The dead of Jericho (2 page)

'Can you just pass that wine across a sec, old chap?' It was one of the older guests, red-faced, pot-bellied, and jovial. 'Sorry to barge in and all that, but a chap needs his booze, eh?'

Their hands had sprung guiltily apart and remained so, for the other guests were now returning to the tables to make their choice of dessert.

'Do you think we'd better mix in again?' he asked, without conviction. 'We shall be causing a bit of comment if we're not careful.'

'That worry you?'

The man appeared to give his earnest attention to this question for a good many seconds; and then his face relaxed into a boyish grin. 'Do you know,' he said, 'I don't give a bugger. Why the hell shouldn't we sit together all night? Just tell me that, my girl! It's what
I
want. And if it's what
you
— 
'

'Which it is — as you know! So why not stop pretending, and go and get me some of that gateau? And
here!'
She gulped down the rest of her wine. 'You can fill this up while you're at it — right to the top.'

After finishing their gateaux, and after twice refusing the offer of coffee, he asked her to tell him something about herself. And she told him.

She'd been born in Rochdale, had been a hardworking and clever girl at school, and had won a place at Lady Margaret Hall to read modern languages. With a good second-class honours degree behind her, she had left Oxford and worked as the (sole) foreign sales rep of a smallish publishing company at Croydon, a company started from scratch a few years previously by two bright and reasonably ambitious brothers and dealing with text books in English as a foreign language. Just before she'd joined the company an increasing number of contracts had been coming in from overseas, and the need for some more effective liaison with foreign customers was becoming ever more apparent. Hence the appointment. Pretty good job, and not bad money either — especially for someone without the slightest experience in business matters. It had involved a good deal of necessary (and occasionally unnecessary) travel with the elder of the two brothers (Charles, the senior partner), and she had stayed in the job for eight years, enjoying it enormously. Business had boomed, the pay-roll had increased from ten to over twenty, new premises were built, new machinery purchased; and during this time, amid rumours of expenses fiddles and tax avoidance, the workforce had witnessed the arrival of the inevitable Rolls Royce, first a black one, then a light-blue one; and, for a favoured few, there was a spanking little beauty of a yacht moored somewhere up at Reading. Her own salary was each year — sometimes twice a year — increased, and when three years ago she had finally left the company she had amassed a nice little nest-egg of savings, certainly enough for her to envisage a reasonably affluent independence for several years to come. Why had she left? Difficult to say, really. Eight years was quite a long time, and even the most enjoyable job becomes a little less challenging, a little more — more familiar (was that the word?) as the years pass by, with colleagues seeming to grow more predictable and more... Oh! It didn't much matter
what
they grew! It was far simpler than that: she'd just wanted a change — that was all. So she'd had a change. At Oxford she'd read French and Italian, and through her work with the company she'd become comprehensively fluent in German. So? So she'd joined the staff of a very large (eighteen hundred!) comprehensive school in the east end of London — teaching German. The school was far rougher than she could have imagined. The boys were doubtless good enough at heart, but were blatantly and impertinently obscene, not infrequently (she suspected) exposing themselves on the back rows of their classes. But it was the girls who had been the real trouble, seeing in their new teacher a rival intruder, likely enough to snatch away the coveted affections of the boys and the male staff alike. The staff? Oh, some of them had tried things on a bit with her, especially the married ones; but they weren't a bad lot, really. They'd certainly been given a Herculean task in trying to cure, or at least to curb, the pervasive truancy, the mindless vandalism, and the sheer bloody-mindedness of those truculent adolescents to whom all notions of integrity, scholarship, or even the meanest of the middle-class virtues were equally foreign and repugnant. Well, she'd stuck it out for four terms; and looking back she wished she'd stuck it longer. The boys and girls in her own form had clubbed together generously to buy her an utterly
hideous
set of wine glasses; and those glasses were the most precious present she'd ever had! She'd cried when they made the presentation — all of them staying behind after final assembly, with one of the boys making a stupidly incompetent, facetious,
wonderful
little speech. Most of the girls had cried a bit, too, and even one or two of the inveterate exposers had been reduced to words of awkward farewell that were sad, and mildly grateful, and quite unbearably moving. Oh dear! Then? Well, she'd tried one or two other things and, finally — two years ago that is — she'd come back to Oxford, advertised for private pupils, got rather more offers than she could cope with, bought a small house — and well, there she was! There she was at the party.

She'd missed something out though — the man knew that. He remembered, albeit vaguely, how Mrs Murdoch had introduced her to him; remembered clearly the third finger on her left hand as she'd wiped the inside of her wine glass. Had she missed out a few other facts as well? But he said nothing. Just sat there, half bemused and more than half besotted.

It was just after midnight. The Murdoch boys had gone to bed and several of the guests had already taken their leave. Most of those who remained were drinking their second or third cups of coffee, but no one came up to interrupt the oddly assorted pair who still sat amidst the wreckage of the trifles and the flans.

'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 wrist-watch. '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 thick-set 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 seat-belt 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.'

Oxford's main tourist attractions are reasonably proximate to one another and there are guide books a-plenty, 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 it 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 circumambuiations. But 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 Ebbe's, 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 appellant.

But further delights there are round other corners — even as the guide books 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.