The dead of Jericho (14 page)

'One more question — we really must make this the last, I'm afraid,' said the chairman.

'You said you were a schoolmaster, Mr Richards,' said a woman in the front row. 'Were you a
good
schoolmaster?'

Richards got to his feet and smiled disarmingly. 'I was rather hoping no one would ask me that. The answer is "no", madam. I was
not
a roaring success as a schoolmaster, I'm afraid. The trouble was, I'm sorry to say, that I just wasn't any good at keeping discipline. In fact, my lessons sounded rather like those recordings on the radio of Mrs Thatcher addressing the House of Commons.'

It was a good note on which to end, and the excellent impression the speaker had made was finally sealed and approved. The audience laughed and applauded all the audience except one, that was, and that one man was Morse. He sat, the sole occupant of the back row, frowning fiercely, for the suspicion was slowly crossing his mind that this man was talking a load of bogus humbug.

At the bar downstairs, the chairman greeted Morse and said how glad he was to see him again. 'You've not met our speaker before, have you? Charles Richards — Chief Inspector Morse.'

The two men shook hands.

'I enjoyed your talk— ' began Morse.

‘I’m glad about that.'

'—except for the last bit.'

'Really? Why— ?'

'I just don't believe you were a lousy Schoolmaster, that's all,' said Morse simply.

Richards shrugged his shoulders. 'Well, let's put it this way: I soon realized I wasn't really cut out for the job. But why did you mention that?'

Morse wasn't quite sure. Yet the truth was that Richards had just held a non-captive audience for an hour and a half with ridiculous ease, an audience that had listened to this virtually unknown man with a progressively deeper interest, respect, and enthusiasm. What could the same man have done with the receptive, enquiring minds of a class of young schoolboys?

'I think you were an excellent schoolmaster, and if I were a headmaster now, I'd appoint you tomorrow.'

'I may have exaggerated a bit,' conceded Richards. 'It's always tempting to play for a laugh, though, isn't it?’

Morse nodded. That was one way of putting it, he supposed. The other way was that this man could be a formidable two-faced liar. 'You've not been here — near Oxford — very long?'

'Three months. You couldn't have been listening very carefully, Inspector— '

'You knew Anne Scott, didn't you?'

'Anne?' Richards' voice was very gentle. 'Yes, I knew Anne all right. She used to work for us. You know, of course, that she's dead.'

The chairman apologized for butting in, but he wished to introduce Richards to the other committee members.

'You won't perhaps know... ?' Morse heard the chairman say.

'No, I'm afraid I don't get over to Oxford much. In fact...'

Morse drifted away to drink his beer alone, feeling suddenly bored. But boredom was the last thing that Morse should have felt at that moment. Already, had he known it, he had heard enough to put him on the right track, and, indeed, even now his mind was beginning to stir in the depths, like the opening keys of
Das Rheingold
in the mysterious world of the shadowy waters.

When Richards took his leave, just on ten o'clock, Morse insinuated himself into a small group gathered round the bar, and lost no time in asking the bearded chairman about Anne Scott.

'Poor old Anne! She wasn't with us long, of course, but she was a jolly good committee member. Full of ideas, she was. You see, one of our big problems is getting some sort of balance between the literary side of things — you know, authors, and so on and the technical side — publishing, printing, that sort of thing. We're naturally a bit biased towards the literary side, but an awful lot of our members are more interested in the purely technical, business side — and it was Anne, actually, who suggested we should try to get Charles Richards. She used to work for him once and she — well, we left it to her. She fixed it all up. I thought he was good, didn't you?'

Morse nodded his agreement. 'Very good, yes.' But his mind was racing twenty furlongs ahead of his words.

'Pity we didn't get a decent turn-out. Still, it was their loss. Perhaps with the change of date and everything...'

Morse let him go on, then drained his beer, and stood silently at the corner of the bar with a replenished pint. His mind, which had been so obtuse up until this point in the case, was now extraordinarily clear — and he felt excited.

