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.
1 IAN BRADLEY
2 EMMA SKIPPER
3 VALERIE WARD
4 JIM MORWOOD
5 CHRISTINA COLLINS
6 UNA BROSHOLA
7 ELISSA THORPE
8 RICHARD ELVES
9 MARY ANN COTTON
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.
Part two
Yet always it is those fictional addenda which will effect the true alchemy.
(Diogenes Small, Reflections on Inspiration and Creativity)
The story (printed verbatim here) which Morse now began to read was cleanly typed and carefully presented.
I’d seen the advert in the Gazette.
She was going to be a woman who walked silent and unsmiling through any door held open for her; a woman who would speak in a loud voice over the counter at a bank; a woman conscious of her congenital superiority over her fellow beings.
In short she was going to be a North Oxford lady.
And she was — a double-barrelled one.
I was gratified though surprised that my carefully worded application had been considered and I caught the bus in good time.
At 10:30 A.M. to the minute I walked along the flagged path that bisected the weedless front lawn and knocked at the door of The Grange in Squitchey Lane.
A quarter of an hour later, after a last mouthful of some bitter-tasting coffee, I’d landed the job.
How?
I wasn’t sure, not then. But when she asked me if I’d enjoyed the coffee, I said I preferred a cup of instant, and she’d smiled thinly.
“That’s what my husband says.”
I hoped my voice showed an appropriate interest.
“Your husband?”
“He’s abroad. The Americans are picking his brains.”
She stood up.
“Do you know why I’ve offered you the job?”
It was a bit risky but I said it: “No one else applied?”
“I’m not surprised you have a degree. You’re quite bright really.”
“Thank you.”
“You need the money, I suppose?”
I lowered my eyes to the deep Wilton and nodded.
“Goodbye,” she said.
I left her standing momentarily there at the front door — slim, elegantly dressed, and young — well, comparatively young.
And, yes, I ought to admit it, uncommonly attractive.
The tasks allotted to me could only just be squeezed into the nine hours a week I spent at The Grange.
But £36 was £36.
And that was a bonus.
Can you guess what I’m saying? Not yet?
You will.
Two parts of the house I was forbidden to enter: the master bedroom (remember that bedroom!) and the master’s study — the latter by the look of it a large converted bedroom on the upstairs floor whose door was firmly closed.
Firmly locked, as I soon discovered.
There was no such embargo on the mistress’s study — a fairly recent addition at the rear of the house in the form of a semi-conservatory, its shelves, surfaces, and floor all crammed with books and littered with loose papers and typescripts. And dozens of house-plants fighting for a little Lebensraum.