Colin Dexter - Death Is Now My Neighbor

“You never became, you know, more friendly? Took her out? Drink? Meal?”

“Why do you ask that?”

“I’ve just got to find out as much as I can about everybody there, that’s all. Otherwise, as you say, I wouldn’t be doing my job, would I, Mr. Owens?”

“We’ve had a few dates, yes — usually at the local.”

“Which is?”

“The Bull and Swan.”

“Ah, ‘Brakspear,’ ‘Bass,’ ‘Bishop’s Finger’...”

“I wouldn’t know. I’m a lager man myself.”

“I see,” said a sour-faced Morse. Then, after a pause, “What about Rachel James? Did you know her well?”

“She lived next door , dammit! Course I knew her fairly well.”

“Did you ever go inside her house?”

Owens appeared to consider the question carefully. “Just the twice, if I’ve got it right. Once when I had a few people in for a meal and I couldn’t find a corkscrew and I knocked on her back door and she asked me in, because it was pissing the proverbials, while she looked around for hers. The other time was one hot day last summer when I was mowing the grass at the back and she was hanging out her smalls and I asked her if she wanted me to do her patch and she said she’d be grateful, and when I’d done it she asked me if I’d like a glass of something and we had a drink together in the kitchen there.”

“Lager, I suppose.”

“Orangeade.”

Orangeade, like water, had never played any significant role in Morse’s dietary, but he suddenly realized that at that moment he would have willingly drunk a pint of anything, so long as it was ice-cold.

Even lager.

“It was a hot day, you say?”

“Boiling.”

“What was she wearing?”

“Not much.”

“She was an attractive girl, wasn’t she?”

“To me? I’m always going to be attracted to a woman with not much on. And, as I remember, most of what she’d got on that day was mostly off, if you follow me.”

“So she’d have a lot of boyfriends?”

“She was the sort of woman men would lust after, yes.”

“Did you?”

“Let’s put it this way, Inspector. If she’d invited me to bed that afternoon, I’d’ve sprinted up the stairs.”

“But she didn’t invite you?”

“No.”

“Did she invite other men?”

“I doubt it. Not on Bloxham Drive, anyway. We don’t just have Neighborhood Watch here; we’ve got a continuous Nosey-Parker Surveillance Scheme.”

“Even in the early morning?”

“As I told you, somebody saw me go to work on Monday morning.”

“You think others may have done?”

“Bloody sure they did!”

Morse switched tack again. “You wouldn’t remember — recognize — any of her occasional boyfriends?”

“No.”

“Have you heard of a man called Julian Storrs?”

“Yes.”

“You know him?”

“Not really, no. But he’s from Lonsdale, and I interviewed him for the Oxford Mail last year — December, I think it was — when he gave the annual Pitt Rivers Lecture. On Captain Cook, as I recall. I’d never realized how much the natives hated that fellow’s guts — you know, in the Sandwich Islands or somewhere.”

“I forget,” said Morse, as if at some point in his life he had known...

At his local grammar school, the young Morse had been presented with a choice of the 3 Gs: Greek, Geography, or German. And since Morse had joined the Greek option, his knowledge of geography had ever been fatally flawed. Indeed, it was only in his late twenties that he had discovered that the Balkan States and the Baltic States were not synonymous. Yet about Captain Cook’s voyages Morse should (as we shall see) have known at least a little — did know a little — since his father had adopted that renowned British navigator, explorer, and cartographer as his greatest hero in life — unlike (it seemed) the natives of those “Sandwich Islands or somewhere...”

“You never saw Mr. Storrs on Bloxham Drive?”

In their sockets, Owens’ eyes shot from bottom left to top right, like those of a deer that has suddenly sniffed a predator.

“Never. Why?”

“Because,” Morse leaned forward a few inches as he summoned up all his powers of creative ingenuity, “because someone on the Drive — this is absolutely confidential, sir! — says that he was seen, fairly recently, going into, er, another house there.”

“ Which house?” Owens’ voice was suddenly sharp.

Morse held up his right hand and got to his feet. “Just a piece of gossip, like as not. But we’ve got to check out every lead, you know that.”

Owens remained silent.

“You’ve always been a journalist?”

“Yes.”

“Which papers...?”

“I started in London.”

“Whereabouts?”

“Soho — around there.”

“When was that?”

“Midseventies.”

“Wasn’t that when Soho was full of sex clubs and striptease joints?”

“ And more. Gets a bit boring, all that stuff though, after a time.”

“Yes. So they tell me.”

“I read your piece today in the Oxford Mail ,” said Morse as the two men walked toward reception. “You write well.”

“Thank you.”

“I can’t help remembering you said ‘comparatively’ crime-free area.”

“That was in yesterday’s.”

“Oh.”

“Well... we’ve only had one burglary this last year, and we’ve had no joyriders around since the council put the sleeping policemen in. We still get a bit of mindless vandalism, of course — you’ll have seen the young trees we tried to plant round the back. And litter — litter’s always a problem — and graffiti... And someone recently unscrewed most of the latches on the back gates — you know, the things that click as the gates shut.”

“I didn’t know there was a market for those,” muttered Morse.

“And you’re wasting your time if you put up a name for your house, or something like that. I put a little notice on my front gate. Lasted exactly eight days. Know what it was?”

Morse glanced back at the corporate workforce seated in front of VDU screens at desks cluttered with in-trays, out-trays, file cases, handbooks, and copy being corrected and cosseted before inclusion in forthcoming editions of Oxford’s own Times, Mail, Journal, Star ...

“ ‘No Free Newspapers?’ ” he suggested sotto voce.

Morse handed in his Visitor badge at reception.

“You’ll need to give me another thing to get out with.”

“No. The barrier lifts automatically when you leave.”

“So once you’re in...”

She smiled. “You’re in! It’s just that we used to get quite a few cars from the Industrial Estate trying it on.”

Morse turned left onto Botley Road and drove along to the Ring Road junction where he took the northbound A34, coming off at the Pear Tree Roundabout, and then driving rather too quickly up the last stretch to Kidlington HQ — where he looked at his wristwatch again.

Nine and a half minutes.

Only nine and a half minutes.

It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data.

As Morse climbed the stairs to Lewis’s office he was experiencing a deep ache in each of his calves.

“Hardest work I’ve done today, that!” he admitted as, panting slightly, he flopped into a chair.

“Interview go okay, sir?”

“Owens? I wouldn’t trust that fellow as far as I could kick him.”

“Which wouldn’t be too far, in your present state of health.”

“Genuine journalist he may be — but he’s a phony witness, take it from me!”

“Before you go on, sir, we’ve got the preliminary postmortem report here.”