CHAPTER 28 -Something's puzzling

Part 1

Morse and Thursday stood to one side to allow the paramedics to carry out the stretcher on which Vera Cooper lay, motionless and with breathing apparatus applied to her mouth. Once the paramedics had carefully lifted her into the ambulance, Thursday told Jim Strange to follow the ambulance to the hospital and put two uniformed coppers outside her hospital bed with strict instructions not to let anyone but him and Morse access to Fraser's aunt.

'What a bloody mess this has turned out to be,' said Thursday in a simmering rage, furious with himself more than anyone else at having failed to protect Ms Cooper.

'You can't blame yourself, Sir,' said Morse who could read his guvnor's mind and was feeling exactly the same way himself. 'She wouldn't tell us what it was she knew even though she may have suspected it could get her into serious trouble.'

'We should have got it out of her, Morse! We knew she was holding something back and we didn't press her hard enough. And now look what's happened. She's fighting for her life and we could have saved her.'

'Maybe she didn't want to be saved.' Morse stared hard down at the ground as if hoping it would reveal some clue as to the identity of Vera Cooper's attacker.

'What does that mean?' Thursday looked quizzically at his sergeant.

Morse shrugged his shoulders and shook his head. 'Just a hunch, Sir. I think she may have planned a rendezvous here with her attacker, but he took her by surprise.'

'He? You're sure it's a he we're looking for?'

'He or she, Sir. Either way, I think a confrontation was planned but our attacker had other ideas.'

'Let's go back inside and have a good look round,' said Thursday with a heavy sigh. 'Ms Cooper may have left some clues as to her killer's identity. If she had been prepared to take a chance and meet with her attacker, perhaps she took out some insurance, left some sort of clue for us to find.'

Morse's mind was immediately taken back to one of his earliest cases with Thursday when a vicar who had been murdered had left a cryptic clue to the identity of his killer in the form of a series of hymn numbers which Morse decoded into the atomic numbers of the elements of the periodic table which, when put together, spelt out the name of the killer.

'I doubt we'll find any atomic numbers or chemical elements this time, Sir,' he said ruefully. Thursday gave Morse a wry grin as he recalled that same case that Morse was referring to. 'You never know, Morse. You just never know. I'm not ruling anything out just yet.'

The two of them got to work giving the cottage a quick once over, paying due respect to the SOCO officers who were busy doing their stuff all around them. It didn't take long for Morse to find the golf club buried behind the cushions on the living room sofa.

'Sir!' he cried and when Thursday reappeared in the room, he held out the golf club towards him. 'It looks like Ms Cooper did think of taking precautions.'

Thursday took the golf club from Morse's outstretched hand and examined it closely. 'But she never got the chance to use it, obviously,' he concluded. 'The paramedics handed me this too before they took her away.' He held out a forensics bag containing the kitchen knife which Ms Cooper had stuck inside the pocket of her trousers. Morse took a good look at it and whistled softly in surprise.

'She certainly was expecting trouble, wasn't she?' said Thursday. 'Why the hell didn't she tell us what this was all about? We could have hidden in the cottage and caught her attacker in the act.'

'Perhaps she thought she could deal with the problem, make whatever it was she was afraid would come out just… go away without having to involve us.'

Thursday was struggling to get his head around Ms Cooper's motives for taking such an enormous risk with her life. 'What the hell could be more important than putting her own life at risk, though? What was she so afraid of, Morse?'

Morse gave the matter some thought before offering up a few possibilities off the top of his head. 'Scandal, perhaps? Something shameful about herself or her family coming out that would ruin her? Or maybe she was hoping to protect someone who was very dear to her?'

'Like who? She hasn't got any family, other than Fraser. By all accounts she's married to her work, all she lives for is her academic standing and reputation over in Canada.'

'Well, maybe she thought that was at risk if something shameful came out, something to do with her family past.'

'To do with the child in the photo, you mean?' Thursday couldn't get past that photo and Vera Cooper's flat denial of having seen it before or knowing who it was.

'I get the feeling that the motive for these murders is personal rather than professional,' said Morse. 'I think we should concentrate on Ronald Fraser's private past rather than any recent professional incidents.'

'OK,' nodded Thursday in agreement. 'When we're back in the office, let's start digging around in Fraser's early life. Find out everything we can from way back to before he joined the Oxford Mail.'

Morse nodded and looked around the living room, his eyes alighting on the table in the middle of the room in front of the sofa where Vera Cooper had been sitting while she waited for her visitor to arrive. There was a half full glass of brown liquid on the table which Morse picked up and smelt. 'Whisky,' he concluded, and Thursday nodded. 'She was a cool customer, you've got to hand it to her,' the DCI said. 'Even passed the time waiting doing the crossword.'

Morse picked up the newspaper that was placed next to her drink and cast a casual eye over the crossword which Vera Cooper obviously had got halfway through completing before she had been rudely interrupted by her intruder who clearly had no regard for intellectual pursuits. She was obviously a keen crossword solver and all around the puzzle she had written a number of possible answers to some of the unsolved clues, random words or phrases written down for consideration, above, beneath and alongside the puzzle. Being an inveterate crossword solver himself, Morse naturally had a quick glance at the crossword and Vera's jottings alongside but no more than a quick glance. He would carry out a more detailed examination of the newspaper later on, he decided.

He stared hard at the other items that had been left on the table to see if they held any more interest, but they were very slim pickings indeed. A ball point pen which Ms Cooper had clearly been using to fill in the crossword, a standard Oxford English dictionary, not unlike the one that Morse himself regularly used when he did the Times crossword every day, a coaster on which the glass of whisky stood and a small pile of paperback books, three in total. Morse picked up the books and looked at them. They appeared at first sight an odd collection – one was a copy of the novel Persuasion by Jane Austen, the second a play called Berenice by the 17th century French playwright Racine and the third was a book on photography, entitled 'True Image'.

Morse frowned as he considered each of the books in turn, a frown which Thursday noticed and seized upon immediately.

'What is it?' he asked. 'Something wrong?'

Morse shook his head slowly as his brain tried to compute the meaning of this peculiar selection of books that Vera Cooper had by her side in the moments before she was attacked. 'I don't know. Maybe. They just seem to be an odd collection of books, that's all.'

He showed them to Thursday who raised an eyebrow and looked back at Morse. 'Well, Ms Cooper was an expert on Jane Austen, wasn't she so it's hardly surprising for her to have a Jane Austen novel to hand, is it?'

'True enough,' admitted Morse. 'But what about these other two? How do they fit in with what we know about Ms Cooper?'

'There'll be a reason, I'm sure. You'll figure it out…eventually. You usually do.' If there was a meaning and purpose to these books, Thursday was confident Morse would get to the bottom of it, however cryptic or convoluted it proved to be. It was what he specialised in, bizarre clues requiring a level of intellect far beyond his own or even lesser mortals.

'Come on,' he said, 'Let's get out of here and go home. There's nothing more we can do tonight. A good night's sleep and a fresh pair of eyes tomorrow morning is what we need.'

Morse nodded but nonetheless he carried the three books with him out of the cottage, along with the half-finished crossword. If they were the last objects that Vera Cooper was preoccupied with before her attack, then surely they must mean something, he reasoned logically. He would consider them later that evening in the privacy and peacefulness of his room, assisted by a large scotch.

Part 2

When Morse got back home, Jim Strange was just finishing off the fish and chips that he had picked up on the way back from the pub. He had invited Trewlove and Fancy to join him in a fish supper, but they politely declined, saying they were tired after a hard day and Trewlove, in particular, expressing a wish for her bed and an early night.

Morse was very quiet and looking a bit downcast when he joined Strange in the kitchen so when Jim asked him what was up, Morse sat down and gave his housemate a potted version of the events of the evening after Morse had left the rest of them in the pub.

'Blimey!' cried Strange. 'So you were dead right to be concerned about her.'

'If only I'd been concerned an hour earlier,' said Morse, shaking his head gloomily. 'I might have been able to prevent it happening.'

'You can't blame yourself for that, matey,' said Strange sympathetically. 'That won't get you anywhere except a one-way trip to the shrink. We can't protect everyone all of the time, can we?'

