Chapter Text
Morse listened to the radio as he dressed. The old wireless set had been cheap and its reception was poor; even the strongest stations came through with a background of rustling static. International news filtered in: America, West Berlin, Vietnam. Then the local happenings – a new factory opening in Cowley, a local victory in the rowing regatta, a murder.
Morse looked up, fingers stilling on smooth silk. A local woman had been found strangled, a handkerchief in her mouth. His fingers traced the tight noose of his tie and he scowled, then tightened it and switched off the set.
He’d always had far too much imagination.
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The warm weather was lasting well into October this year; Morse met it thankfully – there was no extra money in his budget for a proper winter coat or gloves, and the car coat provided little shelter against strong frosts and biting winds.
The cane skittered over the pavement as he walked from the bus to the George Street office, the sound of its passing a quiet noise like the whickering of a flagpole’s wire against the metal pole. News of the local woman’s murder had already made it into the papers; even over the traffic he could hear the hawkers calling the headlines from across the street by the station. Oxford didn’t stop, not for one murder.
He made it into the office just as the raised hands on his watch told him it was 8:15, to be met by Mrs Thrumming’s gruff, “Good morning.” He returned it more pleasantly. He had no paucity of experience in dealing with disapproving matrons, and he had realised some time ago he would likely never live down offering the Resource office’s braille printer at no cost to the local operatic society to print a few of their brochures.
“Hullo, Morse.” A young, bright voice and a hint of peppermint. Chewing gum, indulged only when Mrs Thrumming was absent.
He smiled and dipped his head. “Miss Mann.”
“We’ve just had the latest edition of Merton’s exam papers in; they’re locked in your desk.”
“Thank you; I’ll see to them right away.”
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Usually while he worked he listened to BBC 3 on one of the office’s small transistors. But the news today was shot through with the leading local story: woman strangled.
Inspector Thursday had refused to give the details of Rosalind Calloway’s death, but the papers hadn’t been so kind. Prima Donna Hangs in Cowley Cells, according to Miss Mann, who had read him the story.
There wasn’t any connection between the two deaths – how could there be? But when he heard woman, strangled only one thought came to mind: Rosalind Calloway’s throat being crushed by her bedsheets, her beautiful voice silenced forever.
Morse went home the long way that evening, skirting the newspaper sellers and newsstands.
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He almost didn’t turn on the radio the next morning, but the idea of giving into his own imagination was too much; he turned the dial defiantly and pulled his suit from its hanger.
Unsurprisingly, there were more updates on the strangling. The victim was Evelyn Balfour, a local wife and mother who worked at a bingo hall. And, sensationally, an anonymous tip had reported the discovery of a message chalked on the door of the empty train cargo coach where she had been found. Un bacio ancora.
Morse straightened, turning towards the radio which was now translating the Italian for the audience, “One kiss more.” BBC refused to speculate on what this meant, but just reporting it would be enough to feed the frenzy: crime of passion, foreign lover, Mafia connection. Any number of possibilities presented themselves.
Morse, however, stopped by the cabinet holding his records on the way to the door. Brushed his fingers over the smooth surface, feeling the grain of the cheap wood. Even with the braille titles he had clipped onto the sleeves it would take more time than he had to find Otello.
And anyway, it had to be a coincidence. Surely.
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The day passed uneventfully, as most did. More gruff from Mrs Thrumming, more sympathy from the office girls. Morse worked in silence again; he had no interest in the radio’s puerile suggestions and insinuations.
He didn’t go out of his way that evening to avoid it, though, which is why he heard of the second death before the following morning. The newspapers were reporting it as possibly suspicious, police hedging their bets. An aged lady found dead in her home after a visit from a mysterious gentleman.
By the next morning, the news was positively singing. A second message, Ici, loin du monde réel had been found and the tone for the murders set: Local women murdered by foreign gang.
Morse turned off his radio in disgust, the cuff of his sleeve popping open. A cufflink fell with a tinny clatter and he cursed, stooping and searching for it, hands brushing over the flat’s uneven floorboards.
