Inspector Morse 13 The Remorseful Day

Once they were, she felt almost unprecedentedly excited.

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chapter forty-five Nunquam ubi sub ubi!

after he had locked the door behind them she immedi- lately, albeit a little

nervously, commented upon the civilized appearance of the bachelor flat,

listening with half an ear to a love-duet from one of the operas, although

she had no idea which one; standing appreciatively for a while in front of a

reproduction of The Milkmaid, although she had only just heard of Vermeer;

looking wide-eyed along the shelves and shelves and shelves of books that

lined three of the walls there; noticing too, although not herself a

particularly house proud woman, the thin layer of dust on the CD player and

the thicker layer along the top of the skirting boards.

On the glass-topped coffee table there stood a chilled bottle of champagne,

with two sparklingly bright glasses on their coasters beside it.

As quietly bidden, she sat down, the hem of the mini-dress riding more than

halfway up her black-stockinged thighs as languidly she crossed her lengthy

legs.  Then, as he untwisted the wire at the top of the bottle, she turned

away, holding the palms of her hands over her ears.

"No need for that," he said.

"I'm an expert."

Tilting the bottle to 45 degrees, he turned the cork sharply, pulling only

slightly and that was it.  Out!  He filled the two glasses, sat opposite her,

raised his glass, and said,

"Cheerio!"

It seemed to her a strange thing to say.

"Hello!"  would surely

 have been more appropriate?  It was obviously

something he'd stored away in his verbal baggage from a period at least

twenty- five years (she decided) earlier than her own.

Not that that mattered.

She sipped the champagne; sipped it again; and concluded, although she knew

nothing whatever of Bruts and Crus, that it might well be fairly expensive

stuff.

"Specially bought for the occasion?"

"No.  I won it in a raffle."

She took a further sip, then drank off the rest in a single draught.

"Lovely!"

He leaned forward and refilled her glass.

"Are you trying to get me drunk?"

"It might even things up a bit."

"Mind if I smoke?"

"No.  I'll join you."

"You took a lot of trouble about getting' me here ' " Don't you like taxis?  "

' - and I've never been told exactly what to wear before.  "

He surveyed her vertically striped brown-and-white dress, and counted the

button-holes: seven of them, the top three straining across her breasts.

"I like buttons.  I've read that " unbuttoning" was Philip Larkin's favourite

present participle."

She let it go, fairly certain that she understood, and slowly unfastened the

top button of her dress.

"I shall expect a fee, you know that."

"Fee?  You mean as well as the taxi and the champagne?"

She nodded, and pointed to the bottle.

"Will one be enough, do you think?"

"I won two in the raffle.  The other one's cooling in the fridge."

She drained her second glass, and sat back in the deeply comfortable set tee

unfastening the second button as he again refilled her glass.

She patted the cushion beside her.

"Come and sit next to me."

"In a little while.  It's just that I'd like to get my fill of sitting here

and lusting after you."

She smiled.

"I wonder how we would have been together?"

"Know something?  You've just quoted T.  S.  Eliot, virtually verbatim."

She let it go, fairly certain that Eliot was a poet.  But there wasn't much

poetry out there not in the world in which she moved.  It all made her feel

pleasingly important and decidedly sexy.  Something more, too.  As she tilted

the third glass of champagne into her lipstick-moistened mouth; as she worked

the third button of her dress loose; as she looked down at her bra-less

breasts now almost fully exposed, she felt an animal sense of her own power

and she felt good.

He was right, though.  She was enjoying teasing him, and he was enjoying

being teased.  No need for that rush to sexual congress the great majority of

men (she knew full well) preferred.

"You know," she said,

"I thought first of all when you rang that you wanted to ask me about the

murders."

"Afterwards, don't you think?"

She uncrossed her legs and leaned forward to light another cigarette.

"No.  Let's get the inquisition over.  Where's the bedroom, by the way?"

He pointed to a door on his left.

"Top sheet turned back in a very neat hypotenuse."

She let it go, for her own mathematics had stopped well short of Pythagoras.

"I didn't ask you here for any grilling you know that.  But there is one

thing I'd like you to tell me."

"Fire away."

"I think you've got a good idea who murdered Harry.  And if you have, I'd

like you to tell me."

"But I don't - not for certain, I don't."  She recrossed the legs that a

little earlier had been provocatively open.

 "Go on!"

"It's just ..  .  well, I reckon perhaps it was Johnnie- might have been,

anyway."

"Why do you think that?"

"Somethin' he said and .  ..  well, you get the vibes sometimes."

He seemed to know nothing of 'vibes' -- interested only in strictly verbal

significations.

"What exactly did he say?"

"Nodiin' really.  Nodiin' I'm going to tell you, anyway."

"W^en was dlis?"