Colin Dexter - The Daughters of Cain

Morse changed tack completely.

‘Do you know, I’m beginning to feel a bit thirsty, Mrs Brooks. Does that offer of a cuppa still stand?’

After Mrs Brooks had put the kettle on and taken the china cups from the dresser, she stood close to the kitchen door. Her hearing was still good. It was the white-haired one who was speaking…

‘Have you got a car, sir?’

‘Not ’ad one for ten year or more.’

‘How do you get to work?’

‘Still go on the bus, mostly.’

‘You don’t bike?’

‘Why d’you ask that?’

‘I saw your cycling helmet in the hall, that’s all.’

‘So?’

‘Didn’t mind me asking, did you?’

‘Why the ’ell should I?’

‘Well, Dr McClure was knifed to death, as you know, and there was an awful lot of blood all over the place — and all over the murderer, like as not. So if he’d driven off in a car, well… these clever lads in the labs, they can trace the tiniest speck of blood…’

‘As I said, though, I ’aven’t got a car.’

‘I still think we’d quite like to have a look at your bike. What do you think, Sergeant Lewis?’

‘Not a question of “liking”, sir. I’m afraid we shall have to take it away.’

‘Well, that’s where you’re wrong, ’cos I ’aven’t got no bike no longer, ’ave I? Bloody stolen, wasn’t it? Sat’day lunchtime, that were — week yesterday. Just went to the Club for a pint and when I got out — there it was, gone! Lock ’n’ all on the back wheel. Ten bloody quid, that fancy lock cost me.’

‘Did you report the theft, sir?’

‘Wha’? Report a stolen bike? In Oxford? You must be jokin’.’

Mrs Brooks came in with a tray.

‘I must ask you to report the theft of your bike, sir,’ said Lewis quietly. ‘To St Aldate’s.’

‘Milk and sugar, Inspector?’

For the first time her eyes looked unflinchingly straight into his, and suddenly Morse knew that behind the nervousness, behind the fear, there lay a look of good companionship. He smiled at her; and she, fleetingly, smiled back at him.

And he felt touched.

And he felt poorly again.

And he felt convinced that he was sitting opposite the man who had murdered Felix McClure; felt it in his bones and in his brains; would have felt it in his soul, had he known what such a thing was and where it was located.

When ten minutes later Mrs Brooks was about to show them out, Morse asked about the two photographs hanging on the wall of the entrance-hall.

‘Well, that one’ — she pointed to a dark, broody-looking girl in her mid-teens or so — ‘that’s my daughter. That’s Ellie. Her first name was Kay, really, but she likes to be called Ellie.’

Phew!

With an effort, Lewis managed not to exchange glances with Morse.

‘That one’ — she pointed to a photograph of herself arm-in-arm, in front of a coach, with a younger, taller, strikingly attractive woman — ‘that’s me and Mrs Stevens, when we went on a school-party to Stratford last year. Lovely, it was. And with a bit of luck I’ll be going with her again this next week. She teaches at the Proctor Memorial School. I clean for her… Well, as I say… I clean for her.’

It seemed for a few seconds that she was going to add a gloss to that last repeated statement. But her husband had shouted from within, and Morse managed not to look down at that disfigured palm again as Brenda Brooks’s hands indulged in a further spasm of floccillation.

‘Well, well ! What do you make of all that?’

The Jaguar was gently negotiating half a dozen traffic-calming humps, before reaching the T-junction at the Cowley Road.

‘Not now, Lewis!’

‘How’re you feeling, sir?’

‘Just change the first letter of my name from “M” to “W”.’

‘You should be in bed.’

Morse looked at his wristwatch. ‘Nearest pub, Lewis. We need to think a little.’

Morse was comparatively unfamiliar with the part of Oxford in which he now found himself. In his own undergraduate days, it had seemed a long way out, being dubbed a ‘Bridge Too Far’ — on the farther side, the eastern side, the wrong side, of Magdalen Bridge — beyond the pale, as it were. Yet even then, three decades earlier, it had been (as it still was) a cosmopolitan, commercial area of fascinating contrasts: of the drab and the delightful; of boarded-up premises and thriving small businesses; of decay and regeneration — a Private Sex Shop at the city-centre end, and a police station at the far Ring Road end, with almost everything between, including (and particularly) a string of highly starred Indian restaurants. Including too (as Morse now trusted) a local pub selling real ale.

Lewis himself knew the area well; and after turning right at the T-junction, he almost immediately turned left into Marsh Road, pulling up there beside the Marsh Harrier.

Ashley Davies, he thought, would almost certainly have approved.

The Good Pubs of Oxford guide always reserved its highest praise for those hostelries where conversation was not impeded (let alone wholly precluded) by stentorian juke-boxes. And certainly Morse was gratified to find no music here. Yet he appeared to Lewis clearly ill-at-ease as he started — well, almost finished really — his first swift pint of Fuller’s ‘London Pride’.

‘What’s worrying you, sir?’

‘I dunno. I’ve just got a sort of premonition—’

‘Didn’t know you believed in them.’

‘—about this copy-cat-crime business. You know, you get a crime reported in the press — somebody pinching a baby from outside a supermarket, say — and before you can say “Ann Robinson” somebody else’s having a go at the same thing.’

Lewis followed the drift of Morse’s thought. ‘The article we placed in the Oxford Mail ?’

‘Perhaps.’

‘You mean, we shouldn’t perhaps…?’

‘Oh, no! It was our duty to print that. And for all we know it could still produce something. Though I doubt it.’

Morse drained his beer before continuing: ‘You know, that knife’s somewhere, isn’t it? The knife that someone stuck into McClure. The knife that Brooks stuck into McClure. That’s the infuriating thing for me. Knowing that the bloody thing’s somewhere , even if it’s at the bottom of the canal.’

‘Or the Cherwell.’

‘Or the Isis.’

‘Or the gravel-pits…’

But the conversation was briefly interrupted whilst Lewis, on the landlord’s announcement of Last Orders, was now despatched to the bar for the second round.

Perhaps it was Morse’s bronchial affliction which was affecting his short-term memory, since he appeared to be suffering under the misapprehension that it was he who had purchased the first.

Whatever the case, however, Morse quite certainly looked happier as he picked up his second pint, and picked up the earlier conversation.

‘Brooks wouldn’t have been too near any water, would he?’

‘Not that far off, surely. And he’d have to go over Magdalen Bridge on his way home, anyway.’

‘On his blood-saddled bike…’

‘All he’d need to do was drop his knife over the bridge there — probably be safe till Kingdom Come.’

Morse shook his head. ‘He’d have been worried about being seen.’

Lewis shrugged. ‘He could have waited till it was dark.’

‘It was bloody morning , Lewis!’

‘He could’ve ditched it earlier. In a garden or somewhere.’