The Riddle Of The Third Mile

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Morse, having been put on the right track by the wrong clues, now finds his judgement almost wholly vindicated.

Morse opened the door of his office a few minutes after eight to find Lewis reading the Daily Mirror.

‘You seem very anxious to further our inquiries this morning, Lewis.’

Lewis folded up the newspaper. ‘I’m afraid you’ve made a bad mistake, sir.’

‘You mean you are busy on the case?’

‘Not only that, sir. As I say, you’ve made a bad mistake.’

‘Nonsense!’

‘I was trying to do the coffee-break crossword and there was a clue there that just said “Carthorse (anagram)”-’ ‘ “Orchestra”,’ interrupted Morse. ‘I know that, sir. But “Simon Rowbotham” is not an anagram of “O.M.A. Browne-Smith”!’

‘Of course it is!’ Morse immediately wrote down the letters, was checking them off one by one when suddenly he stopped. ‘My God! You’re right. There’s an “o” instead of an “e” isn’t there?’

‘It was only by chance I checked it when I was-’

But Morse wasn’t listening. Was he wrong, after all his mighty thoughts and bold deductions? Was Lewis right-with his simple minded assertion that the case was becoming quite unnecessarily complicated? He shook his head in some dismay. Perhaps (he clutched at straws), perhaps if he himself had made a mistake over an anagram, so might Browne-Smith have done in concocting a completely bogus name? But he couldn’t convince even himself for a second, and the truth was that he felt lost.

At eight-thirty the phone rang, an excited voice announcing itself as Constable Dickson.

‘I’ve just been reading last week’s Oxford Times, sir.’

‘Not on duty, I hope.’

‘I’m off duty, sir. I’m at home.’

‘Oh.’

‘I’ve found him!’

‘Found who?’

‘Simon Rowbotham. I was reading the angling page-and his name’s there. He came second in a fishing match out at King’s Weir last Sunday.’

‘Oh.’

‘He lives in Botley, so it says.’

‘I don’t give a sod if he lives in Bootle.’

‘Pardon, sir?’

‘Thanks for letting me know, anyway.’

‘Remember what you said about those doughnuts, sir?’

‘No, I forget,’ said Morse, and put the receiver down.

‘Shall I go out and see him?’ asked Lewis quietly.

‘What the hell good would that do?’ snapped Morse, thereafter lapsing into sullen silence.

Since it was marked “Strictly Private and Confidential”, the Registry had not opened the bulky white envelope, and it was lying there on Morse’s blue blotting-pad when later the two men returned from coffee. Inside the envelope was a further sealed envelope (addressed, like the outer cover, to Chief Inspector E. Morse), and a covering letter from the Manager of the High Street branch of Barclays Bank, dated 26th July. It read as follows:

Dear Sir,

We received the sealed envelope enclosed on Monday, 21st July, with instructions that it be posted to you personally on Saturday, 26th July. We trust you agree that we have discharged our obligation.

Yours faithfully…

Morse handed the note over to Lewis. ‘What do you make of that?’

‘Seems a lot of palaver to me, sir. Why not just post it straight to you?’

‘I dunno,’ said Morse. ‘Let’s hope it’s full of fivers.’

‘Aren’t you going to open it?’

‘Interesting,’ said Morse, apparently unhearing. ‘If this letter reached the bank on Monday, the 21st, it was probably written on Sunday, the 20th-and Max says that’s the likeliest day that someone put the corpse in the canal.’

‘But it’s probably nothing to do with the case.’

‘Well, we’ll soon know.’ Morse slit the envelope and began reading and apart from a solitary “My God!” (after the first few lines of the typewritten script) he read in utter silence, as totally engrossed, it seemed, as a dedicated pornophilist in a sex shop.

When he had finished the long letter, he wore that look of almost sickening self-satisfaction frequently found on the face of any man whose judgement has been called into question, but thereafter proved correct.

Lewis took the letter now, immediately turning to the last page. There’s no signature, sir.’

‘Read it-just read it, Lewis,’ said Morse blandly, as he reached for the phone and dialled the number of the bank.

‘Manager please’

‘He’s rather tied up at the minute. Could you-’

‘Constable of Oxfordshire here, lad. Just tell him to get to the phone please.’ (Lewis had by now read the first page of the letter.)

‘Can I help you?’ asked the manager.

‘I want to know whether Dr Browne-Smith-Dr O. M. A. Browne-Smith-of Lonsdale College is one of your clients.’

‘Yes, he is.’

‘We received a letter from you today, sir, and it’s my duty to] ask you if it was Dr Browne-Smith himself who asked you to forward it to us.’

‘Ah, the letter, yes. I hoped the Post Office wouldn’t keep yon waiting too long.’

‘You haven’t answered my question, sir.’

‘No, I haven’t. And I can’t, I’m afraid.’

‘I think you can, sir, and I think you will-because we’re caught up in a case of murder.’

‘Murder? You’re not-you’re not saying Dr Browne-Smith’s been murdered, surely?’

‘No, I didn’t say that.’

‘Could you tell me exactly who it is that’s been murdered?^’

Morse hesitated-for too long. ‘No, I can’t, not just for the present. Inquiries are still at a very – er – delicate stage, and that’s why we’ve got to expect the co-operation of everyone concerned-people like yourself, sir.’

