Colin Dexter - Death Is Now My Neighbor

Boyfriends? — Lewis had ventured.

Well, she was attractive — face, figure — and doubtless there had been a good many admirers. But no specific beau; no one that Rachel spoke of as anyone special; no incoming calls on the office phone, for example.

“That hers?” Lewis had asked.

“Yes.”

Lewis took down a white coat from its hook behind the door and looked at the oval badge — CHARTERED SOCIETY OF PHYSIOTHERAPY — printed round a yellow crest. He felt inside the stiffly starched pockets.

Nothing.

Not even Morse (Lewis allowed the thought) could have made much of that.

Each of the two women had a personal drawer in the office desk, and Lewis looked carefully through the items which Rachel had kept at hand during her own working hours: lipstick; lip salve; powder compact; deodorant stick; a small packet of tissues; two Biros, blue and red; a yellow pencil; a pocket English dictionary (OUP); and a library book. Nothing else. No personal diary; no letters.

Again Lewis felt (though wrongly this time) that Morse would have shared his disappointment.

As for Morse, he had called in at his bachelor flat in North Oxford before returning to Police HQ. Always, after a haircut, he went through the ritual of washing his hair — and changing his shirt, upon which even a few stray hairs left clinging seemed able to effect an intense irritation on what, as he told himself (and others), was a particularly sensitive skin.

When he finally returned to HQ he found Lewis already back from his missions.

“You’re looking younger, sir.”

“No, you’re wrong. I reckon this case has put years on me already.”

“I meant the haircut.”

“Ah, yes. Rather nicely done, isn’t it?”

“You had a good morning, sir — apart from the haircut?”

“Well, you know— er— satisfactory. What about you?”

Lewis smiled happily.

“Do you want the good news first or the bad news?”

“The bad news.”

“Well, not ‘bad’ — just not ‘news’ at all, really. I don’t think we’re going to get many leads from her workplace. In fact I don’t think we’re going to get any.” And Lewis proceeded to give an account of his visit to the Oxford Physiotherapy Center.

“What time did she get there every morning?”

Lewis consulted his notes. “Five past, ten past eight — about then. Bit early. But if she left it much later she’d hit the heavy Kidlington traffic down into Oxford, wouldn’t she?”

“Mm... The first treatments don’t begin till quarter to nine, you say?”

“Or nine o’clock.”

“What did she do before the place opened?”

“Dunno.”

“ Read , Lewis!”

“Well, like I said, there was a library book in her drawer.”

“What was it?”

“I didn’t make a note.”

“Can’t you remember?”

Ye-es, Lewis thought he could. Yes!

“Book called The Masters , sir — by P. C. Snow.”

Morse laughed and shook his head.

“He wasn’t a bloody police constable, Lewis! You mean C. P. Snow.”

“Sorry, sir.”

“Interesting, though.”

“In what way?”

But Morse ignored the question.

“ When did she get it from the library?”

“How do I know?”

“You just,” said Morse slowly, sarcastically, “take fourteen days from the date printed for the book’s return, which you could have found, if you’d looked, by gently opening the front cover.”

“Perhaps they let you have three weeks — at the library she borrowed it from.”

“And which library was that?”

Somehow Lewis managed to maintain his good humor.

“Well, at least I can give you a very straight answer to that: I haven’t the faintest idea.”

“And what’s the good news?”

This time, it was Lewis’s turn to make a slow, impressive pronouncement:

“I know who the fellow is — the fellow in the photo.”

“You do?” Morse looked surprised. “You mean he turned up at the station?”

“In a way, I suppose he did, yes. There was no one like him standing around waiting for his girlfriend. But I had a word with this ticket collector — young chap who’s only been on the job for a few weeks. And he recognized him straightaway. He’d asked to look at his rail pass and he remembered him because he got a bit shirty with him — and probably because of that he remembered his name as well.”

“A veritable plethora of pronouns, Lewis! Do you know how many he ’s and him ’s and his ’s you’ve just used?”

“No. But I know one thing — he told me his name!” replied Lewis, happily adding a further couple of potentially confusing pronouns to his earlier tally. “His name’s Julian Storrs. ”

For many seconds Morse sat completely motionless, feeling the familiar tingling across his shoulders. He picked up his silver Parker pen and wrote some letters on the blotting pad in front of him. Then, in a whispered voice, he spoke:

“ I know him, Lewis. ”

“You didn’t recognize him, though—?”

“Most people,” interrupted Morse, “as they get older, can’t remember names. For them ‘A name is troublesome’ — anagram — seven letters — what’s that?”

“ ‘Amnesia’?”

“Well done! I’m all right on names, usually. But as I get older it’s faces I can’t recall. And there’s a splendid word for this business of not being able to recognize familiar faces—”

“ ‘Pro-sop-a-something,’ isn’t it?”

Morse appeared almost shell-shocked as he looked across at his sergeant. “How in heaven’s name...?”

“Well, as you know, sir, I didn’t do all that marvelously at school — as I told you, we didn’t even have a school tie — but I was ever so good at one thing,” a glance at the blotting pad, “I was best in the class at reading things upside down.”

Facing the media is more difficult than bathing a leper.

—MOTHER TERESA OF CALCUTTA

There had been little difficulty in finding out information on Julian Charles Storrs — a man to whom Morse (as he now remembered) had been introduced only a few months previously at an exhibition of Thesiger’s desert photography in the Pitt Rivers Museum. But Morse said nothing of this to Lewis as the pair of them sat together that same evening in Kidlington HQ; said nothing either of his discovery that the tie whose provenance he had so earnestly sought was readily available from any Marks and Spencer’s store, priced £6.99.

“We shall have to see this fellow Storrs soon, sir.”

“I’m sure we shall, yes. But we’ve got nothing against him, have we? It’s not a criminal offense to get photographed with some attractive woman... Interesting, though, that she was reading The Masters. ”

“I’ve never read it, sir.”

“It’s about the internal shenanigans in a Cambridge College when the Master dies. And recently I read in the University Gazette that the present Master of Lonsdale is about to hang up his mortarboard — see what I mean?”

“I think I do,” lied Lewis.

“Storrs is a Fellow at Lonsdale — the Senior Fellow, I think. So if he suggested she might be interested in reading that book...”

“Doesn’t add up to much, though, does it? It’s motive we’ve got to look for. Bottom of everything — motive is.”

Morse nodded. “But perhaps it does add up a bit,” he added quietly. “If he wants the top job badly enough — and if she reminded him she could go and queer his pitch...”

“Kiss-and-tell sort of thing?”

“Kiss-and- not -tell, if the price was right.”