Inspector Morse 12 Death is Now My Neighbour

'How did you know that5'

'He's in Who's Who. Or he was. He died two years ago. Your mother died of cancer twelve years ago. You were the only child of the marriage.'

'Orphan Annie, yeah!' The sophisticated, upper-crust veneer was beginning to crack.

'You inherited his estate?'

'Estate? Hah!' She laughed bitterly. 'He left all his money to the bookmakers.'

'No heirlooms, no mementoes - that sort of thing?'

She appeared puzzled.' What sort of thing?'

'A pistol, possibly? A service pistol?'

'Look! You don't seriously think /had anything to do with-'

'My job's to ask the questions-'

'Well, the answer's 'no',' she snapped. 'Any more questions?'

One or two clearly:

'Where were you on Sunday morning - last Sunday morning?'

'At home. In bed. Asleep - until the police woke me up.'

'And then?

'Then I was frightened. And you want me to tell you the truth? Well, I'm still bloody frightened!'

Morse looked at her again: so attractive; so vulnerable; and now just a little nervous, perhaps? Not frightened though, surely.

Was she hiding something?

Ts there anything more,' he asked gently 'anything at all, you can tell me about this terrible business?'

And immediately he sensed that she could.

'Only one thing, and perhaps it's got nothing ... Julian asked me to a Guest Night at Lonsdale last November, and in the SCR after dinner I sat next to a Fellow there called Denis Cornford. I only met him that once - but he was really nice - lovely man, really - the sort of man I wish I'd met in life.'

'Bit old, surely?'

'About your age.'

Morse's fingers folded round the cellophane, and he sought to stop his voice from trembling.

'What about him?'

'I saw him in die Drive, that's all. On Thursday night About eight. He didn't see me. I'd just driven in and he was walking in front of me - no car. He kept walking along a bit, and then he turned into Number 15 and rang the bell. Geoff Owens opened the front door - and let him in.'

'You're quite sure it was him?'

'Oh, yes,' replied Adele.

CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

He looked into her limpid eyes: 1 will turn this Mozart off, if you don't mind, my love. You see, I can never concentrate on two beautiful things at the same time'

(Passage quoted by Terence Benczik in The Good and the Bad in Mills and Boon)

WITH SUSPICIOUSLY extravagant caution Morse drove the Jaguar up towards Kidlington HQ, again conscious of seeing the name-plate of that particular railway station flashing, still unrecognizably, across his mind. At the Woodstock Road roundabout he waited patiently for a gap in the Ring-Road traffic; rather too patiendy for a regularly hooting hooligan somewhere behind him.

Whether he believed what his ABC girl had told him, he wasn't really sure. And suddenly he realized he'd forgotten to ask her whether indeed it was she who occasionally extended her literary talents beyond her humdrum political pamphlets into the fields of (doubtless more profitable) pornography.

But it was only for a few brief minutes that Morse considered the official confiscation of the titillatingly tided novel, since his car-phone had been ringing as he

finally crossed into Five Mile Drive. He pulled over to the side of the road, since seldom had he been able to discharge two simultaneous duties at all satisfactorily.

It was Lewis on the line - an excited Lewis.

Calling from the newspaper offices.

'I just spoke to the Personnel Manager, sir. It was him!'

'Lew-is! Your pronouns! Wftafexacdywas who?'

'It wasn't Owens I spoke to on the phone. It was the Personnel Manager himself!'

Morse replied only after a pause, affecting a tone of appropriate humility: 'I wonder why I don't take more notice of you in the first place.'