Death Is Now My Neighbour (2 page)

In hypothetical sentences introduced by 'if and referring to past time, where conditions are deemed to be 'unfulfilled', the verb will regularly be found in the pluperfect subjunctive, in both protasis and apodosis

(Donet,
Principles of Elementary Latin Syntax)

It is perhaps
unusual to begin a tale of murder with a reminder to the reader of the rules governing conditional sentences in a language that is incontrovertibly dead. In the present case, however, such a course appears not wholly inappropriate.

If
(if)
Chief Inspector Morse had been on hand to observe the receptionist's dress - an irregularly triangled affair in blues, greys, and reds - he might have been reminded of the uniform issued to a British Airways stewardess. More probably, though, he might not, since he had never flown on British Airways. His only flight during the previous decade had occasioned so many fears concerning his personal survival that he had determined to restrict all future travel to those (statistically) far more precarious means of conveyance - the car, the coach, the train, and the steamer.

Yet almost certainly the Chief Inspector would have noted, with approval, the receptionist herself, for in Yorkshire she would have been reckoned a bonny lass: a vivacious, dark-eyed woman, long-legged and well figured; a woman - judging from her ringless, we
ll-manicured fingers - not overtl
y advertising any marital commitment, and not averse, perhaps, to the occasional overture from the occasional man.

Pinned at the top-left of her colourful dress was a name-tag: 'Dawn Charles'.

Unlike several of her friends (certainly unlike Morse) she was quite content with her Christian name. Sometimes she'd felt
slightly
dubious about it; but no longer. Out with some friends in the Bird and Baby the previous month, she'd been introduced to a rather dashing, rather dishy undergraduate from Pembroke College. And when, a
little
later, she'd found herself doodling inconsequentially on a Burton beer-mat, the young man, on observing her sinistrality, had initiated a wholly memorable conversation.

'Dawn? That wyour name?'

She'd nodded.

'Left-handed?'

She'd nodded.

'Do you know that line from Omar Khayyam? "Dreaming when Dawn's left hand was in the sky
..."
Lovely, isn't it?'

Yes, it was. Lovely.

She'd peeled the top off the beer-mat and made him write
it
down for her.

Then, very quietly, he'd asked her if he could see her again. At the start of the new term, perhaps?

She'd known it was silly, for there must have been at least twenty years difference in their ages. If only
...
if only he'd been ten, a dozen years older
...

But people
did
do silly things, and hoped their silly hopes. And that very day, 15 January, was the first full day of the new Hilary Term in the University of Oxford.

Her Monday-Friday job, 6-10 p.m., at the clinic on the Banbury Road (just north of St Giles') was really quite enjoyable. Over three years of it now, and she was becoming a fixture there. Most of the consultants greeted her with a genuine smile; several of them, these days, with her Christian name.

Nice.

She'd once stayed at a four-star hotel which offered a glass of sherry to incoming guests; and although the private Harvey Clinic was unwilling (perhaps on medical grounds?) to provide such laudable hospitality, Dawn ever kept two jugs of genuine coffee piping hot for her clients, most of them soberly suited and well-heeled gentlemen. A number of whom, as she well knew, were most seriously ill.

Yes, there had been several occasions when she had heard a few brief passages of conversation between consultant and client which she
shouldn't
have heard; or which, having heard, she should have forgotten; and which she should never have been willing to report to anyone.

Not even to the police.

Quite certainly not to the Press
...

As it happened,
15
January was to prove a day unusually easy for her to recall, since it marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the clinic's opening in
1971.
By prior negotiation and arrangement, the clinic was visited that evening, between 7 p.m. and 8.30 p.m., by Radio Oxford, by the local press, and by Mr Wesley Smith and his crew from the Central TV studios out at Abingdon. And particularly memorable for Dawn had been those precious moments when the camera had focused upon her: first, when (as instructed) she had poured a cup of genuine coffee for a wholly bogus 'client'; second, when the cameraman had moved behind her left shoulder as she ran a felt-tipped pen through a name on the appointments list in front of her - but only, of course, after a full assurance that no viewer would be able to read the name itself when the feature was shown the following evening.

Yet Dawn Charles was always to remember the name: Mr
.
J. C. Storrs.

It had been a fairly new name to her - another of those pati
ents, as Dawn suspected (correctl
y), whose influence and affluence afforded the necessary leverage and £ s d to jump the queues awaiting their calls to the hospitals up in Headington.

There was something else she would always remember, too
...

By one of those minor coincidences (so commonplace in Morse's life) it had been just as most of the personnel from the media were preparing to leave, at almost exa
ctly
8.30 p.m., that Mr Robert Turnbull, the Senior Cancer

Consultant, had passed her desk, nodded a greeting, and walked slowly to the exit, his right hand resting on the shoulder of Mr J. C. Storrs. The two men were talking quietly together for some while - Dawn was certain of that. But certain of little else. The look on the consultant's face, as far as she could recall, had been neither that of a judge who has just condemned a man to death, nor that of one just granting a prisoner his freedom.

No obvious grimness.

No obvious joy.

And indeed there was adequate cause for such uncertainty on Dawn's part, since the scene had been partially masked from her by the continued presence of several persons: a pony-tailed reporter scribbling a furious shorthand as he interviewed a nurse; the TV crew packing away its camera and tripods; the Lord Mayor speaking some congratulatory words into a Radio Oxford microphone - all of them standing between her and the top of the three blue-carpeted stairs which led down to the double-doored exit, outside which were affixed the vertical banks of well-polished brass plates, ten on each side, the fourth from the top on the left reading:

ROBERT H. TURNBULL

If only Dawn Charles could have recalled a little more.

