Inspector Morse 11 The Daughters of Cain

It was 4:29 v.M. when he walked through the museum shop. He might have bought a postcard of the forty-foot-high Haida Totem Pole (British Columbia), but an assistant was already totting up the takings, and he wished to cause no trouble. As the prominent notice had advised him as he'd entered, the Pitt Rivers Museum of Ethnology and Pre-History closed at 4:30 V.M. each day.

At the Proctor Memorial School, the take-up for the Twelfth Night trip to the Shakespeare Theatre had been encouraging. Before the end of the summer term, Julia Stevens had made her usual block-booking of thirty-one seats; and with twenty-three pupils (mostly fifth- and sixth-formers), two other members of staff, plus two parents, only three tickets had been going begging. Only two, in fact--and those soon to be snapped up with alacrity at the box office--because Julia Stevens had invited Brenda Brooks (as she had done the previous year) to join the school-party.

At the Stratford Coach Park, the three teachers had dis-tributed the brown-paper-wrapped rations: two rolls, one with mayonnaised-curried-chicken, the other with a soft-cheese filling; one packet of crisps; and one banana--with a plastic cup of orangeade.

On the way back, though not on the way out, Mrs. Stev-ens and Mrs. Brooks sat side by side in the front seats: the former semi-listening (with some gratification) to her pu-pils' pronouncements on the performances of Sirs Toby Belch and Andrew Aguecheek; the latter, until Woodstock, trying to read the latest instalment of a romantic serial in Woman Weekly, before apparenfiy falling into a deep slum ber, and not awakening therefrom until, two minutes before midnight on Wednesday, September 7, the coach made it,, first stop at Carfax Tower, from where the streets of Oxfor looked strangely beautiful; and slightly sinister.

Chapter Thirty-five

In me there dwells

No greatness, save it be some far-off touch Of greatness to know well I am not great (ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON, Lancelot and Elaine)

After ringing the emergency number the previous Sunday, it had been a sad sight that confronted Lewis in the bathroom: Morse standing creased over the pedestal basin, his cheeks wholly drained of colour, his vomit streaked with blood forming a chrysanthemum pattern, scarlet on white, across the porcelain.

Dr. Paul Roblin had been adamant.

Ambulance!

Lewis had woken up to the troth an hour or so later: for a while at least, be was going to be left alone with a murder investigation.

Such a prospect would normally have daunted him; yet the present case was unusual in that it had already estab-lished itself into a pattern. In the past, the more spectacu-lar cases on which he and Morse had worked together had often involved some bizarre, occasionally some almost incredible, twists of fate. But the murder of Dr. Felix Mc Clure appeared--surely was--a comparatively straight-forward affair. There could be little doubt none in Morse's mind--about the identity of the murderer. It was just a question of timing now, and patience: of the accumulation, the aggregation of evidence, against a man who'd had the means, the motive, and the opportunity to murder Mc Clure.

Only concerning the actual commission of the crime was there lack of positive evidence. Lack of any evidence. And what a feather in his cap it would be if he, Lewis, could come up with something on that, during Morse's reluctant, yet enforced, immobility.

For the present, then, it was he who was sole arbiter of the course of further enquiries; of the most productive de-ployment of police resources. He had not been bom great, Lewis was aware of that; nor did the rank of Detective Ser-geant mark him out as a man who had achieved any signif-icant greamess. Yet for a few days now, some measure of vicarious greatness was being thrust upon him; and he would have been encouraged by the Latin proverb (had he known it) that "Greatness is but many small littles," since it was upon a series of "small littles" that he embarked over the following three days Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, September 5, 6, 7.

Over these few days many statements were taken from people, both Town and Gown, some fairly closely, some only peripherally, connoted with the murdered man and with his putative murderer. And it was Lewis himself who had visited the JR2 on Tuesday afternoon for it to be con-firmed, quite unequivocally, that Mr. Edward Brooks had been admitted, via Casualty, to the Coronary Care Unit at 2:32 P.M. on Sunday, August 28; that Brooks had spent twenty-four hours in Intensive Care before being transferred to Level 7, whence he had been discharged three days later.