The dead of Jericho (23 page)

'Let me just see what you mean, if you don't mind, sir. I know I— '

'There's this for a start. Remember it?' Morse's right forefinger flicked the statement taken by Lewis from Mrs Celia Richards. 'And with this one, Lewis, if I remember rightly — as you can be bloody sure I do! — I specifically asked you to take care.
Specifically.'

Lewis looked down at the statement brusquely thrust across to him and he remembered exactly what Morse had said. He opened his mouth to say something, but Etna was still erupting.

'What the hell's the good of a sergeant who can't even get an address right? A sergeant who can't even copy three figures without getting 'em cock-eyed? And then look at this one here!' Morse had now picked up another sheet and was launching a second front somewhere else — but Lewis was no longer listening. This wasn't just unfair; it was
wrong.
The address on the statement he held was perfectly correct — he was convinced of that. And so he waited, like a deaf man watching a film of Hitler ranting at a Nuremburg rally; and then, when the reverberations had settled, he spoke four simple words, with the massive authority of the Almighty addressing Moses.

'This address is right.'

Morse's mouth opened — and closed. Reaching across the desk, he retrieved Celia Richasds' statement, and then fingered through the other documents in front of him until he found what he was looking for.

'You mean to say, Lewis, that she lives at
two-six-one,
and that this address here' — he passed across a Xerox copy of the letter which had accompanied the parking-fine — 'is also correct?' The last three words were whispered, and Lewis felt a shiver of excitement as he looked at the copy:

On the original letterhead, the address had been pre-printed at the top right-hand corner:
216 Oxford Avenue, Abingdon, Oxon.

It was Lewis who spoke first. 'This means that Celia Richards never paid the fine at all, doesn't it, sir? This is
Conrad
Richards' address.'

Morse nodded agreement. 'That's about it. And I drove past the wretched place myself when...' His voice trailed off, and in his mind at that very moment it was as if a colossal flash of lightning had suddenly illuminated the landscape for a pilot flying lost and blind in the blackest night.

Morse's eyes were still shining as he stood up. 'Calls for a little celebration, don't you think?'.

'No, sir. Before we do anything else, I want to know about all those other things in the reports where— '

'Forget 'em! Trivialities, Lewis! Minimal blemishes on some otherwise excellent documentation.' He walked round the table and his right hand gripped Lewis's shoulder. 'We're a team, we are — you realize that, don't you? You and me, when we work together — Christ! We're bloody near invincible! Get your coat!'

Lewis rose reluctantly from his seat. He couldn't really understand why Morse should invariably win, but he supposed it would always be so. 'You reckon you've puzzled it all out, sir?'

'Reckon?
Know,
more like. I'll tell you all about it over a pint.'

'I'd rather you told me now.'

'All right, Lewis. The fact of the matter is that we now not only know who killed Anne Scott, my old friend, but we also know who killed George Jackson. And you want the names? Want 'em now?'

So Morse gave the two different names. The first one left Lewis utterly perplexed, since it was completely unknown to him; the second left him open-mouthed and flabbergasted.

'There are three basic views about human life,' began Morse. 'One of 'em says that everything happens by pure chance, like atoms falling through space, colliding with each other occasionally and cannoning off to start new collisions. According to this view there's nothing in the scheme of things that has sorted us out — you and me, Lewis — to sit here in this pub, at this particular time, to drink a pint of beer together. It's all just a pure fluke — all just a chancy set of fortuitous circumstances. Then you get those who reckon that it's ourselves, as people, who determine what happens — at least to some extent. In other words, it's our own characters that affect the way things turn out. Sooner or later our sins will find us out and we have to accept the consequences. It's a bit like bowls, Lewis. When somebody chucks you down the green, there's a bias, one way or the other, and you're always going to drift in a set direction. And then there's another view: the view that it doesn't matter a bugger what particular circumstances are, or what individual people do. The future's fixed and firm — just like the past is. Things are somehow ordained from on high-pre-ordained, that's the word. There's a predetermined pattern in life. What's going to be — is going to be; and whatever you do and whatever your luck is, you just can't avoid it. If your number's up — your number's up! Fate — that's what they call it.'

'What do
you
believe, sir?'

