Colin Dexter - The Daughters of Cain

How things had changed.

Now, in 1994, it was an occasion for considerable surprise if anyone somehow managed to fail an examination. Indeed, to be recorded in the Unclassified ranks of the GCSE was, in Julia’s view, a feat of quite astonishing incompetence, which carried with it a sort of bravura badge of monumental under-achievement. And as far as Christian doctrine was concerned, it was becoming far easier to cope with sin, now that Hell was (semi-officially) abolished.

She looked through 5C’s English results. Very much as she’d expected. Then looked a little more closely at the results of the only pupil in the class whose name had begun with ‘C’. Costyn, K: Religious Education, ‘Unclassified’; English, ‘D’; Maths, ‘Unclassified’; Geography, ‘Unclassified’; Metalwork, ‘Unclassified’. Well, at least he’d got something — after twelve years of schooling… thirty-six terms. But it was difficult to imagine him getting much further than the Job Centre. Nowhere else for him to go, was there — except to jail, perhaps?

How she wished that ‘D’ had been a ‘C’, though.

At 10.30 a.m. she hurried fairly quickly away from the school premises and made her way on foot to the Churchill Hospital where her appointment at the clinic was for 11 a.m.; and where a few minutes ahead of schedule she was seated in the upstairs waiting-room, no longer thinking of Kevin Costyn and his former classmates — but of herself.

‘How are you feeling?’ asked Basil Shepstone, a large, balding, slightly stooping South African.

‘You want me to undress?’

‘I’d love you to undrress,’ he said with that characteristic rolling of the ‘r’. ‘No need today, though. Next time, I’ll insist.’

His friendly brown eyes were suddenly sad, and he reached across to place his right hand on her shoulder.

‘You want the good news first? Or the bad news?’ he asked quietly.

‘The good news.’

‘Well, your condition’s fairly stable. And that’s good — that’s very good news.’

Julia found herself swallowing hard. ‘And the bad news?’

‘Well, it’s not exactly bad news. Shall I read it?’

Julia could see the Oxfordshire Health Authority heading on the letter, but no more. She closed her eyes.

‘It says… blah, blah, blah… “In the event of any deterioration, however, we regret to have to inform Mrs Stevens that her condition is inoperable.” ’

‘They can’t operate if it gets worse, they mean?’

Shepstone put down the letter. ‘I prrefer your English to theirs.’

She sighed deeply; then opened her eyes and looked at him, knowing that she loved him for everything he’d tried to do for her. He had always been so gentle, so kindly, so professional; and now, watching him, she could understand why his eyes remained downcast as his Biro hatched the ‘O’ of ‘Oxfordshire’.

‘How long?’ she asked simply.

He shook his head. ‘Anyone who prredicts something like that — he’s a fool.’

‘A year?’

‘Could be.’

‘Six months?’

He looked defeated as he shrugged his broad shoulders.

‘Less?’

‘As I say—’

‘Would you give up work if you were me?’

‘Fairly soon, I think, yes.’

‘Would you tell anyone?’

He hesitated. ‘Only if it were someone you loved.’

She smiled, and got to her feet. ‘There are not many people I love. You, of course — and my cleaning-lady — with whom incidentally’ — she consulted her wristwatch — ‘in exactly one hour’s time, I have a slap-up lunch engagement at the Old Parsonage.’

‘You’re not inviting me?’

She shook her head. ‘We’ve got some very private things to discuss, I’m afraid.’

After Mrs Stevens had left, the consultant took a handkerchief from his pocket and quickly wiped his eyes. What the dickens was he supposed to say? Because it never really did much good to lie. Or so he believed. He blamed himself, for example, for lying so blatantly to the woman who’d died only two days previously — lying to Mrs Phillotson.

Not much difference in the case-histories.

No hope in either.

Morse now realized that he would have few, if any, further cases of murder to solve during his career with Thames Valley CID. All right, orchestral conductors and High Court judges could pursue their professions into their twilight years, regardless — indeed sometimes completely oblivious — of their inevitably deteriorating talents. But more often than not policemen finished long before any incipient senility; and Morse himself was now within a couple of years of normal retirement.

For many persons it was difficult to tell where the dividing line came between latish middle-age and advisable pensionability. Perhaps it had something to do with the point at which nostalgia took over from hope; or perhaps with a sad realization that it was no longer possible to fall in love again; or, certainly in Morse’s case, the time when, as now, he had to sit down on the side of the bed in order to pull his trousers on.

Such and similar thoughts were circulating in Morse’s mind as on Saturday, 3 September, the morning after his visit with Lewis to Wolsey (and the statement made, immediately thereafter, by Mrs Ewers), he sat in the Summertown Health Centre.

A mild cold had, as usual with Morse, developed into a fit of intermittently barking bronchitis; but he comforted himself with the thought that very shortly, after a sermon on the stupidity of cigarette-smoking, he would emerge from the Centre with a slip of paper happily prescribing a dose of powerful antibiotics.

Clutching his prescription, Morse was about to leave when he remembered The Times , left in his erstwhile seat in the waiting-room. Returning, he found that his earlier companions — the anorexic girl and the spotty-faced, overweight youth — had now been joined by a slatternly looking, slackly dressed young woman, with rings in her nostrils; a woman to whom Morse took an immediate and intense dislike.

Predictably so.

From the chair next to the newcomer he picked up his newspaper, without a word; though not without a hurried glance into the woman’s dull-green eyes, the colour of the Oxford Canal along by Wolvercote. And if Morse had waited there only a few seconds longer, he would have heard someone call her name: ‘Eleanor Smith?’

But Morse had gone.

She’d already got the address of an abortion clinic; but one of her friends, an authority in the field, had informed her that it was now closed. So! So she’d have to find some other place. And the quack ought to be able to point her somewhere not too far away, surely? That’s exactly the sort of thing quacks were there for.

In a marked police car, standing on a Strictly Doctors Only lot in the Centre’s very restricted parking-area, Lewis sat thinking and waiting; waiting in fact, quite patiently, since the case appeared to be developing in a reasonably satisfactory way.

When, the previous afternoon, Susan Ewers had made (and signed) her statement, many things already adumbrated by Morse had dawned at last on Lewis’s understanding.

Suspicion, prima facie, could and should now be levelled against Mr Edward Brooks, the man who had been Mrs Ewers’ immediate predecessor as scout on Staircase G in Drinkwater Quad. Why? Morse’s unusually simple and unspectacular hypothesis had been stated as follows:

It should be assumed, in all probability, that Brooks had played a key role, albeit an intermediary one, in supplying a substantial quantity of drugs to the young people living on his staircase — including Matthew Rodway; that Rodway’s suicide had necessarily resulted in some thorough investigation by the college authorities into the goings-on on the staircase; that McClure, already living on the same staircase anyway, had become deeply involved — indeed had probably been the prime mover in seeing that Brooks was ‘removed’ from his post (coincidentally at the same time as McClure’s retirement); that, as Mrs Ewers had now testified, the former scout had continued his trafficking in drugs, and that this information had somehow reached McClure’s ears; that McClure had threatened Brooks with exposure, disgrace, criminal prosecution, and almost certain imprisonment; that finally, at a showdown in Daventry Court, Brooks had murdered McClure.