It was then that he heard the whine of the police and ambulance sirens.
Deja acoute.
How long was it since Charles Richards had left? Quarter of an hour, or so? Oh God! What a fool he'd been not to have woken up earlier. The light blue Rolls Royce he'd seen outside the Printer's Devil that day when he'd tried to call on Anne, the parking ticket on the windscreen; the reminder of that incident the following morning (that had
almost
clicked!), with the notice pasted on the Lancia's windscreen in the car park of the Clarendon Institute; the recollection (only now!) of what it was that Anne had told him... All these thoughts now shifted into focus, all projecting the same clear picture of Charles Richards — that fluently accomplished liar he'd been listening to less than an hour ago. It was
Charles Richards
who had visited 9 Canal Reach the day Anne Scott had died, for when Morse had parked in the comparatively empty yard of the Clarendon Institute more than a couple of hours ago he had reversed the Lancia into a space next to a large and elegantly opulent Rolls. A light blue Rolls.

Morse pushed a 5p piece into the pay-phone in the foyer and asked for Bell. But Bell wasn't in, and the desk sergeant didn't know exactly where he was. He knew where Bell was making for though: there'd been a murder and—

'You got the address, Sergeant?'

'Just a minute, sir. I've got it here... it was somewhere down in Jericho... one of those little roads just off Canal Street, if I remember...'

But Morse had put down the phone several words ago.

'Don't tell me you've had another meeting at the Clarendon Institute, sir,' said Walters.

Morse ignored the question. 'What's the trouble?'

'Jackson, sir. He's dead. Been pretty badly knocked about.'

'He pointed a thumb towards the ceiling. 'Want to see him?'

'Bell here yet?'

'On his way. He's been over to Banbury for something, but he knows about it. We got in touch with him as soon as we heard.'

'Heard?'

'Another anonymous phone call.'

‘When was that?'

'About a quarter past nine.'

'You sure of that?' Morse sounded more than a little puzzled.

'It'll be booked in — the exact time, I mean. But the message was pretty vague and...'

'Nobody took much notice, you mean?'

'It wasn't that, sir. But you can't expect them to follow up everything — you know, just like that. I mean...'

'You mean they're all bloody incompetent,' snapped Morse. 'Forget it!'

Morse ascended the mean, narrow, little flight of stairs and stood on the miniature landing outside the front bedroom. Jackson's body lay across the rumpled bed-clothes, his left leg dangling over the side, his bruised and bleeding head turned towards the door. The floor of the small room at the side of the single bed was strewn with magazines.

'I've not really had a good look around, sir,' ventured Walters. 'I thought I'd better wait for the inspector. Not much we could have done for him, is there?'

Morse shook his head slowly. The man's head lay in a large sticky-looking stain of dark red blood, and to Morse George Jackson appeared very, very dead indeed.

'I'll tell you exactly when he died, if you like,' volunteered Morse. But before he could fill in the dead man's timetable, the door below was opened and slammed, and Bell himself was lumbering up the stairs. His greeting was predictable.

'What the 'ell are you doing here, Morse?'

For the next hour the biggest difficulty was for the three policemen, the two fingerprint men, and the photographer to keep out of one another's way in the rooms of the tiny house. Indeed, when the hump-backed police surgeon arrived, he flatly refused to look at the corpse unless everyone else cleared out and went downstairs; and when he finally descended from his splendid isolation, his findings appeared to have done little to tone down his tetchiness.

'Between half past seven and nine, at a guess,' he replied to Bell's inevitable question.

Walters looked quizzically at Morse, who sat reading one of the glossy 'porno' magazines he had brought from upstairs.

'You still sex-mad, I see, Morse,' said the surgeon.

'I don't seem to be able to shake it off, Max.' Morse turned over a page. 'And you don't improve much, either, do you? You've been examining all our bloody corpses for donkey's years, and you still refuse to tell us when they died.'

'When do
you
think he died?' From his tone the surgeon seemed far more at ease than at any time since he'd entered.

