Colin Dexter - Death Is Now My Neighbor

“What are your chances — honestly?”

“Hope is a Christian virtue, you know that.”

“Christ! Can’t you think of anything better to say than that?”

He was silent awhile. “It means a lot to you, Angela, doesn’t it?”

“It means a lot to you, too,” she replied, allowing her slow words to take their full effect “It does , doesn’t it?”

“Yes,” he replied softly, “it means almost everything to me.”

Angela got up and poured herself another martini.

“I’m glad you said that. You know why? Because it doesn’t just mean almost everything to me — it means literally everything. I want to be the Master’s Wife, Julian. I want to be Lady Angela! Do you understand how much I want that?”

“Yes... yes, I think I do.”

“So... so if we have to engage in any ‘dirty tricks’ business...”

“What d’you mean?”

“Nothing specific.”

“What d’you mean?” he repeated.

“As I say...”

“Come on! Tell me!”

“Well, let’s say if it became known in the College that Shelly Cornford was an insatiable nymphomaniac...?”

“That just isn’t fair !”

Angela Storrs got to her feet and drained the last drop of her third drink:

“Who said it was ?”

“Where are you going?”

“Upstairs, for a lie down, if you don’t object. I’d had a few before you got back — hadn’t you noticed? But I don’t suppose so, no. You haven’t really noticed me much at all recently, have you?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

But she was already leaving the room, and seemed not to hear.

Storrs took another small sip of his brandy, and pulled the copy of the previous evening’s Oxford Mail from the lower shelf of the coffee table, its front-page headline staring at him again:

“What did you tell Denis?”

“He’s got a tutorial, anyway. I just said I’d be out shopping.”

“He told you about the College Meeting?”

She nodded.

“You pleased?”

“Uh, uh!”

“It’ll be a bit of a nerve-racking time for you.”

“You should know!”

“Only a month of it, though.”

“What d’you think his chances are?”

“Difficult to say.”

“Will you vote for him?”

“I don’t have a vote.”

“Unless it’s a tie.”

“Agreed. But that’s unlikely, they tell me. Arithmetically quite impossible — if all twenty-three Fellows decide to vote.”

“So you won’t really have much say in things at all.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that. I’ll be a bit surprised if one or two of the Fellows don’t ask me for a little advice about, er, about their choice.”

“And?”

“And I shall try to be helpful.”

“To Denis, you mean?”

“Now I didn’t say that, did I?”

The great cooling towers of Didcot power station loomed into view on the left, and for a while little more was said as the two of them continued the drive south along the A34, before turning off, just before the Ridgeway, toward the charming little village of West Ilsley.

“I feel I’m letting poor old Denis down a bit,” he said, as the dark blue Daimler pulled up in front of the village pub.

“Don’t you think I do?” she snapped. “But I don’t keep on about it.”

At the bar, he ordered a dry white wine for Shelly Cornford and a pint of Old Speckled Hen for himself; and the pair of them studied the Egon Ronay menu chalked up on a blackboard before making their choices, and sitting down at a window table overlooking the sodden village green.

“Do you think we should stop meeting?” He asked it quietly.

She appeared to consider the question more as an exercise in logical evaluation than as any emotional dilemma.

“I don’t want that to happen.”

She brushed the back of her right wrist down the front of his dark gray suit.

“Pity we’ve ordered lunch,” he said quietly.

“We can always give it a miss.”

“Where shall we go?”

“Before we go anywhere, I shall want you to do something for me. ”

“You mean something for Denis?”

She nodded decisively.

“I can’t really promise you too much, you know that.”

She looked swiftly around the tables there, before moving her lips to his ear. “ I can, though. I can promise you everything, Clixby,” she whispered.

From his room in College, Denis Cornford had rung Shelly briefly just before 11 A.M. She’d be out later, as she’d mentioned, but he wanted to tell her about the College Meeting as soon as possible.

He told her.

He was pleased — she could sense that.

She was pleased — he could sense that.

Cornford had half an hour to spare before his next tutorial with a very bright first-year undergraduette from Nottingham who possessed one of the most astonishingly retentive memories he had ever encountered, and a pair of the loveliest legs that had ever folded themselves opposite him. Yet he experienced not even the mildest of erotic daydreams as now, briefly, he thought about her.

He walked over to the White Horse, the narrow pub between the two Blackwell’s shops just opposite the Sheldonian; and soon he was sipping a large Glenmorangie, and slowly coming to terms with the prospect that in a month’s time he might well be the Master of Lonsdale College. By nature a diffident man, he was for some curious reason beginning to feel a little more confident about his chances. Life was a funny business — and the favorite often failed to win the Derby, did it not?

Yes, odd things were likely to happen in life.

Against all the odds, as it were.

His black-stockinged student was sitting cross-legged on the wooden steps outside his room, getting to her feet as soon as she saw him. Being with Cornford, talking with him for an hour every week — that had become the highlight of her time at Oxford. But History was the great fascination in his life — not her.

She knew that.

Prosōpagnoia(n.): the failure of any person to recognize the face of any other person, howsoever recently the aforementioned persons may have mingled in each other’s company.

— Small’s Enlarged English Dictionary ,

13th Edition, 1806

From Oxford railway station, at 10:20 A.M., Lewis had tried to ring Morse at HQ. But to no avail. The dramatic news would have to wait awhile, and at least Lewis now had ample time to execute his second order of the day.

There had been just the two of them at the Oxford Physiotherapy Center — although “Center” seemed a rather grandiloquent description of the ground-floor premises of the large, detached redbrick house halfway down the Woodstock Road (“1901” showing on the black drainpipe): the small office, off the spacious foyer; the single treatment room, to the right, its two beds separated by mobile wooden screens; and an inappropriately luxurious loo, to the left.

Rachel James’s distressed partner, a plain-featured, muscular divorcée in her midforties, could apparently throw little or no light on the recent tragedy. Each of them a fully qualified physiotherapist, they had gone freelance after a difference of opinion with the Hospital Trust, and two years earlier had decided to join forces and form their own private practice: women for the most part, troubled with ankles and knees and elbows and shoulders. The venture had been fairly successful, although they would have welcomed a few more clients — especially Rachel, perhaps, who (as Lewis learned for a second time) had been wading deeper and deeper into negative equity.