The manager was also hesitant. ‘It’s very difficult for me. You see, it involves the whole question of the confidentiality of the bank.’

Morse sounded surprisingly mild and accommodating. ‘I understand, sir. Let’s leave it, shall we, for the present? But if it becomes an absolutely vital piece of information, we shall naturally have to come and question you.’

‘Yes, I see that. But I shall have to take the matter up with the bank’s legal advisers, of course.’

‘Very sensible, sir. And thank you for your co-operation.’

Lewis, who had been half-reading the letter (with continued amazement) and also half-listening to this strange telephone conversation, now looked up to see Morse smiling serenely and waiting patiently for him to finish.

When he had done so, but before he had the chance to pass any comment, Morse asked him to give Barclays another ring. and tell them he was Chief Inspector Morse, and to find out whether they had a second client on their books: a Mr George Westerby, of Lonsdale.

The answer was quick and unequivocal: yes, they had.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

We have an exact transcript of the long letter, which was without salutation or subscription, studied by Chief Inspector Morse and by Sergeant Lewis, in the mid-morning of Monday, 28th July.

‘Perhaps it is not too much to expect that you have made the necessary investigations? It would scarcely need an intellect as (potentially) powerful as your own accurately to have traced the sequence of events thus far. After all, you had my suit, did you not? That, most surely, should have led your assistants to my (agreed, rather limited) wardrobe at Lonsdale, where (I assume) the waist-band inches and the inside-leg measurements have already been minutely matched. But let us agree: the body was not mine. I did try, perhaps amateurishly, to make you think it was; yet I had little doubt that you would quickly piece together a reasonably coherent letter, the torn half of which I left in the back pocket of the trousers. You might therefore have had the reasonable suspicion that the corpse was me – but not for long, if I assess you right.

‘But whichever way it is (either your thinking of me as one of the dead or as one of the non-dead), I see it my duty to inform you that I am alive, at least for a little while longer. (You will have discovered that, too?) Whose, then, is the body you found in the waters out at Thrupp? For it is not, most certainly not, my own. I repeat-whose is it? To find the answer to that question must be your next task, and it is a task in which I am prepared (even anxious) to offer some co-operation. As a child, did you ever play the game called “treasure-hunt”, wherein a clue would lead from A to B? From, let us say, a little message hidden underneath a stone to a further message pinned behind a maple tree? Well, let us go on a little, shall we? From B to C, as it were.

‘I received the letter and immediately acted upon it. All very odd, was it not? I knew the girl mentioned, of course, for she was one of my own pupils; and, what is more, she was a girl acknowledged by all to be the outstanding classic of the year – if not of the decade. This was common knowledge, and it was totally predictable (why bother to ask me?) that her marks in the Greats papers would be higher than any of her contemporaries of either sex. Therefore the request to communicate (and that to some anonymous third party) this particular girl’s result only a week or so before the publication of class-lists struck me as rather suspicious. (A poorly constructed sentence, but I have not time to recast it.) My reward, I was told, for divulging the result some days early would be a memorably pleasant one. You would agree, I think? Even an ageing (I always put the “e” in that word) bachelor like myself may be permitted his mildly erotic day-dreams. And, as I believe, I would hardly be committing the ultimate sin in informing the world of what the world already knew. But I am not telling you the whole truth, even now. Let me go back a little.

‘I have a colleague living directly opposite me: a Mr G. Wesrerby. He and I have been fellow dons for far too many years and it is an open secret that the relations between the two of us have been almost childishly hostile for a great deal of that time. This colleague (I prefer not to mention his name again) is now retiring and, although I have never actively sought to learn of his immediate plans, I have naturally gleaned a few desultory facts about his purposes: he is now away on one of his customary cut-price holidays in the Greek islands; he is, on his return, to take up residence in some pretentiously fashionable flat in the Bloomsbury district; he has recently hired a firm of removal people to pack up the cheap collection of bric-a-brac his philistine tastes have considered valuable enough to accumulate during his overlong stay in the University. (Please forgive my cynical words.)

‘Now-please pay careful attention! One day, only a few weeks ago, I saw a maa walking up my own staircase; the man did not see me-not at that point, anyway. He looked around him, at first with the diffidence of a stranger, then with the confidence of an intimate; and he took the key he was holding and inserted it into Westerby’s oak. For myself, I took little notice. If someone wished to burgle my colleague’s valueless belongings, I felt little inclination to interfere. In fact, I was secretly interested-and amused. I learned that this stranger was the head of a London removals firm; that he had come to size up the task and to pack up the goods. A few days later, I saw this same individual again-although this time he wore a bright red scarf about his face, as if the wind blew uncommonly keenly, or as if the wretched fellow had recently returned from the dentist’s chair. It was only a matter of days after this that I received a letter-istam epistoiam; the letter you half-received yourself.

‘Does all this sound rather mysterious and puzzling? No! Not to you, surely. For you have already guessed what I am about to say. Yes! I recognized the man; and the man brought back poignantly to me the one episode in my life of which I am bitterly-so bitterly-ashamed. But again, I am getting ahead of myself- or behind. It depends upon which way you look at it.

