Colin Dexter - Morse’s Greatest Mystery and other stories

“Don’t underrate yourself, Lewis! Let others do it for you.”

Lewis grunted humourlessly. “I’m like a second-class stamp, and well you know it.”

“But second-class stamps usually get there in the end.”

“Exactly. Just take a dickens of a lot longer—”

“Slowdown!”

Morse had been consulting an Oxford street plan, and now jabbed a finger to his right.

“That’s it, Lewis: Jowett Place. What number did you say?”

“Probably where those two police cars are parked, sir.”

Morse grinned weakly. “Maintain that level of deductive brilliance, Lewis, and we’ll be through this case before the pubs are open.”

It was 8:50 on the dull, intermittently drizzly morning of Monday, 15 February 1993.

The Oxford City Police had contacted Kidlington CID an hour or so earlier after receiving a 999 call from one Paul Bayley, first-floor tenant of the narrow, two-storey property that stood at 14 Jowett Place. Bayley, an erstwhile History graduate from Magdalen College, Oxford, had found himself out of milk that morning — had walked downstairs — knocked on the door of the woman tenant directly below him, Ms. Sheila Poster — had found the door unlocked — and there...

Or so he said.

Morse looked down at the fully dressed woman lying just inside the ground-floor living-room, the left arm extended, the pleasingly manicured fingernails straining, it appeared, to reach the door. Beneath and in front of the body was a distressingly copious pool of dully matted blood; and although the weapon had been removed it was possible even for such a non-medical man as Morse to unjumble the simple truth that the woman had most probably been stabbed through the heart. Longish dark curls framed the pale face — from which the large brown eyes now stared, for ever fixedly, at a threadbare square of the lime-green carpet.

“Lovely looking girl,” said Lewis quietly.

Morse averted his eyes from the terrible sight, glanced across the the curtained window, then stepped outside the room into the narrow hallway, where Dr. Laura Hobson, the police pathologist, stood in subdued conference with a scene-of-crime officer.

“She’s all yours,” said Morse, in a tone suggesting that the abdication of responsibility for the body was something of a relief. As indeed it was, for Morse had always recoiled from the sight of violent death.

“Funny name — ‘Poster’!” volunteered Lewis as the two detectives stepped up the narrow stairs of Number 14.

“Is it?” asked Morse, his voice betraying no real interest in the matter.

Bayley was sitting beside a police constable in his untidy living room — a large-buttocked, lank-haired, yet handsome sort of fellow, in his late twenties perhaps; unshaven, pony-tailed, with a small earring in his left ear. To whom, predictably, Morse took an instant and intense dislike.

He had been out drinking (Bayley claimed) throughout most of the previous evening, not leaving the King’s Arms in Broad Street until closing time. After which he’d gone back to a friend’s flat to continue the celebrations, and in fact had slept there — before returning to Jowett Place at about a quarter past seven that morning. The rest he’d already told the police, OK?

As he gave his evidence, Bayley’s hands were nervously opening and closing the Penguin translation of Virgil’s Aeneid , and Morse noted (again with distaste) the lines of ingrained dirt beneath the fingernails.

“You slept with a woman last night?”

Bayley nodded, eyes downcast.

“We shall have to know her name — my sergeant here will have to check with her. You understand that?”

Again Bayley nodded. “I suppose so, yes.”

“You didn’t leave her at all?”

“Went to the loo coupla times.”

“You in the habit of sleeping around?”

“I wouldn’t put it like that, no.”

“Ever sleep with — with the woman downstairs?”

“Sheila? No, never.”

“Ever ask her?”

“Once.”

“And?”

“She said if we were going to have a relationship it would have to be cerebral — not conjugal.”

“Quite a way with words she had, then?”

“You could say that.”

“When did you last speak to her?”

“Week or so ago? We were talking — she was talking — about epic poetry. She... lent me this... this book. I was going to give it back to her... today.”

Lewis looked away in some embarrassment as a curtain of tears now covered Bayley’s eyes; but for a while longer Morse himself continued to stare cynically at the young man seated opposite him.

Downstairs, in the second of the two rooms which (along with the kitchen) were offered for rent at 14 Jowett Place, Morse contemplated the double bed in which, presumably, the murdered tenant had usually slumbered overnight. Two fluffy pillows concealed a full-length, bottle-green nightdress, which Morse now fingered lightly before turning back the William-Morris-patterned duvet and examining the undersheet.

“No sign of any recent nocturnal emissions, sir.”

“You have a genteel way of putting things,” said Morse.

The room was sparsely furnished, sparely ornamented — with a large mahogany wardrobe taking up most of the space left by the bed. On the bedside table stood a lamp; an alarm clock; a box containing half a dozen items of cheap jewellery; and a single book: Reflections on Inspiration and Creativity , by Diogenes Small (Macmillan, £14.99).

Picking up the latter, Morse opened its pages at the point where a blue leather bookmarker (“Greetings from Erzincan”) had been placed — and then with no obvious enthusiasm read aloud the few sentences which had been highlighted in the text with a yellow felt-tipped pen:

Obviously our writer will draw upon character and incident taken from personal experience. Inevitably so. Laudibly so. Yet always it is those fictional addenda which will effect the true alchemy; which will elevate our earth-bound artist, and send him forth high-floating on the wings of freedom and creativity.

“Bloody ’ell!”

“Pardon, sir?”

“Can’t even spell,” muttered Morse, as Lewis picked up the bookmarker.

“Where’s Erzincan?”

“Dunno. When I was at school we had to do one of the three ’G’s: Greek, German, or Geography.”

“And you didn’t do Geography...”

But a silent Morse was standing now at the window (curtains drawn back) which looked out onto a patch of leaf-carpeted lawn at the rear of the house. Strangely, something had stirred deep down in his mind, like the opening chords of Das Rheingold; chords that for the moment, though, remained below his audial range.

Lewis opened the wardrobe doors, exposing a modest collection of dresses and coats hanging from the rail; and half a dozen pairs of cheap shoes stowed neatly along the bottom.

Overhead they heard the creaking of floorboards as someone — must be Bayley? — paced continuously to and fro. And Morse’s eyes rose slowly to the ceiling.

But he said nothing.

Neither the bedroom nor the kitchen had yielded anything of significant interest; and Morse was anxious to hear Dr. Hobson’s verdict, however tentative, when half an hour later she emerged from the murder-room.

“Sharp knife by the look of things — second attempt — probably entering from above. Bled an awful lot — as you saw... still, most of us would — with the knife-blade through the heart. Shouldn’t be too difficult to be fairly precise about the time — I’ll be having a closer look, of course — but I’d guess, say, eight to ten hours ago? No longer, I don’t think. Eleven o’clock, twelve o’clock last night?”

“After the pubs had closed.”