The Riddle Of The Third Mile

CHAPTER ONE

In which a veteran of the ElAlamein offensive finds cause to recall the most tragic day of his life.

There had been the three of them-the three Gilbert brothers: the twins, Alfred and Albert; and the younger boy, John, who had been killed one day in North Africa. And it was upon his dead brother that the thoughts of Albert Gilbert were concentrated as he sat alone in a North London pub just before closing time: John, who had always been less sturdy, more vulnerable, than the formidable, inseparable, and virtually indistinguishable pair known to their schoolmates as “Alf ‘n’ Bert”; John, whom his elder brothers had always sought to protect; the same John whom they had not been able to protect that terrible day in 1942.

It was in the early morning of 2nd November that “Operation Supercharge” had been launched against the Rahman Track to the west of El Alamein. To Gilbert, it had always seemed strange that this campaign was considered by war historians to be such a miraculous triumph of strategic planning, since from his brief but not unheroic participation in that battle he could remember only the blinding confusions around him during that pre-dawn attack. ‘The tanks must go through’ had been the previous evening’s orders, filtered down from the red-tabbed hierarchy of Armoured Brigade to the field officers and the NCOs of the Royal Wiltshires, into which regiment Alf and Bert had enlisted in October 1939, soon to find themselves grinding over Salisbury Plain in the drivers’ seats of antique tanks-both duly promoted to full corporals, and both shipped off to Cairo at the end of 1941. And it had been a happy day for the two of them when brother John had joined them in mid-1942, as each side built up reinforcements for the imminent show-down.

On that morning of 2nd November, at 0105 hours, Alf and Bert moved their tanks forward along the north side of Kidney Ridge, where they came under heavy fire from the German 88s and the Panzers dug in at Tel Aqqaqir. The guns of the Wiltshires’ tanks had spat and belched their shells into the enemy lines, and the battle raged furiously. But it was an uneven fight, for the advancing British tanks were open targets for the antitank weapons and, as they nosed forward, they were picked off piecemeal from the German emplacements.

It was a hard and bitter memory, even now; but Gilbert allowed his thoughts full rein. He could do so now. Yes, and it was important that he should do so.

About fifty yards ahead of him, one of the leading tanks was burning, the commander’s body sprawled across the hatch, the left arm dangling down towards the main turret, the tin-helmeted head spattered with blood. Another tank, to his left, lurched to a crazy standstill as a German shell shattered its left-side track, four men jumping down and sprinting back towards the comparative safety of the boundless, anonymous sands behind them.

The noise of battle was deafening as shrapnel soared and whistled and plunged and dealt its death amidst the desert in that semi-dawn. Men shouted and pleaded and ran-and died; some blessedly swiftly in an instantaneous annihilation, others lingeringly as they lay mortally wounded on the bloody sand. Yet others burned to death inside their tanks as the twisted metal of the hatches jammed, or shot-up limbs could find no final, desperate leverage.

Then it was the turn of the tank immediately to Gilbert’s right-an officer leaping down, clutching a hand that spurted blood, and just managing to race clear before the tank exploded into blinding flame.

Gilbert’s turret-gunner was shouting down to him.

‘Christ! See that, Bert? No wonder they christened these fuckin’ things “Tommycookers”!’

‘You just keep giving it to the bastards, Wilf!’ Gilbert had shouted back.

But he received no reply, for Wilfred Barnes, Private in the Royal Wiltshire Yeomanry, had spoken his last words.

The next thing Gilbert saw was the face of Private Phillips as the latter wrestled with the driver’s hatch and helped him out.

‘Run like hell, corporal! The other two have had it.’

They had struggled only some forty yards before flinging themselves down as another shell kicked up the sand just ahead of them, spewing its steel fragments in a shower of jagged metal. And when Gilbert finally looked up, he found that Private Phillips, too, was dead-a lump of twisted steel embedded hi his lower back. For several minutes after that, Gilbert sat where he was, severely shocked but apparently uninjured. His eyes looked down at his legs, then at his arms; he felt his face and his chest; then he tried to wriggle his toes in his army boots. Just thirty seconds ago there had been four men. And now there was only one-him. His first conscious thought (which he could recall so vividly) was a feeling of ineffable anger; but almost immediately his heart rejoiced as he saw a fresh wave of 8th Armoured Brigade tanks moving up through the gaps between the broken or blazing hulks of the first assault formation. Only gradually did a sense of vast relief surge through him – relief that he had survived, and he said a brief prayer to his God in gratitude for coming through.

Then he heard the voice.

‘For Christ’s sake, get out of here, corporal!’ It was the officer with the bleeding hand, a lieutenant in the Wiltshires-a man who was known as a stickler for discipline, and a bit pompous with it; but not an unpopular officer, and indeed the one who the night before had relayed to his men the Montgomery memorandum.

‘You a’right, sir? Gilbert asked.

‘Not too bad.’ He looked down at his hand, the right index finger hanging only by a tissue of flesh to the rest of his hand. ‘What about you?’

‘I’m fine, sir.’

‘We’ll get back to Kidney Ridge-that’s about all we can do.’ Even here, amid the horrifying scenes of carnage, the voice was that of a pre-war wireless announcer, clipped and precise -what they called an “Oxford” accent.

The two men scrambled through the soft sand for a few hundred yards before Gilbert collapsed.

‘Come on! What’s the matter with you, man?’

‘I dunno, sir. I just don’t seem…’ He looked down at his left trouser-leg, where he had felt the fire of some intense pain; and he saw that blood had oozed copiously through the rough khaki. Then he put his left hand to the back of his leg and felt the sticky morass of bleeding flesh where half his calf had been shot away. He grinned ruefully:

‘You go on, sir. I’ll bring up the rear.’

But already the focus had changed. A tank which had seemed to be bearing down upon them suddenly slewed round upon its tracks so that now it faced backwards, its top completely sheared away. Its engine, however, still throbbed and growled, the gears grinding like the gnashing of tortured teeth in hell. But Gilbert heard more than that. He heard the voice of a man crying out in the agony of some godforsaken despair, and he found himself staggering towards the tank as it lurched round yet again in a spurting spray of sand. The man in the driver’s seat was alive! Thereafter Gilbert forgot himself completely: forgot his leg-wound, forgot his fear, forgot his relief, forgot his anger. He thought only of Private Phillips from Devizes…

The hatch was a shattered weld of hot steel that just would not open-not yet. Almost it came; and the sweat showered down Gilbert’s face as he swore and wrenched and whimpered at his task. The petrol-tank ignited with a soft, almost apologetic ‘whush’, and Gilbert knew it was a matter only of seconds before another man was doomed to death inside a Tommycooker.

‘For Chrissake!’ he yelled to the officer behind him. ‘Help! Please! I’ve-nearly-’He wrenched for the last time at the hatch, and the sweat poured again on to his bulging, vein-ridged forearms.

‘Can’t you fuckin’ well see? Can’t you -’ His voice tailed off in desperation, and he fell to the sand, overwhelmed by failure and exhaustion.

‘Leave it, corporal! Come away! That’s an order?

So Gilbert crawled away across the sand and wept in frenetic despair, his grimed face looking up to see through his tears the glaze in the officer’s eyes… the glaze of frozen cowardice. But he remembered little else except the screaming of that burning fellow soldier. And it was only later that he thought he’d recognized the voice-for he hadn’t seen the face.

He was picked up (so they told him) soon after this by an army truck, and the next thing he could remember was lying comfortably in very white sheets and red blankets in a military hospital. They didn’t tell him until two weeks later that his brother John, tank driver with the 8th Armoured Brigade, had been killed in the second-phase offensive.

Then Albert Gilbert had been almost sure; but even now, he wasn’t quite sure. He knew one thing, though, for nothing could erase from his cerebral cortex the name of the officer who, one morning in the desert, in the battle for the ridge at Tel El Aqqaqir, had been tried in the balance of courage-and been found wanting. Lieutenant Browne-Smith, that was the name. Funny name, really, with an ‘e’ in the middle. A name he’d never seen again, until recently.

Until very recently indeed.

CHAPTER TWO

We are in the University of Oxford, at the marks-meeting of the seven examiners appointed for ‘Greats’.

‘He would have walked a first otherwise,’ said the Chairman. He looked down again at the six separate assessments, all of them liberally sprinkled with alphas and beta plusses except for the one opposite Greek History, where stood a feeble-looking beta double minus/delta. Not, this last, the category of the finest minds.

‘Well, what do you think, gentlemen? Worth a viva, surely, isn’t he?’

With minimal effort, five of the other six men, seated at a large table bestrewn with scripts and lists and mark-sheets, raised the palms of their hands in agreement.

‘You don’t think so?’ The Chairman had turned towards the seventh member of the examining panel.

‘No, Chairman. He’s not worth it-not on this evidence.’ He flicked the script in front of him. ‘He’s proved quite conclusively to me that he knows next to nothing outside fifth- century Athens. I’m sorry. If he wanted a first, he ought to have done a bit more work than this.’ Again he flicked the script, an expression of disgust further disfiguring a face that had probably been sour from birth. Yet, as all those present knew, no one else in the University could award a delicate grading like B+/B+?+ with such confident aplomb, or justify it with such fierce conviction.

‘We all know, though, don’t we,’ (it was one of the other members) ‘that sometimes it’s a bit hit-and-miss, the questions we set, I mean-especially in Greek History.’

‘I set the questions,’ interrupted the dissident, with some heat. There’s never been a fairer spread.’

The Chairman looked very tired. ‘Gentlemen. We’ve had a long, hard day, and we’re almost at the finishing-post. Let’s just-’

‘Of course he’s worth a viva,’ said one of the others with a quiet, clinching authority. ‘I marked his Logic paper-it’s brilliant in places.’

‘I’m sure you’re right,’ said the Chairman. ‘We fully take your point about the history paper, Dr Browne-Smith, but…’

‘So be it-you’re the Chairman.’

‘Yes, you’re quite right. I am the Chairman and this man’s going to get his viva!’

It was a nasty little exchange, and the Logic examiner immediately stepped in with a peace proposal. ‘Perhaps, Dr Browne-Smith, you might agree to viva him yourself?’

But Browne-Smith shook his aching head. ‘No! I’m biased against the fellow-and all this marking-it’s been quite enough for me. I’m doing nothing else.’

The Chairman, too, was anxious to end the meeting on a happier note: ‘What about asking Andrews? Would he be prepared to take it on?’

Browne-Smith shrugged. ‘He’s quite a good young man.’

So the Chairman wrote his final note: ‘To be vivaed by Mr Andrews (Lonsdale), 18th July’; and the others began to collect their papers together.

‘Well, thank you all very much gentlemen. Before we finish, though, can we just think about our final meeting? Almost certainly it’s got to be Wednesday 23rd or Thursday 24th.’

Browne-Smith was the only one of the panel who hadn’t taken out his diary; and when the meeting was finally fixed for 10 a.m. on Wednesday the 23rd, he appeared to take no notice whatsoever.

The Chairman had observed this. ‘All right with you, Dr Browne-Smith?’

‘I was just about to say, Chairman, that I’m afraid I probably shan’t be with you for the final meeting. I should very much like to be, of course, but I-I’ve got to be… Well, I probably shan’t be in Oxford.’

The Chairman nodded a vague, uneasy understanding. ‘Well, we’ll try to do our best without you. Thank you, anyway, for all the help you’ve been-as ever.’ He closed the thick, black volume in front of him, and looked at his wrist-watch: 8.35 p.m. Yes, it had been a long, hard day. No wonder, perhaps, that he’d become a little snappy at the end.

Six members of the panel agreed to repair to the King’s Amis in Broad Street; but the seventh member, Dr Browne-Smith, begged leave to be excused. Instead, he left the Examination Schools, walked slowly along the High, and let himself through the back-door (‘Senior Fellows Only’) into Lonsdale College. Once in his rooms, he swallowed six Paracetamol tablets, and lay down fully-clothed upon his bed, where for the next hour his brain blundered around uncontrollably in his head. Then he fell asleep.

On the morning of the next day, Thursday, 10th July, he received a letter. A very strange and rather exciting letter.

CHAPTER THREE

In which we learn of an Oxford don’s invitation to view the vice and viciousness of life in a notorious area of the metropolis.

Never throughout his life-almost sixty-seven years of it now-had Oliver Maximilian Alexander Browne-Smith (with an “e” and with hyphenation) MC, MA, D. Phil., really come to terms with his inordinately ponderous names. Predictably, in his prep-school days he had been nicknamed “Omar”; and now, with only one year before his University appointment was due to be statutorily terminated, he knew that amongst the undergraduates he had acquired the opprobrious sobriquet of “Malaria”, which was not so predictable and very much nastier.

It was some small surprise to him, therefore, to find how quickly he had managed to bring himself to terms, in a period of only a few weeks, with the fact that he would quite certainly be dead well within a twelvemonth (‘At the very outside, since you insist on the truth, Dr Browne-Smith’). What he did not realize, however, as he walked on to Platform One at Oxford Station, was that he would be dead within a shorter period than that so confidently predicted by his distinguished and expensive consultant.

A very much shorter period.

As he made his way to the rear end of the platform, he kept his eyes lowered, and looked with distaste at the empty beer cans and litter that bestrewed the “up” line. A few of his University colleagues, some from Lonsdale, were fairly frequent passengers on the 9.12 a.m. train from Oxford to Paddington, and the truth was that he felt no wish to converse with any of them. Under his left arm he held a copy of The Times, just purchased from the station bookstall; and in his right hand he held a brown leather briefcase. For a fine, bright morning in mid-July, it was surprisingly chilly.

The yellow-fronted diesel snaked its slow way punctually through the points just north of the station, and two minutes later he was seated opposite a young couple in a non-smoking compartment. Although an inveterate and incurable smoker himself, one who had dragged his wheezing lungs through cigarettes at the rate of forty-plus a day for fifty years, he had decided to impose upon himself some token abstinence during the hour-long journey that lay ahead of him. It seemed, somehow, appropriate. When the train moved out, he folded The Times over and started on the crossword, his mind registering nothing at all on the first three of the clues across. But on the fourth, a hint of a grin formed around his slightly lopsided mouth as he looked down again at the extraordinarily apposite words: ‘First thing in Soho tourist’s after? (8).’ He quickly wrote in ‘stripper’; and with more and more letters thenceforth making their horizontal and vertical inroads into the diagram-grid, the puzzle was finished well before Reading. Then, hoping that the couple opposite had duly noted his cruciverbalistic competence-if not the ugly stump of his right index finger, chopped off at the first joint – he leaned back in his seat as far as his longish legs would allow, closed his eyes, and concentrated his thoughts on the very strange reason that was drawing him to London that day.

At Paddington he was almost the last person to leave the train and, as he walked to the ticket barrier, he saw that it was still only 10.15 a.m. Plenty of time. He collected a Paddington-Reading-Oxford timetable from the Information Bureau, bought a cup of coffee at the buffet, where he lit a cigarette, and looked up the possible trains for his return journey. Curiously enough, he felt relaxed as he lit a second cigarette from the first, and wondered vaguely what times the pubs-and clubs-would be open in London. 11 a.m. perhaps? But that was a matter of no great moment.

It was 10.40 a.m. when he left the station buffet and walked briskly to the Bakerloo line, where, as he queued for his ticket, he realized that he must have left his timetable in the buffet. But that was of no great moment, either. There were plenty of trains to choose from, and he’d made a mental note of some of the times.

He could not have known, of course, that he would not be travelling back to Oxford that night.

On the tube he opened his briefcase and took out two sheets of paper: the first was a letter addressed to himself, amateurishly typed but perfectly literate-a letter that still seemed very strange to him; the second was a more professionally typed sheet (indeed, typed by Browne-Smith himself) comprising a list of students from Oxford University, with the names of their colleges appended in brackets, and the words “Class One, Literae Humaniores” printed across the top in bold, red capitals. But Browne-Smith glanced only cursorily at the two sheets through his bifocal lenses. It appeared that he was merely reassuring himself that both were still in existence. Nothing more.

At Edgware Road he looked up above the carriage-windows, noting that there were only two more stops, and for almost the first time he felt a flutter of excitement somewhere in his diaphragm. It was that letter… Very odd! Even the address had been odd, with the full details carefully stated: Room 4, Staircase T, Second Quad, Lonsdale College, Oxford. Such specificity was rare, and seemed to suggest that whoever had sent the letter was more than usually anxious for it not to go astray-more than a little knowledgeable, too, about the college’s geography… Staircase T, Second Quad… In his mind’s eye, Browne-Smith saw himself climbing those few stairs once more; climbing them, as he had done for the past thirty years, up to the first landing, where his own name, handprinted in white, Gothic lettering, still stood above the door. And immediately opposite him, Room 3-where George Westerby, the Geography don, had lived for almost exactly the same time: just one term longer than himself, in fact. Their mutual hatred was intense, the whole college knew that, though it might just have been different if Westerby had ever been prepared to make the feeblest gesture towards some reconciliation. But he had never done so.

Via the ziggurat of steep escalators, Browne-Smith emerged at 11.05 a.m. into the bright sunlight of Piccadilly Circus, crossed over into Shaftesbury Avenue, and immediately plunged into the maze of roads and alleyways that criss-cross the area off Great Windmill Street, Here abounded small cinemas that featured films of hard, uncompromising porn, with stills outside of nudes and semi-nudes, vast-breasted and voluptuous; clubs that promised passers-by the prospects of erotic, non-stop nudity; bookshops that boasted the glossiest, grossest magazines for paedophiles and buffs of bestiality. And it was along these gaudy streets, beneath the orange and the yellow signs, past the inviting doors, that Browne-Smith walked slowly, savouring the uncensored atmosphere, and feeling himself inexorably sucked into the cesspool that is known as Soho.

It was in a narrow lane just off Brewer Street that he spotted it-as he’d known he would: The Flamenco Topless Bar: No Membership Fee: Please Walk Straight Down.’ The wide, shallow steps that led from the foyer down to the subterranean premises had once been carpeted in heavy crimson, but now the middle of the tread resembled more the trampled sward of a National Trust beauty spot at the height of a glorious summer. He was walking past, but there must have been some tell-tale hesitation in his step, for the acne-faced youth who lounged just inside the doorway had spotted him already.

‘Lovely girls in here, sir. Just walk straight down. No membership fee.’

‘The bar is open, is it? I only want a drink.’

‘Bar’s always open here, sir. Just walk straight down.’ The young man stepped aside, and Browne-Smith took his fateful step across the entrance and slowly descended to The Flamenco Topless Bar. Facilis descensus Avemo.

At the foot of the stairs further progress was barred by a velvet drape, and he was wondering what he should do when a seemingly disembodied head poked through a gap in the middle of the curtain- the head of an attractive young girl of no more than nineteen or twenty years, the hazel eyes luridly blued and blackened by harsh mascaras, but the senuous mouth devoid of any lipstick. A pink tongue completed a slow circuit round the soft-looking mouth, and a pleasant voice asked simply and sweetly for only £1.

‘There’s no membership fee; it says so outside. And the man on the door said so.’

The face smiled, as it always smiled at the gullible men who’d trodden those broad and easy stairs.

‘It’s not a membership fee-just admission. You know what I mean?’ The eyes held his with simmering sexuality, and the note passed quickly through the crimson curtain.

The Flamenco Bar was a low-ceilinged affair with the seats grouped in alcoves a deux, towards one of which the young girl escorted him. She was, herself, fully clothed; and, after handing her client a buff-coloured drinks list, she departed without a further word to her wonted seat behind a poor imitation of a drinking-man’s bar, whereat she was soon deeply engrossed in her zodiacal predictions as reported in the Daily Mirror.

It seemed to Browne-Smith, as he struggled to interpret the long bill of fare, that the minimum charge for any semi-alcoholic beverage was £3. And he was beginning to suspect that the best value for such an exorbitant charge was probably two (separate) half-glasses of lager-when he heard her voice.

‘Can I take your order?’

Over the top of his glasses he looked up at the young woman who stood in front of him. She was leaning forward, completely naked from the waist upwards, her long, pink skirt split widely to the top of her thigh.

‘The lager, I think, please.’

She made a note on the pad she held. ‘Would you like me to sit with you?’

‘Yes, I would.’

‘You’d have to buy me a drink.’

‘All right.’

She pointed to the very bottom of the card:

Flamenco Revenge- & marriage of green-eyed Chartreuse with aphrodisiac Cointreau. Soho Wallbanger-z dramatic confrontation of voluptuous Vodka with a tantalizing taste of Tia Maria. EastemEcstasy – an irresistible alchemy of rejuvenating Gin and pulse-quickening Campari. Price: £6.00

£6.00!

