It was Morse's turn to nod. 'Always hard, isn't it, Lewis? I hate it too, you know that.'
'Well, at least there are the two of us tonight, sir.'
'Pardon?'
'I said, at least with the two of us—'
'No! Only you, Lewis. We can't waste precious resources at this unearthly hour.'
'You mean you're not—'
'Me? I'm just going to walk round to, er, talk to our other witness.'
'Who's that?'
'That, Lewis, is Mrs. Sheila Williams. She could very well have something vital to tell us. It was Mrs. Williams, remember, who ordered the taxi—'
'But she'll be in bed!'
By not the merest flicker of an eyebrow did Morse betray the slightest interest in the prospect of interviewing an attractively proportioned and (most probably) scantily clad woman at such an ungodly hour.
'Well, I shall have to wake her up then, Lewis. Our job, as you rightly say, is full of difficult and sometimes distasteful duties.'
Lewis smiled in spite of himself. Why he ever enjoyed working with this strange, often unsympathetic, superficially quite humourless man, well, he never quite knew. He didn't even know if he did enjoy it. But his wife did. For whenever her husband was working with Morse, Mrs. Lewis could recognise a curious contentment in his eyes that was not only good for him, but good for her, too. Very good. And in a strange sort of way, she was almost as big an admirer of Morse as that faithful husband of hers — a husband whose happiness had always been her own.
'Perhaps, I'd better run you round there, sir.'
'No, no, Lewis! The walk may do me good.'
'As you say.'
'Er. just one more thing, Lewis. About the Jaguar. I left it just outside St. John's, I think. If, er. ' He held up his car-keys between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand, as if saving his nostrils the distress of some malodorous handkerchief. Then he got out of the car.
As Lewis watched him walk away up to Hamilton Road, he wondered, as he'd so often wondered, what exactly Morse was thinking; wondered about what was going on in Morse's mind at that very moment; the reading of the clues, those clues to which no one else could see the answers; those glimpses of motive that no one else could ever have suspected; those answers to the sort of questions that no one else had even begun to ask.
When Morse opened the ramshackle gate to number 97, his mind was anticipating a potentially most interesting encounter. If a diabetic patient was in need of so-called 'balance'—namely, the appropriate injection of human insulin for the control of blood-sugar levels — equally so did Morse require the occasional balance of some mildly erotic fancy in order to meet the demands of what until recently he had diagnosed as a reasonably healthy libido. Earlier that very week, in fact, as he'd filled up the Jaguar with Gulf-inflated gasoline, he'd found himself surveying the display of the semi-pornographic magazines arranged along the highest shelf above the dailies; and re-acquainted himself with such reasonably familiar titles as Men Only, Escort, Knave, Video XXXX, and so many others, each of them enticing the susceptible motorist with its cover of some provocatively posed woman, vast-breasted and voluptuous. And it was just after he'd flicked through one of them that Detective Constable Hodges (blast his eyes!) had come in, walked over to the newspaper stall, and picked up the top copy but one from the Daily Mirror pile. Morse had immediately picked up a copy of The Times, and proceeded to hold this newspaper like a crusader flaunting his emblazoned shield as he'd stood beside Hodges at the check-out.
'Nice day, sir?'
'Very nice.'
It had seemed to Morse, at that moment, that the dull eyes of Hodges had betrayed not the slightest suspicion of Morse's susceptibility. But even Morse — especially Morse! — was sometimes wholly wrong.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Yet the first bringer of unwelcome news
Hath but a losing office
(Shakespeare, King Henry IV, Part 2)
LEWIS WATCHED THE silhouette gradually form behind the opaque glass in the upper half of the front door.
'Hullo? Who is it?' The voice sounded sharp, and well educated.
'Police, Mrs. Kemp. You rang—'
'All right! All right! You took your time. Let me take mine!'
With much clicking of locks and a final scrabbling of a chain, the door was opened, and Lewis looked down with ill-disguised surprise.
'For Heaven's sake! Didn't they tell you I was a cripple?' And before Lewis could reply: 'Where's the policewoman?'
'Er, what policewoman, Mrs. Kemp?'
'Well, I'm not going to be put to bed by you—let's get that straight for a start!'
Lewis might almost have been amused by the exchanges thus far, were it not for the heavy burden of the news he was bearing.
'If I could just come in a minute—'
Marion Kemp turned her chair through one hundred and eighty degrees with a couple of flicks of her sinewy wrists, then wheeled herself swiftly and expertly into the front room. 'Close the door behind you, will you? Who are you by the way?'
Lewis identified himself, though Marion Kemp appeared but little interested in the proffered warranty.
'Have you found him yet?' The voice which Lewis had earlier thought well under control now wavered slightly, and with her handkerchief she quickly wiped away the light film of sweat that had formed on her upper lip.
'I'm afraid—' began Lewis.
But for the moment Marion simulated a degree of hospitality. 'Do sit down, Sergeant! The settee is quite comfortable — though I have little first-hand experience of it myself, of course. Now, the only reason I rang — the chief reason — was that I need a little help, as you can see.'
'Yes, I do see. I'm, er, sorry. '
'No need! My husband managed to crash into another car on the Ring Road down near Botley.'
'Er, I'll just, er. ' Lewis had seen the phone in the entrance-hall and with Mrs. Kemp's permission he now quickly left the room and rang HQ for a WPC. He felt profoundly uneasy, for he'd known the same sort of thing on several previous occasions: surviving relatives rabbiting on, as if so fearful of hearing the dreaded information.
'She'll be along soon, madam,' reported Lewis, seating himself again. 'Very dangerous that stretch by the Botley turn. '
'Not for the driver, Sergeant! Not on this occasion. One broken collar-bone, and a cut on the back of his shoulder — and even that refused to bleed for more than a couple of minutes.' The bitterness in her voice had become so intense that Lewis couldn't think of anything, even anything inadequate, to say. 'It would have been better if he'd killed me, and had done with the whole thing! I'm sure he thinks that. You see, he can't get rid of me — not the way he could get rid of any normal wife. He has to keep coming back all the time to look after my needs when. when he'd much rather be out having his needs looked after. You do know what I'm talking about, don't you, Sergeant?'
Lewis knew, yes; but he waited a little, nodding his sympathy to a woman who, for the moment, had said her immediate say.
'What time did your husband leave this morning?' he asked quietly, noting a pair of nervous eyes suddenly flash across at him.
'Seven-twenty. A taxi called. My husband was banned for three years after he'd killed me.'