manila file.
'Got what you wanted, Mr Morse?'
'Perhaps so. Ready?'
With the house now in total darkness, the two men felt their way to the kitchen, when Morse stopped suddenly.
'The torch! Give me the torch.'
Retracing his steps to the living-room, he shone the beam along an empty mantelpiece.
'Put it back!'he said.
Johnson took the ormolu clock from his overcoat-pocket and replaced it carefully on its litde dust-free rectangle.
'I'm glad you made me do that,' confided Johnson quiedy. 'I shouldn't 'a done it in the first place. Anyway, me conscience'll be clear now.'
There was a streak of calculating cruelty in the man, Morse knew that. But in several respects he was a lovable rogue; even sometimes, as now perhaps, a reasonably honest one. And oddly it was Morse who was beginning to worry - about his own conscience.
He went quickly up to die second bedroom once more and slipped the book back in its drawer.
At last, as quiedy as it had opened, die back door closed behind diem and die pair now made dieir way up die grassy gradient to die gap in die slatted perimeter fence.
'You've not lost your old skills,' volunteered Morse.
'Nah! Know what diey say, Mr Morse? Old burglars never die - diey simply steal away.'
' *
In the darkened house behind them, on the mantelshelf in the front living-room, a little dust-free rectangle still betrayed the spot where the beautifully fashioned ormolu clock had so recently stood.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
When you have assembled what you call your 'facts' in logical order, it is like an oil-lamp you have fashioned, filled, and trimmed; but which will shed no illumination unless first you light it
(Saint-Exupery,
BACK IN HIS flat, Morse closed the door and shot the bolts, both top and bottom. It was an oddly needless precaution, yet an explicable one, perhaps. As a twelve-year-old boy, he remembered so vividly returning from school with a magazine, and locking all the doors in spite of his certain knowledge that no other member of the family would be home for several hours. And then, even then, he had waited awhile, relishing the anticipatory thrill before daring to open the pages.
It was just that sensation he felt now as he switched on the electric fire, poured a glass of Glenfiddich, lit a cigarette, and settled back in his favourite armchair - not this time, however, with the
The cover was well worn, with tears and creases along its edges; and maroon rings where once a wine glass had rested, amid many doodles of quite intricate design. Inside the file was a sheaf of papers and cuttings, several of them clipped or stapled together, though not arranged in any chronological or purposeful sequence.
Nine separate items.
- Two newspaper cuttings, snipped from one of the less inhibited of the Sunday tabloids, concerning a Lord Hardiman, together with a photograph of the aforesaid peer fishing in his wallet (presumably for Deutschmarks) outside a readily identifiable sex establishment in Hamburg's Reeperbahn. Clipped to this material was a further photograph of Lord Hardiman arm-in-arm with Lady Hardiman at a polo match in Great Windsor Park (September 1984).
- A letter (August 1979) addressed to Owens from a firm of solicitors in Cheltenham informing the addressee that it was in possession of letters sent by him (Owens) to one of their clients (unspecified); and that some arrangement beneficial to each of the parties might possibly be considered.
- A glossy, highly defined photograph showing a ·· paunchy elderly man fondling a frightened-looking
prepubescent girl, both of them naked. Pencilled on the back was an address in St Albans.
- A stapled sheaf of papers showing the expenses of a director in a Surrey company manufacturing surgical appliances, with double exclamation-marks against several of the mammoth amounts claimed for foreign business trips.
-A brief, no-nonsense letter (from a woman, perhaps?) in large, curly handwriting, leaning italic-fashion to the right: 'If you contact me again I shall take your letters to the police - I've kept them all. You'll get no more money from me. You're a despicable human being. I've got nothing more to lose, not even my money.' No signature but (again) a pencilled address, this time in the margin, in Wimbledon.
- Four sets of initials written on a small page probably torn from the back of a diary:
AM DC JS CB
Nothing more - except a small tick in red Biro against the first three.
- Two further newspaper cuttings, paper-clipped together. The first
After a nine-year tenure lege, Oxford. Sir Clixby Sir Clixby Bream is retiring would, indeed should, have as Master of Lonsdale Col- retired earlier. It is only the
inability of anyone in the been the result of some
