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.
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
