Inspector Morse 11 The Daughters of Cain

Morse now realised that he would have few, if any, further cases of murder to solve during his career with Thames Valley CID. All right, orchestral conductors and High Court judges could pursue their professions into their twilight years, regardless--indeed sometimes completely obliv-ious--of their inevitably deteriorating talents. But more of-ten than not policemen finished long before any incipient senility; and Morse himself was now within a couple of years of normal retirement.

For many persons it was difficult to tell where the dividing line came between latish middle-age and advisable pensionability. Perhaps it had something to do with the point at which nostalgia took over from hope; or perhaps with a sad realisation that it was no longer possible to fall in love again; or, certainly in Morse's case, the time when, as now, he had to sit down on the side of the bed in order to pull his trousers on.

Such and similar thoughts were circulating in Morse's mind as on Saturday, September 3, the morning after his visit with Lewis to Wolsey (and he statement made, imme-diately thereafter, by Mrs. Ewers), he sat in the Summer-town Health Centre.

A mild cold had, as usual with Morse, developed into a fit of intermittently barking bronchitis; but he cornforted himself with the thought that very shortly, after a sermon on the stupidity of cigarette-smoking, he would emerge from the Centre with a slip of paper happily prescribing a dose of powerful antibiotics.

Clutching his prescription, Morse was about to leave when he remembered The Times, left in his erstwhile seat in the waiting-room. Returning, he found that his earlier companions--the anorexic git and the spotty-faced, over-weight youth--had now been joined by a slatternly looking, slackly dressed young woman, with rings in her nostrils; a woman to whom Morse took an immediate and intense dis-like.

Predictably so.

From the chair next to the newcomer he picked up his newspaper, without a word; though not without a hurried glance into the woman's dull-green eyes, the colour of the Oxford Canal along by Wolvercote. And if Morse had waited there only a few seconds longer, he would have heard someone call her name: "Eleanor Smith?"

But Morse had gone.

She'd already got the address of an abortion clinic; but one of her friends, an authority in the field, had informed her that it was now closed. Sol So she'd have to find some other place. And the quack ought to be able to point her somewhere not too far away, surely? That's exactly the sort of thing quacks were there for.

In a marked police car, standing on a Strictly Doctors Only lot in the Center's very restricted parking-area, Lewis sat thinking and waiting; waiting in fact, quite patiently, since the case appeared to be developing in a reasonably satisfac-tory way.

When, the previous afternoon, Susan Ewers had made (and signed) her statement, many things already adum-brated by Morse had dawned at last on Lewis's understanding.

Suspicion, prima facie, could and should now be levelled against Mr. Edward Brooks, the man who had been Mrs. Ewers's immediate predecessor as scout on Staircase G in Drinkwater Quad. Why? Morse's unusually simple and un-spectacular hypothesis had been stated as follows: It should be assumed, in all probability, that Brooks had played a key role, albeit an intermediary one, in supplying a substantial quantity of drugs to the young people living on his staircase--including Matthew Rodway; that Rod-way's suicide had necessarily resulted in some thorough in-vestigation by the college authorities into the goings-on on the staircase; that Mc Clure, already living on the same staircase anyway, had become deeply involved indeed had probably been the prime mover in seeing that Brooks was "removed" from his post (coincidentally at the same time as Mc Clure's retirement); that, as Mrs. Ewers had now tes-tified, the former scout had continued his trafficking in drugs, and that this information had somehow reached Mc Clure's ears; that Mc Clure had threatened Brooks with exposure, disgrace, criminal prosecution, and almost certain imprisonment; that finally, at a showdown in Daventry Court, Brooks had murdered Mc Clure.

Such a hypothesis had the merit of fitting all the known facts; and if it could be corroborated by the new facts which would doubtless emerge from the meeting arranged for that afternoon at the Pitt Rivers Museum...

Yes.

But there was the "one potential fly in the oinmaent," as Lewis had expressed himself half an hour earlier.

And Morse had winced at the phrase. "The clich6's bad enough in itself, Lewis--but what's a 'potential fly' look like when it's on the window-pane?"

"Dunno, sir. But if Brooks was ambulanced off that Sun-day with a heart attack "

"Wouldn't you be likely to have a heart attack if you'd just killed somebody?"

"We can check up straightaway at the hospital."

"All in good time," Morse had said. "You'll have me in hospital if you don't get me down to the Health Centre..."