‘I’m sorry,’ said Browne-Smith, ‘but I just can’t afford-’

‘I can’t sit with you if you won’t buy me a drink.’

‘It’s so terribly expensive, though, isn’t it? I just can’t aff-’

‘All right!’ The words were clipped and final, and she left his table, to return a few minutes later with his first small glass of lager, setting the meagre measure before him with studied indifference and departing immediately.

From the alcove behind him, Browne-Smith could hear the conversation distinctly:

‘Where you from?’

‘Ostrighlia.’

‘Nice there?’

‘Sure is!’

‘You’d like me to sit with you?’

‘Sure would!’

‘You’d have to buy me a drink.’

‘Just you nime it, bighby!’

Browne-Smith swallowed a mouthful of his flat and tepid lager and took stock of the situation. Apart from the proximate Australian, he could see only one other customer, a man of indeterminate age (forty? fifty? sixty?) who sat at the bar reading a book. In contrast to his balding pate and the grey-white patches at his temples, the neatly-trimmed and black-brown beard was quite devoid of grizzled hairs; and for a few seconds the fanciful notion occurred to Browne-Smith that the man might be in disguise, this notion being somewhat reinforced by the fact that he was wearing a pair of incongruous sunglasses which masked the eyes whilst not, apparently, blurring the print of the page upon which he appeared so totally engrossed.

From where Browne-Smith sat, the decor looked universally cheap. The carpet, a continuation of the stairway crimson, was dirty and stained, with threadbare patches beneath most of the plastic tables; the chairs were flimsy, rickety, wickerwork structures which seemed barely capable of supporting the weight of any over-fleshed client; the walls and ceiling had clearly once been painted white, but were now grubby and stained with the incessant smoke of cigarettes. But there was one touch of culture-a most surprising one: the soberly volumed background music was the slow movement of Mozart’s ‘Elvira Madigan’ piano concerto (played by Barenboim-Browne-Smith could have sworn it), and this seemed to him almost as incongruous as listening to Shakin’ Stevens in St Paul’s Cathedral.

Another man was admitted through the curtain and was duly visited by the same white-breasted beauty who had brought his own lager; the man at the bar turned over another page of his book; the Australian, clearly audible still, was none too subtly prodding his hostess into revealing what exactly it was she was selling, because she’d got what he wanted and his only concern was the price she might be asking for it; the girl behind the bar had obviously exhausted whatever the Daily Mirror could prognosticate; and Barenboim had landed lightly upon the final notes of that ethereal movement.

Browne-Smith’s glass was now empty, and the only two hostesses on view were happily supping whatever the management had decided were today’s ingredients for Soho Wailbangers, Flamenco Revenges, el al. So he got up, walked over to the bar and sat himself down on a stool.

‘I’ve got another one paid for, I think.’

‘I’ll bring it to you.’

‘No, don’t bother. I’ll sit here.’

‘I said I’d bring it to you.’

‘You don’t mind me sitting here, do you?’

‘You si’ down where you were – you understand English?’ All pretence at civility had vanished, and her voice sounded hard and mean.

‘All right,’ said Browne-Smith quietly. ‘I don’t want to cause any trouble.’ He sat down at a table a few yards from the bar, and watched the girl, and waited.

‘You still didn’t ‘ear wha’ I said, did you?” The voice was now crudely menacing, but Browne-Smith decided that a few more rounds of small-arms fire could safely be expended; not quite time yet for the heavy artillery. He was enjoying himself.

‘I did hear you, I assure you. But-’

‘Look! I told you!’ (Which she hadn’t.) ‘If you want a bloody rub-off there’s a sauna right across the road. OK?’

‘But I don’t-’

‘I shan’t tell you again, mister.’

Browne-Smith stood up, and stepped slowly to the bar, where the man reading the book flicked over another page, disinterestedly neutral, it appeared, in the outcome of the escalating hostilities.

‘I’d like a pint of decent beer, if you have one.’ He spoke quietly.

‘If you don’t want tha’ lager-’

Abruptly Browne-Smith crashed his glass on the counter, and fixed the girl with his eyes. ‘Lager? Let me tell.you something, miss! That’s not lager-that’s horse-piss!’

The battle odds had changed dramatically, and the girl had clearly lost her self-control as she pointed a shaking, carmined finger towards the crimson curtain: ‘Get out!’

‘Oh no! I’ve paid for my drinks.’

‘You heard what the lady said.’ It was the man sitting his book by the bar. Although he had neither lifted his eyes one centimetre from the text, nor lifted, it seemed, his flat (West Country?) voice one semitone above its customary pitch, the brief words sounded ominously final.

But Browne-Smith, completely ignoring the man who had just spoken to him, continued to glare at the girl. ‘Never speak to me like that again!’

The hissed authority of these words reduced the girl to speechlessness, but the seated man had slowly closed his book, and now at last he raised his eyes. The fingers of his right hand crept across to the upper muscles of his left arm and, although as he eased himself off the bar-stool he stood some two or three inches shorter than Browne-Smith, he looked a dangerous adversary. He said nothing more.

The velvet curtains by which Browne-Smith had entered were only some three yards to his left, and there were several seconds during which a quick, if inglorious, exit could easily have been effected. But no such decision was taken; and before he could consider the situation further he felt his left wrist grasped powerfully, and found himself propelled towards a door marked ^; ‘Private’.

Two things he was to remember as his escort knocked quietly upon this door. First, he saw the look on the face of the man from Australia, a look that was three-parts puzzlement and one pan panic; second, he observed the title of the book the bearded man was reading: Know Your Köchel Numbers.

The anonymous Australian, sitting no more than four or five yards from the door, was destined never to mention this episode to another living soul. And indeed, even had he reason to do so, it seems most improbable that he would have mentioned that enigmatic little moment, just before the door closed behind the two men, when the one of them who seemed to be causing the trouble, the one whose name he would never know, had suddenly looked at his wrist-watch, and said in a voice that sounded inexplicably calm: ‘My goodness! I see it’s exactly twelve noon.’

For a few seconds after he had crossed the threshold of the office, Browne-Smith experienced that dazzling, zigzag pain again that seemed to saw its way across his brain, momentarily cutting him off from any recollection of himself and of what he was doing. But then it stopped-as suddenly as it had started-and he thought he was in control of things once more.

Looking out over the lawn of Second Quad, George Westerby had watched the tallish figure (several inches taller than himself) striding out towards the Porter’s Lodge at 8.15 a.m. that same morning. Uppermost in his mind at that moment-and he gloried in it-was the realization that he would be seeing very little more of his detested colleague, Browne-Smith. He himself, George Westerby, having recently, celebrated his sixty-eighth birthday, was retiring at last. Indeed, a removal firm had already been at work on his vast accumulation of books; and the treasured rows from more than half his shelves had been removed in blocks, stringed up, and stacked into the tea-chests that now occupied an uncomfortably large area of the floor space. And soon, of course, there would be the wooden crates, and the lumbering, muscled men who would transfer his precious possessions to the flat he had purchased in London. A smaller place, naturally, and one that might well pose a few storage problems. That could wait though, certainly until after his forthcoming holiday in the Aegean Isles… over to Asia across that azure sea…

But even as he stood there by the window, nodding slowly and contentedly to himself for a few moments, it was Browne-Smith who still dominated his thoughts. It had always been “Browne-Smith” with him-not even “Malaria” Browne-Smith, as though such familiarity might compromise his eternal antagonism. There would be only a few more nights now when he would have to dine in Hall with that odious man; just a few more lunches, occasionally standing awkwardly proximate over the cold buffets; only one more College meeting, at the beginning of next week- the very last one. For the Trinity Term was almost over now; his last term, and very soon his last day and his last hours; and then the moment (when it came) of looking down for the very last time on that immaculate lawn…

George Westerby was collectively conscious of all these things as he stood watching from his first-floor window on that chilly early morning of the 11th July. What he did not know at that time-what he could not have known-was that Lonsdale College was never again to welcome Browne-Smith within its quiet quads.

CHAPTER FOUR

In which we hem a tantalizing glimpse of high-floss harlotiy.

The taxi-driver knew the street, and Browne-Smith settled himself in the back seat with a heightened sense of excitement. He would have wished to savour these moments longer, but in less than five minutes the taxi pulled up at the kerb of Number 29, a large four-storied balconied building in a fashionable terrace just behind Russell Square. In general, although the original brickwork on the lower reaches of the walls had been smutted by traffic-fumes and smoke, the house seemed to have maintained its elegant fagade with comparative ease. The black door, with its polished brass knobs and letter-box, was framed by white pillars; and the woodwork of the windows was also painted white, with neatly kept window-boxes adding their splash of greens and reds. Black railings, set in concrete, were stretched along the front; behind which, after a gap of about five feet, the wall of the house continued down to a basement. On these railings a board had been affixed:

Luxury Apartments for Sale or to Let

Please apply: Brooks and Gilbert

(Sole Agents) Tel. 01-483 2307

Viewing by appointment only

Browne-Smith walked up the three shallow steps, and pressed the single bell, apprehensively fingering the blue card that was now in his inside jacket-pocket. He waited. But he had heard no sound of ringing on the other side of the great door, and he could see no sign of life. At this moment, and for the first time, the idea filtered into his mind that he might have been cruelly duped for the silly fool – the silly old fool – that he was, in going along with the whole disreputable and dishonourable business. He turned to look at the busy street and saw an aristocratic female disembarking from a taxi only a few doors away. No, it wasn’t too late even now! He could just forget it all, hail the taxi…

But the door had opened silently behind him.

‘Can I help you?’ (That West Country intonation again.)

‘I’m a friend of Mr Sullivan’s.’ (Hardly the customary tone of his Mods tutorials-hesitant and slightly croaky.)

‘You have an appointment?’

He took out the small, oblong card and handed it to her. The typewritten legend was exceedingly brief, but also (as Browne-Smith saw it) exceedingly significant: ‘Please admit bearer’-nothing else, except for that little constellation of asterisks clustered hi the top right-hand corner.

The woman stood aside and beckoned him over the threshold, closing the door (again noiselessly) behind them. ‘You’re an important client, sir, and we welcome you.’ She smiled appropriately as they moved through the large entrance hall, carpeted in a light-olive shade, with the same carpeting leading up the wide staircase which faced the front door. She turned to him as she walked on ahead up these stairs, and Browne-Smith noticed her inappropriately ugly teeth as she smiled again. ‘All blue cards are on the first floor, sir. I’m afraid we haven’t got our full complement of girls just for the moment-it’s the evenings usually that we have our busiest time. But I’m sure you won’t be disappointed in any way. No one’s ever disappointed here.’

On the first landing, she turned to him again, her eyes assessing him shrewdly, like a tailor mentally measuring some wealthy customer. Then, after looking along the corridor to left and right, she appeared to decide where the most appropriate prospects lay, for she opened the door immediately across the landing with a brusqueness which seemed clearly to betoken her mistress-ship of the establishment.

At a table immediately inside the room on the left sat a woman of some forty summers, blonde and big-breasted, wearing a low-cut, full-length purple gown; and, as the lady of the house introduced her client, she stood up and slowly smiled.

‘You’re free, I think, this afternoon, Yvonne?’

‘Thees eevening, also, madame, eef you weesh it.’ The blonde smiled bewitchingly again, showing her beautifully even teeth. She was exquisitely made up, a moist lipstick marking the contours of her sensuous mouth, her hair piled immaculately on top of her finely-boned head.

‘Is Paula free, too?’

‘She weel be, madame. She ‘ave a client for lernch, but she weel be free aftair.”

‘Well-’ (madame spoke directly to Browne-Smith) ‘-if you’re happy to stay here with Yvonne, sir?’

He swallowed and nodded his unequivocal assent.

‘Good. I’ll leave you, then. But you are to have everything you want, sir-I hope you understand that? Absolutely everything.’

‘I’m most grateful.’

She turned to go. ‘You must know Mr-er-Sullivan very well, sir?’

‘I was just able to do him a little favour, that’s all. You know how these things are.’

‘Of course. And you promise to let me know if there’s anything that Yvonne here can’t-’

‘I don’t think you need worry.”

Then madame was gone, and the back of Browne-Smith’s throat felt parched as he fought to stem the flood of erotic imaginings that threatened to swamp him. He had little help from the woman who, briefly resuming her seat in order to make some entry in a red leather-bound diary on the table, leant forward as she did so and revealed even to the most casual glance that beneath her dress she was wearing little else-at least above her rather ample hips.

‘I am weeth you now, sir.’ She rose from her chair and walked round to him. ‘Let me take your coat.’

Browne-Smith took off the light brown summer raincoat he had worn continuously since leaving Oxford, and watched her as she folded it neatly over her left arm, slid her right hand under his elbow, and guided him over to a door at the far end of the room.

Compared with the somewhat austere and sparsely furnished room they had just left, this inner room was lavishly and (to Browne-Smith’s tastes) rather luridly equipped. Two blood-red lamps, affixed to the inner wall, cast a subdued light around, and thick, yellow curtains, drawn fully across the single window, cut out all but the narrowest chink of natural light. The other furnishings were gaudily provocative with a cohort of multi-coloured cushions covering the long, low settee, and, behind that, bright yellow sheets and pillows on the widely welcoming bed, its coverlet already turned back. Opposite the settee was a tall, well-stocked, drinks cabinet, its doors standing open; and beside it a film projector, pointing a protruding snout towards the white expanse of wall to the left of the curtained casement. Pervading all was the heavy, heady smell of some sweet scent, and Browne-Smith felt a semi-permanent, priapic push between his loins.

‘You’d like a dreenk?’

She went over to the cabinet and recited a comprehensive choice: whisky, gin, campari, vodka, rum, martini…

‘Whisky, please.’

‘Glenfeeddich?’

‘My favourite.’

‘And mine.’

There seemed to be two bottles of each drink, one of them as yet unopened, as though the liquid capacity of even the most dedicated toper had been nobly anticipated. And he watched her (why was he puzzled?) as she ripped the seal off a new bottle, poured out a half-tumbler of the pale malt whisky, and brought it over to him.

‘Aren’t you going to have one, er-’

‘Eevone. Please call me “Eevone”. I call you “sir”-because, madame, she inseest on eet. But for me-Eevone!’

Even as she spoke, Browne-Smith found himself thinking, albeit vaguely, that her French accent was carefully cultivated and-yes, completely phoney. But why worry about that? More important, for his own fastidious tastes, was the fear that someone else might enter the room. So he took a large gulp of Scotch and voiced his anxiety.

‘We shan’t be interrupted, shall we?’

‘Non, non! Madame, you raymember, she say you ‘ave everything you want? So? Eef you want me to lock the door, I lock eet. Eef you want Paula, per’aps, you ‘ave Paula, OK? But I ‘ope you want me, non?’

Phew!

She went over to the door and turned the key, went over to the cabinet and poured herself a gin and dry martini, and finally came to sit beside him on the settee, her thigh pressing closely against his own. She clinked their glasses: ‘I’m sure we ‘ave a good time together, eh? I always like it eef I dreenk.’

Browne-Smith took a further gulp of his Scotch, sensing even at this early stage that the alcohol was having an unwontedly powerful effect upon him.

‘I feel you up a leetle?’

Momentarily he misunderstood her pronunciation of that second word; but when she took his glass he nodded in happy acquiescence, watching her in a wonderful anticipation as she walked away.

‘You like my dress?’ She was in front of him now, the replenished glass in her left hand. ‘Eet show off my figure, non?’

‘You have a lovely figure.’

‘You theenk so? But eet ees so ‘ot in ‘ere. You take off your coat, per’aps?’ She leaned over him, helping to remove his jacket, the dress soft against him, her body soft, the lighting soft; and he sat there passively as she slid her hands beneath the cuffs of his shirt, and deftly unfastened the cufflinks (Oxford University) before pushing the sleeves slowly up the arms. ‘Just to see eef you ‘ave a leede, what you call eet, “tattoo”?’

‘No, I haven’t, actually.’

‘Nor ‘ave I. But soon you weel be able to see for yourself, non?’ She sat closely beside him again, and Browne-Smith gulped back another large mouthful of his drink and willed himself to relax for a while. But she gave him little chance, taking his right hand and placing it on the shoulder of her dress.

‘You like that?’ she asked.

My God! His hand fumbled for a few seconds with the material of the dress, and then slipped tentatively beneath it, feeling the soft flesh around her neck.

‘Can I-?’

‘You can do anytheeng,’ Even as she spoke those blissful words her eyes sparkled, and she jumped to her feet, pulling him up in turn with both hands. ‘But we ‘ave a leetle feelm first, OK?’

Reluctantly, Browne-Smith did as he was bidden, taking his seat in an upright chair in front of the projector, and seeking to prepare himself for the voyeuristic aperitif. Clearly the pattern of events she’d suggested was not an unusual one; she, doubtless, must occasionally feel the need for some erotic stimulus. It was rather sad, this last fact, but he was too intelligent a man to feel surprised.

The scenes now witnessed on the white patch of wall beside the yellow curtaining were wilder by a dozen leagues than the few X-certificated films that Browne-Smith had paid to see at the ABC cinema during the Oxford vacations. It was a pity that the woman wasn’t seated close to him; but (as she’d explained) unless she continually made some slight adjustments to the focusing mechanism, the technicolour delineation tended to drift out of true.

It was all so strangely deja vu.

A man, in a smartly cut business suit; a beautiful blonde in a full-length, purple gown; a few intimate drinks on a multi-cushioned settee; the man’s hand slipping slowly inside the low-cut bodice and hoisting there from a bronzed, globed breast; then a teasingly slow, provocative undress on the part of the blonde, followed by much mutual grasping and gasping-before a finale that was fully orchestrated by climactic groans and an energetic spurting of semen.

The whirring, clicking projector was now switched off, and he felt her hands on his shoulders from behind.

‘You like eet again?’ She came round and sat on his knees. ‘Or would you rather ‘ave me?’

He swallowed the first ‘You!’, but managed the second.

‘There ees a long zeep at the back of my dress-that’s eet. Just pull down-pull! Yes, that’s eet!’

Browne-Smith felt the sinuous movement of her hips pressing down on him as his fingers ventured across her naked back; and then she got up and walked over to the bed.

‘Come and let me undress you.’

Her back was turned away from him as she shrugged the dress off her shoulders, bent down to slip off her black, high-heeled shoes, stepped professionally out of her dress, and folded it neatly over the chair at the foot of the bed. Then she turned fully towards him, and he felt an enormously urgent need to take her immediately; but still she teetered on the brink of things, and he thought of the mercilessly tortured Tantalus and the illicit grapes that dangled just above his lips.

‘One more lettk drink, per’aps?’

Browne-Smith, now almost in a delirium of anticipation, watched her as she walked over to the cabinet, watched her as she poured the two drinks, watched her as her beautifully formed breasts bounced towards him once more.

‘Just lie there a leetle meenite. You can ‘ave me very soon.’

She had disappeared through the only other door in the room, doubtless (judging by the flushing of water) a bathroom. And he, for his part, lay there almost fully clothed upon the yellow sheets, wondering in a hazily distanced sort of way just what was going on. Although his mouth seemed dry as the Sahara, he put down his drink untasted on the bedside-table, and for a while his mind grew clearer. Why had she used the other bottle of Glenfiddich? Perhaps… perhaps it had been watered down a bit? Just as the Bursar always said at a Gaudy: ‘Let them have the good stuff first.’

When, after what seemed an eternity, she returned, he watched her again, leaning half-upright on his right elbow. But his request was the oddest she had ever heard.

‘Have you got any sort of cream, or something? My lips are awfully dry.’

She fetched her handbag from the settee, opened the flap, and delved around for a few seconds. Then, unscrewing a circular container, she leaned over him, her breasts suspended only inches from his eyes, and smoothly smeared some cream along his lips.

‘That ees better, non? Dreenk up, darleeng!’

She unfastened his tie; then unfastened the front of his shirt, one button at a time, at each stage her fingers splaying across his chest.

For Browne-Smith these moments were almost unbearably erotic, and he knew that he had little hope of lasting out much longer. Yet he made one further quite extraordinary request. ‘Can you open the curtains-just a little bit?’