A couple of minutes later he still hadn’t found it, and he was near to missing his bus. Caught up in a whirlwind of irritation and ire he grabbed his second pair from the dressing table, dropped them into his pocket, caught up his jacket and coat and ran out of the flat.
It was only when he was sitting on the bus, cane collapsed at his side, that he remembered the radio broadcast. Ici, loin du monde réel. It was from Lakme, he was sure of it. Far surer than he could be of its implications.
He got into the office a few seconds before 8:15, ignoring Mrs Thrumming’s cold greeting, and hurried into his room. He had flipped through his rolodex to the card with Inspector Thursday’s name and number printed on it which he himself had punched by hand when the office had been slow.
Only when he had that reassurance in his hands did he slow to really think. What could he possibly tell the man – and more to the point how much would Thursday, who struck him as quick-witted but with his feet very firmly on the ground, care to hear?
He tucked the card slowly away and started his work, turning back thoughtfully to it every now and then when his mind wandered from the proofing.
It wasn’t until his lunch hour that he made the call.
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“Thursday.” The voice on the other end of the line was terse, word bitten out through a tight jaw. Morse drew a long line across the top of his desk with his fingertip, the cool smoothness of the wood reassuring. There was a faint coat of dust gathering; the char lady cutting corners again. It wasn’t unusual; most people assumed he wouldn’t notice a little extra untidiness. In fact, he noticed it more acutely.
“Inspector? It’s Morse. I’m not sure if you remember, but –”
“Of course I do,” interrupted Thursday, tone taking on a slightly more genial leaning. “What can I do for you?”
“It’s about these deaths. I heard on the radio about the two women found with notes; Un bacio ancora; ici, loin du monde réel.”
Thursday made a low sound of agreement, and Morse continued, more hesitantly now.
“I just thought… it might be useful for you to know. Both the lines are from operas. The first from Otello, the second from Lakme. I don’t know how the second woman died, but they reported the first was strangled with a handkerchief in her mouth. In the opera, Otello strangles his wife Desdemona, believing her to have given a handkerchief to another man.”
There was a moment of silence, Morse’s nail skating along the edge of the desk. Then: “Desdemona, you said?”
“Yes, sir,” replied Morse, politely.
“And the other opera you mentioned – is there a murder in that?”
“A suicide. The main character is an Indian princess who kills herself by eating the leaves of the Datura plant.”
He could hear Thursday’s fingers tapping on the desk, a thoughtful tattoo. “I think I’d like to know more. Can you come in?”
Morse frowned. “I might manage it briefly; I’m on my lunch hour.”
“I’ll send a car for you.”
Morse had a brief image of Mrs Thrumming’s reaction returning to the office to find he had been escorted away by a policeman; he shuddered delicately. “I’ll be waiting on the kerb.”
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The man who came to pick him up was called Strange; it hardly fitted him – he seemed very much the average copper. A little slow, a little tongue-tied, and much too fast a driver. Morse swayed from one side of the car to the other as they shot through traffic, Strange apparently doing his utmost to shave seconds off the journey.
The station was an old stone building; he could hear it in the echoes that rang down the narrow corridors. It teemed with life; coppers hurrying through the halls, visitors arguing and pleading, even a dog trotting on clacking nails. The sort of place that could strangle a man with its vivaciousness. Morse let Strange guide him, his hand on the PC’s shoulder.
Upstairs the offices smelt of smoke, boot polish, chalk and papers. He was led through a large room full of men and typewriters and phones to the Inspector’s door.
“Come,” called Thursday in response to the constable’s knock and Morse pulled free and advanced on his own.
It was always uncertain, entering somewhere for the second or third time. After a few more visits he would have an accurate sense of the space, know if the furniture was regularly moved and whether Thursday was the type to unreliably leave things about to trip on. But now he had only his memory of the room’s proportions from his one other visit. A pair of chairs four steps in, and beyond them the Inspector’s desk.
He found the chairs easily, the laminate floor between them and the door clear, and seated himself. Behind him the door closed, and the racket beyond became just a background murmur.
