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Catharine Edgeley was busy writing an essay on the irony to be found in Jane Austen's novels, and she was enjoying her work. There was little room in her mind for a dead woman whom she had met only twice, and of whom she could form only the vaguest visual recollection. She'd rather liked the policeman, though. Quite dishy, really-well, he would have been when he was fifteen or twenty years younger.
Gwendola Briggs sat reading Bridge Monthly: one or two pretty problems, she thought. She re-read an article on a new American bidding system, and felt happy. Only just over half an hour and the bridge players would be arriving. She'd almost forgotten A
Mrs. Murdoch was another person that evening for whom A
Charles Richards was not thinking of A
It was only as he sat in a lonely corner of his local that evening that Morse's mind reverted to the death of A
Only Mrs. Scott, now back in her semi-detached house in Burnley, grieved ever for her daughter and could not be comforted, her eyes once more brimming with tears as she struggled to understand what could have happened and-most bitter thought of all-how she herself could surely have helped if only she had known. If only… if only…
Chapter Sixteen
The lads for the girls and the lads for the liquor are there.
– A. E. Housman, A Shropshire Lad
After declining the Master of Lonsdale's invitation to lunch, Morse walked from the Mitre along the graceful curve of the High up to Carfax. He had turned right into Cornmarket and was crossing over the road towards Woolworths when he thought he recognised someone walking about fifteen yards ahead of him-someone carrying a brown brief-case, and dressed in grey fla
The bar to his right was crowded with about forty or fifty men, most of them appearing to be in their early twenties and almost all of them dressed in denims and dark-coloured anoraks. But clearly Edward was no stranger here. He walked through a wide porch-way into the rear bar-a more sedate area with upholstered wall-seats and low tables where a few older men sat eating sausages and chips.
'A pint of bitter, please.'
Whether it was his upper-class accent, or the politeness of his request, or his somewhat youthful features, that caused the barmaid to glance at him-it made no difference. She pulled his pint, and the boy sauntered back to the main bar. Here, to his left, was a small dais, about one foot high and measuring some three yards by five, its dullish brown linoleum looking as if a group of Alpine mountaineers had walked across it in their crampons. Only a few chairs were set about the room, and clearly the clientele here was not the kind of sit quietly and discuss the Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle. And even had any wished to do so, such conversation would have been drowned instantly by the deafening blare of the jukebox. Edward sat on the edge of the dais, sipped his Worthington 'E', stared down at the red-and-black-patterned carpet-and waited. Most of the other men pulled fitfully and heavily upon their cigarettes, the smoke curling slowly to a ceiling already stained a deep tobacco-brown. These men were waiting, too.
Suddenly the blue and yellow spotlights were switched on, the jukebox switched off, and a buxom girl in a black cloak, who had hitherto been seated sipping gin in some dim alcove, stepped out on to the miniature stage. Like iron filings drawn towards a powerful magnet, fifty young men who a moment before had been lounging at the bar were now formed into a solid phalanx around the three sides of the dais.
At that second only one man in the room had his eyes on the large blackboard affixed to the whitewashed wall behind the dais-a blackboard whereon the management proudly proclaimed the programme for the week: go-go dancing every lunch time; live pop groups each evening; with 'Bar snacks always available' written in brackets at the bottom as an afterthought. But now a softer, more sensuous music filled the semi-subterranean vaults, and the girl billed as the 'Fabulous Fiona' was already unfastening the clasp at the top of her cloak. All eyes (without exception now) were riveted upon her as amateurishly but amiably enough she pranced about the floor, exhibiting a sequence of sequined garments, slowly divested and progressively piled on top of the cloak beneath the blackboard, until at last she was down to her panties and bra. A roar of approval greeted the doffing of this latter garment; but the former, its sequins glittering in the kaleidoscopic lights, remained staunchly in place, in spite of several quite unequivocal calls for its removal. She was a daring girl. With the palms of her hands supporting her weighty breasts, she paraded herself under the noses of several of the more proximate voyeurs-like a maiden holding up a pair of giant bowls in a ten-pin bowling alley. Then the record stopped, the synthetic smile was switched off, and with the cloak now covering all once more, the fabled girl retired to her alcove where she joined two bearded men whose functions in the proceedings had not been immediately apparent.