When the woman returned she saw that the man’s jacket, hitherto folded at the foot of the bed, was now lying beside him; and as she looked down, at his motionless body, she saw the tell-tale stain that seeped around the front of his well-cut, dark-blue trousers. His eyes were closed and his breathing steady, the right hand hanging loosely over the side of the bed, the index finger missing below the proximal inter-phalangeal joint. His glass, on the table beside his head, was now empty. She gently took his right arm and lay it alongside his body. Almost, for a moment or so, she felt a pang of tenderness. Then she hurriedly redressed, unlocked the door of the room, went out, and spoke in whispers to a man standing outside-a man who was reading a book entitled Know Your Kochel Numbers.

Her duties were done.

CHAPTER FIVE

A woman of somewhat dubious morals seeks to relax, although such is her nature that she recalls too clearly, and too often, the duties she has been paid so handsomely to perform.

In the latish evening of the day on which the events described in the previous chapter took place, a woman was seated alone in an upstairs flat, bedsitter-cum-bathroom-cum-kitchen, of a house situated in one of the many residential streets that lead south off the Richmond Road. Half an hour earlier she had walked from East Putney tube station, and now she felt tired. Piccadilly to Earls Court, change trains, across the Thames to Putney-how many times had she made that tiresome journey? It would have been so much easier to live in Soho, and there had been no lack of opportunity on that score! But she enjoyed her two lives-her two spheres of existence which intersected at (almost) no no single point. Here, in soberly bourgeois suburbia, she was a middle-aged woman with a job in the city. Here, she kept herself very much to herself, quietly, pleasantly, comfortably, dealing with rent and rates and household bills, and furnishing her few rooms at lavish expense. Yet these rooms were for her enjoyment only, since she had never invited another person into them,aceptfar the cleaning woman (two hours per week). Except, too, for the man who had come to see her only four days ago.

The woman we are describing looked to be about forty, but was in fact some ten years older. Yet one could readily be forgiven for such misjudgement. She was a large breasted woman, with hips that had put on several inches over recent years, but her legs were finely graceful still, her ankles slim and firm. There were, certainly, a few tell-tale lines at the corners of her mouth, and again at the sides of her eyes; but the mouth itself was as delicately, deliciously sensitive as it had always been, and the eyes were normally as clear and bright as a summer’s noon in the Swedish hills.

Tonight, however, those selfsame eyes were dull and sombre. Seated in an armchair, she crossed her nyloned legs, rested her blonde head upon her left arm, and stared down for many minutes at the richly patterned Wilton carpet. She still felt that residual sense of triumph and achievement; but she felt, too, a certain tension and concern which, over the last few hours, had been growing inexorably into a sense of guilt-ridden remorse.

It had all had its beginnings early on the previous Monday morning, almost immediately after the Sauna Select (just off Brewer Street) had opened its doors to the men who frequented that establishment. There was nothing common, nothing mean about it all; just a gentlemanly and a ladylike understanding that with little fuss and large finance the whole gamut of erotic refinements was readily available. Many of the steady if unspectacular clients were men of middle or late-middle age; some of them were undisguisedly and indisputably ancient. But all were wealthy, since that was the sine qua non of the business. How else could the management afford the princessly salaries of its four assorted hostesses? For (as the woman so often reminded herself) it was a big salary – far better than her former wages as a popular stripper in the Soho clubs, commuting with her bulky case of costumes from one cramped dais to another.

It had been 10.35 a.m. when the man had come in. He’d wanted a sauna, he said; he wanted nothing else. That’s what they all said; but soon the moisture and the heat and the inhibitions slowly dissipating in a world of steam and relaxation would almost always lead to something else. And this man? He had assessed the four of them with an almost embarrassing thoroughness- their figures, their complexions, their eyes – and he had chosen her, thereafter being escorted to the steam-room, and thence to one of the private massage parlours (£20 extra) in which the expertly fingered and minimally clad girls would exercise their skills.

He was sweating profusely under the belted white towelling that reached down to mid-thigh. She, for her part, cool and elegant, was dressed in the regulation white-cotton housecoat, with only the thinly transparent bra and pants beneath.

‘Would you like to lie down on the couch, sir? On your back, please.’

He had said nothing at that stage, obeying her suggestions mechanically and closing his eyes as she stood behind him, her fingers gently massaging the muscles round his neck.

‘Nice?’

‘Lovely!’

‘Just relax!’ She insinuated her hands beneath the towelling and massaged his shoulders with the tips of her strong and beautifully manicured fingers, working down from the neck towards the armpits-repeatedly, gently, sensually. And then, as she’d done a thousand tunes before, she walked round the couch and stood at his side, leaning over him, the top two buttons of her tunic already unfastened.

‘Would you like me to undress while I massage you?’ Wonderful question! And almost invariably an offer that couldn’t be refused, even when the price of such an optional extra was clearly stated in advance.

It was a surprise to the woman, therefore, when her apparently pliable and co-operative client had slowly sat up, swung his legs off the couch, leaned forward to fasten the buttons of her tunic, pulled the white towelling back over his shoulders, and said ‘No’.

But there followed an even bigger surprise.

‘Look! I think I know you, and I certainly knew your father. Is it safe to talk here?’

Her father! Yes, she could still remember him. Those interminable rows she had heard so often from her lonely bedroom when the amiable drunkard had finally reached home from the local-rows apparently forgotten by the following dawns, when the household moved about its normal business. Then, in 1939, he had been called up in the army, when she had been only eight years old; and his death, three years later, had seemed to her little more than the indefinite prolongation of an already lengthy period of absence from her life. There had been many reminders of him, of course: photographs, letters, clothes, shoes. But, truth to tell, the death of her father had been an event that was less than tragic and only dimly comprehended. But it had been otherwise for her mother, who had wept so often through those first few weeks and months. And it was largely to try to compensate for such an uneven burden of things that the young girl had tried so very hard with her schoolwork, helped so regularly with the housework, and even (later on) kept in check those symptoms of teenage rebelliousness that had threatened to swamp all sense of filial piety. As the years went by, she had gradually taken over everything from an increasingly neurotic and feckless mother, who had sunk into premature senility by her early fifties, arid into her grave before reaching her sixtieth year.

When the man had fastened up her buttons, she had felt belittled and cheap-on the wrong side of the habitual transaction. But she also felt deeply interested.

‘Yes, it’s safe,’ she said, finally answering his question.

‘No microphones? No two-way mirrors?’

She shook her head. ‘About my father-’

‘You don’t remember me, do you?’

She looked at him: a man over sixty, perhaps; fairly well-preserved by the look of him; head balding, teeth nicotined, jowls blue, chin somewhat sagging, but the mouth still firm and not without some sensitivity. No, she couldn’t remember him.

‘I called at your house once, but that was a long time ago. You were, I don’t know, fifteen or sixteen-still at school, anyway, because your mother asked you to go and do your homework in the kitchen. It was the year after the war was over, and I’d known your father – we were in the same mob together. In fact, I was with him when he died.’

‘What do you want?’ she asked abruptly.

‘I want you to do something for me – something you’ll be paid for doing-paid very well.’

‘What-?’

But he held up his hand. ‘Not now! You’re living at 23A Colebourne Road-is that right?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’d like to come and see you, if I may.’

He had come the next evening, and talked whilst she listened. And, when she’d expressed her willingness to do what he asked, a deal was done, a partial payment made. And now, this very day, she had acted the role that he had asked of her, and the final payment had been made. A lot of easy money for a little easy work, and yet…

Yes, it was that little ‘and yet’ that caused her mind to fill with nagging doubts as she sat and sipped her China tea. She knew enough, of course-she’d insisted on that. But perhaps she should have insisted on knowing more, especially about the sequel to her own performance in the drama. They couldn’t -they wouldn’t, surely-have… killed him?

Her lips felt dry, and she reached for her handbag, opened the flap, and delved around for a few seconds before unscrewing a circular container-for the second time that day.

CHAPTER SIX

In which the Master ofLonsdale is somewhat indiscreet to a police inspector, and discusses his concern for one of his colleagues, and for the niceties of English grammar.

On the fifth morning after the events described in the preceding chapter, Detective Chief Inspector Morse, of the Thames Valley Constabulary, was seated in his office at Kidlington, Oxon. One half of him was semi-satisfied with the vagaries of his present existence; the other half was semi-depressed. Earlier that very morning he had sworn himself a solemn vow that the day ahead would be quite different. His recent consumption of food, tobacco, and alcohol had varied only within the higher degrees of addictive excess; and now, at the age of fifty-two, he had once again decided that a few days of virtually total abstinence was urgently demanded by stomach, lungs, and liver alike. He had arrived at his office, therefore, unbreakfasted, having already thrown away a half-full packet of cigarettes, and having left his half-empty wallet on the bedside-table. Get thou behind me, Satan! And, indeed, things had gone surprisingly well until about 11.30 a.m., when the Master of Lonsdale had rung through to HQ and invited Morse down to lunch with him.

‘Half-past twelve-in my rooms-all right? We can have a couple of snifters first.’

‘I’d like that,’ Morse heard himself saying.

As he walked towards the Master’s rooms in the first quad, Morse passed two young female students chattering to each other like a pair of monkeys.

‘But surely Rosemary’s expecting a first, isn’t she? If she doesn’t get one-’

‘No. She told me that she’d made a terrible mess of the General Paper.’

‘So did I.’

‘And me!’

‘She’ll be awfully disappointed, though…’

Yes, life was full of disappointments, Morse knew that better than most; and, as he half-turned, he watched the two young, lovely ladies as they walked out through the Porter’s Lodge. They must be members of the college- two outward and happily visible signs of the fundamental change of heart that had resulted in the admission of women to these erstwhile wholly. masculine precincts. Now when he himself had been up at St John’s…But, abruptly, he switched off the memories of those dark, disastrous days.

‘What’ll it be, Morse? No beer, I’m afraid but-gin and tonic-gin and French?’

‘Gin and French-lovely!’ Morse reached over and took a cigarette from the well-stocked open box on the table.

The Master beamed in avuncular fashion as he poured his mixtures with a practised hand. He had changed little in the ten years or so that Morse had known him: going to fat a little, but as distinguished-looking a man now, in his late fifties, as he had been in his late forties; a tall man, with that luxuriant grey hair still framing the large head; the suits (famed throughout the University) as flamboyant as ever they were, and today eye-catchingly complemented by a waistcoat of green velvet. A successful man, and a proud man. A Head of a House.

‘You’ve got women here now, I see,’ said Morse.

‘Yes, old boy. We were almost the last to give in-but, well, it’s been a good thing on the whole. Very good, some of them.’

‘Good-looking, you mean?’

The Master smiled. ‘A few.’

‘They sleep in?’

‘Some of them. Still, some of them always did, didn’t they?’

‘I suppose so,’ said Morse; and his mind drifted back to those distant days just after the war, when he had come up to Oxford with an exhibition in Classics from one of the Midland grammar schools.

‘Couple of firsts this year-among the girls, I mean. One in Greats, one in Geography. Not bad, eh? In fact the Classics girl, Jane-’ Suddenly the Master stopped and leaned forward earnestly, awkwardly twiddling the large, onyx dress-ring on the little finger of his left hand. ‘Look Morse! I shouldn’t have said-what I just said. The class-lists won’t be out for another week or ten days-’

Morse waved his right hand across the space between them, as though any mental recollection of the indiscretion had already been expunged. ‘I didn’t hear a word you said, Master. I know what you were going to tell me, though.’

‘Oh?’

‘She’s got the top first in the University, and she’ll soon get a summons for a congratulatory viva. Right?’

The Master nodded. ‘Super girl-bit of a honey, too, Morse. You’d have liked her.’

‘Still would, I shouldn’t wonder.’

The Master’s eyes were twinkling with merriment now. How he enjoyed Morse’s company!

‘She’ll probably marry some lecherous sod,’ continued Morse, ‘and end up with half a dozen whining infants.’

‘You’re not exactly full of the joys of summer.’

‘Just envious. Still there are more important things in life than getting a first in Greats.’

‘Such as?’

Morse considered the question a few moments before shaking his head. ‘I dunno.’

‘I’ll tell you one thing. There’s not likely to be anything much more important for her. We shall probably offer her a junior fellowship here.’

‘You mean you’ve already offered her one.’

‘Please don’t forget, will you, that I-er-I shouldn’t have said anything about all this. I’m normally very discreet.’

‘Must be the drink,’ said Morse, looking down into his empty glass.

‘Same again? Mixture about right?’

‘Fraction more gin, perhaps?’ Morse reached for another cigarette as the Master refilled the glasses. ‘I suppose she could take her pick of all the undergrads?’

‘And the dons!’

‘You never married, did you, Master.’

‘Nor did you.’

For some minutes the two of them sat silently sipping. Then Morse asked: ‘Has she got a mother?’

‘Jane Summers, you mean?’

‘You didn’t mention her surname before.’

‘Odd question! I don’t know. I expect so. She’s only, what, twenty-two, twenty-three. Why do you ask?’

But Morse was hardly listening. In the quad outside it had been comparatively easy to pull the curtain across the painful memories. But now? Not so! His eyes seemed on the point of shedding a gin-soaked tear as he thought again of his own sad days at Oxford…

‘You listening?’

‘Pardon?’ said Morse.

‘You don’t seem to be paying much attention to what I’m saying.’

‘Sorry! Must be the booze.’ His glass was empty again and the Master needed no prompting.

‘Will you keep a gentle eye on things for me, then? You see, I’m probably off myself this weekend for a few days.’

‘Few weeks, do you mean?’

‘I’m not sure yet. But if you could just, as I say, keep an eye on things – you’d put my mind at rest.’

‘Keep an eye on what’

‘Well, it’s just-so unlike Browne-Smith, that’s all. He’s the most pedantic and pernickity fellow in the University. It’s-it’s odd. No arrangements, none. Just this note left at the lodge. No apology for absence from the college meeting; nothing to the couple of students he’d arranged to see.’

‘You’ve got the note?’

The Master took a folded sheet from his dove-grey jacket and handed it over:

Please keep any mail for me here. I shall be away for several days. Sudden irresistable offer-quite out of the blue. Tell my scout to look after my effects,,i.e. to keep the rooms well dusted, put the laundry through and cancel all meals until further notice.

B-S

Morse felt a tingle in his veins as he read through the brief, typewritten message. But he said nothing.

‘You see,’ said the Master, ‘I just don’t think he wrote that.’

‘No?’

‘No, I don’t.’

‘When did the Lodge get this?’

‘Monday morning-two days ago.’

‘And when was he last seen here?’

‘Last Friday. In the morning, it was. He left college at about quarter-past eight, to catch the London train. One of the fellows here saw him on the station.’

‘Did this note come through the post?’

‘No. The porter says it was just left there.’

‘Why are you so sure he didn’t write it?’

‘He just couldn’t have written it. Look, Morse, I’ve known him for twenty-odd years, and there was never a man, apart from Housman, who was so contemptuous about any solecism in English usage. He was almost paranoiac about things like that. You see, he always used to draft the minutes of the college meetings, and even a comma out of place in the final version would bring down the wrath of the gods on the college secretary. He even used to type a draft before he’d put a bloody notice on the board!’

Morse looked at the letter again. ‘You mean he’d have put commas after “sudden”-and “through”?’

‘By Jove, yes! He’d always use commas there. But there’s something else. Browne-Smith was the only man in England, I should think, who invariably argued for a comma after “i.e.”.’

‘Mm.’

‘You don’t sound very impressed.’

‘Ah! But I am. I think you may be right.’

‘Really?’

‘You think he’s got a bird somewhere?’

‘He’s never had a “bird”, as you put it.’

‘Is Jane Summers still in residence?’

The Master laughed aloud with genuine amusement. ‘I saw her this morning, Morse, if you must know.’

‘Did you tell her she’d got a first?’ A smile was playing slowly around Morse’s mouth, and the” Master’s shrewd eyes were again upon him.

‘Not much point pretending with you, is there? But no! No, I didn’t tell her that. But I did tell her that perhaps she had every reason to be-er, let’s say, optimistic about her-ah, future. Anyway, it’s time we went down for lunch. You ready to eat?’

‘Can I keep this?’ Morse held up the single sheet, and the Master nodded.

‘Seriously, I’m just a fraction worried. And you just said, didn’t you, that I might be right?’

‘You are right. At least, you’re almost certainly right in suggesting that he didn’t type it. He could have dictated it, of course.’

‘Why are you so sure?’

‘Well,’ said Morse, as the Master locked the door behind them, ‘he was a literary pedant for a good many years before you met him. He was one of my “Mods” tutors, you see; and even then he’d bark away at the most trivial sort of spelling mistake as if it were the sin against the Holy Ghost. At the time, of course, it didn't seem to matter two farts in the universe; but in an odd sort of way I came to respect his views- and I still do. I'd never let a spelling mistake go through my secretary-not if I could help it.'

‘Never?’

‘Never!’ said Morse, his grey-blue eyes sober and serious as the two men lingered on the landing outside the Master's rooms. ‘And you can be absolutely sure of one thing, Master. Browne-Smith would have died sooner than misspelt “irresistible”.'

‘You don't think-you don't think he is dead?’

‘Course he's not!’ said Morse, as the two old friends walked down the stairs.

CHAPTER SEVEN

In which those readers impatiently waiting to encounter the first corpse will not be disappointed, and in which interesting light is thrown on the character of the detective, Morse.

It had been 2.30 p.m. when Morse finally left Lonsdale; and after stocking himself up from a tobacconist's shop just along the High, he was back in his Kidlington office just before three o'clock, where nothing much appeared to have happened during his absence.

On leaving Lonsdale, he had promised the Master to ‘keep an eye on things’ (a quite meaningless phrase, as Morse saw it) should any aspect of Browne-Smith's sudden departure take on a slightly more sinister connotation.

To an observer, Morse's eyes would have appeared slightly ‘set’, as Shakespeare has it, and his mood was mellowly maudlin. And as he sat there, his freely-winged imagination glided easily back to the fateful days of his time at Oxford…

After eighteen months as a National Serviceman in the Royal Signals Regiment, Morse had come up to St John's College, where his first two years were the happiest and most purposeful of his life. He had worked hard at his texts, attended lectures regularly, been prompt with unseens and compositions; and it had been no surprise to his tutors when such an informed and intelligent young man had duly gained a first in Classical Moderations. With two years ahead of him- two years in which to study for Greats-the future seemed to loom as sure as the sun-bright day that would follow the rosy-fingered dawn -particularly so, since the slant of Morse’s mind was ideally suited to the work ahead of him in History, Logic, and Philosophy. But in the middle of his third year he had met the girl who matched the joy of all his wildest dreams.

She was already a graduate of Leicester University, whence a series of glowing testimonials had proved sufficiently impressive for her application to take a D.Phil. at Oxford to be accepted by St Hilda’s. For her first term, she had been alloted digs way out in the distances of Cowley Road. But amidst the horsehair sofas and the sombre, dark-brown furnishings, she had been unhappy and had jumped at the opportunity of a smaller flat in Number 22 St John Street (just off St Giles’) at the start of the Hilary Term. It was so much brighter, so much nearer the heart of things, and only a short walk from the Bodleian Library, where she spent so much of her time. She felt happy in her new room. Life was good.

At this same time it was customary for the Dean of St John’s to farm out most of his third-year undergraduates to some of the nearby College property and, from the start of the Michaelmas term, Morse had moved into St John’s Road: Number 24.

They first met one night in late February, during the interval of the OUDS’ production of Doctor Faustus at the New Theatre, only some fifty yards or so away, in Beaumont Street. Morse had finally managed to order a pint of beer at the crowded bar when he felt a lightly laid hand upon his shoulder -and turned round to find a pale face, the blonde hair high upswept, the hazel eyes looking into his with an air of pleading diffidence.

‘Have you just ordered?’

‘Yes-I’ll soon be out of your way.’

‘You wouldn’t mind, would you, ordering a drink for me as well?’

‘Pleasure!’

Two gins and tonics, please.’ She pushed a pound note into his hand-and was gone.

She was seated in a far corner of the bar, next to a dark-haired dowdy-looking young woman; and Morse, after negotiating his way slowly through the throng, carefully placed the drinks on the table.

‘You didn’t mind, did you?’

It was the blonde who had spoken, looking up at him with widely innocent eyes; and Morse found himself looking at her keenly – noting her small and thinly nostrilled nose, noting the tiny dimples in her cheeks, and the lips that parted (almost mischievously now) over the rather large but geometrically regular teeth.

‘Course not! It’s a bit of a squash in here, isn’t it?’

‘You enjoying the play?’

‘Yes. Are you?’

