Colin Dexter: The Daughters of Cain

Morse nodded, picked up his own knife and fork, found (blessedly!) that the plate itself was hot — and then he froze, as if a frame on the family video had suddenly been switched to ‘Pause’.

‘Everything all right, sir?’

Morse made no reply.

‘You — you’re feeling all right, sir?’ persisted a slightly anxious Lewis.

‘Bloody ’ell!’ whispered Morse tremulously to himself in a voice just below audial range. Then, louder: ‘Bloody ’ell! You’ve done it again, Lewis. You’ve done it again !’

Unprecedentedly Lewis was moved to lay down both knife and fork.

‘You know we had a little bet…’ Morse’s voice was vibrant now.

‘When we both lost.’

‘No. When to be more accurate neither of us won.

Well, I’d like to bet you something else, Lewis. I’d like to bet you that I know whose fingerprints are on that knife in Brooks’s back!’

‘That’s more than the fingerprint-boys do.’

Morse snorted. ‘I’m very tempted to report them for professional incompetence.’ Then his voice softened. ‘But I can forgive them. Yes, I can understand them.’

‘I’m lost, sir, I’m afraid.’

‘Shall I tell you,’ asked Morse, ‘whose fingerprints we found on that knife?’

His blue eyes looked so fiercely across the kitchen table that for a few moments Lewis wondered whether he was suffering from some slight stroke or seizure.

‘Shall I tell you?’ repeated Morse. ‘You see, there’s a regular procedure which you know all about; which every CID man knows all about. A procedure that wasn’t — couldn’t have been — followed in this case: that when you take fingerprints from the scene of any murder you take everybody’s — including the corpse’s.’

Lewis felt the blood in his veins growing cold — like the plate in front of him.

‘You can’t mean…?’

‘But I do, Lewis. That’s exactly what I do mean. The prints are those of Edward Brooks himself .’

As Morse well knew, it was difficult enough to describe to someone else such a comparatively simple physical action as walking, say — let alone something considerably more complicated such as serving a ball in a game of tennis. How much more difficult then, later that same evening, for him to answer Lewis’s direct question about the cerebral equivalent of such a process.

‘What put you on to it, sir?’

What indeed?

It was perhaps perfectly possible to describe the mental gymnastics involved in the solving of a cryptic crossword clue. But how did one explain those virtually inexplicable convolutions of the mind which occasionally led to some dramatic, some penny-dropping moment, when the answers to a whole series of cryptic clues — and those not of the cruciverbalist but of the criminological variety — combined to cast some completely new illumination on the scene? How did one begin to explain such a sudden, almost irrational, psychological process?

‘With difficulty,’ was the obvious answer; but Morse was trying much harder than that, as he now sought to identify the main constituents which had led him to his quite extraordinary conclusion.

It was all to do with the fortuitous collocation of several memories, several recollections, which although occurring at disparate points in the case — and before — had suddenly come together in his mind, and coalesced.

There had been the report (Lewis’s own) on the interview with Mrs Rodway, when he had so easily been able to re-visualize some of the smallest details of the room in which they had spoken with her, and particularly that oblong patch above the radiator where a picture had been hanging.

Then there had been (only that very evening) a second oblong, prompting memory further, when he had looked down at the pristine strawberry-red in the lounge there, and when Mrs Lewis had spoken of the unfading linings in her cupboards.

And then, working backwards (or was it forwards?) there had been the visit to the Pitt Rivers Museum, when the Administrator had pointed with pride to the fine quality of the hessian lining for her cabinet-exhibits, with its optimistic guarantee of Tithonian immortality.

Then again, a much more distant memory from his childhood of a case of cutlery, a family heirloom, where over the years each knife, each fork, each spoon, had left its own imprint, its own silhouette, on the blue plush-lining of the case. Things always left their impressions, did they not?

Or did they?

Perhaps in the Pitt Rivers cabinets, in those slightly sombre, sunless galleries, the objects displayed there — the artefacts, the relics from the past — were leaving only very faint impressions, like the utensils in Mrs Lewis’s kitchen-cupboards.

No impressions at all, possibly…

Then, and above all, the discrepancy between the pathologist’s report on the knife used to murder McClure, and the statement given by the Raysons about the knife found in their own front garden: the ‘blade not really sharp’, in the former; the ‘blade in no immediate need of sharpening’, in the latter. Not a big discrepancy, perhaps; but a hugely significant one — and one which should never, never have passed unnoticed.

Yes, all the constituents were there: separate, though, and unsynthesized — waiting for a catalyst.

Lewis!

Lewis the Catalyst.

For it was Lewis who had returned from his p.m. investigations with the information that one of the small keys found in Brooks’s pocket fitted a wall-safe in the museum; in which, in turn, were to be found row upon row of other keys, including the key to Cabinet 52. It was Lewis, too, who so innocently had asserted, as he picked up a knife with which to eat his meal, that his own fingerprints would soon be found thereon…

And whither had such ratiocination finally led the Chief Inspector, as, like Abraham, he had made his way forth from his tent in the desert knowing not whither he went? To that strangest of all conclusions: that on Wednesday, 7 September, from Cabinet 52 in the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford — nothing whatsoever had been stolen .

A council of war was called in Caesar’s tent two days later, on Sunday, 2 October, with three other officers joining Chief Superintendent Strange in the latter’s Kidlington HQ office at 10 a.m.: Chief Inspector Morse, Chief Inspector Phillotson, and Sergeant Lewis. Morse, invited to put a case for a dramatic intensification of enquiries, for a series of warrants, and for a small cohort of forensic specialists, did so with complete conviction.

He knew now (or so he claimed) what had been the circumstances of each of the murders, those of McClure and Brooks; and he would, with his colleagues’ permission, give an account of those circumstances, not seeking to dwell on motives (not for the present) but on methods — on modi operandi .

Strange now listened, occasionally nodding, occasionally lifting his eyebrows in apparent incredulity, to the burden of Morse’s reconstructions.

McClure lived on a staircase where Brooks was the scout. The latter had gained access to drugs and became a supplier to several undergraduates, one of whom, Matthew Rodway, had become very friendly with McClure — probably not a homosexual relationship, though — before committing suicide in tragic and semi-suspicious circumstances. As a result of this, McClure had insisted that Brooks resign from his job; but agreed that he, McClure, would not report the matter to the Dean, and would even provide a job-testimonial, provided that Brooks forswore his dealings in drugs.