IT is PERHAPS unusual to begin a tale of murder with a reminder to the reader of the rules governing conditional sentences in a language that is incontrovertibly dead. In the present case, however, such a course appears not wholly inappropriate.
11
COLIN DEXTER
Yet almost certainly the Chief Inspector would have noted, with approval, the receptionist herself, for in Yorkshire she would have been reckoned a bonny lass: a vivacious, dark-eyed woman, long-legged and well figured; a woman - judging from her ringless, well-manicured fingers - not overdy advertising any marital commitment, and not averse, perhaps, to the occasional overture from the occasional man.
Pinned at the top-left of her colourful dress was a name-tag: 'Dawn Charles'.
Unlike several of her friends (certainly unlike Morse) she was quite content with her Christian name. Sometimes she'd felt
'Dawn? That is your name?'
She'd nodded.
'Left-handed?'
She'd nodded.
'Do you know that line from Omar Khayyam? 'Dreaming when Dawn's left hand was in the sky ...' Lovely, isn't it?'
Yes, it was. Lovely.
She'd peeled die top off the beer-mat and made him write it down for her.
DEATH IS NOW MY NEIGHBOUR
Then, very quietly, he'd asked her if he could see her again. At the start of the new term, perhaps?
She'd known it was silly, for there must have been at least twenty years difference in their ages. If only ... if only he'd been ten, a dozen years older...
But people
Her Monday-Friday job, 6-10 p.m., at the clinic on the Banbury Road (just north of St Giles') was really quite enjoyable. Over three years of it now, and she was becoming a fixture there. Most of the consultants greeted her with a genuine smile; several of them, these days, with her Christian name.
Nice.
She'd once stayed at a four-star hotel which offered a glass of sherry to incoming guests; and although the private Harvey Clinic was unwilling (perhaps on medical grounds?) to provide such laudable hospitality, Dawn ever kept two jugs of genuine coffee piping hot for her clients, most of them soberly suited and well-heeled gentlemen. A number of whom, as she well knew, were most seriously ill.
Yes, there had been several occasions when she had heard a few brief passages of conversation between consultant and client which she
Not even to the police.
COLIN DEXTER
Quite certainly not to the Press ...
As it happened, 15 January was to prove a day unusually easy for her to recall, since it marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the clinic's opening in 1971. By prior negotiation and arrangement, the clinic was visited that evening, between 7 p.m. and 8.30 p.m., by Radio Oxford, by the local press, and by Mr Wesley Smith and his crew from the Central TV studios out at Abingdon. And particularly memorable for Dawn had been those precious moments when the camera had focused upon her: first, when (as instructed) she had poured a cup of genuine coffee for a wholly bogus 'client'; second, when the cameraman had moved behind her left shoulder as she ran a felt-tipped pen through a name on the appointments list in front of her - but only, of course, after a full assurance that no viewer would be able to read the name itself when the feature was shown the following evening.
Yet Dawn Charles was always to remember the name:
Mr J. C. Storrs.
It had been a fairly new name to her - another of those patients, as Dawn suspected (correctly), whose influence and affluence afforded the necessary leverage and ? s d to jump the queues awaiting their calls to the hospitals up in Headington.
There was something else she would always remember, too...
By one of those minor coincidences (so commonplace in Morse's life) it had been just as most of the personnel from the media were preparing to leave, at almost exactly 8.30 p.m., that Mr Robert Tumbull, the Senior Cancer
DEATH IS NOW MY NEIGHBOUR
