Inspector Morse 11 The Daughters of Cain

The body had been found in a hunched-up, foetal postm with both hands clutching the lower abdomen and the ey screwed tightly closed as if Mc Clure had died in the thro of some excruciating pain. He was dressed in a shoi sleeved shirt, vertically striped in maroon and blue, a bla Jaeger cardigan, and a pair of dark-grey flannels---the low part of the shirt and the upper regions of the trousers st J and steeped in the blood that had oozed so abundantly.

Mc Clure had been one of those "perpetual students life" (Phillotson's words). After winning a Major Scholar~ ship to Oxford in 1946, he had gained a First in Mods, a First in Greats--thereafter spending forty-plus years of his life as Ancient History Tutor in Wolsey College. In 1956 he had married one of his own pupils, an undergraduate from Somerville--the latter, after attaining exactly similar dis-tinction, duly appointed to a Junior Fellowship in Merton, and in 1966 (life jumping forward in decades) running off with one of her own pupils, a bearded undergraduate from Trinity. No children, though; no legal problems. Just a whole lot of heartache, perhaps.

Few major publications to his name--mostly a series of articles written over the years for various classical journals. But at least he had lived long enough to see the publication of his magnum opus: The Great Plague at Athens: Its Effect on the Course and Conduct of the Peloponnesian War. A long title. A long work.

Witnesses?

Of the eight "luxurious apartments" only four had been sold, with two of the others being let, and the other two still empty, the "For Sale" notices standing outside the respec-tive properties---one of them the apartment immediately below Mc Clure's, Number 5; the other Number 2. Questioning of the tenants had produced no information of any value: the newly-weds in Number 1 had spent most of the Sunday morning a-bed--sans breakfast, sans newspapers, sans everything except themselves; the blue-rinsed old lady in Number 3, extremely deaf, had insisted on making a very full statement to the effect that she had heard nothing on that fateful mom; the couple in Number 4 had been out all morning on a Charity "Save the Whales" Walk in Wytham Woods; the temporary tenants of Number 7 were away in Tunisia; and the affectionate couple who had bought Number 8 had been unintermptedly employed in redecorating their bathroom, with the radio on most of the morning as they caught up with The Archers omnibus. (For the first time in several minutes, Morse? s interest had been activated.)

"Not all that much to go on," Phillotson had admitted; yet all the same, not without some degree of pride, laying a hand on two green box-files f'dled with reports and statements and notes and documents and a plan showing the full specification of Mc Clure's apartment, with arcs and rulings and arrows and dotted lines and measurements. Morse him-self had never been able to follow such house-plans; and now glanced only cursorily through the stapled sheets supplied by Adkinsons, Surveyors, Valuers, and Estate Agents--as Phillotson came to the end of his briefing.

"By the way," asked Morse, rising to his feet, "how's the wife? I meant to ask earlier.... "

"Very poorly, I'm afraid," said Phillotson, miserably.

"Cheerful sod, isn't he, Lewis?"

The two men had been back in Morse's office then, Lewis seeking to find a place on the desk for the bulging box-files.

"Well, he must be pretty worried about his wife if"

"Pah! He just didn't know where to go next that was his trouble."

"And we do?"

"Well, for a start, I wouldn't mind knowing which of those newspapers Mc Clure read first?'

"If either."

Morse nodded. "And I wouldn't mind finding out if he made any phone-calls that morning."

"Can't we get British Telecom to itemise things? "Can we?" asked Morse vaguely. "You'll want to see the body?"

"Why on earth should I want to do that?"

"I just thought--"

"I wouldn't mind seeing that shirt, though. Maroon and blue vertical stripes, didn't Phillotson say?" Morse passed the index finger of his left hand round the inside of his slightly tight, slightly frayed shirt-collar. "I'm thinking of, er, expanding my wardrobe a bit."

But the intended humour was lost on Lewis, to whom it seemed exceeding strange that Morse should at the same time apparently show more interest in the dead man's shirt than in his colleague's wife. "Apparently" though... that was always the thing about Morse: no one could ever really plot a graph of the thoughts that ran through that extraordi-nary mind.

"Did we learn anything from Phillotson, sir?"

"You may have done: I ditha't. I knew just as much about things when I wen*. into 1;]s office as when I came out."

"Reminds you a bit of Omar Khayyam, doesn't it?" sug-gested Lewis, innocently.

Chapter Four

Krook chalked the letter upon the wall in a very curious manner, beginning with the end of the letter, and shaping it backward. It was a capital letter, not a printed one.