The builder (rather a handsome man, she thought) grinned wryly as he looked down at overalls bespattered with scarlet paint. “Not my choice, Mrs. B. I’m with you, all the way. If there’s a better combination of color than black and white and yellow, I don’t know it.”
Mrs. B. felt gratified. “Well, I’ll let you get on then. I won’t bother you — no one will bother you. It’s all very quiet round here. Would you like some coffee later?”
“Tea, if you don’t mind, Mrs. B. Milk and two teaspoons of sugar, please. About ten? Smashing!”
From the ground-floor window she watched him as he removed the aluminum ladders from the top of the van, stood there for a few seconds looking up at the dormer window, then shaking out the first extension and, by means of a rope and pulley at the bottom, elongating the ladder to its fullest extent with a second, smaller extension. For a few seconds he stood there, holding the loftily assembled structure at right angles to the ground; then easing the pointed top of the third stage — most carefully, lovingly almost — into place against the casement of the dormer window some thirty feet above, before finally firming the bottom of the ladder on the compacted gravel of the pathway which divided the front of the houses there from the wide stretch of grass leading to the edge of Sheep Street, some four or five feet below.
For several minutes Mrs. B. stood by her front window on the ground floor, looking out a little anxiously to observe her builder’s varied skills. Across the road, a solitary jogger in red trainers was running reasonably briskly past the Bay Tree Hotel, his tracksuit hood over his head, as if he were trying to work up a sweat; or just perhaps to keep his ears warm, since there was an unseasonal nip in the air that morning. Mrs. B thought jogging a silly and dangerous way of keeping fit, though. She’d known the young North Oxford don who had written the hugely popular Joys of Jogging, and who had died aged twenty-seven, whilst on an early-morning not-so-joyful jog.
Jogging was a dangerous business.
Like climbing ladders.
And Mrs. B.’s nerves could stand things no longer.
She would repair to the second-floor back bedroom to continue with her quilting — as well as to quell the acute fear she felt for a man who (as she saw it) was risking his life at every second of his working day. But before doing so, she knew she had the moral duty to impart a few cautionary words of advice. And she opened the front door just as the builder was beginning his ascent, his left hand on a shoulder-high rung, his right hand grasping a narrowly serrated saw, a long chisel, and a red, short-handled Stanley knife.
“You will be careful, won’t you? Please!”
The builder nodded, successively grasping each rung (each “round” as the firemen say) at a point just above his shoulders as he climbed with measured step, professionally, confidently, to the top of the triple-length ladder. He’d always enjoyed being up high, ever since the vicar of St. John the Baptist’s in Burford had taken him and his fellow choirboys up to the top of the church. It was the first time in his young life he’d felt superior, felt powerful, as he traversed his way along the high places there with a strangely happy confidence, whilst the others inched their cautious way along the narrow ledges.
It was just the same now.
Once he had reached the top rung but three, he looked up and immediately decided he would be able to work at the top of the dormer without any trouble. Then he looked down, and saw that the ladder(s) beneath him, though sagging slightly in the middle (that was good), seemed perfectly straight and secure. Funny, really! Most people thought you were all right on heights just so long as you didn’t look up or down. Rubbish! The only thing to avoid was looking laterally to left or right, when there really was the risk (at least for him) of losing all sense of the vertical and the horizontal. He dug his red Stanley knife into the upper lintel, then the lower sill; in each case, as he twisted the blade, finding the wooden texture crumble with ominous ease. Not surprising though, really, for he’d noticed the date above the door. He secured the top of the ladder to the gutterings — his normal practice — and began work.
At the appointed hour Mrs. B. boiled the kettle in the second-floor front (as her husband had called it); squeezed a Typhoo bag with the kitchen tongs; and stirred in two heaped spoonsful of sugar. Then, with the steaming cup and two digestive biscuits on a circular tray, she was about to make her way downstairs when something quite extraordinary flashed across her vision: she saw a pair of oblique parallel lines passing almost in slow motion across the oblong frame of the second-floor window. So sharply was that momentary configuration imprinted upon her retina that she was able to describe it so very precisely later that same afternoon; was able to recall that earsplitting, skin-tingling shriek of terror as the man whose skull was about to be smashed to pieces fell headfirst on to the compacted pathway below, so very few yards from her own front door.
“Dead,” the senior paramedic had told her quietly, six minutes only after her panic-stricken call on 999. Incontrovertibly dead.
For the next hour or so Mrs. Bayley wept almost uncontrollably. Partly from shock. Partly, too, from guilt, because (as she repeatedly reminded herself) it was her fault that he’d appeared upon the scene in the first place. She’d found his name among the local builders and house renovators listed alphabetically in the telephone directory. In the Yellow Pages, in fact. Exactly where Sergeant Lewis, also, had discovered the address of J. Barron, Builder, together with a telephone number in Lower Swinstead.
Chapter forty-two
And what is the use of a book without pictures or conversations?
Had he been left to himself, had he been without any knowledge of the context in which the apparent “accident” had occurred, Lewis would not have suspected that it all amounted to murder. But it had been murder, he felt sure of that; and four hours earlier he had taken personal responsibility for initiating the whole apparatus of yet another murder inquiry. Same SOCOs as in the Sutton Courtenay murder, same pathologist, same everything; but with almost every sign of immediate activity over when, just before 3 P.M., Morse finally put in an appearance, very soon to be seating himself in Mrs. Bayley’s north-facing sitting room on the ground floor.
“Northamptonshire faring any better?” he asked the senior SOCO.
“Next year, perhaps,” said Eddie Andrews pessimistically.
“You’d be out of a job without me,” continued Morse. “Just like Dr. Hobson here.”
But the unsmiling pathologist could find little place in her heart for any banter and ignored the comment. As did Edwards.
The gloomy room was suddenly empty, apart from Sergeant Lewis. “You said there wasn’t any danger of him being murdered, sir.”
Morse could find no satisfactory answer and stared silently out of the window until Mrs. Bayley came in with (for Morse) wholly unwelcome cups of coffee and the same two digestive biscuits that Barron would have eaten with his oversugared tea.
“You mentioned to Sergeant Lewis what you saw from the window? The one above this, wasn’t it?”
She nodded. “It made such a vivid imprint on the, er...”
“Retina?” suggested Lewis.
“Thank you, Sergeant. I did myself once work in the Oxford Eye Hospital.” She turned to Morse. “You’ll think me a silly old woman, but it reminded me of something I saw quite a few years ago now in one of the Sundays. There were these outline drawings sent in by readers and you had to guess what they were; and one of them always stuck in my, er...” (This time Lewis desisted.) She took a pencil and without permission made a quick little drawing in Lewis’s notebook: