The Dead of Jericho

bundles, since the bank statements from the previous two and a half years, conjoined with her mortgage receipts and electricity bills, were neatly stacked together and fastened with stout household twine, rather too thick for its modest purpose.

'Recognize that, Walters?' Bell had asked quietly, flicking his finger under the knot.

Two or three loops of the twine, also knotted, were to be seen loose amongst the scores and scores of envelopes, as though perhaps Ms. Scott had recently been searching through the pre-tied bundles for some specific letters. Almost an hour had been spent on these two drawers, but Bell had finally left everything where it was. It was under the cover of the roll-top desk that he had found the only three items that held his attention: a recently dated letter headed from a Burnley address and subscribed 'Mum'; an address book; and a desk diary for the current year. Bell had looked through the address book with considerable care, but had finally laid it back on the desk without comment. The desk diary, however, he had handed to Walters.

'Should be helpful, my son!'

He had pointed to the entry for Tuesday, 2 October: 'Summertown Bridge Club 8 p.m.'; and then to the single entry for the following day, Wednesday, 3 October-the day that Anne Scott had died. The entry read: 'E.M. 2.30'.

***

When Walters reported to Bell on the Friday morning of the same week, he felt he'd done a good job. And so did Bell, for the picture was now pretty clear.

Anne Scott had been the only child of the Revd. Thomas Enoch Scott, a minister in the Baptist Church (deceased some three and a half years previously) and Mrs. Grace Emily Scott, presently living in Burnley. At the time of Anne's birth and throughout her childhood, the family had lived in Rochdale, where young Anne had been a pupil at Rochdale Grammar School, and where she had shown considerable academic prowess, culminating in her gaining a place at Lady Margaret Hall to read Modern Languages. Then the cream had turned sour. At Oxford, Anne had met a fellow undergraduate, a Mr. John Westerby, had fallen in love with him, fallen into bed with him, and apparently forgotten to exercise any of her contraceptual options. The Revd. Thomas, mortified by his beloved child's unforgivable lapse, had refused to have anything whatsoever to do with the affair, and had dogmatically maintained to the end his determination never to see his daughter again; never to recognise the existence of any child conceived in such fathoms of fornication. Anne had attended the funeral service when her father's faithful soul had solemnly been ushered into the joyous company of the saints, and she had been corresponding regularly with her mother since that time, occasionally travelling up to Lancashire to see her. Anne and John had been married at a register office, she 19, he 20; and then, almost immediately it seemed, they had left Oxford at the beginning of one long summer vac-no one knowing where they went-and when Anne returned some three and a half months later she told her few friends that she and John had separated. The gap of the lost months could be filled in only with guesswork, but Walters suggested (and Bell agreed) that the time was probably spent touting some back- street abortionist, followed by miserable weeks of squabble and regret, and finally by a mutual acceptance of their incompatibility as marriage partners. After that, Anne's career had been easy to trace and (in Walters' view) unexceptional to record. John Westerby was more of a mystery, though. A Barnado boy who had made good (or at least started to make good) he had not finished his degree in Geography, and after the break-up of his marriage had lived in a succession of dingy digs in the Cowley Road area, carrying on a variety of jobs ranging from second-hand car salesman to insurance agent. He was well-liked by his landladies, popular enough with the girls, generous with his money; but also somewhat withdrawn, a little unpredictable, and-according to two former employers whom Walters had interviewed-almost totally lacking in drive or ambition. Anyway, that was all hearsay now, for John Westerby, too, was dead. He had been killed just over a year ago in a car crash on the Oxford-Bicester road-one of those accidents where it was difficult to apportion blame, although the inquest findings revealed that the quantity of beer in Westerby's belly placed him just beyond the limits of statutory sobriety. Unlike the young male driver of the other car, he had not been wearing his safety-belt-and his head had gone straight through the windscreen. Finis.

