Julian knew someone must have shopped him down at the clinic and he soon found out it was Dawn Charles. So we had the hold on her now and it wasn't difficult to get her to co-operate. She'd got money problems and Julian promised to help if she did what we wanted. Which wasn't much really.
Things went as we planned them. Julian drove down to Bath in the BMW and I followed in my car. He went M4.1 went Burford way. He booked in and left his car in the hotel garage. I left my car in one of
the side-streets behind the hotel. Dawn Charles went by train to Bath changing at Didcot, so Julian told me. She booked into the hotel as herself of course. After we got back from the Abbey, Julian and I had dinner together, and then I left. Julian rang Dawn Charles on the internal phone system and all she had to do was to walk across the garden. I drove back to Oxford and then up to Bicester where I'd got the key to Dawn's flat. It would have been far too risky to go back to Polstead Road.
Unless Julian persuaded her to sleep in the raw Dawn wore my pyjamas, and the hotel-girl took them breakfast in bed the next morning. Mistake about all that sugar, I agree! Dawn Charles is my sort of height and shape, so Julian tells me, and if she wore something that was obviously mine there wouldn't be much of a problem. The whole thing was very neat really. It didn't matter if she was seen round the hotel or if I was, because both of us were staying there officially.
I'd phoned Owens to arrange everything and last Sunday morning I drove round to Bloxham Drive again. Probably he'd have been more wary if I'd been a man instead of a woman but I told him I'd have the money with me. So he said he'd meet me and have a signed letter ready promising he wouldn't try any more blackmail. I went down the slope at the back like before and knocked on the right door this time. It was about a quarter past seven when he let me in and we went through to his front room. I don't think either of us spoke. He was standing there in
front of the settee and I took the pistol out of my shopping bag and shot him twice and left him there for dead.
Angela Storrs 11.3.1996
(As it happened, Lewis was not to read this final version. Had he done so, he might have felt rather surprised -and a little superior? - to notice that his own 'burnt sienna' had been amended to 'burnt Siena', since he had taken the trouble to look up that colour in Chambers, and had spelt it accordingly.)
CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN
Belbroughton Road is bonny, and pinkly burst the spray Of prunus and forsythia across the public way, For a full spring-tide of blossom seethed and departed hence, Leaving land-locked pools of jonquils by a sunny garden fence (John Betjeman, May-Day Song for North Oxford)
SPRING WAS particularly beautiful, if late, in North Oxford that year, and even Morse, whose only potential for floral exhibitionism was a small window-box, much enjoyed the full-belled daffodils and the short-lived violets, though not the crocuses.
Sir Clixby Bream received a letter from Julian Storrs on Tuesday, 12 March. Both contestants had now withdrawn from the Mastership Stakes. At an Extraordinary General Meeting held the next day in the Stamper Room, the Fellows of Lonsdale had little option but to extend yet again the term of the incumbent Master; and by a majority vote to call hi the 'Visitor', that splendidly tided dignitary (usually an archbishop) whose right and duty it was, and is, periodically to inspect and to report on
College matters, and to advise and to intervene in any such disputatious circumstances as Lonsdale, omnium consensu, now found itself. An outside appointment seemed a certainty. But Sir Clixby accepted the situation philosophically, as was his wont ... and the College lawns were beginning to look immaculate again. Life had to go on, even if Denis Cornford was now a broken man, with Julian Storrs awaiting new developments - and death.
Adele Beatrice Cecil had recently learned that the membership of the Young Conservatives had fallen from 500,000 twenty years earlier to 5,000 hi January 1996; and anyway she had for several weeks been contemplating a change in her lifestyle. Morse may have been right in one way, she thought - only one way, though - in suggesting that it was the personnel rather than the policies which were letting the Party down. Yes, it might be time for a change; and on Wednesday, 13 March, she posted off her resignation to Conservative Central Office. She did so with deep regret, yet she knew she was never destined to be idle. She could write English competently, she knew that; as indeed did Morse; as did also her publishers, Erotica Press, who had recently requested an equally sexy sequel to Topless in Torremolinos. And already a nice little idea was burgeoning in her brain almost as vigorously as the wall-flowers she'd planted the previous autumn: an idea about an older man - well, say a whitish-haired man who wasn't quite so old as he looked - and a woman who was considerably younger, about her own
age, say. Age difference, in heterosexual encounters, was ever a guaranteed 'turn-on', so her editor confided.
One man was to continue his officially unemployed status for the remainder of the spring; and probably indefinitely thereafter, although he was a little troubled by die rumour that the Social Security system was likely to be less sympathetic in the future. For the moment, however, he appeared to be adequately funded, judging from his virtually permanent presence in die local pubs and betting-shops. It was always going to be difficult for any official down in the Job Centre to refute his claim that the remuneration offered for some of their 'employment opportunities' could never compensate for his customary lifestyle: he was a recognized artist; and if anyone doubted his word, diere was a man living in North Oxford who would always be willing to give him a reference...
On the mantelpiece in his bedroom, die little ormolu clock ticked on, keeping excellent time.
In die immediate aftermath of Mrs Storrs' arrest, Sergeant Lewis found himself extremely busy, happily i/c die team of companionable DCs assigned to him. So many enquiries remained to be made; so many statements to be taken down and duly typed; so many places to be visited and revisited: Soho, Bloxham Drive, the newspaper offices, die Harvey Clinic, Polstead Road, Lonsdale College, Woodpecker Way, The Randolph, die
Royal Crescent Hotel ... He had met Morse for lunch on the Wednesday and had listened patiently as a rather self-congratulatory Chief Inspector remembered a few of the more crucial moments in the case: when, for example, he had associated that photograph of the young Soho stripper with that of the don's wife at Lonsdale; when the elegantly leggy Banbury Road receptionist had so easily slipped alongside that same don's wife in a chorus line at the Windmill. That lunchtime, however, Lewis's own crucial contributions to such dramatic developments were never even mentioned, let alone singled out for special praise.
Late on Thursday evening, Morse was walking home from the Cotswold House after a generous measure of Irish whiskey (with an 'e', as the proprietor ever insisted) when a car slowed down beside him, the front passenger window electronically lowered.
'Can I give you a lift anywhere?'
'Hello! No, thank you. I only live ...' Morse gestured vaguely up towards the A4O roundabout.
'Everything OK with you?'
'Will be - if you'd like to come along and inspect my penthouse suite.'
'I thought you said it was a flat'
Though clearly surprised to find Morse in his office over the Friday lunch-period, Strange refrained from his usual raillery.
'Can you nip in to see me a bit later this afternoon about these retirement forms?'
'Let's do it now, sir.'
'What's the rush?'
'I'm off this afternoon.'
'Official, is that?'
Yes, sir.'
Strange eyed Morse shrewdly. 'Why are you looking so bloody cheerful?'