'What about you?' she asked. 'You've managed to get me to do all the talking.'
'I'm not half as interesting as you are. I'm not! I just want to keep sitting here-next to you, that's all.'
He'd drunk a prodigious amount of wine, and his voice (as she noticed) was at last becoming slurred. 'Nesht to you, thas aw,' would be the more accurate phonetic equivalents of his last few words; and yet the woman felt a curiously compelling attraction towards this mellowing drunkard, whose hand now sought her own once more and who lightly traced his fingertips across her palm.
The phone rang at twenty minutes past one.
Mrs. Murdoch placed her hand tactfully on his shoulder and spoke very quietly. 'Call for you.' Her keen eyes had noticed everything, of course; and she was amused and-yes!-quite pleased that things were turning out so sweetly for the pair of them. Pity to interrupt. But, after all, he'd mentioned to her that he might be called away.
He picked up the receiver in the hallway. 'What?… Lewis? What the hell do you have to…? Oh!… Oh!… All right.' He looked at his wristwatch. 'Yes! Yes! I said so, didn't I?' He banged down the receiver and walked back into the lounge.
She sat just as he had left her, her eyes questioning him as he stood there. 'Anything wrong?'
'No, not really. It's just that I've got to be off, I'm afraid. I’m sorry-'
'But you've got time to see me home, haven't you? Please!'
'I'm sorry, I can't. You see, I'm on er on call tonight and-'
'Are you a doctor or something?'
'Policeman.'
'Oh, God!'
'I'm sorry-'
'You keep saying that!'
'Don't let's finish up like this,' he said quietly.
'No. That would be silly, wouldn't it? I'm sorry, too-for getting cross, I mean. It's just that…' She looked up at him, her eyes now dull with disappointment. 'Perhaps the fates-'
'Nonsense! There's no such bloody thing!'
'Don't you believe in-?'
'Can we meet again?'
She took a diary from her handbag, tore out a page from the back, and quickly wrote: 9 Canal Reach.
'The car's here,' said Mrs. Murdoch.
The man nodded and turned as if to go. But he had to ask it. 'You're married, aren't you?'
'Yes, but-'
'One of the brothers in the company?'
Was it surprise? Or was it suspicion that flashed momentarily in her eyes before she answered him. 'No, it wasn't. I was married long before that. In fact, I was silly enough to get married when I was nineteen, but-'
A rather thickset man walked into the lounge and came diffidently over to them. 'Ready, sir?'
'Yes.' He turned to look at her for the last time, wanting to tell her something, but unable to find the words.
'You've got my address?' she whispered.
He nodded. 'I don't know your name, though.'
'Anne. Anne Scott.'
He smiled-almost happily.
'What's your name?'
'They call me Morse,' said the policeman.
Morse fastened his safety-belt as the police car crossed the Banbury Road roundabout and accelerated down the hill towards Kidlington. 'Where do you say you're dragging me to, Lewis?'
'Woodstock Crescent, sir. Chap's knifed his missus in one of the houses there. No trouble, though. He came into the station a few minutes after he'd killed her.'
'Doesn't surprise you, Lewis, does it? In the great majority of murder cases the identity of the accused is apparent virtually from the start. You realise that? In about 40 per cent of such cases he's arrested, almost immediately, at or very near the scene of the crime-usually, and mercifully for the likes of you, Lewis, because he hasn't made the slightest effort to escape. Now-let me get it right-in about 50 per cent of cases the victim and the accused have had some prior relationship with each other, often a very close relationship.'
'Interesting, sir,' said Lewis as he turned off left just opposite the Thames Valley Police HQ. 'You been giving another one of your lectures?'
'It was all in the paper this morning,' said Morse, surprised to find how soberly he'd spoken.
The car made its way through a maze of darkened side streets until Morse saw the flashing blue lights of an ambulance outside a mean-looking house in Woodstock Crescent. He slowly unfastened his seatbelt and climbed out. 'By the way, Lewis, do you know where Canal Reach is?'
'I think so, yes, sir. It's down in Oxford. Down in Jericho.'
BOOK ONE
Chapter One
A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho.
– Luke x, 30
Oxford's main tourist attractions are reasonably proximate to one another and there are guidebooks aplenty, translated into many languages. Thus it is that the day visitor may climb back into his luxury coach after viewing the fine University buildings clustered between the High and the Radcliffe Camera with the gratifying feeling that it has all been a compact, interesting visit to yet another of England's most beautiful cities. It is all very splendid: it is all a bit tiring. And so is fortunate that the neighbouring Cornmarket can offer to the visitor its string of snack bars, coffee bars, and burger bars in which to rest his feet and browse through his recently purchased literature about those other colleges and ecclesiastical edifices, their dates and their benefactors, which thus far have fallen outside his rather arbitrary circumambulations. Perhaps by noon he's had enough, and quits such culture for the Westgate shopping complex, only a pedestrian precinct away, and built on the old site of St. Ebbes, where the city fathers found the answer to their inner-city obsolescence in the full-scale flattening of the ancient streets of houses, and their replacement by the concrete giants of supermarket stores and municipal offices. Solitudinem faciunt: architecturam.
But further delights there are round other corners-even as the guidebooks say. From Cornmarket, for example, the visitor may turn left past the Randolph into the curving sweep of the Regency houses in Beaumont Street, and visit the Ashmolean there and walk round Worcester College gardens. From here he may turn northwards and find himself walking along the lower stretches of Walton Street into an area which has, thus far, escaped the vandals who sit on the City's planning committees. Here, imperceptibly at first, but soon quite unmistakably, the University has been left behind, and even the vast building on the left which houses the Oxford University Press, its lawned quadrangle glimpsed through the high wrought-iron gates, looks bleakly out of place and rather lonely, like some dowager duchess at a discotheque. The occasional visitor may pursue his way even further, past the red and blue lettering of the Phoenix cinema on his left and the blackened-grey walls of the Radcliffe Infirmary on his right; yet much more probably he will now decide to veer again towards the city centre, and in so doing turn his back upon an area of Oxford where gradual renewal, sensitive to the needs of its community, seems finally to have won its battle with the bulldozers.
This area is called Jericho, a largely residential district, stretching down from the western side of Walton Street to the banks of the canal, and consisting for the most part of mid-nineteenth-century, two-storey, terraced houses. Here, in the criss-cross grid of streets with names like 'Wellington' and 'Nelson' and the other mighty heroes, are the dwellings built for those who worked on the wharves or on the railway, at the University Press or at Lucy's iron foundry in Juxon Street. But the visitor to the City Museum in St. Aldates will find no Guide to Jericho along the shelves; and even by the oldest of its own inhabitants, the provenance of that charming and mysterious name of 'Jericho' is variously-and dubiously-traced. Some claim that in the early days the whistle of a passing train from the lines across the canal could make the walls come tumbling down; others would point darkly to the synagogue in Richmond Road and talk of sharp and profitable dealings in the former Jewish quarter; yet others lift their eyes to read the legend on a local inn: 'Tarry ye at Jericho until your beards be grown'. But the majority of the area's inhabitants would just look blankly at their interlocutors, as if they had been asked such obviously unanswerable questions as why it was that men were born, or why they should live or die, and fall in love with booze or women.