Colin Dexter - Death Is Now My Neighbor

Morse had been silent throughout the interrogation, his attention focused, it seemed, on the long, black-stockinged legs.

“Where does that leave me — leave us?” she asked miserably.

“We shall have to ask you to come in to make an official statement,” said Lewis.

“Now, you mean?”

“That’ll be best, yes.”

“Perhaps not,” intervened Morse. “It’s not all that urgent, Miss Charles. We’ll be in touch fairly soon.”

At the door, Morse thanked her for the coffee: “Not the best homecoming, I’m afraid.”

“Only myself to blame,” she said, her voice tight as she looked across at the Visitors’ parking lots, where the Jaguar stood.

“Where did you go?” asked Morse.

“I didn’t go anywhere.”

“You stayed here — in your flat?”

“I didn’t go anywhere.”

“What was that about?” asked Lewis as he drove back along the A34 to Oxford. “About her statement?”

“I want you to be with me when we see Storrs this afternoon.”

“What did you think of her?”

“Not a very good liar.”

“Lovely figure, though. Legs right up to her armpits! She’d have got a job in the chorus line at the Windmill.”

Morse was silent, his eyes gleaming again as Lewis continued:

“I read somewhere that they all had to be the same height and the same build — in the chorus line there.”

“Perhaps I’ll take you along when the case is over.”

“No good, sir. It’s been shut for ages.”

Dawn Charles closed the door behind her and walked thoughtfully back to the lounge, the suspicion of a smile about her lips.

Everything in life is somewhere else, and you get there in a car.

Lewis had backed into the first available space on Polstead Road, the tree-lined thoroughfare that leads westward from Woodstock Road into Jericho; and now stood waiting while Morse arose laboriously from the low passenger seat of the Jaguar.

“Seen that before, sir?” Lewis pointed to the circular blue plaque on the wall opposite: “This house was the home of T. E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) from 1896–1921.”

Morse grunted as he straightened up his aching back, mumbling of lumbago.

“What about a plaque for Mr. Storrs, sir? ‘This was the home of Julian Something Storrs, Master of Lonsdale, 1996 to... 1997’?”

Morse shrugged indifferently:

“Perhaps just 1996.”

The two men walked a little way along the short road. The houses here were of a pattern: gabled, redbricked, three-storied properties, with ashlared, mullioned windows, the frames universally painted white; interesting and amply proportioned houses built toward the end of the nineteenth century.

“Wouldn’t mind living here,” volunteered Lewis.

Morse nodded. “Very civilized. Small large houses, these, Lewis, as opposed to large small houses.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Something to do with the number of bathrooms, I think.”

“Not much to do with the number of garages!”

“No.”

Clearly nothing whatever to do with the number of garages, since the reason for the continuum of cars on either side of the road was becoming increasingly obvious: there were no garages here, nor indeed any room for such additions. To compensate for the inconvenience, the front areas of almost all the properties had been cemented, cobbled, graveled, or paved, in order to accommodate the parking of motor cars; including the front of the Storrs’ residence, where on the gravel alongside the front window stood a small, pale gray, D-registration Citroën, a thin pink stripe around its bodywork.

“Someone’s in?” ventured Morse.

“Mrs. Storrs, perhaps — he’s got a BMW. A woman’s car, that, anyway.”

“Really?”

Morse was still peering through the Citroën’s front window (perhaps for some more eloquent token of femininity) when Lewis returned from his ineffectual ringing.

“No one in. No answer, anyway.”

“On another weekend break?”

“I could ring the Porters’ Lodge.”

“You do that small thing, Lewis. I’ll be...” Morse pointed vaguely toward the hostelry at the far end of the road.

It was at the Anchor, a few minutes later, as Morse sat behind a pint of John Smith’s Tadcaster bitter, that Lewis came in to report on the Storrs: away again, for the weekend, the pair of them, this time though their whereabouts not vouchsafed to the Lodge.

Morse received the news without comment, appearing preoccupied; thinking no doubt, supposed Lewis, as he paid for his orange juice. Thinking and drinking... drinking and thinking... the twin activities which in Morse’s view were ever and necessarily concomitant.

Not wholly preoccupied, however.

“I’ll have a refill while you’re at the bar, Lewis. Smith’s please.”

After a period of silence, Morse asked the question:

“If somebody came to you with a letter — a photocopied letter, say — claiming your missus was having a passionate affair with the milkman—”

Lewis grinned. “I’d be dead worried. We’ve got a woman on the milk float.”

“—what would you do?”

“Read it, obviously. See who’d written it.”

“Show it to the missus?”

“Only if it was a joke.”

“How would you know that?”

“Well, you wouldn’t really, would you? Not for a start. You’d try to find out if it was genuine.”

“Exactly. So when Storrs got a copy of that letter, a letter he’d pretty certainly not seen before—”

“Unless Turnbull showed it to him?”

“Doubt it. A death certificate, wasn’t it? He’d want to let Storrs down a bit more gently than that.”

“You mean, if Storrs tried to find out if it was genuine, he’d probably go along to the clinic...”

Morse nodded, like some benevolent schoolmaster encouraging a promising pupil.

“And show it to... Dawn Charles?”

“Who else? She’s the sort of Practice Manager there, if anybody is. And let’s be honest about things. You’re not exactly an expert in the Socratic skills yourself, are you? But how long did it take you to get the truth out of her? Three or four minutes?”

“You think Storrs did it as well?”

“Pretty certainly, I’d say. He’s nobody’s fool; and he’s not going to give in to blackmail just on somebody’s vague say-so. He’s an academic, and if you’re an academic you’re trained to check — check your sources, check your references, check your evidence.”

“So perhaps Storrs has been a few steps in front of us all the time.”

Morse nodded. “He probably rumbled our receptionist straightaway. Not many suspects there at the clinic.”

Slowly Lewis sipped his customary orange juice, his earlier euphoria fading.

“We’re not exactly galloping toward the finishing post, are we?”

Morse looked up, his blue eyes betraying some considerable surprise.

“Why do you say that, Lewis? That’s exactly what we are doing.”

Hombre apercebido medio combatido

(A man well prepared has already half fought the battle).

Somewhat concerned about the adequacy of the Jaguar’s petrol allowance, Morse had requisitioned an unmarked police car, which just before 10 A.M. was heading south along the A34, with Sergeant Lewis at the wheel. As they approached Abingdon, Morse asked Lewis to turn on Classic FM, and almost immediately asked him to turn it off, as he recognized the Brandenburg Concerto No. 2.

“Somebody once said, Lewis, that it was not impossible to get bored even in the presence of a mistress, and I’m sorry to say I sometimes get a little bored even in the company of Johann Sebastian Bach.”