Inspector Morse 11 The Daughters of Cain

During the daytime, she had so little fear of dying; but recently, in the hours of darkness, Fear had been stalking her bedroom, reporting to her its terrifying tales, and bullying her into confessing (Oh, God!) that, no, she didn't want to die. In her dream that night, when finally she drifted off into a fitful sleep, she beheld an image of the Pale Home; and knew that the name of the one who rode thereon was Covering the space over and alongside the single bed pushed up against the inside wall of the small bedroom, were three large posters, featuring Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, and Kurt Cobain--rock idols who during their comparatively short lives had regularly diced with drags and death. At 1 A.M., still dressed, Kevin Costyn was sitting on the bed, his back against the creaking headboard, listen-Lng on his Walkman to some ear-blasting fury of punk mu-sic. In a perverse sort of way, he found it quite soothing. Eroticon/V, a crudely pornographic paperback, lay open on the bed beside him; but for the moment Kevin's mind was not beset with sexual fantasies.

Surprisingly, in a week of virtually unparalleled excitement, his thoughts were now centred more soberly on the nature of his surroundings: the litter-strewn front gardens along the road, with derelict, disembowelled cars propped up in drives; the shoddy, undusted, threadbare house in wb. ich he lived with his feckless mother; above all the sor-did state of his own bedroom, and particularly of the dingy, soiled, creased sheets in which he'd slept for the past seven weeks or more. It was the contrast that had caught his imagination--the contrast between all this and the tidy if unpretentious terrace in which Mrs. Julia Stevens lived; the polished, clean, sweet-smelling rooms in her house; above all, the snow-white, crisply laundered sheets on her inviting bed.

He thought he'd always known what makes the differ enee in life.

Money.

And as he took off his socks and trousers and got into bed, he found himself wondering how much money Mrs. Stevens might have saved in life.

In the past few weeks Mrs. Rodway was beginning to sleep more soundly. Sleeping pills, therapy, exercise, holidays, diet--none of them had been all that much help. But she had discovered something very simple which did help: she counted. One thousand and one; one thousand and two... and after a little while she would stop her counting, and whisper some few words aloud to herself: "And--there--was--a--great--calm"... Then she would begin counting again, backwards this time: one thousand and five; one thousand and four....

Sometimes, as she counted, she almost managed not to think of Matthew. On a few nights recently, she didn't have to count at all. But this particular night was not one of them....

The previous evening, Ashley Davies had taken Ellie Smith to a motel near Buckingham where he, flushed with the success of his marriage proposal, and she, much flushed with much champagne, had slept between pale green sheets--an idyllic introit, one might have thought, to their newly plighted state.

And perhaps it was.

But as Davies lay awake, alone, this following night, he began to doubt that it was so.

His own sexual enjoyment had been intense, for in medio coitu she had surrendered her body to his with a wondrous abandon. Yet before and after their love-making--both!--he had sensed a disturbing degree of reserve in her, of holding bacic Twice had she turned her mouth away from him when his lips had craved some full commitment, some deeper tenderness. And in retrospect he knew that there must be some tiny comer in her heart which she'd not unlocked as yet to any man.

In the early hours, she had turned fully away from him, seeming to grow colder and colder, as if sleep and the night were best; as if, too, somewhere within her was a secret passion committed already to someone else....

Restless, too, that night was the scout now given responsi-bility for Staircase G in the Drinkwater Quad at Wolsey. At 2 ^.M. she went downstairs to the kitchen to make herself a cup of tea, looking in the mirror there at a neatly featured face, with its auburn hair cut in a fringe across the fore-head: getting just a little long now, and almost covering a pair of worried eyes.

Susan had agreed to check and sign (at 10 o'clock the following moming, Saturday) the statement earlier made to Sergeant Lewis. And the prospect worried her. It was like reporting some local vandals to the police, when there was always the fear that those same vandals would return to wreak even greater havoc, precisely for having been re-ported. In her own case, though--as Susan was too intelli-gent not to appreciate--the risk was considerably greater.