The dead of Jericho (3 page)

It was on Wednesday, October 3rd, almost exactly six months after Mrs Murdoch's party in North Oxford, that Detective Chief Inspector Morse of the Thames Valley Police was driving from Kidlington to Oxford. He turned down into Woodstock Road, turned right into Bainton Road, and then straight down into Walton Street. As he drove the Jaguar carefully through the narrow street, with cars parked either side, he noticed that
Sex in the Suburbs
was on at the Phoenix; but almost simultaneously the bold white lettering of a street sign caught his eye and any thoughts of an hour or two of technicolour titillation were forgotten: the sign read 'Jericho Street'. He'd thought of Anne Scott occasionally — of course he had! — but the prospect of a complicated liaison with a married woman had not, in the comparatively sober light of morning, carried quite the same appeal it had the night before; and he had not pursued the affair. But he was thinking of her now...

That morning, in Kidlington, his lecture on Homicide Procedures to a group of earnest, newly-fledged detectives (Constable Walters amongst them) had been received with a polite lack of enthusiasm, and Morse knew that he had been far from good. How glad he was to have the afternoon free! Furthermore, for the first time in many months he had every reason to be in the precincts of Jericho. As a member of the Oxford Book Association he had recently received advanced notice of a talk (Oct. 3rd, 8 p.m.) by Dame Helen Gardner on
The New Oxford Book of English Verse;
and the prospect of hearing that distinguished Oxford academic was quite sufficient in itself to stir an idle Morse to his first attendance of the year. But, in addition, the Association's committee had appealed to all members for any old books that might be finished with, because before Dame Helen's talk a sale of secondhand books had been arranged in aid of the Association's languishing funds. The previous night, therefore, Morse had decimated his shelves, selecting those thirty or so paperbacks which now lay in a cardboard box in the boot of the Jaguar. All books were to be delivered to the Clarendon Press Institute in Walton Street (where the Association held its meetings) between 3 p.m. and 5 p.m. that day. It was now twenty-five minutes past three.

For very good reasons, however, the delivery of Morse's offerings was temporarily postponed. Just before the OUP building, Morse turned right and drove slowly down Great Clarendon Street, crossed a couple of intersections, and noticed Canal Street on his right. Surely she must live somewhere very close?

It had been raining intermittently all day, and heavy spots were spattering his windscreen as he turned into the deserted street and looked around for parking space. Difficult, though. Double yellow lines on one side of the street, with a row of notices on the other — a series of white P's set against their blue backgrounds: 'Resident Permit Holders Only'. True, there was a gap or two here and there; but with a stubborn law-abiding streak within him — and with the added risk of a hefty parking fine — Morse drove on slowly round the maze of streets. Finally, beneath the towering Italianate campanile of St Barnabas' Church, he found an empty space in a stretch of road by the canal, marked off with boxed white lines: 'Waiting limited to 2 hours. Return prohibited within 1 hour'. Morse backed carefully into the space and looked around him. Through an opened gate he glimpsed the blues, browns, and reds of a string of house-boats moored alongside the canal, whilst three unspecified ducks, long-necked and black against the late-afternoon sky, flapped away noisily towards a more northerly stretch of water. He got out of the car and stood in the rain awhile, looking up at the dirtyish yellow tower that dominated the streets. A quick look inside, perhaps? But the door was locked, and Morse was reading the notice explaining that the regrettable cause of it all was adolescent vandalism when he heard the voice behind him.

'Is this your car?'

A young, very wet traffic warden, the yellow band round her hat extremely new, was standing beside the Jaguar, trying bravely to write down something on a bedrenched page of her notebook.

'All right, aren't I?' mumbled Morse defensively, as he walked down the shallow steps of the church towards her.

'You're over the white line and you'll have to back it up a bit. You've plenty of room.'

Morse dutifully manoeuvred the Jaguar until it stood more neatly within its white box, and then wound down the window. 'Better?'

