Colin Dexter: The Daughters of Cain

The body had been found in a hunched-up, foetal posture, with both hands clutching the lower abdomen and the eyes screwed tightly closed as if McClure had died in the throes of some excruciating pain. He was dressed in a short-sleeved shirt, vertically striped in maroon and blue, a black Jaeger cardigan, and a pair of dark-grey flannels — the lower part of the shirt and the upper regions of the trousers stiff and steeped in the blood that had oozed so abundantly.

McClure had been one of those ‘perpetual students in life’ (Phillotson’s words). After winning a Major Scholarship to Oxford in 1946, he had gained a First in Mods, a First in Greats — thereafter spending forty-plus years of his life as Ancient History Tutor in Wolsey College. In 1956 he had married one of his own pupils, an undergraduette from Somerville — the latter, after attaining exactly similar distinction, duly appointed to a Junior Fellowship in Merton, and in 1966 (life jumping forward in decades) running off with one of her own pupils, a bearded undergraduate from Trinity. No children, though; no legal problems. Just a whole lot of heartache, perhaps.

Few major publications to his name — mostly a series of articles written over the years for various classical journals. But at least he had lived long enough to see the publication of his magnum opus: The Great Plague at Athens: Its Effect on the Course and Conduct of the Peloponnesian War . A long title. A long work.

Witnesses?

Of the eight ‘luxurious apartments’ only four had been sold, with two of the others being let, and the other two still empty, the ‘For Sale’ notices standing outside the respective properties — one of them the apartment immediately below McClure’s, Number 5; the other Number 2. Questioning of the tenants had produced no information of any value: the newly-weds in Number 1 had spent most of the Sunday morning abed — sans breakfast, sans newspapers, sans everything except themselves; the blue-rinsed old lady in Number 3, extremely deaf, had insisted on making a very full statement to the effect that she had heard nothing on that fateful morn; the couple in Number 4 had been out all morning on a Charity ‘Save the Whales’ Walk in Wytham Woods; the temporary tenants of Number 7 were away in Tunisia; and the affectionate couple who had bought Number 8 had been uninterruptedly employed in redecorating their bathroom, with the radio on most of the morning as they caught up with The Archers omnibus. (For the first time in several minutes, Morse’s interest had been activated.)

‘Not all that much to go on,’ Phillotson had admitted; yet all the same, not without some degree of pride, laying a hand on two green box-files filled with reports and statements and notes and documents and a plan showing the full specification of McClure’s apartment, with arcs and rulings and arrows and dotted lines and measurements. Morse himself had never been able to follow such house-plans; and now glanced only cursorily through the stapled sheets supplied by Adkinsons, Surveyors, Valuers, and Estate Agents — as Phillotson came to the end of his briefing.

‘By the way,’ asked Morse, rising to his feet, ‘how’s the wife? I meant to ask earlier…’

‘Very poorly, I’m afraid,’ said Phillotson, miserably.

‘Cheerful sod, isn’t he, Lewis?’

The two men had been back in Morse’s office then, Lewis seeking to find a place on the desk for the bulging box-files.

‘Well, he must be pretty worried about his wife if—’

‘Pah! He just didn’t know where to go next — that was his trouble.’

‘And we do ?’

‘Well, for a start, I wouldn’t mind knowing which of those newspapers McClure read first.’

‘If either.’

Morse nodded. ‘And I wouldn’t mind finding out if he made any phone-calls that morning.’

‘Can’t we get British Telecom to itemize things?’

‘Can we?’ asked Morse vaguely.

‘You’ll want to see the body?’

‘Why on earth should I want to do that?’

‘I just thought—’

‘I wouldn’t mind seeing that shirt, though. Maroon and blue vertical stripes, didn’t Phillotson say?’ Morse passed the index finger of his left hand round the inside of his slightly tight, slightly frayed shirt-collar. ‘I’m thinking of, er, expanding my wardrobe a bit.’

But the intended humour was lost on Lewis, to whom it seemed exceeding strange that Morse should at the same time apparently show more interest in the dead man’s shirt than in his colleague’s wife. ‘Apparently’ though… that was always the thing about Morse: no one could ever really plot a graph of the thoughts that ran through that extraordinary mind.

‘Did we learn anything — from Phillotson, sir?’

‘You may have done: I didn’t. I knew just as much about things when I went into his office as when I came out.’

‘Reminds you a bit of Omar Khayyam, doesn’t it?’ suggested Lewis, innocently.

THE sitting-cum-dining-room — the murder room — 12' X 17'2" as stated in Adkinsons’ (doubtless accurate) specifications, was very much the kind of room one might expect as the main living-area of a retired Oxford don: an oak table with four chairs around it; a brown leather settee; a matching armchair; TV; CD and cassette player; books almost everywhere on floor-to-ceiling shelves; busts of Homer, Thucydides, Milton, and Beethoven; not enough space really for the many pictures — including the head, in the Pittura Pompeiana series, of Theseus, Slayer of the Minotaur. Those were the main things. Morse recognized three of the busts readily and easily, though he had to guess at the bronze head of Thucydides. As for Lewis, he recognized all four immediately, since his eyesight was now keener than Morse’s, and the name of each of those immortals was inscribed in tiny capitals upon its plinth.

For a while Morse stood by the armchair, looking all round him, saying nothing. Through the open door of the kitchen — 6 '10" X 9 '6 "— he could see the Oxford Almanack hanging from the wall facing him, and finally went through to admire ‘St Hilda’s College’ from a watercolour by Sir Hugh Casson, RA. Pity, perhaps, it was the previous year’s, for Morse now read its date, ‘MDCCCCLXXXXIII’; and for a few moments he found himself considering whether any other year in the twentieth century — in any century — could command any lengthier designation. Fourteen characters required for ‘1993’.

Still, the Romans never knew much about numbers.

‘Do you know how many walking-sticks plus umbrellas we’ve got in the hall-stand here?’ shouted Lewis from the tiny entrance area.

‘Fourteen!’ shouted Morse in return.

‘How the — how on earth—?’

‘For me, Lewis, coincidence in life is wholly unexceptional; the readily predictable norm in life. You know that by now, surely?’

Lewis said nothing. He knew well where his duties lay in circumstances such as these: to do the donkey-work; to look through everything, without much purpose, and often without much hope. But Morse was a stickler for sifting the evidence; always had been. The only trouble was that he never wanted to waste his own time in helping to sift it, for such work was excessively tedious; and frequently fruitless, to boot.

So Lewis did it all. And as Morse sat back in the settee and looked through McClure’s magnum opus, Lewis started to go through all the drawers and all the letters and all the piles of papers and the detritus of the litter-bins — just as earlier Phillotson and his team had done. Lewis didn’t mind, though. Occasionally in the past he’d found some item unusual enough (well, unusual enough to Morse) that had set the great mind scurrying off into some subtly sign-posted avenue, or cul-de-sac; that had set the keenest-nosed hound in the pack on to some previously unsuspected scent.