“Well, he sent for one of the choices—”
“Copenhagen Red-Hot Sex?”
“No. Housewives on the Job — that was the title; and he expected, you know...”
Morse nodded. “Housewives ‘on the job’ with the milkman, the postman, the itinerant button salesmen...”
Lewis grinned. “But it wasn’t, no. It just showed all these fully dressed Swedish housewives washing up the plates and peeling the potatoes.”
“Serves Sergeant Dixon right.”
“You won’t mention it, sir!”
“Of course I won’t. And you’re probably right. You never really get something for nothing in this life. I never seem to, anyway.”
“Really, sir?”
Morse licked the flap of the white envelope. Then licked the back of the first-class stamp that Lewis had just given him.
The phone had been ringing for several seconds, and Lewis now took the call, listening briefly but carefully, before putting his hand over the mouthpiece:
“There’s been a murder, sir. On the doorstep, really — up on Bloxham Drive.”
Part two
Chapter seven
In addition to your loyal support on the ballot paper, we shall be grateful if you can agree to display the enclosed sticker in one of your windows.
—Extract from a 1994 local election leaflet
distributed by the East Oxford Labor Party
It reminded Morse of something — that rear window of Number 17.
As a young lad he’d been fascinated by a photograph in one of his junior school textbooks of the apparatus frequently fixed round the necks of slaves in the southern states of America: an iron ring from whose circumference, at regular intervals, there emanated lengthy, fearsome spikes, also of iron. The caption, as Morse recalled, had maintained that such a device readily prevented any absconding cotton picker from passing himself off as an enfranchised citizen.
Morse had never really understood the caption.
Nor indeed, for some considerable while, was he fully to understand the meaning of the neat bullet hole in the center of the shattered glass, and the cracks that radiated from it regularly, like a young child’s crayoning the rays of the sun.
Looking around him, Morse surveyed the area from the wobbly paving slabs which formed a pathway at the rear of the row of terraced houses stretching along the northern side of Bloxham Drive, Kidlington, Oxfordshire. About half of the thirty-odd young trees originally planted in a staggered design beside and behind this path had been vandalized to varying degrees: some of them wholly extirpated; some cruelly snapped in the middle of their gradually firming stems; others, with many of their burgeoning branches torn off, standing wounded and forlorn amid the unkempt litter-strewn area, once planned by some Environmental Officer as a small addendum to England’s green and pleasant land.
Morse felt saddened.
As did Sergeant Lewis, standing beside him.
Yet it is appropriate here to enter one important qualification. Bloxham Drive, in the view of most of its residents, was showing some few signs of unmistakable improvement. The installation of sleeping policemen had virtually eliminated the possibilities of joyriding; many denizens were now lying more peacefully in their beds after the eviction of one notoriously antisocial household; and over the previous two or three years the properties had fallen in price to such an extent as to form an attractive proposition to those few of the professional classes who were prepared to give the street the benefit of the doubt. To be more specific, three such persons had taken out mortgages on properties there: the properties standing at Number 1, Number 15, and Number 17.
But — yes, agreed! — Bloxham Drive and the surrounding streets were still a league from the peaceful, leafy lanes of Gerrards Cross; and still the scene of some considerable crime.
Crime which now included murder…
The call had come through to Lewis at 8:40 A.M.
Just over one hour previously, while the sky was still unusually dark, Mrs. Queenie Norris, from Number 11, had (as was her wont) taken out her eight-year-old Cavalier King Charles along the rear of the terrace, ignoring (as was her wont) the notices forbidding the fouling of pavements and verges. That was when she’d noticed it: noticed the cracked back window at Number 17 — yet failed to register too much surprise, since (as we have seen) vandalism there had become commonplace, and any missile, be it bottle or brick, would have left some similar traces of damage.
Back from her walk, Mrs. Norris, as she was later to explain to the police, had felt increasingly uneasy. And just before the weather forecast on Radio 4, she had stepped out once again, now minus the duly defecated Samson, and seen that the light in the kitchen of Number 17 was still on, the blind still drawn down to the bottom of the casement.
This time she had knocked quietly, then loudly, against the back door.
But there had been no reply to her reiterated raps; and only then had she noticed that behind the hole in the kitchen window — immediately behind it — was a corresponding hole in the thin beige-brown material of the blind. It was at that point that she’d felt the horrid crawl of fear across her skin. Her near-neighbor worked in North Oxford, almost invariably leaving home at about a quarter to eight. And now it was coming up to the hour. Had reached the hour.
Something was wrong.
Something, Mrs. Norris suspected, was seriously wrong; and she’d rung 999 immediately.
It had been ten minutes later when PCs Graham and Swift had finally forced an entry through the front door of the property to discover the grim truth awaiting them in the back kitchen: the body of a young woman lying dead upon her side, the right cheek resting on the cold red tiles, the light brown hair of her ponytail soaked and stiffened in a pool of blood. Indeed it was not only the dreams of the two comparatively inexperienced constables, but also those of the hardened Scenes-of-Crime Officers, that would be haunted by the sight of so much blood; such a copious outpouring of blood.
And now it was Morse’s turn.
“Oh dear,” said Lewis very quietly.
Morse said nothing, holding back (as ever) from any close inspection of a corpse, noting only the bullet wound, somewhere at the bottom of the neck, which clearly had been the cause of death, the cause of all the blood. Yet (as ever, too) Morse, who had never owned a camera in his life, had already taken several mental flashes of his own.
It seemed logical to assume that the murder had occurred toward the end of a fairly conventional breakfast. On the side of a wooden kitchen table — the side nearest the window — a brown plastic-topped stool had been moved slightly askew. On the table itself was a plate, a small heap of salt sprinkled with pepper at its edge, on which lay a brown eggshell beside a wooden eggcup; and alongside, on a second plate, half a round of toasted brown bread, buttered, and amply spread from a jar of Frank Cooper’s Oxford Marmalade. And one other item: a white mug bearing the legend GREETINGS FROM GUERNSEY; bearing, too, the remains of some breakfast coffee, long since cold and muddily brown.
That was what Morse saw. And for the present that was enough; he wished to be away from the dreadful scene.
Yet before he left, he forced himself to look once more at the woman who lay there. She was wearing a white nightdress, with a faded-pink floral motif, over which was a light blue dressing gown, reaching about halfway down the shapely, slim, unstockinged legs. It was difficult to be sure about things, of course; but Morse suspected that the twisted features of the face had been — until so very recently — just as comely as the rest of her. And for a few seconds his own face twisted, too, as if in sympathy with the murdered woman lying at his feet.