Free Death Is Now My Neighbour by Colin Dexter Page B

I?'
    The great cooling-towers of Didcot power-station loomed into view on the left, and for a while little more was said as the two of diem conti nued the drive south along the A34, before turning off, just before the Ridge-way, towards the charming little village of West Ilsley.
    ‘I feel I'm letting poor old Denis down a bit,' he said, as the dark blue Daimler pulled up in front of the village pub.
    'Don't you think I do?' she snapped. 'But I don't keep on about it.'
    At the bar, he ordered a dry white wine for Shelly Cornford and a pint o f Old Speckled Hen for himself; and the pair of them studied the Egon Ronay menu chalked up on a blackboard before making their choices, and sitting down at a window-table overlooking the sodden village green.
    'Do you think we should stop meeting?' He asked it qui etly .
    She appeared to consider the question more as an exercise in logical evaluation than as any emotional dilemma.
    'I don't want that to happen.'
    She brushed the back of her right wrist down the front of his dark grey suit.
    'Pity we've ordered lunch,' he said qui etly . 'We can always give it a miss.' 'Where shall we go?'
    'Before we go anywhere, I shall want you to do something for me.'
    "You mean something for Denis?' She nodded decisively.
    'I can't really promise you too much, you know that.'
    She looked swi ftly around the tables there, befor e moving her lips to his ear. 'I can, though. I can promise you everything, Clixby,' she whispered.
    From his room in College, Denis Cornford had rung Shelly briefly just before 11 a.m. She'd be out later, as she'd mentioned, but he wanted to tell her about the College Meeting as soon as possible. He told her.
    He was pleased - she could sense that.
    She was pleased - he could sense that Cornford had half an hour to spare before his next tutorial with a very bright fir st-year undergraduette from Notti ngham who possessed one of the most astonishingly retentive memories he had ever encountered, and a pair of the loveliest legs that had ever folded themselves opposite him. Yet he experienced not even the mildest of erotic day-dreams as now, briefly, he thought about her.
    He walked over to the White Horse, the narrow pub between the two Blackwell's shops just opposite the Sheldonian; and soon h e was sipping a large Glenmoran gie, and slowly coming to terms with the prospect that in a month's time he might well be the Master of Lonsdale College. By nature a diffident man, he was for some curious reason beginning to feel a little more confident about his chances. Life was a funny business - and the favourite often failed to win the Derby, did it not?
    Yes, odd things were likely to happen in life.
    Against all the odds, as it were.
    His black-stockinged student was sitting cross-legged on the wooden steps outside his room, getting to her feet as soon as she saw him. Being with Cornford, talking with him for an hour every week - that had become the highlight of her time at Oxford. But History was the great fascination in his life - not her.
    She knew that.
Chapter Sixteen
    Prosopagnoia (n.): the failure of any person to recognize the face of any other person, howsoever recently the aforementioned persons may have mingled in each other's company
    (Small's Enlarged English Dictionary, 13th Edition, 1806)
    From Oxford railway station, at 10.20 a.m., Lewis had tried to ring Morse at HQ. But to no avail. The dramatic news would have to wait awhile, and at least Lewis now had ample time to execute his second order of the day.
    There had been just the two of them at the Oxford Physiotherapy Centre - although 'Centre' seemed a rather grandiloquent description of the ground-floor premises of the large, detached red-brick house halfway down the Woodstock Road ('1901' showing on the black drainpipe): the small office, off the spacious foyer; the single treatment room, to the right, its two beds separated by mobile wooden screens; and an inappropriately luxurious loo, to the left.
    Rachel