Morse's Greatest Mystery by Colin Dexter

Author:Colin Dexter
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Mystery
ISBN: 9780804113090
Publisher: Fawcett
Published: 1992-12-31T05:00:00+00:00

THE INSIDE

STORY

Part One

Dido attempted to raise her heavy eyes again, but failed; and the deep wound gurgled in her breast.

(Virgil, Aeneid IV, 688–9)

“Get a move on!”

“I’ll get there as fast as I can, sir—I always do.”

“And what’s that supposed to mean?”

Lewis turned left at Carfax, down into the High, and then over Magdalen Bridge, car siren wailing, before driving past the Asian grocers’ shops and the Indian restaurants in the Cowley Road.

“I mean,” replied Lewis finally, “that here we are with another murder, and you’ll get there, won’t you? You always do.”

“Nearly always,” conceded Morse.

“And I won’t. I’ve got a second-class mind—”

“Don’t underrate yourself, Lewis! Let others do it for you.”

Lewis grunted humourlessly. “I’m like a second-class stamp, and well you know it.”

“But second-class stamps usually get there in the end.”

“Exactly. Just take a dickens of a lot longer—”

“Slowdown!”

Morse had been consulting an Oxford street plan, and now jabbed a finger to his right.

“That’s it, Lewis: Jowett Place. What number did you say?”

“Probably where those two police cars are parked, sir.”

Morse grinned weakly. “Maintain that level of deductive brilliance, Lewis, and we’ll be through this case before the pubs are open.”

It was 8:50 on the dull, intermittently drizzly morning of Monday, 15 February 1993.

The Oxford City Police had contacted Kidlington CID an hour or so earlier after receiving a 999 call from one Paul Bayley, first-floor tenant of the narrow, two-storey property that stood at 14 Jowett Place. Bayley, an erstwhile History graduate from Magdalen College, Oxford, had found himself out of milk that morning—had walked downstairs—knocked on the door of the woman tenant directly below him, Ms. Sheila Poster—had found the door unlocked—and there …

Or so he said.

* * *

Morse looked down at the fully dressed woman lying just inside the ground-floor living-room, the left arm extended, the pleasingly manicured fingernails straining, it appeared, to reach the door. Beneath and in front of the body was a distressingly copious pool of dully matted blood; and although the weapon had been removed it was possible even for such a non-medical man as Morse to unjumble the simple truth that the woman had most probably been stabbed through the heart. Longish dark curls framed the pale face—from which the large brown eyes now stared, for ever fixedly, at a threadbare square of the lime-green carpet.

“Lovely looking girl,” said Lewis quietly.

Morse averted his eyes from the terrible sight, glanced across the the curtained window, then stepped outside the room into the narrow hallway, where Dr. Laura Hobson, the police pathologist, stood in subdued conference with a scene-of-crime officer.

“She’s all yours,” said Morse, in a tone suggesting that the abdication of responsibility for the body was something of a relief. As indeed it was, for Morse had always recoiled from the sight of violent death.

“Funny name—‘Poster’!” volunteered Lewis as the two detectives stepped up the narrow stairs of Number 14.

“Is it?” asked Morse, his voice betraying no real interest in the matter.

Bayley was sitting beside a police constable in his untidy living room—a

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