Colin Dexter - Death Is Now My Neighbor

“Look! You don’t seriously think I had anything to do with—”

“My job’s to ask the questions—”

“Well, the answer’s ‘no,’ ” she snapped. “Any more questions?”

One or two clearly:

“Where were you on Sunday morning — last Sunday morning?”

“At home. In bed. Asleep — until the police woke me up.”

“And then ?”

“Then I was frightened. And you want me to tell you the truth? Well, I’m still bloody frightened!”

Morse looked at her again: so attractive; so vulnerable; and now just a little nervous, perhaps? Not frightened though, surely.

Was she hiding something?

“Is there anything more,” he asked gently “anything at all, you can tell me about this terrible business?”

And immediately he sensed that she could.

“Only one thing, and perhaps it’s got nothing... Julian asked me to a Guest Night at Lonsdale last November, and in the SCR after dinner I sat next to a Fellow there called Denis Cornford. I only met him that once — but he was really nice — lovely man, really — the sort of man I wish I’d met in life.”

“Bit old, surely?”

“About your age.”

Morse’s fingers folded round the cellophane, and he sought to stop his voice from trembling.

“What about him?”

“I saw him on the Drive, that’s all. On Thursday night. About eight. He didn’t see me. I’d just driven in and he was walking in front of me — no car. He kept walking along a bit, and then he turned into Number 15 and rang the bell. Geoff Owens opened the front door — and let him in.”

“You’re quite sure it was him?”

“Oh, yes,” replied Adèle.

He looked into her limpid eyes: “I will turn this Mozart off, if you don’t mind, my love. You see, I can never concentrate on two beautiful things at the same time.”

With suspiciously extravagant caution Morse drove the Jaguar up toward Kidlington HQ, again conscious of seeing the nameplate of that particular railway station flashing, still unrecognizably, across his mind. At the Woodstock Road roundabout he waited patiently for a gap in the Ring Road traffic; rather too patiently for a regularly hooting hooligan somewhere behind him.

Whether he believed what his ABC girl had told him, he wasn’t really sure. And suddenly he realized he’d forgotten to ask her whether indeed it was she who occasionally extended her literary talents beyond her humdrum political pamphlets into the fields of (doubtless more profitable) pornography.

But it was only for a few brief minutes that Morse considered the official confiscation of the titillatingly titled novel, since his car phone had been ringing as he finally crossed onto Five Mile Drive. He pulled over to the side of the road, since seldom had he been able to discharge two simultaneous duties at all satisfactorily.

It was Lewis on the line — an excited Lewis.

Calling from the newspaper offices.

“I just spoke to the Personnel Manager, sir. It was him!”

“Lew-is! Your pronouns! What exactly was who ?”

“It wasn’t Owens I spoke to on the phone. It was the Personnel Manager himself!”

Morse replied only after a pause, affecting a tone of appropriate humility: “I wonder why I don’t take more notice of you in the first place.”

“You don’t sound all that surprised?”

“Little in life surprises me any longer. The big thing is that we’re getting things straight at last. Well done!”

“So your girl wasn’t involved.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Did she tell you anything important?”

“I’m not sure. We know Owens had got something on Storrs, and perhaps... it might be he had something on Cornford as well.”

“Cornford? How does he come into things?”

“She tells me, our Tory lass, that she saw him going into Owens’ house last Thursday.”

“Phew!”

“I’m just going back to HQ, and then I’ll be off to see our friends the Cornfords — both of ’em — if I can park.”

“Last time you parked on the pavement in front of the Clarendon Building.”

“Ah, yes. Thank you, Lewis. I’d almost forgotten that.”

“Not forgotten your injection, I hope?”

“Oh no. That’s now become an automatic part of my lifestyle,” said Morse, who had forgotten all about his lunch-time jab.

The phone was ringing when Morse opened the door of his office.

“Saw you coming in,” explained Strange.

“Yes, sir?”

“It’s all these forms I’ve got to fill in — retirement forms. They give me a headache.”

“They give me a headache.”

“At least you know how to fill ’em in.”

“Can we leave it just a little while, sir? I don’t seem able to cope with two things at once these days, and I’ve got to get down to Oxford.”

“Let it wait! Just don’t forget you ’ll be filling in the same forms pretty soon.”

Bloxham Drive was still cordoned off, the police presence still pervasively evident. But Adèle Beatrice Cecil — alias Ann Berkeley Cox, author of Topless in Torremolinos — was waved through by a sentinel PC, just as Geoffrey Owens had been waved through over a fortnight earlier, on the morning that Rachel James had been murdered.

As she let herself into Number 1, she was immediately aware that the house was (literally) almost freezing. Why hadn’t she left the heating on? How good to have been able to jump straight into a hot bath; or into an electric-blanketed bed; or into a lover’s arms...

For several minutes she thought of Morse, and of what he had asked her. What on earth had he suspected? And suddenly, alone again now, in her cold house, she found herself shivering.

To an outsider it may appear that the average Oxbridge don works but twenty-four weeks out of the annual fifty-two. If therefore at any point in the academic year it is difficult to locate the whereabouts of such an individual, most assuredly this circumstance may not constitute any adequate cause for universal alarm.

Just after 4 P.M. that same day, Morse rang the bell beside the red-painted front door of an elegant, ashlared house just across from the Holywell Music Room. It was the right house, he knew that, with the Lonsdale Crest fixed halfway between the neatly paned windows of the middle and upper stories.

There was no answer.

There were no answers.

Morse retraced his steps up to Broad Street and crossed the cobbles of Radcliffe Square to the Porters’ Lodge at Lonsdale.

“Do you know if Dr. Cornford’s in College?”

The duty porter rang a number; then shook his head.

“Doesn’t seem to be in his rooms, sir.”

“Has he been in today?”

“He was in this morning. Called for his mail — what, ten? Quarter past?”

“You’ve no idea where he is?”

The porter shook his head. “Doesn’t come in much of a Wednesday, Dr. Cornford. Usually has his Faculty Meeting Wednesdays.”

“Can you try him for me there? It’s important.”

The porter rang a second number; spoke for a while; put down the phone.

“They’ve not seen him today, sir. Seems he didn’t turn up for the two o’clock meeting.”

“Have you got his home number?”

“He’s ex-directory, sir. I can’t—”

“So am I ex-directory. You know who I am, don’t you?”

The young porter looked as hopefully as he could into Morse’s face.

“No, sir.”