'Why on earth should I want to do that?'
'I just thought--'
'I wouldn't mind seeing that shirt, though. Maroon and blue vertical stripes, didn't Phillotson say?' Morse passed the index finger of his left hand round the inside of his slightly tight, slightly frayed shirt-collar. 'I'm thinking of, er, expanding my wardrobe a bit.'
But the intended humour was lost on Lewis, to whom it seemed exceeding strange that Morse should at the same time apparently show more interest in the dead man's shirt than in his colleague's wife. 'Apparently' though... that was always the thing about Morse: no one could ever really plot a graph of the thoughts that ran through that extraordi-nary mind.
'Did we learn anything from Phillotson, sir?'
'You may have done: I ditha't. I knew just as much about things when I wen*. into 1;]s office as when I came out.'
'Reminds you a bit of Omar Khayyam, doesn't it?' sug-gested Lewis, innocently.
Chapter Four
Krook chalked the letter upon the wall in a very curious manner, beginning with the end of the letter, and shaping it backward. It was a capital letter, not a printed one.
'Can you read it?' he asked me with a keen glance J (CHARLES DICKENS, Bleak House)
The sitting-cum-dining-room--the murder room--12' x 17' 2' as stated in the Adkinsons' (doubtless accurate) spec-ifications, was very much the kind of room one might ex-pect as the main living-area of a retired Oxford don: an oak table with four chairs around it; a brown leather settee; a matching armchair; TV; CD and cassette player; books al-most everywhere on floor-to-ceiling shelves; busts of Ho-mer, Thucydides, Milton, and Beethoven; not enough space really for the many pictures--including the head, in the Pittura Pompeiana series, of Theseus, Slayer of the Mino-taur.
Those were the main things. Morse recognised three of the busts readily and easily, though he had to guess at the bronze head of Thucydides. As for Lewis, he recog-nized all four immediately, since his eyesight was now keener than Morse's, and the name of each of those immor-tals was inscribed in tiny capitals upon its plinth.
For a while Morse stood by the armchair, looking all round him, saying nothing. Through the open door of the kitchen--6' 10' x 9' 6'---he could see the Oxford Almanack hanging from the wall facing him, and finally went through to admire 'St. Hilda's College' from a watercolour by Sir Hugh Casson, RA. Pity, perhaps, it was the previous year's, for Morse now read its date, 'MDCCCCLXXXXIII'; and for a few moments he found himself considering whether any other year in the twentieth century--in any century--could command any lengthier designation. Fourteen charac-ters required for '1993.'
Still, the Romans never knew much about numbers. 'Do you know how many walking-sticks plus umbrellas we've got in the hall-stand here?' shouted Lewis from the tiny entrance area.
'Fourteen!' shouted Morse in return.
'How the--how on earth?'
'For me, Lewis, coincidence in life is wholly unexceptional; the readily predictable norm in life. You know that by now, surely?'
Lewis said nothing. He knew well where his duties lay in circumstances such as these: to do the donkey-work; to look through everything, without much purpose, and often without much hope. But Morse was a stickler for sifting the evidence; always had been. The only trouble was that he never wanted to waste his own time in helping to sift it, for such work was excessively tedious; and frequently fruitless, to boot.
So Lewis did it all. And as Morse sat back in the settee and looked through Mc Clure's magnum opus, Lewis started to go through all the drawers and all the letters and all the piles of papers and the detritus of the litter- bins--just as earlier Phillotson and his team had done. Lewis didn't mind, though. Occasionally in the past he'd found some item unusual enough (well, unusual enough to Morse) that had set the great mind scurrying off into some subtly sign-posted avenue, or cul-de-sac; that had set the keenest-nosed hound in the pack on to some previously unsuspected scent.
Two things only of interest here, Lewis finally informed Morse. And Phillotson himself had pointed out the potential importance of the first of these, anyway: a black plastic W. H. Smith Telephone Index, with eighteen alphabetical divisions, the collocation of the less common letters, such as 'WX' and 'YZ,' counting as one. The brief introduc-tory instructions (under 'A') suggested that the user might find it valuable to record therein, for speed of reference, the telephone numbers of such indispensable personages as Dec-orator, Dentist, Doctor, Electrician, Plumber, Police....
Lewis opened the index at random: at the letter 'M.' Six names on the card there. Three of the telephone numbers were prefixed with e Inner London code, '071'; the other aee were Oxford numbers, five digits each, all beginning with '5.'
Lewis sighed audibly. Eighteen times six? That was a hundred and eight... Still it might be worthwhile tinging round (had Phillotson thought the same?) provided there were no more than half a dozen or so per page. He pressed the index to a couple of oer letters. 'P': eight names and numbers. 'C': just four. What about the twinned letters? He pressed 'KL': seven, with six of them 'L'; and just one 'K'--and that (interestingly enough?) entered as 9 single capital letter 'K.' Who was K when he was at home?
Or she?
'What does 'K' stand for, sir?
Morse, a crossword fanatic from his early teens, knew some of the answers immediately: ''King'; 'Kelvin'--unit of temperature, Lewis; er, 'thousand'; 'kilometer,' of course; 'K'6chel,' the man who catalogued Mozart, as you know; er...'
'Not much help.'
'Initial of someone's name?'
'Why just the initial?'
'Girl's name? Perhaps he's trying to disguise his sim-mering passion for a married woman--what about that? Or