'Me? What's it matter what I think? But if you want me to try to be a
fraction
more precise than you, Max, I'd say — mm — I'd say between a quarter past seven and a quarter to eight.'

The surgeon allowed himself a lop-sided grin. 'Want a bet, Morse?'

'You can't loose with your bloody bets, can you? What's your bet? He died sometime
tonight — is
that it?'

'I think —
think,
mind you, Morse — that he might well have died a little later than you're suggesting; though why anyone should take an atom of notice of your ideas, God only knows. What really astounds me is that with your profound ignorance of pathology and its kindred sciences you have the effrontery to have any ideas
at all.'

'What's your bet, Max?' asked Morse in the mildest tones.

The surgeon mused. 'Off the record, this is agreed? I'll say between er — No! You only allowed yourself half an hour, didn't you? So, I’ll do the same. I'll say between a quarter past
eight
and a quarter to
nine.
Exactly one hour later than you.'

'How much?'

'A tenner?'

The two men shook hands on it, and the surgeon left.

'Very interesting!' mumbled Bell, but Morse appeared to have resumed his reading. In fact, however, Morse's mind was peculiarly active as he turned the pages of the lurid and crudely explicit magazine. After all, he was at least contemplating one of the few clues furnished at the scene of the crime: mags (pornographic); mags (piscatorial); fingerprints (Jackson's); body (Jackson's) — and little else of much importance. A bare, stark murder. No obvious motive; no murder weapon; a crudely commonplace scene; well, that was what Bell would be thinking. With Morse it was quite different. He was confident he knew the solution even before the problem had been posed, and his cursory look round Jackson's bedroom had done little more than to corroborate his convictions: he knew the time of the murder, the weapon of the murder, the motive of the murder — even the name of the murderer. Poor old Bell!

Morse was still thinking, ten minutes later, that he had probably missed the boat in life and should have been a very highly paid and inordinately successful writer of really erotic pornography — when Walters came back into the room and reported to Bell.

Jackson, it appeared, had been seen around in Jericho that evening: at half past five he had called in the corner grocery store for a small loaf of brown bread; at a quarter to seven he had gone across to Mrs Purvis's to try to normalize the flushing functions of her recently installed water closet; at above five past eight—

'What!'
cried Morse.

'—at about five past eight, Jackson went across to the Printer's Devil and bought a couple of pints of— '

'Nonsense'

'But he
did,
sir! He was
there!
He played the fruit-machine for about ten minutes and finally left about twenty past eight.'

Morse's body sank limply into the uncomfortable armchair. Had he got it all wrong?
All
of it? For if Jackson was blowing the froth off his second pint and feeding 10p's into the slot after eight o'clock, then without the slimmest shadow of doubt it could assuredly
not
have been Charles Richards who murdered George Alfred Jackson, late resident of 10 Canal Reach, Jericho, Oxford.

'Better have that tenner ready, Morse!' said Bell.

In the current telephone directory, neither Richards (C.) nor Richards Publishing Company (or whatever) of Abingdon was listed, and Morse realized he would have saved himself the bother of looking if he had remembered Richards' recent arrival in Oxfordshire. But the supervisor of Telephone Enquiries was able, after finally convincing herself of Morse's
bona fides,
to give him two numbers: those of Richards, C., 261 Oxford Avenue, Abingdon, and of Richards Press, 14 White Swan Lane, Abingdon. Morse tried the latter first, and heard a recorded female voice inform him that in gratitude for his esteemed enquiry the answering machine was about to be activated. He tried the other number. Success.

'I was just on my way to the office, Inspector, but I don't suppose you've rung up about a printing contract, have you?'

'No, sir. I just wondered if you'd heard about the trouble in Jericho last night.'

'Trouble? You don't mean my vast audience rioted after my little talk?'

'A man was murdered in Jericho last night.'

'Yes?' (Had Charles Richards' tone inserted the question-mark? The line was very crackly.)