The dead of Jericho (9 page)

The paper was folded over at page two.

The inquest on Ms Anne Scott was one of a string of such melancholy functions for the Coroner's Court on the Tuesday of the following week. Bell had spent the weekend arranging the massive security measures which had surrounded the visit to Oxfordshire of one of the Chinese heads of state; and apart from exhorting Walters to 'stop bloody worriting' he took no further part in the brief proceedings. He had already been informed of the one new — and quite unexpected — piece of evidence that had come to light, but he had betrayed little surprise about it; indeed, felt none.

Walters took the stand to present a full statement about the finding of the body (including the one or two rather odd features of that scene), and about his own subsequent enquiries. The Coroner had only two questions to ask, which he did in a mournful, disinterested monotone; and Walters, feeling considerably less nervous than he'd expected to be, was ready with his firm, unequivocal replies.

'In your opinion, officer, is it true to say that the jury can rule out any suspicion of foul play in the death of Ms Scott?'

'It is, sir.'

'Is there any doubt in your own mind that she met her death by her own hand?'

'No, sir.'

The hump-backed surgeon was the only other witness to be called, and he (as ever) delighted all those anxious to get away from the court by racing through the technical jargon of his medical report with the exhilarating rapidity of an Ashkenazy laying into Liszt. To those with acute hearing and micro-chip mentalities it was further revealed that the woman had probably died between 7 and 9.30 a.m. on the day she was found — that is, she had been dead for approximately eleven hours before being cut down; that her frame was well nourished and that her bodily organs were all perfectly sound; that she was 8-10 weeks pregnant at the time of death. The word 'pregnant' lingered for a while on the air of the still court-room as if it had been acoustically italicised. But then it was gone, and Bell as he stared down at the wooden flooring silently moved his feet a centimetre or two towards him.

Only one question from the Coroner this time.

'Is there any doubt in your own mind that this woman met her death by her own hand?'

'That is for the jury to decide, sir.'

At this point Bell permitted himself a saddened smile. The surgeon had answered the same question in the same courtroom in the same way for the last twenty years. Only once, when the present Coroner had just begun his term of office, had this guarded comment been queried, and on that occasion the surgeon had deigned to add an equally guarded gloss, at a somewhat decelerated tempo: 'My job, sir, is to certify death where it has occurred and to ascertain, where possible, the physical causes of that death.' That was all. Bell was sometimes surprised that the old boy ever had the temerity to certify death in the first place; and, to be fair, the surgeon himself had grown increasingly reluctant to do so over the past few years. But, at least, that was his province, and he refused to trespass into territory beyond it. As a scientist, he had a profound distrust of all such intangible notions as 'responsibility', 'motive', and 'guilt'; and as a man he had little or no respect for the work of the police force. There was only one policeman he'd ever met for whom he had a slight degree of admiration, and that was Morse. And the only reason for such minimal approbation was that Morse had once told him over a few pints of beer that he in turn had a most profound contempt for the timid twaddle produced by pathologists.

The jury duly recorded a verdict of 'death by suicide', and the small band of variously interested parties filed out of the court-room. Officially, the case of Ms Anne Scott was filed and finished with.

On the evening of the day of the inquest, Morse telephoned the hump-backed surgeon.

'You fancy a drink in an hour or so, Max?'

'No.'

'What's up? You stopped boozing or something?'

'I've started boozing at home. Far cheaper.'

'No licensing hours, either.'

'That's another reason.'

'When do you start?'

'Same time as you, Morse — just before breakfast.'

'Did this Scott woman commit suicide, Max?'

'Oh God! Not you as well!'

'Did
she commit suicide?'

'I look at the injuries, Morse — you know that, and in this case the injuries were firm and fatal. All right? Who it is who commits the injuries is no concern of mine.'

'Did she commit
suicide,
Max? It's important for me to have your opinion.'

There was a long hesitation on the other end of the line, and the answer obviously cost the surgeon dearly. The answer was 'yes'.

A little later that evening, Detective Constable Walters, in the course of his variegated duties, was seated by the bedside of a young girl in the Intensive Care Unit of the John Radcliffe Two. She had swallowed two bottles of pills without quite succeeding in cutting the thread — sometimes so fragile, sometimes so tough — that holds us all to life.