'It doesn't feel like we're protecting anyone any of the time,' replied Morse with a heavy sigh.

'Have you eaten?' asked Strange, knowing the answer would be no. Food always seemed to be right at the bottom of Morse's To Do list.

'I'm not that hungry,' said Morse predictably to Strange's way of thinking. He was staring at the books and the crossword and contemplating retreating to his room with them and giving them his fullest attention.

'What are they?' asked Strange, nodding at the books that Morse had laid down on the table in front of him.

'Oh, just some books that Ms Cooper had with her before she was attacked.' Morse passed them over to Strange to have a gander at.

'Jane Austen,' remarked Strange. 'I remember her,' he said with a painful grimace at the memory of dark days at school trying to get to grips with the unfeasibly stylistic language of one of England's greatest writers. 'We did one of her novels at school. Not this one, mind. It was called Pride and Prejudice, I think.'

Morse nodded distractedly to confirm Strange's recollection was accurate. 'Yes, that was one of hers too.'

Strange struggled with the second book and almost caused Morse to let out a small laugh in the process. 'Racein,' he observed initially and followed it up with a commendable attempt at the title of the play. 'Bear nice', he settled for in the end after much hesitation.

'Berenice,' Morse corrected him in impeccable French. 'By the 17th century French dramatist Jean Racine. It's one of his tragedies.'

'Certainly looks like it,' responded Strange impassively, marvelling again at the breadth of Morse's intellectual knowledge. 'It would be bloody tragic if you had to read that at school. What's with this last book, the one about photography? True Image.'

'No idea,' replied Morse. 'I need to sit down and have a think about them. I'm sure they must mean something but I've no idea what at the moment.'

'But not on an empty stomach, matey, surely? Would you like me to rustle you up an omelette? It'll only take five minutes.'

Morse was touched by Strange's generosity and expressed his gratitude and nodded his agreement. 'In that case,' he said in an effort to assuage his feelings of guilt, 'I'll open a couple of bottles of beer for us, then.'

'Right you are matey. Sounds like a good idea.'

While Strange got to work with eggs and frying pan, Morse went upstairs to where he kept his private stash of bottles of real ale which he insisted on keeping at room temperature in his own room for fear that some clueless idiot might commit the cardinal, unforgiveable sin of putting them away in the fridge. Five minutes later the two coppers were sitting at the table, Morse tucking eagerly into his omelette and Strange knocking back the strong ale, while both men contemplated the items of Vera Cooper that Morse had brought home to ponder over.

'So, this crossword was left at the scene also, then, was it?' asked a distinctly puzzled Strange. 'What possible connection could that have with our murderer?'

'I haven't a clue,' admitted Morse, reluctantly. 'Possibly no relevance at all. It's just a crossword that she was busy doing before she was attacked. Nothing particularly sinister about that, I wouldn't have thought.'

Strange let out a snort of disbelief, indeed almost of derision. He wasn't having that for one minute, not when it was Morse they were talking about.

'Oh, come on, matey. You don't think that, do you? You must think these things are important otherwise why have you brought them back home with you?' Strange looked across at Morse with a quizzical stare which had the effect of making Morse give a half smile in return.

'Well, I'm going to work on them a while. See if anything comes to mind. You never know. Something might…suggest itself.' Morse pushed his empty plate away, stood up, picked up the books and the newspaper in his arms and made to go.

'I'll be staggered if it doesn't,' said Strange confidently. 'The way your mind works, with all your knowledge of opera, classical literature, history, you name it, you know it. Something will occur to you. Something will hit you right between the eyes, at the most unexpected moment, if I know you. You mark my words. You'll be screaming Eureka before the week is up.'

Morse couldn't prevent a wry grin from escaping the corners of his mouth, despite his generally gloomy humour, before he nodded at Strange, turned on his heels, called out 'Night!' and disappeared from view.

Part 3

After Morse had retired to the bowels of his own room to ruminate over the bizarre collection of objects he had brought back with him from Fraser's cottage, Strange settled down in front of the television to watch the best of the programmes that BBC and ITV had to offer him for his late evening's entertainment. He didn't feel like going to bed just yet but there wasn't a great deal on the telly that night to capture his attention and interest either, so he merely sat in the living room staring into space while he finished off his beer, wondering how Morse was getting on trying to make sense of the books and the crossword, while the TV provided nothing more than meaningless background noise like piped music in a hotel reception or a department store lift.