'Type it all up,' said Bell. 'Nobody'll read it-but get it typed. There's not much else we can do.'

Bell had a busy day ahead of him. Two more burglaries overnight, one a wholesale clear-out in North Oxford; an appearance before the magistrates' court in half an hour's time; lunch with the Chairman of Oxford United to discuss the recurring hooliganism of the club's ill-christened 'supporters'; and a good deal of unfinished business from the past week. No, he could hardly feel justified in allowing young Walters to worry much more about what might have happened many years ago to a woman who had just put herself out of whatever misery she was in. Anyway, Bell had a secret respect for suicides… But he couldn't just leave things where they were, he knew that. There was the inquest to think about. Why had she done it?-that would be the question nagging away in the minds behind those saddened, tense, and self-recriminating faces. Oh dear! It was always the same old questions. Was there anything that was worrying her? Anything at all? Health troubles? Money troubles? Sex troubles? Family troubles? Any bloody troubles? And the answer to most of these questions was always the same, too: it was 'yes', 'yes', 'yes', and so they all said 'no', 'no', 'no', because it seemed so much the kinder way. Bell shook his head sadly at his own thoughts. The real mystery to him was why so many of them thought fit to soldier on. He got up and lifted his overcoat from the hook behind the door.

'Any luck with 'E.M.'?'

'No, sir,' said Walters, with obvious disappointment. That Anne Scott had taken in several private pupils each week had been made perfectly clear to him, but there seemed to have been an ad hoc acceptance of fees in cash for the tutorials rendered. Certainly there was no formal record of names and receipts of monies, and doubtless the tax-man was far from well informed about the scope of Anne's activities. The neighbours had spoken of various visitors, usually young, usually with books, and almost always with bicycles. But such visits appeared to have been somewhat spasmodic, and none of the neighbours could promise to recognise any of the callers again, let alone recall their names. Pity! Walters was slowly coming to terms with the sheer volume of work associated with even the most mundane inquiries; beginning, too, to appreciate the impossibility of following up every little clue. Yet, all the same, he would have been much gratified to have come up with a name (if it was a name) for those tantalising initials.

He found Bell looking at him with a half-smile on his lips.

'Forget it, Walters! It was probably the electricity man And just let me tell you one thing, my lad. That woman committed suicide-you can take the word of a man who's been finding 'em like that for the last twenty years. There is no way, no way, in which that suicide could have been rigged-have you got that? So. What are we left with? Why she did it, all right? Well, we may learn a few things at the inquest, but I doubt we're ever going to know for certain. It's usually cumulative, you know. A bit of disappointment and worry over this and that, and you sort of get a general feeling of depression about life that you just can't shake off, and sometimes you feel why the hell should you try to shake it off anyway.' Bell shrugged on his coat and stood holding the doorhandle. 'And don't you go running around with the idea that life's some wonderfully sacred thing, my lad-because it ain't. There's thousands of unborn kids lying around in abortion clinics, and every second-every second, so they tell me-some poor little sod somewhere round the globe gets its merciful release from hunger. There's floods and earthquakes and disease and plane crashes and car crashes and people killed in wars and shot in prisons and- Agh! Just don't feel too surprised, that's all, if you come across one or two people who find life's a bit too much for 'em, all right? This woman of yours probably put her bank balance on some horse at ten-to-one and it came past the post at twenty-to-six!'

Walters didn't see the joke, although he took the general drift of Bell's philosophy. Would Morse though (he wondered) not have been slightly more anxious to probe more deeply?

'You're not too worried about that chair in the-?'

The telephone rang on the desk, and whilst the outside call was switched through, Bell put his hand over the mouthpiece.

'I'm not worried about anything. But if you are, you go and do something about it. And find me one or two people for the inquest, lad, while you're about it.'

At that point, as Walters walked out into the bright, cold air of St. Aldates, he had not the remotest notion of the extraordinary sequence of events which was soon to unfold itself.