"Dexter, Colin - Inspector Morse 11 - Morse's Greatest Mystery and Other Stories (b)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dexter Colin)

Evans settled himself comfortably on the back seat, and grinned happily.

"Nothin', really. I just 'appened to notice that you've got some O-level Italian classes comin' up next September, that's all."

"Perhaps you won't be with us next September, Evans."

James Roderick Evans appeared to ponder the Governor's words deeply.

"No.-P'r'aps I won't," he said.

As the prison van turned right from Chipping Norton on to the Oxford road, the hitherto silent prison officer unlocked the handcuffs and leaned forward towards the driver.

"For Christ's sake get a move on! It won't take 'em long to find out ' "Where do ye suggest we make for?" asked the driver, in a broad Scots accent.

"What about Newbury?" suggested Evans.

"Why," said the Dodo, 'the best way to explain it is to do it." (And as you might like to try the thing yourself, some winter day, I will tell you how the Dodo managed it.) (Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland) DEAD AS A DODO It was more from necessity than from kindliness, just after 5 p.m. on a rain-soaked evening in early February 1990, that Chief Inspector Morse of the Thames Valley Police leaned over and opened the Jaguar's near-side door. One of his neighbours from the North Oxford bachelor flats was standing at the bus stop, was getting very wet and was staring hard at him.

"Most kind!" said Philip Wise, inserting his kyphotic self into the passenger seat.

Morse grunted a vague acknowledgement as the car made a few further slow yards up the Banbury Road in the red-tail-lighted queue, his wipers clearing short-lived swaths across the screen. Only three-quarters of a mile to go, but at this time of day twenty minutes would be par for the progressively paralytic crawl to the flats. Never an easy conversationalist himself indeed, known occasionally to lapse into total aphasia when driving a car Morse was glad that Wise was doing all the talking.

"Something quite extraordinary's happened to me," said the man in the dripping mackintosh.

In retrospect, Morse was aware that he'd listened, at least initially, with no more than polite passivity. But listen he had done.

Philip Wise had gone up to Exeter College, Oxford, in October 1938; and in due course his linguistic abilities (particularly in German) had ensured for him, when war broke out a year later, a cushy little job in an Intelligence Unit housed on the outskirts of Bicester. For two years he had lived there in a disagreeable and draughty Nissen-hut; and when the chance came of his taking digs back in Oxford, he'd jumped at it. Thus it was that in October 1941 he had moved into Crozier Road, a sunless thoroughfare just off the west of St. Giles'; and it was there that he'd first met Miss Dodo Whitaker ("Only the one "t", Inspector') who had a tiny top-floor bed sitter immediately above his own room in the grimy four-storey property that stood at number 14.

Why on earth she'd been saddled with a name like "Dodo', he'd never discovered nor enquired; but she was certainly a considerably livelier specimen than the defunct Didus inept us of Mauritius. Although physically hardly warranting any second glance, especially in the wartime "Utility' boiler-suit she almost invariably wore, she had the inestimable merit of being interesting. And sometimes, over half a glass of mild beer in the ill-lit bar at the rear of the Bird and Baby, her wonted nervousness would disappear, and in her rather deep, husky voice she would talk with knowledge, volubility, and wit, about the class-structure, about the progress of the war and about music. Yes, above all about music. The pair of them had joined the Record Library, thereafter spending a few candle-lit evenings together in Dodo's room listening to everything from Vivaldi to Wagner. On one occasion, Wise had almost been on the verge of telling her of the Platonic-plus pleasure he was beginning to experience in her company.

Almost.

Dodo had a brother called Ambrose who now and then managed to get a weekend leave-pass and come to stay with Dodo, usually (though quite unofficially) sleeping on the floor of her single room. Almost immediately, Philip Wise and Ambrose Whitaker became firm friends, spending (somewhat to Dodo's annoyance) rather too many hours together drinking whisky a commodity plentiful enough, if over-priced, in the Bird and Baby, but a rare one in the wilds of Bodmin, where Ambrose, with two stripes on each arm, spent his days initiating recruits into the mysteries of antiquated artillery pieces. He was a winsome, albeit somewhat raffish, sort of fellow whose attraction to alcohol apparently eclipsed even his love of music (Dodo spoke of Ambrose, amongst other things, as a virtuoso on the piano). Those weekends had flashed by, with Wise far too soon finding himself walking across Gloucester Green to see his friend off at the Great Western station late on Sunday afternoons.

Brother and sister what an engaging couple they were!

Rich, too at least their parents were.

Dodo, in particular, made no secret of her parents' extremely comfortable lifestyle, which Wise himself had once (and only once) experienced at first hand, when Dodo had suggested on his having to spend a week in Bristol in February 1942 that he stayed with them; had even loaned him a key to the family mansion in case they were out when he arrived. Wise had already known that Dodo's parents lived in Bristol, since he'd noticed the post-mark on the letter (doubtless from Mummy) that lay each week on the un dusted mahogany table in the small entrance hall of number 14 her name in the address, incidentally, always prefixed by the letter "A'. Alice? Angela? Anne? Audrey?

Wise had never been told and, again, had never enquired. But that little fact was something else he'd known earlier, too, since he was with her when, with a practised flourish of those slim and sinewy fingers, she'd signed her membership card at the Record Library. As for the parents, they turned out to be a straightlaced, tight-faced pair who remained frigidly reserved towards their guest throughout his short stay, and who appeared less than effusively appreciative of Dodo and almost embarrassingly dismissive of Ambrose. Oddly, Wise had not found a single fond memento of their talented offspring in the Whitakers' gauntly luxurious villa, and not a single family photograph to grace the daily-dusted mantelpieces.

It was three weeks after his return from this ill-starred visit that Dodo left Oxford, her wartime work (something hush hush it was understood) necessitating a move to Cheltenham. Only about forty miles away and she'd keep in touch, she said.

But she hadn't.

"Forty-eight years ago, this was, Inspector. Forty-eight! I was twenty-three myself, and she must have been about the same. Year or two older, perhaps I'm not sure. You see, I never even asked her how old she was. Pretty spineless specimen, wasn't I?"

In the darkness, Morse nodded his silent assent, and the Jaguar finally turned into the Residents Only parking area.