Colin Dexter - Death Is Now My Neighbor

“I don’t give a sod who sleeps where. We’re just not sleeping in the same room, that’s all.”

His eyes were still full of anger and anguish, though his voice was curiously calm. “We’ve got to talk about this. For a start, you’d better find out the rights and wrongs and the rest of it about people involved in divorce on the grounds of adultery. Not tonight, though.”

“Denis! Please let’s talk now — please! — just for a little while.”

“What the hell about? About me ? You know all about me, for Christ’s sake. I’m half-pissed — and soon I’m going to be fully pissed — and as well as that I’m stupid — and hurt — and jealous — and possessive — and old-fashioned — and faithful... You following me? I’ve watched most of your antics, but I’ve never been too worried. You know why? Because I knew you loved me. Deep down I knew there was a bedrock of love underneath our marriage. Or I thought I knew.”

In silence, in abject despair, Shelly Cornford listened, and the tears ran in furrows down her cheeks.

“We’re finished. The two of us are finished, Shelly — do you know, I can hardly bring myself to call you by your name? Our marriage is over and done with — make no mistake about that. You can feel free to do what you want now. I just don’t care. You’re a born flirt! You’re a born prick-teaser! And I just can’t live with you any longer. I just can’t live with the picture of you lying there naked and opening your legs to another man. Can you try to get that into your thick skull?”

She shook her head in utter anguish.

“You said,” Cornford continued, “you’d have given anything in life to see me become Master. Well, I wouldn’t — do you understand that? But I’d have given anything in life for you to be faithful to me — whatever the prize.”

He turned away from her, and she heard the door of the spare bedroom close; then open again.

“When was it? Tell me that. When ?”

“This morning.”

“You mean when I was out jogging?”

“Yes,” she whispered.

He turned away once more; and she beheld and could see no sorrow like unto her own sorrow.

The keys to her car lay on the mantelpiece.

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.

Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.

In time the curtain-edges will grow light.

Till then I see what’s really always there:

Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,

Making all thought impossible but how

And where and when I shall myself die.

Never, in his lifetime of muted laughter and occasional tears, had Morse spent such a horrifying night. Amid fitful bouts of semislumber — head weighted with pain, ears throbbing, stomach in spasms, gullet afire with bile and acidity — he’d imagined himself on the verge of fainting, of vomiting, of having a stroke, of entering cardiac arrest. One of Ovid’s lovers had once besought the Horses of the Night to slacken their pace and delay thereby the onset of the Dawn. But as he lay turning in his bed, Morse longed for a sign of the brightening sky through his window. During that seemingly unending night, he had consumed several glasses of cold water, Alka-Seltzer tablets, cups of black coffee, and the equivalent of a weekly dosage of Nurofen Plus.

No alcohol, though. Not one drop of alcohol.

At last Morse had decided to abandon alcohol.

Lewis looked into Morse’s bedroom at 7:30 A.M. (Lewis was the only person who had a key to Morse’s flat.)

In the prestigious area of North Oxford, most householders had long since fitted their homes with antiburglar devices, with neighbors holding the keys to the alarm mechanism. But Morse had little need of such a device, for the only salable, stealable items in his flat were the CDs of all the operas of the man he regarded as a towering genius, Richard Wagner; and his earnestly assembled collection of first editions of the greatest hero in his life, the pessimistic poet A. E. Housman, who, like Morse, had left St. John’s College, Oxford, without obtaining a degree.

But not even North Oxford burglars had tastes that were quite so esoteric.

And in any case, Morse seldom spoke to either of his immediate neighbors.

“You look awful, sir.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Lewis! Don’t you know if somebody says you look awful, you feel awful?”

“Didn’t you feel awful before I said it?”

Morse nodded a miserable agreement.

“Shall I get you a bit of breakfast?”

“No.”

“Well, I reckon we can eliminate the Storrs — both of ’em. I’ve checked with the hotel as far as possible. And unless they hired a helicopter...”

“We can cross off the Cornfords, too — him, anyway. He’s got four witnesses to testify he was running around Oxford pretending to be Roger Bannister.”

“What about her ?”

“I can’t really see why... or how.”

“Owens could have been blackmailing her?”

Morse fingered his stubbled chin. “I don’t think so somehow. But there’s something there... something Cornford didn’t want to tell me about.”

“What d’ you think?”

But Morse appeared unable to answer, as he swung his legs out of bed and sat for a while, alternately turning his torso to left and right.

“Just easing the lumbago, Lewis. Don’t you ever get it?”

“No.”

“Just nip and get me a glass of orange juice from the fridge. The unsweetened orange juice .”

As he walked into the kitchen, Lewis heard the post slither through the letter-box.

So did Morse.

“Lewis! Did you find out what time the postman usually calls on Polstead Road?”

“I’ve already told you. You were right.”

“About the only bloody thing I have been right about.”

“Arrghh! Cheer up, sir!”

“Just turn out those pockets, will you?” Morse pointed to the suit and shirt thrown carelessly over the only chair in the bedroom. “Time I had a change of clothes — maybe bring me a change of luck.”

“Who’s your new girlfriend?” Lewis held up the invitation card. “ ‘Make it, Morse! DC.’ ”

“That card is wholly private and—”

But Morse got no further.

He felt the old familiar tingling across the shoulders, the hairs on his lower arms standing up, as if a conductor had invited his orchestra to arise after a concert.

“Christ!” whispered Morse irreverently. “Do you know what, Lewis? I think you’ve done it again!”

The four-barreled Lancaster Howdah pistol is of .577 in caliber. Its name derived from the story that it was carried by tiger hunters who traveled by elephant and who kept the pistol as a defense against any tiger that might leap on to the elephant’s back.

For the relatives, for the statement takers and the form fillers, for the boffins at ballistics and forensics, the murder of Geoffrey Owens would be a serious business. No less than for the detectives. Yet for Morse himself the remainder of that Monday had been unproductive and anticlimactic, with a morning of euphoria followed by an afternoon of blood trouble.

Hospital instructions had been for him to take four daily readings of his blood sugar level, using a slim, penlike appliance into which he inserted a test strip duly smeared with a drop of his blood, with each result appearing, after only thirty seconds, in a small window on the side of the pen. While the average blood sugar level of the healthy person is about 4.5, the pen is calibrated from 1 to 25, since the levels of diabetic patients often vary very considerably. Any level higher than 25 is registered as “HI.”