Colin Dexter - Death Is Now My Neighbor

“No, not sure at all. Next question?”

“Why didn’t everybody hear the shot?” (The same young, ginger-headed reporter.)

“Silencer, perhaps?”

“There’d be the sound of breaking glass surely?” (A logically minded man from the Oxford Star. )

A series of hand gestures and silent lip movements from the TV crew urged Lewis to look directly into the camera.

Lewis nodded. “Yes. In fact several of the neighbors think they heard something — two of them certainly did. But it could have been lots of things, couldn’t it?”

“Such as?” (The importunate ginger knob again.)

Lewis shrugged. “Could have been the milkman dropping a bottle—?”

“No broken glass here, though, Sergeant.”

“Car backfiring? We don’t know.”

“Does what the neighbors heard fit in with the time all right?” (The TV interviewer with his fluffy cylindrical microphone.)

“Pretty well, yes.”

The senior reporter from the Oxford Mail had hitherto held his peace. But now he asked a curious question, if it was a question:

“Not the two immediate neighbors, were they?”

Lewis looked at the man with some interest.

“Why do you say that?”

“Well, the woman who lives there,” a finger pointed to Number 19, “she was probably still asleep at the time, and she’s stone-deaf without her hearing aid.”

“Really?”

“And the man who lives there,” a finger pointed to Number 15, “he’d already left for work.”

Lewis frowned. “Can you tell me how you happen to know all this, sir?”

“No problem,” replied Geoffrey Owens. “You see, Sergeant, I live at Number 15.”

Where lovers lie with ardent glow,

Where fondly each forever hears

The creaking of the bed below—

Above, the music of the spheres.

When Lewis returned from his encounter with the media, Morse was almost ready to leave the murder house. The morning had moved toward noon, and he knew that he might be thinking a little more clearly if he were drinking a little — or at least be starting to think when he started to drink.

“Is there a real-ale pub somewhere near?”

Lewis, pleasantly gratified with his handling of the Press and TV, was emboldened to sound a note of caution.

“Doesn’t do your liver much good — all this drinking.”

Surprisingly Morse appeared to accept the reminder with modest grace.

“I’m sure you’re right; but my medical advisers have warned me it may well be unwise to give up alcohol at my age.”

Lewis was not impressed, for he had heard the same words — exactly the same words — on several previous occasions.

“You’ve had a good look around, sir?”

“Not really. I know I always find the important things. But I want you to have a look around. You usually manage to find the un important things — and often they’re the things that really matter in the end.”

Lewis made little attempt to disguise his pleasure, and straightway relented.

“We could go up to the Boat at Thrupp?”

“Excellent.”

“You don’t want to stay here any longer?”

“No. The SOCOs’ll be another couple of hours yet.”

“You don’t want to see... her again?”

Morse shook his head. “I know what she looks like — looked like.” He picked up two colored photographs and one postcard, and made toward the front door, handing over the keys of the maroon Jaguar to Lewis. “You’d better drive — if you promise to stick to the orange juice.”

Once on their way, Lewis reported the extraordinarily strange coincidence of the pressman, Owens, living next door to the murdered woman. But Morse, who always looked upon any coincidence in life as the norm rather than the exception, was more anxious to set forth the firm details he had himself now gleaned about Ms. Rachel James, for there could now be no real doubt of her identity.

“Twenty-nine. Single. No offspring. Worked as a freelance physiotherapist at a place in the Banbury Road. CV says she went to school at Torquay Comprehensive; left there in 1984 with a clutch of competent O-levels, three A-levels — two Bs, in Biology and Geography, and an E in Media Studies.”

“Must have been fairly bright.”

“What do you mean? You need to be a moron to get an E in Media Studies,” asserted Morse, who had never seen so much as a page of any Media Studies syllabus, let alone a question paper.

He continued:

“Parents, as you know, still alive, on their way here—”

“You’ll want me to see them?”

“Well, you are good at that sort of thing, aren’t you? And if the mother’s like most women she’ll probably smell the beer as soon as I open the door.”

“Good reason for you to join me on the orange juice.”

Morse ignored the suggestion. “She bought the property there just over four years ago for £65,000 and the value’s been falling ever since by the look of things, so the poor lass is one of those figuring in the negative equity statistics; took out a mortgage of £55,000 — probably Mom and Dad gave her the other £10,000; and the salable value of Number 17 is now £40,000, at the most.”

“Bought at the wrong time, sir. But some people were a bit irresponsible, don’t you think?”

“I’m not an economist, as you know, Lewis. But I’ll tell you what would have helped her. Helped so many in her boots.”

“A win on the National Lottery?”

“Wouldn’t help many , that, would it? No. What she could have done with is a healthy dose of inflation. It’s a good thing — inflation — you know. Especially for people who’ve got nothing to start with. One of the best things that happened to some of us. One year I remember I had three jumps in salary.”

“Not many would agree with you on that, though, would they? Conservative and Labor both agree about inflation.”

“Ah! Messrs. Bull and Thomas, you mean?”

“You noticed the stickers?”

“I notice most things. It’s just that some of them don’t register — not immediately.”

“What’ll you have, sir?”

“Lew-is! We’ve known each other long enough, surely.”

As Morse tasted the hostelry’s best bitter, he passed over a photograph of Rachel James.

“Best one of her I could find.”

Lewis looked down at the young woman.

“Real good looker,” he said softly.

Morse nodded. “I bet she’d have set a few hearts all aflutter.”

“Including yours, sir?”

Morse drank deeply on his beer before replying. “She’d probably have a good few boyfriends, that’s all I’m suggesting. As for my own potential susceptibility, that’s beside the point.”

“Of course.” Lewis smiled good-naturedly. “What else have we got?”

“What do you make of this? One of the few interesting things there, as far as I could see.”

Lewis now considered the postcard handed to him. First, the picture on the front: a photograph of a woodland ride, with a sunlit path on the left, and a pool of azured bluebells to the right. Then turning over the card, he read the cramped lines amateurishly typed on the left-hand side:

Ten Times I beg, dear Heart, let’s Wed!

(Thereafter long may Cupid reigne)

Let’s tread the Aisle, where thou hast led

The fifteen Bridesmaides in thy Traine.

Then spend our honeyed Moon a-bed ,

With Springs that creake againe— againe!

—John Wilmot, 1672

That was all.

No salutation.

No valediction.

And on the right-hand side of the postcard — nothing: no address, with the four dotted, parallel lines devoid of any writing, the top right-hand rectangle devoid of any stamp.