Colin Dexter - Death Is Now My Neighbor

Wednesday, February 21

Orandum est ut sit mens sana in corpore sano.

(Our aim? Just a brain that’s not addled with pox,

And a guaranteed clean bill-of-health from the docs.)

The next meeting of the Lonsdale Fellows had been convened for 10 A.M.

In the Stamper Room.

William Leslie Stamper, b. 1880, had graduated from Oxford University in 1903 with the highest marks (it is said) ever recorded in Classical Moderations. The bracketed caveat in the previous sentence would be unnecessary were it not that the claim for such distinction was perpetuated, in later years, by one person only — by W. L. Stamper himself. And it is pointless to dwell upon the matter since no independent verification is available: The relevant records had been removed from Oxford to a safe place, thereafter never to be seen again, during the First World War — a war in which Stamper had not been an active participant, owing to an illness which was unlikely to prolong his eminently promising career as a don for more than a couple of years or so. Such nonparticipation in the great events of 1914–18 was a major sadness (it is said) to Stamper himself, who was frequently heard to lament his own failure to figure among the casualty lists from the fields of Flanders or Passchendaele.

Now, the reader may readily be forgiven for assuming from the preceding paragraph that Stamper had been a timeserver; a dissembling self-seeker. Yet such an assumption is highly questionable, though not necessarily untrue. When, for example, in 1925, the Mastership of Lonsdale fell vacant, and nominations were sought amid the groves of Academe, Stamper had refused to let his name go forward, on the grounds that if ten years earlier he had been declared unfit to fight in defense of his country he could hardly be considered fit to undertake the governance of the College; specifically so, since the Statutes stipulated a candidate whose body was no less healthy than his brain.

Thereafter, in his gentle, scholarly, pedantic manner, Stamper had passed his years teaching the esoteric skills of Greek Prose and Verse Composition — until retiring at the age of sixty-five, two years before the statutory limit, on the grounds of ill health. No one, certainly not Stamper himself (it is said), anticipated any significant continuation of his life, and the College Fellows unanimously backed a proposal that the dear old boy should have the privilege, during the few remaining years of his life, of living in the finest set of rooms that the College had to offer.

Thus it was that the legendary Stamper had stayed on in Lonsdale as an honorary Emeritus Fellow, with full dining rights, from the year of his retirement, 1945, to 1955; and then to 1965... and 1975; and almost indeed until 1985, when he had finally died at the age of 104 — and then not through any dysfunction of the bodily organs, but from a fall beside his rooms in the front quad after a heavy bout of drinking at a Gaudy, his last words (it is said) being a whispered request for the Madeira to be passed round once again.

The agenda which lay before Sir Clixby Bream and his colleagues that morning was short and fairly straightforward:

(i) To receive apologies for absence

(ii) To approve the minutes of the previous meeting (already circulated)

(iii) To consider the Auditors’ statement on College expenditure, Michaelmas 1995

(iv) To recommend appropriate procedures for the election of a new Master

(v) AOB

Items (i)-(iii) took only three minutes, and would have taken only one, had not the Tutor for Admissions sought an explanation of why the “Stationery, etc.” bill for the College Office had risen by four times the current rate of inflation. For which increase the Domestic Bursar admitted full responsibility, since instead of ordering 250 Biros he had inadvertently ordered 250 boxes of Biros.

This confession put the meeting into good humor, as it passed on to item (iv).

The Master briefly restated the criteria to be met by potential applicants: first, that he be not in Holy Orders; second, that he be mentally competent, and particularly so in the “Skills of the Arithmetick” (as the original Statute had it); third, that he be free from serious bodily infirmity. On the second criterion, the Master suggested that since it was now virtually impossible (a gentle glance here at the innumerate Professor of Arabic) to fail GCSE Mathematics, there could be little problem for anyone. As far as the third criterion was concerned however (the Master grew more solemn now) there was a sad announcement he had to make. One name previously put forward had been withdrawn — that of Dr. Ridgeway, the brilliant microbiologist from Balliol, who had developed serious heart trouble at the comparatively youthful age of forty-three.

Amid murmurs of commiseration round the table, the Master continued:

“Therefore, gentlemen, we are left with two nominations only... unless we... unless anyone...? No?”

No.

Well, that was pleasing, the Master declared: He had always wished his successor to be appointed from within the College. And so it would be. Voting would take place in the time-honored way: A single sheet of paper bearing the handwritten name of the preferred candidate, with the signature of the Voting Fellow beneath it, must be delivered to the Master’s Lodge before noon on the nineteenth of March, one month away.

The Master proceeded to wish the two candidates well; and Julian Storrs and Denis Cornford, by chance seated next to each other, shook hands smilingly, like a couple of boxers before the weigh-in for a bruising fight.

That was not quite all.

Under AOB, the Tutor for Admissions was moved to make his second contribution of the morning.

“Perhaps it may be possible, Master, in view of the current plethora of pens in the College Office, for the Domestic Bursar to send us each a free Biro with which we can write down our considered choices for Master?”

It was a nice touch, typical of an Oxford SCR; and when at 10:20 A.M. they left the Stamper Room and moved outside into the front quad, most of the Fellows were grinning happily.

But not the Domestic Bursar.

Nor Julian Storrs.

Nor Denis Cornford.

The virtue of the camera is not the power it has to transform the photographer into an artist, but the impulse it gives him to keep on looking — and looking.

Earlier that same morning Morse and Lewis had been sitting together drinking coffee in the canteen at Kidlington Police HQ.

“Well, that’s them!” said an unwontedly ungrammatical Morse as he pointed to the photograph which some darkroom boy had managed to enlarge and enhance. “Our one big clue, that; one small clue, anyway.”

As Lewis saw things, the enlargement appeared to have been reasonably effective as far as the clothing was concerned; yet to be truthful, the promised “enhancement” of the two faces, those of the murdered woman and of the man so close beside her, seemed to have blurred rather than focused any physiognomical detail.

“Well?” asked Morse.

“Worse than the original.”

“Nonsense! Look at that.” Morse pointed to the tight triangular knot of the man’s tie, which appeared — just — above a high-necked gray sweater.

Yes. Lewis acknowledged that the color and pattern of the tie were perhaps a little clearer.

“I think I almost recognize that tie,” continued Morse slowly. “That deepish maroon color. And that,” he pointed again, “that narrow white stripe...”

“We never had ties at school,” ventured Lewis.

But Morse was too deeply engrossed to bother about his sergeant’s former school uniform, or lack of it, as with a magnifying glass he sought further to enhance the texture of the small relevant area of the photograph.