Inspector Morse 11 The Daughters of Cain

"Well, that's two more of the keys accounted for: that second Yale opens the staff entrance door at the back of the Piu Rivers, just off South Parks Road; and that little 'X 10' key--remember?--that's a Pitt Rivers key, too: it's a key to a wail-safe there that's got rows and rows of little hooks in it, with a key on each of 'em--keys to all the display-cabinets."

Morse granted a perfunctory "Well done!" as he reverted his attention to the news.

Mrs. Lewis produced a slightly unladylike whistle a few minutes later: "On the table, boys!"

Morse himself had acquired one culinary skill only--that of boiling an egg; and he was not infrequently heard to boast that such a skill was not nearly so common as was generally assumed. But granted that Morse (in his own es-timation) was an exemplary boiler of eggs, Mrs. Lewis (omnium consensu) was a first-class frier; and the milkily opaque eggs, two on each plate, set beside their mountains of thick golden chips, were a wonderful sight to behold.

As Morse jotted out some tomato sauc, Lewis picked up his knife and fork. "You know, sir, if they ever find a body with an empty plate of eggs and chips beside it "

"I think you mean a plate empty of eggs and chips, Lewis."

"Well, I reckon if the fingerprints on the knife don't match any of those in our criminal library, the odds are they'll probably be mine."

Morse nodded, picked up his own knife and fork, found (blessedly!) that the plate itself was hot--and then he froze, as if a frame on the family video had suddenly been switched to "Pause."

"Everything all right, sir?"

Morse made no reply.

"You--you're feeling all right, sir?" persisted a slightly anxious Lewis.

"Bloody 'ell!" whispered Morse tremulously to himself in a voice just below audible range. Then, louder: "Bloody 'ell! You've done it again, Lewis. You've done it again!"

Unprecedentedly Lewis was moved to lay down both knife and forlc "You know we had a little bet "Morse's voice was vibrant now.

"When we both lost."

"No.

When to be more accurate neither of us won. Well, I'd like to bet you something else, Lewis. I'd like to bet you that I know whose fingerprints are on that knife in Brooks's back!"

"That's more than the fingerprint-boys do." Morse snorted. 'Tm very tempted to report them for pro-fessional incompetence." Then his voice softened. "But I can forgive them. Yes, I can understand them."

"I'm lost, sir, I'm afraid."

"Shall I tell you," asked Morse, "whose pounds gerprints we found on that knife?"

His blue eyes looked so fiercely across the kitchen table that for a few moments Lewis wondered whether he was suffering from some slight stroke or seizure.

"Shall I tell you?" repeated Morse. "You see, there's a regular procedure which you know all about; which every CID man knows all about. A procedure that wasn't--couldn't have been followed in this case: that when you take fingerprints from the scene of any murder you take everybody's--including the corpse's."

Lewis felt the blood in his veins growing cold--like the plate in front of him.

"You can't mean...?"

"But I do, Lewis. That's exactly what I do mean. The prints are those of Edward Brooks himself."

Chapter Sixty-four

Gestalt (n): chiefly Psychol. An integrated perceptual struc-ture or unity conceived as functionally more than the sum of its parts (The New Shorter Oxford Dictionary)

As Morse well knew, it was difficult enough to describe to someone else such a comparatively simple physical action as walking, say--let alone something considerably more complicated such as serving a ball in a gmne of tennis, How much more difficult then, later that same evening, for him to answer Lewis's direct question about the cerebral equivalent of such a process.

"What put you on to it, sir?"

What indeed?

It was perhaps perfectly possible to describe the menta! gymnastics involved in the solving of a cryptic crossword clue. But how did one explain those virtually inexplicable convolutions of the mind which occasionally led to some dramatic, some penny-dropping moment, when the answer:: to a whole series of cryptic clues--and those not of th cruciverbalist but of the criminological variety--combine; to cast some completely new illumination on the scene How did one begin to explain such a sudden, almost irra tional, psychological process?

"With difficulty," was the obvious answer; but Morse was trying much harder than that, as he now sought to identify the main constituents which had led him to his quite exlraordinary conclusion.

It was all to do with the fortuitous collocation of several memories, several recollections, which although occurring at disparate points in the case--and before had suddenly come together in his mind, and coalesced.

There had been the report (Lewis's own) on the inter-view with Mrs. Rodway, when he had so easily been able to re-visualise some of the smallest details of the room in which they had spoken with her, and particularly that ob-long patch above the radiator where a picture had been hanging.