‘Oh yes! I’m a great Marlowe fan. So’s Sheila, here. Er-I’m sorry. Perhaps you don’t know each other?’

‘I don’t know you, either!’ said Morse.

‘There you are! What did I tell you?’ It was the dark girl who had taken up the conversation. She smiled at Morse: ‘Wendy here said she recognized you. She says you live next door to her.’

‘Really?’ Morse stood there, gaping ineffectually.

A bell sounded in the bar, signalling the start of the last act; and Morse, calling upon all his courage, asked the two girls if they might perhaps like to have a drink with him after the performance.

‘Why not?’ It was the saturnine Sheila who had answered. ‘We’d love to, Wendy, wouldn’t we!’

It was agreed that the trio should meet up again in the cocktail-bar of the Randolph, a stone’s throw away, just along the street.

For Morse, the last act seemed to drag its slow length interminably along, and he left the theatre well before the end. The name “Wendy” was re-echoing through his mind as once the woods had welcomed “Amaryllis”. With the bar virtually deserted, he sat and waited expectantly. Ten minutes. Fifteen minutes. The bar was filling up now, and twice, with some embarrassment, Morse had assured other customers that, yes, there was someone sitting in each of the empty seats at his table.

She came at last-Sheila, that is-looking around for him, coming across, and accepting his offer of a drink.

‘What will-er- Wendy have?’

‘She won’t be coming, I’m afraid. She says she’s sorry but she suddenly remembered-’

But Morse was no longer listening, for now the night seemed drear and desolate. He bought the girl a second drink; then a third. She left at ten-thirty to catch her bus, and Morse watched with relief as she waved half-heartedly to him from the bar entrance.

It was trying to snow as Morse walked slowly back to St John Street, but he stopped where he knew he would stop. On the right of the door of Number 22, he saw four names, typed and slotted into folders, a plastic bell-push beside each one of them. The first name was ‘Miss W. Spencer (Top Floor)’, but no light shone at the highest window, and Morse was soon climbing the stairs to his cold bed-sitter.

For the next three days he spent much of the time hanging about in the vicinity of St John Street, missing lectures, missing meals, and missing, too, any sight of the woman he was aching to see once more. Had she been called away? Was she ill? The whole gamut of tragic forebodings presented itself to his mind as he frittered away his hours and his energies in fruitless and futile imaginings. On the fourth evening he walked over to the Randolph, drank two double Scotches, walked back to St John Street, and with a thumping heart rang the bell at the top of the panel. And, when the door opened, she was standing there, a smile of gentle recognition in her eyes.

‘You’ve been a long time,’ she said.

‘I didn’t quite know-’

‘You knew where to find me-I told you that.’

‘I-’

‘It wasn’t you who made the first move, was it?’

‘I-’

‘Would you like to come in?’

Impetuously-even that first night-Morse told her that he loved her; and she, for her part, told him how very glad she was that they had met. After that, their days and weeks and months were spent in long, idyllic happiness: they walked together across the Oxfordshire countryside; went to theatres, cinemas, concerts, museums; spent much time in pubs and restaurants; and, after a while, much time in bed together, too. But, during those halcyon days, both were neglecting the academic work that was expected of them. At the end of the Trinity term, Morse was gently reminded by his tutor that he might be in danger of failing to satisfy the examiners the following year unless he decided to mount a forceful assault upon the works of Plato during the coming vacation. After a similar interview with her own supervisor, Wendy Spencer was firmly informed that unless her thesis began to show more obvious signs of progress, her grant-and therewith her doctorate-would be in serious jeopardy.

Surprisingly, perhaps, it was Morse who saw the more clearly the importance of some academic success-and who sought the more anxiously to promote it. But such success was not to be. Just before the Christmas vac a tearful Wendy announced that her doctorate was terminated; her grant, w.e.f. January 1st, withheld. Yet the two of them lived on very much as before: Wendy stayed on in her digs, and almost immediately got a job as a waitress in the Randolph; Morse tried hard to curb his beer consumption and occasionally read the odd chapter of Rate’s Republic.

Ironically, it was one day before the anniversary of their first, wonderful evening together that Wendy received the telegram, informing her that her widowed mother had suffered a stroke, and that help was urgently required. So she had gone home-and stayed there. Scores of letters passed between the lovers during the dark months that followed; and twice Morse had made the journey to the West Country to see her. But he was very short of money now; and slowly he was learning to assimilate the truth that (for some reason) her mother was a more important figure in Wendy’s life than he was. His performances for his tutors were now so pathetically poor that his college exhibition was rescinded, and he had the humiliating task of writing to beg his county authority to make up the deficit. Then, three weeks before Greats, he had received his last letter from her: she could not see him again; she had almost ruined his life already; she had a duty to stay with her mother, and had irrevocably decided to do so; she had loved him-she had loved him desperately-but now they had come to the end; she implored him not to reply to her letter; she urged him to do himself some semblance of justice in his imminent examination; that would always be important for her. Morse had immediately sent a telegram, begging her to meet him once more. But he received no reply-and had no money for a further journey. In his despair, he did nothing-absolutely nothing.

Two months later he learned that he had failed Greats; and, although the news was no surprise, he departed from Oxford a withdrawn and silent young man, bitterly belittled, yet not completely broken in spirit. It had been his sadly disappointed old father, a month or so before his death, who suggested that his only son might find a niche somewhere in the police force.

Morse’s attractive young secretary came into the office and handed over his letters for signature.

‘Do you want to dictate the others, sir?’

‘A little later. I’ll give you a ring.’

After she had gone, he continued his earlier train of thought-but not for long. In any case, there was nothing more to recall. Of Wendy Spencer he had never heard another word. She would still be alive, though, surely? Even at that minute -that very second-she’d be somewhere. He repeated to himself the line from “Wessex Heights”: ‘But time cures hearts of tenderness – and now I can let her go.’ It was a lie, of course. But so it had been for Hardy.

Nor had Morse ever met any of his Greats examiners since he had first come down from Oxford. Yet even now he could remember with dramatic clarity the six names that were subscribed to the class-list on that bleak day some thirty years ago:

Wells (Chairman)

Styler

Stockton

Sherwin-White

Austin

Browne-Smith.

During the following week Morse did nothing about bis tenuous promise to the Master. Well, virtually nothing. He had rung Lonsdale early on the Monday morning, but neither the Master, nor the Vice-Master, nor the Senior Fellow, nor the Bursar, was on the premises. Everyone had either gone or was about to be gone. With the heavy work over for another academic year, the corporate body of the University appeared to be taking a collective siesta. The thought suddenly occurred to Morse that this would be a marvellous time to murder a few of the doddery old bachelor dons. No wives to worry about their whereabouts; no families to ring their fathers from railway stations; no landladies to whine about the unpaid rents. In fact, nobody would miss most of them at all-not, that is, until the middle of October.

It was on Wednesday, 23rd July, two days after his abortive phone-call to Lonsdale, that Morse himself, in mid-afternoon, received the news, recognizing Sergeant Lewis’s voice immediately.

‘We’ve got a body, sir-or at least part-’

‘Where are you?’

‘Thrupp, sir. You know the-’

‘Course I know it!’

‘I think you’d better come.’

‘I’ve got a lot of correspondence to get on with you handle things, can’t you?’

“We fished it out of the canal.’

‘Lots of people chuck ‘emselves into -’

‘I don’t think this one drowned himself, sir,’ said Lewis quietly.

So Morse got the Lancia out of the yard, and drove the few miles out to Thrupp.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The necrophobic Morse reluctantly surveys a corpse, and converse with a cynical and ageing police surgeon.

Two miles north of police headquarters in Kidlington, on the main A423 road to Banbury, an elbow turn to the right leads, after only three hundred yards or so, to the Boat Inn, which, together with about twenty cottages, a farm, and a depot of the Inland Waterways Executive, comprises the tiny hamlet of Thrupp. The inn itself, only some thirty yards from the waters of the Oxford Canal, has served generations of boatmen, past and present. But the working barges of earlier times, which brought down coal from the Midlands and shipped up beer from the Oxford breweries, have now yielded place to the privately owned long-boats and pleasure-cruisers which ply their way placidly along the present waterway.

Chief Inspector Morse turned right at the inn, then left along the narrow road stretching between the canal and a row of small, grey-stoned, terraced cottages, their doors and multi-paned windows painted a clean and universal white. At almost any other time, Thrupp would have seemed a snugly secluded little spot; but already Morse could see the two white police cars pulled over on to the tow-path, beside a sturdy-looking drawbridge; and an ambulance, its blue light flashing, parked a little further ahead, where the road petered out into a track of grass-grown gravel. It is strange to relate (for a man in his profession) that in addition to incurable acrophobia, arachnophobia, myophobia, and ornithophobia, Morse also suffered from necrophobia; and had he known what awaited him now, it is doubtful whether he would have dared to view the horridly disfigured corpse at all.

A knot of thirty or so people, most of them from the gaudily painted houseboats moored along the waterway, stood at a respectful distance from the centre of activities; and Morse, pushing his way somewhat officiously through, came face to face immediately with a grim-looking Lewis.

‘Nasty business, sir!’

‘Know who it is?’

‘Not much chance.’

‘What? You can always tell who they are – doesn’t matter how long they’ve been in the water. You know that, surely? Teeth, hair, finger-nails, toe-nails-’

‘You’d better come and look at him, sir.’

‘Ha! Know it’s a “him” do we? Well, that’s something. Reduces the population by about 50 per cent at a stroke that does.’

‘You’d better come and look at him,’ repeated Lewis quietly.

A uniformed police constable and two ambulance men moved aside as Morse walked towards the green tarpaulin sheet that covered a body recently fished from the murky-looking water. For a few moments, however, he was more than reluctant to pull back the tarpaulin. Instead, his dark eyebrows contracted to a frown as mentally he traced the odd configuration of the bulge beneath the winding-sheet. Surely the body had to be that of a child, for it appeared to be about three and a half feet long-no more; and Morse’s up-curved nostrils betokened an even grislier revulsion. Adult suicide was bad enough. But the death of a child-agh! Accident? Murder?

Morse told the four men standing there to shield him from the silent onlookers as he pulled back the tarpaulin and – after only a few seconds – replaced it. His cheeks had grown ashen pale, and his eyes seemed stunned with horror. He managed only two hoarsely spoken words: ‘My God!”

He was still standing there, speechless and shaken, when a big, battered old Ford braked sharply beside the ambulance, from it emerging a mournful, humpbacked man who looked as though he should have taken late retirement ten years earlier. He greeted Morse with a voice that matched his lean, lugubrious mien.

‘I thought I’d find you in the bar, Morse.’

‘They’re closed.’

‘You don’t sound very cheerful, old man?’

Morse pointed vaguely behind him, towards the sheet, and the police surgeon immediately knelt to his calling.

‘Phew! Very interesting!’

Morse, his back still turned on the corpse, heard himself mutter something that vaguely concurred with such a finding, and thereafter left his sanguine colleague utterly in peace.

Slowly and carefully the surgeon examined the body, methodically entering notes into a black pocket-book. Much of what he wrote would be unintelligible to one unversed in forensic medicine. Yet the first few lines were phrased with frightening simplicity:

First appearances: male (60-65?); Caucasian; torso well nourished (bit too well?); head (missing) severed from shoulders (amateurishly?) at roughly the fourth cervical vertebra; hands 1. & r. missing, the wrists cut across the medial ligaments; legs l. & r. also missing, severed from torso about 5-6 inches below hip-joint (more professionally done?); skin – ‘washerwoman effect’…

Finally, and with some difficulty, the surgeon rose to his feet and stood beside Morse, holding his lumbar regions with both hands as though in chronic agony.

‘Know a cure for lumbago, Morse?’

‘I thought you were the doctor.’

‘Me? I’m just a poorly paid pathologist.’

‘You get lumbago in mid-summer?’

‘Mid-every-bloody-season!’

‘They say a drop of Scotch is good for most things.’

‘I thought you said they’re closed.’

‘Emergency, isn’t it?’ Morse was beginning to feel slightly better’.

One of the ambulance men came up to him. ‘All right to take it away?’

‘Might as well.’

‘No!’ It was the surgeon who spoke. ‘Not for the moment. I want to have a few words with the chief inspector here first.’

The ambulance man moved away and the surgeon sounded unwontedly sombre. ‘You’ve got a nasty case on your hands here, Morse, and-well, I reckon you ought to have a look at one or two things while we’re in situ, as it were-you were a classicist once, I believe? Any clues going’ll pretty certainly be gone by the time I start carving him up.’

‘I don’t think there’s much point in that, Max. You just give him a good going-over-that’ll be fine!’

In kindly fashion, Max put a hand on his old friend’s shoulder. ‘I know! Pretty dreadful sight, isn’t it? But I’ve missed things in the past-you know that! And if-’

‘All right. But I need a drink first, Max.’

‘After. Don’t worry-I know the landlord.’

‘So do I,’ said Morse.

‘OK, then?’

‘OK!’

But, as the surgeon drew back the tarpaulin once more, Morse found himself quite incapable of looking a second time at that crudely jagged neck. Instead he concentrated his narrowed eyes upon the only limbs that someone – someone (already the old instincts were quickened again)-had felt it safe to leave intact. The upper part of the man’s body was dressed in a formal, dark-blue, pin-striped jacket, matching the material of the truncated trousers below; and, beneath the jacket, in a white shirt, adorned with a plain rust-red tie-rather awkwardly fastened. Morse shuddered as the surgeon peeled off the sodden jacket, and placed the squelching material by the side of the dismembered torso.

‘You want the trousers too?-what’s left of ‘em?’

Morse shook his head. ‘Anything in the pockets?’

The surgeon inserted his hands roughly into the left and right pockets; but his fingers showed through the bottom of each, and Morse felt as sick as some sensitively palated patient in the dentist’s chair having a wax impression taken of his upper jaw.

‘Back pocket?’ he suggested weakly.

‘Ah!’ The surgeon withdrew a sodden sheet of paper, folded over several times, and handed it to Morse. ‘See what I mean? Good job we-’

‘You’d have found it, anyway.’

‘Think so? Who’s the criminologist here, Morse? They pay me to look at the bodies-not a lump of pulp like that. I’d have sent the trousers to Oxfam, like as not-better still, the Boy Scouts, eh?’

Morse managed to raise a feeble grin, but he wanted the job over.

‘Nothing else?’

Max shook his head; and as Morse (there being nothing less nauseating to contemplate) looked vaguely down along the outstretched arms, the surgeon interrupted his thoughts.

‘Not much good, arms, you know. Now if you’ve got teeth -which in our case we have not got-or-’

But Morse was no longer listening to his colleague’s idle commentary. ‘Will you pull his shirt-sleeves up for me, Max?’

‘Might take a bit of skin with ‘em. Depends how long-’

‘Shut up!’

The surgeon carefully unfastened the cuff-links and pushed the sleeves slowly up the slender arms. ‘Not exactly a weight-lifter, was he?’

‘No.’

The surgeon looked at Morse curiously. ‘You expecting to find a tattoo or something, with the fellow’s name stuck next to his sweetheart’s?’

‘You never know your luck, Max. There might even be a name-tape on his suit somewhere.’

‘Somehow I don’t reckon you’re going to have too much luck in this case,’ said the surgeon.

‘Perhaps not…’ But Morse was hardly listening. He felt the sickness rising to the top of his gullet, but not before he’d noticed the slight contusion on the inner hollow between the left biceps and the forearm. Then he suddenly turned away from the body and retched up violently on the grass.

Sergeant Lewis looked on with a sad and vulnerable concern. Morse was his hero, and always would be. But even heroes had their momentary weaknesses, as Lewis had so often learned.

CHAPTER NINE

In which Morse’s mind drifts elsewhere as the police surgeon enunicates some of the scientific principles concerning immersion in fluids.

It was later that same afternoon that Morse, Lewis, and the police surgeon presented themselves at the Boat Inn, where the landlord, sensibly circumspect, informed the trio that it would of course be wholly improper for him to serve any alcoholic beverages at the bar; on the other hand the provision of three chairs in a back room and a bottle of personally purchased Glenfiddich might not perhaps be deemed to contravene the nation’s liquor laws.

‘How long’s he been dead?’ was Morse’s flatly spoken, predictable gambit, and the surgeon poured himself a liberal tumbler before deigning to reply.

‘Good question! I’ll have a guess at it tomorrow.’

Morse poured himself an equally liberal portion, his sour expression reflecting a chronic distrust in the surgeon’s calling.

‘A week, perhaps?’

The surgeon merely shrugged his shoulders.

‘Could be longer, you mean?’

‘Or shorter.’

‘Oh Christ! Come off it, Max!’ Morse banged the bottle on on the table, and Lewis wondered if he himself might be offered a dram. He would have refused, of course, but the gesture would have been gratifying.

The surgeon savoured a few sips with the slow dedication of a man testing a dubious tooth with a mouthwash, before turning to Morse, his ugly face beatified: ‘Nectar, old man!’

Morse, likewise, appeared temporarily more interested in the whisky than in any problems a headless, handless, legless corpse might pose to the Kidlington CID. ‘They tell me the secret’s in the water of those Scottish burns.’

‘Nonsense! It’s because they manage to get rid of the water.’

‘Could be!’ Morse nodded more happily now. ‘But while we’re talking of water, I just asked you-’

‘You know nothing about water, Morse. Listen! If you find a body immersed in fresh water, you’ve got the helluva job finding out what happened. In fact, one of the trickiest problems in forensic medicine-about which you know bugger-all, of course-is to prove whether death was due to drowning.’

‘But this fellow wasn’t drowned. He had his head-’

‘Shut up, Morse. You asked how long he’d been in the canal, right? You didn’t ask me who sawed his head off!’

Morse nodded agreement.

‘Well, listen, then! There are five questions I’m paid to ask myself when a body’s found immersed in water, and in this particular case you wouldn’t need a genius like me to answer most of them. First, was the person alive when entering the water? Answer: pretty certainly, no. Second, was death due to immersion? Answer: equally certainly, no. Third, was death rapid? Answer: the question doesn’t apply, because death took place elsewhere. Fourth, did any other factors contribute to death? Answer: almost certainly, yes; the poor fellow was likely to have been clinically dead when somebody chopped him up and chucked him in the canal. Fifth, where did the body enter the water? Answer: God knows! Probably where it was found-as most of them are. But it could have drifted a fair way, in certain conditions. With a combination of bodily gases and other internal reactions, you’ll often find a corpse floating up to the surface and then-’

‘But Morse interrupted him, turning to Lewis: ‘How did we find him?’

‘We had a call from a chap who was fishing there, sir. Said he’d seen something looking like a body half-floating under the water, just where we found him.’

‘Did you get his name-this fisherman’s?’ Morse’s question was sharp, and to Lewis his eyes seemed to glint with a frightening authority.

‘I wasn’t there myself, sir. I got the message from Constable Dickson.’

‘He took down the name and address, of course?’

‘Not quite, sir,’ gulped Lewis. ‘He got the name all right, but-’

‘ – the fellow rang off before giving his address!’

‘You can’t really blame-’

‘Who’s blaming anybody, Lewis? What was his name, by the way?’ ‘Rowbotham. Simon Rowbotham.’

‘Christ! That’s an unlikely sounding name.’ ‘But Dickson got it down all right, sir. He asked the fellow to spell it for him-he told me that.’

‘I see I shall have to congratulate Constable Dickson the next time I have the misfortune to meet him.’

‘We’re only talking about a name, sir.’ Lewis was feeling that” incipient surge of frustrated anger he’d so often experienced with Morse.

‘Only? What are you talking about? “Simon”? With a surname like “Rowbotham”? Lew-is! Now George Rowbotnam -that’s fine, that squares with your actual proletarian parentage. Or Simon Comakers, or something-that’s what you’d expect from some aristocrat from Saffron Waldon. But Simon Rowbotham’? Come off it, Lewis. The fellow who rang was making it up as he went along.’

The surgeon, who had remained sipping placidly during this oddly intemperate exchange, now decided it was time to rescue the hapless Lewis. ‘You do talk a load of nonsense, Morse. I’ve never known your first name, and I don’t give a sod what it is. For all I know, it’s “Eric” or “Ernie” or something. But so} bloody what?’

Morse, who had ever sought to surround his Christian name in the decent mists of anonymity, made no reply. Instead, he poured himself another measure of the pale yellow spirit, thereafter lapsing into silent thought.

It was Max who picked up the thread of the earlier discussion. ‘At least you’re not likely to get bogged down in any doubts about accident or suicide – unless you find some boat-propeller’s sliced his head off-and his hands-and his legs.’