‘With assorted young assistants, this man reappeared three or four times, presumably to supervise the packing-up of crates and boxes in my colleague’s rooms. And on each of these subsequent occasions, the man wore the same gaudy scarf around the lower half of his face, as if (as I have said) a wayward tooth was inflicting upon him the acutest agony… or else as if he wished to keep his face concealed. Is one not, in such circumstances, quite justified in adding two and two together, and making of them twenty-two? Was he worried, perhaps, that would recognize his face? Had he known it, however, his… clumsy attempts at deception were futile. Why? Simply because I had already recognized the man. And because of this, I experienced little difficulty in linking the two contiguous events together: first, the arrival in Lonsdale of the one man in the world I had hoped and prayed I would never meet again; second, the arrival of the strangest letter I ever received in the whole of my time in the college. In sum, these two events appeared to me to add to more than twenty-two; yet not to more than I could cope with. Let us go on a bit.

‘I followed up my invitation. Why not do so? I have never married. I have never, therefore, known the delights (if such they are) of the marriage-bed. Overrated as I have frequently considered them, the illicit lure of sexual delights will almost always be a potential attraction to an old, unhonoured person like myself. (I don’t think we have a hanging participle in the previous sentence.) And lascivious thoughts, albeit occasional ones, are not wholly alien even from such a dryasdustest man as me.

‘Where are we then? Ah, yes. I went. I went through the doors that had been clearly labelled for my attention, and I knew where I was going; I knew exactly. It will be of little value to you so have a comprehensive account of subsequent events, although (to be fair to myself) they were not particularly sordid. The whole drama (I must admit it) was played with a carefully rehearsed verisimilitude, with myself acting a role that was equally carefully rehearsed. Yet at one stage (if I may continue -the metaphor), I forgot my lines completely. And so, perhaps, would you have done. For a devastatingly lovely woman-a Siren fit to beguile the wily Ulysses himself- was almost, almost rob me of my robe of honour; and, perhaps more importantly to rob me of my one defence-an army revolver which I had kept since my days in the desert, and which was even now still bulging reassuringly in my jacket-pocket.

‘But things are getting out of sequence, and we must go back. Who was the man I had seen on Staircase T at Lonsdale College? You will have to know. Yes, I am afraid you will have to know.

‘I was a young officer in the desert during the battle of El Alamein. I was, I think, a good officer, in the sense that I tried to look after the men in my charge, left little to needless chance, enforced the orders I was given and faced the enemy with the conviction that this conflict-this one, surely-was as fully justified as any in the, annals of Christendom. But I knew one thing that no one else could know. I knew that at heart I was a physical coward; and I always feared the thought that, if there were to come a time when I should be called upon to show a personal, an individual-as against a communal, corporate-act of courage, well, I knew that I would fail. And that moment came. And I failed. It came-I need not relate the shameful details-when a man pleaded with me to risk my own life in trying to save the life of a man who was trapped in a fiercely burning tank. But enough of that. It hurts me deeply, even now, to recall my cowardice.

‘Let us now switch forward again. It was all phoney: I soon began to realize that. There were those two bottles of everything, for example: two of them-in whatever the client (in this case, me) should happen to indulge. Why two? The one of them about two thirds empty (or is it one third full?); the other completely intact, with the plastic seal fixed round its top. Why go, then, to the new bottle for the first, perfunctory drinks? I didn’t know, but I soon began to wonder. And then her accent! Oh dear! Had she been at an audition, any director worth a tuppence of salt would have told her to flush her Gallic vowels down the nearest ladies’ lavatory. And then at one point she opened her handbag-a handbag she must have owned for twenty years. A professional whore with an aged handbag? And not only that. She was introduced to me by an unconvincing old hag as “Yvonne”; so why are the faded gilt initials on the inside flap of her handbag clearly printed “W.S.”? You see where all this suspicion is leading? But I had my revolver. I was going to be all right. I was all right. (How I hate underlining words in typescript- but often it is necessary.) It was only when this lovely girl (oh dear, she was lovely!) poured my final drink from the other bottle (not the bottle I had drunk from before) that I knew exactly what my situation was. I asked her to open the curtains a little, and whilst she was doing this I poured the (doubtless doctored) contents of my glass inside my trousers, in order that the impression should be given that I had been incapable of controlling myself. (I know you will understand the sense of what, so delicately, I have tried to express.) You must understand that at this point she was quite openly and wantonly naked, and I myself quite justifiably aroused.

‘After that? If I may say so, I performed my part professionally. Making vaguely somnolent noises, I now assumed the role of a man (as the Americans have it) in a totally negative response situation. Then the woman left me; and after hearing whispered communications on the other side of the door, I sensed that someone else was in the room. Let us leave it there.

‘I am getting tired with this lengthy typing, but it is important that I should go on a little longer.

