pitt Rivers Museum.

‘Mr Brooks, was that?’ asked Morse.

‘Yes. Do you know him?’

‘Heard of him, er… please go on.’

Her duties? Well, everything really. The immediate area outside; the entrance; the porchway; the stairs; the eight sets of rooms, all of them occupied during term-time, of course; and some of them during the vacs, like now, by delegates and visitors to various do’s and conferences. Her first job each morning was to empty all the rubbish-baskets into black bags; then to clean the three WCs, one on each floor (no en suite facilities as yet); same with the wash-basins. Then, only twice a week, though, to Hoover all the floors, and generally to dust around, polish any brasswork, that sort of thing; and in general to see that the living quarters of her charges were kept as neat and tidy as could be expected with young men and young women who would (she felt) probably prefer to live in — well, to live in a bit of a mess, really. No bed-making, though. Thank goodness!

Willingly she showed the detectives the rooms at G4, on the second floor of her staircase, where until fourteen months previously the name ‘Dr F. F. McClure’ had been printed in black Gothic capitals beside the Oxford-blue double doors.