The spire of St. Mary the Virgin pointed promisingly skywards in front of her as she walked down the High, and into the Mitre.
'Large Scotch — Bell's,please — if you have it.' (How often had she heard her husband use those selfsame words!)
A young barmaid pushed a tumbler up against the bottom of an inverted bottle, and then pushed again.
'Ice?'
'Pardon?'
'Do you want ice?'
'Er — no. Er — yes — yes please! I'm sorry. I didn't quite hear. .'
As she sipped the whisky, a hitherto dormant nerve throbbing insistently along her left temple, the world seemed to her perhaps fractionally more bearable than it had done when she'd left the Delegacy. Like some half-remembered medicine — foul-tasting yet efficacious — the whisky seemed to do her good; and she bought another.
A few minutes later she was standing in Radcliffe Square; and as she looked up at the north side of St. Mary's Church, a strange and fatal fascination seemed to grip her soul. Half-way up the soaring edifice, his head and shoulders visible over the tricuspid ornamentation that marked the intersection of tower and spire, Margaret could see a duffel-coated young man, binoculars to his eyes, gazing out across the northern parts of Oxford. The tower must be open, surely! She walked down the steps towards the main porch of the church and then, for a moment, turned round and gazed up at the dome of the Radcliffe Camera behind her; and noticed the inscription on the top step: Dominus custodial introitum tuum et exitum tuum. But since she had no Latin, the potential irony of the words escaped her. TOWER OPEN was printed in large capitals on a noticeboard beside the entrance; and just inside, seated behind a table covered with postcards, guidebooks and assorted Christian literature, was a middle-aged woman who had already assumed that Margaret Bowman wished to ascend, for she held out a maroon-coloured ticket and asked for 60p. A few flights of wide wooden stairs led up to the first main landing, where a notice on a locked door to the left advised visitors that here was the Old Library — the very first one belonging to the University — where the few books amassed by the earliest scholars were so precious that they were chained to the walls. Margaret had seldom been interested in old churches, or old anythings for that matter; but she now found herself looking down at the leaflet the woman below had given her:
when Mary became Queen and England reverted to Roman Catholicism, Archbishop Cranmer and two of his fellow bishops, Latimer and Ridley, were tried in St. Mary's for heresy. Latimer and Ridley were burned at the stake. Cranmer himself, after officially recanting, was brought back to St. Mary's and condemned to death. He was burned at the stake in the town ditch, outside Balliol College, holding his right hand (which had written his recantation) steadily in the flames. .
Margaret looked at her own right hand — a couple of blue biro marks across the bottom of the thumb — and thought of the tortured atonement that Cranmer had sought, and welcomed, for his earlier weaknesses. A tear ran hurriedly down her cheek, and she took from her handbag a white paper handkerchief to dry her eyes.
The stairs — iron now, and no longer enclosed for the next two flights — led up and over the roof of the Lady Chapel, and she felt a sense of exhilaration in the cold air as she climbed higher still to the Bell Tower, where the man with the binoculars, his hair windswept, had just descended the stone spiral staircase that led to the top.
'Not much further!' he volunteered. 'Bit blowy up there, though. Bit slippery, too. Be careful!'
For several seconds as she emerged at the top of the tower, Margaret was conscious of a terrifying giddiness as her eyes glimpsed, just below her feet, the black iron ring that circled the golden-painted Roman numerals of the great clock adorning the north wall of the church. But the panic was soon gone, and she looked out across at the Radcliffe Camera; and then to the left of the Camera at the colleges along Broad Street; then the buildings of Balliol where Cranmer had redeemed his soul amid the burning brushwood; then she could see the leafless trees along St. Giles', and the roads that led off from there into North Oxford; and then the giant yellow crane that stood at the Haworth Hotel in the Banbury Road. She took a few steps along the high-walk towards the north-western corner of the tower, and she suddenly felt a sense of elation, and the tears welled up again in her eyes as the wind blew back her hair, and as she held her head up to the elements with the same joyous carelessness she had shown as a young girl when the rain had showered down on her tip-tilted face. .
At a point on the corner, her wholly inadequate and unsuitable shoes had slipped along the walkway, and a man standing below watched the black handbag as it plummeted to the earth and landed, neatly erect, in a drift of snow beneath the north-west angle of the tower.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Monday, January 6th: P.M.
Everything comes to him who waits — among other things, death.
