'Rather nicely put, I'd've thought,' said Morse.
'Anyway,' conceded Lewis, 'you score twenty out of twenty according to this fellow who seems to have all the answers.' Lewis looked again at the name printed below the article.' "Rhadamanthus" - whoever he is.'
'Lord Chief Justice of Appeal in the Underworld.'
Lewis frowned, then grinned. 'You've been cheating! You've got a copy-'
'No!' Morse's blue eyes gazed fiercely across at his sergeant. 'The first I saw of that Gazette was when you brought it in just now.'
'If you say so.' But Lewis sounded less than convinced.
'Not surprised, are you, to find me perched up there on the topmost twig amongst the intelligentsia?'
'"The wise and the cultured", actually.'
'And that's another thing. I think I shall go crackers if I hear three things in my life much more: "Hark the Herald Angels Sing"; Eine Kleine Nachtmusik; and that wretched bloody word "actually".'
'Sony, sir.'
Suddenly Morse grinned. 'No need to be, old friend. And at least you're right about one thing. I did cheat -in a way.'
COLIN DEXTER
"You don't mean you... ?' Morse nodded.
It had been a playful, pleasant interlude. Yet it would have warranted no inclusion in this chronicle had it not been that one or two of the details recorded herein were to linger significandy in the memory of Chief Inspector E. Morse, of the Thames Valley Police HQ.
PART ONE
CHAPTER ONE
In hypothetical sentences introduced by 'if' and referring to past time, where conditions are deemed to be 'unfulfilled', the verb will regularly be found in the pluperfect subjunctive, in both protasis and apodosis
(Donet, Principles of Elementary Latin Syntax)
IT is PERHAPS unusual to begin a tale of murder with a reminder to the reader of the rules governing conditional sentences in a language that is incontrovertibly dead. In the present case, however, such a course appears not wholly inappropriate.
If (if) Chief Inspector Morse had been on hand to observe the receptionist's dress - an irregularly triangled affair in blues, greys, and reds - he might have been reminded of the uniform issued to a British Airways stewardess. More probably, though, he might not, since he had never flown on British Airways. His only flight during the previous decade had occasioned so many fears concerning his personal survival that he had determined to restrict all future travel to those (statistically) far more precarious means of conveyance - the car, the coach, the train, and the steamer.
11
COLIN DEXTER
Yet almost certainly the Chief Inspector would have noted, with approval, the receptionist herself, for in Yorkshire she would have been reckoned a bonny lass: a vivacious, dark-eyed woman, long-legged and well figured; a woman - judging from her ringless, well-manicured fingers - not overdy advertising any marital commitment, and not averse, perhaps, to the occasional overture from the occasional man.
Pinned at the top-left of her colourful dress was a name-tag: 'Dawn Charles'.
Unlike several of her friends (certainly unlike Morse) she was quite content with her Christian name. Sometimes she'd felt slightly dubious about it; but no longer. Out with some friends in the Bird and Baby the previous month, she'd been introduced to a rather dashing, radier dishy undergraduate from Pembroke College. And when, a little later, she'd found herself doodling inconsequentially on a Burton beer-mat, the young man, on observing her sinistrality, had initiated a wholly memorable conversation.
'Dawn? That is your name?'
She'd nodded.
'Left-handed?'
She'd nodded.
'Do you know that line from Omar Khayyam? "Dreaming when Dawn's left hand was in the sky ..." Lovely, isn't it?'
Yes, it was. Lovely.
She'd peeled die top off the beer-mat and made him write it down for her.
DEATH IS NOW MY NEIGHBOUR
Then, very quietly, he'd asked her if he could see her again. At the start of the new term, perhaps?
She'd known it was silly, for there must have been at least twenty years difference in their ages. If only ... if only he'd been ten, a dozen years older...
But people did do silly things, and hoped their silly hopes. And that very day, 15 January, was the first full day of the new Hilary Term hi the University of Oxford.
Her Monday-Friday job, 6-10 p.m., at the clinic on the Banbury Road (just north of St Giles') was really quite enjoyable. Over three years of it now, and she was becoming a fixture there. Most of the consultants greeted her with a genuine smile; several of them, these days, with her Christian name.
Nice.
She'd once stayed at a four-star hotel which offered a glass of sherry to incoming guests; and although the private Harvey Clinic was unwilling (perhaps on medical grounds?) to provide such laudable hospitality, Dawn ever kept two jugs of genuine coffee piping hot for her clients, most of them soberly suited and well-heeled gentlemen. A number of whom, as she well knew, were most seriously ill.
Yes, there had been several occasions when she had heard a few brief passages of conversation between consultant and client which she shouldn't have heard; or which, having heard, she should have forgotten; and which she should never have been willing to report to anyone.
Not even to the police.
COLIN DEXTER
Quite certainly not to the Press ...
As it happened, 15 January was to prove a day unusually easy for her to recall, since it marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the clinic's opening in 1971. By prior negotiation and arrangement, the clinic was visited that evening, between 7 p.m. and 8.30 p.m., by Radio Oxford, by the local press, and by Mr Wesley Smith and his crew from the Central TV studios out at Abingdon. And particularly memorable for Dawn had been those precious moments when the camera had focused upon her: first, when (as instructed) she had poured a cup of genuine coffee for a wholly bogus 'client'; second, when the cameraman had moved behind her left shoulder as she ran a felt-tipped pen through a name on the appointments list in front of her - but only, of course, after a full assurance that no viewer would be able to read the name itself when the feature was shown the following evening.
Yet Dawn Charles was always to remember the name:
Mr J. C. Storrs.
It had been a fairly new name to her - another of those patients, as Dawn suspected (correctly), whose influence and affluence afforded the necessary leverage and £ s d to jump the queues awaiting their calls to the hospitals up in Headington.
There was something else she would always remember, too...
By one of those minor coincidences (so commonplace in Morse's life) it had been just as most of the personnel from the media were preparing to leave, at almost exactly 8.30 p.m., that Mr Robert Tumbull, the Senior Cancer
DEATH IS NOW MY NEIGHBOUR
Consultant, had passed her desk, nodded a greeting, and walked slowly to the exit, his right hand resting on the shoulder of Mr J. C. Storrs. The two men were talking quietly together for some while - Dawn was certain of that But certain of little else. The look on the consultant's face, as far as she could recall, had been neither that of a judge who has just condemned a man to death, nor that of one just granting a prisoner his freedom.
No obvious grimness.
No obvious joy.
And indeed there was adequate cause for such uncertainty on Dawn's part, since the scene had been partially masked from her by the continued presence of several persons: a pony-tailed reporter scribbling a furious shorthand as he interviewed a nurse; the TV crew packing away its camera and tripods; the Lord Mayor speaking some congratulatory words into a Radio Oxford microphone - all of them standing between her and the top of the three blue-carpeted stairs which led down to the double-doored exit, outside which were affixed the vertical banks of well-polished brass plates, ten on each side, the fourth from the top on the left reading: