Obviously our writer will draw upon character and incident taken from personal experience. Inevitably so. Laudibly so. Yet always it is those fictional addenda which will effect the true alchemy; which will elevate our earth-bound artist, and send him forth high-floating on the wings of freedom and creativity.
“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:
And wide apart lie we, my love,
And seas between the twain.
(7.v.92)
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:
“I know not if it rains,
my love,
In the land where you
do lie...”
“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.