“I’m sure you’re right, sir.”
“And if I’m right about the card coming in an envelope — fairly recently — we might be able to find the envelope, agreed? Find a postmark, perhaps? Even a bit of handwriting?”
Lewis looked dubious. “I’d better get something organized, then.”
“All taken care of! I’ve got a couple of the DCs looking through the wastepaper baskets and the dustbin.”
“You reckon this is important, then?”
“Top priority! You can see that. She’s been meeting some man — meeting him secretly. Which means he’s probably married, probably fairly well-known, probably got a prominent job, probably a local man—”
“Probably lives in Peterborough,” mumbled Lewis.
“That’s exactly why the postmark’s so vital!” countered an unamused Morse. “But if he’s an Oxford man...”
“Do you know what the population of Oxford is?”
“I know it to the nearest thousand!” snapped Morse.
Then, of a sudden, the Chief Inspector’s mood completely changed. He tapped the postcard.
“Don’t be despondent, Lewis. You see, we know just a little about this fellow already, don’t we?”
He smiled benignly after draining his second pint; and since no other customers had as yet entered the lounge, Lewis resignedly got to his feet and stepped over to the bar once more.
Lewis picked up the postcard again.
“Give me a clue, sir.”
“You know the difference between nouns and verbs, of course?”
“How could I forget something like that?”
“Well, at certain periods in English literature, all the nouns were spelled with capital letters. Now, as you can see, there are eight nouns in those six lines — each of them spelled with a capital letter. But there are nine capitals — forgetting the first word of each line. Now which is the odd one out?”
Lewis pretended to study the lines once more. He’d played this game before, and he trusted he could get away with it again, as his eyes suddenly lit up a little.
“Ah... I think— I think I see what you mean.”
“Hits you in the eye, doesn’t it, that ‘Wed’ in the first line? And that’s what it was intended to do.”
“Obviously.”
“What’s it mean?”
“What, ‘Wed’? Well, it means ‘marry’ — you know, get hitched, get spliced, tie the knot—”
“What else?”
“Isn’t that enough?”
“What else?”
“I suppose you’re going to tell me it’s Anglo-Saxon or something.”
“Not exactly. Not far off, though. Old English, in fact. And what’s it short for?”
“ ‘Wednesday?’ ” suggested Lewis tentatively.
Morse beamed at his sergeant. “Woden’s day — the fourth day of the week. So we’ve got a day, Lewis. And what else do you need, if you’re going to arrange a date with a woman?”
Lewis studied the lines yet again. “Time? Time, yes! I see what you mean, sir. ‘Ten Times’… ‘fifteen Bridesmaides’… Well, well, well! Ten-fifteen!”
Morse nodded. “With A.M. likelier than P.M. Doesn’t say where though, does it?”
Lewis studied the lines for the fifth time.
“ ‘Traine,’ perhaps?”
“Well done! ‘Meet me at the station to catch the ten-fifteen A.M. train’ — that’s what it says. And we know where that train goes, don’t we?”
“Paddington.”
“Exactly.”
“If only we knew who he was...”
Morse now produced his second photograph — a small passport-sized photograph of two people: the woman, Rachel James (no doubt of that), turning partially round and slightly upward in order to kiss the cheek of a considerably older man with a pair of smiling eyes beneath a distinguished head of graying hair.
“Who’s he, sir?”
“Dunno. We could find out pretty quickly, though, if we put his photo in the local papers.”
“If he’s local.”
“Even if he’s not local, I should think.”
“Bit dodgy, sir.”
“Too dodgy at this stage, I agree. But we can try another angle, can’t we? Tomorrow’s Tuesday, and the day after that’s Wednesday — Woden’s day...”
“You mean he may turn up at the station?”
“If the card’s fairly recent, yes.”
“Unless he’s heard she’s been murdered.”
“Or unless he murdered her himself.”
“Worth a try, sir. And if he does turn up, it’ll probably mean he didn’t murder her...”
Morse made no comment.
“Or, come to think of it, it might be a fairly clever thing to do if he did murder her.”
Morse drained his glass and stood up.
“You know something? I reckon orange juice occasionally germinates your brain cells.”
As he drove his chief down to Kidlington, Lewis returned the conversation to where it had begun.
“You haven’t told me what you think about this fellow Owens — the dead woman’s next-door neighbor.”
“Death is always the next-door neighbor,” said Morse somberly. “But don’t let it affect your driving, Lewis!”
Chapter eleven
Wednesday, February 21
Orandum est ut sit mens sana in corpore sano.
(Our aim? Just a brain that’s not addled with pox,
And a guaranteed clean bill-of-health from the docs.)
The next meeting of the Lonsdale Fellows had been convened for 10 A.M.
In the Stamper Room.
William Leslie Stamper, b. 1880, had graduated from Oxford University in 1903 with the highest marks (it is said) ever recorded in Classical Moderations. The bracketed caveat in the previous sentence would be unnecessary were it not that the claim for such distinction was perpetuated, in later years, by one person only — by W. L. Stamper himself. And it is pointless to dwell upon the matter since no independent verification is available: The relevant records had been removed from Oxford to a safe place, thereafter never to be seen again, during the First World War — a war in which Stamper had not been an active participant, owing to an illness which was unlikely to prolong his eminently promising career as a don for more than a couple of years or so. Such nonparticipation in the great events of 1914–18 was a major sadness (it is said) to Stamper himself, who was frequently heard to lament his own failure to figure among the casualty lists from the fields of Flanders or Passchendaele.
Now, the reader may readily be forgiven for assuming from the preceding paragraph that Stamper had been a timeserver; a dissembling self-seeker. Yet such an assumption is highly questionable, though not necessarily untrue. When, for example, in 1925, the Mastership of Lonsdale fell vacant, and nominations were sought amid the groves of Academe, Stamper had refused to let his name go forward, on the grounds that if ten years earlier he had been declared unfit to fight in defense of his country he could hardly be considered fit to undertake the governance of the College; specifically so, since the Statutes stipulated a candidate whose body was no less healthy than his brain.
Thereafter, in his gentle, scholarly, pedantic manner, Stamper had passed his years teaching the esoteric skills of Greek Prose and Verse Composition — until retiring at the age of sixty-five, two years before the statutory limit, on the grounds of ill health. No one, certainly not Stamper himself (it is said), anticipated any significant continuation of his life, and the College Fellows unanimously backed a proposal that the dear old boy should have the privilege, during the few remaining years of his life, of living in the finest set of rooms that the College had to offer.