'Type it all up,' said Bell. 'Nobody'll read it-but get it typed. There's not much else we can do.'

Bell had a busy day ahead of him. Two more burglaries overnight, one a wholesale clear-out in North Oxford; an appearance before the magistrates' court in half an hour's time; lunch with the Chairman of Oxford United to discuss the recurring hooliganism of the club's ill-christened 'supporters'; and a good deal of unfinished business from the past week. No, he could hardly feel justified in allowing young Walters to worry much more about what might have happened many years ago to a woman who had just put herself out of whatever misery she was in. Anyway, Bell had a secret respect for suicides… But he couldn't just leave things where they were, he knew that. There was the inquest to think about. Why had she done it?-that would be the question nagging away in the minds behind those saddened, tense, and self-recriminating faces. Oh dear! It was always the same old questions. Was there anything that was worrying her? Anything at all? Health troubles? Money troubles? Sex troubles? Family troubles? Any bloody troubles? And the answer to most of these questions was always the same, too: it was 'yes', 'yes', 'yes', and so they all said 'no', 'no', 'no', because it seemed so much the kinder way. Bell shook his head sadly at his own thoughts. The real mystery to him was why so many of them thought fit to soldier on. He got up and lifted his overcoat from the hook behind the door.

'Any luck with "E.M."?'

'No, sir,' said Walters, with obvious disappointment. That Anne Scott had taken in several private pupils each week had been made perfectly clear to him, but there seemed to have been an ad hoc acceptance of fees in cash for the tutorials rendered. Certainly there was no formal record of names and receipts of monies, and doubtless the tax-man was far from well informed about the scope of Anne's activities. The neighbours had spoken of various visitors, usually young, usually with books, and almost always with bicycles. But such visits appeared to have been somewhat spasmodic, and none of the neighbours could promise to recognise any of the callers again, let alone recall their names. Pity! Walters was slowly coming to terms with the sheer volume of work associated with even the most mundane inquiries; beginning, too, to appreciate the impossibility of following up every little clue. Yet, all the same, he would have been much gratified to have come up with a name (if it was a name) for those tantalising initials.

He found Bell looking at him with a half-smile on his lips.

'Forget it, Walters! It was probably the electricity man And just let me tell you one thing, my lad. That woman committed suicide-you can take the word of a man who's been finding 'em like that for the last twenty years. There is no way, no way, in which that suicide could have been rigged-have you got that? So. What are we left with? Why she did it, all right? Well, we may learn a few things at the inquest, but I doubt we're ever going to know for certain. It's usually cumulative, you know. A bit of disappointment and worry over this and that, and you sort of get a general feeling of depression about life that you just can't shake off, and sometimes you feel why the hell should you try to shake it off anyway.' Bell shrugged on his coat and stood holding the doorhandle. 'And don't you go running around with the idea that life's some wonderfully sacred thing, my lad-because it ain't. There's thousands of unborn kids lying around in abortion clinics, and every second-every second, so they tell me-some poor little sod somewhere round the globe gets its merciful release from hunger. There's floods and earthquakes and disease and plane crashes and car crashes and people killed in wars and shot in prisons and- Agh! Just don't feel too surprised, that's all, if you come across one or two people who find life's a bit too much for 'em, all right? This woman of yours probably put her bank balance on some horse at ten-to-one and it came past the post at twenty-to-six!'

Walters didn't see the joke, although he took the general drift of Bell's philosophy. Would Morse though (he wondered) not have been slightly more anxious to probe more deeply?

'You're not too worried about that chair in the-?'

The telephone rang on the desk, and whilst the outside call was switched through, Bell put his hand over the mouthpiece.

'I'm not worried about anything. But if you are, you go and do something about it. And find me one or two people for the inquest, lad, while you're about it.'

At that point, as Walters walked out into the bright, cold air of St. Aldates, he had not the remotest notion of the extraordinary sequence of events which was soon to unfold itself.

Walters returned to Canal Reach at 2 p.m. the same day. It was the brief conversation with Morse that had given him the idea, and over a pint and a pork pie he had decided on his first move. Although he had already spoken to most of the residents in the Reach, he now knocked once again at the door of number 7, the house immediately adjacent to number 9.

'I just wondered whether Ms. Scott ever left a key with you, Mrs. Purvis,' he asked of the little, grey-haired widow who stood in the slit of the hall-here leading directly to the staircase.

'Well, as a matter of fact she did, yes. Left it about a year ago, she did. I always keeps it in me little pot on the- Just a minute, me dear.'

Mrs. Purvis retreated through one of the doors that led off the hall to the downstairs rooms, and returned with a key which Walters took from her and examined with interest.

'Did she ever ask you for it?'

'No, she didn't. But I know she were locked out once, poor soul, and it's always just as well to have a fall-back, isn't it? I remember once…' Walters nodded understandingly as the old girl recalled some bygone incident from the unremarkable history of the Purvis household.

'Do you remember how many keys you had when you came here?'

'Just the two, me dear.'

Was Walters imagining things, or did Mrs. Purvis seem rather more nervous than when he had interviewed her the day before? Imagining things, he decided, as he took his leave of her and walked along Canal Street to Great Clarendon Street where, turning left, he could see the sandstone, temple-like church of St. Paul's, its fluted columns supporting the classical portico, facing him at the far end on the other side of Walton Street. Yes, he'd been right, and he felt pleased with himself for remembering. There it was, the corner shop he'd been looking for, only twenty-odd yards up the street on the left: A. Grimes, Locksmith.

The proprietor himself, surrounded by a comprehensive array of keys, locks, and burglar-alarm devices, sat behind a yellow-painted counter sorting out into various boxes a selection of metal and plastic numerals such as are used for the numbering of street houses. Putting a large, white '9' into its appropriate box, he extended a dirt-ingrained hand as Walters introduced himself.

'You cut quite a lot of extra keys, I suppose?'

Grimes nodded cautiously, pushing his horn-rimmed glasses slightly further up his porous-looking nose. 'Steady old line, that sort of thing, officer. People are forever losin' 'em.'

Walters held out the three keys now in his possession: the one (that found on the cupboard-top just inside Anne Scott's lounge) a dull, chocolate-brown in colour; the other two of newish, light-grey gun-metal, neither of them looking as if it had often performed its potential function.

'You think you cut those two?' asked Walters, nodding to the newer keys.