‘No chance of that?’

‘I haven’t examined the body yet, have I?’ f

Morse grunted with frustration. ‘I asked you, and I ask you again. How long’s he been in the water?’

‘I just told you. I haven’t-’

‘Can’t you try a feeble bloody guess?’

‘Not all that long-in the water, that is. But he may have been dead a few days before then.’

‘Have a guess, for Christ’s sake!’

‘That’s tricky.’

‘It’s always “tricky” for you, isn’t it? You do actually think the fellow’s dead, I suppose?’

The surgeon finished his whisky, and poured himself more, his lined face creasing into something approaching geniality. ‘Time of death? That’s always going to play a prominent part in your business, Morse. But it’s never been my view that an experienced pathologist-such as myself-can ever really put too much faith in the accuracy of his observations. So many variables, you see -’

‘Forget it!’

‘Ah! But if someone actually saw this fellow being chucked in-well, we’d have a much better ideas of things, um?’

Morse nodded slowly and turned his eyes to Lewis; and Lewis, in turn, nodded his own understanding.

‘It shouldn’t take long, sir. There’s only a dozen or so houses along the towpath.’

He prepared to go. Before leaving, however, he asked one question of the surgeon. ‘Have you got the slightest idea, sir, when the body might have been put in the canal?’

‘Two, three days ago, sergeant.’

‘How the hell do you know that?’ growled Morse after Lewis had gone.

‘I don’t really. But he’s a polite fellow, your Lewis, isn’t he? Deserves a bit of help, as I see it.’

‘About two or three days, then…’

‘Not much more-and probably been dead about a day longer. His skin’s gone past the “washerwoman” effect, and that suggests he’s certainly been in the water more than twenty-four hours. And I’d guess -guess, mind! -that we’re past the “sodden” stage and almost up to the time when the skin gets blanched. Let’s say about two, two-and-a-half days.’

‘And nobody would be fool enough to dump him in during the hours of daylight, so-’

‘Yep. Sunday night- that’s about the time I’d suggest, Morse. But if I find a few live fleas on him, it’ll mean I’m talking a load of balls; they’d usually be dead after twenty-four hours in the water.’

‘He doesn’t look much like a fellow who had fleas, does he?’

‘Depends where he was before they pushed him in. For all we know, he could have been lying in the boot of a car next to a dead dog.’ He looked across and saw the Chief Inspector looking less than happily into his glass.

‘I can understand somebody chopping his head off, Max -even his hands. But why in the name of Sweeney Todd should anyone want to slice his legs?’

‘Same thing. Identification.’

‘You mean… there was something below his knees -couple of wooden legs, or something?’

‘ “Artificial prostheses”, that’s what they call ‘em now.’

‘Or he might have had no toes?’

‘Not many of that sort around…’

But Morse’s mind was far away_r the image of the gruesome corpse producing a further spasm in some section of his gut.

‘You’re right, you know, Morse!’ The surgeon happily poured himself another drink. ‘He probably wouldn’t have recognized a flea! Good cut of cloth, that suit. Pretty classy shirt, too. Sort of chap who had a very-nice-job-thank-you: good salary, pleasant conditions of work, carpet all round the office, decent pension…’ Suddenly the surgeon broke off, and seemed to arrive at one of his few firm conclusions. ‘You know what, Morse? I reckon he was probably a bank manager!’

‘Or an Oxford don,’ added Morse quietly.

CHAPTER TEN

In spite of his toothache, Morse begins his investigations with the reconstruction of a letter.

In spite of his unorthodox, intuitive, and seemingly lazy approach to the solving of crime, Morse was an extremely competent administrator; and when he sat down again at his office desk that same evening, all the procedures called for in a case of murder (and this was murder) had been, or were about to be, put into effect. Superintendent Strange, to whom Morse had reported on his return to HQ, knew his chief inspector only too well.

‘You’ll want Lewis, of course?’

‘Thank you, sir. Couple of frogmen, too.’

‘How many extra men?’

‘Well-er-none; not for the minute, anyway.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘I wouldn’t quite know what to ask them to do, sir,’ had been Morse’s simple and honest explanation.

And, indeed, as he looked at his wrist-watch (7.30 p.m.-’Blast, missed The Archers), he was not at all sure what to ask himself, either. On his desk lay the soddenly promising letter found on the corpse; but his immediate preoccupation was a throbbing toothache which had been getting worse all day. He decided he would do something about it in the morning.

As he sat there, he was conscious that there was a deeper reason for his refusal of the Superintendent’s offer of extra personnel. By temperament he was a loner, if only because, although never wholly content in the solitary state, he was almost invariably even more miserable in the company of others. There were a few exceptions, of course, and Lewis was one of them. Exactly why he enjoyed Lewis’s company so much, Morse had never really stopped to analyse; but perhaps it was because Lewis was so totally unlike himself. Lewis was placid, good-natured, methodical, honest, unassuming, faithful, and (yes, he might as well come clean about it!) a bit stolid, too. Even that afternoon, the good Lewis had been insistently anxious to stay on until whatever hour, if by any chance Morse should consider his availability of any potential value. But Morse had not. As he had pointed out to his sergeant, they might’pretty soon have a bit of luck and find out who the dead man was; the frogmen might just find a few oddments of identifiable limbs in the sludge of the canal waters by Aubrey’s Bridge. But Morse doubted it. For, even at this very early stage of the case, he sensed that his major problem would not so much be who the murderer was, but who exactly had been murdered. It was Morse’s job, though, to find the answer to both these questions; and so he started on his task, alternately stroking his slightly swollen left jaw and prodding down viciously on the offending double-fang. He took the letter lying on the desk in front of him, pressed it very carefully between sheets of blotting-paper, and then removed it. The paper was not so sopped and sodden as he had feared, and with a pair of tweezers he was soon able to unfold a strip about two inches wide and eight inches long. It was immediately apparent that this formed the left-hand side of a typewritten letter; and, furthermore, except for some minor blurring of letters at the torn edge, the message was gladdeningly legible:

Dear Sir,

This is a most unusua

realize. But please re

because what I am pro

both you and me. My wa 5

College has just take

final examinations in G

in about ten or twelve

an old man and I am de

how she has got on ah 10

The reason for my r

ridiculously impatient

to America in a few

able to be contacte

want to know how J 15

this. I have spent a

education, and she is

I realize that this

only that you should g

to such an impropriet 20

publication of the cl

July.

If you can possibly se

shall be in a positi

unconventionally. You s 25

most select clubs, sa

give you a completely

delights which are as

Please do give me a r

may be, at 01-417 808 30

you feel able to do

result, I shall give

able to enjoy, at no c

the most discreet er

ever imagined. 35

You

Morse sat back and studied the words with great joy. He’d been a lifelong addict of puzzles and of cryptograms, and this was exactly the sort of work his mind could cope with confidently. First he enumerated the lines in 5’s (as shown above); then he set his mind to work. It took him ten minutes, and another ten minutes to copy out his first draft. The general drift of the letter required no Aristotelian intellect to decipher-primarily because of the give-away clue in line 7. But it had been none too easy to concoct some continuum over a few of the individual word-breaks, especially “wa – “ in line 5; “ah – “ in line 10; “cl-”in line 21; and “sa-” in line 26. This is the first draft that Morse wrote out:

Dear Sir,

This is a most unusua l letter as I know you’ll

realize. But please re ad it with great care

because what I am pro posing can benefit

both you and me. My wa strel daughter at _

College has just take n (without much hope) her

final examination in G eography, and will get the result

in about ten or twelve days time. Now I am

an old man and I’m de speratly anxious to know

how she has got on ah ead of the official lists.

The reason for my r equest is that I am

ridiculously impatient, and in fact I am off

to America in a few dfays time where I may not be

able to be contacte d for some while. All I

want to know is how J -got on, if you can tell me

this. I have spent a great deal of money on her

education, and she is the only child I have.

I realize that this is a improper request. I ask

only that you should g ive a thought to stooping

to such an impropriet y. I think the official date for

publication of the cl ass list is-

July.

If you can possibly se e your way to this favour

I shall be in a positi t to pay you very well if

ununconventionally. You s ee I manage some of the

most select clubs, sa unas and parlours and I will

give you a completely free access to the sexual

delights which are as sociated with such places

Please do give me a r ing whatever your decision

May be at 01-417-808 -. If it so happens that

You fell able to do what I ask about J

Result I shall give you details about how you’ll be

Able to enjoy at no c ost at all to yourself,

The most discreet er otic thrills you can have

Ever imagined

You rs sincerely

Morse was reasonably pleased with the draft. It lacked polish here and there, but it wasn’t bad at all, really. Three specific problems, of course: the name of the college, the name of the girl, and the last bit of the telephone number. The college would be a bit more difficult now that almost all of them accepted women, but…

Suddenly Morse sat at his desk quite motionless, the blood tingling across his shoulders. Could it be that “G- “? It needn’t be Geography or Geology or Geophysics or whatever. And it wasn’t. It was Greatsl And that “J-”? That wasn’t Judith or Joanna or Jezebel. It was Jane-the girl the Master had indiscreetly mentioned to him! And that would solve the college automatically: it was Lonsdalel

Phew!

The telephone number wouldn’t be much of a problem, either, since Lewis could soon sort that out. If it was a four-digit group, that would only mean ten possibilities; and if it was five digits, that was only a hundred; and Lewis was a very patient man…

But the tooth was jabbing its pain along his jaw once more, and he made his way home, where doubling (as he invariably did) the dosage of all medical nostrums he took six Aspros, washed them down well with whisky, and went to bed. But at 2 a.m. we find him sittingup in bed, his hand caressing his jaw, the pain jumping in his gum like some demented dervish. And at 8a.m. we find him standing outside a deserted dentist’s premises in North Oxford, an inordinately long scarf wrapped round his jaw, waiting desperately for one of the receptionists to arrive.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Wherein such diverse activities as dentistry, crossword-solving, and pike-angling make their appropriate contributions to Morse’s view of things.

‘You’ve not been looking after these too well, have you, Mr Morse?’

Since at this point, however, the dapperly dressed dentist had his patient’s mouth opened to its widest extremities, Morse was able only to produce a strained grunt from his swollen larynx.

‘You ought to cut out the sugar,’ continued the dentist, surveying so many signs of incipient decay, ‘and some dental floss wouldn’t come amiss with all this… Ah! I reckon that’s the little fellow that’s been causing you-’ He tapped one of the lower-left molars with a blunt instrument, and the recumbent Morse was almost levitated in agony. ‘Ye-es, you’ve got a nasty little infection there… does that hurt?’

Again Morse’s body jumped in agonizing pain, before the chair was raised to a semi-vertical slant and he was ordered to ‘rinse out”.

‘You’ve got a nasty little infection there, as I say…’

Everything with the dentist appeared to warrant the epithet ‘little’, and Morse would have been more gratified had it been suggested to him that he was the victim of a massive great bloody infection stemming from an equally massive great bloody tooth that even now was throbbing mightily. He continued to sit in the chair, but the dentist himself was writing something across at his desk.

‘Aren’t you going to take it out?’ asked Morse.

The dentist continued writing. ‘We try to preserve as many teeth as we can these days, you know. And it’s particularly important for you not to lose many more. You haven’t got too many left, have you?’

‘But it’s giving me -’

‘Here’s a prescription for a little pencillin. Don’t worry! It’ll soon sort out the infection and get that little swelling down. Then if you come and see me again in-a week, shall we say?’

‘A week?

‘I can’t do anything till then. If I took it out now-well, let’s say you’d have to be a brave man, Mr Morse.’

‘Would I?’ said Morse weakly. He finally rose from the chair, and his eyes wandered to the shelf of plaster-casts of teeth behind the dentist’s desk, the upper jaws resting on the lower, a few canines missing here, a few molars there. It all seemed rather obscene to Morse, and reminded him of his junior-school history books, with their drawings of skulls labelled with such memorable names as Eoanthropus dawsoni, Pithecanthropus erectus, and the rest.

The dentist saw his interest and reached down a particularly ugly cast, snapping the jaws apart and together again like a ventriloquist at a dumb-show. ‘Remarkable things teeth, you know. No two sets of teeth can ever be the same. Each set-well, it’s unique, like fingerprints.’ He looked at the squalid lump of plastering with infinite compassion, and it seemed quite obvious that teeth obsessed not only his working life but his private soul as well.

Morse stood beside him, waiting for the prescription; and when the dentist got to his feet Morse became surprisingly aware of how small a man the dentist was. Had it been the white coat that had given him the semblance of being taller? Had it been the fact that the last thing Morse had earlier been interested in was whether the kindly man who’d readily agreed to see one of his most irregular clients was a dwarf or a giant? Yet there was something else, wasn’t there?

Morse’s mind suddenly grasped it as he stood waiting at the Summertown chemist’s. It had been when the dentist had been sitting at his desk-yes. Because the length of his back was that of a man of normal height; and so it must have been the legs…

‘Are you a pensioner, sir?’ asked the young assistant as she took his prescription. (My God! Could he really look as old as that?)

After an exhortation to stick religiously to the stated dosage, and also to be sure to complete the course, Morse was soon on his way to Kidlington, quite convinced now of the perfectly obvious fact that whoever had dismembered the corpse had been at desperate pains to conceal its identity.

Teeth? The murderer would have left a means of certain identification – ‘unique’, as his little torturer had said. Hands? If they had been deformed in any way, or one of them had? It was difficult for fellow humans to forget deformity. Legs? What if that exciting idea that had occurred to him at the chemist’s…

But he was at HQ now, and the need for instant action was at hand. He swallowed twice the specified dosage of tablets, told himself that the marvellous stuff was already engaged in furious conflict with the ‘little infection’, and finally greeted Lewis at 9.30 a.m.

‘You said you’d be here by eight, sir.’

‘Your lucky to see me at all!’ Morse snapped, as he unwrapped his scarf and bared his bulging jaw.

‘Bad tooth, sir?’

‘Not just bad, Lewis. It’s the worst bloody tooth in England!’

The missus always swears by-’

Forget what your missus says! She’s not a dentist, is she?’

So Lewis forgot it, and sat down silently.

Soon Morse was feeling better, and for an hour he discussed with Lewis both the letter and the curious thoughts that had been occurring to him.

‘Someone certainly seems to be making it difficult for us,’ said Lewis; and the sentence did little more than state in simple English the even simpler thought that had gradually dawned on Morse’s mind. But for Lewis life was full of surprises, since he now heard Morse ask him to repeat exactly that same sentence. And as he did so, Lewis saw the familiar sight of his chief looking out over the concreted yard, or wherever it was those eyes, unblinking, stared with more than a hint of deeper understanding.

‘Or it could be just the opposite,’ Lewis heard him mumble enigmatically.

‘Pardon, sir?’

‘Do you reckon a cup of coffee would upset this tooth of mine?’

‘Be all right, unless it’s too hot.’

‘Nip and get a couple of cups.”

After Lewis had gone, Morse unfolded The Times and looked at the crossword. 1 across: “He lived perched up, mostly in sites around East, shivering (6,8).” Anagram, obviously: “mostly in sites” round “e”. Yes! He quickly wrote in “Simon Stylites” -only to find himself one letter short. Of course! It was Simeon Stylites, and he was about to correct the letters, when he stopped.

It couldn’t be, surely!

He wrote a circle of letters in the bottom margin of the newspaper, crossed off a few letters, then a few more-and stopped again. Not only could it be, it was! What an extraordinary-

‘I told her to stick some extra cold milk in, sir.’

‘Did you sugar it?’

‘You do take sugar, don’t you?’

‘Bad for the teeth – surely you know that?’

‘Shall I go and-’

‘No-siddown. I’ve got something to show you. Oh God! This coffee’s cold!’

‘You haven’t done much of the crossword.’

‘Haven’t I?’ Morse was smiling serenely, and he thrust the paper across to Lewis who looked down uncomprehendingly at the almost illegible alterations in the top row of squares. But Lewis was happy. The chief was on to something- the chief was always on to something, and that was good. That’s why he enjoyed working with Morse. Being on the receiving end of all the unpredictability, all the irascibility, all the unfairness-it was a cheap price to pay for working with him. And now he whistled softly to himself as Morse explained the riddle of the circle of letters he had printed.

‘Do you want me to get on to it, sir?’

‘No, I’d rather you got on with those telephone numbers.’

‘Straight away, you mean?’

Morse gestured gently towards the phone on his desk, a smile spreading lopsidedly across his swollen mouth. ‘You said it was Dickson on the desk yesterday when we got the call from Thrupp?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, you get on with things here, Lewis. I’m just going to have a little chat with Dickson.’

If Lewis’s weakness in life was the smell of freshly-fried chips (and fast driving!), with Dickson it was the sight of amply-jammed doughnuts, and he sought to swallow his latest mouthful hastily as he saw Morse bearing down on him.

‘Fingers a bit sticky this morning, Dickson?’

‘Sorry, sir.’

‘Sugar is bad for the teeth, didn’t you know that?’

‘Do you eat a lot yourself, sir?’

For the next few minutes Morse questioned Dickson patiently about the informant who had telephoned HQ about the corpse in the water by Aubrey’s Bridge. The facts were clear. The man had not only given his name, he’d spelt it out; he hadn’t been absolutely sure that what he had seen was a human body, but it most decidedly looked like one; the call had been made from a phone-box, and after the second lot of ‘pip-pips’ the line had gone dead.

‘Is there a phone-box in Thrupp?’

‘On the corner, by the pub, sir.’

Morse nodded. ‘Did it not occur to you, my lad, that after getting this fellow’s name you ought to have got his address? In the book of rules, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, sir, but-’

‘Why didn’t he want to keep talking, tell me that.’

‘Probably ran out of 10p’s.’

‘He could have rung you again later.’

“Probably thought he’d-he’d already done his duty,’

‘More than you did, eh?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Why didn’t he stay there at Thrupp?’

‘Not everybody likes seeing-sort of drowned people.’

Morse conceded the point, and moved on. ‘What do they fish for there?’

‘They say there’s a few biggish pike up by the bridge.’

‘Really? Who the hell’s “they”?’

“Well, one of my lads, sir. He’s been fishing for pike up there a few times.’

‘Keen fisherman, is he?’

Dickson was feeling more at ease now. ‘Yes, sir, he’s joined the Oxford Pike Anglers’ Association.’

‘I see. Is the fellow who rang you up a member, too?’

Dickson swallowed hard. ‘I don’t know, sir.’

‘Well, bloody well find out, will you!’

Morse walked away a few steps from the flustered Dickson; then he walked back. ‘And I’ll tell you something else, lad. If your man Rowbotham is a member of whatever it’s called, I’ll buy you every bloody doughnut in the canteen. And that’s a promise!’

Morse walked over to the canteen, ordered another cap of coffee with plenty of milk, smoked a cigarette, assessed the virulence of his gnathic bacteria, noted the pile of approximately thirty-five doughnuts on the counter, and returned to his office.

It was Lewis who was beaming with pleasure now. ‘Got it, I reckon sir!’ He showed Morse the list he made. ‘Only four digits and so there are only the ten numbers. What do you think?’

Morse read the list:

8080-J. Pettiford, Tobacconist, Piccadilly

8081-Comprehensive Assurance Co., Shaftesbury Avenue

8082-ditto

8083-ditto

8084-Douglas Schwartz, Reproductions, Old Compton Street

8085 – Ping Hong Restaurant, Brewer Street

8086-Claude & Mathilde, Unisex Hairdressers, Lower Regent Street

8087-Messrs Levi & Goldstein, Antiquarian Books, Tottenham Court Road

8088-The Flamenco Topless Bar, Soho Terrace

There’s one missing, Lewis.’

‘You want me to-?’

‘I told you to try them all, I think.’

But whoever was renting number 8089 was clearly away from base, and Morse told Lewis to forget it.

‘We are not, my friend, exactly driving through the trackless wastes of the Sahara with a broken axle, you agree? Now, if you can just make one more call and find out the price of a cheap-day second-class return to Paddington-’

‘Are we going there?’

‘Well, one of us’ll have to, Lewis, and it’s important for you to stay here, isn’t it, because I’ve got one or two very interesting little things I want you to look into. So I’ll -er-perhaps go myself.’

‘It won’t do your tooth much good.’

‘Ah! That reminds me,’ said Morse. ‘I think it’s about time I took another pill or two.’

CHAPTER TWELVE

A brief interlude in which Sergeant Lewis takes his first steps into the Examination Schools, the Moloch of Oxford’s testing apparatus.