'It's getting dreadful, all this drugs business,' said the sister as Walters was leaving. 'I don't know! We're getting them in all the time. Another one besides her today.' She pointed to a closed white door a little further down the corridor, and Walters nodded with a surface understanding but with no real sympathy: he had quite enough to cope with as it was. In fact, as he walked along the polished corridor he passed within two feet of the door that the Sister had pointed out to him. And, if Walters had only known, he was at that very second within those same two feet of finding out the truth of what was later to be called The Case of the Jericho Killings.

On Saturday, 13th October, four days following the inquest on Anne Scott, a man knocked on the door of 2 Canal Reach, and told the heavily pregnant, nervous-looking young woman who answered the door that he was writing an article for the Bodleian archives on the socio-economic development of Jericho during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Not surprisingly, he elicited little information likely to further his researches, and was soon knocking at number 4: this time with no answer. At number 6 he was brusquely told to 'bugger off' by a middle-aged giant of a man, heavily tattooed from wrists to muscular shoulders, who supposed the caller to be some peripatetic proselytiser. But at number 8, the slim, pale-faced, bespectacled young man who opened the door proved a gushing fount of information on the history of the area, and very soon the researcher was filling his amateurish-looking, red-covered Cash Book with rapid notes and dates: 'Key decade 1821-31 — see monograph Eliza M. Hawtrey (? 1954) Bodleian — if they'd ever let me in — variable roof lines, brick built, sash-windowed — I went down to Jericho and fell among thieves — artisan dwellings — there was a young fellow from Spain — Lucy's Iron Works 1825 — who enjoyed a tart — OUP to its pres. site 1826 — now and again — Canal: Oxford-Banbury-Coventry-Midlands, compl. 1790 — not just now and again but — St Paul's begun 1835 — now and again and — St Barnabas 1869 — again and again and again'.

'Marvellous, marvellous!' said the researcher as the young man at last showed the first welcome signs of flagging. 'Most interesting and — and so valuable. You're a local historian, I suppose?'

'Not really, no. I work on the line up at Cowley.'

With further profuse expressions of gratitude for a lengthy addendum on the construction of the railway, the researcher finally saw the door to number 8 close — and he breathed a sigh of relief. Most of the other residents in the Reach would now have seen him, and his purpose was progressing nicely. No answer from number 10; no bicycle there, either. Over the narrow — ridiculously narrow — street, and no answer from number 9, either, in spite of three fairly rigorous bouts of knocking, during the third of which he had surreptitiously tried the door-knob. Locked. At number 7 he introduced himself with a most ingratiating smile, and Mrs Purvis, on hearing of his projected monograph for the Royal Architectural Society on the lay-out of the two-up, two-down, dwellings of the mid-Victorian era, duly invited him into her home. Ten minutes later he was seated in the little scullery at the back of the house drinking a cup of tea and (as Mrs Purvis was to tell her married daughter the next day) proving to be 'such a charming, well-educated sort of person'.

'I see you grow your own vegetables,' said Morse, getting to his feet and looking out onto the narrow garden plot beyond the dark-green doors of what looked like an outside lavatory-cum-coal-shed. 'Very sensible, too! Do you know, I bought a caulie up in Summertown the other day and it cost me...'

Willingly, it appeared, Mrs Purvis would have spent the rest of the day discussing the price of vegetables, and Morse had no difficulty in pressing home his advantage.

'What's your soil like here, Mrs Purvis? Sort of clayey, is it? Or,' — Morse hunted around in his mind for some other vaguely impressive epithet — 'alkaline, perhaps?'

'I don't
really
know too much about that sort of thing.'

'I could tell you if...'

They were soon standing in the garden, where Morse scooped up a handful of soil from a former potato furrow and let it trickle slowly through his fingers. His eyes missed nothing. The wall between number 7 and number 9 was a lowish red-brick affair, flaked into lighter patches by the tooth of countless frosts; and beyond that wall... Morse could see it all now. What, in Mrs Purvis's house, had been the original low-ceilinged scullery had there been converted into a higher, longer extension, with the line of the slates carried forward, albeit at a shallower angle, to roof it. Beyond that, and shielding the plot from the boat-building sheds which fronted the canal, was a wall some eight feet high — a wall (as Morse could see) which had recently been repaired at one point.

