Colin Dexter - Morse’s Greatest Mystery and other stories

“How long would they be? Watching that stuff?”

“Dunno, really. Couple of hours? Bit longer? Till the booze runs out? Some of ’em tell me they get a little bit bored — after a while. But I don’t reckon they’re going to get bored too quickly with this little lot.”

Muldoon sat silent for a while.

Muldoon sat silent for a considerable while.

Finally he breathed in deeply, held his breath — and exhaled, noisily.

Then he lit yet another cigarette.

And another little corner of his resolution was collapsing. Had collapsed.

“Tomorrow, you say?”

Phew!

Outside the re-locked room, Inspector Crawford also exhaled, though silently. And to Sergeant Wilkins, standing at the far end of the corridor, he gave a faint smile, and raised his right fist to shoulder-level, the thumb upstandingly proud like some membrum virile blessed with a joyous erection.

After returning from Inspector Crawford’s room late that same afternoon, Sergeant Lewis found Morse seated at his desk, The Times in front of him, looking grim — and smoking a cigarette. It seemed to Lewis, in view of the tight-lipped taciturnity hitherto observed between the pair of them throughout the day, that it was the latter activity which afforded the more promising ice-breaker.

“I thought you’d given up, sir?”

“I have — many times. In fact I’ve given up smoking more often than anyone else in the history of the habit. By rights I should have a paragraph all to myself in The Guinness Book of Records.”

The tone of Morse’s words was light enough, perhaps, but the underlying mood was sombre.

And Lewis, too, as he sat down, looked far from happy with himself.

“You told me off good and proper last night, didn’t you, sir? And I deserved it. You were right To be truthful, I wish I’d taken a bit more notice of you.”

“Why this sudden change of heart?”

“Well, it’s getting... it’s getting all a bit involved and underhand—”

“Dishonest.”

“Yes... and messy.”

The hard lines on Morse’s face relaxed somewhat. “You can hardly expect the sort of classical economy and purity of line you get when you’re working with me! Crawford’s a cretin — that’s common knowledge, isn’t it?”

“No he’s not! It’s just that — well, I don’t honestly think he’s all that bright.”

“Your judgement is reasserting itself, Sergeant.”

Lewis was silent.

“Come on. You know you’re dying to tell me all about it.”

“I thought you didn’t want anything to do with it.”

“How right you are!” snapped Morse bitterly.

He got up and took his mackintosh off its peg.

A persistent drizzle had stippled the window that looked out over the car-park — a window through which Lewis had so often seen Morse gazing as he grappled in his mind with the problems of a case.

Saw him so gazing now; but only for a few seconds, before he put on his mackintosh and walked to the door.

“Make sure you lock up! If there’s some crook around prepared to pinch an empty can of Beamish, what the hell’s he going to do with my Glenfiddich? Goo’ night!”

The door slammed, and Morse was gone.

But Lewis heard no footsteps along the corridor; and twenty seconds later the door re-opened slowly, and Morse stepped back into his office.

“It would help, Lewis, wouldn’t it, if you told me what’s worrying you.”

“Yes,” replied Lewis simply.

“You should have told me earlier.”

“You looked, well, pretty grim, sir.”

“What? Oh, that! That was just me — not you. Six minutes — to the second almost — with the crossword! Would have been just about the record — except for one clue: I couldn’t do 14 across. Still can’t do bloody 14 across.”

“Shall I have a look at it?”

“You? Fat lot o’ use that’d be!”

Lewis looked down at the threadbare patch of off-white carpet on his own side of Morse’s desk.

“If you could spare five minutes, sir — I’d feel a lot happier.”

Morse took off his mackintosh, replaced it on its peg, and resumed his seat in the black-leather armchair behind his desk.

As Morse now began to see, Crawford’s scheme hardly matched the strategic genius of Napoleon at Austerlitz, or NASA in planning one of its moon missions...

At 20:30, an hour after lighting-up time, on Thursday, 31 March, Muldoon, handcuffed to a police officer, his head concealed from any inquisitive public or press intrusion beneath a grey prison blanket, would be taken from Oxford Prison in an unmarked police van. The outing had already been sanctioned (no problem) “in pursuance of corroborative or associative evidence.” No one had ever understood this long-winded phrase, yet it had the merit of sounding most impressive.

The prisoner would be taken first to Jericho, then to Botley; shown over the two properties in question; and invited, on each occasion, to make a brief statement. This, in truth, in the interests of verisimilitude only. Yet (as Crawford maintained) there was always just the possibility that Muldoon would say something of value. Prisoners had grassed in the past; prisoners would grass in the future.

Thereafter things would become a little more complicated.

Muldoon would then be informed that the reward for his co-operation lay some ten miles away, along the A40, in a police-house in Witney. In fact, the van would be driven out from Botley on to the western Ring Road; and, after a suitably convincing “ten-mile” detour, would land up in the Blackbird Leys Estate, on the eastern side of Oxford, beyond the Rover car-plant at Cowley.

At which point, Crawford’s careful, albeit clumsy, planning would enter its critical phase.

The outward appearance of Bannister Close might well be fairly familiar to Muldoon. Although he had visited the flat only once (as it appeared) there was the real possibility that he might recognize some aspect of the block — its architectural style, its black-painted balcony, the colours of its doors and windows — even in semi-darkness. And no risks could be taken.

Therefore...

Muldoon, still handcuffed, would be dropped off at the rear of the block, where a main road ran behind the back of the properties. In the interests of public safety a five-foot fence of vertical wooden slats had been erected to separate this road from Bannister Close. But as in so many parts of the Estate, vandals had been at work here too, and several irregular gaps had been kicked through the fencing; and (Crawford had done his homework) there was a most convenient opening, two or three feet wide, in the stretch almost immediately behind Number 14.

Easy.

And since a fairly steep grassy slope led down from the fence to the concreted path running beside the rear entrance to the flats, it seemed wholly unlikely that a man with only one leg was going to be too deeply engrossed in his environment.

The flat originally raided was on the first floor, with access only via an external stairway, one at each end of the block. But by a stroke of good fortune, the flat beneath it, on the ground floor, was empty; had been empty for several months — the For Sale notice stuck into the scratty patch of weedy waste which passed itself off in the property’s specification as “a small front garden.” And it was to be in the living-room of this flat (Crawford had decreed) that the scene was to be set: off screen, and on screen, as it were.