It was late morning when, from its frontage on the High, Sergeant Lewis entered the high-roofed, hammer-beamed lobby of the Examination Schools. Never before had there been occasion for him to visit this grove of Academe, and he felt self-conscious as his heavy boots echoed over the mosaics of the marble floor, patterned in green and blue and orange. At intervals, in front of the oak panelling that lined the walls, were stationed the white and less-than-animated busts of former University Chancellors, former loyal servants of the monarchy, and sundry other benefactors. And along the walls themselves was a series of ‘faculty’ headings: Theology, Philosophy, Oriental Studies, Modern History, and the rest; below which, behind glass, were pinned a line of notices announcing the names of those candidates adjudged to have satisfied, in varying degrees, the appropriate panels of the faculties’ examiners.

On the Literae Hutnaniores (“Greats”) board (as Morse had assured him he would) Lewis duly found a long list of names, categorized into Class I, Class II, Class III, and Pass Degree. He noticed, too (as Morse had assured him he would), that a young lady by the name of Summers (Jane) of Lonsdale College, had secured a place in the first of these aforesaid categories. Then, doing precisely as he had been told, Lewis looked to the bottom of the list, where he saw the signatures of seven examiners. A few of them were barely legible. But one of them was conspicuously clear: the neatly penned signature of O. M. A. Browne-Smith. So Lewis made a brief entry in his notebook, and wondered why Morse had bothered to send him on this particular errand.

An attendant was seated in an office to the left of the lobby, and Lewis was soon enlisting this man’s ready assistance in learning something of the processes involved in the evolution of the class-lists. What happened, it seemed, was this. After candidates had finished their written examinations, mark coordination meetings were held by each of the examining panels, where “classes” were provisionally allotted, and where borderline candidates at each class-boundary were considered for vivas, especially those candidates hovering between a first and a second; finally, but then only the day before the definitive lists were due to be published, the chairman of the examiners (and no one else) was fully in possession of all the facts. At that point it was the duty of the chairman of examiners to summon his colleagues together in order to make a corporate, meticulous check of the final lists, and then to entrust the agreed document to one of the senior personnel of the Schools, whose task it now was to deliver the document for printing to the Oxford University Press. Immediately this was done, five copies of the lists were redelivered to the waiting panel, who would usually be sitting around drinking tea and eating a few sandwiches during the hour or so’s interval. There would follow the long and tedious checking of all results, the spellings of names, and the details of index-numbers and colleges, before the chairman would read aloud to his colleagues the final version, down to the last diaeresis and comma. Only then, if all were correct, would the chairman summon the Clerk of the Schools, in whose august presence each of the five copies would be signed in turn by each of the examiners. Then, at long last, the master-copy would be posted in the lobby of the Schools.

Lewis thanked the attendant, and clattered out across the entrance hall, where examinees, parents, and friends were still clustered eagerly round the notice-boards. For the first time in his life he felt a little envy for those white-tied, subfusc-suited students so happily perched upon the topmost boughs of the tree of knowledge. But such thoughts were futile. Anyway, he had his second assignment ahead of him-at the Churchill Hospital.

Morse was out when he returned, and so for a change it was Lewis who had some little time in which to ponder how the case was going. On the whole, he thought that Morse was probably right. Far from being stranded in the Sahara, they were following a fairly well-directed route, with signposts at almost all the early stages-quite certainly at the Examination Schools; but not (Lewis reminded himself) at the Churchill, where his enquiries had yielded nothing, and where Morse’s confident predictions had clearly gone dramatically askew.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Quite fortuitously, Morse lights upon a set of college rooms which he had no original intention of visiting.

Morse himself had decided to postpone for a day or two the pleasures of a trip to Soho, and instead to make some more immediate inquiries in Oxford. Thus it is that just before midday he was parking the Lancia in one of the spaces at the back of Lonsdale (‘Reserved for Senior Fellows’), walking through the front gate (‘No Visitors’), and introducing himself at the Lodge. Here, a bowler-hatted porter, very young but already equipped with the requisite blend of servility and officiousness, was perfectly willing to answer the questions Morse put to him: yes, most of the undergrads had now gone down for the long vac; yes, most of the dons had also departed, amongst their number the Master, the Vice-Master, the Investments Bursar, the Domestic Bursar, the Senior Tutor, the Senior Fellow, the…

‘Off to the Bahamas, all of them?’

‘Continent mostly, sir-and Greece.’

‘You think it’s all those topless beaches, perhaps?’

For a few seconds the young porter leered as though he were about to produce a dirty postcard from one of the innumerable pigeon-holes, but he quickly resumed his dignity. ‘I wouldn’t know about that, sir.’

‘What about Dr Browne-Smith? Is he still away?’

‘I’ve not seen him in college since we had a note from him… and then we had a-just a minute.’He went over to his desk and returned to the ‘Enquiries’ window with a sheaf of papers. In spite of having to read them upside-down, Morse was able to read some of the messages clearly: ‘Professor M. Liebermann-back 6th August. All post to Pension Heimstadt, Friederichstrasse 14, Zurich’; ‘Mr G. Westerby-off to Greece until end of August. Keep all mail at the Lodge’; ‘Dr Browne-Smith…’

‘Here we are, sir.’

Morse took the handwritten sheet and read the few words: ‘Away untill further notice no forwarding adress.’ Mentally deleting an T, inserting a ‘d’, and introducing a major stop into mid-message, Morse handed the sheet back. ‘Phone message, was it?’

‘Yes, sir. Yesterday, I think it was-or Tuesday.’

‘You took it yourself?’

The porter nodded.

‘It was Dr Browne-Smith who rang?’

‘I think so, yes.’

‘You know him well?’

The young man shrugged. ‘Pretty well.’

‘You’d recognize his voice all right?’

‘Well-’

‘How long have you been here?’

‘More than three months now.’

‘Just let me have the key to his rooms, will you?’ Morse pointed peremptorily to a bunch of keys hanging beside the pigeon-holes, and the porter did as he was told.

The book-lined room to which Morse admitted himself was shady and silent as the grave. Everywhere there were signs of the academic pursuits to which Browne-Smith had devoted his life: on the desk, a large stack of typescript of what appeared to be a forthcoming opus on Philip, father of Alexander the Great, and scores of photographs, slides, and postcards; on a bookcase beside the desk a marble bust of a sombre-featured Cicero; on the few square yards of the walls still free from books, many black-and-white photographs of temples, vases and statuary. But nothing untoward; nothing out of place.

Leading off this main room were two other rooms: one a bleakish-looking, rather dirty WC; the other a small bedroom, containing a single bed, hundreds more books, a white washbasin and a large mahogany wardrobe. The door of the wardrobe creaked noisily as Morse opened it and looked vaguely along the line of suits and shirts. He told himself he should have brought a tape-measure, but he accepted the fact that usually such forward-planning was quite beyond him. Apart from patting a few pockets, his only other interest appeared to lie in a very large selection of socks, whence he abstracted a brand-new pair and stuffed them in his pocket.

Back in the main room, his eyes wandered along the shelves and into the alcoves (failing to observe the small cooking-ring); but again he seemed mildly satisfied. He picked up a virgin sheet of paper, flicked it into the portable typewriter which stood beside the typescript, and clumsily tapped his way through the leap of the lazy, brown fox over the something or other. Morse couldn’t quite remember it all, but he knew he’d got most of the letters included.

As he closed the door behind him (forgetting to re-lock it), he felt a few more sudden jabs in his lower jaw; and, although that unsettled July had at last turned hot and sunny, he pulled his scarf round his throat once more as he stood on the wide, wooden landing. He looked around him, first up the stairs, then down them; then across to the room immediately opposite, where the name G. D. Westerby was printed above the door. Yes! He had seen that name ten minutes ago in the Porters’ Lodge; and the owner of that name was, at that very moment, sunning himself on some Aegean island, surely. Yet the door stood slightly open, and Morse stepped silently across the landing and listened.

There was someone there. For a few seconds Morse felt a childlike shudder of fear, but only (he told himself) because of his recent prying in the quiet rooms behind him. Anyway, it would only be some staircase-scout doing a bit of tidying up, dusting… But suddenly the rustling noises ceased, succeeded by the more reassuring clean-cut metallic clacks of hammer upon nails; and Morse felt better. Pushing open the door he saw a room very similar to the one he had just left, except that tea-chests and packing crates (most of them with address labels already attached) were bestrewn over almost the whole of the carpet-area, in the midst of which a youth of no more than sixteen or seventeen, dressed in a khaki overall, was inexpertly fixing a lid to one of the wooden crates. As Morse came in, the youth looked up; but only it seemed from curiosity, for he promptly returned to his amateurish hangings.

‘Excuse me, is Mr-er-Westerby in?’

‘On holiday, I think,’ said the spotty-faced youth.

‘I’m -er-one of his colleagues. I was very much hoping to catch him before he went.’ This explanation appeared unworthy of further comment, for the youth merely nodded and drove yet another nail askew into the wooden lath.

Almost exactly the same layout of rooms as opposite-even the similar positioning of the working desk, with a similar pile of typescript, and exactly the same model of portable typewriter. And Morse knew in a flash what he was about to do, although he had almost no idea of why he did it.

‘I’ll just leave a note for him, lad, if you’ll let me through.’

From his pocket he took out the sheet he had just typed, and put the lazy, brown fox through his faltering paces once more.

‘Your firm’s moving the old boy, I see.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Lot of stuff-he always kept a lot of stuff.’

‘Books!’ (Clearly the youth had as yet no great respect for literature.)

The crate that was in the process of being lidded was doubtless packed with objects that were eminently breakable, since three quarters of its contents appeared to be wrapped in crumpled newspaper. And there was another crate, alongside, presumably designated for a similar purpose, with a battalion of cut-glass objects, still unwrapped, surrounding it on the carpet. But other objects had already been deposited in this second crate-bulkier objects; and one in particular that lay snugly in the middle, swathed in past editions of The Times. It was about the shape of a medium-sized goldfish bowl, almost the size of a-yes!-almost the size of a head.

‘I’m glad to see you’re being careful with the old boy’s valuables,” Morse heard himself saying as he knelt down beside this crate and, with a shaking hand, touched the packaged article, where his probing fingers soon felt the configurations of a human nose and a human mouth.

‘What’s this?’ he managed to ask.

The youth looked across at him. ‘Mr Gilbert told me to be very careful about that.’

‘Who’s Mr Gilbert?’

‘I’m Mr Gilbert!’

Morse almost panicked as he turned to the door and saw a man of about sixty, perhaps-grey-flannelled and shirt-sleeved, with a pair of gold-rimmed, half-glasses on his nose, and a pair of no-nonsense eyes behind them. But there was something else about him-the first thing that anyone would notice: for, like Morse, he wore a scarf that draped his lower jaw.

‘Hullo, Mr Gilbert. I’m – ah – one of Westerby’s colleagues here. He asked me to look in from time to time to see, you know, that the stuff was being stowed away carefully.’

‘We’re looking after that all right, sir.’

‘He’s got some valuable things here-’

‘Have no fears, sir! We’re looking after everything beautifully.’ With agility he picked his way across the room and stood above the still-kneeling Morse. ‘You know we get more fusspots in this business, especially with the women-’

‘But some of this stuff-well, you just couldn’t replace it, could you?’

‘No?’ Mr Gilbert’s tone sounded too knowledgeable for Morse to demur. I’ll tell you one thing, sir. Almost all my clients would prefer to collect their insurance money.’

‘Perhaps so.’ Morse rose to his feet, and as he did so Gilbert’s shrewd eyes seemed to measure him for crating, like some melancholy undertaker surveying a corpse for coffining. ‘It’s just that he asked me-’

‘Look around and check up, sir! We’re only too anxious to give every satisfaction-aren’t we, Charlie?’

The young assistant nodded. ‘Yes, Mr Gilbert.’

Almost involuntarily Morse’s eyes were drawn down once again to the head in the unlidded crate, and Gilbert’s eyes were following.

‘He’s all right. Don’t worry about him, sir. Took us a good ten minutes to put him to bed.’

‘What is it?’ asked Morse weakly.

‘You want me to-?’ There was annoyance in Gilbert’s face.

Morse nodded.

If it had taken ten minutes to put this particular valuable finally to rest, it took less than ten seconds to resurrect it. And it was a head, a marble head of Gerardus Mercator, the Flemish geographer- a head chopped off at the neck, like the head of the man who had been dragged from the canal out at Thrupp.

A somewhat foolish-looking Morse now hastened to take his leave, but before doing so he sought briefly to mitigate the awkward little episode. He addressed himself to Gilbert: “You’re a fellow sufferer, I see.’

For a second or two Gilbert’s eyes looked puzzled – suspicious almost. ‘Ah-the scarf-yes! Abscess. But the dentist won’t touch it. What about you, sir?’

So Morse told him, and the two men chatted amiably enough for a couple of minutes. Then Morse departed.

From the window, Gilbert watched Morse as he walked towards the Lodge.

‘How the hell did he get in?’

‘I must have left the door open.’

‘Well, you’re going to have to learn to keep doors shut in this business – understand? One of the first rules of the trade, that is. Still, you’ve not been with us long, have you?’

‘Month.’ The youth looked surly, and Gilbert’s tone was deliberately softer as he continued.

‘Never mind -no harm done. You don’t know who he is, do you?’

‘No. But I saw him go into the room opposite, then I heard him come out again.’

‘Opposite, eh?’ Gilbert opened the door, and looked out. ‘Mm. That must be Dr Browne-Smith, then.’

‘He said he was a friend o’ this fella here.’

‘Well, you believed him, didn’t you?’

‘Yeah – course.’

‘As I say, though, we can’t be too careful in this job, Charlie. Lots of valuables around. It’s always the same.’

‘He didn’t take anything.’

‘No, I’m sure he didn’t. He-er-just sort of looked round, you say?’

‘Yeah, looked around a bit- said he wanted to leave a message for this fella, that’s all.’

‘Where’s the message?’ Gilbert’s voice was suddenly sharp.

‘I dunno. He just typed-’

‘He what?’

The unhappy Charlie pointed vaguely to the portable. ‘He just typed a little note on that thing, that’s all.’

‘Ah, I see. Well, if that’s all-’ Gilbert’s face seemed to relax, and his tone was kindly again. ‘But look, my lad. If you’re going to make a success of this business, you’ve got to be a bit cagey, like me. When you’re moving people, see, it’s easy as wink for someone to nip in the property and pretend he’s a relative or something. Then he nicks all the silver- and then where are we? Understand?’

‘Yeah.’

‘So. Let’s start being cagey right away, OK? You be a good lad, and just nip down to the Lodge, and see if they know who that fellow was in here. It’ll be a bit of good experience for you.’

Without enthusiasm, Charlie went out, and for a second Gilbert walked over to the window, and waited until the young apprentice was out of sight. Then he put on a pair of working gloves, picked up the portable typewriter and crossed the landing. He knew that the door opposite was unlocked (since he had already tried it on his way up), and very swiftly he entered the room and exchanged the typewriter he carried for the one on Dr Browne-Smith’s desk.

Gilbert was kneeling by one of the crates, carefully repacking the head of Gerardus Mercator, when a rather worried-looking Charlie returned.

‘It was the police.’

‘Really?’ Gilbert kept his eyes on his work. ‘Well, that’s good news. Somebody must have seen you here and thought the college had a burglar or something. Yes-that explains it. You see, lad, there aren’t many people in the colleges this time of year. They’ve nearly all gone, so it’s a good time for burglars, understand?’

Charlie nodded, and was soon attaching an address label to the recently lidded crate: G. D. Westerby, Esq., Flat 6, 29 Cambridge Way, London, WC1.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Preliminary investigations are now in full swing, and Morse appears unconcerned about the contradictory evidence that emerges.

It might perhaps appear to the reader that Morse had come off slightly the worse in the exchanges recorded in the previous chapter. But the truth is that after a late pub lunch Morse returned to his office exceedingly, satisfied with his morning’s work, since fresh ideas were breeding in profusion now.

He was still seated there, deep in thought, when three quarters of an hour later the phone rang. It was the police surgeon.

‘Look, I’ll cut out the technicalities. You can read ‘em in my report-and anyway you wouldn’t be able to follow ‘em. Adult, male, Caucasian; sixtyish or slightly more; well nourished; no signs of any physical abnormality; pretty healthy except for the lungs, but there’s no tumour there-in fact there’s no tumour or neoplasm anywhere-we don’t call it cancer these days, you know. By the way, you still smoking, Morse?’

‘Get on with it!’

‘Dead before immersion-’

‘You do surprise me.’

‘-and probably curled up a bit after death.’

‘He was carried there, you mean?’

‘I said “probably”.’

‘In the boot of a car?’

‘How the hell do I know!’

‘Anything else?’

‘Dismembered after death-pretty certain of that.’

‘Brilliant,’ mumbled Morse.

‘And that’s almost it, old man.’

Morse was secretly delighted with these findings, but for the moment he feigned a tone of disappointment. ‘But aren’t you going to tell me how he died? That’s what they pay you for, isn’t it?’

As ever, the surgeon sounded unperturbed. Tricky question, that. No obvious wounds -or unobvious ones for that matter. Somebody could have clobbered him about the head -a common enough cause of death, as well you know. But we haven’t got a head, remember?’

‘Not poisoned?’ asked Morse more quietly.

‘Don’t think so. It’s never all that easy to tell when you’ve got your giblets soaked in water.’

‘Ah, yes. Drop of Scotch there, Morse. But, after all, there’s a drop of Scotch in most – by the way, Morse, you still boozing?’

‘I’ve not quite managed to cut it out.’

‘And some kippers. You interested in kippers?’

‘For breakfast?’

‘He’d had some, yes. But whether he’d had ‘em for breakfast-’

‘You mean he might have had the Scotch for breakfast and the kippers for lunch?’

‘We live in a strange world.’

‘Nothing else?’

‘As I said, that’s almost the lot.’

With huge self-gratification, Morse now prepared to launch his Exocet. ‘Well, thanks very much, Max. But if I may say so I reckon somebody at your end – I’m sure it isn’t you! – deserves a hefty kick up the arse. As you know, I don’t pretend to be a pathologist myself but- ‘

‘I said it was “almost” the lot, Morse, and I know what you’re going to say. I just thought I’d leave it to the end -you know, just to humour an old friend and all that.’

‘It’s that bloody arm I’m talking about!’

‘Yes, yes! I know that. You just hold your horses a minute! I noticed you looking down at that arm, of course, almost as if you thought you’d made some wonderful discovery. Discovery? What? With that bloody great bruise there? You don’t honestly think even a part-time hospital porter could have missed that, do you?’

Morse growled his discomfiture down the phone, and the surgeon proceeded placidly.

‘Funny thing, Morse. You just happened to be right in what you thought-not for the right reasons, though. That contusion on the left arm, it was nothing to do with giving blood. He must have just knocked himself somewhere-or somebody else knocked him. But you were right, he was a blood donor. Difficult to be certain, but I examined his arms very carefully and I reckon he’d probably had the needle about twenty to twenty-five times in his left arm; about twelve to fifteen in his right.’

‘Mm.’ For a few seconds Morse was silent. ‘Send me the full report over, please, Max.’

‘It won’t help much.’

‘I’ll decide that, thank you very much.’

‘What do I do with the corpse?’

‘Put it in the bloody deep-freeze!’

A few minutes later, after slamming down the phone, Morse rang Lonsdale and asked for the college secretary.

‘Can I help you?’ She had a nice voice, but for once it didn’t register with Morse.

‘Yes! I want to know whether the college had kippers for breakfast on Friday llth July.’

‘I don’t know. I could try to find out, I suppose.’

‘Well, find out!’ snapped Morse.

‘Can I ring you back, sir?’ She was obviously distressed, but Morse was crudely adamant.

‘No! Do it now!’

Morse heard a hectic, whispered conversation at the other end of the line, and eventually a male voice, defensive but quite firm, took over.

‘Andrews, here. Perhaps I could help you. Inspector.’

And, indeed, he could; for he happened to live with his family in Kidlington, and professed himself only too glad to call in at police HQ later that same afternoon.

Lewis, who had come in during this latter call, realized immediately that someone had seriously upset the chief, and he was not at all hopeful about how his own two items of information would be received-especially the second. But Morse appeared surprisingly amiable and listened attentively as Lewis recounted what he had learned at the Examination Schools.

