Colin Dexter - The Daughters of Cain

The Warden proved to be intelligent and informative. After stressing the importance, in all such considerations, of time of year, weather conditions, river-temperature, volume of water, and frequency of river-traffic; after giving Morse a clear little lesson on buoyancy and flotation, he suggested a few likely answers. As follows.

The strong probability was that the body had not been shifted all that far by the prevailing flow; indeed, if it had been slightly more weighted down, the body might have rested permanently on the bottom; as things were, the body could well have been put into the river at a point just beside the Falcon Rowing Club; certain it was that the body would not have drifted against the north — south movement of the tide. The only objection to such a theory was that it would have been an inordinately long way for anyone to carry such a weighty bundle. With the barrier locked down across the approach road to the slipway, no car (unless authorized) could even have reached the river at that point, let alone turned right there and deposited a body sixty, seventy yards upstream.

Unless…

Well, there were just over a hundred members of the Riverside Club who possessed boats, who used the slipway fairly regularly, and who were issued with a key to the barrier. Not infrequently (the Warden confessed) a boat-owner neglected to close the barrier behind him; or deliberately left it open for a colleague known to be sailing up behind. And so… if the barrier happened to be left open — well, not much of a problem, was there?

‘You know what I’d’ve done, Mr Holmes, if I’d had to dispose of a body here?’ Morse’s eyes slowly rose to the top of Donnington Bridge, where public interest was, if anything, increasing, in spite of the makeshift screen which had now been erected around the body.

‘You tell me.’

‘I’d have driven here, about two o’clock in the morning, and pushed it over the bridge.’

‘Helluva splash, you’d make,’ said the Warden.

‘Nobody around to hear it, though.’

‘A few people around then, Inspector. You know who they are?’

Morse shook his head.

‘Three lots o’ people, really: lovers, thieves, police.’

‘Oh!’ said Morse.

Twenty minutes later the young pathologist got to her feet — the grim, grisly preliminary examination over.

‘Mustn’t do much more here,’ she reported. ‘Been in the river between a week and a fortnight, I’d guess. Difficult to say — he’s pretty well preserved. Neat little job of packaging somebody did there. But we’ll sort him out later. All right?’

Morse nodded. ‘We’re in your hands.’

‘Not much doubt he’s been murdered, though — unless he died, then somebody stuck a knife in him, then wrapped him all up and put him in the river here.’

‘Seems unlikely,’ conceded Morse.

Dr Hobson was packing up her equipment when Morse spoke again:

‘You’ll be sure not to touch the knife until—?’

‘You’ve not got much faith in some of your colleagues, have you?’

She was an attractive young woman; and when first she had taken over from the sadly missed Max, Morse had felt he could almost have fallen a little in love with her. But now he dreamed of her no longer.

Morse had taken the sensible (almost unprecedented) precaution of refraining from a few pints of beer on a Sunday lunchtime; and at 3.15 p.m. he and Lewis stood in the path lab beside the prone body of Edward Brooks, the plastic bags in which he had been inserted lying folded neatly at his feet, like the linen wraps at the Resurrection. Apart from Dr Hobson herself, two further forensic assistants and a fingerprint expert stood quite cheerfully around the body, in which the handle of a broad knife stood up straight.

Yet it was not the handle itself, so carefully dusted now with fingerprint-powder, which had riveted Morse’s attention. It was the label attached to the side of the handle; a label whose lettering, though washed and smudged by the waters of the Thames, was still partially legible on its right-hand side:

‘ I just do not believe this ,’ whispered Morse slowly.

‘Pardon, sir?’

But Morse was not listening. He touched Laura Hobson lightly on the shoulder of her starched white coat, and for the second time that day asked for the quickest way to the nearest Gents.

The following day, Monday, 26 September, both Morse and Lewis arrived fairly early, just after 7 a.m., at Thames Valley HQ.

Morse himself had slept poorly, his eyeballs ceaselessly circling in their sockets throughout the night as the dramatic new development in the case had gradually established itself into the pattern of his thinking; for in truth he had been astonished at the discovery that Brooks had been murdered after the theft of the Rhodesian knife; murdered in fact by the Rhodesian knife.

As he had hitherto analysed the case, assessing motive and opportunity and means, Morse had succeeded in convincing himself that two or perhaps three persons, acting to some degree in concert, had probably been responsible for Brooks’s murder. Each of the three (as Morse saw things) would have regarded the death of Brooks, though for slightly different reasons, as of considerable benefit to the human race.

Three suspects.

Three women: the superficially gentle Brenda Brooks, who had suffered sorely in the role of the neglected and maltreated wife; the enigmatic Mrs Stevens, who had developed a strangely strong bond between herself and her cleaning-lady; and the stepdaughter, Eleanor Smith, who had left home in her mid-teens, abused (how could Morse know?) mentally, or verbally, or physically, or sexually even…

Women set apart from the rest of their kind by the sign of the murderer — by the mark of Cain.

A confusing figuration of ‘if’s’ had permutated itself in Morse’s restless brain that previous night, filtering down to exactly the same shortlist as before, since the Final Arbiter had handed to Morse the same three envelopes. In the first, as indeed in the second, the brief verdict was typed out in black letters: ‘Not Guilty’; but in the third, Morse had read the even briefer verdict, typed out here in red capitals: ‘guilty’. And the name on the front of the third envelope was — Eleanor Smith .

For almost an hour, Morse and Lewis had spoken together that morning: spoken of thoughts, ideas, hypotheses. And when he returned from the canteen with two cups of coffee at 8 a.m., Lewis stated, starkly and incontrovertibly, the simple truth they both had to face:

‘You know, I just don’t see — I just can’t see — how Brenda Brooks, or this Mrs Stevens — how either of them could have done it. We’ve not exactly had a video-camera on them since the knife was stolen — but not far off. All right, they’d got enough motive. But I just don’t see when they had the opportunity.’

‘Nor do I,’ said Morse quietly. And Lewis was encouraged to continue.

‘I know what you mean about Mrs Stevens, sir. And I agree. There’s somebody pretty clever behind all this, and she’s the only one of the three who’s got the brains to have thought it all out. But as I say…’

Morse appeared a little pained as Lewis continued: