Inspector Morse 11 The Daughters of Cain

It had been that terrible Tuesday night, when her mother had phoned, pleading in such deep anguish for her daugh-ter's help; when she'd got rid of that quite likable cock-happy little Welshman; and finally reached the house--a full five minutes before that other woman had arrived in a car--to find her mother standing like a zombie in the eh~ trance hall, continuously massaging a gloved right hand with her left, as if she had inflicted upon it some recent and agonising injury; and when, after going into the kitch-en, she'd looked down on her step-father lying prone on the lino there, a strange-looking, wooden-handled knife stuck--so accurately it had seemed to her--halfway be-tween the shoulder-blades. Strangely enough, there hadn't been too much blood. Perhaps he'd never had all that much blood in him. Not warm blood, anyway.

Then the red-headed woman had arrived, and taken over--so coolly competent she'd been, so organised. It was as if the plot of the drama had already been written, for clearly the appropriate props had been duly prepared, waiting only to be fetched from the back-garden shed. Just the timing, it appeared, had gone wrong, as if a f'mal rehearsal had suddenly turned into a first-night pefformanee. And it was her mother surely who'd been responsible for that: jumping the starting-gate and seizing the reins in her own hands--her own hand, rather (singular).

Then, ten minutes later, following a rapidly spoken tele-phone conversation, the young man had appeared, to whom the red-headed woman had spoken in hushed tones in the hallway; a young man whom, oddly enough, she knew by sight, since the two of them had attended the same Mmial Arts classes together. But she said nothing to him. Nor he to her. Indeed he seemed hardly aware of her presence as he began to manoeuvre the awkward corpse into its poly-thene winding sheet--sheets, rather (plural).

She'd even found herself remembering his name. Kevin something...

As the car turned right from Park End Street into the rail-way station, Ellie's mind jerked back to the present, aware that Williamson's left hand had crept above the top of her suspenderod fight-stocking. But she would always be able to handle people like WLIliamson, who now reminded her of their proposed agreement as he humped the two large suitcases from the boot.

"You ring me, like you said, OK.'?"

Ellie nodded, adding a verbal gloss to her unspoken promise as she took his business card from her handbag and mechanically recited the telephone number.

"Right, then. And don't forget we can do real business with a body like yours, kid."

It would have been a nice gesture if he had offered to carry her case up the steps to the automatic doors; or ever as h- as the ticket window. But he didn't; and of that she was glad. Had he done so she would probably have fel obliged to buy a ticket for Paddington, for she had spoker to him vaguely of "friends in London." As it was, once hz had driven off, she bought a single ticket to Liverpool, ant with aching arms crossed over the foot-bridge to Platform Two--where she stood for twenty-five minutes, forgetting for a while the futura plight of her mother; forgetting the minor role she herself had played in the murder of a man she had learned to hate; yet remembering again now, as she fingered the gold pendant, the man who had given it to her, the man for whom she would have sacrificed anything. If only he could have loved her.

Epilogue

Life is a progress from want to want, not from enjoyment to enjoyment (S^MUEL JOUNSON, in Boswell's The Life of Samuel Johnson)

It is now Friday, October 28, 1994, the Feast of St. Simor and St. Jude, and this chronicle has to be concluded, wis brief space only remaining to record a few marginal notes on some of the characters who played their roles in these pages.

On Thursday, October 20, Mrs. Brenda Brooks was re arrested, additionally charged with the murder of her hus band, Mr. Edward Brooks, and remanded in custody a Holloway Prison. From which institution, four days late she was granted temporary leave of (escorted) absence t attend a midday funeral service at the Oxford Crematorium where many teachers from the Proctor Memorial Schoo were squeezed into the small chapel there, together with few relatives, and a few friends though the couple fi.on California were unable to make the journey at such shot notice.

Two others completed (almost completed) the saddene congregation: the facially scarred Kevin Costyn and a pale looking Chief Inspector Morse, neither of whom partic pared in (what seemed to the latter) the banal revision c Archbishop Cranmer's noble words for the solemn servic of the dead.