‘So you see, sir,’ he concluded, ‘no one, not even the chairman, could be absolutely certain of all the results until just before the final list goes up.’

Morse just nodded, and sat back almost happily.

But Lewis had barely begun his report on his second visit when Morse sat forward and exploded.

‘You couldn’t have looked carefully enough, Lewis! Of course he’s bloody there!’

‘But he’s not, sir. I checked and re-checked everything-so did the girl.’

‘Didn’t it occur to you they’d probably put him under “Smith” or something?’

Lewis replied quietly: ‘If you really want to know, I looked under “Brown”, and “Browne” with an “e”; and “Smith”, and “Smithe” with an “e”; and I looked through all the rest of the “B”s and the “S”s just in case his card was out of order. But you’d better face it, sir. Unless they’ve lost his records, Dr Browne-Smith isn’t a blood donor at all.’

‘Oh!’ For some time Morse just sat there, and then he smiled. “Why didn’t you try under the “W”s?’

‘Pardon?’

‘Forget it! For the minute anyway. Now let me tell you a few interesting facts.’

So Morse, in turn, recounted his own morning’s work, and finished up by handing over to Lewis the sheet of paper on which he had typed his two sentences.

‘See that second one, Lewis?’

Lewis nodded as he looked down at the version beginning ‘The laxy brown fox 13aped…’

‘Well, that’s the same typewriter as the one used for the letter we found on the body!’

Lewis whistled in genuine amazement. ‘You’re sure you’re not mistaken, sir?’

‘Lew-is!’ (The eyes were almost frighteningly unblinking once more.) ‘And there’s something else.’ He pushed across the desk the note that the Master of Lonsdale had given him earlier-the note supposedly left in the Porters’ Lodge by Browne-Smith.

‘That was done on the same typewriter, too!’

‘Whew!’

‘So your next job-’

‘Just a minute, sir. You’re quite certain, are you, which typewriter it was?’

‘Oh yes, Lev/is. It was Westerby’s.’

He was very happy now, and looked across at Lewis with the satisfaction of a man leaning over the parapet of infallibility.

So it was that Lewis was forthwith dispatched to impound the two typewriters, whilst Morse took two more penicillin tablets and waited for the arrival of Mr Andrews, Ancient History Tutor of Lonsdale.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

From two sources, Morse gains valuable insight into the workings of the human mind, and specifically into the mind of Dr Browne-Smith of Lonsdale.

Andrews (‘a good young man’, as Browne-Smith had earlier described him) turned out to be about Morse’s age-a slim, bespectacled, shrewd-looking man of medium height who gave the immediate impression of not suffering fools at all gladly. For the time being he was (as he told Morse) the senior resident fellow at Lonsdale, in which capacity he was far from happy about the way the college secretary had been telephonically assaulted. But, yes: on Friday, 11th July, the college had breakfasted on kippers. That had been the question-and that was the answer.

So Morse began to like the man, and was soon telling him about the Master’s mild anxiety over Browne-Smith, as well as about his own involvement in the matter.

‘Let me come clean, Inspector. I know more about this than you think. Before he left, the Master told me he was worried about Browne-Smith.’

‘If he’s got any sense, he’s still worried.’

‘But we had a note from him.’

‘Which he didn’t write.’

‘Can you prove that?’ Andrews asked, as if prodding some semi-informed student into producing a piece of textual evidence.

‘Browne-Smith’s dead, I’m afraid, sir.’

For a few moments Andrews sat silently, his eyes betraying no sense of shock or surprise.

‘Was he a blood donor?’ asked Morse suddenly.

‘I don’t know. Not the sort of thing one broadcasts, would you say?’

‘Some people have those “Give Blood” suckers on the car windows.’

‘I don’t remember seeing-’

‘Did he have a car?’

‘Big, black, thirsty Daimler.’

‘Where’s that now?’

‘I’ve no idea.’

‘What was his favourite tipple in the Common Room?’

‘He liked a drop of Scotch, as most of us do, but he wasn’t a big drinker. He was an Aristotelian, Inspector; with him it was always the half-way house between the too much and the too little -if you- er- follow what I’m saying.”

‘Yes, I think I do.’

‘You remember the Cambridge story that Trinity once saw Wordsworth drunk and once saw Person sober? Well, I can tell you one thing: Lonsdale never once saw Browne-Smith drunk.’

‘He was a bore, you mean?’

‘I mean nothing of the sort. It’s just that he couldn’t abide woolly-mindedness, shoddiness, carelessness-’

‘He wouldn’t have made too many mistakes in English grammar?’

‘Over his dead body!”

‘Which is precisely where we stand, sir,’ said Morse sombrely.

Andrews waited a moment or two. ‘You really are quite sure of that?’

‘He’s dead,’ repeated Morse flatly. ‘His body was fished out of the canal up at Thrupp yesterday.’

Morse was conscious of the steady, scholarly eyes upon him as Andrews spoke: ‘But I only read about that in the Oxford Mail this lunch time. It said the body couldn’t be identified.’

‘Really?’ Morse appeared genuinely surprised. ‘Surely you don’t believe everything you read in the newspapers, sir?’

‘No, but I believe most of it,’ replied Andrews simply and tellingly; and Morse abruptly switched his questioning.

‘Dr Browne-Smith, sir. Was he a fit man-considering his age, I mean?’

For the first time Andrews appeared less than completely at ease. ‘You know something about that?’

‘Well, not officially, but

Andrews stared down at the threadbare carpet. ‘Look, Inspector, the only reason the Master mentioned anything to me…’

‘Go on!’

‘… well, it’s because I shall be taking over his duties in the College, you see.’

‘After he retires?’

‘Or before, I’m afraid. You-er-you knew, didn’t you, that he’d only a few months to live?’

Morse nodded, quite convincingly.

‘Tragic thing, Inspector – cancer of the brain.’

Morse shook his head. ‘You’re as bad as the Master, sir. “Cancer”? Forget the word! “Tumour”, if you like-or “neoplasm”. They’re the generic terms we use these days for all those nasty things we used to call “cancer”.’ (He congratulated himself on remembering the gist of what the surgeon had told him earlier that afternoon.)

‘I’m not a medical man myself, Inspector.’

‘Nor me, really. But, you know, in this job you have to pick up a few things, sometimes. By the way, are you likely yourself to be much better off-financially, I mean-with Dr Browne-Smith out of the way?’

‘What the hell’s that supposed to mean?’

‘It means we’re dealing with murder, that’s all,’ said Morse, looking across the table with guileless eyes. ‘And that’s what they pay me for, sir-trying to find out who murdered people.’

‘All right. If you must know, I shall be just over two thousand a year better off.”

‘You’re gradually shinning up the tree, sir.’

‘Not so gradually, either!’ Andrews’ eyes glinted momentarily with the future prospects of further academic preferment, and momentarily Morse was taken aback by the honesty of his answer.

‘But the Master’s still got about ten years to go,’ objected Morse.

‘Eight actually.’

Strangely, this was neither an unpleasant nor an embarrassing moment, as though each man had perfectly understood and perfectly respected the other’s thoughts.

‘Head of House!’ said Morse slowly. ‘Great honour, isn’t it?’

‘For me it’s always seemed the greatest honour.”

‘Do most of the dons share your view?’

‘Most of them-if they’re honest.’

‘Did Browne-Smith?’

‘Oh, quite certainly, yes.’

‘So he was a disappointed man?’

‘Life’s full of disappointments, Inspector.’

Morse nodded. ‘Had Browne-Smith any physical abnormalities you can remember?’

‘Don’t think so – except for his finger, of course. He lost most of his right index finger-accident in the war. But you probably know all about that.’

Morse nodded, again quite convincingly. God, he’d forgotten all about that! And suddenly the hooked atoms were engaging and re-engaging themselves so rapidly in his mind that he was desperately anxious to rid himself of the worthy man seated opposite who had put the fire to so many fuses. So he stood up, expressed his thanks and showed the Lonsdale don to the door.

‘There is just one thing,’ said Andrews. ‘I was meaning to mention it earlier, but you side-tracked me. Browne-Smith was never down to College breakfast in my time at Lonsdale-and that’s fifteen years, now.’

‘Well, that’s very interesting, sir,’ said Morse in a light tone that masked a heavy blow. ‘You’ve been extremely helpful, sir, and thank you for coming along. There’s just one more thing. Please, if you will, convey my apologies to the College secretary. I’m sorry I was rude to her-I’d like her to know that.’

‘I’ll certainly see that she does. She was upset, as I told you-and she’s a lovely girl.’

‘Is she?’ said Morse.

As soon as Andrews had gone, Morse reached for the phone to put his query to the curator of the Medical Science Library at the Bodleian, and, a few minutes later, he was listening carefully to the answer.

‘It’s the definitive work, Inspector – Dr J. P. F. Coole on Carcinoma in the Brain. This is what he’s got to say – chapter six, by the way: “Tumours are broadly divided into malignant tumours, which invade and destroy surrounding tissues; and benign tumours, which do not. Most malignant tumours have the additional property of giving rise to metastases or secondary tumours in parts of the body remote from the primary growth. A minority of malignant tumours fall into the category of tumours of local malignancy which invade and destroy surrounding tissues, but never metastasize. There are several tumours of local malignancy that occur in or on the head.” ‘

‘Bit slower now,’ interposed Morse.

“Many brain tumours are local in their malignancy; for example, the spongioblostoma multiforme and the diffuse astro-cytoma. All tumours inside the skull are potentially fatal, even if they are quite benign-as this term has already been defined in-”

‘Thanks. That’s fine. From what you’re saying, then, it’s possible that a brain-tumour might not spread to somewhere else in the body?’

‘That’s what this fellow says.’

‘Good. Now, one more thing. Would one of these brain-tumours perhaps result in some sort of irrationality? You know, doing things quite out of character?’

‘Ah! That’s in chapter seven. Just let me-’

‘No, no. Just tell me vaguely, that’ll be fine.’

‘Well, judging from the case-histories, the answer’s a pretty definite “yes”. Very strange things, some of them did.’

‘You see, I’m just wondering whether a man who’d got a brain-tumour, a man who’d been sober and meticulous all his life, might suddenly snap and-’

‘By Jove, yes! Let me just quote that case of Olive Mainwearing from Manchester. Now, just let me-’

‘No! Please don’t bother. You’ve been wonderfully helpful, and I’m most grateful. The beer’s on me next time we’re together in the King’s Arms.’

Morse sat back in his black leather chair, happily ignorant of the aforementioned Olive’s extraordinary behaviour, and happily confident that at last he was beginning to see, through the mists, the outline of those further horizons.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Lewis again finds himself the unsuspecting catalyst as Morse considers the course of the case so far.

When Lewis came in half an hour later, he found Morse sitting motionless at his desk, staring down fixedly at his blotting-pad, the orange-and-brown-striped scarf still round his jaw, and the signature ‘On-no-account-disturb-me’ written overall.

Yet Lewis shattered the peace enthusiastically. ‘It was Browne-Smith’s typewriter, sir! Portable job, like you said. No doubt about it.’

Morse looked up slowly. ‘It was Westerby’s typewriter-I thought I told you that.’

‘No, sir. It was Browne-Smith’s. You must have made a mistake. Believe me-you can’t get two identical typewriters.’

‘I told you it was Westerby’s,’ repeated Morse calmly. ‘Perhaps you didn’t hear me properly.”

Lewis felt the anger rising within him: why couldn’t Morse-just for once -allow a fraction of credit for what, so conscientiously, he tried to do? ‘I did hear what you said. You told me to find the typewriter-’

‘I told you no such thing!’ snapped Morse. I told you to get Westerby’s typewriter. You deafi’

Lewis breathed deeply, and very slowly shook his head.

‘Well? Did you get Westerby’s typewriter?¹

‘It wasn’t there,’ growled Lewis. ‘The removal must have taken it. And don’t blame me for that! As I just said, sir, it would do me good just once in a while to get a bit of thanks for-’

‘Lew-is!’ beamed Morse. ‘When-when will you begin to understand the value of virtually everything you do for me? Why do you misjudge me all the time? Listen! I remember perfectly well that the first sentence I typed out was done on Browne-Smith’s typewriter, and the second on Westerby’s. Now, just think! Since it was the second, as we know, that matched the letter we found in the dead man’s pocket, it was on Westerby’s typewriter that someone wrote our letter. Agreed? And now you come and tell me it was typed on Browne-Smith’s? Well… you see what it all means, don’t you?’

Over the years, Lewis had become skilled in situations such as this, knowing that Morse, like some inexperienced schoolmaster, was far more anxious to parade his own cleverness than to elicit any halting answer from his dimmer pupils. So it was that Lewis, with a knowing nod, sat back to listen.

‘Of course you do! Someone changed those typewriters. And that, Lewis – does it not? – throws a completely new perspective on the whole case. And you know who’s given me that new perspective? You!’

Sergeant Lewis sat back helplessly in his chair, feeling like a man just presented with the Wimbledon Challenge Cup after losing the last point of the tennis match. So he bowed towards the royal box, and waited. Not for long either, since Morse seemed excited.

‘Tell me how you see this case, Lewis. You know-just in general.’

‘Well, I reckon Browne-Smith gets a letter from somebody who’s terribly anxious to know how someone’s got on in this examination, and he says if you’ll scratch my back I’ll scratch yours: just tell me that little bit early and I’ll see you get your little reward.’

‘And then?’

‘Well-like you, sir-this fellow Browne-Smith’s a bachelor: he’s quite tempted with the proposition put to him, and goes along with it.’

‘So?’

‘Well, then he finds out that the people who run these sex-places in Soho are pretty hard boys.’

‘I wish you wouldn’t start off every sentence with “With”’

‘You don’t sound very convinced, sir?’

‘Well, it all sounds a bit feeble, doesn’t it? I mean, going to all that trouble just to get a girl’s results a week or so early?’

‘But you wouldn’t understand these things. You’ve never had any children yourself, so you can’t begin to imagine what it’s like. I remember when my girls were expecting their eleven-plus results – then their O-Levels- waiting for the letter-box to rattle and then being scared to open the envelope; just hoping and praying there’d be some good news inside. It sort of gets you, sir-all that waiting. It’s always at the back of your mind, and sometimes you’d give anything just to know. You realize somebody knows-somebody typing out the results and putting them into envelopes and all the rest of it. And I tell you one thing, sir: I’d have given a few quid myself to save me all that waiting and all that worrying.”

Morse appeared temporarily touched by his sergeant’s eloquence. ‘Look, Lewis. If that’s all there is to it, why don’t we just ring up this girl’s father? You don’t honestly think he wrote that letter, do you?’

‘Jane Summers’s dad, you mean?’ Lewis shook his head. “Quite impossible, sir.’

Morse sat upright in his chair. ‘Why do you say that?’

‘Both her parents were killed in a car-crash six years ago-I rang up the college secretary. Very helpful, she was.’

‘Oh, I see.’ Morse unwound his scarf and looked a little lost. “Do you know, Lewis, I think you’re a bit ahead of me in this case.’

‘No! I’m miles behind, sir-as well you know. But in my opinion we shouldn’t rule out the parent angle altogether. She could only have been in her late teens when her parents died, and somebody must have had legal responsibility for her-an uncle or a guardian or something.’

Morse’s eyes were suddenly shining; and taking the torn letter from a drawer in his desk, he concentrated his brain upon it once more, his perusal punctuated by ‘Yes!’, ‘Of course!’, and finally ‘My son, you’re a genius!’; whilst Lewis himself sank back in his chair and dropped back a further furlong in the case

‘Very illuminating,’ said Morse. ‘You say that not even the chairman would know the final results until a few hours before the lists are put up?’

Lewis nodded: ‘That’s right.’

‘But doesn’t that cock up just about everything?’

‘Unless, sir,’ Lewis now felt happy with himself, ‘she was way out at the top of the list- the star of the whole show, sort of thing.’

‘Mm. We could ring up the chairman?’

‘Which I have done, sir.’

It was Morse himself who was happy now. The penicillin was working its wonders, and he felt strangely content. ‘And she was the top of the list, of course?’

Lewis, too, knew that life was sometimes very good. ‘She was, sir. And if you want my opinion-’

‘Of course, I do!’

‘ – if this girl’s uncle or whatever turns out to own a sex-club in Soho, we’ve probably found the key to the case, and the sooner we get up there the better.’

‘You’ve got a good point there, Lewis. On the other hand it’s vital for one of us to stay here.’

‘Vital for me, I suppose?’

But Morse ignored the sarcasm, and adumbrated for the next half-hour to his sergeant a few of the stranger thoughts that had criss-crossed his brain throughout the day.

It was getting late now; and, when Lewis left, Morse was free once more to indulge his own thoughts. At one time his mind would leap like a nimble-footed Himalayan goat; at another, it would stick for minutes on end like a leaden-footed, diver in a sandbank. It was time to call it a day, that was obvious.

He was not quite finished, however, and before he left his office he did two things.

First, he amended his reconstruction of the fifth line of the tornm letter so that it now read:

both you and me. My ward, Jane Summers of Lonsdale

Second, he took a sheet of paper and wrote the following short piece (reproduced below as it appeared in the Oxford Mail the following day):

CLUE TO MURDER

Customers of Marks and Spencers in the Oxford area are being asked to join in the hunt for the murderer of a 60-year-old man found in the canal at Thrupp. The bloodstained socks on the body (not yet identified) have been traced as one of just 2,500 pairs distributed around a handful of M & S stores in the Oxford region. The socks were of navy-blue cotton, with two light blue rings round the tops. Anyone who might have any information is asked to ring Kidlington 4343.

Only after dictating this absurd news-item (comma included) did Morse finally leave his office that day to return to his bachelor flat. There he played through the first act of Die Walkure and began to make significant inroads into the bottle just purchased from Augustus Barnett. When, at midnight, he looked around for his pyjamas, he couldn’t quite remember why he had bothered the newspaper editor; yet he knew that when a man was utterly at a loss about what he should do, it was imperative that he should do something- like the motorist stuck in a snowdrift who decided to activate his blinkers alternately.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Discussion of identity, and of death, leads the two detectives gradually nearer to the truth,

Lewis came in early the next morning (although not so early as Morse), and immediately got down to reading the medical report from the lab.

‘Gruesome all this, isn’t it, sir?’

‘Not read it,’ replied Morse.

‘You know, chopping a chap’s head off.’

‘It’s one way of killing someone. After all, the experiment has been tried on innumerable occasions and found to be invariably fatal.’

‘But the head was cut off after he was dead-says so here.’

‘I don’t give two monkeys how he was killed. It’s the why that we’ve got to sort out. Why did someone chop his head off-just tell me that, for a start.’

‘Because we’d have identified him, surely. His teeth would have been there and-’

‘Come off it! Helluva job that’d be, hawking some dental chart round a few million dentists-’

‘Thousands, you mean.’

‘ – and perhaps he didn’t have any teeth, like sometimes I wish I hadn’t.’

‘It says here that this chap might have been killed somewhere else and taken out to the canal later.’

‘So?’

‘What do people usually get carried around in?’ asked Lewis.

‘Cars?’ (Morse hardly enjoyed being catechized himself.)

‘Exactly! So if the body was too big to get into the boot of the car____________________’

‘You cut him down to size.’

‘That’s it. It’s like one of those ghost things, sir. You sort of tuck the head underneath the arm.”

‘Where’s the head now, then?’

‘Somewhere in the canal.’

‘The frogmen haven’t found it.’

‘Heads are pretty heavy, though. It’s probably stuck way down in the mud.’

‘What about the hands, Lewis? You reckon we’re going to find them neatly folded next to the head? Or is some poor little beggar going to find them in his fishing-net?’

‘You don’t seem to think we’re going to find them, sir.’

Morse was showing signs of semi-exasperation. ‘You’re missing the bloody point, Lewis! I’m not asking where they are. I’m asking why someone chopped them off.’

‘Same as before. Must be because someone could have identified them. He may have had a tattoo on the back of his wrist or something.’

Morse sat quite still. He knew even then that Lewis had made a point of quite extraordinary significance, and his mind, like some downhill skier, had suddenly leaped into the air across a ridge and landed neatly upon a track of virgin snow…

Lewis’s voice seemed to reach his ears as if through a wadge of tightly packed cotton wool. ‘And what about the legs, sir. Why do you think they were chopped off?’

‘You mean you know?’ Morse heard himself saying.

‘Hardly that, sir. But it’s child’s play these days’ for the forensic boys to find a hundred-and-one things on clothes, isn’t it? Hairs and threads and all that sort of thing-’

‘Even if it’s been in water for a few days?’

