Colin Dexter - The Daughters of Cain

‘You mean she got him to steal the knife — for somebody else? For Ellie Smith, say?’

‘Who else?’

‘But you’ve always thought—’

‘Give it a bloody rest, Lewis, will you?’ snarled Morse. ‘Do you think I get any pleasure from all this? Do you think I want to get Ellie Smith in here this morning and take her prints and tell her that she’s a bloody liar and that she knifed her sod of a step-father?’

He got up and walked to the window.

‘No, I don’t think that,’ said the ill-used Lewis quietly. ‘It’s just that I’m getting confused, that’s all.’

‘And you think I’m not ?’

No, Lewis didn’t think that. And he wondered whether his next little item of news was likely to clarify or further to befuddle the irascible Chief Inspector’s brain.

‘While you were shopping, I went down to Wolsey and had another look in Mrs Ewers’ pantry.’

‘And?’

‘Well, something rang a bit of a bell when we found Brooks’s body: those plastic bags. Do you remember when we first went to the Staircase?’

‘The pile of them there in the pantry, yes.’

Lewis sought to hide his disappointment. ‘You never said anything.’

‘There’s no end of those around.’

‘I just thought that if Brooks used to take a few things home occasionally, unofficially — toilet-rolls, cartons of detergent, that sort of thing…’

‘We could have a look in Brooks’s place, yes. Where do you reckon he’d keep them?’

‘Garden shed?’

‘We’d need a search warrant… unless, Lewis—’

‘Oh no! I’m not forcing any more locks, sir. Look what a mess I made of the box in his bedroom.’

‘Perhaps you won’t need to.’ Morse opened a drawer of his desk and took out the bunch of keys. ‘I’d like to bet one of these fits the garden shed; but I doubt we’re going to find any bags there. They’ll have been too careful for that.’

‘What are you thinking of exactly?’

‘Well, you’d have expected a few prints on the plastic bags, don’t you think? But there aren’t any, it seems. The water wouldn’t have washed them off completely, I’m told. So they wore gloves all the time. And then they took good care to make sure the body wouldn’t float, agreed? There’s a gash in the bags, through all three layers — I don’t think that was caused accidentally in the river. I think it was made deliberately, to let the air out, and get the body to sink… at least, temporarily. That’s what the Warden thought, too.’

Yes, Lewis remembered. Holmes had claimed that unless any body was weighted down it would almost certainly have come up towards the surface sooner or later because of the body’s natural gases.

‘Why do you think they — somebody — went to all that trouble with the bags, sir? It’s almost as if…’

‘Go on, Lewis!’

‘As if somebody wanted the body to be found.’

‘Ye-es.’ Morse was gazing across the yard once more. ‘You know what’s buggering us up the whole time, don’t you? It’s simply that we’re going to have one helluva job making out a case against anybody . If somebody like Helena Kennedy, QC, was hired for the defence, she’d make mincemeat of us: we’ve got all the motive in the world; and all the means — but we just can’t find any bloody opportunity … except at about teatime on that Wednesday afternoon. They’ve been too clever for us. But it’s not just cleverness: it’s ruthlessness too. Not a blatant ruthlessness, but certainly a latent ruthlessness — latent in all three of them. Something that suddenly hardened into a cold-blooded resolve to get rid of Brooks — not just because they knew, must have known, that he was a murderer himself, but for an even better reason. Hatred.’

There was a knock at the door, and a WPC announced that Ms Smith was now seated in Reception.

‘Bring her up, please,’ said Morse, quickly opening a small, square black box, lined with white satin, and passing it across to Lewis.

‘What d’you think?’

Lewis, like Dr Hobson the previous day, looked across at Morse most curiously.

‘But if what you say’s right, sir, she’s going to have to postpone the happy day indefinitely — for quite a few years, perhaps.’

‘She can still sit in a cell and twiddle it in her fingers. No law against that, is there?’

But before Lewis could remind Morse of the very strict and very sensible prison regulations regarding necklaces and the like, there was another knock at the door, and Morse swiftly took back the pendant of St Anthony — plus his golden chain.

After rolling the little finger of her left hand across the pad, after pressing it firmly on to the fingerprint-form, Eleanor Smith had finished; and Lewis now asked her to add her signature to the form.

‘That didn’t take very long, did it?’ said Morse patronizingly.

‘Does all this mean you’ve found some fingerprints on the knife?’ she asked.

Morse was slightly hesitant. ‘We think so, yes. Unidentified prints — unidentified as yet. As I explained, though, it’s just a matter of elimination.’

She looked rather weary; gone was the sparkle that had characterized the latter part of that champagne evening at the Old Parsonage.

‘You think they could be mine?’

Rather weary too was Morse’s smile.

‘We’ve got to have some suspects, haven’t we? In fact my sergeant here’s got a long list of ’em.’

She turned to Lewis. ‘Whereabouts am I on the list?’

‘We always try to put the most attractive at the top, don’t we, sir?’

Morse nodded his agreement, wishing only that he’d thought of such a splendid rejoinder himself.

‘And when exactly am I supposed to have murdered that shithouse?’

She looked from one to the other, and Morse in turn looked to Lewis the Interlocutor.

‘Perhaps,’ said the latter slowly, ‘when you got back from Birmingham that Wednesday?’

‘I see… And did I pinch the knife as well?’

‘I — we don’t think you could have done that because, as you told us, you didn’t get back into Oxford until after the museum had closed. We checked up on the train time: it got into Oxford Station at 16.35 — just three minutes late.’

‘You still don’t sound as if you believe me.’

‘We don’t think you took the knife,’ said Morse.

The slight but perceptible stress on the ‘you’ was clearly not lost on Suspect Number One.

‘You suggestin’ somebody else pinched it — then slipped it to me on the way home from the railway station? Then I just called in to have a chat with him and decided to murder the old bugger there and then — is that what you’re thinking?’

‘There are more unlikely scenarios than that,’ said Morse quietly.

‘Oh, not you! How I hate that bloody word “scenario”.’

She had touched a raw spot, for Morse hated the word too. Yet he’d not been able to come up with anything better; and he made no protest as Ellie Smith continued, changing down now into her lower-gear register of speech.

‘And what am I s’posed to ’ave done with ’im then?’

‘Well, we were hoping you could give us a few ideas yourself.’

‘Is this turnin’ into a bleedin’ interview or something?’

‘No,’ said Morse simply. ‘You’re under no obligation to answer anything. But sooner or later we’re going to have to ask all sorts of questions. Ask you, ask your mother… Where is your mother, by the way?’