Colin Dexter - The Daughters of Cain

‘Why do you have to keep talking in that sort of way? You’ve got a pleasant voice and you can speak very nicely. But sometimes you deliberately seem to try to sound like a…’

‘A trollop?’

‘Yes.’

Neither of them spoke for a while. Then it was Ellie:

‘I wanted to ask you two things really.’

‘I’m all ears.’

‘Actually you’ve got quite nice ears, for a man. Has anyone ever told you that?’

‘Not recently, no.’

‘Look. You think my step-father’s dead, don’t you?’

‘I’m not sure what I think.’

‘If he is dead, though, when do you think…?’

‘As I say — I just don’t know.’

‘Can’t you guess?’

‘Not to you, Miss Smith, no.’

‘Can’t you call me “Ellie”?’

‘All right.’

‘What do I call you?’

‘They just call me Morse.’

‘Yes — but your Christian name?’

‘Begins with “E”, like yours.’

‘No more information?’

‘No more information.’

‘OK. Let me tell you what’s worrying me. You think Mum’s had something to do with all this, don’t you?’

‘As I say—’

‘I agree with you. She may well have had, for all I know — and good luck to her if she did. But if she did, it must have been before that Wednesday. You know why? Because — she doesn’t know this — but I’ve been keeping an eye on her since then, and there’s no way — no way — she could have done it after…’

‘After what?’ asked Morse quietly.

‘Look, I’ve read about the Pitt Rivers business — everybody has. It’s just that… I just wonder if something has occurred to you, Inspector.’

‘Occasionally things occur to me,’ said Morse.

‘Have you got any cigarettes, by the way?’

‘No, I’ve given up.’

‘Well, as I was saying, what if the knife was stolen on the Wednesday afternoon to give everybody the impression that the murder — if there is a murder — was committed after that Wednesday afternoon? Do you see what I mean? OK, the knife was stolen then — but what if it wasn’t used ? What if the murder was committed with a different knife?’

‘Go on.’

‘That’s it really. Isn’t that enough?’

‘You realize what you’re saying, don’t you? If your step-father has been murdered; if he was murdered before the theft of the knife, then your mother is under far more suspicion, not less. As you say, quite rightly, she’s got a continuous alibi from the time she left for Stratford with Mrs Stevens on that Wednesday, but she hasn’t got much of one for the day before. In fact she probably hasn’t got one at all.’

Ellie looked down at the avocado-coloured carpet, and sipped the last of her champagne.

‘Would you like me to go and get a packet of cigarettes, Inspector?’

Morse drained his own glass.

‘Yes.’

Whilst she was gone (for he made no effort to carry out the errand himself) Morse sat back and wondered exactly what it was that Ellie Smith was trying to tell him… or what it was that she was trying not to tell him. The point she had just made was exactly the one which he himself (rather proudly) had made to Sergeant Lewis, except that she had made it rather better.

‘Now, second thing,’ she said as each of them sat drinking again and (now) smoking. ‘I want to ask you a favour. I said, didn’t I, that me and Ashley—’

‘Ashley and I.’

‘Ashley and I are getting married, at the Registry Office—’

‘Register Office,’ corrected the pedantic Inspector.

‘—and we wondered — I wondered — if you’d be willing to come along and be a witness.’

‘Why me?’

‘Because… well, no reason really, perhaps, except I’d like you to be there, with me mum. It’d make me… I’d be pleased, that’s all.’

‘When is it — the wedding?’

‘“Wedding”? Sounds a bit posh, doesn’t it? We’re just getting married: no bridesmaids, no bouquets — and not too much bloody confetti, I hope.’

An avuncular Morse nodded, like an understanding senior citizen.

‘Not like all the razzmatazz you probably had at your wedding,’ she said.

Morse looked down at the carpet, as she had done earlier; then looked up again. For a second or two it was as though an electric current had shot across his forehead, and for some strange reason he found himself wanting to reach out across the table and just for a moment touch the hand of the young woman seated opposite.

‘How are you getting home, Ellie?’

In the taxi (‘Iffley Road — then the top of the Banbury Road,’ Morse had instructed), Ellie had interlaced her fingers into his; and Morse felt moved and confused and more than a little loving.

‘Did you see that watercolour?’ she asked. ‘The one just by our table? Our table?’

‘No.’

‘It was lovely — with fields and sheep and clouds. And the clouds…’

‘What about them?’ asked Morse quietly.

‘Well, they were white at the top and then a sort of middling, muddy grey, and then a darker grey at the bottom. Clouds are like that, aren’t they?’

‘Are they?’ Morse, the non-Nephologist, had never consciously contemplated a cloud in his life, and he felt unable to comment further.

‘It’s just that — well, all I’m tryin’ to say is that I enjoyed bein’ with you, that’s all. For a little while I felt I was on the top o’ one o’ them clouds, OK?’

After the taxi had dropped her off, and was making its way from East Oxford to North Oxford, Morse realized that he too had almost been on top of one of ‘them clouds’ that evening.

Back in his flat, he looked with some care at the only watercolour he had. The clouds there had been painted exactly as Ellie Smith had said. And he nodded to himself, just a little sadly.

In the waiting area of the Churchill Hospital, immediately Mrs Stevens had been called in to see her specialist, at 10.35 a.m. on Tuesday, 20 September, Brenda Brooks picked up a surprisingly recent issue of Good Housekeeping , and flicked through its glossy pages. But she found it difficult to concentrate on any particular article.

Brenda was a person who took much pleasure in the simple things of life. Others, she knew, had their yearnings for power or wealth or knowledge, but two of her own greatest delights were cleanliness and tidiness. What a joy she felt each week, for example, when she watched the dustmen casually hurl her black bags into the back of the yellow rubbish-cart — then seeing them no more. It seemed like Pilgrim finally ridding himself of his burden of sin.

For her own part, she had seldom made any mess at all in her life. But there was always an accumulation of things to be thrown away: bits of cabbage-leaves, and empty tins, and cigarette stubs from her husband’s ashtrays… Yes. It was always good to see the black bags, well, disappear really. You could put almost anything in them: bloodstained items like shirts, shoes, trousers — anything.

There were the green bags, too — the bags labelled ‘Garden Waste’, issued by Oxford City Council, at 50p apiece. Householders were permitted to put out two such bags every week; but the Brooks’s garden was small, and Brenda seldom made use of more than one a fortnight.

Then there were those strong, transparent bags which Ted had brought home a couple of years ago, a heavy stack of them piled in the garden shed, just to the left of the lawn-mower. Precisely what purpose her husband had envisaged for such receptacles had been unclear, but they had occasionally proved useful for twigs and small branches, because the material from which they were manufactured was stout, heavy-duty stuff, not easily torn.