The dead of Jericho (21 page)

Half an hour later Lewis was to discover that between the excellent facsimiles of the fingerprints lifted from Jackson's bedroom and those taken only that afternoon from Conrad Richards,
there was not a single line or whorl of correspondence anywhere.

Edward Murdoch felt ill-tempered and sweaty as he cycled homewards late that Wednesday afternoon. Much against his will, he had been roped into making up the number for his house rugby team, and his own ineffectualness and incompetence had been at least partly to blame for their narrow defeat. He was almost always free on Wednesday afternoons, and here was one afternoon he could have used profitably to get on with those two essays to be handed in the next morning. The traffic in Summertown was its usual bloody self, too, with cars seeking to pull into the precious parking bays, their nearside blinkers flashing as they waited for other cars to back out. Twice he had to swerve dangerously as motorists, seemingly oblivious to the rights of any cyclist, cut over in front of him. It was always the same, of course; but today everything seemed to be going wrong, and he felt increasingly irritated. He came to the conclusion that his bio-rhythms were heterodyning. The two words were very new to him, and he rather liked them both. He was getting hungry, too, and he just hoped that his mother had got something decent in the oven — for a change! The last ten days or so, meals had been pretty skimpy: it had been mince, stew, and baked beans in a dreary cyclical trio, and he longed for roast potatoes and thinly sliced beef. Not, he knew, that he ought to blame his mother too much — considering all that she'd been going through. Yet somehow his own selfish interests seemed almost invariably to triumph over his daily resolutions to try to help, even fractionally, during these tragic and traumatic days in the life of the Murdoch family.

He pushed his bike roughly into the garden shed, ignored the tin of nails which spilt on to the floor as his handle-bars knocked it over, unfastened his brief-case from the rack over the back wheel, and slammed the shed door noisily to.

His mother was in the kitchen ironing one of his white shirts.

'What's for tea?' His tone of voice suggested that whatever it was it would be viewed with truculent disfavour.

'I've got a nice bit of stew on, with some— '

'Oh Christ! Not stew again!'

Then something happened which took the boy completely by surprise. He saw his mother put down the iron; saw, simultaneously, her shoulders heave and the backs of her two forefingers go up to her tight mouth; and he saw in her eyes a look that was utterly helpless and hopeless, and then the tears soon streaming down her cheeks. A second later she was sitting at the kitchen table, her breath catching itself in short gasps as she fought to stave off the misery that threatened to swamp her. Edward had never for a second seen his mother like this, and the knowledge that she — she, his own solid and ever-dependable mother — was liable, just like anyone else, to be engulfed by waves of desperation, was a deeply felt shock for him. His own troubles vanished immediately, and he was conscious of a long-forgotten love for her.

'Don't be upset, mum! Please don't! I'm sorry, I really am. I didn't mean...'

Mrs Murdoch shook her head vigorously, and wiped her handkerchief across her eyes. 'It's not— ' But she couldn't go on, and Edward put a hand on her shoulder, and stood there, awkward and silent.

'I've not helped much, have I, mum?' he said quietly.

'It's
not
that. It's — it's just that I can't
cope.
I just can't! Everything seems to be falling to bits and I — I—' She shook her head once more, and the tears were rolling freely again. 'I just don't know what to
do! 
I've tried
so
hard to—' She put her own hand up on to her son's, and tried to steady her quivering voice. 'Don't worry about me. I'm just being silly, that's all.' She stood up and blew her nose noisily into the paper handkerchief. 'You have a good day?'

'It's Michael — isn't it, mum?'

Mrs Murdoch nodded. 'I went to see him again this afternoon. He's lost one eye completely and — and they don't really know — they don't really know... '

'You don't mean — he'll be
blind
?
'

Mrs Murdoch picked up the iron again and seemed to hold it in front of her like some puny shield. 'They're doing the best they can but... '

'Don't let's lose hope, mum! I know I'm not much of a one for church and all that, but hope
is
one of the Christian virtues, isn't it?'

