"Endeavour Morse."
The voice rang out in the dusty stone corridor, and Endeavour's head darted up from its occupation of studying the cracks in the marble floor. Fumbling with his notes and pencils he extricated his gangly legs from where they had been tucked (or rather tangled) around the chair legs. He followed the sound of the voice towards the only open door on the corridor, a huge wooden affair the size of a barn door, but infinitely more intricately carved. Concentrate, Morse. Endeavour walked into the room.
It was huge, the size of a ballroom, and decorated like one, apart from the rows and rows of examination tables filling it. Near the back of the room, three such tables were pushed together to create a t shape. A man and a woman sat at two desks side by side; the stem of the T was reserved for Endeavour. He sat down in silence, noticing the woman's cheap plastic watch at odds with her finely tailored suit, the man's cut lip, presumably chapped from the December cold but more similar to the split lips from punches that Endeavour regularly saw at school. What sort of people were these Oxford academics? Certainly nothing like the worn out teachers at his school, wringing their hands at the lack of interest the boys had for anything other than rugby.
The man was speaking. Concentrate, Morse.
"… what you thought the poem was about, Morse?"
"Sorry? Oh, um, yes, well-" Endeavour checked his notes, hands shaking. Come on, Morse, you know poetry- "I thought it was interestingly egotistical of you to pick a poem so clearly extolling the wonders of an Oxford education. In the first stanza the author decries his lack of an education in his home town, but by the end of the poem his university days seem to have brought him peace. Rather good publicity for you, I thought." Damn. I wasn't meant to be truthful today.
"Yes, well, the egotism of Oxford scholars aside-" here the man glared at Endeavour while his colleague smiled faintly- "shall we continue?"
17 minutes later, Endeavour stood and left the room.
Endeavour stared moodily at the ground as he slouched back along St Giles and crossed the road to St John's. The December wind bit at his face, turning the finely cut cheekbones red and tugging the messy curls into a golden halo. His stomach growled underneath his navy duffel coat: he hadn't been able to eat any of the college breakfast that morning, through nerves over the interview. Not that those nerves were any use, the way I messed that one up. Endeavour ducked through the college gates and hurried up to his bedroom, where he threw himself on the bed.
He hadn't thought himself capable of tantrums any more, not since his mother died and all emotion seemed to vanish from him overnight. While the house used to shake from the sound of his fists beating on the floor, usually for some minor, but to him inconceivable, annoyance, for the past six years nothing had seemed worth getting upset about. Life was pain, and what was one more pain among the many?
And yet, though he had believed himself now immune to disappointment, numb to anticipation, disinterested in, well, anything, he now found himself sobbing silently on the strange bedclothes, his bony shoulders heaving with grief at the dream destroyed. It had been Oxford or nothing, his father had been adamant- what was the point of forking out funds for three years of study at a second rate university?- and now, after that disastrous interview, it seemed like nothing was going to be his lot.
For the rest of his three days in Oxford, Endeavour actually had nothing to do. For some vague reason the college insisted that everyone on his course stay until Saturday, saying that they might have more interviews. Endeavour wasn't quite sure why they couldn't just plan the interviews in advance so as to get them out of the way in one day, but wasn't complaining: anything to escape the poisonous atmosphere at home. Gwen's bad hip got worse in the winter, and somehow she always managed to attribute this to him.
Endeavour spent the afternoon after his interview (and subsequent silent tantrum) walking around the city. He was eager to escape the metaphorically cold college- no doubt it buzzed during term time, but currently he couldn't stand to spend any time with of the nervous, overly-loud public school boys jamming the common room with their analyses of every clever sounding book under the sun. I AM a public-school boy. It still didn't feel true, though.
Endeavour meandered down the broad, turning right and continuing under the bridge of sighs. He found himself in a narrow cobbled lane, with high walls on either side set with lamps. Blackened with age, to endeavour they whispered of a history waiting to be discovered. By anybody but me. The lane continued around many corners and Endeavour almost forgot his bitterness, lost in imaginings of the past, when suddenly-
BANG. Pain exploded into Endeavour's brain. He had collided with the pavement. Confused, seeing stars, leaning on the sooty wall, Endeavour stood and turned around. He started shaking violently. There was a body at his feet. He had tripped over a body. It was soaked in blood, its face was unrecognisable, so drenched was it in thick red liquid still oozing from a dent in its skull. Endeavour's vision was becoming fuzzy, he staggered away from the red wet thing and started to run back the way he had come, he screamed help, he ran into the wall and staggered away again, still yelling police, ambulance, murder. He didn't make it to the end of the lane before once again he was face to face with the road, this time unconscious.