The Dead of Jericho

someone bending low behind one of the cars parked outside the Printer's Devil, getting his hands very dirty as he fiddled with the greasy chain of his bicycle-a chain that had been, and still was, in perfect working order. The gown this person had been wearing, together with the pile of books he had been carrying, was now stowed away in the basket affixed to the front of the new, folding bicycle which he held upright on the pavement as he watched the door of 10 Canal Reach close.

Chapter Eighteen

An experienced, industrious, ambitious, and often quite picturesque liar.

– Mark Twain, Private History of a Campaign that Failed

The Chairman of the Oxford Book Association was relieved to see the Rolls Royce edge slowly through the narrow entrance to the Clarendon Institute car park. It was six minutes to eight, and he was having an anxious evening all round. Only about fifteen members had so far turned up, and already two of the committee were hastily removing many of the chairs in the large upstairs hall reserved for the meeting. Friday was never a good night, he knew that, and the late change of date could hardly have helped; but it was embarrassing, for everyone, to have an attendance as meagre as this.

Morse counted twenty-five in the audience when he tiptoed into the back row at five-past eight. After listening to The Archers he had felt restless, and the thought that he might be able to have a word with the chairman of the OBA about Anne Scott had finally tilted the balance in favour of 'Charles Richards: Triumphs and Tribulations of the Small Publisher. It took only a few minutes for Morse to feel glad he had made the effort to attend. It was not (in Morse's eyes) that this thickishly set man, of medium height, had a particularly forceful presence-although, to be fair, his expensively cut dark blue suit lent a certain air of elegance and rank. It was his manner of speaking that was impressive. In his quietly spoken, witty, tolerant, self-deprecatory way, Richards spoke of his early days as a schoolmaster, his life-long interest in books, the embryonic idea of starting up for himself as a small publisher, his first, fairly disastrous months, his ladling of luck as time went by, with a few minor coups here and there, and finally the expansion of his company and the recent move to Abingdon. In his peroration he quoted Kipling (much to Morse's delight), and exhorted his listeners to treat that poet's 'twin impostors' with the same degree of amused-or saddened- cynicism.

He'd been good-there was no doubt of that-possessing as he did that rare gift of speaking to an audience in an individualised, personal sort of way, as if he were somehow interested in each of them. Afterwards there were a lot of questions, as if the audience, in its turn, was directly interested in the man who had thus addressed them. Too many questions, for Morse's liking. It was already half-past nine, and he hadn't drunk a pint all day.

'One more question-we really must make this the last, I'm afraid,' said the chairman.

'You said you were a schoolmaster, Mr. Richards,' said a woman in the front row. 'Were you a good schoolmaster?'

Richards got to his feet and smiled disarmingly. 'I was rather hoping no one would ask me that. The answer is 'no', madam. I was not a roaring success as a schoolmaster, I'm afraid. The trouble was, I'm sorry to say, that I just wasn't any good at keeping discipline. In fact, my lessons sounded rather like those recordings on the radio of Mrs. Thatcher addressing the House of Commons.'

It was a good note on which to end, and the excellent impression the speaker had made was finally sealed and approved. The audience laughed and applauded all the audience except one, that was, and that one man was Morse. He sat, the sole occupant of the back row, frowning fiercely, for the suspicion was slowly crossing his mind that this man was talking a load of bogus humbug.

At the bar downstairs, the chairman greeted Morse and said how glad he was to see him again. 'You've not met our speaker before, have you? Charles Richards-Chief Inspector Morse.'

The two men shook hands.

'I enjoyed your talk-' began Morse.

'I’m glad about that.'

'-except for the last bit.'

'Really? Why-?'

'I just don't believe you were a lousy Schoolmaster, that's all,' said Morse simply.

Richards shrugged his shoulders. 'Well, let's put it this way: I soon realised I wasn't really cut out for the job. But why did you mention that?'

Morse wasn't quite sure. Yet the truth was that Richards had just held a non-captive audience for an hour and a half with ridiculous ease, an audience that had listened to this virtually unknown man with a progressively deeper interest, respect, and enthusiasm. What could the same man have done with the receptive, enquiring minds of a class of young schoolboys?

'I think you were an excellent schoolmaster, and if I were a headmaster now, I'd appoint you tomorrow.'

'I may have exaggerated a bit,' conceded Richards. 'It's always tempting to play for a laugh, though, isn't it?'

Morse nodded. That was one way of putting it, he supposed. The other way was that this man could be a formidable two-faced liar. 'You've not been here-near Oxford-very long?'

'Three months. You couldn't have been listening very carefully, Inspector-'

'You knew Anne Scott, didn't you?'

'Anne?' Richards' voice was very gentle. 'Yes, I knew Anne all right. She used to work for us. You know, of course, that she's dead.'

The chairman apologised for butting in, but he wished to introduce Richards to the other committee members.

'You won't perhaps know…?' Morse heard the chairman say.

'No, I'm afraid I don't get over to Oxford much. In fact…'

Morse drifted away to drink his beer alone, feeling suddenly bored. But boredom was the last thing that Morse should have felt at that moment. Already, had he known it, he had heard enough to put him on the right track, and, indeed, even now his mind was beginning to stir in the depths, like the opening keys of Das Rheingold in the mysterious world of the shadowy waters.

When Richards took his leave, just on ten o'clock, Morse insinuated himself into a small group gathered round the bar, and lost no time in asking the bearded chairman about Anne Scott.

'Poor old Anne! She wasn't with us long, of course, but she was a jolly good committee member. Full of ideas, she was. You see, one of our big problems is getting some sort of balance between the literary side of things-you know, authors, and so on and the technical side-publishing, printing, that sort of thing. We're naturally a bit biased towards the literary side, but an awful lot of our members are more interested in the purely technical, business side-and it was Anne, actually, who suggested we should try to get Charles Richards. She used to work for him once and she-well, we left it to her. She fixed it all up. I thought he was good, didn't you?'

Morse nodded his agreement. 'Very good, yes.' But his mind was racing twenty furlongs ahead of his words.

'Pity we didn't get a decent turn-out. Still, it was their loss. Perhaps with the change of date and everything…'

Morse let him go on, then drained his beer, and stood silently at the corner of the bar with a replenished pint. His mind, which had been so obtuse up until this point in the case, was now extraordinarily clear-and he felt excited.

It was then that he heard the whine of the police and ambulance sirens. Deja acoute. How long was it since Charles Richards had left? Quarter of an hour, or so? Oh God! What a fool he'd been not to have woken up earlier. The light blue Rolls Royce he'd seen outside the Printer's Devil that day when he'd tried to call on Anne, the parking ticket on the windscreen; the reminder of that incident the following morning