The dead of Jericho (6 page)

He rang Sergeant Lewis.

To Morse's annoyance, he found that a sticker had been obstinately glued to the Jaguar's windscreen, completely obscuring the driver's view. It was an official notice, subscribed by the Publisher of the Oxford University Press:

It was Lewis, of course, who had to scrape it off, whilst Morse asked vaguely, though only once, if he could do anything to help. Yet even now Morse's mind was tossing as ceaselessly as the sea, and it was at this very moment that there occurred to him an extraordinarily interesting idea.

Detective Constable Walters had been impressed by Bell's professionalism after the finding of Anne Scott. The whole grisly gamut of procedures had been handled with a quiet and practised authority, from the initial handling of the swinging corpse through to the post-mortem and inquest arrangements. And Walters admired professionalism.

Upstairs in the two small bedrooms of 9 Canal Reach, Bell had shown (as it seemed to Walters) an enviable competence in sifting the relevant from the irrelevant and in making a few immediate decisions. The bed in the front room had not, it appeared, been slept in during the previous night, and after a quick look through the drawers of the dressing table and the wardrobe Bell had concluded that there was nothing there to detain him further. In the back room, however, he had stayed much longer. In the two bottom right-hand drawers of the roll-top desk they had found piles of letters in a state of moderate — though far from chaotic — confusion. At a recent stage, it appeared, Anne Scott had made an effort to sort some of the letters into vaguely definable categories and to tie them into separate bundles, since the bank statements from the previous two and a half years, conjoined with her mortgage receipts and electricity bills, were neatly stacked together and fastened with stout household twine, rather too thick for its modest purpose.

'Recognise that, Walters?' Bell had asked quietly, flicking his finger under the knot.

Two or three loops of the twine, also knotted, were to be seen loose amongst the scores and scores of envelopes, as though perhaps Ms Scott had recently been searching through the pre-tied bundles for some specific letters. Almost an hour had been spent on these two drawers, but Bell had finally left everything where it was. It was under the cover of the roll-top desk that he had found the only three items that held his attention: a recently dated letter headed from a Burnley address and subscribed 'Mum'; an address book; and a desk diary for the current year. Bell had looked through the address book with considerable care, but had finally laid it back on the desk without comment. The desk diary, however, he had handed to Walters.

'Should be helpful, my son!'

He had pointed to the entry for Tuesday, 2 October: 'Summer-town Bridge Club 8 p.m.'; and then to the single entry for the following day, Wednesday, 3 October — the day that Anne Scott had died. The entry read: 'E.M. 2.30'.

When Walters reported to Bell on the Friday morning of the same week, he felt he'd done a good job. And so did Bell, for the picture was now pretty clear.

Anne Scott had been the only child of the Revd Thomas Enoch Scott, a minister in the Baptist Church (deceased some three and a half years previously) and Mrs Grace Emily Scott, presently living in Burnley. At the time of Anne's birth and throughout her childhood, the family had lived in Rochdale, where young Anne had been a pupil at Rochdale Grammar School, and where she had shown considerable academic prowess, culminating in her gaining a place at Lady Margaret Hall to read Modern Languages. Then the cream had turned sour. At Oxford, Anne had met a fellow undergraduate, a Mr John Westerby, had fallen in love with him, fallen into bed with him, and apparently forgotten to exercise any of her contraceptual options. The Revd Thomas, mortified by his beloved child's unforgivable lapse, had refused to have anything whatsoever to do with the affair, and had dogmatically maintained to the end his determination never to see his daughter again; never to recognise the existence of any child conceived in such fathoms of fornication. Anne had attended the funeral service when her father's faithful soul had solemnly been ushered into the joyous company of the saints, and she had been corresponding regularly with her mother since that time, occasionally travelling up to Lancashire to see her. Anne and John had been married at a registry office, she 19, he 20; and then, almost immediately it seemed, they had left Oxford at the beginning of one long summer vac — no one knowing where they went — and when Anne returned some three and a half months later she told her few friends that she and John had separated. The gap of the lost months could be filled in only with guesswork, but Walters suggested (and Bell agreed) that the time was probably spent touting some back-street abortionist, followed by miserable weeks of squabble and regret, and finally by a mutual acceptance of their incompatibility as marriage partners. After that, Anne's career had been easy to trace and (in Walters' view) unexceptional to record. John Westerby was more of a mystery, though. A Barnardo boy who had made good (or at least started to make good) he had not finished his degree in Geography, and after the break-up of his marriage had lived in a succession of dingy digs in the Cowley Road area, carrying on a variety of jobs ranging from secondhand car salesman to insurance agent. He was well-liked by his landladies, popular enough with the girls, generous with his money; but also somewhat withdrawn, a little unpredictable, and — according to two former employers whom Walters had interviewed — almost totally lacking in drive or ambition. Anyway, that was all hearsay now, for John Westerby, too, was dead. He had been killed just over a year ago in a car crash on the Oxford-Bicester road — one of those accidents where it was difficult to apportion blame, although the inquest findings revealed that the quantity of beer in Westerby's belly placed him just beyond the limits of statutory sobriety. Unlike the young male driver of the other car, he had not been wearing his safety-belt — and his head had gone straight through the windscreen.
Finis.

'Type it all up,' said Bell. 'Nobody'll read it — but get it typed. There's not much else we can do.'

