Colin Dexter - The Daughters of Cain

‘Oxford.’

Davies sighed miserably, stood up, and reached inside his trouser-pocket for his car-keys.

‘Come on, then.’

‘I’m not going with you .’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘I’ll hitch a lift.’

‘You can’t do that.’

‘Course I bloody can. That’s all they’re lookin’ for, most of these lecherous sods. All I gotta do—’

‘ Ellie! ’

‘First car, like as not. You see.’

In fact, Ellie Smith’s prediction was unduly optimistic, since the first car drove past her with little observable sign of interest, no detectable sign of deceleration.

The second car did exactly the same.

But not the third.

On the following day, Sunday 4 September, Ted Brooks was sitting up in bed, two pillows behind his back, reading the more salacious offerings in the News of the World . It was exactly 11.30 a.m., he knew that, since he had been looking at his wristwatch every minute or so since 11.15.

Now, for some reason, he began to feel slightly less agitated as the minute-hand moved slowly up in the climb towards the twelve — the ‘prick of noon’, as Shakespeare has it. His mind, similarly, was moving slowly; perhaps it had never moved all that quickly anyway.

Whatever happened, though, he was going to make the most of his heart attack — his ‘mild’ heart attack, as they’d assured him in the Coronary Care Unit. Well, he hoped it was mild. He didn’t want to die. Course he bloody didn’t. Paradoxically, however, he found himself wishing it wasn’t all that mild. A heart attack — whatever its measurement on the Richter Scale — was still a heart attack; and the maximum sympathy and attention should be extracted from such an affliction, so Brenda’d better bloody understand that .

He shouted downstairs for a cup of Bovril. But before the beverage could arrive, he heard the double-burred ring of the telephone: an unusual occurrence in the Brooks’s household at any time; and virtually unprecedented on a Sunday.

He got out of bed, and stood listening beside the bedroom door as Brenda answered the call in the narrow entrance-hall at the bottom of the stairs.

‘Oh, I see…’

‘I do understand, yes…’

‘Look, let me try to put him on…’

She found him sitting on the side of the bed, pulling on his socks.

‘Thames Valley Police, Ted. They want to come and talk to you.’

‘Christ!’ he hissed. ‘Don’t they know I’ve only just got out of ’ospital?’

Brenda’s upper lip was trembling slightly, but her voice sounded strangely calm. ‘Would you like to speak to him yourself? Or tell me what to say? I don’t care — but don’t let’s keep him waiting.’

‘What’s ’is name, this feller?’

‘Lewis. Detective Sergeant Lewis.’

Lewis put down the phone.

Like Brooks a few minutes earlier, he was sitting on the side of the bed — Morse’s bed.

‘That’s fixed that up, then, sir. I still feel you’d be better off staying in bed, though.’

‘Nonsense!’

Lewis looked with some concern across at his chief, lying back against three pillows, in pyjamas striped in maroon, pale blue, and white, with an array of bottles and medicaments on the bedside table: aspirin, Alka Seltzer, indigestion tablets, penicillin, paracetamol — and a bottle of The Macallan, almost empty.

He looked blotchy.

He looked ghastly.

‘No rush, is there, sir?’ he asked in a kindly manner.

‘Not much danger of me rushing today.’ He put down the book he’d been reading, and Lewis saw its title: The Anatomy of Melancholy .

‘Trying to cheer yourself up, sir?’

‘Oddly enough, I am. Listen to this: “There is no greater cause of melancholy than idleness; no better cure than busyness” — that’s what old Burton says. So tell me all about Bedford.’

So Lewis told him, trying so very hard to miss nothing out; and conscious, as always, that Morse would probably consider of vital importance those things he himself had assumed to be obviously trivial.

And vice versa, of course.

Morse listened, with only the occasional interruption.

‘So you can see, sir, he’s not got much of an alibi, has he?’

‘Lew-is! We won’t want another suspect. We know who killed McClure: the fellow we’re off to see this afternoon. All we’re looking for is a bit more background, a slightly different angle on things. We can’t take Brooks in yet — well, we can ; but he’s not going to run away. We ought to wait for a bit more evidence to accumulate.’

‘We certainly haven’t got much, to be truthful, have we?’

‘You’ve still got people looking for the knife?’

Lewis nodded. ‘Eight men on that, sir. Doing the houses Phillotson’s lads didn’t — along most of the road, both sides.’

Morse grunted. ‘I don’t like this fellow Brooks.’

‘You’ve not even seen him yet.’

‘I just don’t like this drugs business.’

‘I doubt if Davies had any part in that. Didn’t seem the type at all.’

‘Just in on the sex.’

‘He fell for that woman in a pretty big way, no doubt about that.’

‘Mm. And you say there may have been somebody in the house while you were there?’

‘As I say, I heard the loo flushing.’

‘Well, a trained detective like you would, wouldn’t he?’

‘When the cat’s away…’

‘Looks like it.’

‘I think he’s the sort of fellow who just welcomes all the floozies with open arms—’

‘And open flies.’

‘You don’t think…’ The thought struck Lewis for the first time. ‘You don’t think…?’

‘The loo-flusher was one and the same as our staircase Lulu? No. Not a chance. Forget it! The really interesting thing is what Davies told you about her — about Ellie Smith, or whatever her name is.’

Morse broke off, wearily, wiping the glistering perspiration from his forehead with a grubby white handkerchief taken from his pyjama top — top number three, in fact, for he had already sweated his way through two pairs of pyjamas since taking to his bed the previous afternoon.

‘Did you take your dose this morning, sir?’

Morse nodded. ‘Double dose, Lewis. That’s always been the secret for me.’

‘I meant the medicine, not the Malt.’

Morse grinned weakly, his forehead immediately prickling with moisture once more, like a windscreen in persistent drizzle.

He lit a cigarette; and coughed revoltingly, his chest feeling like a chunk of excoriated flesh. Then spoke:

‘She said she couldn’t see him on a weekday, right? Saturday OK, though, and perhaps Sunday. Why? Pretty clearly because she knew somebody there on the staircase; and you thought — be honest, now! — you thought it must be somebody who buggered off to his cottage in the Cotswolds somewhere every weekend, and left the coast clear. You thought it was one of the two Students, didn’t you? You thought it was McClure.’

‘To be honest with you, I didn’t, no. I thought it was somebody who didn’t work after Saturday lunchtime until starting up again on Monday morning. I thought it was the scout. I thought it was Brooks.’

‘Oh!’

‘Wasn’t I supposed to think that?’

Morse wiped his brow yet again. ‘I’m not really up to things at the minute, am I?’

‘No, I don’t think you are.’

‘Oh!’

‘I think Brooks wasn’t just a pusher; I think he was a pimp as well. And it was probably too risky for him to let any of his girls get into the college — into the House , sir. So, if this particular girl was going to get in, it was going to be at weekends, when he wasn’t there, when she could make her own arrangements, take her own risks, and set her own fee — without cutting him in at all.’