Colin Dexter - The Daughters of Cain

‘Good. I’m glad you’re not letting our own enquiries interfere with his college routine.’

‘It wasn’t like that—’

‘Come on, Lewis!’ Morse pointed to the Diploma. ‘When you said Ellie Smith must have been a bit cruel to run away from her mother, you were right, in a way. But she didn’t run away from her mother at all, Lewis. She ran away from her father , her natural father.’

‘But she could just have changed her name, surely?’

‘Nonsense!’

Morse consulted the directory lying beside the phone: only one C. P. Taylor, with an Abingdon Road address. He rang the number, and learned, yes indeed, that he was speaking to the Former Head of East Oxford Senior School, who would willingly help if he could. That same evening? Why not?

After Lewis had dropped Morse (‘I’ll find my own way home’) at a rather elegant semi-detached property in the Abingdon Road, he himself proceeded to Lonsdale College, where his mission was quietly and quickly productive.

Llewellyn-Jones freely admitted that he’d met the young woman he’d always known as ‘Kay’ fairly regularly for sexual purposes: never in his college rooms; more often than not in a hotel; and twice in her own little place — as was the case on Tuesday, 6 September, when he’d spent the evening with her, and would have spent longer but for a phone-call — half-past nine? quarter-to ten? — which had galvanized her into panicky activity. She’d have to leave: he’d have to leave. Obviously some sort of emergency; but he knew no more, except perhaps that he thought the voice on the phone was that of a woman.

Lewis thanked the dark, dapper little Welshman, and assured him that the information given would of course be treated with the utmost confidentiality.

But Gareth Llewellyn-Jones appeared little troubled:

‘I’m a bachelor, Sergeant, see? And I just loved being with her, that’s all. In fact, I could’ve… But I don’t think she’s the sort of woman who could ever really fall arse-orver-tit for any man — certainly not for me.’

He smiled, shook his head, and bade farewell to Lewis from the Porters’ Lodge.

As Lewis drove up to his home in Headington, he realized that Morse had almost certainly been right about Ellie Smith’s involvement in the murder.

With a tumbler of most welcome Scotch beside him, Morse sat back to listen.

‘Kay Brooks? Oh yes, I remember her ,’ said the ex-headmaster, a thin, mildly drooping man in his early seventies. ‘Who wouldn’t…?’

Aged eleven, she’d started at his school as a lively, slightly devil-may-care lass, with long dark hair and a sweet if somewhat cheeky sort of smile. Bright — well above average; and very good at sketching, painting, design, that type of thing. But… well, something must have gone a bit sour somewhere. By her mid-teens, she’d become a real handful: playing hookey, surly, inattentive, idle, a bit cruel, perhaps. Trouble at home, like as not? But no one knew. Kay’s mother had come along to see him a couple of times but—

Morse interrupted:

‘That’s really what I’ve come about, sir. It may not be important, but I rather think you probably mean her step -mother, don’t you?’

‘Pardon?’ Taylor looked as if he had mis-heard.

‘You see, I think Brooks, Edward Brooks, the man fished out of the Isis, could well have been her real father, not her step -father.’

‘Nonsense!’ (The second time the word had been used in the past half-hour.) ‘I can understand what you’re thinking, Inspector; but you’re wrong. She changed her name when her mother got remarried; changed it to her mother’s new name. You see, I knew her, knew her mother, well before then.’

Morse looked puzzled. ‘Is that sort of thing usual?’

Taylor smiled. ‘Depends, doesn’t it? Some people would give an arm and a leg to change their names. Take me, for instance. My old mum and dad — bless their hearts but… you know what they christened me? “Cecil Paul”. Would you credit it? I was “Cesspool” before I’d been at school a fortnight. You know the sort of thing I mean?’

Oh, yes, Morse knew exactly the sort of thing he meant.

‘And I’m afraid,’ continued Taylor, ‘that Kay got teased pretty mercilessly about her name — about her surname, that is. So it was only natural, really, that when the opportunity arose to change it…’

‘What was her surname?’ asked Morse.

Taylor told him.

Oh dear!

Poor Ellie!

After gladly becoming Eleanor ‘Brooks’ on her mother’s remarriage, so very soon, it seemed, had she come to detest her newly-adopted name. And when she had left home, she had plumped for ‘Smith’ — a good, common-stock, unexceptionable sort of name that could cause her pain no more.

Yes, Morse knew all about being teased because of a name — in his own case a Christian name. And he felt so close to Ellie Smith at that moment, so very caring towards her, that he would have sacrificed almost anything in the world to find her there, waiting for him, when he got back home.

‘Ellie Morse’?

‘ Eleanor Morse’?

Difficult to decide.

But gladly would Morse have settled for either as he walked slowly up into Cornmarket, where he stood waiting twenty-five minutes for a bus to take him up to his bachelor flat in North Oxford.

The subject of each of these last two enquiries, the young woman who has been known (principally) in these pages as Ellie Smith, had hurriedly wiped her eyes and for a considerable time said nothing after getting into Mike Williamson’s car. Her thoughts were temporarily concentrated not so much on Morse himself as on what she could have told him; or rather on what she could never have told him…

It had been that terrible Tuesday night, when her mother had phoned, pleading in such deep anguish for her daughter’s help; when she’d got rid of that quite likable cock-happy little Welshman; and finally reached the house — a full five minutes before that other woman had arrived in a car — to find her mother standing like a zombie in the entrance hall, continuously massaging a gloved right hand with her left, as if she had inflicted upon it some recent and agonizing injury; and when, after going into the kitchen, she’d looked down on her step-father lying prone on the lino there, a strange-looking, wooden-handled knife stuck — so accurately it had seemed to her — halfway between the shoulder-blades. Strangely enough, there hadn’t been too much blood. Perhaps he’d never had all that much blood in him. Not warm blood, anyway.

Then the red-headed woman had arrived, and taken over — so coolly competent she’d been, so organized. It was as if the plot of the drama had already been written, for clearly the appropriate props had been duly prepared, waiting only to be fetched from the back-garden shed. Just the timing , it appeared, had gone wrong, as if a final rehearsal had suddenly turned into a first-night performance. And it was her mother surely who’d been responsible for that: jumping the starting-gate and seizing the reins in her own hands — her own hand, rather (singular).

Then, ten minutes later, following a rapidly spoken telephone conversation, the young man had appeared, to whom the red-headed woman had spoken in hushed tones in the hallway; a young man whom, oddly enough, she knew by sight, since the two of them had attended the same Martial Arts classes together. But she said nothing to him. Nor he to her. Indeed he seemed hardly aware of her presence as he began to manoeuvre the awkward corpse into its polythene winding sheet — sheets, rather (plural).