Including Number 17.
The Jaguar door closed behind him with its accustomed aristocratic click, and he walked slowly through the drizzle along the street. Still the same count: six for Labor; two for the Tories; and two apparently unprepared to parade their political allegiances.
Yes! YES!
Almost everything (he saw it now so clearly) had been pushing his mind toward that crucial clue — toward the break-through in the case.
It had not been Owens who had murdered Rachel James — almost certainly he couldn’t have done it, anyway.
And that late evening, as if matching his slow-paced walk, a slow and almost beatific smile had settled round the mouth of Chief Inspector Morse.
Chapter twenty-three
Friday, February 23
Thirteen Unlucky: The Turks so dislike the number that the word is almost expunged from their vocabulary. The Italians never use it in making up the numbers of their lotteries. In Paris, no house bears that number.
As Lewis pulled onto Bloxham Drive, he was faced with an unfamiliar sight: a smiling, expansive-looking Morse was leaning against the front gate of Number 17, engaged in a relaxed, impromptu press conference with one camera crew (ITV), four reporters (two from national, two from local newspapers — but no Owens), and three photographers. Compared with previous mornings, the turnout was disappointing.
It was 9:05 A.M.
Lewis just caught the tail end of things. “So it’ll be a waste of time — staying on here much longer. You won’t expect me to go into details, of course, but I can tell you that we’ve finished our investigations in this house.”
If the “this” were spoken with a hint of some audial semi-italicization, it was of no moment, for no one appeared to notice it.
“Any leads? Any new leads?”
“To the murder of Rachel James, you mean?”
“Who else?”
“No. No new leads at all, really... Well, perhaps one.”
On which cryptic note, Morse raised his right hand to forestall the universal pleas for clarification, and with a genial — perhaps genuine? — smile, he turned away.
“Drive me round the block a couple of times, Lewis. I’d rather all these people buggered off, and I don’t think they’re going to stay much longer if they see us go.”
Nor did they.
Ten minutes later the detectives returned to find the Drive virtually deserted.
“How many houses are there here, Lewis?”
“Not sure.” From Number 17 Lewis looked along to the end of the row: two other houses — presumably Numbers 19 and 21, although the figures from the front gate of the latter had been removed. Then he looked across to the other side of the street where the last even-numbered house was 20. The answer, therefore, appeared to be reasonably obvious.
“Twenty-one.”
“That’s an odd number, isn’t it?”
Lewis frowned. “Did you think I thought it was an even number?”
Morse smiled. “I didn’t mean ‘odd’ as opposed to ‘even’; I meant ‘odd’ as opposed to ‘normal.’ ”
“Oh!”
“Lew-is! You don’t build a street of terraced houses with one side having ten and the other side having eleven, now do you? You get a bit of symmetry into things; a bit of regularity.”
“If you say so.”
“And I do say so!” snapped Morse, with the conviction of a fundamentalist preacher asserting the divine authority of Holy Writ.
“No need to be so sharp, sir.”
“I should have spotted it from day one! From those political stickers, Lewis! Let’s count, okay?”
The two men walked along the odd-numbered side of Bloxham Drive. And Lewis nodded: six Labor; two Tory; two don’t-knows.
Ten.
“You see, Lewis, we’ve perhaps been a little misled by these minor acts of vandalism here. We’ve got several houses minus the numbers originally screwed into their front gates — and their back gates. So we were understandably confused.”
Lewis agreed. “I still am, sir.”
“How many odd numbers are there between one and twenty-one — inclusive?”
“I reckon it’s ten, sir. So I suppose there must be eleven.”
Morse grinned. “Write ’em down!”
So Lewis did, in his notebook: 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, 15, 17, 19, 21. Then counted them.
“I was right, sir. Eleven.”
“But only ten houses, Lewis.”
“I don’t quite follow.”
“Of course you do. It happens quite often in hotel floors and hotel room numbers... and street numbers. They leave one of them out.”
Enlightenment dawned on Lewis’s honest features.
“Number thirteen!”
“Exactly! Do you know there used to be people in France called ‘fourteeners’ who made a living by going along to dinner parties where the number of guests was thirteen?”
“Where do you find all these bits and pieces?”
“Do you know, I think I saw that on the back of a matchbox in a pub in Grimsby. I’ve learned quite a lot in life from the back of matchboxes.”
“What’s it all got to do with the case, though?”
Morse reached for Lewis’s notebook, and put brackets round the seventh number. Then, underneath the first few numbers, he wrote in an arrow, →, pointing from left to right.
“Lewis! If you were walking along the back of the houses, starting from Number 1 — she must be feeling a bit sore about the election, by the way... Well, let’s just go along there.”
The two men walked to the rear of the terrace, where (as we have seen) several of the back gates had been sadly, if not too seriously, vandalized.
“Get your list, Lewis, and as we go along, just put a ring round those gates where we haven’t got a number, all right?”
At the end of the row, Lewis’s original list, with its successive emendations, appeared as follows:
“You see,” said Morse, “the vandalism gets worse the further you get into the Close, doesn’t it? As it gets further from the main road.”
“Yes.”
“So just picture things. You’ve got a revolver and you walk along the back here in the half-light. You know the number you want. You know the morning routine, too: breakfast at about seven. All you’ve got to do is knock on the kitchen window, wait till you see the silhouette behind the thin blind, the silhouette of a face with one distinctive feature — a ponytail. You walk along the back; you see Number 11; you move along to the next house — Number 13 — you think! And so the house after that must be Number 15. And to confirm things, there’s the ponytailed silhouette. You press the trigger — and there you have it, Lewis! The Horseman passes by. But you’ve got it wrong, haven’t you? Your intended victim is living at Number 15, not Number 17!”
“So,” said Lewis slowly, “whoever stood at the kitchen window thought he — or she — was firing...”
Morse nodded somberly. “Yes. Not at Rachel James, but Geoffrey Owens.”
Chapter twenty-four
Men entitled to bleat BA after their names.
The Senior Common Room at Lonsdale is comparatively small, and for this reason has a rather more intimate air about it than some of the spacious SCRs in the larger Oxford Colleges. Light-colored, beautifully grained oak-paneling encloses the room on all sides, its coloring complemented by the light-brown leather sofas and armchairs there. Copies of almost all the national dailies, including the Sun and the Mirror, are to be found on the glass-topped coffee tables; and indeed it is usually these tabloids which are flipped through first — sometimes intently studied — by the majority of the dons.