The dead of Jericho (10 page)

Although the writing was crudely printed, with several words written out in individual, unjoined characters, the message was surprisingly coherent — and disturbing. Yet as Charles Richards read it, his mind seemed curiously detached: it was almost as if the writing had been submitted to him as a piece of English prose that had to be corrected and commented upon — its message secondary and of comparatively little significance. He read the letter through a second time, and then a third, and then a fourth; but if a hidden observer had recorded the conflicting emotions of puzzlement, anger, and even anxiety, that played upon his face, there was never the slightest hint of panic or despair. For Charles Richards was a clever and resourceful man, and he now refolded the letter, replaced it in its envelope and put it, together with the outer cover, inside his wallet.

Five minutes later he waited for a few seconds by Celia's bedside as she sat up, drew a cardigan round her shoulders, and took the breakfast tray of orange juice, tea, and toast. He kissed her lightly on the forehead, told her that he had to go into Oxford, that he'd take the Mini, and that he'd certainly be home for lunch about one. Was there anything he could get her from the shops? He'd perhaps have to nip into Oxford again in the evening, too.

Celia Richards heard him go, a great burden of anxiety weighing on her mind. How could a man so treacherous seem so kind? It had been an extraordinary coincidence that the first copy of the
Oxford Mail
she'd read for months had contained that account of Anne Scott's death, and she felt quite sure that Charles had read the article, too. Had he been responsible for that terrible thing? She couldn't really know and, to be truthful, she didn't care much either. What she
did
know was that their life together just couldn't go on as it had been. Putting things off was merely aggravating that almost intolerable burden, and she would put it off no longer. He'd said he'd be in for lunch; and after lunch... Yes! She would tell him
then.
Tell him all she knew; tell him the truth. It was the only way-the only way for
her.
Conrad had counselled against it, but Conrad would understand. Conrad always understood... She munched the tasteless toast and drank the lukewarm tea. Oxford... He'd always insisted how important it was for him to put in a few hours at the office on Saturday mornings. So why Oxford? With Anne Scott dead, what could possibly be dragging him to Oxford?

In the Intensive Care Unit at the J.R.2, Doctor Philips walked from the side of the youth lying motionless beneath the startlingly white sheets, and pulled out the chart from the slot at the foot of the bed: temperature still high, pulse still rather disturbingly variable.

'Bloody fool!' he mumbled to the nurse who stood beside him.

'Will he be all right?' she asked.

Philips shrugged his shoulders. 'Doubt it. Once you start on that sort of stuff...'

'Do we know what stuff it was?'

'Can't be sure, really. Cocaine, I shouldn't wonder, though. High temperature, dilation of the pupils, sweating, gooseflesh, hypertension — all the usual symptoms. Took it intravenously, too, by the look of things. Which doesn't help, of course.'

'Will he get over
this,
I mean?'

'If he does it'll be thanks to you, Nurse — no one else.' Nurse Warrener felt pleased with the compliment, and just a little more hopeful than she had been. She thought she could perhaps get to like Michael Murdoch. He was only a boy really: well, nineteen according to the records — exactly the same age as she was — and a prospective undergraduate at Lonsdale College. What a tragedy it would be if his life were now to be completely ruined! She thought of Michael's mother, too — a brisk, energetic-looking woman who seemed on the face of it to be taking things none too badly, but who (as Nurse Warrener rightly suspected) was hiding behind that competent, no-nonsense mien the ghost of some distraught despair.

The gates of the boat-yard were open as Morse moved swiftly along Canal Reach that night, no lights showing in the fronts of either 9 or 10. It was just before 9 p.m., and the Lancia stood on double yellow lines outside the Printer's Devil, into which Morse had slipped a quarter of an hour earlier, not only to establish some spurious
raison d'etre
for his presence in the area, but also to down a couple of double Scotches. Once inside the yard, he turned immediately to his left and felt his way along the brick wall, treading cautiously amid the petrol drums, the wooden spars, and the assorted, derelict debris of old canal barges. There was no one about, and the boatman's hut just ahead of him was securely padlocked. The only noise was a single splash of some water bird behind the low bulk of the house-boat moored alongside the Canal, and the moon had drifted darkly behind the scudding clouds.

With the level of the wharf a foot or so higher than the street behind it, the wall was not going to pose such a problem as Morse had feared, and standing on one of the petrol drums, he peered cautiously over the recently repaired section of the wall. No lights shone in the back rooms of numbers 9, 7 or 5. He hoisted himself up and, keeping his body as close to the top of the wall as he could, dropped down on the other side, feeling a sharp spasm of pain as his right foot crushed a small, terra-cotta flower pot beneath. The noise startled him, and his heart pounded as he stood for several minutes beside the deep shadow of the wall. But nothing moved; no lights came on; and he stepped silently along to the back door, let himself in, stood inside the kitchen, and waited until his eyes could slowly accustom themselves to the darkness. The door immediately to his right would lead, he guessed, to a small bathroom and WC; to his left, the door at the other side of the kitchen would lead (he knew) directly into the lounge. And lifting the latch of the latter, he pulled it open, the bottom of the lower panel scraping raspingly along the floor. Inside the lounge, he felt on familiar territory, and taking a torch from his raincoat pocket he carefully shielded the light with his left hand as he made his way up to the back bedroom. He had already decided that it would be far too risky to venture into the front bedroom, let alone switch on any lights; and so he spent the next half hour by torchlight looking through the drawers of the desk in what had clearly been the woman's study, feeling like some scrawny bird of prey that is left with the offal after the depredations of the jackals and hyenas. Finally he pocketed one book, shone his torch timorously around the room, and nodded with sad approval as the light picked out the black spines of a whole shelf of Penguin Classical Authors, correctly ordered in alphabetical sequence through from Aeschylus to Xenophon. One little gap, though, wasn't there? And Morse frowned slightly as he shone the torch more closely. Yes, a gap between Seneca's
Tragedies
and Suetonius'
Lives of the Caesars.
What could that be? Sophocles, perhaps? Yes, almost certainly Sophocles. So what? So bloody what? Morse shrugged his shoulders, pulled the door to behind him, and stepped carefully down the narrow, squeaking stairs.

