“So you keep telling me, Lewis. And all I’m asking is the chance to get as bored as everybody else. I’ve only got a week, remember.”
“I like your next choice, though. Beautiful girl, Kim Basinger. Beautiful.”
“Something of a toss-up, that — between her and Mother Teresa. But I’d already played the God card.”
“Then,” Lewis considered the next answer, “Arrghh, come off it, sir! You didn’t even go for the beer! You’re supposed to answer these questions honestly.”
“I’ve already got plenty of booze in,” said Morse. “Certainly enough to see me through to Judgment Day. And I don’t fancy facing the Great Beyond with a blinding hangover. It’ll be a new experience for me — tranquilizers...”
Lewis looked down again, and proceeded to read out the reasons for Morse’s greatest triumph. “It says here, on Question Five, ‘Those choosing any of the suggested titles are clearly unfit for high honors. If any choice whatsoever is made, four marks will therefore be deducted from the final score. If the answer is a timid dash — or similar — no marks will be awarded, but no marks will be deducted. A more positively negative answer — e.g. “Come off it!” — will be rewarded with a bonus of four marks.’ ” Again Lewis shook his head. “Nonsense, isn’t it? ‘Positively negative,’ I mean.”
“Rather nicely put, I’d’ve thought,” said Morse.
“Anyway,” conceded Lewis, “you score twenty out of twenty according to this fellow who seems to have all the answers.” Lewis looked again at the name printed below the article. “ ‘Rhadamanthus’ — whoever he is.”
“Lord Chief Justice of Appeal in the Underworld.”
Lewis frowned, then grinned. “You’ve been cheating! You’ve got a copy—”
“No!” Morse’s blue eyes gazed fiercely across at his sergeant. “The first I saw of that Gazette was when you brought it in just now.”
“If you say so.” But Lewis sounded less than convinced.
“Not surprised, are you, to find me perched up there on the topmost twig amongst the intelligentsia?”
“ ‘The wise and the cultured,’ actually.”
“And that’s another thing. I think I shall go crackers if I hear three things in my life much more: ‘Hark the Herald Angels Sing’; Eine Kleine Nachtmusik; and that wretched bloody word ‘actually.’ ”
“Sorry, sir.”
Suddenly Morse grinned. “No need to be, old friend. And at least you’re right about one thing. I did cheat — in a way.”
“You don’t mean you...?”
Morse nodded.
It had been a playful, pleasant interlude. Yet it would have warranted no inclusion in this chronicle had it not been that one or two of the details recorded herein were to linger significantly in the memory of Chief Inspector E. Morse of the Thames Valley Police HQ.
Part one
Chapter one
In hypothetical sentences introduced by “if” and referring to past time, where conditions are deemed to be “unfulfilled,” the verb will regularly be found in the pluperfect subjunctive, in both protasis and apodosis.
It is perhaps unusual to begin a tale of murder with a reminder to the reader of the rules governing conditional sentences in a language that is incontrovertibly dead. In the present case, however, such a course appears not wholly inappropriate.
If (if) Chief Inspector Morse had been on hand to observe the receptionist’s dress — an irregularly triangled affair in blues, grays, and reds — he might have been reminded of the uniform issued to a British Airways stewardess. More probably, though, he might not, since he had never flown on British Airways. His only flight during the previous decade had occasioned so many fears concerning his personal survival that he had determined to restrict all future travel to those statistically far more precarious means of conveyance — the car, the coach, the train, and the steamer.
Yet almost certainly the Chief Inspector would have noted, with approval, the receptionist herself, for in Yorkshire she would have been reckoned a bonny lass: a vivacious, dark-eyed woman, long-legged and well-figured; a woman — judging from her ringless, well-manicured fingers — not overtly advertising any marital commitment, and not averse, perhaps, to the occasional overture from the occasional man.
Pinned at the top left of her colorful dress was a name tag: “Dawn Charles.”
Unlike several of her friends (certainly unlike Morse) she was quite content with her Christian name. Sometimes she’d felt slightly dubious about it; but no longer. Out with some friends in the Bird and Baby the previous month, she’d been introduced to a rather dashing, rather dishy undergraduate from Pembroke College. And when, a little later, she’d found herself doodling inconsequentially on a Burton beer mat, the young man, on observing her sinistrality, had initiated a wholly memorable conversation.
“Dawn? That is your name?”
She’d nodded.
“Left-handed?”
She’d nodded.
“Do you know that line from Omar Khayyam? ‘Dreaming when Dawn’s left hand was in the sky...’ Lovely, isn’t it?”
Yes, it was. Lovely.
She’d peeled the top off the beer mat and made him write it down for her.
Then, very quietly, he’d asked her if he could see her again. At the start of the new term, perhaps?
She’d known it was silly, for there must have been at least twenty years’ difference in their ages. If only... if only he’d been ten, a dozen years older...
But people did do silly things, and hoped their silly hopes. And that very day, January 15, was the first full day of the new Hilary Term in the University of Oxford.
Her Monday–Friday job, 6–10 P.M., at the clinic on Banbury Road (just north of St. Giles’) was really quite enjoyable. Over three years of it now, and she was becoming a fixture there. Most of the consultants greeted her with a genuine smile; several of them, these days, with her Christian name.
Nice.
She’d once stayed at a four-star hotel which offered a glass of sherry to incoming guests; and although the private Harvey Clinic was unwilling (perhaps on medical grounds?) to provide such laudable hospitality, Dawn ever kept two jugs of genuine coffee piping hot for her clients, most of them soberly suited and well-heeled gentlemen. A number of whom, as she well knew, were most seriously ill.
Yes, there had been several occasions when she had heard a few brief passages of conversation between consultant and client which she shouldn’t have heard; or which, having heard, she should have forgotten; and which she should never have been willing to report to anyone.
Not even to the police.
Quite certainly not to the Press...
As it happened, January 15 was to prove a day unusually easy for her to recall, since it marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the clinic’s opening in 1971. By prior negotiation and arrangement, the clinic was visited that evening, between 7 P.M. and 8:30 P.M., by Radio Oxford, by the local press, and by Mr. Wesley Smith and his crew from the Central TV studios out at Abingdon. And particularly memorable for Dawn had been those precious moments when the camera had focused upon her: first, when (as instructed) she had poured a cup of genuine coffee for a wholly bogus “client”; second, when the cameraman had moved behind her left shoulder as she ran a felt-tipped pen through a name on the appointments list in front of her — but only, of course, after a full assurance that no viewer would be able to read the name itself when the feature was shown the following evening.