Death Is Now My Neighbour Read Online Free PDF Page B

Rattl e. And Richard Strauss, Four Last Songs - Jessye Norman. I've got several recordings by other sopranos, of course.'
    Of course ...
    Lewis nodded, and looked for a stamp.
    It was not infrequent for Lewis to be reminded of what he had lost in life; or rather, what he'd never had in the first place. The one Strauss he knew was the 'Blue D anube' man. And he'd only recentl y learned there were two of those, as well - Senior and Junior; and which was which he'd no idea.
    'Perhaps you'll be in for a bit of a let-down, sir. Some of these offers - they're not exa ctly up to what they promise.'
    You're an expert on these things?'
    'No ... but ... take Sergeant—' Lewis stopped himself in time. Just as well to leave a colleague's weakness cloaked in anonymity. 'Take this chap I know. He read this advert in one of the tabloids about a free video - sex video - sent in a brown envelope with no address to say where it had come from. You know, in case the wife ...'
    'No, I don't know, Lewis. But please continue.'
    'Well, he sent for one of the choices—'
    ' Copenhagen Red-Hot Sex?'
    'No. Housewives on the Job - that was the title; and he expected, you know
    Morse nodded. 'Housewives "on the job" with the milkman, the postman, the itinerant button-salesmen
    Lewis grinned. 'But it wasn't, no. It just showed all these fully dressed Swedish housewives washing up the plates and peeling the potatoes.'
    'Serves Sergeant Dixon right.'
    You won't mention it, sir!'
    'Of course I won't. And you're probably right. You never really get something for nothing in this life. I never seem to, anyway.'
    'Really, sir?'
    Morse licked the flap of the white envelope. Then licked the back of the first-class stamp that Lewis had just given him.
    The phone had been ringing for several seconds, and
    Lewis now took the call, listening briefly but carefully, before putting his hand over the mouthpiece:
    "There's been a murder, sir. On the doorstep, really -up in Bloxham Drive.'

PART TWO
Chapter Seven
    In addition to your loyal support on the ballot paper, we shall be grateful if you can agree to display the enclosed sticker in one of your windows
    (Extract from a 1994 local election leaflet distributed by the East Oxford Labour Party)
    It reminded Morse of something - that rear window of Number 17.
    As a young lad he'd been fascinated by a photograph in one of his junior school text -books of the apparatus frequentl y fixed round the necks of slaves in the southern states of America: an iron ring from whose circumference, at regular intervals, there emanated lengthy, fearsome spikes, also of iron. The caption, as Morse recalled, had maintained that such a device readily prevented any absconding cotton-picker from passing himself off as an enfranchised citizen.
    Morse had never really understood the caption.
    Nor indeed, for some considerable while, was he fully to understand the meaning of the neat bullet-hole in the centre of the shattered glass, and the cracks that radiated from it regularly, like a young child's crayoning the rays of the sun.
    Looking around him, Morse surveyed the area from the wobbly paving-slabs which formed a pathway at the rear of the row of terraced houses stretching along the northern side of Bloxham Drive, Kidlington, Oxfordshire. About half of the thirty-odd young trees originally planted in a staggered design beside and behind this path had been vandalized to varying degrees: some of them wholly extirpated; some cruelly snapped in the middle of their gradually firming stems; others, with many of their burgeoning branches torn off, standing wounded and forlorn amid the unkempt litter-strewn area, once planned by some Environmental Officer as a small addendum to England's green and pleasant land.
    Morse felt saddened.
    As did Sergeant Lewis, standing beside him.
    Yet it is appropriate here to enter one important qualification. Bloxham Drive, in the view of most of its residents, was showing some few signs of unmistakable improvement.