Colin Dexter - The Daughters of Cain

‘Has he got much to do with us, though — this fellow?’

‘Dunno, Lewis. But he was a marvellous man. In one of the books on arithmetic he was studying he wrote something like: “I’ve got a truly marvellous demonstration of this proposition which this margin is too narrow to contain.” Isn’t that a wonderful sentence?’

‘If you say so, sir.’

‘Well, I’ve worked out the square of three and the square of four and I’ve added them together and I’ve come up with — guess what, Lewis!’

‘Twenty-five?’

‘Much more! You see, this morning I suddenly realized where we’ve been going wrong in this case. We’ve been assuming what we were meant to assume… No. Let me start again. As you know, I felt pretty certain almost from the beginning that McClure was murdered by Brooks. And I think now, though I can’t be certain of course, that Brooks himself was murdered last week. And I know — listen, Lewis! — I now know what Brooks’s murderer wanted us to think.’

Lewis looked at the Chief Inspector, and saw that not uncommon, strangely distanced, almost mystical look in the gentian-blue eyes.

‘You see, Brooks’s body is somewhere where we’ll never find it — I feel oddly sure about that. Pushed in a furnace, perhaps, or buried under concrete, or left in a rubbish-dump—’

‘Waste Reception Area, sir.’

‘Wherever, yes. But consider the consequences of the body never being found. We all jump to the same conclusion — the conclusion our very intelligent Administrator at the Pitt Rivers jumped to: that there was a direct link between the murder of Brooks and the theft of the knife. Now, there was a grand deception here. The person who murdered Brooks wanted us to take one fact for granted, and almost — almost! — he succeeded.’

‘Or she.’

‘Oh, yes. Or she… But as I say the key question is this: why was the knife stolen? So let me tell you. That theft was a great big bluff! For what purpose? To convince us that Brooks was murdered after 4.30 p.m. on that Wednesday the seventh. But he wasn’t,’ asserted Morse slowly. ‘ He was murdered the day before — he was murdered on Tuesday the sixth.’

‘But he was seen alive on the Wednesday, sir. His wife saw him — Mrs Stevens saw him—’

‘Liars!’

‘Both of ’em?’

‘Both of them.’

‘You mean… you mean they murdered Brooks?’

‘That’s exactly what I do mean, yes. As I see things, it must have been Julia Stevens who supplied the brains, who somehow arranged the business with the knife. But what — what , Lewis — if Brooks was murdered by another knife — a household knife, let’s say — a knife just like the one McClure was murdered with, the knife that was found in Daventry Avenue, the knife that was missing from the Brooks’s kitchen.’

Lewis shook his head slowly. ‘Why all this palaver, though?’

‘Good question. So I’ll give you a good answer. To give the murderer — murderers — watertight alibis for that Wednesday . I sensed something of the sort when I interviewed Julia Stevens; and I suddenly knew it this morning when I was interviewing our punk-wonder.’

‘She’s in it, too, you reckon?’

Morse nodded. ‘All three of them have been telling us the same thing, really. In effect they’ve been saying: “Look! I don’t mind being suspected of doing something on Tuesday — but not on the Wednesday .” They’re happy about not having an alibi for the day Brooks was murdered. It was for the day afterwards — the Wednesday — that for some reason they figured an alibi was vital. And — surprise, surprise! — they’ve each of ’em got a beautiful alibi for then. It’s been very clever of them — this sort of casual indifference they’ve shown for the actual day of the murder, the Tuesday. You see, they all knew they’d be the likely suspects, and they’ve been very gently, very cleverly, pushing us all along in the direction they wanted.’

‘All three of them, you think?’

‘Yes. They’d all have gladly murdered Brooks, even if they hadn’t known he was a murderer himself: the wife he’d treated so cruelly; the step-daughter he’d probably abused; and Julia Stevens, who could see how her little cleaner was being knocked about by the man she’d married. So they hatch a plot. They arrange for the knife to be stolen, having made sure that none of them could have stolen it—’

‘Ellie Smith could have stolen it,’ interposed Lewis quietly.

‘Yes… perhaps she could, yes. But I don’t think so. Didn’t the attendant think it was more likely to have been a man? No. My guess is that they bribed someone to steal it — someone they could trust… someone one of them could trust.’

‘Ashley Davies?’

‘Why not? He’s got his reward, hasn’t he?’

‘You think that’s a reward, sir, marrying her ?’

Morse was silent awhile. ‘Do you know, Lewis, it might be. It might be…’

‘What did they do with the knife?’

‘That’s the whole point. That’s what I’m telling you. They didn’t use the stolen knife at all . They just got rid of it.’

‘But you can’t just get rid of things like that.’

‘Why not? Stick it in a black bag and leave it for the dustmen. You could leave a dismembered corpse in one of those and get away with it. Kein Problem . The only thing the dustmen won’t take is garden-refuse — that’s a well-known fact, isn’t it?’

‘You seem to be assuming an awful lot of brains somewhere.’

‘Look, Lewis! There seems to be a myth going round these days that criminals are a load of morons and that CID personnel are all members of Mensa.’

‘Perhaps I should apply then,’ said Lewis slowly.

‘Pardon?’

‘Well, I’ve been very clever, sir, while you were away. I think I’ve found Brooks’s bike.’

‘You have? Why the hell didn’t you tell me before?’

AT THE Proctor Memorial School that Friday afternoon the talk was predominantly of a ram-raid made on an off-licence in the Blackbird Leys Estate the previous evening, when by some happy chance a routine police patrol-car had been cruising round the neighbourhood just as three youths were looting the smashed shop in Verbena Avenue; when, too, a little later, the same police car had been only fifty or so yards behind when the stolen getaway car had crashed at full speed into a juggernaut lorry near the Horspath roundabout on the Eastern Ring Road…

When the chase was over one of the three was seated dead in the driving seat, his chest crushed by the collapsed steering-wheel; another, the one in the front passenger seat, had his right foot mangled and trapped beneath the engine-mounting; the third, the one seated in the back, had severe lacerations and contusions around the head and face and was still unconscious after the firemen had finally cut free his colleagues in crime from the concertina’ed Escort.

The considerable interest in this incident — accident — is readily explicable, since two of the youths, the two who survived the crash, had spent five years at the Proctor Memorial School; had spent fifteen terms mocking the attempts of their teachers to instil a little knowledge and a few of the more civilized values into their lives. Had they received their education at one of the nation’s more prestigious establishments — an Eton, say, or a Harrow, or a Winchester — the youths would probably have been designated ‘Old Boys’ instead of the ‘former pupils’ printed in the late afternoon edition of the Oxford Mail . And the former pupil who had been seated in the back of the car had left his Alma Mater only the previous term.