Interesting... Tonight, perhaps?

It says something for Morse that he proceeded to knock (though very gently) on the doors of numbers 5, 3, and 1 of the Reach, and he was fortunate to the extent that the first two were either at that moment empty or tenanted by the slightly hard-of-hearing. At number 1 he satisfied his talent for improvisation by asking the very old man who answered the door if a Mr-Mr er-Green lived anywhere about; and was somewhat taken aback to see an arthritic finger pointing firmly across to number 8 — the abode of the polymath from the car-line at Cowley.

'Haven't I seen you somewhere afore, mister?' asked the old man, peering closely at him.

A rather flustered Morse confessed that he'd often been in the district doing a bit of local research ('For the library, you know'), and stayed talking long enough to learn that the old boy spent a couple of hours across at the Printer's Devil every evening. 'Eight o'clock to ten o'clock, mister. Reg'lar as clockwork — like me bowels.'

If it was going to be tonight, it had better be between 8 and 10 p.m., then. Why not? Easy!

Morse was more honest (well, a little more honest) with the locksmith — the same locksmith whom Walters had visited and questioned a week earlier. Introducing himself as a chief inspector of police. Morse stated (which was quite true) that he had to get into number 9 Canal Reach again, and (which, of course, was quite untrue) that he'd left his key at the police station. It was a bit of a nuisance, he knew, but could... ? Mr Grimes, however, was unable to oblige: there wasn't a single key in the shop that could fit the front door of number 9. He could always open the lock himself, though; could open
any
door. Did Morse want him to... ? No! That was the last thing Morse wanted.

'Look,' said Morse. 'I know I can trust you. You see, we've had some outside information about the trouble there — you remember? — the suicide. The big thing is that we don't want the neighbours to be worried or suspicious at all. And the truth is that my incompetent sergeant has er temporarily misplaced both the keys— '

'You mean
three
keys, don't you, Inspector?'

The locksmith proceeded to give an account of his earlier visit from Walters, and Morse listened and learned — and wondered.

'I didn't tell him about the back door key, though,' continued the locksmith. 'It didn't seem important, if you follow me, and he didn't ask me, anyway.'

Two minutes and one ?5 note later, Morse left the shop with a key which (he was assured) would fit the back door lock of number 9: Grimes himself had fitted the lock some six months earlier and could remember exactly which type it was. 'Keep all this quiet, won't you?' Morse had said, but he'd found no kindred spirit in the locksmith. And how foolish and risky it all was! Yet so much of Morse's life was exactly that, and now, at least, his mind was urgently engaged. It made him feel strangely content. He walked up Great Clarendon Street and saw (as Walters had seen) St Paul's now facing him at the top of Walton Street. 'Begun 1835,' he said to himself. Even his memory was sharpening up again.

It was the same morning, the morning of Saturday, 13th October, that Charles Richards had received the letter at his home address. The postage stamp (first class) corner of the cover had been doubly cancelled — the first postmark clearly showing 'Oxford, 8 Oct.', with the second, superimposed mark blurred and illegible. Nor was the reason for the delayed delivery difficult to see, for the original address was printed as 61 (instead of 261) Oxford Avenue, Abingdon, Nr. Oxford, and someone (doubtless the householder at number 61) had been aware of the mistake, had re-addressed the envelope correctly, and had put the letter back in the pillar box. The clean, white envelope (with 'Private' printed across the top-left of the cover) was neatly sealed with Sellotape, with the name and address written in capital letters by what seemed a far from educated hand. 'Abingdon' was misspelt (the 'g' omitted), and each of the lines gradually veered from the horizontal towards the bottom of the envelope, as if the correspondent were not particularly practised in any protracted activity with the pen. Inside the cover was another envelope, of the same brand, folded across the middle, the name 'Charles Richards' printed on it in capitals, with the words 'Strictly Personal' written immediately above. Richards slit this second envelope with rather more care than he had done the first, and took out the single sheet of good quality paper. There was no address, no signature, and no date: