Morse's Greatest Mystery and Other Stories (18 page)

“Week or so ago? We were talking—
she
was talking—about epic poetry. She … lent me this … this book. I was going to give it back to her … today.”

Lewis looked away in some embarrassment as a curtain of tears now covered Bayley’s eyes; but for a while longer Morse himself continued to stare cynically at the young man seated opposite him.

Downstairs, in the second of the two rooms which (along with the kitchen) were offered for rent at 14 Jowett Place, Morse contemplated the double bed in which, presumably, the murdered tenant had usually slumbered overnight. Two fluffy pillows concealed a full-length, bottle-green nightdress, which Morse now fingered lightly before turning back the William-Morris-patterned duvet and examining the undersheet.

“No sign of any recent nocturnal emissions, sir.”

“You have a genteel way of putting things,” said Morse.

The room was sparsely furnished, sparely ornamented—with a large mahogany wardrobe taking up most of the space left by the bed. On the bedside table stood a lamp; an alarm clock; a box containing half a dozen items of cheap jewellery; and a single book:
Reflections on Inspiration and Creativity
, by Diogenes Small (Macmillan, £14.99).

Picking up the latter, Morse opened its pages at the point where a blue leather bookmarker (“Greetings from Erzincan”) had been placed—and then with no obvious enthusiasm read aloud the few sentences which
had been highlighted in the text with a yellow felt-tipped pen:

“Bloody ’ell!”

“Pardon, sir?”

“Can’t even spell,” muttered Morse, as Lewis picked up the bookmarker.

“Where’s Erzincan?”

“Dunno. When I was at school we had to do one of the three ’G’s: Greek, German, or Geography.”

“And you didn’t do Geography …”

But a silent Morse was standing now at the window (curtains drawn back) which looked out onto a patch of leaf-carpeted lawn at the rear of the house. Strangely, something had stirred deep down in his mind, like the opening chords of
Das Rheingold;
chords that for the moment, though, remained below his audial range.

Lewis opened the wardrobe doors, exposing a modest collection of dresses and coats hanging from the rail; and half a dozen pairs of cheap shoes stowed neatly along the bottom.

Overhead they heard the creaking of floorboards as someone—must be Bayley?—paced continuously to and fro. And Morse’s eyes rose slowly to the ceiling.

But he said nothing.

Neither the bedroom nor the kitchen had yielded anything of significant interest; and Morse was anxious to hear Dr. Hobson’s verdict, however tentative, when half an hour later she emerged from the murder-room.

“Sharp knife by the look of things—second attempt—probably entering from above. Bled an awful lot—as you saw … still, most of us would—with the knife-blade through the heart. Shouldn’t be too difficult to be fairly precise about the time—I’ll be having a closer look, of course—but I’d guess, say, eight to ten hours ago? No longer, I don’t think. Eleven o’clock, twelve o’clock last night?”

“After the pubs had closed.”

“She
hadn’t been drinking, Inspector.”

“Oh!”

Morse placed his hand lightly on the young pathologist’s shoulder and thanked her. Her eyes looked interesting—and interested. Sometimes Morse thought he could fall in love with Laura Hobson; and sometimes he thought he couldn’t.

It was almost midday before Morse gave the order for the body to be removed. The scene-of-crime personnel had finished their work, and a thick, transparent sheeting had now been laid across the carpet. Lewis, with two DCs, had long since been despatched to cover the preliminary tasks: to check Bayley’s alibi, to question the neighbours, and to discover whatever they could of Sheila Poster’s past. And Morse himself now stood alone, and gazed around the room in which Sheila Poster had been murdered.

Almost immediately, however, it was apparent that little was likely to be found. The eight drawers of the modern desk which stood against the inside wall were completely empty; with the almost inevitable conclusion to be drawn that the murderer had systematically emptied the contents of each, as well as whatever had stood on the desk-top, into … well, into something—black plastic-bag, say? And then disappeared into the night; in gloves, like as not, for Morse had learned that no extraneous prints had been discovered—only those left almost everywhere by the murdered tenant. The surfaces of the desk, the shelving, the furniture, the window—all had been dutifully daubed and dusted with fingerprint powder; but it seemed highly improbable that such a methodical murderer had left behind any easily legible signature.

No handbag, either; no documents of any sort; nothing.

Or was there?

Above the desk, hanging by a cord from the picture-rail, was a plywood board, some thirty inches square, on which ten items were fixed by multicoloured drawing-pins: five Medici reproductions of well-known paintings (including two Pre-Raphaelites); a manuscript facsimile of Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale”; a postcard showing the death-mask of Tutankhamen; a photograph of a kingfisher, a large fish balanced in its mouth, perched on a “No Fishing” sign; a printed invitation to a St. Hilda’s Old Girls’ evening in March 1993; and a leaflet announcing a crime short-story competition organized by Oxfordshire County Libraries: “First prize £1,000— Judges Julian Symons and H. R. F. Keating—Final date 10 April 1993.”

Huh! Still seven weeks to go. But there’d now be no entry from Sheila Poster, would there, Morse?

He methodically unpinned each of the cards and turned them over. Four were blank—obviously purchased for decorative purposes. But two had brief messages written on them. On the Egyptian card, in what Morse took to be a masculine hand, were the words: “Cairo’s bloody hot but wish you were here—B.” And on the back of Collins’s “Convent Thoughts,” in what Morse took to be a feminine hand: “On a weekend retreat! I knew I wouldn’t miss men. But I do!! Susan.”

On each side of the boarded-up fireplace were five bookshelves, their contents systematically stacked in order: Austen novels, top left, Wordsworth poems, bottom right. Housman’s
Collected Poems
suddenly caught Morse’s eye, and he extracted his old hero, the book falling open immediately at “Last Poems” XXVI, where a postcard (another one) had been inserted: the front showing a photograph of streets in San Jose (so it said) and, on the back, a couplet written out in black Biro:

Morse smiled to himself, for the poem from which the lines were taken had been part of his own mental furniture for many moons.

