still drawn and the electric light was still turned on in the living room, as well as in the kitchen, the door to which stood open wide. And even before she walked through to the kitchen she saw the slumped figure of Baines in front of the refrigerator, a long-handled household knife plunged deep into his back, the dried blood forming a horrid blotch upon the cotton shirt, like a deranged artist's study in claret and blue.
She screamed hysterically.
It was 4.30 p.m. before the fingerprint man and the photographer were finished, and before the humpbacked surgeon straightened his afflicted spine as far as nature would permit
'Well?' asked Morse.
'Difficult to say. Anywhere from sixteen to twenty hours.'
'Can't you pin it down any closer?'
'No.'
Morse had been in the house just over an hour, for much of which time he had been sitting abstractedly in one of the armchairs in the living room, waiting for the others to leave. He doubted they could tell him much, anyway. No signs of forcible entry, nothing stolen (or not apparently so), no fingerprints, no blood-stained footprints. Just a dead man, and a deep pool of blood and a fridge with an open door.
A police car jerked to a halt outside and Lewis came in. 'He wasn't at school this morning, sir.'
'Hardly surprising,' said Morse, without any conscious humour.
'Do we know when he was murdered?'
'Between eight o'clock and midnight, they say.'
'Pretty vague, sir.'
Morse nodded. 'Pretty vague.'
'Did you expect something like this to happen?'
Morse shook his head. 'Never dreamed of it.'
'Do you think it's all connected?'
'What do you think?'
'Somebody probably thought that Baines was going to tell us what he knew.' Morse grunted noncommittally. 'Funny, isn't it, sir?' Lewis glanced at his watch. 'He'd have told us by now, wouldn't he? And I've been thinking, sir.' He looked earnestly at the inspector. 'There weren't many who knew you were going to see Baines this afternoon, were there? Only Phillipson really.'
'Each of them could have told somebody else.'
'Yes, but—'
'Oh, it's a good point I see what you're getting at. How did Phillipson take the news, by the way?'
'Seemed pretty shattered, sir.'
'I wonder where he was between eight o'clock and midnight,' mumbled Morse, half to himself, as he eased himself out of the armchair. 'We'd better try to look like detectives, Lewis.'
The ambulance men asked if they could have the body, and Morse walked with them into the kitchen. Baines had been eased gently on to his right side, and Morse bent down and eased the knife slowly from the second master's back. What an ugly business murder was. It was a wooden-handled carving knife. 'Prestige, Made in England', some 35–36 centimetres long, the cutting blade honed along its entire edge to a razor-sharp ferocity. Globules of fresh pink blood oozed from the wicked-looking wound, and gradually seeped over the stiff clotted mess that once had been a blue shirt. They took Baines away in a white sheet.
You know, Lewis, I think whoever killed him was bloody lucky. It's not too easy to stab a man in the back, you know. You've got to miss the spinal column and the ribs and the shoulder blades, and even then you've got to be lucky to kill someone straight off. Baines must have been leaning forward, slightly over to his right and exposing about the one place that makes it comparatively easy. Just like going through a joint of beef.'
Lewis loathed the sight of death, and he felt his stomach turning over. He walked to the sink for a glass of water. The cutlery and the crockery from Baines's last meal were washed up and neatly stacked on the draining board, the dish cloth squeezed out and draped over the bowl.
'Perhaps the post-mortem'll tell us what time he had his supper,' suggested Lewis hopefully.
Morse was unenthusiastic. He followed Lewis to the sink and looked around half-heartedly. He opened the drawer at the right of the sink unit. The usual collection: teaspoons, tablespoons, wooden spoons, a fish slice, two corkscrews, kitchen scissors, a potato peeler, various meat skewers, a steel — and a kitchen knife. Morse picked up the knife and looked at it carefully. The handle was bone, and the blade was worn away with constant sharpening into a narrowed strip. 'He's had this a good while,' said Morse. He ran his finger along the blade; it had almost the same cruel sharpness as the blade that had lodged its head in Baines's heart.
'How many carving knives do you keep at home, Lewis?'
'Just the one.'
'You wouldn't think of buying another one?'
'No point, really, is there?'
'No,' said Morse. He placed the murder weapon on the kitchen table and looked around. There seemed singularly little point in any inspection, however intelligently directed, of the tins of processed peas and preserved plums that lined the shelves of the narrow larder.
'Let's move next door, Lewis. You take the desk; I'll have a look at the books.'
Most of the bookshelves were taken up with works on mathematics, and Morse looked with some interest at