‘You were a fool when you were an undergraduate-wasting, as you did, the precious talent of a clear, clean mind. It was me (or do you prefer “I”?) who marked some of your Greats papers, and even amidst the widespread evidence of your appalling ignorance there were moments of rare perception and sensitivity. But since that time you have made a distinguished reputation for yourself as a man of the Detective (as Dickens has it), and I was anxious that it should be a worthy brain that was to be pitted against my own. Why else should the body be discovered where it was? Who made sure that it should be found at Thrupp-a place almost in your own back-yard? You will, I suspect, have almost certainly discovered by now why I was not able to leave the head and the hands for your inspection? Yes, I think so. You would have been quite certain that it was not my body had I done so, and I wished to sharpen up your brain, for (believe me!) it will need to be as sharp as the sword of Achilles before your work is finished. Here then is a chance for you to show the sort of quality that was apparent in your early days at Oxford. Perhaps this case of yours will afford for you the opportunity to kill an ancient ghost, since I shall quite certainly (albeit posthumously) award you a “first” this time if you can grasp the inevitable (and basically so simple) logic of all these strange events.

‘I shall make no further communication to you; and I advise you not to try to track me down, for you will not find me.

‘Post Scriptum. I have just read this letter through and wish to apologize for the profusion of brackets. (I am not often over-influenced by the work of Bernard Levin.)’

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Investigations proceed with a nominal line drawn down the middle of needful inquiries.

So many clues now, and as Morse and Lewis saw things there were four main areas of inquiry:

1. What were the real facts about that far-off day in the desert when Browne-Smith had faced his one real test of character-and (apparently) failed so lamentably?

2. Where exactly did Westerby (a name cropping up repeatedly now) fit into the increasingly complex pattern?

3. Who was the person whom Browne-Smith had met after his anti-climactic sexual encounter with the pseudonymous “Yvonne”?

4. And (still, to Morse the most vital question of all) whose was the body they had found?

Obviously the strands of these inquiries would interweave at many points; but it seemed sensible to the two detectives that each should make his own investigations for a day or two, with Lewis concentrating his attentions on the first two areas, and Morse on the second two.

Lewis spent most of the morning on the telephone, ringing,

amongst other numbers, those of the War Office, the Ministry of Defence, the HQ of the Wiltshire Regiment, and the Territorial Unit at Devizes. It was a long, frustrating business; but by lunch-time he had a great deal of information, much of it useless, but some of it absolutely vital.

First, he discovered more about Browne-Smith: Captain, acting Major, (Royal Wiltshires); served North Africa (1941-42); wounded El Alamein; Italy (1944-45); awarded the MC (1945).

Second, he learned something about Gilbert. There had been three Gilbert brothers, Albert, Alfred, and John. All had fought at El Alamein; the first two, both full corporals, had survived the campaign (although both of them had been wounded); the third, the youngest brother, had died in the same campaign. That was all.

But it couldn’t be quite all, Lewis knew that. And it was from the Swindon branch of the British Legion that he learned the address of a man in the Wiltshires who must certainly have known the Gilbert brothers fairly well. Immediately after lunch, Lewis was driving out along the A420.

‘Yes, I knew ‘em, Sergeant – s’funny, I wur a sergeant, too, you know. Yes, there wur Alf ‘n’ Bert – like as two peas in a pod, they wur. One of ‘em, ‘e got a bit o’ the ol’ shrapnel in the leg, and I ‘ad a bit in the ‘ead. We wur at base ‘ospital for a while together, but I can’t quite recolleck… Real lads, they wur – the pair of ‘em!’

‘Did you know the other one?’ asked Lewis.

‘Johnny! That wur ‘is name. I didn’t know ‘im very well, though.’

‘You don’t know how he was killed?”

‘No, I don’t.’

‘They were all tank-drivers, weren’t they?’

‘All of’em-like me.’

‘Was he killed in his tank?’

For the second time the old soldier looked rather vague and puzzled, and Lewis wondered whether the man’s memory could be relied upon.

‘There wur a bit of an accident as I recolleck. But ‘e wurn’t with us that morning, Sergeant – not when we all moved up long Kidney Ridge.’

‘You don’t remember what sort of accident?’

‘No. It wur back at base, I seem to… But you get a lot of accidents in wartime, Sergeant. More’n they tell the folk back ‘ome in Blighty.’

He was an engaging old boy; a sixty-nine-year-old widower for whom, it seemed, the war had been the only intermission of importance in a largely anonymous life, for there was no real sadness in him as he recalled those weeks and months of fighting in the desert-only an almost understandable nostalgia. So Lewis wrote down the facts, such as they were, in his painstakingly slow long-hand, and then took his leave.

Morse was away from the office when Lewis returned at 4.30 p.m and of this fact he was strangely glad. All the way back from Swindon he had been wondering what that ‘accident’ might have been. He suspected that had Morse been there he would of guessed immediately; and it was a pleasant change to be able tackle the problem at his own, rather slower, pace. He rang the War Office once again, was put through to the Archives section, and soon began to realize that he was on to something important.

‘Yes we might be able to help in some way. You’re Thames Valley Police you say?’

‘That’s right’

‘Why are you asking for information about this man?’

‘It’s in connection with a with a murder, sir.’

‘I see what’s your number? Can’t be too careful in these things -you’ll know all about that.’ He spoke with the bark of a machine-gun.