'Me? Well, I certainly don’t go for all this "fate" lark — it's a load of nonsense. I reckon I come somewhere in the middle of the other two. But that's neither here nor there. What
is
important is what Anne Scott believed; and it's perfectly clear to me that she was a firm believer in the fates. She even mentioned the word, I remember, when — when I met her. And then there was that particular row of books just above the desk in her study — all those Penguin Classics, Lewis. It's pretty clear from the look of some of those creased black spines that the works of the Greek tragedians must have made a deep impression on her, and some of those stories — well, let's be more specific. There was one book she'd been rereading very recently and hadn't put back on the shelf yet. It was lying on her desk, Lewis, and one of the stories in that book— '

'I think I'm getting a bit lost, sir.'

'All right. Listen! Let me tell you a story. Once upon a time — a long, long time ago, in fact — a handsome young prince came to a city and quite naturally he was entertained at the palace, where he met the queen of that city. Soon these two found themselves in each other's company quite a bit, and the prince fell in love with the beautiful and lonely queen; and she, in turn, fell in love with the young prince. And things were easy for 'em. The prince was a bachelor and he found out that the queen was a widow — her husband had recently been killed on a journey by road to one of the neighbouring cities. So they confessed their love — and then they got married. Had quite a few kids, too. And it would've been nice if they'd lived happily ever after, wouldn't it? But I'm afraid they didn't. In fact, the story of what happened to the pair of 'em after that is one of the most chilling and terrifying myths in the whole of Greek literature. You know what happened then, of course?'

Lewis looked down at his beer and reflected sadly upon his lack of any literary education. 'I'm sorry, I don't, sir. We didn't have any of that Greek and Latin stuff when I was at school.'

Morse knew again at that moment exactly why he always wanted Lewis around. The man was so wholesome, somehow: honest, unpretentious, humble, almost, in his experience of philosophy and life. A lovable man; a good man. And Morse continued in a gentler, less arrogant tone.

'It's a tragic story. The prince had plenty of time on his hands and one day he decided to find out, if he could, how the queen's former husband had died. He spent years digging out eye-witnesses of what had happened, and he finally discovered that the king hadn't died in an accident after all: he'd been murdered. And he kept working away at the case, Lewis, and d'you know what he found? He found that the murderer had been— ' (the fingers of Morse's left hand which had been gesticulating haphazardly in front of him, suddenly tautened and turned dramatically to point to his own chest) '—that the murderer had
been himself.
And he learned something else, too. He learned that the man he'd murdered had
been — his own father.
And in a blinding, terrifying flash of insight, Lewis, he realized the full enormity of what he'd done. You see, not only had he murdered his own father — but he'd married
his own mother,
and had a family by her! And the truth had to come out — all of it. And when it did, the queen went and hanged herself. And the prince, when he heard what she'd done, he — he blinded himself. That's it. That's the myth of Oedipus.'

Morse had finished, and Lewis felt himself strangely moved by the story and the way his chief had told it. He thought that if only his own schoolteachers had been able to tell him about such top-of-the-head stuff in the way Morse had just done, he would never have felt so distanced from that intimidating crew who were listed in the index of his encyclopaedia under 'Tragedians'. He saw, too, how the legend Morse had just expounded linked up at so many points with the present case; and he would indeed have been able to work it all out for himself had not Morse anticipated his activated musings.

‘You can appreciate, Lewis, how Anne Scott's intimate knowledge of this old myth was bound to affect her attitudes and actions. Just think! As a young and beautiful undergrad here, she had met a man and married him, just as in the Oedipus myth Queen Jocasta married King Laius. Then a baby arrived. And just as Jocasta couldnt keep her baby — because an oracle had told her that the baby would kill its father — so Anne Scott and her husband couldn't keep theirs, because they had no permanent home or jobs and little chance of bringing up the boy with any decent prospects. Jocasta and Laius exposed the infant Oedipus on some hillside or other; and Anne and her husband did the modern equivalent — they found a private adoption society which took the baby off their hands immediately. I don't know much about the rules and regulations of these societies, but I'd like to bet that in this case there was a provision that the mother was not to know who the future foster-parents were going to be, and that the foster-parents weren't to know who the actual mother was. Now, Lewis! What would every mother be absolutely certain to remember about her only child — even if it was taken from her almost immediately after it was born. Face and features? Certainly not! Even after a few weeks any clear-cut visual memory would be getting progressively more blurred — and after a few months, certainly after a year, the odds are that she wouldn't even recognize her own offspring. So what's that one thing that she'll never forget, Lewis? Just think back a minute. Our friend Bell —
Superintendent
Bell — was quite right on one point. He believed that something must have happened the night before Anne Scott died that proved to be the
immediate
cause of her subsequent actions. He didn't do a bad job, either, because he came up with two or three very interesting facts.'