'You ought to lock your doors if you're going to stay here — two hours, remember. A lot of cars get stolen, you know.'

'Yes, I always lock— '

'It wasn't locked just now!'

'I was only seeing if... '

But the young lady had walked on, apparently unwilling to discuss her edicts further, and was writing out a sodden ticket for one of the hapless non-permit holders just a little way up the street when Morse called out to her.

'Canal Reach? Do you know it?'

She pointed back up to Canal Street. 'Round the corner. Third on the left.'

In Canal Street itself, two parking tickets, folded in cellophane containers, and stuck beneath the windscreen wipers, bore witness to the conscientious young warden's devotion to her duties; and just across the road, on the corner of Victor Street, Morse thought he saw a similar ticket on the windscreen of an incongruously large, light-blue Rolls Royce. But his attention was no longer focused on the problems of parking. A sign to his left announced 'Canal Reach'; and he stopped and wondered. Wondered why exactly he was there and what (if anything)
he
had to say to her...

The short, narrow street, with five terraced houses on either side, was rendered inaccessible to motor traffic by three concrete bollards across the entrance, and was sealed off at its far end by the gates of a boat-builder's yard, now standing open. Bicycles were propped beside three of the ten front doors, but there was little other sign of human habitation. Although it was now beginning to grow dark, no light shone behind any of the net-curtained windows, and the little street seemed drab and uninviting. These were doubtless some of the cheaper houses built for those who once had worked on the canal: two up, two down — and that was all. The first house on the left was number 1, and Morse walked down the narrow pavement, past number 3, past number 5
,
past number 7 — and there he was, standing in front of the last house and feeling strangely nervous and undecided. Instinctively he patted the pocket of his raincoat for a packet of cigarettes, but found he must have left them in the car. Behind him, a car splashed its way along Canal Street, its side-lights already switched on.

Morse knocked, but there was no answer. Just as well, perhaps? Yet he knocked again, a little louder this time, and stood back to look at the house. The door was painted a rust-red colour, and to its right was the one downstairs window, its crimson curtains drawn across; and just above it, the window of the first floor bedroom where — Just a minute! There
was
a light. There was a light
here.
It seemed to Morse that the bedroom door must be open, for he could see a dull glow of light coming from somewhere: coming from the other room across the landing, perhaps? Still he stood there in the drizzling rain and waited, noting as he did so the attractive brickwork of the terrace, with the red stretchers alternating in mottled effect with the grey-blue contrast of the headers.

But no one answered at the rust-red door.

Forget it? It was stupid, anyway. He'd swallowed rather too much beer at lunch time, and the slight wave of eroticism which invariably washed over him after such mild excess had no doubt been responsible for his drive through Jericho that day... And then he thought he heard a noise from within the house. She
was
there. He knocked again, very loudly now, and after waiting half a minute he tried the door. It was open.

'Hello? Anyone there?' The street door led directly into the surprisingly large downstairs room, carpeted and neatly decorated, and the camera in Morse's mind clicked and clicked again as he looked keenly around.

'Hello? Anne?
Anne?'

A staircase faced him at the far left-hand corner of the room, and at the foot of the stairs he saw an expensive-looking, light-brown leather jacket, lined with sheep's wool, folded over upon itself, and flecked with recent rain.

But even leaning slightly forward and straining his ears to the utmost, Morse could hear nothing. It was strange, certainly, her leaving the door unlocked like that. But then he'd just done exactly the same with his own car, had he not? He closed the door quietly behind him and stepped out on to the wet pavement. The house immediately opposite to him was number 10, and he was reflecting vaguely on the vagaries of those responsible for the numbering of street houses when he thought he saw the slightest twitch of the curtains behind its upper-storey window. Perhaps he was mistaken, though... Turning once more, he looked back at the house he had come to visit, and his thoughts lingered longingly on the woman he would never see again...

It was many seconds later that he noticed the change: the light on the upstairs floor of number 9 was now
switched off —
and the blood began to tingle in his veins.

She seemed on nodding terms with all the great, and by any standards the visit of Dame Helen, emeritus Merton Professor of English Literature, to the Oxford Book Association was an immense success. She wore her learning lightly, yet the depths of scholarship and sensitivity became immediately apparent to the large audience, as with an assurance springing from an infinite familiarity she ranged from Dante down to T. S. Eliot. The texture of the applause which greeted the end of her lecture was tight and electric, the crackling clapping of hands seeming to constitute a continuous crepitation of noise, the palms smiting each other as fast as the wings of a humming bird. Even Morse, whose applause more usually resembled the perfunctory flapping of a large crow in slow flight, was caught up in the spontaneous appreciation, and he earnestly resolved that he would make an immediate attempt to come to terms with the complexities of the
Four Quartets.
He ought, he knew, to come along more often to talks such as this; keep his mind sharp and fresh — a mind so often dulled these days by cigarettes and alcohol. Surely that's what life was all about? Opening doors; opening doors and peering through them — perhaps even finding the rose gardens there... What were those few lines that Dame Helen had just quoted? Once he had committed them to memory, but until tonight they had been almost forgotten:

That was writing for you! Christ, ah!

Morse recognised no one at the bar and took his beer over to the corner. He would have a couple of pints and get home reasonably early.

The siren of a police car (or was it an ambulance?) whined past outside in Walton Street, reminding him tantalisingly of the opening of one of the Chopin nocturnes. An accident somewhere, no doubt: shaken, white-faced witnesses and passengers; words slowly recorded in constables' notebooks; the white doors of the open ambulance with the glutinous gouts of dark blood on the upholstery. Ugh! How Morse hated traffic accidents!

'You look lonely. Mind if I join you?' She was a tall, slim, attractive woman in her early thirties.

'Delighted!' said a delighted Morse.

'Good, wasn't she?'

'Excellent!'

For several minutes they chatted happily about the Dame, and Morse, watching her large, vivacious eyes, found himself hoping she might not go away.

'I'm afraid I don't know you,' he said.

She smiled bewitchingly. 'I know you, though. You're Inspector Morse.'

'How— ?'

'It's all right. I'm Annabel, the chairman's wife.'

'Oh!' The monosyllable was weighted flat with disappointment.

Another siren wailed its way outside on Walton Street, and Morse found himself trying to decide in which direction it was travelling. Difficult to tell though...

A few minutes later the bearded chairman pushed his way through from the crowded bar to join them. 'Ready for another drink, Inspector?'

'No — no. Let me get you one. My pleasure. What will you have— ?'

'You're not getting anything, Inspector. I would have bought you a drink earlier but I had to take our distinguished speaker back to Eynsham.'

When the chairman came back with the drinks, he turned immediately to Morse. 'Bit of a traffic jam outside. Some sort of trouble down in Jericho, it seems. Police cars, ambulance, people stopping to see what's up. Still, you must know all about that sort of thing, Inspector.'

But Morse was listening no longer. He got to his feet, mumbling something about perhaps being needed; and leaving his replenished pint completely ungulped walked swiftly out of the Clarendon Press Institute.

Turning left into Richmond Road, he noticed with a curiously disengaged mind how the street lights, set on alternate sides at intervals of thirty yards, bent their heads over the street like guardsmen at a catafalque, and how the houses not directly illuminated by the hard white glow assumed a huddled, almost cowering appearance, as if somehow they feared the night. His throat was dry and suddenly he felt like running. Yet with a sense of the inevitable, he knew that he was already far too late; guessed, with a heavy heart, that probably he'd always been too late. As he turned into Canal Street — where the keen wind at the intersection tugged at his thinning hair — there, about one hundred yards ahead of him, there, beneath the looming, ominous bulk of St Barnabas' great tower, was an ambulance, its blue light flashing in the dark, and two white police cars pulled over on to the pavement. Some three or four deep, a ring of local residents circled the entrance to the street, where a tall, uniformed policeman stood guard against the central bollard.