Inspector Morse 11 The Daughters of Cain

And one other mourner: a dark-suited, prosperom looking, middle-aged man, who went last of all into the chapel; and sat down, as it happened, next to Morse, on the back row of the left-hand side of the aisle. A minute earlier, wholly unobserved, he had added his own floral tribute to the many others laid out in the Garden of Remembrance there: a wreath of white lilies. The card attached bore no salutation, no valediction--just the same words that Julia Stevens had read on a birthday card some eighteen months before: "Don't forget we had some good times too!"

St. Giles's (enforced) new home is some little way from Oxford. Yet that aristocratic cat is not displeased with his environment--particularly with the wildlife opportunities offered in the open field just behind Number 22, Kingfisher Way, Bicester; and with the soft, beige leather settee on which he now sleeps for long stretches of the day until his attractive young mistress returns from her duties at the Ox-ford University Press.

Janis Lawrence, only temporarily she trusts, is now unem-ployed once more; and her familiar, exasperated "Stop frowin' them bricks, Jason!" is still often to be heard in the streets of the Cutteslowe Estate.

On the whole, Mrs. Lewis is well pleased with the work of the decorators; and extremely pleased with her husband's present to her of a new set of five black-handled knives, in-cluding one (Number 4) whose blade, unusually broad at its base, curves to a dangerous-looking point.

The former dwelling of Dr. Felix Mc Clure has now been on the market for two weeks, its lounge completely re-carpeted. But Mrs. (Miss?) Laura Wynne-Wilson, though maintaining a dedicated vigil behind her carefully parted lace curtains, has yet to spot any prospective client arriving to view the property. And Messrs. Adkinson, renowned for their meticulous room-measurements, are a little worded that the vicious murder enacted in Number 6 has, quite un derstandably, postponed the prospect of any immediate pur-chase.

And what of Morse?

His proposed lunchtime meeting with Strange, with a view to launching a twin assault on the complexities of form-filling, has not yet been arranged; and Morse is not pursuing the matter with any sense of great urgency, since he is undecided about the "sooner or later" of his own eventual retirement, and curiously unsettled about the im-mediate months ahead of him....

He knew, of course, that it would be utterly hopeless to ring Ellie Smith, and therefore he rang her number only three times in the week following her disappearance; only twice in the second week. After all, as Morse recalled from his believing days, Hope is one of the greatest of all the Christian virtues.

In the third week, his normal routine in life appeared to reassert itself; and at about 9:30,.M. he was again regularly to be observed walking fairly purposefully down the Ban-bury Road to one of the local hostelries. He has promised himself most faithfully that he will dramatically curtail his consumption of alcohol wef November 1; which same day will also mark his permanent renunciation of nicotine.

In the meantime there is much work still to be done in the aftermath of the case--the aftermath of both cases, rather. And above all else in Morse's life there remains the searching out of Ellie Smith, since as a police officer that is his professional duty and, as a man, his necessary pur Coming soon to a bookstore near you, the original Inspector Morse mystery: LAST BUS TO WOODSTOCK The richly drawn novel that introduced readers to the inimitable Inspector Morse. Published by Ivy Books.

Look for it in bookstores everywhere.

Turn the page for a sneak peak into LAST BUS TO WOODSTOCK....

I Wednesday, September 29

From St. Giles' in the centre of Oxford two parallel roads run due north, like the prongs of a tuning fork. On the northern perimeter of Oxford, each must first cross the busy northern ring-road, along which streams of frenetic motorists speed by, gladly avoiding the delights of the old universi-ty city. The eastern branch eventually leads to the town of Banbury, and thence continues its rather unremarkable course towards the hear of the industrial midlands; the western branch soon brings the motorist to the small town of Woodstock, some eight miles north of Oxford, and thence to Stratford-upon-Avon.