If Mrs Murdoch had followed her instincts at that moment, she would have thrown her arms around her son and blessed him for the words he'd just spoken. But she didn't. Somehow she'd never felt able to express her feelings with any loving freedom, either with Michael or with Edward, and something restrained her even now. She turned off the iron and put two plates under the grill to warm. Where had she gone wrong? Where? If only her husband hadn't died... If only they'd never decided to... Oh God! Surely,
surely,
things could never get much worse than this? And yet she knew in her heart that they
could;
and as she put on the oven-glove to take out the stew-pot, she guiltily clutched her little secret even closer to herself: the knowledge that she would never be able to love Michael as she had always loved the boy who was now setting the table in the dining-room.

Later that evening the senior ophthalmic surgeon lifted, with infinite care, the bandage round Michael Murdoch's head. Then he took off his wrist-watch and held it about six inches in front of his patient's left eye.

'How are you, Michael?'

'All right. I feel tired, though — ever so tired.'

'Hungry?'

'No, not really. I've had something to eat.'

'That was a little while ago, though, and you've been asleep since then. Have you any idea of the time now?' He still held the watch steadily in front of the boy's remaining eye.

'Must be about tea time, is it? About five?'

The wrist-watch said 8.45, and still the surgeon held it out. But the boy's horridly blood-shot eye stared past the watch, unseeing still, and as the surgeon replaced the bandage he shook his head sadly at the nurse who was standing anxiously beside him.

On his way back from the Friar Bacon at ten minutes to eleven that night, Morse chanced to meet Mrs Murdoch, her Labrador straining mightily from her; and for the first time he learned of the tragic fate of her elder boy. He listened dutifully and compassionately, but somehow he couldn't seem to find the appropriate words of comfort, mumbling only the occasional 'Oh dear!', the occasional 'I
am
sorry', as he stood staring blankly at the grass verge. Fortunately the dog came to his rescue, and Morse felt relieved as the sandy coloured beast finally wrenched his mistress off to pastures new.

As he walked the remaining few hundred yards to his home, he pondered briefly upon the Murdoch family and their links with Anne Scott. But he was tired and over-beered, and nothing was to click in Morse's rather muddled mind that night.

Thursday saw Morse late into his office, where — he greeted Lewis with a perfunctory nod. He had slept badly, and silently vowed to give the booze a rest that day. Whilst Lewis amateurishly tapped the keys as he typed up a report, Morse forced his attention back to the blackmail note discovered in Charles Richards' desk. At one reading, it seemed a typically semi-literate specimen of the sort of note so often received by blackmail victims — ill-spelt, ill-punctuated, and ill-expressed. And yet, at another reading, it seemed not to fall into the conventional category at all. He handed the note across to Lewis.

'What do you make of it?'

'His spelling's even worse than mine, isn't it? Still, we knew all along he'd never been to Eton.'

'By "he", you mean Jackson, I suppose?'

Lewis turned from the typewriter and frowned. 'Who else, sir?'

'You think Jackson wrote this?'

'Don't
you?
'

'No, I don't. In fact, I'm absolutely sure that Jackson himself couldn't have written one line of this — let alone the whole caboodle. You'll find in Jackson's pathetic little pile of possessions a couple of pamphlets about that telly programme
On the Move
— and that wasn't a programme for your actual
semi-complete
illiterates, Lewis: it was for your
complete
illiterates, who've never managed to read or write and who get embarrassed about ever admitting it to anyone. So I reckon Jackson must have got somebody— '

'But it's pretty
bad
,that letter, sir. Probably get about Grade Five CSE, if you ask me.'