“I appreciate your coming,” began Thursday. “I know you don’t have long, so I’ll get down to brass tacks. What you heard on the radio is true; what we’re not releasing is that the second victim was poisoned, and the pathologist is of a mind to suspect a mixture including Datura.”
Morse felt a shiver run down his spine. “Then it is related. To the operas, I mean.”
“Mad though it sounds, it’s the best clue we have so far. We wouldn’t be liable to tie them together otherwise. As theories go it’s incredible, but it has the beginnings of a disturbing kind of pattern to it.” Thursday leant forward on his desk, the wood creaking. He had a musky scent: pipe tobacco and aftershave. “Tell me a bit more about these operas.”
Morse did. Sketched out the plots of Otello and Lakme for the Inspector in a few quick sentences.
“And have these been performed in Oxford recently?”
“Not to my knowledge. We had Tosca and the Barber of Seville last year. The year before that was Tristan Und Isolde and Norma. But they may have been on in London.” London, where there would be thousands and thousands of patrons to search through. He heard Thursday sigh. “Anything else that connects them?”
Morse ran his fingers down the line of his chin, considering. “Well, they’re both love stories which end unhappily. But the same could be said for many – most operas, really.”
There was a knock on the door; Morse turned slightly to half-face it. A throat was cleared, and then a thin reedy voice said, “Thursday, do you have a moment?”
Two men entered the room; the air currents shifted and he heard their footsteps. One smelled of expensive cigarettes, the other… Morse frowned. Not a smoker, nor wearing heavy scent. Just a more subtle hint of something faintly sweet. A tickle of honey? No – he caught his lip between his teeth to stop himself shaking his head. Something else.
“Excuse me please,” said Thursday, passing him; in the doorway he heard a Dr Daniel Cronyn being introduced. A psychiatrist who took an interest in such killings and was volunteering his services.
Thursday received the introduction politely. “Thank you, sir. As a matter of fact I’ve my own expert. Mr Morse helped us with the Mary Tremlett case, and he’s come forward with some information you might like to hear.”
Morse, so introduced, stood and turned, producing his hand to shake and letting the two men take it. They were introduced to him as Bright – a thin weak hand belonging to the reedy voice – and Cronyn – a very strong grip and a scent like treacle. Morse frowned; no, still not quite right.
“What information is that?” asked Bright, sounding impetuous. He was a short man; Morse pictured a little bantam, strutting about the yard for all the world king of his farm.
“There’s a chance these deaths are connected by operas, sir, or at least dressed up to appear so. Morse?”
Morse licked his lips and spoke. Explained the strangling and the handkerchief, the poisoning and the Datura. Afterwards there was only silence. And then,
“A novel theory, surely,” picked out Bright in a tone laced with scepticism.
“Fits the facts, sir,” said Thursday, stoutly.
“So does a Don from a languages department, but we have not turned over those faculties,” retorted Bright. He, at least, hadn’t realised Morse’s shortcoming. The treatment of men like Bright was always different, once the secret was out. They placated Morse like a child, as though his condition conferred imbecility.
“Perhaps Dr Cronyn could give us his opinion.” Thursday redirected the conversation smoothly, and Morse turned to the man who had until now remained silent.
“The perpetrator of these crimes clearly exhibits a profoundly disturbed psyche,” began the psychiatrist.
Morse snorted and Cronyn went on, a little more defensively, “But what might be less obvious to you is that he will also be high-functioning which, I regret to say, will make him very difficult to apprehend.”
“But not impossible,” said Thursday.
“Thankfully such cases are rare,” was Cronyn’s reply. “But gentlemen, you’re confronting a mind unconstrained by regret, right and wrong, good and evil. So far as he’s concerned, we’re just prey. Kine, reared to slaughter.”
The man irked him, Morse decided. Something in his tone spoke, not of respect but of a belief that this man was beyond them, an undefeatable foe.
“He will be caught,” said Morse, low and sure.
“How?” There was almost a hint of laughter in the doctor’s voice, or perhaps it was just disbelief. “Unless you catch him red-handed over another corpse, there is hardly anything to go on.”
Morse set his chin, frowning in the face of near-mockery. “Isn’t that why we’re here?”
