He'd always enjoyed being up high, ever since the vicar of St John the
Baptist's in Burfbrd had taken him and his fellow choir boys up to the top of
the church. It was the first time in his young life he'd felt superior, felt
powerful, as he traversed his way along the high places there with a
strangely happy confidence, whilst the others inched their cautious way along
the narrow ledges.
It was just the same now.
Once he had reached the top rung but three, he looked up and immediately
decided he would be able to work at the top of the dormer without any
trouble. Then he looked down, and saw that the ladders) beneath him, though
sagging slightly in the middle (that was good), seemed perfectly straight and
secure. Funny, really! Most people thought you were all right on heights
just so long as you didn't look up or down. Rubbish! The only thing to
avoid was looking laterally to left or right, when there really was the risk
(at least for him) of losing all sense of the vertical and the horizontal.
He dug his red Stanley knife into the upper lintel, then the lower sill; in
each case, as
he twisted the blade, finding the wooden texture crumble with
ominous ease. Not surprising though, really, for he'd noticed the date above
the door. He secured the top of the ladder to the gutterings - his normal
practice and began work.
At the appointed hour Mrs B boiled the kettle in the second- floor front (as
her husband had called it); squeezed a Typhoo bag with the kitchen tongs; and
stirred in two heaped spoonsful of sugar. Then, with the steaming cup and
two digestive biscuits on a circular tray, she was about to make her way
downstairs when something quite extraordinary flashed across her vision: she
saw a pair of oblique parallel lines passing almost in slow motion across the
oblong frame of the second- floor window. So sharply was that momentary
configuration imprinted upon her retina that she was able to describe it so
very precisely later that same afternoon; was able to recall that
ear-splitting, skin-tingling shriek of terror as the man whose skull was
about to be smashed to pieces fell headfirst on to the compacted pathway
below, so very few yards from her own front door.
'Dead,' the senior paramedic had told her quietly, six minutes only
after her panic-stricken call on 999. Incontrovertibly dead.
For the next hour or so Mrs Bayley wept almost uncontrollably.
Partly from shock. Partly, too, from guilt, because (as she repeatedly
reminded herself) it was her fault that he'd appeared upon the scene in the
first place. She'd found his name among the local builders and
house-renovators listed alphabetically in the Telephone Directory. In the
Yellow Pages, in fact. Exactly where Sergeant Lewis, also, had discovered
the address ofJ. Barron, Builder, together with a telephone num- her in
Lower Swinstead.
198
chapter forty-two And what is the use of a book without pictures or
conversations?
(Lewis Can-oil, Alice in Wonderland) had he been left to himself, had he been
without any knowledge of the context in which the apparent 'accident' had
occurred, Lewis would not have suspected that it all amounted to murder. But
it had been murder, he felt sure of that; and four hours earlier he had taken
personal responsibility for initiating the whole apparatus of yet another
murder enquiry. Same SO COs as in the Sutton Courtenay murder, same
pathologist, same everything; but with almost every sign of immediate
activity over when, just before 3 p. m. ' Morse finally put in an
appearance, very soon to be seating himself in Mrs Bayley's north-facing
sitting room on the ground floor.
'Northamptonshire faring any better?' he asked the
