Colin Dexter - The Daughters of Cain (Inspector Morse 11)

C olin Dexter

The Daughters of Cain

For the staff of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, with my gratitude to them for their patient help.

Prolegomena

Wednesday, May 25, 1994

Natales grate numeras?

(Do you count your birthdays with gratitude?)

(Hog^cl, Epistles I1)

On Mondays to Fridays it was fifty-fifty whether the post-man called before Julia Stevens left for school.

So, at 8:15 A.M. on May 25 she lingered awhile at the dark blue front door of her two-bedroomed terraced house in East Oxford. No sign of her postman yet; but he'd be bringing something a bit later.

Occasionally she wondered whether she still felt just a little love for the ex-husband she'd sued for divorce eight years previously for reasons of manifold infidelity. Espe-cially had she so wondered when, exactly a year ago now, he'd sent her that card a large, tasteless, red-rosed affair--which in a sad sort of way had pleased her more than she'd wanted to admit. Particularly those few words he'd written inside: "Don't forget we had some good times too!"

If anyone, perhaps, shouldn't she tell him?

Then there was Brenda: dear, precious, indispensable Brenda. So there would certainly be one envelope lying on the "Welcome" doormat when she returned from school that afternoon.

Aged forty-six (today) the Titian-haired Julia Stevens would have been happier with life (though only a little) had she been able to tell herself that after nearly twenty-three years she was still enjoying her chosen profession. But she wasn't; and she knew that she would soon have packed it all in anyway, even if...

Even if...

But she put that thought to the back of her mind.

It wasn't so much the pupilsmher thirteen- to eighteen-year-olds though some of them would surely have ruffled the calm of a Mother Teresa. No. It wasn't that. It was the way the system was going: curriculum development, aims and objectives (whatever the difference between those was supposed to be!), assessment criteria, pastoral care, parent consultation, profiling, testing... God! When was there any time for teaching these days?

She'd made her own views clear, quite bravely so, at one of the staff meetings earlier that year. But the Head had paid little attention. Why should he? After all, he'd been appointed precisely because of his cocky conversance with curriculum development, alms and objectives and the rest.... A young, shining ideas-man, who during his brief spell of teaching (as rumour had it) would have experienced considerable difficulty in maintaining discipline even amongst the glorious company of the angels.

There was a sad little smile on Julia's pale face as she fished her Freedom Ticket from her handbag and stepped on to the red Oxford City double-decker.

Still, there was one good thing. No one at school knew of her birthday. Certainly, she trusted, none of the pupils did, although she sensed a slight reddening under her high cheekbones as just for a few seconds she contemplated her embarrassment if one of her classes broke out into "Happy Birthday, Mrs. Stevens!" She no longer had much confi-dence in the powers of the Almighty; but she almost felt herself praying.

But if she were going to target any prayer, she could surely so easily find a better aim (or was it an "objective"?) than averting a cacophonic chorus from 5C, for example. And in any case, 5C weren't all that bad, really; and she, Julia Stevens, mirabile dictu, was one of the few members of staff who could handle that motley and unruly crowd.

No. If she were going to pray for anything, it would be something that was of far greater importance.

Of far greater importance for herself...

As things turned out, her anxieties proved wholly grow less. She received no birthday greetings from a single s either in the staff-room or in any of the six classes taught that day.

Yet there was, in 5C, just the one pupil who knew h Stevens's bixthday. Knew it well, for it was the same as own: the twenty-fifth of May. Was it that strange coi dence that had caused them all the trouble?

Trouble? Oh, yes!

In the previous Sunday Mirror's horoscope colur Kevin Costyn had scanned his personal "Key to Desth with considerable interest: GEMINI Now that the lone planet voyages across your next ro-mance chart, you swop false hope for thrilling fact. Maximum mental energy helps you through to hard-to-reach person who is always close to yom heart. Play it cool.

"Maximum mental energy" had never been Kevi strong point. But if such mighty exertion were required win his way through to such a person, well, for once h put his mind to things. At the very least, it would be an: provement on the "brute-force-and-ignorance" appro; he'd employed on that earlier occasion--when he'd trie{ make amorous advances to one of his school-mistresse,, When he'd tried to rape Mrs. Julia Stevens.

Chaos ruled OK in the classroom as bravely the teacher walked in the havocwreakers ignored him his VOice was lost in the din (ROGER Mc GOUGH, The Lesson)

At the age of seventeen (today) Kevin Costyn was the dom-inant personality amongst the twenty-four pupils, of both sexes, COmprising Form 5C at the Proctor Memorial School in East Oxford. He was fourteen months or so above the average age of his class because he was significantly below the average Intelligence Quotient for his year, as measured by. orthodox psychomem.'c, crite 'a m rts had semi In earher years, Kewn s end. lftar optrmstcally suggested a. - ment, should he ever begln Pto SS acitvpfor im rove Y ormant any realistic hopes of academic achievement had been abandoned many terms ago.

In spite of--or was it because of?.--such intellectual shortcomings, Kevin was an individual of considerable men-ace and POwer; and if any pupil was likely to drive his teacher to retirement, to resignation, even to suicide, that pupil was Kevin Costyn. Both inside and outside school, this young man could be described only as crude and vi-cious; and during the current summer term his sole interest in class activities had focused upon his candidature for the British National Party in the school's annual mock-elections.

Teachers Were fearful of his presence in the classroom, and blessed their good fortune whenever he was alle ill or playino h ( gedly)

, vey or appeanng ocrore me courts or c k t oned (again b '.. au ) y the pohce or being Interviewed by proba tion officers, social workers, or psychiatrists. Only rarely was his conduct less than positively disruptive; and that when some OVernight dissipation had sapped his wonted en thusiasm for selective subversion.

Always he sat in the front row, immediately to the right of the central gangway. This for three reasons. First, be-cause he was thus enabled to mm around and thereby the more easily to orchestrate whatever disruption he had in mind. Second, because (without ever admitting it) he was slightly deaf; and although he had little wish to listen to his teachers' lessons, his talent for verbal repartee was always going to be diminished by any slight mis-hearing. Third, because Eloise Dring, the sexiest girl in the Fifth Year, was so very short-sighted that she was compelled (refusing spectacles) to take a ring-side view of each day's proceedings. And Kevin wanted to sit next to Eloise Dring.

So there he sat, his long legs sticking way out beneath his undersized desk; his feet shod in a scuffed, cracked, de-crepit pair of winkle-pickers, two pairs of which had been bequeathed by some erstwhile lover to his mother--the lat-ter a blowsy, frowsy single parent who had casually con-ceived her only son (as far as she could recall the occasion) in a lay-by just off the Cowley Ring Road, and who now lived in one of a string of council properties known to the largely unsympathetic locals as Prostitutes Row.