(F. H. BRADLEY)
MORSE WAS DISSATISFIED and restless — that much was obvious as they sat outside the Bowmans' house in Charlbury Drive. Ten minutes they waited, Morse just sitting there in the passenger seat, his safety-belt still on, staring out of the window. Then another ten minutes, with Morse occasionally clicking his tongue and taking sharp audible breaths of impatient frustration.
'Think she's coming back?' said Lewis.
'I dunno.'
'How long are we going to wait?'
'How do I know!'
'Just asked.'
'I tell you one thing, Lewis. I'm making one bloody marvellous mess of this case!'
'I don't know about that, sir.'
'Well you should know! We should never have let her out of our sight.'
Lewis nodded, but said nothing; and for a further ten minutes the pair of them sat in silence.
But there was no sign of Margaret Bowman.
'What do you suggest we do, Lewis?' asked Morse finally.
'I think we ought to go to the post office: see if we can find some of Bowman's handwriting — there must be something there; see if any of his mates know anything about where he is or where he's gone; that sort of thing.'
'And you'd like to get somebody from there to go and look at the body, wouldn't you? You think it is Bowman!'
'I'd just like to check, that's all. Check it isn't Bowman, if you like. But we haven't done anything at all yet, sir, about identification.'
'And you're telling me it's about bloody time we did!'
'Yes sir.'
'All right. Let's do it your way. Waste of time but —' His voice was almost a snarl.
'Are you feeling all right, sir?'
'Course I'm not feeling all right! Can't you see I'm dying for a bloody cigarette, man?'
The visit to the post office produced little information that was not already known. Tom Bowman had worked on the Thursday, Friday and Saturday following Christmas Day, and then had taken a week's holiday. He should have been back at work that very day, the 6th; but as yet no one had seen or heard anything of him. It seemed he was a quiet, punctual, methodical sort of fellow, who had been working there for six years now. No one knew his wife Margaret very well, though it was common knowledge that she had a job in Oxford and took quite a bit of trouble over her clothes and her personal appearance. There were two handwritten letters from Bowman in the personnel file: one dating back to his first application to join the PO; the second concerning itself with his options under the PO pension provisions. Clearly there had been little or no calligraphic variance in Bowman's penmanship over the years, and here seemed further evidence — if any were required — that the letter Margaret Bowman had produced from her handbag that morning was genuinely in her husband's hand. Mr. Jeacock, the co-operative and neatly competent postmaster, could tell them little more; but, yes, he was perfectly happy for one of Bowman's colleagues to follow the police officers down into Oxford to look at the unidentified body.
'Let's hope to God it's not Tom!' he said as Morse and Lewis got up and left his small office.
'I honestly don't think you need to worry about that, sir,' said Morse.
As always, the cars coming up in the immediate rear had all decelerated to the statutory speed limit; and by the time the police car reached the dual carriageway just after Blenheim Palace, with Mr. Frederick Norris, sorter of Her Majesty's mail in Chipping Norton, immediately behind, there was an enormous tailback of vehicles. Morse, who had told Lewis to take things quietly, sat silent throughout the return journey, and Lewis too held his peace. At the bottom of the Woodstock Road he turned right into a narrow road at the Radcliffe Infirmary and stopped on an 'Ambulances Only' parking lot outside the mortuary to which the body found in the Haworth annexe had now been transferred. Norris got out of the car that pulled up behind them.
'You coming, sir?' asked Lewis.
But Morse shook his head.
Fred Norris stood stock-still for a few seconds, and then — somewhat to Lewis's bewilderment — nodded slowly, his own pallor only a degree less ghastly than the skin that backed the livid bruising of the murdered man's features. No words were spoken; but as the mortuary attendant replaced the white sheet, Lewis put a kindly, understanding hand on Norris's shoulder, and then gently urged him out of the grim building into the bright January air.
An ambulance had pulled in just ahead of the police car, and Lewis, as he stood fixing a time with Norris for an official statement, saw the ambulance driver unhurriedly get out and speak to one of the porters at the Accident entrance. From the general lack of urgency, Lewis gathered that the man was probably delivering some fussy octogenarian for her weekly dose of physiotherapy. But the back doors were suddenly opened to reveal the body of a woman covered in a red blanket, with only the shoeless stockinged feet protruding. Lewis's throat was dry as he walked past the police car, and saw Morse (the latter still unaware of the dramatic news that Lewis was about to impart) point to the back of the ambulance.
'Who is she?' asked Lewis as the two ambulance men prepared to fix the runners for the stretcher.
'Are you. .?' The driver jerked his thumb towards the police car.