So Lewis gave him his number and was rung back inside thirty seconds, and was given an extraordinary piece of information. Private John Gilbert of the Royal Wiltshires had not been killed in the El Alamein campaign. He had played no part in it. The night before the offensive, he had taken his army rifle, placed the muzzle inside his mouth, and shot himself through the brain. The incident had been hushed up on the highest orders; and that for obvious reasons. A few had known, of course – had to know. But “officially” John Gilbert died on active service in the desert, and that is how his family and his friends had been informed.

‘This is all in the strictest confidence, you understand that?’

‘Of course, sir.’

‘Never good for morale, that sort of thing, eh?’

Morse was having a far less fruitful day. He realized that with the first of his self-imposed assignments he could for the present make little headway, since that would necessitate some far from disagreeable investigations in Soho-a journey he had planned for the morrow. Which only left him with the same old tantalizing problem that had monopolized his mind from the beginning: the identity of the corpse. From the embarrassment of clues contained in Browne-Smith’s letter, the shortest odds must now be surely on the man whom Browne-Smith had finally encountered in London. But who was that man? Had it been Gilbert, as the letter so obviously suggested? Or was the body Westerby’s? If Browne-Smith had killed anyone, then Westerby was surely the most likely of candidates. Or was the body that of someone who had not yet featured in the investigations? Some outsider? Someone as yet unknown who would make a dramatic entry only towards the finale of Act Five? A sort of deus ex machinal Morse doubted this last possibility-and amidst his doubts, quite suddenly the astonishing thought flashed through his mind that there might just be a fourth possibility. And the more Morse pondered the idea, the more he convinced himself that there was: the possibility that the puffed and sodden salt-white corpse was that of Dr Browne-Smith.

On the way home that evening, Lewis decided to risk his w &’s wrath, to face the prospect of almost certainly reheated daps- and to call on Simon Rowbotham in Botley.

Simon Rowbotham invited him into the small terraced bouse in which he lived with his mother. But Lewis declined, learning over the doorstep that Simon had been one of three anglers who had spotted the body, and that it was he, Simon, who had readily volunteered to dial the police in lieu of looking further upon the horror just emerging from the waters. He often fished out along the banks at Thrupp, a good place for specialists such as himself. As it happened, they were just about to form a new angling club there, for which he had volunteered his services as secretary. In fact (just as Lewis had called) he had been checking a proof of the new association’s letter-head for the printer. They had managed to persuade a few well-known people to support them; and clearly, for Simon Rowbotham, the world was entering an exciting phase.

Lewis waited until 8.30 p.m. before ringing Morse (who had been strangely absent somewhere since lunch-time). He found him at his flat and promptly reported on his day’s work.

When he had finished, Morse could hardly keep the excitement out of his voice. ‘Just go over that bit about John Gilbert again, will you, Lewis?’

So Lewis repeated, as accurately as he could recall it, the news he had gleaned from the War Office archivist; and he felt very happy as he did so, for he knew that the news was pleasing to his master-a master, incidentally, who now had guessed the whole truth about the desert episode.

‘You’ve done a marvellous day’s work, old friend. Well done!’

‘Did you find out anything new, sir?’

‘Well, yes and no, really. I’ve-I’ve been thinking about the case for most of the day. But nothing startling.’

‘Anyway, have a good day in London tomorrow, sir!’

‘What Ah yes-tomorrow. I’ll-er-give you a ring if I find out anything exciting.’ -‘Perhaps you’ll do that, sir.’

‘What? Ah yes-perhaps I will.’

A rather sad footnote to the events described in this chapter is that if Lewis had been slightly more interested in the formation of a new angling association and if he had asked to see the proof of the proposed letter-heading (but why should he?), he would have found that one of the two honorary vice-presidents listed at the top left-hand corner of the page was a man with a name which was now very familiar to him: Mr G. Westerby (Lonsdale College, Oxford).

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Morse appears to have a powerful effect on two women, one of whom he has never met.

For Lewis, a 10 a.m. visit to Lonsdale was pleasantly productive, since the college secretary (she liked Lewis) had brought him a cup of coffee, and been quite willing to talk openly about Westerby as a person. So Lewis made his notes. Then he found out something about cars, since – in spite of Morse’s apparent indifference to the problem – it seemed to him of great importance to discover exactly how the corpse had been transported from London to Thrupp, and he learned that Browne-Smith – doubtless on doctor’s orders – had sold his Daimler a month or so ago, whilst Westerby still ran a red Metro, occasionally to be seen in the college forecourt.

‘Why would Westerby want a car, though?’ asked Lewis. ‘He lived in college.’

‘I don’t know. He’s a bit secretive – doesn’t tell anyone much about what he does.’ ‘He must go somewhere?’

‘I suppose so,’ she nodded vaguely.

‘Nice little car, the Metro. Economical!’

‘Roomy in the back, too. You can take the seats out, you know -get no end of stuff in there.’

‘So they tell me, yes.’

‘You’ve got a car, Sergeant?’

‘I’ve got an old Mini, but I don’t use it much. Usually go to work on the bus and then use a police car.’

The college secretary looked down at her desk. ‘Has Inspector Morse got a car?’

Lewis found it an odd question. ‘He’s got a Lancia, He’s had a Lancia ever since I’ve known him.’

