Gerrard now scanned the pages of his extraordinary memory.
'You remember Hardy'd just burnt a photo of one of his old flames - he didn't know if she was alive or not - she was someone from the back of beyond of his life -but he felt awfully moved - as if he was putting her to death somehow - when he burned the photo ... Just a minute .. .just a minute, I think I've got it:
Well - she knew nothing thereof did she survive, And suffered nothing if numbered among the dead;
Yet -yet - if on earth alive
Did she feel a smart, and with vague strange anguish strive? If in heaven, did she smile at me sadly and shake her head?'
Morse felt saddened as he walked out into the High. Hardy always managed to make him feel sad. And particularly so now, since only a few days earlier he'd consigned a precious photograph to the flames: a photograph hitherto pressed between pages 88-89 °f h*s Collected Poems of A. E. Housman - the photograph of a dark-haired young woman seated on a broken classical
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column somewhere in Crete. A woman named Ellie Smith; a woman whom he'd loved - and lost.
Morse pondered the probabilities. Had other photographs been burned or torn to little pieces since the murder of Rachel James - photographs hitherto kept in books or secret drawers?
Perhaps Lewis was right. Why not publish the photo in the Oxford Mail"? Assuredly, there'd be hundreds of incoming calls: so many of them wrong, of course - but some few of them probably right...
Morse turned left into Alfred Street, and walked down the narrow cobbled lane to the junction with Blue Boar Street, where he tried the saloon-bar door of the Bear Inn.
Locked - with the opening hour displayed disappointingly as midday. It was now 11.20 a.m., and Morse felt thirsty. Perhaps he was always diirsty. That morning, though, he felt pretematurally thirsty. In fact he would gladly have swallowed a pint or two of ice-cold lager - a drink which at almost any other time would have been considered a betrayal by a real-ale addict like Morse.
He tapped lightly on the glass of the door. Tapped again. The door was opened.
A few minutes later, after offering identification, after a brief explanation of his purpose, Morse was seated widi the landlord, Steven Lowbridge, at a table in the front bar.
'Would you like a coffee or something?' asked Sonya, his wife.
Morse turned round and looked towards the bar,
DEATH IS NOW MY NEIGHBOUR
where a row of beers paraded their pedigrees on the hand-pumps.
'Is the Burton in good nick?'
The landlord (Morse learned) had been at the Bear Inn for five years, greatly enjoying his time there. A drinking-house had been on the site since 1242, and undergraduates and undergraduettes were still coming in to crowd the comparatively small pub: from Oriel and Christ Church mostly; from Lincoln and Univ, too.
And the ties?
The Bear Inn was nationally - internationally -renowned for its ties: about five thousand of them at the last count. Showcases of ties covered die walls, covered the ceilings, in each of the bars: ties from Army regiments, sports clubs, schools and OB associations; ties from anywhere and everywhere. The collection started (Morse learned) in 1954, when the incumbent landlord had invited any customer with an interesting-looking tie to have the last diree or four inches of its back-end cut off - in exchange for a couple of pints of beer. Thereafter, the snipped-off portions were put on display in cabinets, with a small square of white card affixed to each giving provenance and description.
Morse nodded encouragingly as the landlord told his well-rehearsed tale, occasionally casting a glance at the cabinet on the wall immediately opposite: Yale University Fencing Club; Kenya Police; Welsh Schoolboys' Hockey Association; Women's Land Army...
Ye gods!
What a multitude of ties!
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Morse's glass was empty; and the landlady tentatively suggested that the Chief Inspector would perhaps enjoy a further pint?
Morse had no objection; and made his way to the Gents where, as he washed his hands, he wondered whither all the washbasin plugs in the world could have disappeared - plugs from every pub, from every hotel, from every public convenience in the land. Somewhere (Morse mused) there must surely be a prodigious pile of basin-plugs, as high as some Egyptian pyramid.
Back in the bar, Morse produced his photograph and pointed to the little patch of tie.
'Do you think there's anything like that here?'
Lowbridge looked down at the slimly striped maroon tie, shaking his head dubiously.
'Don't think so ... But make yourself at home - please have a look round - for as long as you like.'
Morse experienced disappointment
If only Lewis were there! Lewis - so wonderfully competent with this sort of thing: checking, checking, checking, the contents of the cabinets.
Help, Lewis!
But Lewis was elsewhere. And for twenty-five minutes or so, Morse moved round the two bars, with increasing fecklessness and irritation.
Nothing was matching...
Nothing.
'Find what you're after?' It was the darkly attractive Sonya, just returned from a shopping expedition to the Westgate Centre.
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'No, sadly no,' admitted Morse. 'It's a bit like a farmer looking for a lost contact lens in a ploughed field.'
That what you're looking for?'
Sonya Lowbridge pointed to the tie in the photograph that still lay on the table there.
Morse nodded. "That's it.'
'But I can tell you where you can find that.'
Tou can?' Morse's eyes were suddenly wide, his mouth suddenly dry.
"Yep! I was looking for a tie for Steve's birthday. And you'll find one just like that on the tie-rack in Marks and Spencer's.'
93
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
A Slave has but one Master; yet ambitious folk have as many masters as there are people who may be useful in bettering their position
(La Bruyere, Characters)
'WELL?'
Julian Storrs closed the front door behind him, hung up his dripping plastic mac, and took his wife into his arms.
'No external candidates -just the two of us.'
'That's wonderful news!' Angela Storrs moved away from her husband's brief, perfunctory embrace, and led the way into the lounge of the splendidly furnished property in Polstead Road, a thoroughfare linking the Woodstock Road with Aristotle Lane (the latter, incidentally, Morse's favourite Oxford street-name).
'Certainly not bad news, is it? If the gods just smile on us a litde ...'
'Drink?'
'I think I may have earned a small brandy.'
She poured his drink; poured herself a large Dry Martini; lit a cigarette; and sat beside him on the brown-
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leather settee. She clinked her glass with his, and momentarily her eyes gleamed with potential triumph.
'To you, Sir Julian!'
'Just a minute! We've got to win the bloody thing first No pushover, old Denis, you know: good College man -fine scholar - first-class brain-'
'Married to a second-class tart!'
Storrs shook his head with an uneasy smile.
You're being a bit cruel, love.'
'Don't call me "love" - as if you come from Rother-ham, or somewhere.'
'What's wrong with Rotherham?' He put his left arm around her shoulders, and forced an affectionate smile to his lips as he contemplated the woman he'd married just over twenty years previously - then pencil-slim, fresh-faced, and wrinkle-free.
Truth to tell, she was aging rather more quickly than most women of her years. Networks of varicose veins marred the long, still-shapely legs; and her stomach was a little distended around the waistband of the elegant trouser-suits which recently she almost invariably wore. The neck had grown rather gaunt, and there were lines and creases round her eyes. Yet the face itself was firmly featured still; and to many a man she remained an attractive woman - as she had appeared to Julian Storrs when first he had encountered her ... in those extraordinary circumstances. And few there were who even now could easily resist the invitation of those almond eyes when after some dinner party or drinks reception she removed the dark glasses she had begun to wear so regularly.