Bell had a busy day ahead of him. Two more burglaries overnight, one a wholesale clear-out in North Oxford; an appearance before the magistrates' court in half an hour's time; lunch with the Chairman of Oxford United to discuss the recurring hooliganism of the club's ill-christened 'supporters'; and a good deal of unfinished business from the past week. No, he could hardly feel justified in allowing young Walters to worry much more about what might have happened many years ago to a woman who had just put herself out of whatever misery she was in. Anyway, Bell had a secret respect for suicides... But he couldn't just leave things where they were, he knew that. There was the inquest to think about.
Why
had she done it? — that would be the question nagging away in the minds behind those saddened, tense, and self-recriminating faces. Oh dear! It was always the same old questions. Was there anything that was worrying her? Anything at all? Health troubles? Money troubles? Sex troubles? Family troubles? Any bloody troubles? And the answer to most of these questions was always the same, too: it was 'yes', 'yes', 'yes', and so they all said 'no', 'no', 'no', because it seemed so much the kinder way. Bell shook his head sadly at his own thoughts. The real mystery to him was why so many of them thought fit to soldier on... He got up and lifted his overcoat from the hook behind the door.

'Any luck with "E.M."?'

'No, sir,' said Walters, with obvious disappointment. That Anne Scott had taken in several private pupils each week had been made perfectly clear to him, but there seemed to have been an
ad hoc
acceptance of fees in cash for the tutorials rendered. Certainly there was no formal record of names and receipts of monies, and doubtless the tax-man was far from well informed about the scope of Anne's activities. The neighbours had spoken of various visitors, usually young, usually with books, and almost always with bicycles. But such visits appeared to have been somewhat spasmodic, and none of the neighbours could promise to recognise any of the callers again, let alone recall their names. Pity! Walters was slowly coming to terms with the sheer volume of work associated with even the most mundane enquiries; beginning, too, to appreciate the impossibility of following up every little clue. Yet, all the same, he would have been much gratified to have come up with a name (if it was a name) for those tantalising initials.

He found Bell looking at him with a half-smile on his lips.

'Forget it, Walters! It was probably the electricity man! And just let me tell you one thing, my lad. That woman committed suicide — you can take the word of a man who's been finding 'em like that for the last twenty years. There is no way,
no way,
in which that suicide could have been rigged — have you got that? So. What are we left with?
Why
she did it, all right? Well, we may learn a few things at the inquest, but I doubt we're ever going to know for certain. It's usually cumulative, you know. A bit of disappointment and worry over this and that, and you sort of get a general feeling of depression about life that you just can't shake off, and sometimes you feel why the hell should you try to shake it off anyway.' Bell shrugged on his coat and stood holding the door-handle. 'And don't you go running around with the idea that life's some wonderfully sacred thing, my lad — because it ain't. There's thousands of unborn kids lying around in abortion clinics, and every second —
every second,
so they tell me —
some
poor little sod somewhere round the globe gets its merciful release from hunger. There's floods and earthquakes and disease and plane crashes and car crashes and people killed in wars and shot in prisons and — Agh! just don't feel too surprised, that's all, if you come across one or two people who find life's a bit too much for 'em, all right? This woman of yours probably put her bank balance on some horse at ten-to-one and it came past the post at twenty-to-six!'

Walters didn't see the joke, although he took the general drift of Bell's philosophy. Would Morse though (he wondered) not have been slightly more anxious to probe more deeply?

'You're not too worried about that chair in the— ?'

The telephone rang on the desk, and whilst the outside call was switched through, Bell put his hand over the mouthpiece.

'I'm not worried about
anything.
But if
you
are, you go and do something about it. And find me one or two people for the inquest, lad, while you're about it.'

At that point, as Walters walked out into the bright, cold air of St Aldates, he had not the remotest notion of the extraordinary sequence of events which was soon to unfold itself.

Walters returned to Canal Reach at 2 p.m. the same day. It was the brief conversation with Morse that had given him the idea, and over a pint and a pork pie he had decided on his first move. Although he had already spoken to most of the residents in the Reach, he now knocked once again at the door of number 7, the house immediately adjacent to number 9.

'I just wondered whether Ms Scott ever left a key with you, Mrs Purvis,' he asked of the little, grey-haired widow who stood in the slit of the hall — here leading directly to the staircase.

'Well, as a matter of fact she did, yes. Left it about a year ago, she did. I always keeps it in me little pot on the — Just a minute, me dear.'

Mrs Purvis retreated through one of the doors that led off the hall to the downstairs rooms, and returned with a key which Walters took from her and examined with interest.

'Did she ever ask you for it?'

'No, she didn't. But I know she were locked out once, poor soul, and it's always just as well to have a fail-back, isn't it? I remember once... ' Walters nodded understanding as the old girl recalled some bygone incident from the unremarkable history of the Purvis household.

'Do you remember how many keys you had when you came here?'

'Just the two, me dear.'

Was Walters imagining things, or did Mrs Purvis seem rather more nervous than when he had interviewed her the day before? Imagining things, he decided, as he took his leave of her and walked along Canal Street to Great Clarendon Street where, turning left, he could see the sandstone, temple-like church of St Paul's, its fluted columns supporting the classical portico, facing him at the far end on the other side of Walton Street. Yes, he'd been right, and he felt pleased with himself for remembering. There it was, the corner shop he'd been looking for, only twenty-odd yards up the street on the left:
A. Grimes, Locksmith.

The proprietor himself, surrounded by a comprehensive array of keys, locks, and burglar-alarm devices, sat behind a yellow-painted counter sorting out into various boxes a selection of metal and plastic numerals such as are used for the numbering of street houses. Putting a large, white '9' into its appropriate box, he extended a dirt-ingrained hand as Walters introduced himself.

'You cut quite a lot of extra keys, I suppose?'

Grimes nodded cautiously, pushing his horn-rimmed glasses slightly further up his porous-looking nose. 'Steady old line, that sort of thing, officer. People are forever losin' 'em.'