Colin Dexter - The Daughters of Cain

Morse was coughing again. ‘Why don’t I put you in charge of this case, Lewis?’

‘Because I couldn’t handle it.’

‘Don’t you think you can handle Brooks?’

‘No.’

‘You think we ought to wait a couple of days, don’t you — before we see him?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you think I’ll agree to that?’

‘No.’

Morse closed Burton’s immortal work, and folded the duvet aside.

‘Will you do me a quick favour, Lewis, while I get dressed?’

‘Course.’

‘Just nip out and get me the News of the World , will you?’

At 1.15 p.m., on the way to the Brooks’s residence in East Oxford, they had called briefly at Daventry Avenue. Still no sign of any murder weapon.

‘Give ’em a chance,’ Lewis had said.

Morse had insisted on taking the Jaguar, with Lewis driving: he thought the finale of Die Walküre might well refresh his drooping spirits, and the tape (he said) was already in position there. But strangely enough he hadn’t turned it on; even more strangely he appeared ready to engage in conversation in a car.

Most unusual.

‘You ought to invest in a bit of Wagner, Lewis. Do you far more good than all that rubbish you play.’

‘Not when you’re there, I don’t.’

‘Thank God!’

‘I don’t get on to you, for what you like.’

‘What do you like best?’

Lewis came up to the roundabout at the Plain, and took the second exit, the one after St Clements, into the Cowley Road.

‘I’ll tell you what I can’t stand, sir — the bagpipes.’

Morse smiled. ‘Somebody once said that was his favourite music — the sound of bagpipes slowly fading away into the distance.’

It was a quarter-to two when Ted and Brenda Brooks, side by side on the living-room settee, sat facing the two detectives: Morse in the only armchair there, Lewis on an upright chair imported for the occasion from the kitchen.

Brooks himself, in his late forties, dressed in a white, short-sleeved shirt and well-pressed grey slacks, looked pale and strained. But soon he appeared to relax a little, and was confirming, with an occasional nod of his greying head, the background details which Morse now briefly rehearsed: his years as a scout at Wolsey, where he had got to know Matthew Rodway (‘Yup’); and Dr McClure (‘Yup’); his present employment at the Pitt Rivers Museum (‘Yup’).

The skirmishing had been very civilized, and Mrs Brooks asked them all if they’d like a cup of tea.

But Morse declined, speaking, as it appeared, for all three of them, and turning back to Brooks and to the trickier part of the examination paper.

‘Do you want your wife to be here, sir, while I ask you — I’m sorry — some rather awkward questions?’

‘She stays. You stay, don’t you, Bren? Nothing she shouldn’t know about, Inspector.’

Lewis watched the man carefully, but could see no greater signs of nervousness than was normal among witnesses being interviewed by the police. Wasn’t she , Mrs Brooks, the more obviously nervous of the two?

‘Mr Brooks,’ Morse began. ‘I know you’ve been in hospital, but please bear with me. We have evidence that there was some trading in drugs on your old staircase over the last three or four years.’

‘Nothin’ to do wi’ me if there was.’

‘You knew nothing of it?’

‘No.’

‘It’s difficult for us, you see, because we have a statement to the effect that you did know something about it.’

‘Christ! I’d like to know who it was as told you that. Load o’ bloody lies!’

‘You’d have no objections to coming along to HQ and going through that statement with us?’

‘I can’t — not just now, I can’t — but I will — I’ll be ’appy to — when I’m better. You don’t want to give me another bloody ’eart attack, do you?’

Brooks’s manner of speaking, which had begun in a gentle Oxfordshire burr, had suddenly switched into the coarse articulation with which he was wont to address his wife.

‘Would you have known, Mr Brooks, if there had been drugs?’

‘No job o’ mine to interfere. Everybody’s got their own lives to live.’

‘There were parties there, on the staircase?’

‘You try an’ stop ’em!’

‘Did you try?’

‘If you talk to people they’ll all tell you I were a good scout. That’s all that worried me.’

‘I’m afraid we shan’t be able to talk to Dr McClure, shall we?’

‘There’s others.’

‘Did you like Dr McClure?’

‘OK, yeah.’

‘You both left at the same time, I believe.’

‘So wha’?’

‘I just wondered if you had a farewell drink together, that’s all.’

‘Don’t know much about Town and Gown, do you?’

Morse turned to Lewis. ‘Sergeant?’

‘We’ve obviously got to interview anyone, sir, who had a link with Dr McClure. That’s why we’re here, as I told you on the phone. So I shall have to ask you where you were last Sunday — Sunday the twenty-eighth of August.’

‘Huh! Last Sunday?’ He turned to his wife. ‘Hear that, Bren? Not bloody difficult, that one, is it? You tell ’em. You remember better ’an I do. Bloody ’ell! If you reckon I ’ad anything to do wi’ that — last Sunday ? Christ!’

Brenda Brooks folded her hands nervously in her lap, and for the first time Morse noticed that the right hand, beneath an elastic support, might be slightly deformed. Perhaps she held them to stop them shaking? But there was nothing she could do about her trembling upper-lip.

‘Well… Ted woke me about three o’clock that Sunday morning—’

‘More like ’alf-two.’

‘—with this awful pain in his chest, and I got up to find the indigestion tablets and I made a cup o’ tea and you seemed better, didn’t you, Ted? Well, a bit better anyway and I slept a bit and he did, just a bit, but it was a bad night.’

‘Terrible!’

‘I got up at six and made some more tea and asked Ted if he wanted any breakfast but he didn’t and the pain was still there, and I said we ought to ring the doctor but Ted said not yet, well, you know, it was Sunday and he’d have to come out special, like. Anyway he got up about ten because I remember we sat in the kitchen listening to The Archers at quarter-past while I got the meat ready — lamb and mint sauce — but Ted couldn’t face it. Then about half-past one, quarter-to two, it got so bad, well, it was no good hanging on any longer and I rang the ambulance and they came in about… well, it was only about ten minutes — ever so quick. He was on a machine at half-past two — about then, weren’t you, Ted?’

‘Intensive Care,’ said the ex-scout, not without a touch of pride. ‘The pain ’ad got t’rific — I knew it were summat serious. Told you so at the time, didn’t I, Bren?’

Brenda nodded dutifully.

It had immediately become clear to Morse that there was now a very considerable obstacle between him and any decision to arrest Edward Brooks on suspicion of murder; a considerable objection even to leaving his name on the list of suspects — which indeed would be a dramatic set-back for the whole case, since Brooks’s name was the only one appearing on Morse’s list.

He looked across now at the faithful little lady sitting there in her skirt and summer blouse next to her husband. If she persisted in her present lies (for Morse was convinced that such they were) it was going to be extremely difficult to discredit her testimony, appearing, as she did, to possess that formidable combination of nervousness and innocence. Any jury would strongly sympathize.