He locked the back door behind him, walked down the strip of garden, and looked for a place in the wall where he could get something of a foothold in order to scale what, from this side, appeared a most formidable precipice. What if he couldn't manage… But then Morse saw it. At the foot of the wall was a wooden board, about one foot square, on which someone had recently been mixing small quantities of cement, and beside it a bricklayer's trowel. The shudder that passed through Morse at that moment was not of fear-but of excitement. With his crisis of confidence now passed, his brain was sweetly clear once more. Spontaneously it told him, too, of a dustbin somewhere nearby; and he found it almost immediately, moved it against the wall, and standing on it clambered to the top. Easy! He breathed a great sigh of relief as he landed safely inside the boatyard, where the gates were still open, and whence he made his exit without further alarum.
As he walked into Canal Reach, keeping tightly to his right, a hand clamped upon his shoulder with an iron grip, and a voice whispered harshly in his ear: 'Just keep walking, mister!'
At about the same time that Morse was entering the house in Canal Reach, a Mini Clubman turned down into the northern stretch of the Woodstock Road, having travelled into Oxford from Abingdon via the western Ring Road. The car kept closely into the bus lane, crawling along at about 10 m.p.h. past the large, elegant houses, set back on higher ground behind the tall hedges that masked their wide fronts and provided a quiet privacy for their owners. The driver pulled the car completely over on to the pavement beside a telephone kiosk on his left, turned off the lights, got out, entered the kiosk, and picked up the receiver. The dialling tone told him that the phone was probably in working order, and keeping the instrument to his ear he turned round and looked up and down the road. No one was in sight. He stepped out and, as if searching his pockets for some coinage, carefully examined the surrounds of the kiosk. The stone wall behind it was luxuriantly clad with thick ivy, and he pushed his hands against it, seeming to be satisfied that all was well. He got back into the Mini and drove along the road for about fifty yards, before stopping again and taking note of the name of the road, that stretched quite steeply off on his left. He then drove the short distance down to Squitchey Lane, turned left, left at the Banbury Road, left into Sunderland Avenue, and finally left again into the Woodstock Road. For the moment there was no traffic and he drove slowly once more along the selfsame stretch of road. Then, nodding to himself with apparent satisfaction, he accelerated away.
The plan was laid.
Michael Murdoch opened his eyes at about ten minutes to ten that evening to find the same pretty face looking down at him. He noticed with remarkable vividness the strong white teeth, a gold filling somewhere towards the extremity of her smile, and he heard her speak.
'Feeling better?'
Momentarily he was feeling nothing, not even a sense of puzzlement, and in a dry-throated whisper he managed to answer 'Yes.' But as he lay back and closed his eyes again, his head was drifting off in a giddying whirl and the body it had left behind seemed slowly to be slipping from the sloping bed. He felt a cold, restraining hand on his drenched forehead, and immediately he was back inside his skull once more, with a giant, brown rat that sat at the entrance of his right ear, twitching its nose and ever edging menacingly forward, its long tail insinuating itself centimetre by centimetre into the gaping orifice, and the long white slits of teeth drawing nearer and nearer to a vast and convoluted dome of pale-white matter that even now he recognized: it was his own matter, his own flesh, his own brain.
He heard himself shriek out in terror.
Miss Catharine Edgeley returned to Oxford that night. Her mother had died of a brain tumour; her mother was now buried. And there was little room in Miss Edgeley's mind that night for any thoughts of the last time she had played bridge in North Oxford. Indeed, she had no knowledge at that time that Anne Scott, too, was dead.
Chapter Thirteen
Sit Pax in Valle Tamesis.
– Motto of the Thames Valley Police Authority
Morse's mind was curiously detached as he 'kept walking', eyes frozen forward, along the short length of Canal Reach. With Teutonic recollections the order of the night, he recalled that in Germany the situation might have been regarded as serious but not hopeless, in Austria, hopeless but not serious. Or was it the other way round? To his astonishment, however, he found himself being firmly manipulated towards a police car, parked just round the corner, its gaily-coloured emblem illuminated by the orange glare of a street lamp. And as he reached the car and turned about, he found himself looking slightly upwards into the face of a rather frightened-looking young man.
'You, sir!' It was Detective Constable Walters who was the first to speak, and Morse's shoulders sagged with a combination of relief and exasperation.
'Are you in the habit of arresting your superior officers, Constable?'
A flustered Walters followed the Lancia up to Morse's North Oxford flat, where over a few whiskies the two of them sat and talked until way after midnight. On his own side, Morse came almost completely clean, omitting only any mention of his bribing of the Jericho locksmith. For his part, Walters admitted to his own anxiety about Morse's behaviour, recounted in detail his own investigations, and revealed that after working late in St. Aldates that night he had been on his way to return the few items taken from Canal Reach when he had seen the yellow glow flitting about the dark and silent rooms. Throughout Walters' somewhat discontinuous narrative, Morse remained silent, attentive, and seemingly impassive. When Walters had mentioned the strange discoveries of the chair in the kitchen and the key on the door-mat, Morse had nodded noncommittally, as though the incidents were either of little moment or perfectly explicable. Only during Walters' account of his visit to the Summertown Bridge Club had Morse's eyes appeared to harden to a deeper blue.
'You're in a tricky position, young fellow,' said Morse finally. 'You find a superior officer snooping around in an empty house-a house in which he'd poked his nose the day the dead woman was found-an officer who had no more right to be there than a fourth-grade burglar-so what do you do, Walters?'
'I just don't know, sir.'
'I'll tell you what you ought to have done.' The sudden sharp edge on Morse's voice made Walters look up anxiously. 'If you had any nous at all you would have asked me how I got in. Not really good enough, was it?'
Walters opened his mouth to say something, but Morse continued. 'How long have you been in the Force?'
'Eighteen months altogether, but only three-'
'You've got a lot to learn.'
'I'm learning all the time, sir.'
Morse grinned at the young man. 'Well, you've got something else to learn; and that's exactly what your duty has got to be now. And in case you don't know, I'll tell you. It's your duty to report everything that's happened tonight to Chief Inspector Bell, agreed?'
Walters nodded. The point had been worrying him sorely, and he felt glad that Morse had made things so easy for him. Again he was about to say something, but again he was interrupted.
'But not just yet, understand? I'll see the Assistant Chief Constable first and explain the whole position. You see, Walters, there's something a bit odd about this business; something that needs an older and a wiser head than yours.'