Colin Dexter - Death Is Now My Neighbor

If the “this” were spoken with a hint of some audial semi-italicization, it was of no moment, for no one appeared to notice it.

“Any leads? Any new leads?”

“To the murder of Rachel James, you mean?”

“Who else?”

“No. No new leads at all, really... Well, perhaps one.”

On which cryptic note, Morse raised his right hand to forestall the universal pleas for clarification, and with a genial — perhaps genuine? — smile, he turned away.

“Drive me round the block a couple of times, Lewis. I’d rather all these people buggered off, and I don’t think they’re going to stay much longer if they see us go.”

Nor did they.

Ten minutes later the detectives returned to find the Drive virtually deserted.

“How many houses are there here, Lewis?”

“Not sure.” From Number 17 Lewis looked along to the end of the row: two other houses — presumably Numbers 19 and 21, although the figures from the front gate of the latter had been removed. Then he looked across to the other side of the street where the last even-numbered house was 20. The answer, therefore, appeared to be reasonably obvious.

“Twenty-one.”

“That’s an odd number, isn’t it?”

Lewis frowned. “Did you think I thought it was an even number?”

Morse smiled. “I didn’t mean ‘odd’ as opposed to ‘even’; I meant ‘odd’ as opposed to ‘normal.’ ”

“Oh!”

“Lew-is! You don’t build a street of terraced houses with one side having ten and the other side having eleven, now do you? You get a bit of symmetry into things; a bit of regularity.”

“If you say so.”

“And I do say so!” snapped Morse, with the conviction of a fundamentalist preacher asserting the divine authority of Holy Writ.

“No need to be so sharp, sir.”

“I should have spotted it from day one! From those political stickers, Lewis! Let’s count, okay?”

The two men walked along the odd-numbered side of Bloxham Drive. And Lewis nodded: six Labor; two Tory; two don’t-knows.

Ten.

“You see, Lewis, we’ve perhaps been a little misled by these minor acts of vandalism here. We’ve got several houses minus the numbers originally screwed into their front gates — and their back gates. So we were understandably confused.”

Lewis agreed. “I still am, sir.”

“How many odd numbers are there between one and twenty-one — inclusive?”

“I reckon it’s ten, sir. So I suppose there must be eleven.”

Morse grinned. “Write ’em down!”

So Lewis did, in his notebook: 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, 15, 17, 19, 21. Then counted them.

“I was right, sir. Eleven.”

“But only ten houses, Lewis.”

“I don’t quite follow.”

“Of course you do. It happens quite often in hotel floors and hotel room numbers... and street numbers. They leave one of them out.”

Enlightenment dawned on Lewis’s honest features.

“Number thirteen!”

“Exactly! Do you know there used to be people in France called ‘fourteeners’ who made a living by going along to dinner parties where the number of guests was thirteen?”

“Where do you find all these bits and pieces?”

“Do you know, I think I saw that on the back of a matchbox in a pub in Grimsby. I’ve learned quite a lot in life from the back of matchboxes.”

“What’s it all got to do with the case, though?”

Morse reached for Lewis’s notebook, and put brackets round the seventh number. Then, underneath the first few numbers, he wrote in an arrow, →, pointing from left to right.

“Lewis! If you were walking along the back of the houses, starting from Number 1 — she must be feeling a bit sore about the election, by the way... Well, let’s just go along there.”

The two men walked to the rear of the terrace, where (as we have seen) several of the back gates had been sadly, if not too seriously, vandalized.

“Get your list, Lewis, and as we go along, just put a ring round those gates where we haven’t got a number, all right?”

At the end of the row, Lewis’s original list, with its successive emendations, appeared as follows:

“You see,” said Morse, “the vandalism gets worse the further you get into the Close, doesn’t it? As it gets further from the main road.”

“Yes.”

“So just picture things. You’ve got a revolver and you walk along the back here in the half-light. You know the number you want. You know the morning routine, too: breakfast at about seven. All you’ve got to do is knock on the kitchen window, wait till you see the silhouette behind the thin blind, the silhouette of a face with one distinctive feature — a ponytail. You walk along the back; you see Number 11; you move along to the next house — Number 13 — you think! And so the house after that must be Number 15. And to confirm things, there’s the ponytailed silhouette. You press the trigger — and there you have it, Lewis! The Horseman passes by. But you’ve got it wrong, haven’t you? Your intended victim is living at Number 15, not Number 17!”

“So,” said Lewis slowly, “whoever stood at the kitchen window thought he — or she — was firing...”

Morse nodded somberly. “Yes. Not at Rachel James, but Geoffrey Owens .”

Men entitled to bleat BA after their names.

The Senior Common Room at Lonsdale is comparatively small, and for this reason has a rather more intimate air about it than some of the spacious SCRs in the larger Oxford Colleges. Light-colored, beautifully grained oak-paneling encloses the room on all sides, its coloring complemented by the light-brown leather sofas and armchairs there. Copies of almost all the national dailies, including the Sun and the Mirror , are to be found on the glass-topped coffee tables; and indeed it is usually these tabloids which are flipped through first — sometimes intently studied — by the majority of the dons.

Forgathered here on the evening of Friday, February 23 (7:00 for 7:30), was a rather overcrowded throng of dons, accompanied by wives, partners, and friends, to enjoy a Guest Night — an occasion celebrated by the College four times per term. A white-coated scout stood by the door with a silver tray holding thinly fluted glasses of sherry: either the pale amber “dry” variety or the darker brown “medium,” for it was a basic assumption in such a setting that no one could ever wish for the deeply umbered “sweet.”

A gowned Jasper Bradley took a glass of dry, drained it at a swallow, put the glass back onto the tray, and took another. He was particularly pleased with himself that day; and with the Classical Quarterly , whose review of Greek Moods and Tenses (J. J. Bradley, 204 pp., £45.50, Classical Press) contained the wonderful lines that Bradley had known by heart:

A small volume, but one which plumbs the unfathomed mysteries of the aorist subjunctive with imaginative insights into the very origins of language.

Yes. He felt decidedly chuffed.

“How’s tricks?” he asked, looking up at Donald Franks, a very tall astrophysicist, recently head-hunted from Cambridge, whose dark, lugubrious features suggested that for his part he’d managed few imaginative insights that week into the origins of the universe.

“So-so.”

“Who d’you fancy then?”

“What— of the women here?”

“For the Master’s job.”

“Dunno.”

“Who’ll you vote for?”