Colin Dexter - Death Is Now My Neighbor

The second bedroom was locked.

“Malcolm!” whispered Morse down the stairwell.

Two and a half minutes later, Morse was taking stock of a smaller but clearly more promising room: a large bookcase containing a best-seller selection from over the years; one armchair; one office chair; the latter set beneath a veneered desk with an imitation leather top, four drawers on either side, and between them a longer drawer with two handles — locked.

“Malcolm!” whispered Morse down the stairwell.

Ninety seconds only this time, and clearly the locksman was running into form.

The eight side drawers contained few items of interest: stationery, insurance documents, car documents, bank statements, pens and pencils — but in the bottom left-hand drawer a couple of pornographic paperbacks. Morse opened Topless in Torremolinos at random and read a short paragraph.

In its openly titillating way, it seemed to him surprisingly well written. And there was that one striking simile where the heroine’s bosom was compared to a pair of fairy cakes — although Morse wasn’t at all sure what a fairy cake looked like. He made a mental note of the author, Ann Berkeley Cox, and read the brief dedication on the title page, “For Geoff From ABC,” before slipping the book into the pocket of his mackintosh.

Johnson was seated in an armchair, in the living room, in the dark, when Morse came down the stairs holding a manila file.

“Got what you wanted, Mr. Morse?”

“Perhaps so. Ready?”

With the house now in total darkness, the two men felt their way to the kitchen, when Morse stopped suddenly.

“The torch! Give me the torch.”

Retracing his steps to the living room, he shone the beam along an empty mantelpiece.

“Put it back!” he said.

Johnson took the ormolu clock from his overcoat pocket and replaced it carefully on its little dust-free rectangle.

“I’m glad you made me do that,” confided Johnson quietly. “I shouldn’t ’a done it in the first place. Anyway, me conscience’ll be clear now.”

There was a streak of calculating cruelty in the man, Morse knew that. But in several respects he was a lovable rogue; even sometimes, as now perhaps, a reasonably honest one. And oddly it was Morse who was beginning to worry — about his own conscience.

He went quickly up to the second bedroom once more and slipped the book back in its drawer.

At last, as quietly as it had opened, the back door closed behind them and the pair now made their way up the grassy gradient to the gap in the slatted perimeter fence.

“You’ve not lost your old skills,” volunteered Morse.

“Nah! Know what they say, Mr. Morse? Old burglars never die — they simply steal away.”

In the darkened house behind them, on the mantelpiece in the front living room, a little dust-free rectangle still betrayed the spot where the beautifully fashioned ormolu clock had so recently stood.

When you have assembled what you call your “facts” in logical order, it is like an oil lamp you have fashioned, filled, and trimmed; but which will shed no illumination unless first you light it.

Back in his flat, Morse closed the door and shot the bolts, both top and bottom. It was an oddly needless precaution, yet an explicable one, perhaps. As a twelve-year-old boy, he remembered so vividly returning from school with a magazine, and locking all the doors in spite of his certain knowledge that no other member of the family would be home for several hours. And then, even then, he had waited awhile, relishing the anticipatory thrill before daring to open the pages.

It was just that sensation he felt now as he switched on the electric fire, poured a glass of Glenfiddich, lit a cigarette, and settled back in his favorite armchair — not this time, however, with the Naturist Journal which (all those years ago now) had been doing the rounds in Lower IVA, but with the manila file just burgled from the house on Bloxham Drive.

The cover was well worn, with tears and creases along its edges; and maroon rings where once a wine glass had rested, amid many doodles of quite intricate design. Inside the file was a sheaf of papers and cuttings, several of them clipped or stapled together, though not arranged in any chronological or purposeful sequence.

Nine separate items.

• Two newspaper cuttings, snipped from one of the less inhibited of the Sunday tabloids, concerning a Lord Hardiman, together with a photograph of the aforesaid peer fishing in his wallet (presumably for Deutschmarks) outside a readily identifiable sex establishment in Hamburg’s Reeperbahn. Clipped to this material was a further photograph of Lord Hardiman arm-in-arm with Lady Hardiman at a polo match in Great Windsor Park (September 1984).

• A letter (August 1979) addressed to Owens from a firm of solicitors in Cheltenham informing the addressee that it was in possession of letters sent by him (Owens) to one of their clients (unspecified); and that some arrangement beneficial to each of the parties might possibly be considered.

• A glossy, highly defined photograph showing a paunchy elderly man fondling a frightened-looking prepubescent girl, both of them naked. Penciled on the back was an address in St. Albans.

• A stapled sheaf of papers showing the expenses of a director in a Surrey company manufacturing surgical appliances, with double exclamation points against several of the mammoth amounts claimed for foreign business trips.

• A brief, no-nonsense letter (from a woman, perhaps?) in large, curly handwriting, leaning italic-fashion to the right: “If you contact me again I shall take your letters to the police — I’ve kept them all. You’ll get no more money from me. You’re a despicable human being. I’ve got nothing more to lose, not even my money.” No signature but (again) a penciled address, this time in the margin, in Wimbledon.

• Four sets of initials written on a small page probably torn from the back of a diary:

Nothing more — except a small tick in red Biro against the first three.

• Two further newspaper cuttings, paper-clipped together. The first ( The Times Diary, 2-2-96) reporting as follows:

After a nine-year tenure Sir Clixby Bream is retiring as Master of Lonsdale College, Oxford. Sir Clixby would, indeed should, have retired earlier. It is only the inability of anyone in the College (including the classicists) to understand the Latin of the original Statutes that has prolonged Sir Clixby’s term. The present Master has refused to speculate whether such an extension of his tenure has been the result of some obscurity in the language of the Statutes themselves; or the incompetence of his classical colleagues, none of whom appears to have been nominated as a possible successor.

The second, a cutting from the Oxford Mail (November 1995) of an article written by Geoffrey Owens; with a photograph alongside, the caption reading, “Mr. Julian Storrs and his wife Angela at the opening of the Polynesian Art Exhibition at the Pitt Rivers Museum.”

• A smudgy photocopy of a typed medical report, marked “Strictly Private and Confidential,” on the notepaper of a private health clinic in the Banbury Road:

REF.: Mr. J. C. Storrs

DIAGNOSIS: Inoperable liver cancer confirmed. For second opn. see letter Dr. O.V. Maxim (Churchill)

PROGNOSIS: Seven/eight months, or less. Possibly (??) a year. No longer.

PATIENT NOTES: Honesty best in this case. Strong personality. NEXT APPT.: See book, but ASAP.