Colin Dexter - Death Is Now My Neighbor

“Blackmail?” suggested Lewis.

“She’d have letters.”

“The postcard.”

“Photographs.”

“ One photograph.”

“Hotel records. Somebody would use a credit card, and it wouldn’t be her. ”

“He’d probably pay by cash.”

“You’re not trying to help me by any chance, are you, Lewis?”

“All I’m trying to do is be honest about what we’ve got — which isn’t much. I agree with you, though: It wouldn’t have been her money. Not exactly rolling in it, that’s for sure. Must have been a biggish layout — setting up the practice, equipment, rent, and everything. And she’d got a mortgage on her own place, and a car to run.”

Yes, a car. Morse, who never took the slightest interest in any car except his own, visualized again the white Mini which had been parked outside Number 17.

“Perhaps you ought to look a bit more carefully at that car, Lewis.”

“Already have. Logbook in the glove compartment, road atlas under the passenger seat, fire extinguisher under the back seat—”

“No drugs or pornography in the boot?”

“No. Just a wheel brace and a Labor party poster.”

Lewis looked at his watch: 8:35 P.M. It had been a long day, and he felt very tired. And so, by the look of him, did his chief. He got to his feet.

“Oh, and two cassettes: Ella Fitzgerald and a Mozart thing.”

“ Thing? ”

“Clarinet thing, yes.”

“Concerto or Quintet, was it?”

Blessedly, before Lewis could answer (for he had no answer), the phone rang.

Chief Superintendent Strange.

“Morse? In your office? I almost rang the Red Lion.”

“How can I help, sir?” asked Morse wearily.

“TV — that’s how you can help. BBC wants you for the Nine O’Clock News and ITV for News at Ten. One of the crews is here now.”

“I’ve already told ’em all we know.”

“Well, you’d better think of something else, hadn’t you? This isn’t just a murder, Morse. This is a PR exercise. ”

For example, in such enumerations as “French, German, Italian and Spanish,” the two commas take the place of “ands”; there is no comma after “Italian,” because, with “and,” it would be otiose. There are, however, some who favor putting one there, arguing that, since it may sometimes be needed to avoid any ambiguity, it may as well be used always for the sake of uniformity.

Just after lunchtime on Thursday, Morse found himself once again wandering aimlessly around Number 17 Bloxham Drive, a vague, niggling instinct suggesting to him that earlier he’d missed something of importance there.

But he was beginning to doubt it.

In the now-cleared kitchen, he switched on the wireless, finding it attuned to Radio 4. Had it been on when the police had first arrived? Had she been listening to the Today program when just for a second, perhaps, she’d looked down at the gush of blood that had spurted over the front of her nightclothes?

So what if she had been? Morse asked himself, conscious that he was getting nowhere.

In the front living room, he looked again along the single shelf of paperbacks. Women novelists, mostly: Jackie Collins, Jilly Cooper, Danielle Steel, Sue Townsend... He read four or five of the authors’ opening sentences, without once being instantly hooked, and was about to leave when he noticed Craig Raine’s A Choice of Kipling’s Prose — its white spine completely uncreased, as if it had been a very recent purchase. Or a gift? Morse withdrew the book and flicked through some of the short stories that once had meant — still meant — so very much to him. “They” was there, although Morse confessed to himself that he had never really understood its meaning. But genius? Christ, ah! And “On Greenhow Hill”; and “Love-o’-Women” — the latter (Morse was adamant about it) the greatest short story in the English language. He looked at the title page: no words to anyone; from anyone. Then, remembering a book he’d once received from a lovely, lost girl, he turned to the inside of the back cover: and there, in the bottom right-hand corner, he saw the penciled capitals: FOR R FROM J — RML.

“Remember My Love.”

It could have been anyone though — so many names beginning with “J”: Jack, James, Jason, Jasper, Jeremy, John, Joseph, Julian...

So what?

Anyway, these days, Morse, it could have been a woman, could it not?

Upstairs, in the front bedroom, he looked down at the double bed that almost monopolized the room, and noted again the two indented pillows, one atop the other, in their Oxford blue pillowcases, whereon for the very last time Rachel James had laid her pretty head. The winter duvet, in matching blue, was still turned back as she had left it, the under sheet only lightly creased. Nor was it a bed (of this Morse felt certain) wherein the murdered woman had spent the last night of her life in passionate lovemaking. Better, perhaps, if she had...

Standing on the bedside table was a glass of stale-looking water, beside which lay a pair of bluish earrings whose stones (Morse suspected) had never been fashioned from earth’s more precious store.

But the Chief Inspector was forming something of a picture, so he thought.

Picture... Pictures...

Two framed pictures only on the bedroom walls: the statutory Monet; and one of Gustav Klimt’s gold-patterned compositions. Plenty of posters and stickers, though: anti deer hunting; anti export of live animals; anti French nuclear tests; pro the NHS; pro the whales; pro legalized abortion. About par for the course at her age, thought Morse. Or at his age, come to think of it.

He pulled the side of the curtains slightly away from the wall, and briefly surveyed the scene below. An almost reverent hush now seemed to have settled upon Rachel’s side of the street. One uniformed policeman stood at the front gate — but only the one — talking to a representative of the Press — but only the one: the one who had lived next door to the murdered woman, at Number 15; the one with the ponytail; the one whom Morse would have to interview so very soon; the one he ought already to have interviewed.

Then, from the window, he saw his colleague, Sergeant Lewis, getting out of a marked police car; and thoughtfully he walked down the stairs. Odd — very odd, really — that with all those stickers around the bedroom, the one for the party the more likely (surely?) to further those advertised causes had been left in the boot of her car, where earlier Lewis had found it. Why hadn’t she put it up, as so many other householders in the terrace had done, in one of her upper or lower windows?

Aware that whatever had been worrying him had still not been identified, Morse turned the Yale lock to admit Lewis, the latter carrying the lunchtime edition of the Oxford Mail.

“I reckon it’s about time we interviewed him ,” began Lewis, pointing through the closed door.

“All in good time,” agreed Morse, taking the newspaper where, as on the previous two days, the murder still figured on page one, although no longer as the lead story.

The brutal murder of the physiotherapist Rachel James, which has caused such a stir in the local community, has left the police baffled, according to Inspector Morse of the Thames Valley CID.

The murdered woman was seen as a quietly unobtrusive member of the community with no obvious enemies, and as yet the police have been unable to find any plausible motive for her murder.