Inspector Morse 11 The Daughters of Cain

Lewis followed the drift of Morse's thought. "The article we placed in the Oxford Mail?'

"Perhaps."

"You mean, we shouldn't perhaps...?"

"Oh, no! It was our duty to print that. And for all we know it could still produce something. Though I dot, bt it."

Morse drained his beer before continuing: "You know, that knife's somewhere, isn't it? The knife that someone stuck into Mc Clure. The knife that Brooks stucl C into Mc Clure. That's the infuriating thing for me. Knowing that the bloody thing's somewhere, even if it's at the bottom of the canal."

"Or the Cherwell."

"Or the Isis."

"Or the gravel-pits..."

But the conversation was briefly interrupted whilst Lewis, on the landlord's announcement of Last Orders, w now despatched to the bar for the second round.

Perhaps it was Morse's bronchial affliction which was fecting his short-term memory, since he appeared to be st feting under the misapprehension that it was he who h purchased the first.

Whatever the case, however, Morse quite certain looked happier as he picked up his second pint, and pick up the earlier conversation.

"Brooks wouldn't have been too near any water, wou ha T'

"Not that far off, surely. And he'd have to go over Ma dalen Bridge on his way home, anyway."

"On his blood-saddled bike..."

"All he'd need to do was drop his knife over the brid! there--probably be safe till Kingdom Come."

Morse shook his head. "He'd have been worried abo being seen."

Lewis shrugged. "He could have waited till it was dark "It was bloody morning, Lewis!"

"He could'ye ditched it earlier. In a garden or som where."

"No! We'd have found it by now, surely."

"We're still trying," said Lewis, quietly.

"You know"--Morse sounded weary--"it's not quite easy as you think--getting rid of things. You get a gui] complex about being seen. I remember a few weeks a L trying to get rid of an old soldier in a rubbish-bin in Ba bury Road. And just after I'd dropped it in, somebody knew drove past in a car, and waved..."

"He'd seen you?"

"What makes you think it was a 'he'?'

"You felt a bit guilty?"

Morse nodded. "So it's vitally important that we fred fl knife. I just can't see how we're going to make a case against Brooks unless we can find the murder weapon."

"Have you thought of the other possibility, sir?"

"What's that?" Morse looked up with the air of a Profe sor of Mathematics being challenged by an innumera pupil.

"He took the knife home with him."

"No chance. We're talking about instinctive behaviour here. You don't stab somebody--and then just go back home and wash your knife up in Co~op detergent with the rest of the cutlery--and put it back in the kitchen drawer."

"There'd be a knife missing, though--from a set, per-haps."

"So what? Knives get lost, broken.... "

"So Mrs. Brooks would probably know?"

"But she's not going to tell us, is she.'?"

Morse seemed to relax as he leaned back against the wall-seat, and looked around him.

"You sure it was Brooks?" asked Lewis quietly.

'Woo many coincidences, Lewis. All right, they play a far bigger part in life than most of us are prepared to admit. But not in this case. Just think! Brooks left Wolsey, for good, on exactly the same day as the man who was murdered Mc Clure. Not only that, the pair of them had been on the same staircase together---exactly the same staircase for several years. Then, a year later, Brooks has a heart attack on exactly the same day as Mc Clure gets murdered. Just add all that up---go on, Lewis!"

"Like I say, though, you've always believed in coinci-dences.'

"Look! I could stomach two, perhaps--but not three."

Lewis, who'd believed that Morse could easily stomach at least four, was not particularly impressed; and now, looking around him, he saw that he and Morse were the only clients left in the Marsh Harder.

It was 3:10 P.M.

"We'd better be off, sir."

"Nonsense! My mm, isn't it T' "It's way past closing time."

"Nonsense!"

But the landlord, after explaining that serving further drinks after 3?.m. on Sundays was wholly against the law, was distinctly unimpressed by Morse's assertion that he, the latter, was the law. And a minute or so later it was a slightly embarrassed Lewis who was unlocking the passen ger door of the Jaguar--before making his way back to North Oxford.

Chapter Thirty-two

These are, as I began, cumbersome ways to kill a man. Simpler, direct and much more neat is to see he is living somewhere in the middle of the twentieth century, and leave him them (EDw It BROCK, Five Ways to Kill a Man)

Perpetually, on the drive back to North Oxford, Morse had been wiping the perspiration from his forehead; and Lewis was growing increasingly worried, especially when, once back home, Morse immediately poured himself a can of beer.

"Just to replace the moisture," Morse had averred.

"Yon ought to get the doc in, you know that. And you ought not to be drinking any more, with all those pills."