Inspector Morse 12 Death is Now My Neighbour

in Cambridge, Massachusetts - something quite extraordinary had occurred. For six months later, to the amazement and amusement of his colleagues, the confirmed bachelor of Lonsdale had returned to Oxford with a woman who had agreed to change her name from Shelly Benson to Shelly Cornford: a student from Harvard who had just gained her Master's degree in American History, twenty-six years old - exactly half the age of her new husband (for this was her second marriage).

It is perhaps not likely that Shelly would have reached the semi-final heats of any Miss Massachusetts beauty competition: her jawline was slightly too square, her shoulders rather too strong, her legs perhaps a little on the sturdy side. Yet there were a good many in Lonsdale College - both dons and undergraduates - who were to experience a curious attraction to the woman now putting in fairly regular appearances in Chapel, at Guest Nights, and at College functions during the Michaelmas Term of 1994. Her wavy, shoulder-length brown hair framed a face in which the widely set dark brown eyes seemed sometimes to convey the half-promise of a potential intimacy, whilst her quietly voiced New England accent could occasionally sound as sweetly sensual as some enchantress's.

Many were the comments made about the former Shelly Benson during those first few terms. But no one could ever doubt what Denis Cornford had seen in her, for it was simply what others could now so clearly see for themselves. So from the start Shelly Cornford was regularly lusted after; her husband secretly envied. But the

COLIN DEXTER

couple themselves appeared perfectly happy: no hint of infidelity on her part; no cause for jealousy on his.

Not yet

Frequently during those days they were to be seen walking hand-in-hand the short distances from their rooms in Holywell Street to the King's Arms, or the Turf Tavern ('Find Us If You Can!'), where in bars blessedly free from juke-box and fruit-machine Shelly had quickly acquired a taste for real ale and a love for the ambience of the English public house.

Occasionally the two of them ventured further afield in and around Oxford; and one evening, just before Christmas 1994, they had taken the No. 2 bus from Cornmarket up to another King's Arms, the one in the Banbury road, where amid many unashamedly festive young revellers Cornford watched as his (equally young) wife, with eyes half-closed, had rocked her shoulders sensuously to the thudding rhythm of some pop music, her black-stockinged diighs alternately lifted and lowered as though she were mentally disco-dancing. And at diat point he was conscious of being the oldest person in the bar, by about twenty years; inhabiting alien territory there; wholly excluded from the magic circle of die night; and suddenly sadly aware that he could never even begin to share the girlish animality of die woman he had married.

Comford had said nothing dial evening.

Nor had he said anydiing when, diree months later, at die end-of-term Gaudy, he had noticed, beneadi die table, die left hand of Julian Storrs pressed briefly against Shelly's right thigh as she sat drinking rather a lot of

DEATH IS NOW MY NEIGHBOUR

Madeira, after drinking rather a lot of red wine at dinner, after drinking rather a lot of gin at the earlier reception .!. her chair perhaps unnecessarily close to the Senior Fellow seated on her right, the laughing pair leaning together in some whispered, mutual, mouth-to-ear exchange. Perhaps it was all perfectly harmless; and Cornford sought to make little of it. Yet he ought (he knew it!) to have said a few words on that occasion -lighdy, with a heavy heart.

It was only late in die Michaelmas Term 1995 that Cornford finally did say something to his wife ...

They had been seated one Tuesday lunchtime in the Turf Tavern, he immediately opposite his wife as she sat in one of the wooden wall-seats in die main bar, each of them enjoying a pint of London Pride. He was eagerly expounding to her his growing conviction dial die statistical evidence concerning the number of deadis resultant from die Black Deadi in 1348 had been wildly misinterpreted, and dial die supposed demographic effects consequent upon that plague were - most decidedly! - extremely suspect. It should all have been of some interest, surely? And yet Cornford was conscious of a semi-preoccupied gaze in Shelly's eyes as she stared over his left shoulder into some more fascinating area.

All right. She ought to have been interested - but she wasn't. Not everyone, not even a trained historian like his wife, was going to be automatically endiralled by any re-evaluation of some abstruse mediaeval evidence.

He'd diought litde of it.

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And had drunk his ale.

They were about to leave when a man, in his early thirties or so, walked over to them - a tall, dark, slimly built Arab with a bushy moustache. Looking direcdy into Shelly's eyes, he spoke softly to her: