'So she'd been with you the whole time since yesterday afternoon?'
'Since about a quarter-to four, yes. I would have picked her up in the car, but the wretched thing wanted to stay at home in the garage. Suffering from electrical trouble.'
Morse, who didn't know the difference between brake fluid and anti-freeze, nodded wisely. 'You should get a car like mine. I've got a pre-electrics model.'
Julia smiled politely. 'We took a bus up to school and, well, that's about it, really.'
'Did you actually go into the Brookses' house.'?'
'Well, I suppose I did, yes---only into the hallway, though.'
'Was Mr. Brooks there T'
'Only just. He was getting ready to go out, but he was still there when we left.'
'Did you speak to him?'
'You mean.., ask him politely if he was feeling better? You must be joking.'
'Did his wife speak to him?'
'Yes. She said 'goodbye.''
'She didn't say 'cheerio' or 'see you soon'?'
'No. She said 'goodbye.''
'What about you? Did you go out last night?'
'Do you suspect me as well?'
'Suspect you of what, Mrs. Stevens?'
Julia's clear, grey eyes sparkled almost gleefully. 'Well, if somebody's bumped off old Brooks--'
'You look as if you hope someone has.'
'Didn't I make that clear from the start, Inspector?'
'Have you actually seen Mrs. Brooks since you left home this morning?'
'No. I've been in school all day. Bad day, Thursday! No free periods. Then we had a staff-meeting after school to try to decide whether we're all satisfying the criteria for the National Curriculum.'
'Oh.'
It was a dampener; and for a little while each was silent, with Morse looking around the neatly cluttered room. He saw, on the settee beside Julia, a copy of Ernest Dowson's Poems. He pointed to it: 'You enjoy Dowson?'
'You've heard of him?'
'They are not long, the weeping and the laughter, Love and desire and hate...'
'I'm impressed. Can you go on?'
'Oh, yes,' said Morse quietly.
For some reason, and for the first time that evening, Julia Stevens betrayed some sign of discomfiture, and Morse saw, or perhaps he saw, a film of tears across her eyes. 'Anything else I can do for you, Inspector?'
Yes, you can take me to bed with you. I may feel no love for you, perhaps, but I perceive the beauty and the readi-ness of this moment, and soon there will be no beauty and no readiness.
'No, I think that's all,' he said.
The phone rang as they walked into the narrow hallway, and Julia quickly picked up the receiver.
'Hullo? Oh, hullo! Look, I'll ring you back in five min-utes, all right? Just give me the number, will you?' She wrote down five digits on a small yellow pad beside the phone, and said 'Bye'--as did a male voice at the other end of the line (if Morse had heard aright).
As they took leave of each other at the doorway, it seemed for a moment that they might have embraced, how-ever perfunctorily.
But they did not do so.
It might have been possible, too, for Morse to have spot-ted the true importance of what Julia Stevens had told him.
But he did not do so.
Chapter Forty-two
You can lead a whore to culture but you can't make her think (ATTRIBUTED TO DOROTHY PARKER)
'Haven't you got any decent music in this car?' she asked, as Lewis drove down the Iffiey Road towards Magdalen Bridge.
'Don't you like it? That's your Mozart, that is. That's your slow movement of the Clarinet Concerto. I keep get ting told I ought to educate my musical tastes a bit.'
'Bit miserable, innit?'
'Don't you go and say that to my boss.'
