Colin Dexter - The Daughters of Cain

She spoke as Morse came up to the first roundabout on his way towards Oxford:

‘Have you got any decent music in this car?’

‘Such as what?’

‘Well, your nice sergeant played me some Mozart. Fellah playin’ the clarinet.’

‘Jack Brymer, was it?’

‘Dunno. He was great, though. It’d pay him to join a jazz group.’

‘You think so?’

‘If he’s lookin’ to the future.’

‘He’s about eighty.’

‘Really? Ah well, you’re no chicken yourself, are you?’

Morse, unsmiling, kept his eyes on the road.

‘Your sergeant said you was tryin’ to educate his musical tastes.’

‘Did he?’

‘You don’t think I need a bit of educatin’?’

‘I doubt it. I’d guess you’re a whole lot better educated than you pretend to be. For all I know, you’re probably quite a sensitive and appreciative lass — underneath.’

‘Yeah? Christ! What the ’ell’s that s’posed to mean?’

Morse hesitated before answering her. ‘I’ll tell you what your trouble is, shall I? You’re suffering from a form of inverted snobbery, that’s all. Not unusual, you know, in girls — in young ladies of… in young ladies like you.’

‘If that’s supposed to be a bloody insult, mister, you couldn’t a’ done much bleedin’ better, could you?’

‘I’m only guessing — don’t be cross. I don’t know you at all, do I? We’ve never even spoken—’

‘Except on the phone. Remember?’

Morse almost managed a weak smile as he waited at the busy Cutteslowe roundabout.

‘I remember.’

‘Great, that was. You know, pretendin’ to be somebody else. I sometimes think I should a’ been an actress.’

‘I think you are an actress — that’s exactly what I was saying.’

‘Well, I’ll tell you somethin’. Right at this minute there’s one thing I’d swap even for an Oscar.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Plate of steak and chips. I’m starvin’.’

‘Do you know how much steak costs these days?’

‘Yeah. £3.99 at the King’s Arms just down the road here: salad and chips chucked in. I saw it on the way up.’

‘It says “French Fries”, though, on the sign outside. You see, that’s exactly what I meant about—’

‘Yeah, you told me. I’m sufferin’ summat chronic from inverted snobbery.’

‘Don’t you ever eat?’ demanded Ellie, wiping her mouth on the sleeve of her blouse, and draining her third glass of red wine.

‘Not very often at meal-times, no.’

‘A fellah needs his calories, though. Got to keep his strength up — if you know what I mean.’

‘I usually take most of my calories in liquid form at lunchtimes.’

‘Funny, isn’t it? You bein’ a copper and all that — and then drinkin’ all the beer you do.’

‘Don’t worry. I’m the only person in Oxford who gets more sober the more he drinks.’

‘How do you manage that?’

‘Years of practice. I don’t recommend it though.’

‘Wouldn’t help you much with a bleedin’ breathalyser, would it?’

‘No,’ admitted Morse quietly.

‘Do you know when you’ve had enough?’

‘Not always.’

‘You had enough now?’

‘Nearly.’

‘Can I buy you something?’

‘You know, nineteen times out of twenty… But I’ve got to drive you home and then get back to give Sergeant Lewis his next music lesson.’

‘What’s all them weasel words s’posed to mean?’

‘Pint of Best Bitter,’ said Morse. ‘If you insist.’

‘Would you ever think of giving me a music lesson?’ she asked, as after a wait at the lights in Longwall Street the Jaguar made its way over Magdalen Bridge.

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘You want me to be honest?’

‘Why not?’

‘I just couldn’t stick looking at those rings in your nose.’

She felt the insult like a slap across the face; and had the car still been queuing at the Longwall lights she would have jumped out of the Jaguar and left him. But they were travelling now quite quickly up the Iffley Road, and by the time they reached Princess Street she was feeling fractionally less furious.

‘Look! Just tell your sergeant somethin’ from me, will you?’

‘ I’m in charge of the case,’ said Morse defensively, ‘not Sergeant Lewis.’

‘Well, you could a’ fooled me. You never asked me nothin’ — not at the station, did you? You hadn’t said a single word till we got in the car.’

‘Except on the phone. Remember?’ said Morse quietly.

‘Yeah, well, like I said, that was good fun…’ But the wind had been taken from her sails, and she glanced across at Morse in a slightly new light. In the pub, as she’d noticed, he’d averted his gaze from her for much of the time. And now she knew why… He was a bit different — a lot different, really — from the rest of them; the rest of the men his age, anyway. Felix had once told her that she looked at people with eyes that were ‘interested and interesting’, and she would never forget that: it was the most wonderful compliment anyone had ever paid her. But this man, Morse, hadn’t even looked at her eyes; just looked at his beer for most of the time.

What the hell, though.

Bloody police!

‘Look, somethin’ for you or your sergeant, OK? If he wants to check up about Wednesday, when I went to Brum, I went to an abortion clinic there. Sort o’ consultation. But I decided I wasn’t goin’ to go through with it — not this time, OK? Then, about last night, I went out with Ashley — Ashley Davies — and he asked me to marry him. With or without me bloody noserings, mister, OK?’

With that she opened the near-side door and jumped out.

She slammed it so hard that for a moment Morse was worried that some damage might have been incurred by the Jaguar’s (pre-electrics) locking mechanism.

‘And you can stuff your fuckin’ Mozart, OK?’

It is sometimes maintained, and with some cause, that insomnia does not exist. The argument, put most briefly, is that anyone unable to fall asleep has no real need to fall asleep. But there were several key players in the present drama who would have readily challenged such an argument that night — the night of Friday, 9 September.

Morse himself, who only infrequently had the slightest trouble in falling asleep, often had the contrary problem of ‘falling awake’ during the small hours, either to visit the loo, or to drink some water — the latter liquid figuring quite prominently with him during the night, though virtually never during the day. Yet sleep was as important to Morse as to any other soul; and specifically on the subject of sleep, the Greek poets and the Greek prose-writers had left behind several pieces of their literary baggage in the lumber-room of Morse’s mind. And if, for him, the whole of the classical corpus had to be jettisoned except for one single passage, he would probably have opted for the scene depicting the death of Sarpedon, from Book XVI of the Iliad , where those swift companions, the twin brothers Sleep and Death, bear the dead hero to the broad and pleasant land of Lycia. And so very close behind Homer’s words would have been those of Socrates, as he prepared to drink the hemlock, that if death were just one long and dreamless sleep then mortals could have nought to fear.

That night, though, Morse had a vivid dream — a dream that he was playing the saxophone in a jazz ensemble, yet (even in his dream) ever wondering whence he had acquired such dazzling virtuosity, and ever worried that his skill would at any second desert him in front of his adulatory audience — amongst whom he had spotted a girl with two rings in her nose; a girl who could never be Eleanor Smith, though, since the girl in the dream was disfigured and ugly; and Eleanor Smith could never be that…