‘Well, it might be more difficult then, I agree. But all I’m saying is that if we knew whose the body was-’

‘We do, Lewis. You can be sure of that- surer than ever. It’s Browne-Smith’s.’

‘All right. If it’s Browne-Smith’s body, then we shan’t have much trouble in finding out if it’s Browne-Smith’s suit, shall we?’

Morse was frowning in genuine puzzlement. ‘You’re losing me, Lewis.’

‘All I’m trying to say, sir, is that if someone carefully chopped off this fellow’s head and his hands to stop us finding out who he was-’

‘Yes?’

‘ – well, I don’t reckon he would have left the fellow dressed in his own suit.’

‘So someone dressed the corpse in someone else’s suit, is that it?’

‘Yes. You see, a lot of people could wear each other’s jackets. I mean, I could wear yours-you’re a bit fatter than I am round the middle, but it’d fit in a way. And with a jacket in the water a few days, it’d probably shrink a bit anyway, so no one’s going to notice too much. But-’ and here Lewis paused dramatically ‘-if people start wearing each other’s trousers, sir-well, you could find a few problems, couldn’t you? They might be too long, or too short; and it wouldn’t be difficult for anyone to see almost immediately that the suit was someone else’s. Do you see what I mean? I think the dead man must have been several inches shorter, or several inches taller, than the fellow whose suit he was dressed in! And that’s why the legs were chopped off. So as I see it, sir, if we can find out whose suit it is, we shall know one thing for certain: the owner of the suit isn’t the corpse-he’s probably the murderer!’

Morse sat where he was, looking duly impressed and appreciative. As a result of his visit to the dentist he had himself arrived at a very similar conclusion (although by a completely different route), but he felt it proper to congratulate his sergeant.

‘You know, they say your eyes begin to deteriorate about the age of seven or eight, and that your brain follows suit about twenty years later. But your brain, Lewis. It sharper every day.’

Lewis leaned back happily. ‘Must be working with you. Sir’

But Morse appeared not to hear him, staring out (as Lewis had so often seen him) across the concreted yard that lay outside bis window. And thus he stared for many, many minutes; and Lewis had almost read the medical report through a second time before Morse spoke again.

‘It’s very sad about life, really, you know. There’s only one thing certain about it, and that’s death. We all die, sooner or later. Even old Max, with all his laudable caution, would probably accept that. “The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power…”.’

‘Pardon, sir?’

‘We shall all die, Lewis – even you and me – just like that poor fellow we fished out of the pond. There are no exceptions.’

‘Wasn’t there just the one?’ asked Lewis, quietly.

‘You believe that?’

‘Yes.’

‘Mm.’

‘Why do you mention all this, sir-you know, about dying and so on?’

‘I was just thinking about Browne-Smith, that’s all. I was just thinking that a man we all thought was dead is probably alive again-that’s all.’

That’s all. For a little while Lewis had almost convinced himself that he might be a move or two ahead of Morse, Yet now, as he shook his head in customary bewilderment, he knew that Morse’s mind was half a dozen moves ahead of all the world So he sat where he was, like a disciple in the Scriptures at the feet of the Master, wondering why he ever bothered to think about anything himself at all.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Morse decides to enjoy the hospitality of yet another member of Lonsdale’s top brass, whilst Lewis devotes himself to the donkey work.

It was high time something was done, Morse knew that. There was the dead man’s suit to start with, for surely Lewis had been right in maintaining that the minutest detritus of living would still be lingering somewhere in the most improbable crannies of pockets and sleeves. Then there was the mysterious man Gilbert, who had been given free (and official) access to the room in which the two letters had probably been typed: Gilbert the furniture-man, who might at that very minute be shifting the last of the crates and the crockery… Yes, it was high time the pair of them actually did something. Necesse erat digitos extrahere.

Morse was (as almost always when in a car) a morose and uncommunicative passenger as Lewis drove down to Lonsdale via St Giles’ and the Cornmarket, then left at Carfax and into the High. At the Lodge, it was the same young porter on duty. But this tune he refused to hand over the keys to any room before consulting higher authority; and Morse was still trying to get through to the Bursar when a man walked into the Lodge whom he had seen several times when he had dined at Lonsdale. It was the Vice-Master.

Ten minutes later, Lewis, with two keys in his hand, was climbing up the steps of Staircase T, whilst Morse was seating himself comfortably in a deep armchair in the Vice-Master’s suite, and agreeing that although it was rather early in the day a glass of something might not be totally unwelcome.

‘So you see, Inspector’ (it was several minutes later) ‘it’s not a very happy story at all-not an unusual one, though. That pair could never have got on together, whatever happened; but there were no signs of open animosity-not, as I say, until five years ago.’

‘Since when they’ve never even spoken to each other?’

‘That’s it.’

‘And the reason for all this?’

‘Oh, there’s no great secret about that. I should think almost everyone in the college knows, apart from one or two of the younger fellows.’

‘Tell me about it.’

It appeared that only two crucial ordinances had been decreed for election to the Mastership of Lonsdale College: first, that any nominand must be a layman; second, that such a person must be elected by the eight senior fellows of the college, with a minimum of six votes needed in favour, and with the election declared invalid if even a single vote was cast against. It had been common knowledge five years ago, in spite of the so-called “secret” nature of the ballot, that when Dr Browne-Smith had been proposed and seconded, one solitary vote had thwarted his election hopes; equally common knowledge was the fact that when Mr Westerby’s name, in turn, had been put forward, one single slip of paper was firmly printed with a ‘No’. The third choice-the compromise candidate-had also been one of the college’s senior fellows, and it had been a relief for everyone when the present Master had been voted into office, nem. Con.

‘Head of House!’ said Morse slowly. ‘Great honour, isn’t it?’ (He was suddenly conscious that he had repeated verbatim the question he had asked of Andrews.)

‘Some people would give a lot for it, yes.’

‘Would you?

The Vice-Master smiled. ‘No! You can leave me out of the running, inspector. You see, I’m in holy orders, and so, as I said, I’m just not eligible.’

‘I see,’ said Morse. ‘Now just getting back to Dr Browne-Smith for a minute. I’d be grateful, sir, if you could tell me something about his, well, his personal Life.’

‘Such as?’ The Vice-Master’s eyes were upon him, and Morse found himself wondering how much, or how little, he could ever expect to know of the complex web of relationships within this tight community of Lonsdale.

‘What about his health, for example?’

Again the shrewd look, as if the question had been fully expected.’He was a very sick man, Inspector.But you knew that yesterday, didn’t you? By the way, Andrews said you looked just a little surprised when he told you.’

‘How long had,you known?’ countered Morse.

‘Three weeks, I suppose. The Master called Andrews and me up to his room one evening after Hall. Strictly confidential, he said, and all that-but we had to know, of course, because of Browne-Smith’s teaching commitments.’

‘When did the Master think…?’

‘Certainly no longer than the end of the Hilary Term.’

‘Mm.’

‘And you’re wondering whether his teaching days might not be over already. Am I right?’

‘How much did Andrews tell you?’ asked Morse.

‘Everything. You didn’t mind, I hope?’

Morse felt oddly uncomfortable with the man, and after asking a few more vague questions about Browne-Smith’s lifestyle, he got up to go. ‘You getting some holiday soon, sir?”

‘Once the Master gets back. We usually alternate so that one of us is here for most of the vac. I know that some people haven’t much time for all us lazy academic layabouts, but there’s a lot to do in a college apart from looking after students. But you’d know that, of course.’

Morse nodded, and knew that he could very soon learn to dislike this unclerically garbed parson intensely.

‘We shall co-operate as much as we can,’ continued the Vice-Master. ‘You know that. But it would be nice to be kept in the picture – just a little, perhaps?’

‘Nothing really to tell you, sir-not yet, anyway.’

‘You don’t even want to tell me why your sergeant took the key to Westerby’s room as well?’

‘Ah, that! Yes, I ought to have mentioned that, sir. You see, there’s just a possibility that the corpse we found up in the canal wasn’t Browne-Smith’s after all.’

‘Really?’

But Morse declined to elaborate further as he made his farewell and strode away across the quad, sensing those highly intelligent eyes upon him as he turned into the Porters’ Lodge. From there he progressed, only some hundred yards, into the bar of the Mitre, where he had agreed to meet Lewis. He would be half an hour early, he realized that; but a thirty-minute wait in a pub was no great trial of patience to Morse.

Once inside Browne-Smith’s room, Lewis had taken out of its plastic wrapper the dark-blue jacket found on the corpse and measured it carefully against the jackets in the bedroom wardrobe: it was the same length, the same measurement round the chest, of the same sartorial style, with a single slit at the back and slim lapels. There could be little doubt about it: the jacket bad belonged to Browne-Smith. After rehanging the suits, Lewis methodically looked through the rest of the clothes, but learned only that each of the five pairs of shoes was size nine, and that four brand-new pairs of socks were all of navy-blue cotton with two light blue rings round the tops.

Westerby’s rooms opposite were silent and empty now, only the faded brown fitted carpet remaining, with oblong patches of pristine colour marking the erstwhile positions of the heavier furniture. Nothing else at all, except a plastic spoon and an jar of Nescafe on the draining-board in the kitchen.

Lewis’s highly discreet inquiries in the college office produced (amongst other things) the information that Browne-Smith certainly wore a suit very similar to the one he now unwrapped once more; and the college secretary herself (whom even Lewis considered very beautiful) was firmest of all in such sad corroboration.

The young porter was still on duty when Lewis handed back the two keys, and was soon chatting freely enough when Lewis asked about “Gilbert Removals”. As far as the porter could remember, Mr Gilbert himself had been down to T Staircase about four or five times; but he’d finished now, for Mr Westerby had at last been ‘shifted’.

‘Funny you should ask about Mr Gilbert, sergeant. He’s like your chief- both of ‘em got the jaw-ache by the look of things.’

Lewis nodded and prepared to leave. ‘Nuisance, teeth are, yes. Nothing much worse than an abscess on one of your front teeth, you know.’

The porter looked strangely at Lewis for a few seconds, for the words he had just heard were almost exactly (he could swear it) the words he had heard from the afflicted furniture-remover.

He told Lewis so… and Lewis told Morse, in the Mitre. Yet neither of them realized, at least for the present, that this brief and seemingly insignificant little episode was to have a profound effect upon the later stages of the case.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Our two detectives have not yet quite finished with the implications of severe dismemberment.

The case was working out well enough, thought Lewis, as he drove Morse back through Summertown. The shops were in the same order as they’d been two hours earlier when he had driven past them: the RAG building, Budgens, Straw Hat Bakery, Allied Carpets, Chicken Barbecue… yes, just the same. It was only a question of seeing them in reverse order now, tracing them backwards, as it were. Just like this case. Morse had traced things backwards fairly well thus far, if somewhat haphazardly… And he wanted to ask Morse two questions, though he knew better than to interrupt the great man’s thoughts in transit.

In Morse’s mind, too, far more was surfacing from the murky waters of a local canal than a bloated, mutilated corpse that had been dragged in by a boat-hook as it threatened to drift down again and out of reach. Other things had been surfacing all the way along the towpath, as clue had followed clue. One thing at least was fairly firmly established: the murderer-whoever that might be-had either been quite extraordinarily subtle, or quite – inordinately stupid, in going to the lengths of dismembering a body, and then leaving it in its own clothes. If it was in its own suit… Lewis had done his job; and Lewis was sure that the *nt was Browne-Smith’s. But what about the body? Oh yes, •deed – but what about the body?

Back in Morse’s office, Lewis launched into his questions: ‘It’s pretty certainly Browne-Smith’s body, don’t you think, sir?’

‘Don’t know.’

‘But surely-’

‘I said I don’t bloody know!’

So, Lewis, after a decent interval, asked his other question: ‘Don’t you think it’s a bit of a coincidence that you and this Gilbert fellow should have a bad tooth at the same time?’

Morse appeared to find this an infinitely more interesting question, and he made no immediate reply. Then he shook his head decisively. ‘No. Coincidences are far more commonplace than any of us are willing to accept. It’s this whole business of chance, Lewis. We don’t go in much for talking about chance and luck, and what a huge part they play in all our lives. But the Greeks did-and the Romans; they both used to worship the goddess of luck. And if you must go on about coincidences, you just go home tonight and find the forty-sixth word from the beginning of the forty-sixth psalm, and the forty-sixth word from the end of it- and see what you land up with! Authorized Version, by the way.’

‘Say that again, sir?’

‘Forget it, Lewis! Now, listen! Let’s just get back to this case we’re landed with and what we were talking about at lunch-time. If our murderer wants his victim to be identified, he does not-repeat not chop his head off. Quite apart from the facial features-features that could be recognized by some myopic moron from thirty yards away-you’ve got your balding head, your missing mandibles, and whatever-even the angle of your ears; and all of those things are going to lead to a certain identification. Somebody’s going to know who he is, whether he’s been floating in the Mississippi for a fortnight, or whether he’s been up in Thrupp for three months. Agreed? And if our murderer is still anxious for his corpse to be identified, he does not – repeat not cut his hands off, either. Because that removes at one fell chop the one thing we know that gives him a unique and unquestionable individuality-his fingerprints!’

‘What about the legs, sir?’

‘Shut up a minute! And for Christ’s sake try to follow’ I’m telling you! It’s hard enough for me!’

‘I’m not finding much trouble, sir.’

‘All I’m saying is that if the murderer wants the body to be recognized, he doesn’t chop off his head and he doesn’t chop off his hands-agreed?’

Lewis nodded: he agreed.

‘And yet, Lewis, there are two other clues that lead quite dearly to a positive identification of the body; the suit-quite certainly now it seems it was Browne-Smith’s suit; and then the letter- almost as certainly that was written to Browne-Smith. All right, it wasn’t all that obvious; but you’d hardly need to be a Shylock-’

‘ “Sherlock”, sir.’

‘You see what I’m getting at, though?’

Lewis pondered the question, and finally answered, ‘No.’

Morse, too, was beginning to wonder whether he himself was following the drift of his own logic, but he’d always had the greatest faith in the policy of mouthing the most improbable notions, in the sure certainty that by the law of averages some of them stood a more reasonable chance of being nearer to the truth than others. So he burbled on.

‘Just suppose for a minute, Lewis, that the body isn’t Browne-Smith’s, but that somebody wanted it to look like his. All right? Now, if the murderer had left us the head, or the hands or both, then we could have been quite sure that the body wasn’t Browne-Smith’s, couldn’t we? As we know, Browne-Smith was suffering from an incurable brain-tumour, and with a skull stuc on the table in front of him even old Max might have been able to tell us there was something not all that healthy round the cerebral cortex-even if the facial features were badly disfigured. It’s just the same with the hands-quite apart from fingerprints. Browne-Smith lost most of his right index-finger in the war, and not even your micro-surgeons can stick an artificial digit on your hand without even a delinquent like Dickson spotting it. So, if the hands, or at least the right hand, had been left attached to the body, and if all the fingers were intact -then again we’d have been quite sure that the body wasn’t Browne-Smith’s. You follow me? The two things that could have proved that the body wasn’t his are both deliberately and callously removed.’

Lewis frowned, just about managing to follow the line of Morse’s argument. ‘But what about the suit? What about the letter?’

‘All I’m saying, Lewis, is that perhaps someone’s been trying mighty hard to convince us that it was Browne-Smith’s body, that’s all.’

‘Aren’t you making it all a bit too complicated?’

‘Could be,’ conceded Morse.

‘I’m just a bit lost, you see, sir. We’re usually looking for a murderer, aren’t we? We’ve never had all this trouble with a body before.’

Morse nodded. ‘But we’re getting to know more about the murderer all the time! He’s a very clever chap. He tries to lead us astray about the identity of the body, and he very nearly succeeds.’

‘So?’

‘So he’s almost as clever as we are; and most of the clever people I know are-guess where, Lewis!’

‘In the police force?’

Morse allowed himself a weak smile, but continued with his previous earnestness. ‘In the University of Oxford! And what’s more, I reckon I’ve got a jolly good idea about exactly which member of the University it is!’

‘Uh?’ Lewis looked across at his chief with surprise-and suspicion.

But Morse was off again. ‘Let’s just finish off this corpse. We’re left with those legs, right? Now we’ve got some ideas about the head and the hands, but why chop the legs off?’

‘Perhaps he lost a toe in a swimming accident off Bermuda or somewhere. Got his foot caught in the propeller of a boat or something.’

Morse was suddenly very still in his chair, for Lewis’s flippant answer had lit another sputtering fuse. He reached for the phone, rang through on an internal extension to Superintendent Strange, and (to Lewis’s complete surprise) asked for two more frogmen-if possible immediately-to search the bottom of the canal by Aubrey’s Bridge.

‘Now about those legs,’ resumed Morse. ‘At what point would you say they were chopped off?’

‘Well, sort of here, sir.’ Lewis vaguely put his hand on his femur. ‘About half-way between -’

‘Between pelvis and patella, that’s right. Half-way, through, you say? if we don’t know how long his thighs were to start with, where exactly is that “half-way” of yours? It may have been meant to look half-way-’

‘That’s what I told you this morning, sir.’

‘I know you did, yes! All I’m doing is to stick a bit more clarity into your thinking. You don’t mind, I hope?’

‘My mind’s perfectly clear already, sir. He might have been a shorter man or a taller man, and, because Browne-Smith’s about five-eleven, the odds are probably on him being shorter. It’s the length of the femur, you see, that largely determines the height.’

‘Oh!’ said Morse. ‘You don’t happen to know how tall Westerby is-or was?’

‘Five-five, sir-about that. I asked the college secretary very nice girl.’

‘Oh!’

‘And I agree with all you’ve said, sir. Head, hands, legs -you’ve explained them all. If the murderer wanted us to think the body was Browne-Smith’s, perhaps he couldn’t have left any of them.’

The tables were turned now, and it was Morse’s turn to look ‘You don’t think all this is getting a bit too complicated do you, Lewis?’

‘Far too complicated. We’ve got the suit and we’ve got the letter-both of them Browne-Smith’s-and we know that he’s gone missing somewhere. That would be quite enough for me, sir. But you seem to think that the man we’re after is almost as clever as you are.’

Morse did not reply immediately, and Lewis noticed the look of curious exhilaration in the Chief Inspector’s face. What, he wondered, had he suddenly thought of now?

Dickson called in a few minutes later to report that no one by the name of Simon Rowbotham was registered in the membership of the Pike Anglers’ Association or in the membership of any other fishing-club in the vicinity of Oxford; and Lewis was disappointed with this news, for it gave a little more weight to the one freakish objection to his own firm view that the corpse they had found must be Browne-Smith’s: the objection (as Morse had pointed out to him the previous morning) that “Simon Rowbotham” was an exact anagram of “O.M.A. Browne-Smith”.

CHAPTER TWENTY

An extremely brief envoi to the first part of the case.

At five minutes to four the next morning, Morse awoke and looked at his bedside clock. It seemed quite impossible that it should be so early, for he felt completely refreshed. He got out of bed and drew the curtains, standing for several minutes looking down on the utterly silent road, only a hundred yards from Banbury Road roundabout… the road that led north out to Kidlington, and thence past the Thames Valley Police HQ up to the turn for Thrupp, where the waters would now be topping and plopping gently against the houseboats as they lay at fheir overnight moorings.

Morse went into the bathroom, noticed that his jaw was almost normal again, swallowed the last of the penicillin tablets and returned to bed, where he lay on his back, his hands behind his head… There were still many pieces of flotsam that needed to be salvaged before the wreck of a man’s life could wholly bereconstructed… salvaged from those canal waters -which changed their colour from green to grey to yellow to to white… Morse almost dozed off again, momentarily imagining that he saw the outlines of a cunningly plotted murder, with himself-yes, Morse!-at the centre of a beautifully calculated deception. Of one thing he was now utterly sure: that, quite contrary to Lewis’s happy convictions about the identity of the dead man, the man they had found was quite certainly not Dr Browne-Smith of Lonsdale.

Thereafter, Morse was impatient for the morning and for traffic noise and for the sight of people catching buses. Ovid, in the arms of his lover, had cried out to the midnight horses to gallop slow across the vault of heaven. But Morse was without a lover; and at a quarter to five he got up, made himself a cup of tea and looked out once again at the quiet street below, where he sensed a few vague flutterings and stirrings from the chrysalis of night.

And Morse sensed rightly. For the next morning, like Browne-Smith before him, he received a long letter; a strange and extremely exciting letter.