“And no more booze today, Malcolm!”
“What me — drink? On business? Never! And you better not drink, neither.”
“Two sober men — that’s what the job needs,” agreed Morse.
“What time you pickin’ me up then?”
“No. You’re picking me up. Half past seven at my place.”
“Okay. And just remember you got more to lose than I ’ave, Mr. Morse.”
Yes, far more to lose, Morse knew that; and he felt a shudder of apprehension about the risky escapade he was undertaking. His nerves needed some steadying.
He poured himself a good measure of Glenfiddich; and shortly thereafter fell deeply asleep in the chair for more than two hours.
Bliss.
Johnson parked his filthy F-reg Vauxhaull in a fairly convenient lay-by on the Deddington Road, the main thoroughfare which runs at the rear of the odd-numbered houses on Bloxham Drive. As instructed, Morse stayed behind, in the murky shadow of the embankment, as Johnson eased himself through a gap in the perimeter fence, where vandals had smashed and wrenched away several of the vertical slats, and then, with surprising agility, descended the steep stretch of slippery grass that led down to the rear of the terrace.
The coast seemed clear.
Morse looked on nervously as the locksman stood in his trainers at the back of Number 15, patiently and methodically doing what he did so well. Once, he snapped to taut attention hard beside the wall as a light was switched on in one of the nearby houses, throwing a yellow rectangle over the glistening grass — and then switched off.
Six minutes.
By Morse’s watch, six minutes before Johnson turned the knob, carefully eased the door open, and disappeared within — before reappearing and beckoning a tense and jumpy Morse to join him.
“Do you want the lights on?” asked Johnson as he played the thin beam of his large torch around the kitchen.
“What do you think?”
“Yes. Let’s ’ave ’em on. Lemme just go and pull the curtains through ’ere.” He moved into the front living room, where Morse heard a twin swish, before the room burst suddenly into light.
An ordinary, somewhat spartan room: settee; two rather tatty armchairs; dining table and chairs; TV set; electric fire installed in the old fireplace; and above the fireplace, on a mantelpiece patinated deep with dust, the only object perhaps which any self-respecting burglar would have wished to take — a small, beautifully fashioned ormolu clock.
Upstairs, the double bed in the front room was unmade, an orange bath towel thrown carelessly across the duvet; no sign of pajamas. On the bedside table two items only: Wilbur Smith’s The Seventh Scroll in paperback, and a packet of BiSoDoL Extra indigestion tablets. An old-fashioned mahogany wardrobe monopolized much of the remaining space, with coats/suits/trousers on their hangers, and six pairs of shoes neatly laid in parallels at the bottom; and on the shelves, to the left, piles of jumpers, shirts, pants, socks, and handkerchiefs.
The second bedroom was locked.
“Malcolm!” whispered Morse down the stairwell.
Two and a half minutes later, Morse was taking stock of a smaller but clearly more promising room: a large bookcase containing a best-seller selection from over the years; one armchair; one office chair; the latter set beneath a veneered desk with an imitation leather top, four drawers on either side, and between them a longer drawer with two handles — locked.
“Malcolm!” whispered Morse down the stairwell.
Ninety seconds only this time, and clearly the locksman was running into form.
The eight side drawers contained few items of interest: stationery, insurance documents, car documents, bank statements, pens and pencils — but in the bottom left-hand drawer a couple of pornographic paperbacks. Morse opened Topless in Torremolinos at random and read a short paragraph.
In its openly titillating way, it seemed to him surprisingly well written. And there was that one striking simile where the heroine’s bosom was compared to a pair of fairy cakes — although Morse wasn’t at all sure what a fairy cake looked like. He made a mental note of the author, Ann Berkeley Cox, and read the brief dedication on the title page, “For Geoff From ABC,” before slipping the book into the pocket of his mackintosh.
Johnson was seated in an armchair, in the living room, in the dark, when Morse came down the stairs holding a manila file.
“Got what you wanted, Mr. Morse?”
“Perhaps so. Ready?”
With the house now in total darkness, the two men felt their way to the kitchen, when Morse stopped suddenly.
“The torch! Give me the torch.”
Retracing his steps to the living room, he shone the beam along an empty mantelpiece.
“Put it back!” he said.
Johnson took the ormolu clock from his overcoat pocket and replaced it carefully on its little dust-free rectangle.
“I’m glad you made me do that,” confided Johnson quietly. “I shouldn’t ’a done it in the first place. Anyway, me conscience’ll be clear now.”
There was a streak of calculating cruelty in the man, Morse knew that. But in several respects he was a lovable rogue; even sometimes, as now perhaps, a reasonably honest one. And oddly it was Morse who was beginning to worry — about his own conscience.
He went quickly up to the second bedroom once more and slipped the book back in its drawer.
At last, as quietly as it had opened, the back door closed behind them and the pair now made their way up the grassy gradient to the gap in the slatted perimeter fence.
“You’ve not lost your old skills,” volunteered Morse.
“Nah! Know what they say, Mr. Morse? Old burglars never die — they simply steal away.”
In the darkened house behind them, on the mantelpiece in the front living room, a little dust-free rectangle still betrayed the spot where the beautifully fashioned ormolu clock had so recently stood.
Chapter twenty-eight
When you have assembled what you call your “facts” in logical order, it is like an oil lamp you have fashioned, filled, and trimmed; but which will shed no illumination unless first you light it.
Back in his flat, Morse closed the door and shot the bolts, both top and bottom. It was an oddly needless precaution, yet an explicable one, perhaps. As a twelve-year-old boy, he remembered so vividly returning from school with a magazine, and locking all the doors in spite of his certain knowledge that no other member of the family would be home for several hours. And then, even then, he had waited awhile, relishing the anticipatory thrill before daring to open the pages.
It was just that sensation he felt now as he switched on the electric fire, poured a glass of Glenfiddich, lit a cigarette, and settled back in his favorite armchair — not this time, however, with the Naturist Journal which (all those years ago now) had been doing the rounds in Lower IVA, but with the manila file just burgled from the house on Bloxham Drive.
The cover was well worn, with tears and creases along its edges; and maroon rings where once a wine glass had rested, amid many doodles of quite intricate design. Inside the file was a sheaf of papers and cuttings, several of them clipped or stapled together, though not arranged in any chronological or purposeful sequence.
Nine separate items.
• Two newspaper cuttings, snipped from one of the less inhibited of the Sunday tabloids, concerning a Lord Hardiman, together with a photograph of the aforesaid peer fishing in his wallet (presumably for Deutschmarks) outside a readily identifiable sex establishment in Hamburg’s Reeperbahn. Clipped to this material was a further photograph of Lord Hardiman arm-in-arm with Lady Hardiman at a polo match in Great Windsor Park (September 1984).