Colin Dexter - The Daughters of Cain

As she lay in bed that night, she would gladly have prayed for herself, as well as for Kevin, had she managed to retain any residual faith in a personal deity. But she had not so managed. And as she lay staring up at the ceiling, knowing that she could never again look forward to any good nights, quite certainly not to any cheerful awakenings, she pondered how very much more easy such things must be for people with some comfortable belief in a future life. And for just a little while her resolution wavered sufficiently for her to find herself kneeling on the Golden Floor and quietly reciting the opening lines of the Lord’s Prayer.

Photographs of the three young men involved in the Eastern Ring Road accident had appeared on page 2 of The Star (22 September), a free newspaper distributed throughout Oxford each Thursday. Below these photographs, a brief article had made no mention whatsoever of the concomitant circumstances of the ‘accident’. But it was the dolichocephalic face of Kevin Costyn, appropriately positioned between his dead partner-in-crime, to the left, and his amputee partner-in-crime, to the right, that had caught the attention of one of the attendants at the Pitt Rivers Museum. In particular it had been the sight of the small crucifix earring that had jerked his jaded memory into sudden overdrive. Earlier the police had questioned all of them about whether they could remember anything unusual, or anyone unusual, on that Wednesday afternoon when Cabinet 52 had been forced. Like each of his colleagues, he’d had to admit that he couldn’t.

But now he could.

Just before the museum closed, on Thursday, 22 September, he walked along the passage, up the stone steps, and diffidently knocked on the door of the Administrator (capital ‘A’).

Late that same afternoon Morse asked Lewis an unusual question.

‘If you had to get a wedding present, what sort of thing would you have in mind — for the bride?’

‘You don’t do it that way, sir. You buy a present for both of them. They’ll have a list, like as not — you know, dinner-service, saucepans, set of knives—’

‘Very funny!’

‘Well, if you don’t want to lash out too much you can always get her a tin-opener or an orange-squeezer.’

‘Not exactly much help in times of trouble, are you?’

‘Ellie Smith, is it?’

‘Yes.’ Morse hesitated. ‘It’s just that I’d like to buy her something… for herself.’

‘Well, there’s nothing to stop you giving her a personal present — just forget the wedding bit. Perfume, say? Scarf? Gloves? Jewellery, perhaps? Brooch? Pendant?’

‘Ye-es. A nice little pendant, perhaps…’

‘So long as her husband’s not going to mind somebody else’s present hanging round her neck all the time.’

‘Do people still get jealous these days, Lewis?’

‘I don’t think the world’ll get rid of jealousy in a hurry, sir.’

‘No. I suppose not,’ said Morse slowly.

Five minutes later the phone rang.

It was the Administrator.

In the Vaults Bar at The Randolph at lunchtime on Friday, 23 September, Ellie Smith pushed her half-finished plate of lasagne away from her and lit a cigarette.

‘Like I say, though, it’s nice of him to agree, isn’t it?’

‘Oh, give it a rest, Ellie! Don’t start talking about him again.’

‘You jealous or something?’

Ashley Davies smiled sadly.

‘Yeah, I suppose I am.’

She leaned towards him, put her hand on his arm, and gently kissed his left cheek.

‘You silly noodle!’

‘Perhaps everybody feels a bit jealous sometimes.’

‘Yeah.’

‘You mean you do?’

Ellie nodded. ‘Awful thing — sort of corrosive. Yuk!’

There was a silence between them.

‘What are you thinking about?’ he asked.

Ellie stubbed out her cigarette, and pushed her chair back from the table. ‘Do you really want to know?’

‘Please tell me.’

‘I was just wondering what she ’s like that’s all.’

‘Who are you talking about?’

‘ Mrs Morse.’

The sun had drifted behind the clouds, and Ashley got up and paid the bill.

A few minutes later, her arm through his, they walked along Cornmarket, over Carfax, and then through St Aldate’s to Folly Bridge, where they stood and looked down at the waters of the Thames.

‘Would you like to go on a boat trip?’ he asked.

‘What, this afternoon?’

‘Why not? Up to Iffley Lock and back? Won’t take long.’

‘No. Not for me.’

‘What would you like to do?’

She felt a sudden tenderness towards him, and wished to make him happy.

‘Would you like to come along to my place?’

The sun had slipped out from behind the clouds, and was shining brightly once more.

The two rivers, the Thames (or Isis) and the Cherwell, making their confluence just to the south of the City Centre, have long provided enjoyable amenities for Oxford folk, both Town and Gown: punting, rowing, sculling, canoeing, and pleasure-boating. For the less athletic, and for the more arthritic, the river-cruise down from Folly Bridge via the Iffley and Sandford locks to Abingdon, has always been a favourite.

For such a trip, Mr Anthony Hughes, a prosperous accountant now living out on Boar’s Hill, had booked two tickets on a fifty-passenger steamer, the Iffley Princess , timetabled to sail from Folly Bridge at 9.15 a.m. on Sunday, 25 September.

The previous evening he had slowly traced the course of the river on the Ordnance Survey Map, pointing out to his son such landmarks as the Green Bank, the Gut, the concrete bridge at Donnington, Haystacks Corner, and the rest, which they would pass before arriving at Iffley Lock.

For young James, the morrow’s prospects were magical. He was in several ways an attractive little chap — earnest, bespectacled, bright — with his name down for the Dragon School in North Oxford, a preparatory school geared (indeed, fifth-geared) to high academic and athletic excellence. The lad was already exhibiting an intelligent and apparently insatiable interest both in his own locality and in the Universe in general. Such Aristotelian curiosity was quite naturally a great delight to his parents; and the four-and-a-half year old young James was picking up, and mentally hoarding, bits of knowledge with much the same sort of regularity that young Jason was picking up, and physically hurling, bits of brick and stone around the Cutteslowe Estate.

Spanning the fifty-yard-wide Isis, and thus linking the Iffley Road with Abingdon Road, Donnington Bridge was a flattish arc of concrete, surmounted by railings painted, slightly incongruously, a light Cambridge-blue. And as the Iffley Princess rounded the Gut, young James pointed to the large-lettered SOMERVILLE, followed by two crossed oars, painted in black on a red background, across the upper part of the bridge, just below the parapet railings.

‘What’s that, Dad?’

But before the proud father could respond, this question was followed by another:

‘What’s that , Dad?’

Young James pointed to an in-cut, on the left, where a concrete slipway had been constructed to allow owners of cars to back the boats they were towing directly down into the river. There, trapped at the side of the slipway, was what appeared to be an elongated bundle, a foot or so below the surface of the nacre-green water. And several of the passengers on the port side now spotted the same thing: something potentially sinister; something wrapped up; but something no longer wholly concealed.