Death Is Now My Neighbour (15 page)

It had not been Owens who had murdered Rachel James - almost certainly he
couldn't
have done it, anyway.

And that late evening, as if matching his slow-paced walk, a slow an
d almost beatific smile had settl
ed round the mouth of Chief Inspector Morse.

Friday, 23 February

Thirteen Unlucky: The Turks so dislike the number that the word is almost expunged from their vocabulary. The Italians never use it in making up the numbers of their lotteries. In Paris, no house bears that number

(Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable)

As
Lewis pulled
into B
loxham Drive, he was faced with
an unfamiliar sight: a smiling, expansive-looking Morse was leaning against the front gate of Number
17,
engaged in a relaxed, impromptu press conference with one camera crew (ITV), four reporters (two from national, two from local newspapers - but no Owens), and three photographers. Compared with previous mornings, the turn-out was disappointing. It was
9.05
a.m.

Lewis just caught the tail-end of things. 'So it'll be a waste of time - staying on here much longer. You won't expect me to go into details, of course, but I can tell you that we've finished our investigations in this house.'

If
the
'this' were spoken with a hint of some audial semi-italicization, it was of no moment, for no one appeared to notice it.

'Any leads? Any new leads?'

'To the murder of Rachel James, you mean?' 'Who else?'

'No. No new leads at all, really
...
Well, perhaps one.'

On which cryptic note, Morse raised his right hand to forestall the universal pleas for clarification, and with a genial - perhaps genuine? - smile, he turned away.

'Drive me round the block a couple of
times, Lewis. I'd rather all th
ese people buggered off, and I don't think they're going to stay much longer if they see us go.'

Nor did they.

Ten minutes later the detectives returned to find the Drive virtually deserted.

'How many houses are there here, Lewis?'

'Not sure.' From Number
17
Lewis looked along to the end of the row. Two other houses - presumably Numbers
19
and
21,
although the figures from the front gate of
the
latter had been removed. Then he looked across to
the
other side of the street where the last even-numbered house was
20.
The answer, therefore, appeared to be reasonably obvious.

'Twenty-one.'

'That's an
odd
number, isn't it?'

Lewis frowned. 'Did you
think
I thought it was an
even
number?'

Morse smiled.
‘I
didn't mean "odd" as opposed to "even"; I meant "odd" as opposed to "normal".' 'Oh!'

'Lew-is! You don't build a street of terraced houses
with
one side having ten and the oth
er side having eleven, now do you? You get a bit of symmetry into things; a bit of regularity.'

'If you say so.'

'And I do say so!' snapped Morse,
with
the
conviction of a fundamentalist preacher asserting the divine authority of Holy Writ.

'No need to be so sharp, sir.'

'I should have spotted it from day one! From those political stickers, Lewis! Let's count, OK?'

The two men walked along the odd-numbered side of Bloxham Drive. And Lewis nodded: six Labour; two Tory; two don't-knows.

Ten.

"You see, Lewis, we've perhaps been a
little
misled by these minor acts of vandalism here. We've got several houses minus the numbers originally screwed into their front gates -
and their back gates.
So we were understandably confused.'

Lewis agreed. 'I still am, sir.'

'How many odd numbers are there between one and twenty-one - inclusive?'

'I reckon it's ten, sir. So I suppose there must be eleven.'

Morse grinned. 'Write 'em down!' So Lewis did, in his notebook:

1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, 15, 17, 19, 21.

Then counted them.
‘I
was right, sir. Eleven.' 'But only ten houses, Lewis.' 'I don't quite follow.'

'Of course you do. It happens quite often in hotel floors and hotel room numbers
...
and st
reet numbers. They miss one of them out.'

Enlightenment dawned on Lewis's honest features.

'Number thirteen!'

'Exactly! Do you know there used to be people in France called "fourteeners" who made a living by going along to dinner parties where the number of guests was thirteen?'

'Where do you find all th
ese bits and pieces?'

'Do you know, I think I saw
that
on
the
back of a matchbox in a pub in Grimsby. I've learned quite a lot in life from the back of matchboxes.'

'What's it all got to do with the case, though?'

Morse reached for Lewis's notebook, and put brackets round the seventh number. Then, underneath the first few numbers, he wrote in an arrow, pointing from left to right.

'Lewis! If you were walking along the back of the houses, starting from Number
1
- she must be feeling a bit sore about the election, by the way
...
Well, let's just go along there.'

The two men walked to the rear of the terrace, where (as we have seen) several of the back gates had been sadly, if not too seriously, vandalized.

'Get your list, Lewis, and as we go along, just put a ring round those gates where we
haven
'
t
got a number, all right?'

At the end of the row, Lewis's original list, with its successive emendations, appeared as follows:

1, 3,
5,
(7)
9, 11,
13
,
(15) (17)
19, (2l)

You see,' said Morse, 'the vandalism gets worse the further you get into the Close, doesn't it? As it gets further from the main road.'

Yes.'