'If - that
little
conjunction introducing those unfulfilled conditions in past time which, as Donet reminds us, demand the pluperfect subjunctive in both clauses -a syntactical rule which Morse himself had mastered early on in an education which had been far more fortunate than that enjoyed by the receptionist at the Harvey Clinic.

Indeed, over the next two weeks, most people in Oxford were destined to be considerably more fortunate than Dawn Charles: she received no communication from the poetry-lover of Pembroke; her mother was admitted to a psychiatric ward out at Littlemore; she was (twice) reminded by her bank manager of the increasing problems arising from the large margin of negative equity on her small flat; and finally, on Monday morning, 29 January, she was to hear on Fox FM Radio that her favourite consultant, Mr Robert H. Tumbull, MB, ChB, FRCS, had been fatally injured in a car accident on Cumnor Hill.

The Master shall not continue in his post beyond the age of sixty-seven. As a simple rule, therefore, the incumbent Master will be requested to give notice of impending retirement during the University term immediately prior to that birthday. Where, however, such an accommodation does not present-itself, the Master is required to propose a particular date not later than the end of the first week of the second full term after the statutory termination
(vide supra)

(Paragraph
2
(a), translated from the Latin, from the Founders' Statutes of Lonsdale College, Oxford)

Sir Clixby Bream
would be almost sixty-nine years old when he retired as Master of Lonsdale.
A
committee of Senior Fellows, including two eminent Latin scholars, had found itself unable to interpret the gobbledegook of the Founders' Statutes
(vide
supra);
and since no 'accommodation' (whatever that was) had presented itself, Sir Clixby had first been persuaded to stay on for a short while - then for a longer while. Yet this involved no hardship.

He was subject to none of the normal pressures about moving to somewhere nearer the children or the grandchildren, since his marriage to Lady Muriel had been
sine prole.
Moreover, he was blessedly free from the usual uxorial bleatings about a nice
little
thatched cottage in Dorset or Devon, since Lady Muriel had been in her grave these past three years.

The positi
on of Head of House at any of the Oxbridge Colleges was just
about the acme of academic ambiti
on; and since three of the last four Masters had been knighted within ei
ghteen months of their appointm
ents,
it
had been natural for him to be attracted by the opportunity of such pleasing preferment. And he
had
been so attracted; as, even more sorongly, had the late Lady Muriel.

Indeed, the incumbent Master, a distinguished mathematician in his earlier days, had never enjoyed living anywhere as much as in Oxford - ten years of it now. He'd learned to love the old city more and more the longer he was there:
it
was as simple as that. Of course he was somewhat saddened by the thought of his imminent retirement: he would miss the College - miss the challenges of running
the
place - and he knew that the sight of the furniture van outside the wisteria-clad front of the Master's Lodge would occasion some aching regret. But there were a few unexpected consolations, perhaps. In particular, he would be able (he supposed) to sit back and survey with a degree of detachment and sardonic amusement
the in-fighting that would doubtl
ess arise among his potential successors.

It was the duty of
the Fellows' Appointments Com
mittee (its legality long established by one of the more readily comprehensible of the College Statutes) to stipulate three conditions for those seeking election as Master: first, that any candidate should be 'of sound mind and in good health'; second, that the candidate should 'not have taken Holy Orders'; third, that the candidate should have no criminal record within 'the territories administered under the governance of His (or Her) Most Glorious Majesty'.

Such stipulations had often amused the present Master.

If one judged by the longevity of almost all the Masters appointed during the twentieth century, physical well-being had seldom posed much of a problem; yet mental stability had never been a particularly prominent feature of his immediate predecessor, nor (by all accounts) of his predecessor's predecessor. And occasionally Sir Clixby wondered what the College would say of himself once he was gone
...
With regard to the exclusion of the clergy, he assumed that the Founders (like Edward Gibbon three centuries later) had managed to trace the source of all human wickedness back to the Popes and the Prelates, and had rallied to the cause of anticlerical-ism
...
But it was the possibility of the candidate's criminality which was the most amusing. Presumably any convictions for murder, rape, sodomy, treason, or similar misdemeanours, were to be discounted if sh
own to have taken place outside
the jurisdiction of His (or Her) Most Glorious Majesty. Very strange.

Strangest of all, however, was the absence of any mention in the origina
l Statute of academic pedigree;
and, at least theoretically, there could be no bar to a candidate presenting himself with only a Grade E in GCSE Media Studies. Nor was there any stipulation that the successful candidate should be a senior (or, for that matter, a junior) member of the College, and on several occasions 'outsiders' had been appointed. Indeed, he himself, Sir Clixby, had been imported into Oxford from 'the other place', and then (chiefly) in recognition of his reputation as a resourceful fund-raiser.

On this occasion, however, outsiders seemed out of favour. The College itself could offer at least two candidates, each of whom would be an admirable choice; or so
it
was thought In the Senior Common Room the consensus was most decidedly in favour of such 'internal' preferment, and the betting had hardened accordingly.

By some curious omission no entry had hitherto been granted to either of these ante-post favourites in the pages of
Who's Who.
From which one may be forgiven for concluding that the aforesaid work is rather more concerned with the third cousins of secondary aristocrats than with eminent academics. Happily, however, both of these personages had been considered worthy of mention in Debrett's
People of Today
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