‘You’ve known him long?’

‘Long enough.’

‘Is he a nice man?’

‘Well, I wouldn’t exactly call him “nice”.’

‘Do you like him?’

‘I don’t think you “like” Morse. He’s not that sort of person, really.’

‘But you get on well with him?’

‘Usually. You see-well, he’s the most remarkable man I’ve ever met, that’s all.’

‘He must think you’re a remarkable man-if he works with you all the time, I mean.’

‘No! I’m just, well…’ Lewis didn’t quite know how to finish, but he felt more than a little pride in the shadow of the compliment. ‘Do you know him, then, miss?’

She shook her pretty head. ‘He spoke to me over the phone once, that’s all.’

‘Oh he’s terrible over the phone-always sounds so, I don’t know, so cocky and nasty, somehow.’

‘You mean… he’s not really like that?’

‘Not really,’ said Lewis quietly. Then he noticed that the gentle eyes of the college secretary had suddenly drifted away from himself, and out towards a man she had never known or even seen. Momentarily he felt a twinge of jealousy.

Morse!

Down the dingy red-carpeted stairs, through the dingy red curtains, Morse, at 11 a.m., followed the same path that Browne-Smith had trodden eighteen days before him. He sat at a table in the Flamenco Topless Bar, and transacted his business with a milky white maiden. It didn’t take him long; and, after that Browne-Smith’s spunky antagonist behind the bar had proved no match for him, since for some reason she could not conceive of suggesting to this man, with the blue-grey eyes and the thinning, grey-black hair, that he could go across the way to the Sauna if he wanted any further sexual gratification. He seemed to her coldly detached; and when he looked at her with eyes intensely still, she found herself answering his questions almost hypnotically. Thus it was that Morse, in a short space of time had penetrated the door marked “Private” at the rear of the drinking lounge.

At 1 p.m. he was riding in a taxi to an address he had known anyway -the address already pencilled firmly in his mind when that same morning he had left the Number One platform at Oxford on the 9.12 train. Perhaps he should have short-circuited the whole process; but on the whole he thought not, even though he had felt not the vaguest stir of virility as one of the girls had sat opposite him, sipping her exotic juice. So far so good; and comparatively easy. The outlines of the pattern had been confirmed at every stage: Gilbert (one of twins, as Lewis had told him-interesting!) had quite fortuitously found a client in Oxford; and opposite his client’s room he’d seen, in Gothic script, a name that for some reason was indelibly printed on his mind; with (doubtless) considerable ingenuity, had lured this man to London-lured him to the address which Morse had just given to his taxi-driver, the same address that Morse had memorized from the wooden crates in the rooms Westerby on Staircase T: 29 Cambridge Way, London, WC1. But what had happened after the suspicious and resourceful Browne-Smith had faced his second test of personal courage? What exactly had occurred when “Yvonne” had left… and someone else had entered?

Such thoughts occupied Morse’s mind as the taxi made its way (by an extremely circuitous route, it seemed to Morse) to Cambridge Way. Yet there were other thoughts, too: he could, of course, claim full expenses for his train fare (first class, although he usually travelled second), tube fare, taxi fare, subsistence… Yes, he might just make enough on the day to settle down happily in the buffet car on his return and enjoy a couple of Scotches at someone else’s expense. But would he be justified in sticking down on his claims-form such a ludicrous-looking item as “Flamenco Revenge-£6”? On the whole, he thought, probably not. He alighted, and stood alone in front of Number 29.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Lewis retraces some of his steps, and makes some startling new discoveries.

Lewis was back at Police HQ by 11.30 a.m., sensing that without further directions from on high he had gone as far as he was likely to go. But just for the moment he felt a little resentful about taking too many orders; and by noon he had taken the firm decision to revisit the scene of the crime. He didn’t quite know why.

After drinking half a pint of bitter in the Boat Inn, he walked out along the road by the canal and up to Aubrey’s Bridge. But there were no fishermen there this morning, and he turned his attention to his left as he walked slowly along, noting once more the authoritative notices posted regularly along the low, neat terrace: ‘No mooring opposite these cottages.’ The people here here obviously jealous of their acquired territories-doubtless rich enough, too, to own boats of their own and to regard it as some divine right that they should moor such craft immediately opposite their neatly painted porches.

Then something stirred in Lewis’s mind__If all these people were so anxious to preserve their rights and their privacy; if all those sharp eyes there were jealously watching the waterfront for the first signs of any territorial trespass-then,

in this quiet cul-de-sac that led to nowhere, where there was hardly room enough to execute a six-point turn in a car… yes! Surely, someone must have seen something? For the body must quite certainly have been pushed into the canal from the back of a car. How else? And yet Lewis, who had himself earlier questioned the tenants, had learned nothing of any strange car. Understandably, not every cottage had been inhabited at the time; the owners of some had been away -boating, or shopping in Oxford, or waiting in high places in large cities to motor down for a weekend of rural relaxation in their quiet country cottages.

