Colin Dexter - The Daughters of Cain

But the real joy of Brenda’s life had ever centred on the manual skills — knitting, needlework, embroidery — for her hands had always worked confidently and easily with needles and crochet-hooks and bodkins and such things. Of late, too, she had begun to extend the area of her manual competence by joining a cake-icing class, although (as we have seen) it had been only with considerable and increasing pain that she had been able to continue the course, before finally being compelled to pack it up altogether.

She was still able, however, to indulge in some of her former skills; had, in fact, so very recently indulged in them when, wearing a leather glove instead of the uncomfortable Tubigrip, she had stitched the ‘body-bag’ (a word she had heard on the radio) in which her late and unlamented husband was destined to be wrapped. Never could she have imagined, of course, that the disposal of a body would cause a problem in her gently undemanding life. But it had, and she had seen to it. Not that the task had been a labour of love. Far from it. It had been a labour of hate.

She had watched, a few months earlier, some men who had come along and cut down a branch overarching the road there, about twelve feet long and about nine inches across. (Wasn’t a human head about nine inches across?) The men had got rid of that pretty easily: just put it in that quite extraordinary machine they had — from which, after a scream of whirring, the thick wood had come out the other end… sawdust.

Then there was the furnace up at the Proctor Memorial School — that would have left even less physical trace perhaps. But (as Mrs Stevens had said) there was a pretty big problem of ‘logistics’ associated with such waste-disposal. And so, although Brenda had not quite understood the objection, this method had been discounted.

The Redbridge Waste Reception Area had seemed to her a rather safer bet. It was close enough, and there was no one there to ask questions about what you’d brought in your bags — not like the time she and Ted had come through Customs and the man with the gold on his hat had discovered all those cigarettes… No, they didn’t ask you anything at the rubbish dump. You just backed the car up to the skip, opened the boot, and threw the bags down on to the great heap already there, soon to be carted away, and dumped, and bulldozed into a pit, and buried there.

But none of these methods had found favour.

Dis aliter visum .

The stiffish transparent bags measured 28 1⁄ 2inches by 36 inches, and Brenda had taken three. After slitting open the bottoms of two of them, she had stitched the three together cunningly, with a bodkin and some green garden string. She had then repeated the process, and prepared a second envelope. Then a third.

It was later to be recorded that at the time of his murder Mr Edward Brooks was 5 feet 8 inches in height, and 10 1⁄ 2stones in weight. And although the insertion of the body into the first, the second, and the third of the winding-sheets had been a traumatic event, it had not involved too troublesome an effort physically. Not for her, anyway.

Edward Brooks had been almost ready for disposal.

Almost.

By some happy chance, the roll of old brown carpet which had stood for over two years just to the right of the lawn-mower, measured 6 feet by 6 feet.

Ideal.

With some difficulty the body had been manipulated into its container, and four lengths of stout cord were knotted — very neatly! — around the bundle. The outer tegument made the whole thing a bit heavier, of course — but neater, too. And neatness, as we have seen, was an important factor in life (and now in death) for Brenda Brooks. The parcel, now complete, was ready for carriage.

It might be expected perhaps — expected certainly? — that such an experience would permanently have traumatized the soul of such a delicate woman as Mrs Brenda Brooks. But, strangely enough, such was not the case; and as she thought back on these things, and flicked through another few pages of Good Housekeeping , and waited for Mrs Stevens to re-emerge, she found herself half-smiling — if not with cruelty at least with a grim satisfaction…

There was an empty Walkers crisp-packet on the floor, just two seats away; and unostentatiously Brenda rose and picked it up, and placed it in the nearest wastepaper basket.

Mrs Stevens did not come out of the consulting-room until 11.20 a.m. that morning; and when she finally did, Brenda saw that her dearest friend in life had been weeping…

It had been that last little bit really.

‘You’ve got some friends coming over from California, you say?’

‘Yes. Just after Christmas. I’ve not seen them for almost ten years. I went to school with her — with the wife.’

‘Can I suggest something? Please?’ He spoke quietly.

‘Of course.’ Julia had looked up into the brown eyes of Basil Shepstone, and seen a deep and helpless sadness there. And she’d known what he was going to say.

‘If it’s possible… if it’s at all possible, can you get your friends to come over, shall we say, a month earlier? A month or two earlier?’

The case was not progressing speedily.

That, in his own words, is what Lewis felt emboldened to assert the following morning — the morning of Wednesday, 21 September — as he sat in Morse’s office at HQ.

‘Things are going a bit slow, sir.’

‘That,’ said Morse, ‘is a figure of speech the literati call “hyperbole”, a rhetorical term for “exaggeration”. What I think you’re trying to tell me is that we’re grinding to a dead halt. Right?’

Lewis nodded.

And Morse nodded.

They were both right…

Considerable activity had centred on the Brooks’s household following the finding of the bicycle, with Brenda Brooks herself gladly co-operating. Yet there seemed little about which she was able to co-operate, apart from the retraction of her earlier statement that her husband had been at home throughout the morning of Sunday, 28 August. In a nervous, gentle recantation, she was now willing (she’d said) to tell the police the whole truth. He had gone out on his bike, earlyish that morning; he had returned in a taxi, latish that morning — with a good deal of blood on his clothing. Her first thought, naturally enough, was that he’d been involved in a road accident. Somehow she’d got him into his pyjamas, into bed — and then, fairly soon afterwards, she’d called the ambulance, for she had suddenly realized that he was very ill. The bloodstained clothing she had put into a black bag and taken to the Redbridge Waste Reception Area the following morning, walking across the Iffley Road, then via Donnington Bridge Road to the Abingdon Road.

Not a very heavy load, she said.

Not so heavy as Pilgrim’s, she thought.

That was almost all, though. The police could look round the house — of course, they could. There was nothing to hide, and they could take away whatever they liked. She fully understood: murder, after all, was a serious business. But no letters, no receipts, no addresses, had been found; few photographs, few mementos, few books; no drugs — certainly no drugs; nothing much at all apart from the pedestrian possessions of an undistinguished, unattractive man, whose only memorable achievement in life had been the murder of an Oxford don.

There had been just that one discovery, though, which had raised a few eyebrows, including (and particularly) the eyebrows of Brenda Brooks. Although only £217 was in Brooks’s current account at Lloyds Bank (Carfax branch), a building society book, found in a box beside Brooks’s bed, showed a very healthy balance stashed away in the Halifax — a balance of £19,500. The box had been locked, but Brenda Brooks had not demurred when Lewis had asked her permission to force the lid — a task which he had accomplished with far more permanent damage than had been effected by the (still unidentified) thief at the Pitt Rivers Museum…