Standing motionless for a few seconds in the lounge, he was suddenly aware how very cold the house was, and his mind momentarily settled on the household's heating arrangements. No central heating system, that was clear. No night-storage heaters, either, by the look of things; and the only heating appliance so far encountered was that small electric fire upstairs. A coal fire, perhaps? Surely there'd be a grate here somewhere. His torch still turned off, Morse stepped across the carpeted floor-and there it was in the far wall, surrounded by the lightish-coloured tiles of the fixture. Yes, he remembered it now; and bending down he felt with his right hand along the iron grille. Something there. He switched the torch on right up against the back of the grate, and then slowly allowed the beam to illuminate whatever there was to be seen. It wasn't much: the blackened, curled remains of what had probably been a sheet of notepaper, the flimsy fragments floating down and disintegrating as his delicate fingers touched them. But even as they did so, the torch-light picked out a small piece of something white in the ash-pan below, and Morse pulled away the front and gently picked it out. It seemed to be part of the heading of an official letter, printed in small black capitals, and even now Morse could quite easily make out the letters: ICH. Then he found another tiny piece; and although the flames had obviously curled across it, leaving the surface a smoky brown, it seemed clear to him that it was probably part of the same line of print. KAT, was it? Or RAT, more likely? He inserted the pieces between two pages of the book he had pocketed from upstairs, and his mind was already bounding down improbable avenues. Many of the books and papers he'd looked through upstairs were linked in some way with German literature, and he remembered from his schooldays that
'Ich rat'
meant 'I judged' or 'I thought'. Something like that anyway. He could always look it up later, of course, although it promptly occurred to him that he would hardly be overmuch enlightened if his memory proved to have been reliable. And then as he stood in that cold, dark room beside the fireless grate another thought occurred to him: what an idiot — what a stupid idiot he was! It was that first, cowardly evasion of the truth that had caused it all — all because he didn't want it to be known that he'd been floating around in Jericho looking for some necessary sex one afternoon. Suddenly, he felt a little frightened, too...

He locked the back door behind him, walked down the strip of garden, and looked for a place in the wall where he could get something of a foothold in order to scale what, from this side, appeared a most formidable precipice. What if he couldn't manage... But then Morse saw it. At the foot of the wall was a wooden board, about one foot square, on which someone had recently been mixing small quantities of cement, and beside it a bricklayer's trowel. The shudder that passed through Morse at that moment was not of fear — but of excitement. With his crisis of confidence now passed, his brain was sweetly clear once more. Spontaneously it told him, too, of a dustbin somewhere nearby; and he found it almost immediately, moved it against the wall, and standing on it clambered to the top. Easy! He breathed a great sigh of relief as he landed safely inside the boat-yard, where the gates were still open, and whence he made his exit without further alarum.

As he walked into Canal Reach, keeping tightly to his right, a hand clamped upon his shoulder with an iron grip, and a voice whispered harshly in his ear: 'Just keep walking, mister!'

At about the same time that Morse was entering the house in Canal Reach, a Mini Clubman turned down into the northern stretch of the Woodstock Road, having travelled into Oxford from Abingdon via the western Ring Road. The car kept closely into the bus lane, crawling along at about 10 m.p.h. past the large, elegant houses, set back on higher ground behind the tall hedges that masked their wide fronts and provided a quiet privacy for their owners. The driver pulled the car completely over on to the pavement beside a telephone kiosk on his left, turned off the lights, got out, entered the kiosk, and picked up the receiver. The dialling tone told him that the phone was probably in working order, and keeping the instrument to his ear he turned round and looked up and down the road. No one was in sight. He stepped out and, as if searching his pockets for some coinage, carefully examined the surrounds of the kiosk. The stone wall behind it was luxuriantly clad with thick ivy, and he pushed his hands against it, seeming to be satisfied that all was well. He got back into the Mini and drove along the road for about fifty yards, before stopping again and taking note of the name of the road, that stretched quite steeply off on his left. He then drove the short distance down to Squitchey Lane, turned left, left at the Banbury Road, left into Sunderland Avenue, and finally left again into the Woodstock Road. For the moment there was no traffic and he drove slowly once more along the selfsame stretch of road. Then, nodding to himself with apparent satisfaction, he accelerated away.

The plan was laid.

Michael Murdoch opened his eyes at about ten minutes to ten that evening to find the same pretty face looking down at him. He noticed with remarkable vividness the strong white teeth, a gold filling somewhere towards the extremity of her smile, and he heard her speak.

'Feeling better?'

Momentarily he was feeling nothing, not even a sense of puzzlement, and in a dry-throated whisper he managed to answer 'Yes.' But as he lay back and closed his eyes again, his head was,drifting off in a giddying whirl and the body it had left behind seemed slowly to be slipping from the sloping bed. He felt a cold, restraining hand on his drenched forehead, and immediately he was back inside his skull once more, with a giant, brown rat that sat at the entrance of his right ear, twitching its nose and ever edging menacingly forward, its long tail insinuating itself centimetre by centimetre into the gaping orifice, and the long white slits of teeth drawing nearer and nearer to a vast and convoluted dome of pale-white matter that even now he recognized: it was his own matter, his own flesh,
his own brain.