Inspector Morse 12 Death is Now My Neighbour

'He's got a tutorial, anyway. I just said I'd be out shopping.'

'He told you about die College Meeting?'

She nodded.

'You pleased?'

'Uh, uh!'

'It'll be a bit of a nerve-racking time for you.'

'You should know!'

'Only a month of it, though.'

'What d'you think his chances are?'

'Difficult to say.'

'Will you vote for him?'

'I don't have a vote.'

'Unless it's a tie.'

'Agreed. But that's unlikely, they tell me. Arithmetically quite impossible - if all twenty-three Fellows decide to vote.'

'So you won't really have much say in things at all.'

'Oh, I wouldn't say that. I'll be a bit surprised if one or two of the Fellows don't ask me for a little advice about, er, about their choice.'

'And?'

'And I shall try to be helpful.'

'To Denis, you mean?'

'Now I didn't say that, did I?'

The great cooling-towers of Didcot power-station loomed into view on the left, and for a while little more was said as the two of them continued the drive south along the A34, before turning off, just before the Ridge-way, towards the charming little village of West Ilsley.

'I feel I'm letting poor old Denis down a bit,' he said, as the dark blue Daimler pulled up in front of the village pub.

'Don't you think /do?' she snapped. 'But I don't keep on about it.'

At the bar, he ordered a dry white wine for Shelly Cornford and a pint of Old Speckled Hen for himself;

and the pair of them studied the Egon Ronay menu chalked up on a blackboard before making dieir choices, and sitting down at a window-table overlooking the sodden village green.

'Do you think we should stop meeting?' He asked it quietly.

She appeared to consider the question more as an exercise in logical evaluation than as any emotional dilemma.

'I don't want that to happen.'

She brushed the back of her right wrist down the front of his dark grey suit.

'Pity we've ordered lunch,' he said quietly.

'We can always give it a miss.'

'Where shall we go?'

'Before we go anywhere, I shall want you to do something for me.'

'You mean something for Denis?'

She nodded decisively.

'I can't really promise you too much, you know that'

She looked swifdy around the tables there, before moving her lips to his ear. '/ can, though. I can promise you everything, Clixby,' she whispered.

From his room in College, Denis Cornford had rung Shelly briefly just before 11 a.m. She'd be out later, as she'd mentioned, but he wanted to tell her about the College Meeting as soon as possible.

He told her.

He was pleased - she could sense that

She-was pleased - he could sense that

Cornford had half an hour to spare before his next tutorial with a very bright first-year undergraduette from Nottingham who possessed one of the most astonishingly retentive memories he had ever encountered, and a pair of the loveliest legs that had ever folded themselves opposite him. Yet he experienced not even the mildest of erotic day-dreams as now, briefly, he thought about her.

He walked over to the White Horse, the narrow pub between the two Blackwell's shops just opposite the Sheldonian; and soon he was sipping a large Glenmoran-gie, and slowly coming to terms with the prospect that in a