Colin Dexter - Death Is Now My Neighbor

Unless Julian persuaded her to sleep in the raw, Dawn wore my pajamas, and the hotel girl took them breakfast in bed the next morning. Mistake about all that sugar, I agree! Dawn Charles is my sort of height and shape, so Julian tells me, and if she wore something that was obviously mine there wouldn’t be much of a problem. The whole thing was very neat really. It didn’t matter if she was seen round the hotel or if I was, because both of us were staying there officially.

I’d phoned Owens to arrange everything and last Sunday morning I drove round to Bloxham Drive again. Probably he’d have been more wary if I’d been a man instead of a woman but I told him I’d have the money with me. So he said he’d meet me and have a signed letter ready promising he wouldn’t try any more blackmail. I went down the slope at the back like before and knocked on the right door this time. It was about a quarter past seven when he let me in and we went through to his front room. I don’t think either of us spoke. He was standing there in front of the settee and I took the pistol out of my shopping bag and shot him twice and left him there for dead.

Angela Storrs

3-11-96

As it happened, Lewis was not to read this final version. Had he done so, he might have felt rather surprised — and a little superior? — to notice that his own “burnt sienna” had been amended to “burnt Siena,” since he had taken the trouble to look up that color in Chambers, and had spelled it accordingly.

Belbroughton Road is bonny, and pinkly burst the spray

Of prunus and forsythia across the public way,

For a full spring-tide of blossom seethed and departed hence,

Leaving land-locked pools of jonquils by a sunny garden fence.

Spring was particularly beautiful, if late, in North Oxford that year, and even Morse, whose only potential for floral exhibitionism was a small window box, much enjoyed the full-belled daffodils and the short-lived violets, though not the crocuses.

Sir Clixby Bream received a letter from Julian Storrs on Tuesday, March 12. Both contestants had now withdrawn from the Mastership Stakes. At an Extraordinary General Meeting held the next day in the Stamper Room, the Fellows of Lonsdale had little option but to extend yet again the term of the incumbent Master; and by a majority vote to call in the “Visitor,” that splendidly titled dignitary (usually an archbishop) whose right and duty it was, and is, periodically to inspect and to report on College matters, and to advise and to intervene in any such disputatious circumstances as Lonsdale, omnium consensu, now found itself in. An outside appointment seemed a certainty. But Sir Clixby accepted the situation philosophically, as was his wont... and the College lawns were beginning to look immaculate again. Life had to go on, even if Denis Cornford was now a broken man, with Julian Storrs awaiting new developments — and death.

Adèle Beatrice Cecil had recently learned that the membership of the Young Conservatives had fallen from 500,000 twenty years earlier to 5,000 in January 1996; and anyway she had for several weeks been contemplating a change in her lifestyle. Morse may have been right in one way, she thought — only one way, though — in suggesting that it was the personnel rather than the policies which were letting the Party down. Yes, it might be time for a change; and on Wednesday, March 13, she posted off her resignation to Conservative Central Office. She did so with deep regret, yet she knew she was never destined to be idle. She could write English competently, she knew that; as indeed did Morse; as did also her publishers, Erotica Press, who had recently requested an equally sexy sequel to Topless in Torremolinos. And already a nice little idea was burgeoning in her brain almost as vigorously as the wallflowers she’d planted the previous autumn: an idea about an older man — well, say a whitish-haired man who wasn’t quite so old as he looked — and a woman who was considerably younger, about her own age, say. Age difference, in heterosexual encounters, was ever a guaranteed “turn-on,” so her editor confided.

One man was to continue his officially unemployed status for the remainder of the spring; and probably indefinitely thereafter, although he was a little troubled by the rumor that the Social Security system was likely to be less sympathetic in the future. For the moment, however, he appeared to be adequately funded, judging from his virtually permanent presence in the local pubs and betting shops. It was always going to be difficult for any official down in the Job Center to refute his claim that the remuneration offered for some of their “employment opportunities” could never compensate for his customary lifestyle: He was a recognized artist; and if anyone doubted his word, there was a man living in North Oxford who would always be willing to give him a reference...

On the mantelpiece in his bedroom, the little ormolu clock ticked on, keeping excellent time.

In the immediate aftermath of Mrs. Storrs’ arrest, Sergeant Lewis found himself extremely busy, happily i/c the team of companionable DCs assigned to him. So many inquiries remained to be made; so many statements to be taken down and duly typed; so many places to be visited and revisited: Soho, Bloxham Drive, the newspaper offices, the Harvey Clinic, Polstead Road, Lonsdale College, Woodpecker Way, The Randolph, the Royal Crescent Hotel... He had met Morse for lunch on the Wednesday and had listened patiently as a rather self-congratulatory Chief Inspector remembered a few of the more crucial moments in the case: when, for example, he had associated that photograph of the young Soho stripper with that of the don’s wife at Lonsdale; when the elegantly leggy Banbury Road receptionist had so easily slipped alongside that same don’s wife in a chorus line at the Windmill. That lunchtime, however, Lewis’s own crucial contributions to such dramatic developments were never even mentioned, let alone singled out for special praise.

Late on Thursday evening, Morse was walking home from the Cotswold House after a generous measure of Irish whiskey when a car slowed down beside him, the front passenger window electronically lowered.

“Can I give you a lift anywhere?”

“Hello! No, thank you. I only live...” Morse gestured vaguely up toward the A40 roundabout.

“Everything okay with you?”

“Will be — if you’d like to come along and inspect my penthouse suite.”

“I thought you said it was a flat.”

Though clearly surprised to find Morse in his office over the Friday lunch period, Strange refrained from his usual raillery.

“Can you nip in to see me a bit later this afternoon about these retirement forms?”

“Let’s do it now, sir.”

“What’s the rush?”

“I’m off this afternoon.”

“Official, is that?”

“Yes, sir.”

Strange eyed Morse shrewdly. “Why are you looking so bloody cheerful?”

“Well, another case solved...?”

“Mm. Where’s Lewis, by the way?”

“There’s still an awful lot of work to do.”

“Why aren’t you helping him then?”

“Like I say, sir, I’m off for the weekend.”

“You’re lucky, matey. The wife’s booked me for the lawn mower.”

“I’ve just got the window box myself.”

“Anything in it?”

Morse shook his head, perhaps a little sadly.

“You, er, going anywhere special?” asked Chief Superintendent Strange.

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.

They may not mean to, but they do.