Inspector Morse 12 Death is Now My Neighbour

used always for the sake of uniformity

(Fowler, Modern English Usage)

JUST AFTER LUNCHTIME on Thursday, Morse found himself once again wandering aimlessly around Number 17 Bloxham Drive, a vague, niggling instinct suggesting to him that earlier he'd missed something of importance there.

But he was beginning to doubt it.

In the (now-cleared) kitchen, he switched on the wireless, finding it attuned to Radio 4. Had it been on when the police had first arrived? Had she been listening to the Today programme when just for a second, perhaps, she'd looked down at die gush of blood that had spurted over the front of her night-clothes?

So what if she had been? - Morse asked himself, conscious that he was getting nowhere.

In the front living-room, he looked again along the single shelf of paperbacks. Women novelists, mostly; Jackie Collins, Jilly Cooper, Danielle Steel, Sue Town-send ... He read four or five of the authors' opening sentences, without once being instantly hooked, and was about to leave when he noticed Craig Raine's A Choice of Kipling's Prose - its white spine completely uncreased, as if it had been a very recent purchase. Or a gift? Morse withdrew the book and flicked through some of the short stories that once had meant - still meant - so very much to him. 'They' was diere, although Morse confessed to himself that he had never really understood its meaning. But genius? Christ, ah! And 'On Greenhow Hill'; and 'Love-o'-Women' - the latter (Morse was adamant about it) the greatest short story in the English language. He looked at the title page: no words to anyone; from anyone. Then, remembering a book he'd once received from a lovely, lost girl, he turned to the inside of the back cover: and there, in the bottom right-hand corner, he saw the pencilled capitals: FOR R FROM j - RML.

'Remember My Love.'

It could have been anyone though - so many names beginning with 'J': Jack, James, Jason, Jasper, Jeremy, John, Joseph, Julian ...

So what?

Anyway, these days, Morse, it could have been a woman, could it not?

Upstairs, in the front bedroom, he looked down at the double-bed that almost monopolized the room, and noted again the two indented pillows, one atop the other, in their Oxford blue pillowcases, whereon for the very last time Rachel James had laid her pretty head. The winter duvet, in matching blue, was still turned back as she had left it, the under-sheet only lightly creased. Nor was it a bed (of this Morse felt certain) wherein the murdered woman had spent the last night of her life in passionate lovemaking. Better, perhaps, if she had...

Standing on the bedside table was a glass of stale-looking water, beside which lay a pair of bluish earrings whose stones (Morse suspected) had never been fashioned from earth's more precious store.

But the Chief Inspector was forming something of a picture, so he thought

Picture ... Pictures...

Two framed pictures only on the bedroom walls: the statutory Monet; and one of Gustav Klimt's gold-patterned compositions. Plenty of posters and stickers, though: anti deer-hunting; anti export of live animals; anti French nuclear tests; pro the NHS; pro the whales; pro legalized abortion. About par for the course at her age, thought Morse. Or at his age, come to think of it.

He pulled the side of the curtains slightly away from the wall, and briefly surveyed the scene below. An almost reverent hush now seemed to have settled upon Rachel's side of the street. One uniformed policeman stood at the front gate - but only the one - talking to a representative of the Press - but only the one: the one who had lived next-door to the murdered woman, at Number 15; the

one with the pony-tail; the one whom Morse would have to interview so very soon; the one he ought already to have interviewed.

Then, from the window, he saw his colleague, Sergeant Lewis, getting out of a marked police car; and thoughtfully he walked down the stairs. Odd - very odd, really - that with all those stickers around the bedroom, the one for the party the more likely (surely?) to further those advertised causes had been left in the boot of her car, where earlier Lewis had found it. Why hadn't she put it up, as so many other householders in the terrace had done, in one of her upper or lower windows?

Aware that whatever had been worrying him had still not been identified, Morse turned the Yale lock to admit Lewis, the latter carrying the lunchtime edition of the Oxford Mail

'I reckon it's about time we interviewed him,' began Lewis, pointing through the closed door.

'All in good time,' agreed Morse, taking the newspaper where, as on the previous two days, the murder still figured on page one, although no longer as the lead story.

POLICE PUZZLED BY KIDLINGTON KILLING

THE BRUTAL murder The murdered woman was

of the physiotherapist seen as a quietly unobtrusive

Rachel James, which has member of the community

caused such a stir in the local with no obvious enemies,

community, has left the and as yet the police have

police baffled, according to been unable to find any

Inspector Morse of the plausible motive for her

Thames Valley CED. murder.

Neighbours have been by a ghoulish if natural curi-swift to pay their tributes, osity, once police activity is Mrs Emily Jacobs, who scaled down and restrictions waved a greeting just before are lifted. Rachel was murdered, said