The SOCOs had now arrived; and after brief, perfunctory greetings, Morse was glad to escape and leave them to it. Bidding Lewis to initiate some immediate house-to-house inquiries, on both sides of the street, he himself stepped out of the front door onto Bloxham Drive, now the scene of considerable police activity, with checkered-capped officers, the flashing blue lights of their cars, and a cordon of blue-and-white tape being thrown round the murder house. A knot of local inhabitants, too, stood whispering there, shivering occasionally in the early morning cold, yet determined to witness the course of events unfolding.
And the media.
Recognizing the Chief Inspector, two pressmen (how so early there?) pleaded for just the briefest interview — a sentence even; a TV crew from Abingdon had already covered Morse’s exit from the house; and a Radio Oxford reporter waved a bulbous microphone in front of his face.
But Morse ignored them all with a look of vacuous incomprehension worthy of some deaf-mute, and proceeded to walk slowly to the end of the street (observing, all the time observing), where he turned left down one side of the terraced row, then left again, retracing his earlier steps along the uneven paving slabs behind the houses, stopping briefly where he and Lewis had stopped before; then completing the circuit and again curtly dismissing the converging reporters with a wave of his right hand as he walked back along the front of the terrace.
It would be untrue to say that Morse’s mind had been particularly acute on this peripatetic reconnaissance. Indeed, only one single feature of the neighborhood had made much of an impression upon him.
A political impression.
Very soon (the evidence was all around him) there was to be an election for one of the local council seats — death of an incumbent, perhaps? — and clearly, if unusually, there appeared to be considerable interest in the matter. Stickers were to be observed in all but two of the front windows of the north-side terrace: green stickers with the red lettering of the Labor candidate’s name; white stickers with the royal blue lettering of the Conservative’s. With little as yet upon which his mind could fix itself, Morse had taken a straw poll of the support shown, from Number 1 to Number 21. And hardly surprisingly, perhaps, in this marginally depressed and predominantly working-class district, the advantage was significantly with the Labor man, with six stickers to the Tory’s two.
One of the stickers favoring the latter cause was displayed in the ground-floor window of Number 15. And for some reason Morse had found himself standing and wondering for a while outside the only other window in the Drive parading its confidence in the Conservative Party — and in a candidate with the splendidly patriotic name of Jonathan Bull; standing and wondering outside Number 1, at the main entrance to Bloxham Drive.
Chapter eight
Oft have we seen him at the peep of dawn
Brushing with hasty steps the dews away.
In his earlier years Geoffrey Owens had been an owl, preferring to pursue whatever tasks lay before him into the late hours of the night, often through into the still, small hours. But now, in his mid-forties, he had metamorphosed into a lark, his brain seeming perceptibly clearer and fresher in the morning. It had been no hardship, therefore, when he was invited, under the new flexitime philosophy of his employers, to start work early and finish work early — thereby receiving a small bonus into the bargain. And, since the previous September, Owens had made it his regular practice to leave his home on Bloxham Drive just before 7 A.M., incidentally thus avoiding the traffic jams which began to build up in the upper reaches of the Banbury Road an hour or so later; and, on his return journey, missing the corresponding jams the other way, as thousands of motorists left the busy heart of Oxford for the comparative peace of the northern outskirts, and the neighboring villages — such as Kidlington.
It was, all in all, a happy enough arrangement. And one which had applied on Monday, February 19.
Owens had left his house at about ten minutes to seven that morning, when he had, of course, passed the house on the corner, Number 1, where a woman had watched him go. But if he in turn had spotted her, this was in no way apparent, for he had passed without a wave of recognition, and driven up to the junction, where he had turned right, on his way down into Oxford. But if he had not seen her, quite definitely she had seen him.
Traffic had been unusually light for a Monday (more often than not the busiest morning of the week) even at such a comparatively early hour; and without any appreciable holdup Owens soon reached the entrance barrier of the large car park which serves the Oxfordshire Newspapers complex down in Osney Mead, just past the railway station along the Botley Road.
Owens had come to Oxford three years previously with an impressive-looking CV, in which the applicant asserted his “all-round experience in the fields of reporting, copyediting, advertising, and personnel management.” And he had been the unanimous choice of the four members of the interviewing panel. Nor had there been the slightest reason since for them to rue their decision. In fact, Owens had proved a profitable investment. With his knowledge of English grammar way above average, his job description had quickly been modified, with an appropriate increase in salary, to include responsibility for recasting the frequently ill-constructed paragraphs of his junior colleagues, and for correcting the heinous errors in orthography which blighted not a few of their offerings; and, in addition to these new tasks, to stand in as required when the Personnel Manager was called away on conferences.
As a result of these changes, Owens himself, nominally the group’s senior reporter, had become more and more deskbound, venturing out only for the big stories. Like now. For as he stood on Bloxham Drive that morning, he was never in doubt that this would be one of those “big stories” — not just for himself but also for the steadily increasing number of media colleagues who were already joining him.
All of them waiting...
Waiting, in fact, until 11:30 A.M. — well before which time, as if by some sort of collective instinct, each was aware that something grotesque and gruesome had occurred in the house there numbered 17.
Chapter nine
Instead of being arrested, as we stated, for kicking his wife down a flight of stairs and hurling a lighted kerosene lamp after her, the Revd. James P. Wellman died unmarried four years ago.
At 11:15 A.M. Lewis suggested that someone perhaps ought to say something.
For the past hour and a half a group of police officers had been knocking on neighborhood doors, speaking to residents, taking brief preliminary statements. But as yet nothing official had been released to the representatives of the media assembled in a street now increasingly crowded with curious onlookers.
“Go ahead!” said Morse.
“Shall I tell them all we know?”
“That won’t take you long, will it?”
“No need to keep anything back?”
“For Chrissake, Lewis! You sound as if we’ve got something to hide. If we have, why don’t you tell me?”
“Just wondered.”
Morse’s tone softened. “It won’t matter much what you tell ’em, will it?”