'Really? Well, if you honestly think that, I'm sure the nation is most relieved to know that you're not going to be called up to exercise your ignorant prejudices upon the essays written by most of our sixteen-year olds! You see, you're quite
wrong.
Here! Look at it again!' Morse thrust the letter across once more, and sat back in his chair like some smug pedagogue. 'What you want a letter to do, Lewis, is to
communicate — got
that? Now the spelling there is a bit weak, and the punctuation's infantile.
But,
Lewis, I'll tell you this: the upshot of that particular letter is so clear, so unequivocal, so
clever,
that no one who read it could have misunderstood one syllable! Mistakes galore, I agree; but when it comes down to telling Richards exactly where and exactly when and the rest of it — why, the letter's a bloody model of clarity!
Look
at it! Is your understanding held up by some dyslexic correspondent who spells "receive" the wrong way round? Never!'

'But— '

'Yes, I know. If you've got some little typist next door who can't spell, you give her the sack. And quite right, too. That's her job, and none of us wants to sign illiterate letters. But I'll say it again: whoever wrote this letter knew
exactly
what he was up to. And it's just the same with the punctuation, if you look a little more closely. Full stops and question marks are all cock-eyed — but they don't affect what's being
said.'
Morse banged the table with a rather frightening intensity. 'No!
Jackson did not write that letter.'

He wrote two words on the pad in front of him and passed the sheet over. 'What do you make of those?'

Lewis looked down at
egog
and
metantatopi,
but managed to decipher neither of these orthographic monstrosities.

'You've no idea, have you?' continued Morse. 'And I don't blame you, because that's the sort of thing your illiterate johnnies sink to. The first word's supposed to be "hedgehog", and the second's "meat and potato pie" — and they're both genuine! Chap from the examination board told me. Do you see what I mean?'

Yes, Lewis was beginning to wonder if the chief hadn't got something; but wasn't he assuming that Jackson
was
illiterate? If someone found a book on your shelves entitled
Teach Yourself to Spell,
it didn't automatically mean...

But Morse was still going on. 'And then there's this business of the money, isn't there? If Jackson thought he'd got a soft touch for a nice little bit of blackmail, I reckon he'd have asked for one helluva sight more than a measly— '

'Perhaps he did, sir.'

The interjection stopped Morse in his tracks, and he nodded in reluctant agreement. 'Ye-es. You know, I hadn't thought of that.'

'Don't you think, anyway, that it might be better to find out about this? Find out whether Jackson could write?'

'You're right! Get on to that woman at the Post Office down there, Mrs Whatsername— '

'Mrs Beavers.'

‘That's her. Get on to her and ask her how Jackson signed for his OAP. And since she's such a nosy old bugger, ask her who Jackson was doing a bit of work for before he died — apart from Anne Scott. Do you know what, Lewis? I reckon you'll find that Jackson was doing one or two other little jobs as well.'

Three-quarters of an hour later Lewis learned that Jackson was able, just, to render in alphabetical characters a tentative resemblance to 'G. Jackson' on his OAP slips. But it wouldn't much have mattered if he'd not even been able to manage that — so Mrs Beavers asserted. There were one or two of the old 'uns who got by with an 'X', provided that it was inscribed on PO premises in view of one of the staff, or vouched for by some close relative or friend. Mrs Beavers herself had often had to read or explain to Jackson some notification of change or renewal, or some information about supplementary benefit or rate rebate. And Jackson had readily understood such things — and acted upon them. He was, it seemed, far from unintelligent. The fact remained, however, that to all intents and purposes Jackson was illiterate.

Mrs Beavers was just as well up with the odd-job needs of the local community as with the literary competences of her clientele. Mrs Jones in Cardigan Street, had found occasion to hire Jackson's services in planning and rehanging several doors that were sagging and sticking; Mrs Purvis in Canal Reach had asked Jackson if he could rewire the house for her — the estimate from the Electricity Board was quite
ridiculous.
Then there was that couple who'd just moved into Albert Street who wanted pelmets made for the windows...'

Lewis listened and made his awkward notes. It was, he had to admit, pretty well as Morse had said it would be; and when he reported back to Kidlington the only thing that seemed to interest Morse was, of all things, Mrs Purvis's rewiring.