Colin Dexter - Death Is Now My Neighbor

“Secret ballot, innit?”

Mr. and Mrs. Denis Cornford now came in, each taking a glass of the medium sherry. Shelly looked extremely attractive and perhaps a little skimpily dressed for such a chilly evening. She wore a lightweight white two-piece suit; and as she bent down to pick up a cheese nibble her low-cut, bottle-green blouse gaped open to reveal a splendid glimpse of her beautiful breasts.

“Je-sus!” muttered Bradley.

“She certainly flouts her tits a bit,” mumbled the melancholy Franks.

“You mean ‘flaunts’ ’em, I think.”

“If you say so,” said Franks, slightly wounded.

Bradley moved to the far end of the room where Angela Storrs stood talking to a small priest, clothed all in black, with buckled shoes and leggings.

“Ah, Jasper! Come and meet Father Dooley from Sligo.”

Clearly Angela Storrs had decided she had now done her duty; for soon she drifted away — tall, long-legged, wearing a dark gray trouser-suit with a white high-necked jumper. There was about her an almost patrician mien, her face high-cheekboned and pale, with the hair swept back above her ears and fastened in a bun behind. It was obvious to all that she had been a very attractive woman. But she was aging a little too quickly perhaps; and the fact that over the last two or three years she had almost invariably worn trousers did little to discourage the belief that her legs had succumbed to an unsightly cordage of varicose veins. If she were on sale in an Arab wife market (in the cruel words of one of the younger dons) she would have passed her “best before” date several years earlier.

“I knew the Master many years ago — and his poor wife. Yes... that was long ago,” mused the little priest.

Bradley was ready with the appropriate response of scholarly compassion.

“Times change, yes. Tempora mutantur: et nos mutamur in illis. ”

“I think,” said the priest, “that the line should read: Tempora mutantur: nos et mutamur in illis. Otherwise the hexameter won’t scan, will it?”

“Of course it won’t, sorry.”

The scout now politely requested dons — wives — partners — guests — to proceed to the Hall. And Jasper Bradley, eminent authority on the aorist subjunctive in Classical Greek, walked out of the SCR more than slightly wounded.

Sir Clixby Bream brought up the rear as the room emptied, and lightly touched the bottom of Angela Storrs standing just in front of him.

Sotto voce he lied into her ear: “You’re looking ravishing tonight. And I’ll tell you something else — I’d far rather be in bed with you now than face another bloody Guest Night.”

“So would I!” she lied, in a whisper. “And I’ve got a big favor to ask of you , too.”

“We’ll have a word about it after the port.”

“ Before the port, Clixby! You’re usually blotto after it.”

Sir Clixby banged his gavel, mumbled Benedictus benedicat , and the assembled company seated themselves, the table plan having positioned Julian Storrs and Denis Cornford at diagonally opposite ends of the thick oak table, with their wives virtually opposite each other in the middle.

“I love your suit!” lied Shelly Cornford, in a not unpleasing Yankee twang.

“You look very nice, too,” lied Angela Storrs, smiling widely and showing such white and well-aligned teeth that no one could be in much doubt that her upper plate had been disproportionately expensive.

After which preliminary skirmish, each side observed a dignified truce, with neither a further word nor a further glance between them during the rest of the dinner.

At the head of the table, the little priest sat on the Master’s right.

“Just the two candidates, I hear?” he said quietly.

“Just the two: Julian Storrs and Denis Cornford.”

“The usual shenanigans, I assume? The usual horsetrading? Clandestine cabals?”

“Oh no, nothing like that. We’re all very civilized here.”

“How do you know that?”

“Well, you’ve only got to hear what people say — the way they say it.”

The little priest pushed away his half-eaten guinea fowl.

“You know, Clixby, I once read that speech often gets in the way of genuine communication.”

There never was a scandalous tale without some foundation.

While the Guest Night was still in progress, while still the port and Madeira were circulating in their time-honored directions, an overwearied Morse had decided to retire comparatively early to bed, where almost unprecedentedly he enjoyed a deep, unbroken slumber until 7:15 the following morning, when gladly would he have turned over and gone back to sleep. But he had much to do that day. He drank two cups of instant coffee (which he preferred to the genuine article); then another cup, this time with one slice of brown toast heavily spread with butter and Frank Cooper’s Oxford Marmalade.

By 8:45 he was in his office at Kidlington HQ, where he found a note on his desk:

Please see Chief Sup. Strange A S A P

The meeting, almost until the end, was an amiable enough affair, and Morse received a virtually uninterrupted hearing as he explained his latest thinking on the murder of Rachel James.

“Mm!” grunted Strange, resting his great jowls on his palms when Morse had finished. “So it could be a contract killing that went cockeyed, you think? The victim gets pinpointed a bit too vaguely, and the killer shoots at the wrong pigtail—”

“Ponytail, sir.”

“Yes — through the wrong window. Right?”

“Yes.”

“What about the motive? The key to this sort of mess is almost always the motive , you know that.”

“You sound just like Sergeant Lewis, sir.”

Strange looked dubiously across the desk, as if a little uncertain as to whether he wanted to sound just like Sergeant Lewis.

“Well?”

“I agree with you. That’s one of the reasons it could have been a case of misidentity. We couldn’t really find any satisfactory motive for Rachel’s murder anywhere. But if somebody wanted Owens out of the way — well, I can think of a dozen possible motives.”

“Because he’s a newshound, you mean?”

Morse nodded. “Plenty of people in highish places who’ve got some sort of skeleton in the sideboard—”

“Cupboard.”

“Who’d go quite a long way to keep the, er, cupboard firmly locked.”

“Observed openly masturbating on the M40, you mean? Weekend away with the PA? By the way, you’ve got a pretty little lass for a secretary, I see. Don’t you ever lust after her?”

“I seem to have lost most of my lust recently, sir.”

“We all do. It’s called getting old.”

Strange lifted his large head, and eyed Morse over his half-lenses.

“Now about the case. It won’t be easy, will it? You’ve no reason to think he’s got a lot of stuff stashed under his mattress?”

“No... no, I haven’t.”

“You’d no real reason for thinking he’d killed Rachel?”

“No... no, I hadn’t.”

“So he’s definitely out of the frame?”

Morse considered the question awhile. “ ’Fraid so, yes. I wish he weren’t.”

“So?”

“So I’ll — we’ll think of some way of approaching things.”

“Nothing irregular! You promise me that! We’re just about getting over one or two unsavory incidents in the Force, aren’t we? And we’re not going to start anything here. Is that clear, Morse?”

“To be fair, sir, I usually do go by the book.”

Strange pointed a thick finger.