Colin Dexter - The Daughters of Cain

‘What about the bike, though? He must have ridden it up to Daventry Court, mustn’t he? So if he’d felt the pain starting, you’d have thought he’d get back home as fast as he could.’

Morse shook his head. ‘It doesn’t add up, does it? He must have ditched his bike somewhere on the way back.’

‘Where, though?’

Morse pondered the problem awhile. Then, remembering Brooks’s contempt for anyone taking the trouble to report a bicycle-theft in Oxford, he suddenly saw that it had ceased to be a problem at all.

‘Do you know a poem called “Five Ways to Kill a Man”?’

‘No.’

Wearily Morse rose to his feet, fetched an anthology of modern verse from his shelves, looked up Brock in the index, turned to the poem — and read the last stanza aloud.

But Lewis, though not unaccustomed to hearing Morse make some apposite quotation from the poets between draughts of real ale, could see no possible connexion in logic here.

‘I’m not with you.’

Morse looked down at the stanza again; then slowly recited his own parody of the lines:

‘There are several cumbersome ways of losing a bike — like pushing it in the canal. Neater and simpler, though, is to take it somewhere like Cornmarket in Oxford — and just leave it there.’

‘You ought to have been a poet, sir.’

‘I am a poet, Lewis.’

Morse now coughed violently, expectorating into a tissue a disgusting gobbet of yellowish-green phlegm streaked with bright blood.

Lewis, although he saw it, said nothing.

And Morse continued:

‘First thing is to get Brooks in, and go through Susan Ewers’ statement with him. She’s a good witness, that one — and he’ll have to come up with something better than he gave us this afternoon.’

‘When shall we bring him in, though? He’s got a point, hasn’t he? We don’t want to give him another heart attack.’

‘Don’t we?’

‘Day or two?’

‘Day or three.’

Morse finished his beer. It had taken that swift drinker an inordinately long time to do so; and if Morse had experienced a premonition earlier, Lewis himself now sensed that his chief was seriously ill.

‘What about the photograph, sir? Mrs Brooks’s daughter?’

‘Interesting question. I wonder. I wonder where that young lady fits into the picture.’

‘Pretty well everywhere, wouldn’t you say?’

‘Ye-es. “Kay” — “K” — “Eleanor” — “Ellie” — we’ve got to assume she’s the same girl, I suppose: Mrs B’s daughter — Mr B’s step-daughter — staircase-tart for Messrs Rodway and Davies — mistress for Dr McClure…’

‘She must be quite a girl.’

‘But what about that other photograph, Lewis? The school-mistress? D’you know, I’ve got a feeling she might be able to shed a little light—’

But Morse was coughing uncontrollably now, finally disappearing into the bathroom, whence was heard a series of revolting retches.

Lewis walked out into the entrance hall, where he flicked open Morse’s black plastic telephone-index to the letter ‘S’. He was lucky. Under ‘Summertown Health Centre’ he found an ‘Appointments’ number; and an ‘Emergency’ number.

He rang the latter.

That same afternoon, just after four o’clock, Dr Richard Rayson, Chaucerian scholar, and fellow of Trinity College, Oxford, strolled round his garden in Daventry Avenue. For almost three weeks he had been away with his family in the Dolomites. Gardening, in truth, had never been the greatest passion of his life; and as he stood surveying the state of his neglected front lawn, the epithet which sprang most readily to his literate mind was ‘agrestal’: somewhat overgrown; run to seed; wild, as the Shorter Oxford might define it.

Yet strangely, for such an unobservant man, he’d spotted the knife almost immediately — a couple of feet or so inside the property, between an untrimmed laurel bush and the vertical slats of a front fence sorely in need of some re-creosoting. There it was, lying next to a semi-squashed tin of Coca Cola.

Nina Rayson, a compensatingly practical sort of partner, had welcomed her husband’s discovery, promptly washing it in Sainsbury’s ‘Economy’ washing-up liquid, and forthwith adding it to her own canteen of cutlery. A good knife, it was: a fairly new, sturdy, unusually broad-bladed instrument, in no immediate need of any further sharpening.

That same evening, at nine-thirty, Brenda Brooks was aware that her jangled nerves could stand very little more that day. Paradoxically, though, she felt almost competent about coping with the loathsome man she’d just seen to bed, with a cup of tea, two digestive biscuits, and one sleeping tablet. At least she knew him: knew the worst about him — for there was nothing but the worst to know. It was now the unknown that was worrying her the more deeply: that strange technical jargon of the doctors and nurses at the hospital; the brusque yet not wholly unsympathetic questions of the two policemen who had earlier called there.

She found herself neurotically dreading any phone-call; any ringing of the door-bell. Anything.

What was that?

What was that ?

Was she imagining things — imagining noises?

There it was again: a muffled, insistent, insidious, tapping…

Fearfully, she edged towards the front door.

And there, behind the frosted glass, she saw a vaguely human silhouette; and she turned the Yale lock, and opened the door, her heart fluttering nervously.

‘You!’ she whispered.

Oxford’s St Giles’ Fair is held annually on the first Monday and Tuesday after the first Sunday every September, with the whole area of St Giles’ brought into use, from the Martyrs’ Memorial up to (and beyond) St Giles’ Church at the northern end, where the broad, tree-lined avenue bifurcates to form the Woodstock Road to the left and the Banbury Road to the right.

In mid-afternoon on Tuesday, 6 September (two days after Lewis had telephoned the Summertown Health Centre), Kevin Costyn was sauntering under the plane trees there, along the various rides and amusements and candy-floss stalls. Nothing could really kindle his imagination or interest, for the Naked Lady of earlier years, in her rat-infested cage, no longer figured in the fair’s attractions. And as Kevin considered the jazzy, jolty, vertiginous cars and carriages, he felt no real wish to part with any of his limited money.

That day the children in the state schools in Oxfordshire had returned to their classrooms; and for the first time in twelve years Costyn himself was not one of them. No more school. But no job yet, either. He’d signed on at the Job Centre. Even taken away some literature on Youth Employment Schemes and Opportunities . Not that he was going to read that bumf. He wasn’t interested in jobs. Just money. Well, not just money, no.

Smugly he grinned to himself as he stood outside the Bird and Baby and watched the gigantic, gyrating structure of the Big Wheel.

The previous month he’d been part of a three-man ram-raid at a Summertown supermarket, but it hadn’t proved the windfall they’d expected. Shop windows — replaced shop windows — were being made of tougher glass; and several regular, and formerly profitable, targets were now protected by concrete frontal pillars. That wasn’t the real trouble, though. It was getting rid of the stuff that was getting trickier all the time. Cigarettes had usually been the best bet: lightweight, handy to stack, easy to sell. But booze was becoming one helluva job to sell; and the cases of whisky, gin, and vodka they’d got away with then had changed hands for a miserly £850, though according to Costyn’s (admittedly less than competent) calculation their street-value would have been four times that amount. It was the police — becoming far cannier at tracking down the wholesale-market contacts — they were the real trouble.