Colin Dexter - The Daughters of Cain

If Chief Inspector Morse had been present at the short service, he would have been impatient with what he saw as the pretentious prayers; and yet, almost certainly, he would have welcomed the hymn that was played there — ‘O Love that wilt not let me go’ — and his quiet unmusical baritone would probably have mingled with the singing.

But Morse was not one of the thirty-seven mourners Lewis counted at the Oxford Crematorium that Wednesday lunchtime.

‘What exactly’s wrong with you, Morse?’

‘I’m only here for observation.’

‘Yes, I know that. But what exactly is it they’re observing ?’

Morse drew a deep breath. ‘I’m suffering from bronchi-something beginning with “e”; my liver and kidneys are disintegrating; my blood pressure isn’t quite off the top of the scale — not yet; I’m nursing another stomach ulcer; and as if that wasn’t enough I’m on the verge of diabetes, because my pancreas, they tell me, isn’t producing sufficient insulin to counteract my occasional intake of alcohol. Oh yes, and my cholesterol’s dangerously high.’

‘I see. Perhaps I should have asked what exactly’s right with you, Morse.’

Strange shifted his great bulk awkwardly on the small wooden chair beside Morse’s bed in Ward 7 of the John Radcliffe Two Hospital out at Headington, whither, in spite of his every protestation of being in excellent health, Morse had been conveyed by ambulance, half an hour after the doctor had been summoned the previous Sunday afternoon.

‘I had an endoscopy yesterday,’ continued Morse.

‘Sounds painful. Where do they stick that?’

‘In the mouth , sir.’

‘Ah. No more dramatic finds?’

‘No more corpses under the floorboards.’

‘Well, the wife’ll be very pleased if you can last out till — fairly soon, isn’t it? — when you’ve got a speaking engagement, I understand.’

‘I have ?’

‘You know — the WI group-meeting in Kidlington. Likely to be a good crowd there, she says. So try to make it, old man. She’s, er… you know, she’s the President this year. Means a lot to her.’

‘Tell her I’ll be there, even if they have to wheel me in.’

‘Good. Good. “The Grislier Aspects of Murder.” Nice little title, that.’

With which Morse’s mind reverted to the investigation. ‘If you see Lewis, sir, tell him to call in tonight, will you? I’d like to know how things are going.’

‘He was going to Mrs Phillotson’s funeral this lunchtime.’

‘What? Nobody told me about that.’

‘No, well… we didn’t want to, er… Not a nice subject, death, is it.’

The clock showed 2.45 p.m. when Strange made his way out of Ward 7; and for several minutes Morse lay back on his pillows and pondered. Perhaps a hospital was an appropriate place to meditate on death, for there was plenty of it going on all around. But most men or women preferred not to think or talk about it. Morse had known only one person who positively relished discussing the topic — Max the police pathologist, who in a macabre kind of way had almost made a friend of Death. But Death had made no reciprocal arrangement; and Max was police pathologist no longer.

Although the autumn term had only begun the day before, clearly one or two of the local schools had been planning, well in advance, to despatch their pupils on some of the dreaded GCSE ‘projects’ at the earliest possible opportunity. Certainly, until about 4.05 p.m., twenty or so schoolchildren had still been studying a range of anthropological exhibits in the Upper Gallery of the Pitt Rivers Museum.

Which was rather worrying.

But by 4.15 p.m., the galleries were virtually — by 4.20 p.m., totally — deserted. And from where he stood, beside the collection made in the South Pacific by Captain Cook on his second visit there in 1772, the young man observed most carefully whilst a suntanned, balding attendant walked briskly round the Upper Gallery, doubtless checking that no bags or satchels or writing-pads had inadvertently been left behind; and in so doing, as was immediately apparent, giving a quick, upward ‘lift’ to each of the glass covers of the locked cabinets there, like a potential car-thief swiftly moving along a line of vehicles in a Park and Ride and testing the doors.

Two minutes later, the young man was following in the attendant’s same pre-closure tracks; but stopping now, at a particular spot, where he looked down at a collection of knives — knives of all shapes and sizes, knives from many parts of the world — displayed in Cabinet Number 52.

Quickly, his heart pounding, he took a chisel from his summer sweatshirt and inserted its recently sharpened edge between the metal rim of the display-case top and the darkly stained wooden slat below it, into which the cabinet’s lock was set.

Easy!

No great splintering of wood or moaning of metal. Just a single, quick ‘click’. Yet it had been a bad moment; and the young man checked anxiously to his left, then to his right, before lifting the glass lid and putting a hand inside.

It was 4.29 p.m. when he walked through the museum shop. He might have bought a postcard of the forty-foot-high Haida Totem Pole (British Columbia), but an assistant was already totting up the takings, and he wished to cause no trouble. As the prominent notice had advised him as he’d entered, the Pitt Rivers Museum of Ethnology and Pre-History closed at 4.30 p.m. each day.

At the Proctor Memorial School, the take-up for the Twelfth Night trip to the Shakespeare Theatre had been encouraging. Before the end of the summer term, Julia Stevens had made her usual block-booking of thirty-one seats; and with twenty-three pupils (mostly fifth-and sixth-formers), two other members of staff, plus two parents, only three tickets had been going begging. Only two , in fact — and those soon to be snapped up with alacrity at the box office — because Julia Stevens had invited Brenda Brooks (as she had done the previous year) to join the school-party.

At the Stratford Coach Park, the three teachers had distributed the brown-paper-wrapped rations: two rolls, one with mayonnaised-curried-chicken, the other with a soft-cheese filling; one packet of crisps; and one banana — with a plastic cup of orangeade.

On the way back, though not on the way out, Mrs Stevens and Mrs Brooks sat side by side in the front seats: the former semi-listening (with some gratification) to her pupils’ pronouncements on the performances of Sirs Toby Belch and Andrew Aguecheek; the latter, until Woodstock, trying to read the latest instalment of a romantic serial in Woman’s Weekly , before apparently falling into a deep slumber, and not awakening therefrom until, two minutes before midnight on Wednesday, 7 September, the coach made its first stop at Carfax Tower, from where the streets of Oxford looked strangely beautiful; and slightly sinister.

After ringing the emergency number the previous Sunday, it had been a sad sight that confronted Lewis in the bathroom: Morse standing creased over the pedestal basin, his cheeks wholly drained of colour, his vomit streaked with blood forming a chrysanthemum pattern, scarlet on white, across the porcelain.

Dr Paul Roblin had been adamant.

Ambulance!

Lewis had woken up to the truth an hour or so later: for a while at least, he was going to be left alone with a murder investigation.