'There was,' Lewis began slowly, 'a light-coloured patc' on the wall in Mrs. Rodway's lounge, sir--'
'Ah! Glad you noticed that. Fiver to a cracked piss-pc that was a picture of him, Lewis--of Mc Clure! That's wh. she took it down. She didn't want us to see it, but some thing like that's always going to leave its mark, agreed?'
'Unless she put something else up there to cover it.' Morse scorned the objection. 'She wouldn't have takel a photo of her son down, would she? Where's the point c that? Very unlikely.'
'You just said that's exactly what we're looking for sir--something 'unlikely.''
Morse was spared any possible answer to this astutl question by the arrival of the landlady, a slimly attractiw brunette, with small, neat features, and an extra sparkle ii her eyes as she greeted Morse with a kiss on his cheek. 'Not seen you for a little while, Inspector.'
'How's things, beautiful?'
'Another beer T' 'Well, if you insist.'
'I'm not really insisting--'
'Pint of the best bitter for me.'
'You, Sergeant?'
'He's driving,' said Morse.
Biff, the landlord, came over to join them, and the foul sat together for the next ten minutes. Morse, after ex ' plaining that the word 'Tuff' had appeared in the margir of one of Mc Clure's books, asked whether they, either land. lord or landlady, would have known the murdered man if they had seen him in the pub ('No'); whether they'd eve seen the young man from Wolsey who'd committed suicide ('Don't think so'); whether they'd ever seen a young woman with rings in her nose and red streaks in her hair ('Hundreds of 'em').
Yet the landlady had one piece of information.
'There's one of the chaps comes in here sometimes who was a scout on that staircase... when, you know... I heard him talking to somebody about it.'
'That's right.' The landlord was remembering, too.
'Said he used to go to the Bulldog--or was it the Old Tom, Panl?'
'Can't remember.'
'He was a scout, you say?' asked Morse.
'Yeah. Only started coming in here after he moved--moved to the Pitt Rivers, I think it was. Well, only just up the road, isn't it?'
'He still comes?'
Biff considered. 'Haven't seen him for a little while now you come to mention it. Have you, love?' Pam shook her pretty head. 'Know his name?' asked Lewis.
'Brooks--Ted Brooks.'
'Just let me get this clear,' said Lewis, as he and Morse · left the Turf Tavern, this time via St. Helen's Passage, just off New College Lane. 'You're saying that Mrs. Rodway misunderstood what Mc Clure said to her--- about the 'stu-dents'
?'
'You've got it. What he meant was that he blamed the dons, the set-up there, the authorities. He wasn't saying they were a load of crooks--just that they should have known what was going on them, and should have done something about it.'
'If anything was going on, sir.'
'Which'Il be one of our next jobs, Lewis--to find out exactly that.'
It was Lewis who spotted it first: the traffic-warden's notice stuck beneath the near-side windscreen-wiper of the un-marked Jaguar.
By three o'clock that afternoon, Mary Rodway had assem-bled the new passe-partout for the picture-frame. Like most things in the room (she agreed) it had been getting very dingy. But it looked splendid now, as she carefully replaced the mm-mounted photograph, standing back repeatedly and adjusting it, to the millimetre--that photograph of herself and her son which Felix had sent to her as she'd requested.
Nothing further of any great moment occurred that day, ex-cept for one thing--something which for Lewis was the most extraordinary, the most 'unlikely' event of the past six months.
'Come in a minute and let me pay you for those ciga-rettes,'
' Morse had said, as the Jaguar came to a stop out-side the bachelor flat in North Oxford. chapter Sixteen And sidelong glanced, as to explore, In meditated flight, the door (SIR WALTER SCOTT, Rokeby)
What Morse had vaguely referred to as the 'authorities' at Wolsey were immediately co-operative; and at 10 n.M. the following day he and Lewis were soon learning many things about the place: specifically, in due course, about Staircase G in Drinkwater Quad, on which Dr. Mc Clure had spent nine years of his university life, from 1984 until his retirement from academe at the end of the Trinity Term, 1993.
From his rooms overlooking the expansive quad ('Larg est in Oxford, gentlemen.--264 by 261 feet') the Deputy Bursar had explained, rather too slowly and too pedanti-cally for Morse's taste, the way things, er, worked in the, er, House, it clearly seeming to this former Air-Vice Mar-shal ('Often mis-spelt, you know--and more often mis- hyphenated') that these non-University people needed some elementary explanations.
Scouts?
Interested in scouts, were they?