He nodded off after a few minutes only to be awoken from a fairly light slumber by the telephone ringing, an unusual occurrence for that time of the evening. He got up from the sofa, dragged himself into the hall and took the call without much enthusiasm, desperately hoping it wasn't a work call, but he was pleasantly surprised to hear Joan Thursday's voice on the other end of the line.

'Hello, Joanie!' he cried. 'Is everything OK? Don't often hear from you at this time of night.'

'I'm sorry to call you this late, Jim,' apologised Joan, her voice betraying a little uncertainty that she was doing the right thing. 'I hope I haven't called at a bad time. You weren't asleep, were you?'

'Oh, no, of course not,' he lied convincingly, not wishing to make Joan feel guilty about calling him. He was always happy to hear from Joan, whatever the time of day. 'I was just watching a bit of tele, that's all. Nothing important. What's up?'

'Well, believe it or not, I think I may have found you a date, Jim.'

Strange gave an involuntary start, so surprised was he to hear that startling news. 'Already? Blimey Joan, you don't hang about, do you? Are you sure? I mean…' he paused for a moment, trying to come up with the right words to avoid sounding ungrateful and dubious of Joan's good intentions.

'You're not getting cold feet already, are you, Jim?'

'No, no, no, of course not. It's just that it's all been a bit…. you know, quick, like.'

Joan let out a laugh at Jim's reticence and shook her head in despair. Men! She thought. They're never satisfied, are they? Sometimes you can't do right for doing wrong.

'Well, she's a really nice girl, very easy to talk to, great sense of humour, smart too.'

'OK,' said Jim hesitantly, encouraged by Joan's description, although he hoped she wasn't too clever otherwise he feared he might prove something of a disappointment to her if she was hoping for someone more like Morse in the brainbox department.

'And she's very attractive, Jim,' added Joan with a smile, suspecting that this might be the clinching factor in getting Jim's agreement to meet up with her. It usually was, in her experience. Men would often overlook any number of perceived shortcomings in a woman if she had a pretty face and a good body.

'She sounds…perfect, Joan,' admitted Strange, without wishing to get too optimistic. He was hardly any oil painting, he knew that, and he couldn't help wondering just exactly how Joan would have described him to this girl. He began to wonder what the catch would be. It was all starting to sound too good to be true.

'So, are you up for getting together with her, then?' asked Joan, metaphorically crossing her fingers and holding her breath that Jim wouldn't limply back out of it now that she had set it up for him.

'What's the plan, then?

'I thought we could grab an early supper somewhere, then go to the pictures.' Joan wanted to keep it fairly simple for a first double date, nothing that would frighten off Jim unduly.

'We? So, who's we, then?'

You and Claudine, me and Paul.'

'Claudine?' Strange paused for a moment as he considered the foreign-sounding name of his intended date. 'She sounds….'

'French,' interrupted Joan before Strange could even attempt to hazard a guess as to her origins.

'Right,' said Strange. 'Well, my French isn't that good, Joan. In fact, it's almost non-existent, beyond bonjour and merci,' he said with a dreadful French accent.

'Luckily for you, Jim, Claudine's English is perfect. And she speaks it with a very sexy French accent which makes her even more attractive, so stop worrying.' Joan had to bite her tongue to stop herself from laughing out loud. Jim was so typically English with his irrational fear and suspicion of anything sounding or looking foreign.

'Who's Paul when he's at home?' Strange was intrigued at the mention of this man called Paul. He hadn't heard his name come up before, in fact he wasn't even aware that Joan was seeing anyone at the moment.

'Oh, just a guy I know. He's nice, you'll like him.'

'Was he at your party? Was he the guy you were dancing with a lot…you know, after your Mum and Dad left?'

'He was one of them, yes,' replied Joan, deliberately being enigmatic and mysterious.

'Is he Ok with this double date palaver?'

