Colin Dexter: The Daughters of Cain

She’d even found herself remembering his name.

Kevin something…

As the car turned right from Park End Street into the railway station, Ellie’s mind jerked back to the present, aware that Williamson’s left hand had crept above the top of her suspendered right-stocking. But she would always be able to handle people like Williamson, who now reminded her of their proposed agreement as he humped the two large suitcases from the boot.

‘You ring me, like you said, OK?’

Ellie nodded, adding a verbal gloss to her unspoken promise as she took his business card from her handbag and mechanically recited the telephone number.

‘Right, then. And don’t forget we can do real business with a body like yours, kid.’

It would have been a nice gesture if he had offered to carry her cases up the steps to the automatic doors; or even as far as the ticket window. But he didn’t; and of that she was glad. Had he done so she would probably have felt obliged to buy a ticket for Padding-ton, for she had spoken to him vaguely of ‘friends in London’. As it was, once he had driven off, she bought a single ticket to Liverpool, and with aching arms crossed over the footbridge to Platform Two — where she stood for twenty-five minutes, forgetting for a while the future plight of her mother; forgetting the minor role she herself had played in the murder of a man she had learned to hate; yet remembering again now, as she fingered the gold pendant, the man who had given it to her, the man for whom she would have sacrificed anything. If only he could have loved her.

It is now Friday, 28 October 1994, the Feast of St Simon and St Jude, and this chronicle has to be concluded, with brief space only remaining to record a few marginal notes on some of the characters who played their roles in these pages.

On Thursday, 20 October, Mrs Brenda Brooks was re-arrested, additionally charged with the murder of her husband, Mr Edward Brooks, and remanded in custody at Holloway Prison. From which institution, four days later, she was granted temporary leave of (escorted) absence to attend a midday funeral service at the Oxford Crematorium, where many teachers from the Proctor Memorial School were squeezed into the small chapel there, together with a few relatives, and a few friends — though the couple from California were unable to make the journey at such short notice.

Two others completed (almost completed)the saddened congregation: the facially scarred Kevin Costyn and a pale-looking Chief Inspector Morse, neither of whom participated in (what seemed to the latter) the banal revision of Archbishop Cranmer’s noble words for the solemn service of the dead.

And one other mourner: a dark-suited, prosperous-looking, middle-aged man, who went last of all into the chapel; and sat down, as it happened, next to Morse, on the back row of the left-hand side of the aisle. A minute earlier, wholly unobserved, he had added his own floral tribute to the many others laid out in the Garden of Remembrance there: a wreath of white lilies. The card attached bore no salutation, no valediction — just the same words that Julia Stevens had read on a birthday card some eighteen months before:

‘Don’t forget we had some good times too!’

St Giles’s (enforced) new home is some little way from Oxford. Yet that aristocratic cat is not displeased with his environment — particularly with the wildlife opportunities offered in the open field just behind Number 22, Kingfisher Way, Bicester; and with the soft, beige leather settee on which he now sleeps for long stretches of the day until his attractive young mistress returns from her duties at the Oxford University Press.

Janis Lawrence, only temporarily she trusts, is now unemployed once more; and her familiar, exasperated ‘Stop frowin’ them bricks, Jason!’ is still often to be heard in the streets of the Cutteslowe Estate.

On the whole, Mrs Lewis is well pleased with the work of the decorators; and extremely pleased with her husband’s present to her of a new set of five black-handled knives, including one (Number 4) whose blade, unusually broad at its base, curves to a dangerous looking point.

The former dwelling of Dr Felix McClure has now been on the market for two weeks, its lounge completely re-carpeted. But Mrs (Miss?) Laura Wynne-Wilson, though maintaining a dedicated vigil behind her carefully parted lace curtains, has yet to spot any prospective client arriving to view the property. And Messrs Adkinson, renowned for their meticulous room-measurements, are a little worried that the vicious murder enacted in Number 6 has, quite understandably, postponed the prospect of any immediate purchase.

And what of Morse?

His proposed lunchtime meeting with Strange, with a view to launching a twin assault on the complexities of form-filling, has not yet been arranged; and Morse is not pursuing the matter with any sense of great urgency, since he is undecided about the ‘sooner or later’ of his own eventual retirement, and curiously unsettled about the immediate months ahead of him…

He knew, of course, that it would be utterly hopeless to ring Ellie Smith, and therefore he rang her number only three times in the week following her disappearance; only twice in the second week. After all, as Morse recalled from his believing days, Hope is one of the greatest of all the Christian virtues.

In the third week, his normal routine in life appeared to reassert itself; and at about 9.30 p.m. he was again regularly to be observed walking fairly purposefully down the Banbury Road to one of the local hostelries. He has promised himself most faithfully that he will dramatically curtail his consumption of alcohol wef 1 November; which same day will also mark his permanent renunciation of nicotine.

In the meantime there is much work still to be done in the aftermath of the case — the aftermath of both cases, rather. And above all else in Morse’s life there remains the searching out of Ellie Smith, since as a police officer that is his professional duty and, as a man, his necessary purpose.