What Men Say by Joan Smith Page A

just before eight—but would presumably have woken by now and discovered the complete absence of bread and other essentials. Loretta put her change in her purse, came out of the deli and turned right past the old jam factory, striding towards a busy intersection until she remembered that the newsagent’s shop was in the opposite direction, back towards the railway station. The
Guardian,
which she had leafed through before leaving Southmoor Road, had dealt with the discovery of a body in a couple of paragraphs under News in Brief but she doubted whether the tabloids would have shown similar restraint.
    She retraced her steps and pushed open the door of the shop, reacting with instant and almost comic dismay to the giant black type of the front pages. “Party Dons in Dead Blonde Probe,” she read, and “Nude Blonde: Cops Quiz Partygoers.” Underneath the latter, in smaller letters, a sub had inserted the imaginative but inaccurate strapline “Something Nasty in Oxford Woodshed.” Loretta drew closer and saw several very similar photos of police vans parked outside Thebes Farm; one enterprising photographer, quicker than the rest, had snapped a picture of a furious Stephen Kaplan getting into his car, hands thrown up to shield his face like a film star pursued by
paparazzi-
Even the
Daily Mail
and the
Daily Express
had considered the story worthy of frontpage treatment, although it was not the lead item in either paper.
    Loretta breathed out heavily, her involuntary “hah” attracting the attention of a middle-aged shop assistant who had previously been immersed in a copy of
Hello!
Oblivious to the woman’s mildly curious gaze, Loretta seized a copy of each tabloid, balancing them on her left arm as though to avoid both physical and moral contamination. She completed her collection with one broadsheet, recalling her ex-husband’s frequently expressed opinion that page three of the
Daily Telegraph
was to violent crime what page three of the
Sun
was to scantily clad women. By this time the pile of newsprint had become unwieldy and she had to ask for a carrier bag, stuffing the papers inside the flimsy plastic and almost running out of the shop in her haste to reach the privacy of her car in the Worcester Street car park.
    The first thing that struck her as she speed-read one paper after another, propping them against the steering wheel, was the sheer inventiveness of the journalists assigned to the story. Their reports contained no new information, other than a line in the
Daily Telegraph
about the post-mortem being conducted that morning by a Home Office pathologist whose name Loretta vaguely recognized. The tabloids got round this problem, as the policewoman had predicted, by exploiting the
Inspector Morse
angle, breaking up the text with mugshots of John Thaw and Kevin Whateley, the actors who played Inspector Morse and Sergeant Lewis. One paper had even roped in its TV columnist to list the “eerie parallels” between the discovery of the body at Thebes Farm and a recent
Morse
episode about a corpse in the potting shed in the fellows’ garden of a mythical Oxford college.
    Loretta found some of these flights of fancy quite amusing, but her expression darkened when she discovered a reference on an inside page to an eighteen-month-old row between Bridget and another don over course content in the English faculty. The latter, who was famous in Oxford for his scowl and his exclusively male student fan club, had turned a private disagreement into a public slanging match, accusing Bridget in a Sunday newspaper of attempting to impose political correctness on her colleagues. This caricature of Bridget’s view outraged her friends and alarmed the warden of her college, whose reactionary views meant that he and Bridget were unlikely to see eye to eye. Loretta was horrified to find the argument revived in print, certain that the article would upset Bridget far more than the