'He learned, for instance, that the bridge evening happened to be its first anniversary, and whatsername had laid on some sherry for the occasion; and if you want to get non-boozers a bit relaxed fairly quickly, a few glasses of sherry isn't a bad bet. Doubtless tongues began to wag a bit more freely than usual, and we know a couple of the things that cropped up. Vietnam and Cambodia did, for a start, and I suspect that the only aspect of those human tragedies that directly impinges on your bourgeois North Oxford housewife is the question of adopting one or two of the poor little blighters caught up in refugee camps. All right, Lewis? I reckon
adoption
was a topic of conversation that night. Then Bell got to know something else — and bless his heart for sticking it down! They were talking about
birthdays —
and not unnaturally so, in view of the fact they were celebrating their own first birthday; and as I've just said, Lewis, there's one thing no mother's ever going to forget — and that's when her only baby was born! So this is how I reckon things were. That night at the bridge party, somebody who knew Mrs Murdoch pretty well got a fraction indiscreet, and let it be known to a few people — including, alas, Anne Scott — that Mrs Murdoch's elder son was an adopted boy. And then, in the changing circles of conversation, Anne must have heard Mrs Murdoch herself volunteering the information that her elder son, Michael, was celebrating his nineteenth birthday on that very day! What a quirk of fate it all was!'

'I thought you didn't believe in fate, sir.'

But Morse was oblivious to the interjection, and continued his fantastic tale. 'When Laius, Jocasta's husband, was killed, it had been on the road between Thebes and Corinth — a road accident, Lewis! When Anne Scott's husband died, it had also been in a road accident, and I'm pretty sure that she knew all about it. After all, she'd known the elder Murdoch boy — and Mrs Murdoch herself, of course — for more than a couple of years. But, in itself, that couldn't have been a matter of great moment. It had been an
accident:
the inquest had found neither party predominantly to blame. If experience in driving means anything, it means that you have to expect learner drivers — like Michael Murdoch — to do something daft occasionally; and in this case, Anne Scott's husband wasn't careful enough to cope with the other fellow's inexperience. But do you see how things are beginning to build up and develop, Lewis? Everything is beginning to assume a menacing and sinister importance. Young Michael Murdoch was visiting Anne Scott once a week for special coaching; and as they sat next to each other week after week in Canal Reach I reckon that sheer physical proximity got a bit too much for both of 'em. The young lad must have become infatuated by a comparatively mature and attractive woman — a woman with a full and eminently feelable figure; and the woman herself, who had probably only been in love once in her life — and that with a married man who'd never been willing to run off with her — must surely have felt the attraction of a young, virile lad who worshipped whatever ground she chose to tread. She must have led him on a bit, Lewis; and sure as eggs are eggs, the springs on the old charpoy in the bedroom are soon beginning to creak pretty steadily. Then? Well, then the trouble starts. She misses a period — and then another; and she goes off to the Jericho Clinic — where they tell her they'll let her know as soon as they can. It must have been then that she wrote to Charles Richards pleading for a bit of help: a bit of friendly guidance, at the very least — and perhaps for a bit of money so that she could go away and have a quiet, private abortion somewhere. But, as we know, the letter never got through to Charles Richards at all. By some freakish mischance the letter was intercepted by Celia Richards — and that, Lewis, was the source of all the trouble. As the days pass — and still no reply from her former lover — Anne Scott must have felt that the fates were conspiring against her. Michael Murdoch was the very last person in the world she was going to tell her troubles to: he'd finished his schooling, anyway, and so there was no longer any legitimate reason for them seeing each other. Perhaps they met again once or twice after that — I just don't know. What is perfectly clear is that Anne Scott was growing increasingly depressed as the days dragged on. Life hadn't been very kind to her, and looking back on things she saw evidence only of her failures: her hasty adolescent marriage that had been short-lived and disastrous; her love for Charles Richards which had blossomed for a good many years but which had always been doomed to disappointment; other lovers, no doubt, who'd given her some physical gratification, but little else; and then Michael Murdoch...'