There was a pause. Then Bright broke in with facile politeness. “Thank you, gentlemen. Perhaps, Dr Cronyn, you would care to address the men?”
Their footsteps faded and Morse turned to Thursday, scowling. “Are such men really of use?”
“We can’t all count on bright lads to show up with the solution to our problems,” said Thursday, lightly. “Will you stay to hear him out?”
“No. I have to get back. You know where I am; if there’s anything more I can help with…” he left the invitation open-ended.
“I’ll have Constable Strange take you back.”
Strange appeared a moment later and the two of them slipped out of the back of the forming crowd, Cronyn and Bright conferring on the opposite side of the room.
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Morse was working on the proofs for a translation of Plato’s Laches when he heard Mrs Thrumming’s tart voice raised in ire, accompanied by a softer, soothing tone. Then heavy steps on the floor, and a knock at his door. “Mr Morse?”
Constable Strange. Here, in the office. Morse resisted the urge to bury his head in his hands; Mrs Thrumming would make his life hell for this. “Yes?” he said instead, his voice sounding pinched to his ears.
“Inspector Thursday sent for you, sir. Says there’s something he needs you to look at. Urgent-like.”
Morse ran his thumb over his watch; just past two. He could make up the time tomorrow. “Very well, if it’s urgent.” He shut his drawers, locked them and pocketed the key, and stood. Retrieved his coat and cane. “Lead on, Constable.”
He could hear Mrs Thrumming’s terse breathing as he passed his desk, and kept his face perfectly plain. “Mrs Thrumming.” She didn’t answer him.
Outside a car was waiting; he got in and the constable started the engine. A strong, responsive roar. “What does the Inspector want?”
“He’s out looking for a missing suspect, sir. Found something he thought you could help with in his house.”
“You think him connected to the other two murders?”
“Not for me to say, sir.”
Morse rested his chin in his hand. “I see.”
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They drove a fair way, out of the city’s crawling traffic and petrol fumes to the country – quiet, rough roads and the smell of dirt and muck. They came eventually to stop somewhere deserted and silent; Morse could tell that even from inside the car. “Where is this?” he asked tensely, hand resting on the door’s armrest. He had hardly left Oxford since losing his sight, and then only to go home. In town there was always someone to give directions, always the kerb to follow and buildings to act as anchors.
Here, out in the country, there was nothing but dark emptiness. Once lost he would have no hope of finding himself again.
“Looks to be some sort of work yard. There’s all sorts of machinery – grinders, a pump, a cement mixer. The sign says Pet Food Purveyor; I suppose it’s a slaughter yard.”
Morse shivered. He’d been brought out alone to the middle of God knows where, and his destination turned out to be a slaughter yard. He opened the door, grip tight and chilled on the handle, and forced himself out. The sun was shining on his face but the breeze carried the smells of damp sawdust and animal muck; a visceral, base mixture.
The constable led him through the yard and into a house – he didn’t need Strange to tell him the place was abandoned. There was a scented fug of mould and must and rotten food, and under it something odder – a cold, dusty kind of smell. Morse frowned.
He was led down a set of narrow stairs and into an unfinished basement; the walls radiated the cool of the earth. Here the smell was stronger and he could recognize it now – cement.
“Morse,” called Thursday, his voice echoing slightly in the basement’s cavernous interior. “Over here.”
He was led to the Inspector, and a second man smoking a cigarette. “Thank you for coming. This farm belongs to Mr Nimmo – the man who was to meet the second victim at the time of her death. He’s nowhere to be found, but there’s a turntable here with a record – Aida, it says. It was playing when we turned on the breaker down here.” There was a pause, and then the crackle of a record playing. It picked up mid-aria, and it took Morse only a few seconds to recognize it. He felt his chest tighten, throat starting to close.
Morse gave a sharp wave of his hand, the music falling silent. He licked his dry lips, and croaked out his words. “As you say, it’s from Aida. The last thing Ramades sings, before he’s interred alive.”
“Then there’s another murder we haven’t discovered yet.”
