Colin Dexter: Death Is Now My Neighbor

Apart from the midnight “milk float,” which gave passengers the impression that it called at almost every hamlet along the line, the 11:20 P.M. was the last train from Paddington. And a panting Owens jumped into its rear coach as the Turbo Express suddenly juddered and began to move forward. The train was only half-full, and he found a seat immediately.

He felt pleased with himself. The assignation in the pub had proved to be even more interesting than he’d dared to expect; and he leaned back and closed his eyes contentedly as he pondered the possible implications of what he had just learned...

He jolted awake at Didcot, wondering where he was — realizing that he had missed the Reading stop completely. Determined to stay awake for the last twelve minutes of the journey, he picked up an Evening Standard someone had left on the seat opposite, and was reading the sports page when over the top of the newspaper he saw a man walking back down the carriage — almost to where he himself was sitting — before taking his place next to a woman. And Owens recognized him.

Recognized Mr. Julian Storrs of Lonsdale.

Well! Well! Well!

At Oxford, his head still stuck behind the Evening Standard , Owens waited until everyone else had left the rear carriage. Then, himself alighting, he observed Storrs arm-in-arm with his companion as they climbed the steps of the footbridge which led over the tracks to Platform One. And suddenly, for the second time that evening, Owens felt a shiver of excitement — for he immediately recognized the woman, too.

How could he fail to recognize her?

She was his next-door neighbor.

Many is the gracious form that is covered with a veil; but on withdrawing this thou discoverest a grandmother.

Painstakingly, in block capitals, the Chief Inspector wrote his name, E. MORSE; and was beginning to write his address when Lewis came into the office at 8:35 A.M. on Monday, February 19.

“What’s that, sir?”

Morse looked down at a full page torn from one of the previous day’s color supplements.

“Special offer: two free CDs when you apply to join the Music Club Library.”

Lewis looked dubious. “Don’t forget you have to buy a book every month with that sort of thing. Life’s not all freebies, you know.”

“Well, it is in this case. You’ve just got to have a look at the first thing they send you, that’s all — then send it back if you don’t like it. I think they even refund the postage.”

Lewis watched as Morse completed and snipped out the application form.

“Wouldn’t it be fairer if you agreed to have some of the books?”

“You think so?”

“At least one of them.”

Intense blue eyes, slightly pained, looked innocently across the desk at Sergeant Lewis.

“But I’ve already got this month’s book — I bought it for myself for Christmas.”

He inserted the form into an envelope, on which he now wrote the Club’s address. Then he took from his wallet a sheaf of plastic cards: Bodleian Library ticket; Lloyds payment card; RAC Breakdown Service; blood donor card; Blackwell’s Bookshops; Oxford City Library ticket; phone card... but there appeared to be no booklet of first-class stamps there. Or of second-class.

“You don’t, by any chance, happen to have a stamp on you, Lewis?”

“What CDs are you going for?”

“I’ve ordered Janáček, the Glagolitic Mass — you may not know it. Splendid work — beautifully recorded by Simon Rattle. And Richard Strauss, Four Last Songs — Jessye Norman. I’ve got several recordings by other sopranos, of course.”

Of course...

Lewis nodded and looked for a stamp.

It was not infrequent for Lewis to be reminded of what he had lost in life; or rather, what he’d never had in the first place. The one Strauss he knew was the “Blue Danube” man. And he’d only recently learned there were two of those , as well — Senior and Junior; and which was which he’d no idea.

“Perhaps you’ll be in for a bit of a letdown, sir. Some of these offers — they’re not exactly up to what they promise.”

“You’re an expert on these things?”

“No... but... take Sergeant—” Lewis stopped himself in time. Just as well to leave a colleague’s weakness cloaked in anonymity. “Take this chap I know. He read this advert in one of the tabloids about a free video — sex video — sent in a brown envelope with no address to say where it had come from. You know, in case the wife...”

“No, I don’t know, Lewis. But please continue.”

“Well, he sent for one of the choices—”

“ Copenhagen Red-Hot Sex? ”

“No. Housewives on the Job — that was the title; and he expected, you know...”

Morse nodded. “Housewives ‘on the job’ with the milkman, the postman, the itinerant button salesmen...”

Lewis grinned. “But it wasn’t, no. It just showed all these fully dressed Swedish housewives washing up the plates and peeling the potatoes.”

“Serves Sergeant Dixon right.”

“You won’t mention it, sir!”

“Of course I won’t. And you’re probably right. You never really get something for nothing in this life. I never seem to, anyway.”

“Really, sir?”

Morse licked the flap of the white envelope. Then licked the back of the first-class stamp that Lewis had just given him.

The phone had been ringing for several seconds, and Lewis now took the call, listening briefly but carefully, before putting his hand over the mouthpiece:

“There’s been a murder, sir. On the doorstep, really — up on Bloxham Drive.”

In addition to your loyal support on the ballot paper, we shall be grateful if you can agree to display the enclosed sticker in one of your windows.

—Extract from a 1994 local election leaflet

distributed by the East Oxford Labor Party

It reminded Morse of something — that rear window of Number 17.

As a young lad he’d been fascinated by a photograph in one of his junior school textbooks of the apparatus frequently fixed round the necks of slaves in the southern states of America: an iron ring from whose circumference, at regular intervals, there emanated lengthy, fearsome spikes, also of iron. The caption, as Morse recalled, had maintained that such a device readily prevented any absconding cotton picker from passing himself off as an enfranchised citizen.

Morse had never really understood the caption.

Nor indeed, for some considerable while, was he fully to understand the meaning of the neat bullet hole in the center of the shattered glass, and the cracks that radiated from it regularly, like a young child’s crayoning the rays of the sun.

Looking around him, Morse surveyed the area from the wobbly paving slabs which formed a pathway at the rear of the row of terraced houses stretching along the northern side of Bloxham Drive, Kidlington, Oxfordshire. About half of the thirty-odd young trees originally planted in a staggered design beside and behind this path had been vandalized to varying degrees: some of them wholly extirpated; some cruelly snapped in the middle of their gradually firming stems; others, with many of their burgeoning branches torn off, standing wounded and forlorn amid the unkempt litter-strewn area, once planned by some Environmental Officer as a small addendum to England’s green and pleasant land.

Morse felt saddened.

As did Sergeant Lewis, standing beside him.

Yet it is appropriate here to enter one important qualification. Bloxham Drive, in the view of most of its residents, was showing some few signs of unmistakable improvement. The installation of sleeping policemen had virtually eliminated the possibilities of joyriding; many denizens were now lying more peacefully in their beds after the eviction of one notoriously antisocial household; and over the previous two or three years the properties had fallen in price to such an extent as to form an attractive proposition to those few of the professional classes who were prepared to give the street the benefit of the doubt. To be more specific, three such persons had taken out mortgages on properties there: the properties standing at Number 1, Number 15, and Number 17.