Lewis had now reached the end of his walk, looking down as he did so at the water wherein the hideous body had been found. From this perusal he learned nothing. As he made his way back, however, he saw that the third cottage from the far end was “For Sale”, and he began to wonder whether such a property might not perhaps make a nice little investment for himself and the missus when he retired. Retired… And suddenly an exciting thought occurred to him. He knocked loudly on the door of the house for sale. No answer. Then he knocked at the house next door, which was opened by a freckle-faced lad of about twelve years of age.

‘Is your mum in-or your dad?’

‘No.’

‘I was just trying to find out something about the house here.’ Lewis pointed to the empty property.

‘They want twenny thousand forrit-and it’s got a leaky roof.’

‘Lot of money,’ said Lewis.

‘Not worth it. It’s been on the market a couple of months.’

Lewis nodded, sizing up this embryo property-evaluator. ‘You live here?’

The boy nodded.

‘Did you know the people next door-before it was for sale?’

‘Not “people”.’

‘No?’

The young lad looked vaguely suspicious, but he blinked and agreed: ‘No.’

‘Look!’ said Lewis. ‘I’m a policeman and-’

‘I know. I saw you when you was here before.’

‘Shouldn’t you have been at school?’

‘I had the measles, didn’t I? I was watching from the bedroom.”

‘You didn’t see anything sort of suspicious-before that, I mean?’

The boy shook his head.

‘You say it wasn’t “people” next door?’

‘He’s not in any trouble, is he?’ The freckled face looked up at Lewis anxiously, as if it were a matter of deep concern to him that any trouble might have befallen the previous owner of the house next door.

‘Not so far as I know.’

The boy looked down at the threshold and spoke quietly: ‘He was good to me. Took me out in his Metro to King’s Weir, once. Super fisherman he was-Mr Westerby.’

A Jaguar’s horn blared imperiously as Lewis turned left on to the main road down to Kidlington, and he knew his mind was full of other things. He had just discovered a quite extraordinarily significant link between Westerby and the waterfront at Thrupp. And if someone had taken a body from London to Thrupp in a car (as someone must have done), there would have been no suspicions aroused by the familiar sight of a red Metro. No trouble at all. Not if that someone who had brought the body had lived there himself. What was more, this was the only car that had cropped up in the case so far, for Dr Browne-Smith had sold his large, black Daimler…

Lewis turned into HQ and sat down at Morse’s desk, giving his bubbling thoughts the chance to simmer down. The green box-file containing the few documents on the case was lying open before him, and he riffled through the sheets – most of them his own reports. In fact (he told himself) there were only two real clues, anyway, whatever anyone might say: the suit, and the torn letter. Yes… and that torn letter was here, in his hands now – together with Morse’s neatly written reconstruction of the whole. He looked down at the torn half once more, and the final “G” in line 7 and the final “J” in line 15 suddenly shot out at him from the page. Could it be?

He parked the police car half on the pavement outside the Examination Schools and felt like a nervous punter in a betting-shop who can hardly bear to read the latest 1,2,3 The lists were still posted around the entrance hall, and quickly he found the board announcing the final honours list for Geography and read through the names. Whew! It not only could be-it was. “Jennifer Bennet”. There she perched at the top of the list – that wonderful girl beginning with “J” whom he had found on a board beginning with “G”. And the college-Lonsdale. Lewis could hardly believe his eyes, or his luck. And there was more to come, for the bottom name of the examining sextet was none other than Westerby’s!

It was an excited Lewis who drove back to Kidlington; but, even as he drove, the conflicting nature of his morning’s findings was slowly becoming apparent to him. Most of what he had discovered was pointing with an insistent regularity in one direction-in the direction of George Westerby. And with Browne-Smith as the body and Westerby as the murderer, almost everything fitted the facts beautifully. Except… except that last bit. Because if the letter had been written to Westerby and not to Browne-Smith… oh dear! Lewis was beginning to feel a little lost. He wondered if Morse had spent such a successful morning in London. He doubted it-doubted it genuinely. But how he longed to talk to Morse!

Back in the office, Lewis typed up his findings and although spelling had never been Lewis’s strong suit, yet he felt rather pleased with his present reports, particularly with his little vignette of Westerby:

Londoner. Little dapper bumshious fellow -slightly deaf- pretty secretive. Tends to squint a bit, but this may be the usual cigarette at the corner of his mouth.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Unable to get any answer from the house in Cambridge Way, Morse now reflects upon his meeting with the manager of the Flamenco Topless Bar.

Like Browne-Smith before him, Morse walked slowly up the shallow steps of Number 29 and rang the bell. But he, too, heard no sound of ringing on the other side of the great black door. He rang again, noticing as he did so the same board that Browne-Smith must have seen, with its invitation to apply to “Brooks & Gilbert (Sole Agents)”. Almost imperceptibly he nodded; almost imperceptibly he smiled. But there was still no sign of any movement in the house, and he bent down to look through the highly polished brass letter-box. He could make out the light-olive carpeting on the wide staircase that faced him; but the place seemed ominously silent. He walked across the street lad looked up at the four-storied building, admiring the clean-cut architecture, and the progressively foreshortened oblongs of the window-frames, behind which – as far as he could see – there was not the slightest tell-tale twitching of the curtainings. So he walked away along the street, entered a small park, and sat down on a bench, where he communed for many minutes with the pigeons, and with his thoughts. On the taxi-journey he had sought in his mind to minimize the risks he had already run that moring; and yet, as he now began to realize, those risks had been decidedly dangerous, especially after he had walked through the door marked “Private”… He’d started off in the quiet monotone of a man whose authority was beyond that of other men: ‘It matters to me not a single fart in the cosmos, lad, whether you tell me about it here and now, or in one of the cells of Her Majesty’s nearest nick.’