Morse turned his head, the dark confines of the basement a mystery to him; it was no more than endless black, lending no sense of proportions or shape. “I think I may know where. There was a cement mixer in the yard, the constable said. And down here, the smell of concrete. Is there…”
“A new brick wall,” finished Thursday grimly. “There,” he added, utterly unhelpfully. “Sergeant, fetch that mallet.”
The smoker disappeared further into the basement, and then there was the tap-tap-tap of the mallet against bricks. Hard and first, then more carefully so as not to take down the wall on whatever lay inside. After a moment it stopped all together, just the quiet scrabble of brick against mortar.
“Hellfire,” breathed someone, with a disturbed kind of reverence.
“Call it in,” said Thursday, returning to his side. “I’m afraid you’ll have to stay here a while longer,” he added, taking Morse’s arm and leading him away from the newly-opened tomb. He could smell it, the reek of rotting flesh seeping out through the new hole; it turned his stomach. He tried to focus on Thursday’s hand on his sleeve, on the cool air on his face, on anything but the smell. “Morse, there’s something else,” announced Thursday, as though the discovery of one body had not been bad enough.
Morse stiffened. “What?”
Thursday came to a stop a few yards away. “There’s a wall here – tickets, programmes, newspaper articles all pinned up. And your name, cut out of newspaper headlines.”
“My name?” His throat felt dry as the Sahara, rough and grainy.
“MORSE, it says, all glued together. Is there anyone you know – from your choir, or…?”
He shook his head vehemently. “No. No. No one who could do this. Why would this maniac care about me? It makes no sense.”
“It does to him,” said Thursday, grimly.
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With all the men caught up in the discovery of the body, there was no one to take Morse back to Oxford. He stayed in a quiet corner of the basement, feeling forgotten and unwanted. A host of new arrivals trotted through: the coroner’s men, forensic scene men, photographers, and the pathologist. The doctor was a fussy little man with an educated voice who spoke with curt assurance regardless of his audience. He postulated the death was due to thirst, having been walled up alive and left to die. Morse’s mind sprang to The Cask of Amontillado and he shuddered.
He already hated this house, but now he was coming to fear it. The smell of dry crumbled cement and mould and decomposition, the cold air that had been the last breaths of a dying man. The darkness which no longer meant anything to him seemed suddenly hyper-present, to be closing in on him; he shuddered and pressed himself up against the cool stone wall.
“Mr Morse, isn’t it?”
Morse turned, heart leaping in his chest; he hadn’t heard the footsteps approaching. The voice was familiar, and as the rush of shock faded he frowned. “Dr Cronyn?”
“Yes. Mr Bright asked me along for my opinion. I was just about to speak to the others. But I would value your insights?”
Morse crossed his arms over his chest. “I have none; the man must be mad. Why turn something beautiful into something so perverse?”
“But all the operas you believe related to this case are stories of loss and death, aren’t they? The celebration and decoration of violence, death, murder. Perhaps he seeks to turn his deeds into something more than simple killings?”
Morse drew back, simultaneously surprised and offended by the allegation. “Opera is opera, murder is murder. You can’t dress one up in fancy clothes to turn it into the other. Do you mean to suggest he thinks he’s… creating? Making something beautiful, something great?” He found the notion revolting, and frightening. For a man to be mad enough to believe that were possible…
“Possibly. I’ve been thinking, since your suggestions earlier today. I once knew a young man who had killed his mother; deeply disturbed, although his case was hushed up. He was a musical prodigy, obsessed with operas and operettas. Keith Miller, his name was. He was an Oxford boy, as I recall. If this were his doing, I believe him capable of reading a deeper meaning into these deaths.”
“That the victims were a wronged wife? A princess? A soldier?” asked Morse, sarcastic in his dismissal.
“Or perhaps Miller – or the killer – sees himself taking the role of honour. They all died to maintain it, didn’t they?”
Morse took a slow, uneasy breath. This man, his theories. They seemed laughable, but he spoke with such quiet conviction – as though he believed them himself. As though he understood them. From across the room someone hailed the doctor, and he heard Cronyn turn. “We should speak again,” he said, stepping away. Morse listened to him disappear into the darkness, and realised he was sweating.