Evidence of extraneous fingerprints? Virtually none..
Hopeless. And certainly no indication that the assailant--murderer--had entered the premises through any first- floor window.
'Very rare means of ingress, Morse, as you know. Pretty certainly came in the same way as he went out.'
'Reminds me a bit of Omar Khayyam,' Morse had mut-tered.
But Phillotson had merely looked puzzled, his own words clearly not reminding himself of anyone. Or any- thing.
No. Entry from the main door, surely, via the Entryphone system, with Mc Clure himself admitting whomsoever (not Phillotson's word)---be it man or woman. Someone known to Mc Clure then? Most likely.
Time? Well, certainly after 8:30 n.M. on the Sunday he was murdered, since Mc Clure had purchased two newspa-pers at about 8 a.M. that morning from the newsagents in Summertown, where he was at least a well- known face if not a well-known name; and where he (like Morse, a happened) usually catered for both the coarse and the c tured sides of his nature with the News of the World The Sunday Times. No doubts here. No hypothesis requit Each of the two news-sheets was found, unbloodied, on work-top in the 'all-mod-con kitchen.'
After 8:30 A.M. then. But before when? Prelim/n findings--well, not so preliminary--from the patholog fn'mly suggested that Mc Clure had been dead for ab twenty hours or so before being found, at 7:45 ^.M. the f lowing morning, by his cleaning-lady.
Hypothesis here, then, for the time of the murder? [ tween 10 ^.., say, and noon the previous day. Rougk But then everything was 'roughly' with these wretched l thologists, wasn't it? (And Morse had sm/led sadly, a thought of Max; and nodded slowly, for Phillotson preaching to the converted.)
One other circumstance most probably corroborating pre-noon time for the murder was the readily observable, duly observed, fact that there was no apparent sign, such the preparation of meat and vegetables, for any potent Sunday lunch in Flat 6. Not that that was conclusive in itse since it had already become clear, from sensibly orientat enquiries, that it had not been unusual for Mc Clure to w E down the Banbury Road and order a Sunday lunch--8 Steak, French Fries, Salad---only L3.99--at the King's Am washed down with a couple of pints of Best Bitter, no swe no coffee. But there had been no sign of steak or chips lettuce or anything much else when the pathologist had st open the white-skinned belly of Dr. Felix Mc Clure. No si of any lunchtime sustenance at all.
The body had been found in a hunched-up, foetal postm with both hands clutching the lower abdomen and the ey screwed tightly closed as if Mc Clure had died in the thro of some excruciating pain. He was dressed in a shoi sleeved shirt, vertically striped in maroon and blue, a bla Jaeger cardigan, and a pair of dark-grey flannels---the low part of the shirt and the upper regions of the trousers st J and steeped in the blood that had oozed so abundantly.
Mc Clure had been one of those 'perpetual students life' (Phillotson's words). After winning a Major Scholar~ ship to Oxford in 1946, he had gained a First in Mods, a First in Greats--thereafter spending forty-plus years of his life as Ancient History Tutor in Wolsey College. In 1956 he had married one of his own pupils, an undergraduate from Somerville--the latter, after attaining exactly similar dis-tinction, duly appointed to a Junior Fellowship in Merton, and in 1966 (life jumping forward in decades) running off with one of her own pupils, a bearded undergraduate from Trinity. No children, though; no legal problems. Just a whole lot of heartache, perhaps.
Few major publications to his name--mostly a series of articles written over the years for various classical journals. But at least he had lived long enough to see the publication of his magnum opus: The Great Plague at Athens: Its Effect on the Course and Conduct of the Peloponnesian War. A long title. A long work.
Witnesses?
Of the eight 'luxurious apartments' only four had been sold, with two of the others being let, and the other two still empty, the 'For Sale' notices standing outside the respec-tive properties---one of them the apartment immediately below Mc Clure's, Number 5; the other Number 2. Questioning of the tenants had produced no information of any value: the newly-weds in Number 1 had spent most of the Sunday morning a-bed--sans breakfast, sans newspapers, sans everything except themselves; the blue-rinsed old lady in Number 3, extremely deaf, had insisted on making a very full statement to the effect that she had heard nothing on that fateful mom; the couple in Number 4 had been out all morning on a Charity 'Save the Whales' Walk in Wytham Woods; the temporary tenants of Number 7 were away in Tunisia; and the affectionate couple who had bought Number 8 had been unintermptedly employed in redecorating their bathroom, with the radio on most of the morning as they caught up with The Archers omnibus. (For the first time in several minutes, Morse? s interest had been activated.)
'Not all that much to go on,' Phillotson had admitted; yet all the same, not without some degree of pride, laying a hand on two green box-files f'dled with reports and statements and notes and documents and a plan showing the full specification of Mc Clure's apartment, with arcs and rulings and arrows and dotted lines and measurements. Morse him-self had never been able to follow such house-plans; and now glanced only cursorily through the stapled sheets supplied by Adkinsons, Surveyors, Valuers, and Estate Agents--as Phillotson came to the end of his briefing.
'By the way,' asked Morse, rising to his feet, 'how's the wife? I meant to ask earlier.... '
'Very poorly, I'm afraid,' said Phillotson, miserably.
'Cheerful sod, isn't he, Lewis?'
The two men had been back in Morse's office then, Lewis seeking to find a place on the desk for the bulging box-files.
'Well, he must be pretty worried about his wife if'
'Pah! He just didn't know where to go next that was his trouble.'
'And we do?'
'Well, for a start, I wouldn't mind knowing which of those newspapers Mc Clure read first?'
'If either.'
Morse nodded. 'And I wouldn't mind finding out if he made any phone-calls that morning.'
'Can't we get British Telecom to itemise things? 'Can we?' asked Morse vaguely. 'You'll want to see the body?'