Yet so very soon the smile had become a frown. He’d seen that same handwriting only a few seconds since,
surely? He unpinned the postcard from Cairo again; and, yes, the handwriting was more than a reasonable match.

So what?

So what, Morse? Yet for many seconds his eyes were as still as the eyes that stared from the mask of Tutankhamen.

Lewis came briskly into the room twenty minutes later, promptly reading from his note-book:

“Sheila Emily Poster; second-class honours degree in English from St. Hilda’s 1990; aged twenty-five—comes from Bristol; Dad died in ’eighty-four—Hodgkin’s disease; Mum in a special home there—Alzheimer’s; only child; worked for a while with the University Geology Department in the reference section; here in this property almost ten months—£490 a month; £207 in the Building Society; £69.40 in her current account at Lloyds.”

“You can get interest on current accounts these days, did you know that, Lewis?”

“Useful thing for you to know, sir.”

“You’ve been quick.”

“Easy! Bursar of St. Hilda’s, DSS, Lloyds Bank—no problems. Murder does help sometimes, doesn’t it?”

A sudden splash of rain hatched the front window and Morse stared out at the melancholy day:

“Pardon, sir?”

But Morse seemed not to hear. “There’s all this stuff here, Lewis …” Morse pointed vaguely to the piles of magazines lying around. “You’d better have a look through.”

“Can’t we get somebody else—”

“No!” thundered Morse. “I need help—
your
help, Lewis. For Chrissake get on with it!”

Far from any annoyance, Lewis felt a secret contentment. In only one respect was he unequivocally in a class of his own as a police officer, he knew that: for there was only one person with whom the curmudgeonly Morse could ever work with any kind of equanimity—and that was himself, Lewis.

He now settled therefore with his accustomed measure of commitment to the fourth-grade clerical chore of sorting through the piles of women’s magazines, fashion journals, brochures, circulars, and the like, that were stacked on the floor-space in the two alcoves of the living room.

He was still working when just over an hour later Morse returned from his lunchtime ration of calories, taken entirely in liquid form.

“Found anything?”

Lewis shook his head. “One or two amusing bits, though.”

“Well? Let’s share the joke. Life’s grim enough.”

Lewis looked back into one of the piles, found a copy of the
Oxford Gazette
(May 1992), and read from the back page.

Morse was unimpressed. “We’re all of us overqualified in Oxford.”

“Not
all
of us.”

“How long will you be?”

“Another half-hour or so.”

“I’ll leave you then.”

“What’ll you be doing, sir?”

“I’ll still be thinking. See you back at HQ.”

Morse walked out again, down Cowley Road to the Plain; over Magdalen Bridge, along the High, and then up Catte Street to the Broad; and was standing, undecided for a few seconds, in front of Blackwell’s book shop and the narrow frontage of the adjoining White Horse (“Open All Day”)—when the idea suddenly struck him.

He caught a taxi from St. Giles’ out to Kidlington. Not to Police HQ though, but to 45 Blenheim Close, the address given on the leaflet advertising the Oxfordshire short-story competition.

“You’re a bit premature, really,” suggested Rex De Lincto, the short, fat, balding, slightly deaf Chairman of the Oxford Book Association. “There’s still about a couple of months to go and we’ll only receive most of the entries in the last week or so.”

“You’ve had
some
already, though?”

“Nine.”

De Lincto walked over to a cabinet, took out a handwritten list of names, and passed it across.

Morse scanned the list, his attention soon focusing on the last name.

“Odd,” he mumbled.

“Pardon?”

“Mary Ann Cotton. Same name as that of a woman hanged in Durham jail in the 1880s.”

“So?”

“And look at
her
!” Morse’s finger pointed to number five, Christina Collins. “She got herself murdered up on the canal in Staffordshire somewhere. Surely!”

“I’m not quite with you, Inspector.”

“Do you get phoney names sometimes?”

“Well, you can’t tell, really, can you? I mean, if you say you’re Donald Duck—”

Morse nodded. “You
are
Donald Duck.”

“You’d perhaps use a
nom de plume
if you were an established author …”

“But this competition’s only for first-timers, isn’t it?”

“You’ve been reading the small print, Inspector.”

“But how do you know who they are if they’ve won?”

“We don’t sometimes. Not for a start. But every entrant sends an address.”

“I see.”

Morse looked again at the list, and suddenly the blood was running cold in his veins. The clues, or some of them, were beginning to lock together in his mind: the short-story leaflet; the advice of Diogenes Small, that guru of creative writing; the book that young Bayley had borrowed … the translation of Virgil’s
Aeneid
, in which Dido, the queen of Carthage, had fallen in love with Aeneas and then stabbed herself in her despair … Dido …known also by an alternative name—Elissa!

Morse took out a pencil and lightly made twelve oblique strokes through each letter of
ELISSA THORPE
, in what seemed to De Lincto a wholly random order; but an order which in Morse’s mind spelled out in sequence the letters of the name
SHEILA POSTER
.

Morse rose to his feet and looked across at the cabinet. “You’d better let me have story number seven, if you will, sir.”

“Of course. And if I may say so, you’ve made a very good choice, Inspector.”

Only one message was awaiting Morse when he returned to his office at HQ: Dr. Hobson had called to say that Sheila Poster was about twelve weeks pregnant. But Morse paid scant attention to this new
information, for there was something he had to do immediately.

He therefore sat back comfortably in the old black-leather armchair.

And read a story.

The story (printed verbatim here) which Morse now began to read was cleanly typed and carefully presented.