It was 7:45 P.M.
A cigarette would have been a paradisal plus; and yet somehow he managed to resist. But as he looked around him, at the college crests, the colored prints, the photographs of distinguished local patrons, he was debating whether to take a few more calories in liquid form when the landlord was suddenly beside him.
“Inspector! I hadn’t seen you come in. This is for you — it’s been here a couple of weeks.”
Morse took the printed card:
Let me tell you of a moving experience — very moving! The furniture van is fetching my effects from London to Oxford at last. And on March 18th I’ll be celebrating my south-facing patio with a shower of champagne at 53 Morris Villas, Cowley. Come and join me!
RSVP (at above address)
Across the bottom was a handwritten note: “Make it, Morse! DC.”
Morse remembered her well... a slim, unmarried blonde who’d once invited him to stay overnight in her north London flat, following a comparatively sober Metropolitan Police party; when he’d said that after such a brief acquaintance such an accommodation might perhaps be inappropriate.
Yes, that was the word he’d used: “inappropriate.”
Pompous idiot!
But he’d given her his address, which she’d vowed she’d never forget.
Which clearly she had.
“She was ever so anxious for you to get it,” began the landlord — but even as he spoke the door that led to Holywell Street had opened, and he turned his attention to the newcomer.
“Denis! I didn’t expect to see you in tonight. No good us both running six miles on a Sunday morning if we’re going to put all the weight back on on a Sunday night.”
Morse looked up, his face puzzled.
“You mean — you went jogging — together — this morning? What time was that?”
“Far too early, wasn’t it, David!”
The landlord smiled. “Stupid, really. On a Sunday morning, too.”
“What time?” repeated Morse.
“Quarter to seven. We met outside the pub here.”
“And where did the pair of you run?”
“Five of us actually, wasn’t it, Denis? We ran up to Plain, up Iffley Road, across Donnington Bridge, along Abingdon Road up to Carfax, then through Cornmarket and St. Giles’ up to Woodstock Road as far as North Parade, then across to Banbury, South Parks, and we got back here...”
“Just before eight,” added Cornford, pointing to Morse’s empty glass.
“What’s it to be?”
“No, it’s my round—”
“Nonsense!”
“Well, if you insist.”
In fact, however, it was the landlord who insisted, and who now walked to the bar as Cornford seated himself.
“You told me earlier,” Morse was anxious to get things straight, “you’d been on your own when you went out jogging.”
“No. If I did, you misunderstood me. You said, I think, ‘Just you?’ And when I said yes, I’d assumed that you were asking if both of us had gone — Shelly and me.”
“And she didn’t go?”
“No. She never does.”
“She just stayed in bed?”
“Where else?”
Morse made no suggestion.
“Do you ever go jogging, Inspector?” The question was wearily mechanical.
“Me? No. I walk a bit, though. I sometimes walk down to Summertown for a newspaper. Just to keep fit.”
Cornford almost grinned. “If you’re going to be Master of Lonsdale, you’re supposed to be fit. It’s in the Statutes somewhere.”
“Makes you wonder how Sir Clixby ever managed it!”
Cornford’s answer was unexpected.
“You know, as you get older it’s difficult for young people to imagine you were ever young yourself — good at games, that sort of thing. Don’t you agree?”
“Fair point, yes.”
“And the Master was a very fine hockey player — had an England trial, I understand.”
The landlord came back with two pints of bitter; then returned to his bartending duties.
Cornford was uneasy, Morse felt sure of that. Something regarding his wife, perhaps? Had she had anything to do with the murder of Geoffrey Owens? Unlikely, surely. One thing looked an odds-on certainty, though: If Denis Cornford had ever figured on the suspect list, he figured there no longer.
Very soon, after a few desultory passages of conversation, Morse had finished his beer, and was taking his leave, putting Deborah’s card into the inside pocket of his jacket, and forgetting it.
Forgetting it only temporarily, though; for later that same evening he was to look at it again — more carefully. And with a sudden, strange enlightenment.
Chapter forty-eight
Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by? Behold and see if there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow, which is done unto me, wherewith the Lord hath afflicted me in the day of his fierce anger.
Feeling a wonderful sense of relief, Shelly Cornford heard the scratch of the key in the front door at twenty-five past eleven. For over two hours she had been sitting upright against the pillows, a white bed jacket over her pajamas, her mind tormented with the terrifying fear that her husband had disappeared into the dark night, never to return: to throw himself over Magdalen Bridge, perhaps; to lay himself across the railway lines; to slash his wrists; to leap from some high tower. And it was to little avail that she’d listened to any logic that her tortured mind could muster: that the water was hardly deep enough, perhaps; that the railway lines were inaccessible; that he had no razor in his pocket; that Carfax Tower, St. Mary’s, St. Michael’s — all were now long shut...
Come back to me, Denis! I don’t care what happens to me; but come back tonight! Oh, God — please, God — let him come back safely. Oh, God, put an end to this, my overwhelming misery!
His words before he’d slammed the door had pierced their way into her heart. “You hadn’t even got the guts to lie to me... You didn’t even want to spare me all this pain.”
Yet how wrong he’d been, with both his accusations!
Her mother had never ceased recalling that Junior High School report: “She’s such a gutsy little girl.” And the simple, desperately simple, truth was that she loved her husband far more than anything or anyone she’d ever loved before. And yet... and yet she remembered so painfully clearly her assertion earlier that same evening: that more than anything in the world she wanted Denis to be Master.
And now? The center of her life had fallen apart. Her heart was broken. There was no one to whom she could turn.
Except, perhaps...
And again and again she recalled that terrible conversation:
“Clixby?”
“Shelly!”
“Are you alone?”
“Yes. What a lovely surprise. Come over!”
“Denis knows all about us!”
“What?”
“Denis knows all about us!”
“ ‘All’ about us? What d’ you mean? There’s nothing for him to know — not really.”
“Nothing? Was it nothing to you?”