Inspector Morse 11 The Daughters of Cain

With some difficulty the body had been manipulated into its container, and four lengths of stout cord were knotted--very neatly!--around the bundle. The outer tegument made the whole thing a 'bit heavier, of coursebut nearer, too. And neatness, as we have seen, was an important factor in life (and now in death) for Brenda Brooks. The parcel, now complete, was ready for carriage.

It might be expected perhaps--expected certainly?--that such an experience would permanently have tmumatised the soul of such a delicate woman as Mrs. Brenda Brooks. But, strangely enough, such was not the case; and as she thought back on these things, and flicked through another few pages of Good Housekeeping, and waited for Mrs. Stevens to re-emerge, she found herself half smiling--if not with cruelty at least with a grim satisfaction....

There was an empty Walkers crisp-packet on the floor, just two seats away; and unostentatiously Brenda rose and picked it up, and placed it in the nearest wastepaper basket.

Mrs. Stevens did not come out of the consulting-room until 11:20 A.M. that morning; and when she finally did, Brenda saw that her dearest friend in life had been weeping It had been that last little bit really.

"You've got some friends coming over from California, you say?"

"Yes. Just after Christmas. I've not seen them for almost ten years. I went to school with her--with the wife."

"Can I suggest something? Please T' He spoke quietly.

"Of course." Julia had looked up into the brown eyes of Basil Shepstone, and seen a deep and helpless sadness there. And she'd known what he was going to say.

"If it's possible... if it's at all possible, can you get to come, ver, we say, a your friends shall month earlier?

A

/rnonth or two earlier?

Chapter Fifty-two

I said this was fine utterance and sounded well though it could have been polished and made to mean less (P'r IR CIq^MPrd N, The Sleeping Life of Aspern Williams)

The case was not progressing speedily.

That, in his own words, is what Lewis felt emboldened to assert the following morning--the morning of Wednes day, September 21--as he sat in Morse's office at HQ.

"Things are going a bit slow, sir."

"That," said Morse, "is a figure of speech the literati call 'hyperbole,' a rhetorical term for 'exaggeration.' What I think you're trying to tell me is that we're grinding to a dead halt. Right?"

Lewis nodded.

And Morse nodded.

They were both right...

Considerable activity had centred on the Brookses' house-hold following the finding of the bicycle, with Brenda Brooks herself gladly co-operating. Yet there seemed little about which she was able to co-operate, apart from the re-traction of her earlier statement that her husband had been at home throughout the morning of Sunday, August 28. In a nervous, gentle recantation, she was now willing (she'd said) to tell the police the whole truth. He had gone out on his bike, earlyish that morning; he had returned in a taxi, latish that morning--with a good deal of blood on his clothing. Her first thought, naturally enough, was that he'd been involved in a road accident. Somehow she'd got him into his pyjamas, into bed--and then, fairly soon after-wards, she'd called the ambulance, for she had suddenly re-alized that he was very ill. The bloodstained clothing she had put into a black bag and taken to the Redbridge Waste Reception Area the following morning, walking across the Ifficy Road, then via Donnington Bridge Road to the Abingdon Road.

Not a very heavy load, she said.

Not so heavy as Pilgrim's, she thought.

That was almost all, though. The police could look round the house--of course, they could. There was nothing to hide, and they could take away whatever they liked. She fully understood: murder, after all, was a serious business. But no letters, no receipts, no addresses, had been found; few photographs, few mementos, few books; no drugs--certainly no drugs; nothing much at all apart from the pe-destrian possessions of an undistinguished, unattractive man, whose only memorable achievement in life had been the murder of an Oxford don.

There had been just that one discovery, though, which had raised a few eyebrows, including (and particularly) the eyebrows of Brenda Brooks. Although only 217 pounds was in Brooks's current account at Lloyds Bank (Carfax branch), a building society book, found in a box beside Brooks's bed, showed a very healthy balance stashed away in the Hali-fax--a balance of 19,500 pounds pence The box had been locked, but Brenda Brooks had not demurred when Lewis had asked her permission to force the lid a task which he had ac-complished with far more permanent damage than had been effected by the (still unidentified) thief at the Pitt Rivers Museum....

"You think he's dead?." asked Lewis.

"Every day that goes by makes it more likely."

"We need a body, though."

"We do, At least--with Mc Clure--we had a body."

"And a weapon."

"And a weapon."

"But with Brooks we've still not got a body."

"And still not got a weapon," added Morse rather miser-ably.