Colin Dexter - The Jewel That Was Ours

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'What are you doing here?' he asked.

'Annual Dance. Lit and Phil Society. Bloody booring!'

'You with a partner?'

'You don't come to these do's without a partner.'

'So?'

'So he kept trying to get a bit too intimate during the Veleta.'

'Veleta? God! That's what I used to dance. '

'We're none of us getting much younger.'

'And you didn't want — you didn't want that?'

'I wanted a drink. That's why I'm here.'

'And you told him. '

'. to bugger off.'

Morse looked at her now — perhaps properly for the first time. She wore a black dress reaching to just above her knees, suspended from her shoulders by straps no thicker than shoe-laces; black stockings, encasing surprisingly slim legs, and very high-heeled red shoes that elevated her an inch or so above Morse as he stood up and offered her his stool. He smiled at her, with what seemed warmth and understanding in his eyes.

'You look happy,' she said.

But Morse knew, deep down, that he wasn't really happy at all. For the last hour his progressively alcoholised brain had reminded him of the consequences of justice (small 'j'): of bringing a criminal before the courts, ensuring that he was convicted for his sins (or was it his crimes?), and then getting him locked up for the rest of his life, perhaps, in a prison where he would never again go to the WC without someone observing such an embarrassingly private function, someone smelling him, someone humiliating him. (And, yes, it was a him.) Humiliating him in that little paddock of privacy just outside the back of the house where he would try so hard to keep all that remained of his dignity and self-esteem.

'I'm not happy,' said Morse.

'Why not?'

'G and T, is it?'

'How did you guess?'

'I'm a genius.'

'I'm quite good at some things myself.'

'Yes?'

'Do you want me to make you happy for tonight?' Her voice was suddenly more sober, more sharply etched — and yet more gentle, too.

Morse looked at her: looked at the piled-up hair above her wistful face; looked down at the full and observably bra-less bosom; looked down at the taut stretch of black stocking between the knee and the thigh of her crossed right leg. He was ready for her, and she seemed to sense it.

'I've got a wonderfully comfortable bed,' she whispered into his left ear.

'So have I!' said Morse, oddly defensive.

'But we wouldn't argue too much about that sort of thing, would we?' Sheila smiled and reached for her drink. 'Aren't you having another one?'

Morse shook his head: ' "It provokes the desire, but it takes away the performance." '

'Do you know, I've never met anyone before who's quoted that thing correctly.'

Perhaps she shouldn't have said it, for suddenly its implications stirred Morse to an irrational jealousy. But soon, as she linked her arm possessively through his, collected her coat from Cloaks, then steered him across towards the taxi-rank in St. Giles', he knew that his lust for her had returned; and would remain.

'I ought to make it quite clear to you, ma'am,' he murmured in the taxi, 'that any knickers you may be wearing may well be taken down and used in evidence.'

For the first time in many days, Sheila Williams felt inordinately happy. And was to remain so — if truth is to be told — until the early dawn of the following day when Morse left her to walk slowly to his bachelor flat — only a short distance away up the Banbury Road — bareheaded in the beating rain which an hour since had obliquely streaked the windows of Sheila Williams's front bedroom.

CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame

( Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway)

MORSE AND LEWIS arrived at the Chesterton Hotel in Bath at 10.35 a.m. the following morning. Morse had insisted on travelling by what he called the 'scenic' route — via Cirencester — but, alas, the countryside was not appearing at its best: the golden days were gone, and the close-cropped fields where the sheep ever nibbled looked dank and uninviting under a sky-cover of grey cloud. Little conversation had passed between the two detectives until, an hour out of Oxford, Morse (looking, as Lewis saw him, still rather tired) had crossed those final 't's.

'All a bit unusual, though, isn't it, sir?'

'You think so?'

'I do. About as unusual as a. ' But Lewis found himself unable to dredge up the appropriate simile.

' "Unusual as a fat postman",' supplied Morse.

'Really? Our postman looks as if he tips the scales at about twenty stone.'

Morse inhaled deeply upon yet another cigarette, half closed his eyes, shook his head, and relapsed into the silence that was customary for him on any journey.

Behind, in a marked police car, Sergeant Dixon sat beside his driver, a moderately excited PC Watson.

'Drives pretty quick, don't he?' ventured the latter.

' 'Bout the only thing he does do quick, I reckon,' said Dixon.

It seemed to Watson a cruel, unfair remark. And Dixon himself knew it was unfair, for a little while regretting having said it.

It had been forty-five minutes earlier when Dr. Barbara Moule had parked her Fiesta at the Chesterton Hotel, finding John Ashenden waiting for her a little anxiously. The first part of her illustrated lecture was scheduled for 10–11 a.m., followed by a coffee break, and then further slides and questions from 11.30 to noon. Ashenden himself had carried the heavy projector to the Beau Nash Room at the rear of the hotel, where most of the tourists were now foregathering. The room was of a narrow, oblong shape, with the plastic chairs set out two on each side of the central gap in which, at the front, the projector was placed. Looking around, Ashenden noted yet again the readily observable fact that (doubtless like animals) tourists from very early on staked out their territories: find them sitting at one particular table for dinner and almost invariably, for breakfast next morning, you would find them sitting at the very same table; allocate them to particular seats in a coach on the first part of a journey, and as if by some proprietorial right the passengers would thereafter usually veer towards those selfsame seats. And the Beau Nash Room might just as well have been their luxury coach: twenty-three of them only for the minute, with Eddie Stratton now being held in custody by the New York Police, distanced by only a few yards, as it happened, from the mortal remains of his former wife; and with Sam and Vera Kronquist, one of the three married couples originally listed on the tour, still in their room on the second floor of the hotel — Sam watching a mid-morning cartoon on ITV, and Vera, fully dressed, lying back lazily against the pillows of their double bed, reading the previous February's issue of Country Life.

'You won't forget, Birdy' (Birdy?) 'that you're supposed to be having a headache, will you?'

His wife, not deigning to look up from the page, smiled to herself slightly. 'Nobody ain't coming in here, Sam — not if we leave that notice there on the door-narb.'

On the front row of the Beau Nash Room, only one of the chairs was occupied — Number 1, if the chairs had been numbered, from left to right, 1,2,3,4—the seat Janet Roscoe had invariably occupied on every single leg of the coach trip. Behind her the two seats were empty, a troublous reminder of where Eddie and Laura had sat side by side when the coach had first set off from Heathrow Airport. had first arrived at the eastern outskirts of Oxford.

At the back of the room, solitary now, and perfectly prepared to be wholly bored for the next hour (or was it two?) sat Mr. Aldrich. His interest in Roman remains was minimal, and in any case his ears (incipient otosclerosis, his personal physician had diagnosed) seemed to be filling up with thicker and thicker wads of cotton-wool each day. He would have liked to exchange a few words with Cedric Downes at Oxford — surely a man suffering from the same kind of trouble? But the opportunity had not arisen, and Aldrich had taken no initiative in effecting any introduction.