Colin Dexter - The Daughters of Cain

But if Morse had expected to find anything of significance in these rooms, he was disappointed. All fixtures befitting the status of a respected scholar had been replaced by the furniture of standard undergraduate accommodation: a three-seater settee; two armchairs; two desks; two bookcases… It reminded Morse of his own unhappy, unsuccessful days at Oxford; but made no other impact.

It might have been helpful to move quietly around the lounge and the spacious bedroom there, and seek to detect any vibrations, any reverberations, left behind by a cultured and (it seemed) a fairly kindly soul.

But clearly Morse could see little point in such divination.

‘Is G8 free?’ he asked.

‘There is a gentleman there. But he’s not in at the minute. If you want just a quick look inside?’

‘It’s where Matthew Rodway, the man who…’

‘I know,’ said Susan Ewers quietly.

But G8 proved to be equally disappointing: a three-seater settee, two (faded fabric) armchairs… cloned and cleaned of every reminder of the young man who had thrown himself down on to the paved area below the window there — the window at which Morse and Lewis now stood for a little while. Silently.

‘You didn’t know Mr Rodway, either?’ asked Morse.

‘No. As I say, I didn’t come till September last year.’

‘Do people on the staircase still take drugs?’

Mrs Ewers was taken aback by the abruptness of Morse’s question.

‘Well, they still have parties, like, you know. Drink and… and so on.’

‘But you’ve never seen any evidence of drugs — any packets of drugs? Crack? Speed? Ecstasy? Anything? Anything at all?’

Had she?

‘No,’ she said. Almost truthfully.

‘You’ve never smelt anything suspicious?’

‘I wouldn’t know what they smell like, drugs,’ she said. Truthfully.

As they walked down the stairs, Lewis pointed to a door marked with a little floral plaque: ‘Susan’s Pantry’.

‘That where you keep all your things, madam?’

She nodded. ‘Every scout has a pantry.’

‘Can we take a look inside?’

She unlocked the door and led the way into a fairly small, high-ceilinged room, cluttered — yet so neatly cluttered — with buckets, mops, bin-liners, black plastic bags, transparent polythene bags, light bulbs, toilet rolls, towels, sheets, two Hoovers. And inside the white-painted cupboards rows of cleaners and detergents: Jif, Flash, Ajax, Windolene… And everything so clean — so meticulously, antiseptically clean.

Morse had little doubt that Susan Ewers was the sort of housewife to polish her bath-taps daily; the sort to feel aggrieved at finding a stray trace of toothpaste in the wash-basin. If cleanliness were next to saintliness, then this lady was probably on the verge of beatification.

So what?

Apart from mentally extending his lively sympathies to Mr Ewers, Morse was aware that his thought-processes were hardly operating vivamente that morning; and he stood in the slightly claustrophobic pantry, feeling somewhat feckless.

It was Lewis who, as so frequently, was the catalyst.

‘What’s your husband do, Mrs Ewers?’

‘He’s — well, at the minute he’s unemployed, actually. He did work at the old RAC offices in Summertown, but they made him redundant.’

‘When was that?’

‘Last year.’

‘When exactly?’ (If Morse could ask such questions, why not Lewis?)

‘Last, er, August.’

‘Good thing you getting the job then. Help tide things over a bit, like.’

Lewis smiled sympathetically.

And Morse smiled gratefully.

Bless you, Lewis — bless you!

Gestalt — that’s what the Germans call it. That flash of unified perception, that synoptic totality which is more than the sum of the parts into which it may be logically analysable; parts, in this case, like drugs and scouts and a suicide and a murder and a staircase and changing jobs and not having a job and retirement and money and times and dates… Yes, especially times and dates…

Most probably, in the circumstances, Matthew Rodway’s rooms would not have been re-occupied for the few remaining weeks at the end of Trinity Term the previous year; and if (as now) only some of the rooms were in use during the Long Vac, it might well be that Mrs Ewers had been the very first person to look closely around the suicide’s chambers. But no; that was wrong. McClure had already gone through things, hadn’t he? Mrs Rodway had asked him to. But would he have been half as thorough as this newly appointed woman?

He’d questioned her on the point already, he knew that. But he hadn’t asked the right questions, perhaps? Not quite.

‘Just going back a minute, Mrs Ewers… When you got Mr Rodway’s old rooms ready for the beginning of the Michaelmas term, had anyone else been in there — during the summer?’

‘I don’t think so, no.’

‘But you still didn’t find anything?’

‘No, like I just said—’

‘Oh, I believe you. If there’d been anything to find, you’d have found it.’

She looked relieved.

‘In his rooms, that is,’ added Morse slowly.

‘Pardon?’

‘All I’m saying is that you’ve got a very tidy mind, haven’t you? Let’s put it this way. I bet I know the first thing you did when you took over here. I bet you gave this room the best spring-clean — best autumn-clean — it’s ever had — last September — when you moved in — and the previous scout moved out.’

Susan Ewers looked puzzled. ‘Well, I scrubbed and cleaned the place from top to bottom, yes — filthy, it was. Two whole days it took me. But I never found anything — any drugs — honest to God, I didn’t!’

Morse, who had been seated on the only chair the room could offer, got to his feet, moved over to the door, and put his penultimate question:

‘Do you have a mortgage?’

‘Yes.’

‘Big one?’

She nodded miserably.

As they stood there, the three of them, outside Susan’s Pantry, Morse’s eyes glanced back at the door, now closed again, fitting flush enough with the jambs on either side, but with a two-centimetre gap of parallel regularity showing between the bottom of the turquoise-blue door and the linoed floor of the landing.

Morse asked his last question simply and quietly: ‘When did the envelopes first start coming, Susan?’

And Susan’s eyes jumped up to his, suddenly flashing the unmistakable sign of fear.

On Friday, 2 September, two days after Julia Stevens’ return to Oxford, there were already three items of importance on her day’s agenda.

First, school.

Not as yet the dreaded restart (three whole days away, praise be!) but a visit to the Secretary’s Office to look through the GCSE and A-level results, both lists having been published during her fortnight’s absence abroad. Like every self-respecting teacher, she wanted to discover the relative success of the pupils she herself had taught.

In former days it had often been difficult enough for some pupils to sit examinations, let alone pass them. And even in the comparatively recent years of Julia’s girlhood several of her own classmates had been deemed not to possess the requisite acumen even to attempt the 11 Plus. It was a question of the sheep and the goats — just like the division between those who were lost and those who were saved in the New Testament — a work with which the young Julia had become increasingly familiar, through the crusading fervour of a local curate with whom (aged ten and a half) she had fallen passionately in love.