'Of course he is, Jim. Stop worrying! Everything will be fine, trust me. Shall we say tomorrow night at seven-thirty outside the Odeon? We'll choose a film, find out what time it starts and then look for somewhere to eat.'

'OK, it's a deal, 'said Strange, breathing heavily as he finally committed himself to what he imagined would be a nerve-wracking evening as he re-entered the perilous world of dating for the first time in God knows how many years. He said goodnight to Joan and thanked her profusely for her sterling efforts in procuring him a date for the evening at such short notice. He had no idea how it might turn out, whether it would be a resounding success or an unmitigated disaster, but he was intrigued and excited to find out.

Part 4

Morse frowned for the umpteenth time in the last hour as he pored over Vera Cooper's books and her crossword. He had convinced himself that they had to mean something, but he was struggling to make any sense of them at all. Perhaps he was being guilty of wishful thinking, of desperately straining to see something which wasn't there at all, in fact had never been there, even for a second. Perhaps these were nothing more than what they appeared at first sight – an ordinary crossword and a random set of books which Vera had been working on or reading at the time of her attack.

He had turned his attention firstly to the crossword as this was a personal specialist area of his, being an inveterate crossword solver all his life. Vera had completed about two thirds of the crossword and had presumably been attempting to solve the remaining clues, as evidenced by an array of possible answers written all over the page which he considered one by one.

A list of names appeared on the left hand side of the page, written down one after the other, which caught Morse's eye.

Bacall, Bergmann, Grable, Hayworth, Lake, Monroe, Stanwyck

Morse instantly recognised them as the surnames of some of the most famous American actresses of the 1940s and 1950s, but he was puzzled that there didn't appear to be any clue in the crossword which suggested one of these names could be the answer. It was almost as if Vera Cooper had just written down the first names that came to mind in the category of US actresses of the 1940s and 1950s with no indication how they might relate to any of the unsolved crossword clues. He had checked that none of the names represented any of the answers she had already filled in and had confirmed that. So what were they doing on the crossword page? It seemed bizarre and inexplicable and Morse hated anything that couldn't be rationally explained.

The next thing to attract Morse's attention was a quotation from the Bible which again he immediately recognised as coming from the book of Corinthians 'And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.' And yet Ms Cooper seemed to have ignored the merits of charity and tentatively circled in ink the second of these three theological virtues, hope. Why? he asked himself. And where was the clue which pointed to these particular human virtues? Morse's first thought when he saw this short list of three was that they all represented common names for girls brought up by one or both parents in the Quaker movement, just like he was. Was that significant, he wondered? Was their killer also a Quaker and was Ms Cooper aware of this fact and was trying to leave Morse a direct clue? Could they be looking for a woman called Hope? His mind began to spin with the number of possibilities that were slowly suggesting themselves to him.

Another seemingly random list of names appeared towards the bottom of the page, tucked away in the corner, which confounded Morse's attempts to find the logic in their presence and relevance to the crossword.

Plath, cummings, Frost, Eliot, Auden

These luminaries were, Morse knew, amongst the most famous American poets of the twentieth century, universally accepted giants of the genre, names known to millions of scholars world-wide. And yet there was no unsolved clue pointing towards the answer being a famous American poet. The reason for this list of names seemed utterly random, as if Vera had just been passing the time of day compiling lists of famous people in a wide variety of artistic categories, just for her own amusement. A question mark had been placed underneath the name Plath, the only woman in the list, whilst a bold underline was visible underneath the name Frost. It was as if she was trying to compile a series of 'pick the odd one out' puzzles for a quiz night which she had agreed to host. Morse couldn't come up with any other explanation which made even the tiniest more sense than that, bizarre as it seemed.

One final list of names written down by Vera Cooper on the crossword page drew Morse's eye. This was a short list of famous novelists from the Victorian era of the mid to late nineteenth century. Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Robert Louis Stevenson. Again a question mark was ascribed against one of the names, namely George Eliot (because she was actually a woman? wondered Morse) and Stevenson's name was underlined. Morse sat back and contemplated this carnival of artistic references, lists and quotes which had the temerity to challenge him to find some meaning, purpose and sense to it all. He shook his head in defeat, at least for the time being and turned his attention to the books instead in the hope of better success.