'So just picture things. You've got a revolver and you walk along the back here in the half-light.
You know the number you want.
You know the morning routine, too: breakfast at about seven. All you've got to do is knock on the kitchen window, wait till you see the silhouette behind the thin blind, the silhouette of a face with one distinctive feature - a pony-tail. You walk along the back; you see Number
11
; you move along to the next house -Number
13-
you think!
And so the house after that
must
be Number
15.
And to confirm things, there's the pony-tailed silhouette. You press the trigger - and there you have it, Lewis! The Horseman passes by. But you've got it wrong, haven't you? Your intended victim is living at Number
15,
not Number
17!'

'So,' said Lewis slowly, 'whoever stood at the kitchen window thought he - or she - was firing

Morse nodded sombrely. Yes. Not at Rachel James, but
Geoffrey Owens.'

Men entitled to bleat BA after their names (D. S. MacColl)

The Senior Common
Room at Lonsdale is comparatively small, and for t
his reason has a rather more inti
mate air about it than some of the spacious SCRs in the larger Oxford Colleges. Light-coloured, beautifully grained oak-panelling encloses the room on all sides, its colouring complemented by the light-brown leather sofas and armchairs the
re. Copies of almost all the nati
onal dailies, including the
Sun
and the
Mirror,
are to be found on the glass-topped coffee-tables; and indeed it is usually these tabloids which are flipped through first - sometimes inte
ntly
studied - by the majority of the dons.

Forgathered here on the evening of Friday, 23 February (7.00 for 7.30) was a rather overcrowded throng of dons, accompanied by wives, partners, friends, to enjoy a Guest Night - an occasion celebrated by the College four times per term. A white-coated scout stood by the door with a silver tray holding thinly fluted glasses of sherry: either the pale-amber 'dry' variety or the darker brown 'medium', for it was a basic assumption in such a setting
that no one could ever wish for the deeply umbered 'sweet'.

A begowned Jasper Bradley took a glass of dry, drained it at a swallow, put the glass back on to the tray, and took another. He was particularly pleased
with
himself that day;
and
with
the
Classical Quarterly,
whose review of
Greek Moods and Tenses
(J. J. Bradley,
204
pp,
£45.50,
Classical Press) contained the wonderful lines which Bradley had now by heart:

A small volume, but one which plumbs the unfathomed mysteries of the aorist subjunctive with imaginative insights into the very origins of language.

Yes. He felt decidedly chuffed.

'How's tricks?' he asked, looking up at Donald Franks, a very tall astrophysicist, rece
ntly
head-hunted from Cambridge, whose dark, lugubrious features suggested that for his part he'd managed few imaginative insights that week into the origins of the universe.

'So-so.'

'Who d'you fancy then?' '
What - of the women here?' 'For
the Master's job.' 'Dunno.'

'Who'll you vote for?' 'Secret ballot, innit?'

Mr and Mrs Denis Cornford now came in, each taking a glass of the medium sherry. Shelly looked extremely attractive and perhaps a
little
skimpily dressed for such a chilly evening. She wore a lightweight white two-piece
suit; and as she bent down to pick up a cheese-nibble her low-cut,
bottle
-green blouse gaped open to reveal a splendid glimpse of her beautiful breasts. 'Je-sus!' muttered Bradley.

'She certainly flouts her tits a bit,' mumbled the melancholy Franks.

‘
You mean "flaunts" 'em, I
think
.'

'If you say so,' said Franks, sli
ghtly
wounded.

Bradley moved to the far end of the room where Angela Storrs stood talking to a small priest, clothed all in black, with buckled shoes and leggings.

'All, Jasper! Come and meet Father Dooley from Sligo.
’

Clearly Angela Storrs had decided she had now done her duty; for soon she drifted away - tall, long-legged, wearing a dark-grey trouser-suit with a white high-necked jumper. There was about her an almost patrician mien, her face high-cheekboned and pale, with the hair swept back above her ears and fastened in a bun behind. It was obvious to all that she had been a very attractive woman. But she was aging a
little
too quickly perhaps; and the f
act that over the last two or th
ree years she had almost invariably worn trousers did
little
to discourage the belief that her legs had succumbed to an unsi
ghtly
cordage of varicose veins. If she were on sale in an Arab wife-market (in the cruel words of one of the younger dons) she would have passed her best-before date several years earlier.

‘I
knew the Master many years ago - and his poor wife. Yes
...
that was long ago,' mused the
little
priest.

Bradley was ready with the appropriate response of scholarly compassion.

'Times change, yes.
Tempo
ra mutantur: et nos mutamur in ill
is.'

'I think,' said
the
priest, 'that the line should read:
Tempora mutantur:
nos et
mutamur in ill
is.
Otherwise the hexameter won't scan, will it?'

'Of course it won't, sorry.'

The scout now politely requested dons - wives -partners - guests - to proceed to the Hall. And Jasper Bradley, eminent authority on the aorist subjunctive in Classical Greek, walked out of the SCR more than sli
ghtly
wounded.

Sir Clixby Bream brought up
the
rear as the room emptied, and li
ghtly
touched the bottom of Angela Storrs standing just in front of him.