The Jane Austen book, Persuasion, presented no great mystery to the naked eye. Vera Cooper was an Oxford English literature academic who specialised in the novels of Jane Austen and it seemed entirely natural that she might have a copy of one of Austen's novels to hand. She could have chosen to re-read the book as a prelude to producing some fresh lecture or seminar notes for her students back in Canada or perhaps she wanted to check up on one or two specific passages or details to satisfy her own curiosity or confirm her fragile memory. As far as Morse could see, there appeared to be no great surprise with the presence of this book by Ms Cooper's side whatsoever.

The same could not be said for the Racine tragedy, Berenice. Now Morse had a passable knowledge of the plays of Jean Racine, understandable given his time up at Oxford as a Greats undergraduate, studying the three Classic disciplines of Latin, Ancient Greek and Philosophy. Racine's tragedies were firmly rooted in and borrowed from Ancient Greek tragedy and thus Morse was aware of some of the basic aspects of Racine's work, although he was unfamiliar with this particular play, Berenice. It wasn't one of Racine's most famous and Morse could not see an obvious connection with the works of Jane Austen. The two books appeared, superficially at least, to be the most unlikely of bedfellows.

As for the third of this unholy trilogy of literary works, the book on photography called True Image, here Morse was well and truly lost for words. There had been no indication that Vera Cooper had even a passing interest in photography from what they had been able to ascertain about her to date and this reference book seemed totally at odds with the other two examples of romantic and dramatic fiction. Morse had never heard of the author and assumed he must be an acknowledged expert in the field of photography but it was the title of the book which intrigued him most and caused him to stare off into space for a few moments, hoping that something would suddenly dawn on him from the deepest recesses of his mind.

A knock on the door dragged him back into reality. 'Come in,' he cried, and seconds later Strange entered the room, carrying a hot drink in his hand.

'I thought you might like a mug of cocoa before turning in, matey,'' said Strange with a knowing look.

Morse smiled, nodded and thanked Strange when his colleague placed the mug down in front of him on his desk.

'Made any progress?' asked Strange, gesturing towards the books and the crossword which lay accusingly in front of Morse.

Morse shook his head and let out a heavy sigh of disappointment. 'Not really. Maybe I'm barking up the wrong tree. I felt sure Ms Cooper had left these items out as clues to her attacker's identity but now I'm starting to think she was just playing a game with us, compiling random lists for her own amusement.'

Strange picked up the newspaper and scanned the crossword page, noting the various lists of names written across the page.

'I recognise a few of the names,' he said after a while. 'Mainly authors and writers, aren't they? Oh, hold on a minute! This lot aren't authors. Lauren Bacall, Rita Hayworth, Marilyn Monroe. We're talking the cream of the American film industry here, some of the most glamorous Hollywood actresses of all time! What have they got to do with anything?'

'God only knows,' sighed Morse. His head was spinning as he sipped carefully at his steaming hot cocoa.

'Lauren Bacall was my favourite,' said Strange with a wistful look in his eyes. 'Although the others aren't exactly shabby either. Marilyn Monroe and her billowing skirt, Betty Grable and her legs, not forgetting what's her name, Vera Lake. What have a bunch of female Hollywood legends of the 40s and 50s got to do with this case?'

'Your guess is as good as mine, Jim,' said Morse. Strange put the paper back down on Morse's desk and turned to leave, but not before saying, 'Well, don't torment yourself all night, matey. Get some kip. Maybe everything will fall into place in the morning after a good night's sleep.'

Strange said goodnight and closed the door softly behind him, leaving Morse to silently pray that Strange was right and that the key to the puzzle, if there even was one, would soon reveal itself to him, perhaps through the medium of yet another one of his bizarre dreams.

Author's Message

I hope you are enjoying the gradual build up of the mystery and are intrigued by the clues that have been provided - or are they clues at all?! Maybe they are nothing more than red herrings designed to infuriate you and lead you down the wrong path! You'll only find out by sticking with the story and following developments over the next batch of chapters. Enjoy! – and please leave a review if you can. Let me know what you make of it all!