‘I don’t know who the bloody hell you think you are, talking to me like that. Let me tell you -’

‘Before you tell me anything, just call in one of your tarts out there, preferably the one with biggest tits, and tell her to bring me a large Scotch, preferably Bell’s. On the house, I suggest -because I’m here to help you, lad.’

‘I was going to tell you that I’ve got friends here who’d gladly kick the guts out of the likes of you.’

‘ “Friends”, you say?’

‘Yeah-friends!’

‘If you mean what you say, lad, I don’t honestly think they’re going to thank you very much if you bring them into this little business-and get ‘em involved with me.’

‘They’re one helluva sight tougher than you, mate!’

‘Oh no! You’ve got it all wrong, lad. And one little thing. You can curse and swear as much as you like with me, but you must never call me “mate” again! Is that understood? I’ve told you who I am, and I shan’t be telling you again.’

The manager swallowed hard. ‘I suppose you’re going to tell me you’ve got a van full of squaddies outside. Is that it?’

Morse allowed a vague smile to form at the corners of his mouth. ‘No, that’s not it. I’m here completely on my own-and, what’s more no one else knows I’m here at all. Well, let’s be honest, almost no one. And if we get along, you and me, I shan’t even tell anyone that I’ve been here, either. No need really, is there?’

The manager was biting down hard on the nail of his left index finger, and Morse pressed home his obvious advantage.

‘Let me give you a bit of advice. You’re not a crook-you’r not in the same league as most of the murderous morons I deal with every day. And, even if you were, I wouldn’t need a posse of police to go around protecting me. You know why, lad?” Morse broke off for a few seconds, before focusing his eyes with almost manic ferocity upon the youngish man seated opposite him. Then he shook his head almost sorrowfully. ‘No, you don’t know why, do you? So let me tell you. It’s because the archangels look after me, lad-always have done. And most especially when I’m pursuing my present calling as the protector of Law and eternal Justice!’ Morse managed to give each of these mighty personages a capital letter; and pompous as he sounded, he also sounded very frightening.

Certainly, this was the impact upon the manager, for he appeared now to have little faith that he would be likely to emerge victorious from any conflict with the archangelic trio. He walked to the door, and sounded suddenly resigned as he asked “Racquel” to fetch two double Scotches; whilst, for a rather frightened Morse, the prospect of finding himself dead or dying in a Soho side-street was gradually receding.

The manager’s story was brief.

The club was registered in the name of Soho Enterprises Limited, although he had never himself met anyone (or so he thought) directly from this syndicate. Business was transacted through a soberly dressed intermediary-a Mr Schwenck- who periodically visited the bar to look around, and who collected takings and paid all salaries. About three weeks or so ago (he couldn’t remember exactly), Mr Schwenck had announced that a certain Mr William would very soon be calling; that the said Mr William would make his requests known, and that no questions were to be asked. In fact, the bearded Mr William had requested very little, spurning equally the offers of hospitality from the bar and from the bra-less hostesses. He had taken away a projector and two reels of pornographic film, and announced that he would be back the following morning. And he had been, bringing with him a small blue card (given to the manager) and a cassette of some piano music (given to the girl behind the bar). Thereafter he had stood quietly at the bar, reading a paperback and drinking half a glass of lime-juice. Another man (so the manager had been informed) would probably be coming in that morning; and at some point this newcomer would be directed to the office where he was to be given the blue card, plus an address. That was all.

The young man appeared not overtly dishonest (albeit distinctly uncomfortable) as he told his little tale; and Morse found himself believing him.

‘How much in it for you?’ he asked,

‘Nothing. I’m only-’

‘Couple of hundred?’

‘I told you-’

‘Five hundred?’

‘What? Just for-?’

‘Forget it, lad! What was on the card?’

‘Nothing really. It was just one of those cards that-that let you into places.’

‘Which place?’

‘I-I don’t remember.’

‘You didn’t write it down?’

‘No. I remembered it.’

‘You’ve got a good memory?’

‘Good enough.’

‘But you just said you can’t remember.’

‘I can’t. It was a good while ago now.’

‘When exactly was it?’

‘I can’t-’

‘Friday? Friday 11th July?’

‘Could have been.’

‘Did you get your projector and stuff back all right?’

‘Course I did.’

‘The next day?’

‘Yes-er-I think it was the next day.’

For the first time Morse felt convinced that the man was lying. But why (Morse asked himself) should the man have lied to him on that particular point?

‘About that address. Was it a number in Cambridge Way by any chance?’

Morse noted the dart of recognition in the manager’s eyes, and was about to repeat his question when the telephone rang. The manager pounced on the receiver, clamping it closely to his right ear.

‘Yes’ (Morse could hear nothing of the caller’s voice) ‘yes’ (a quick, involuntary look across at Morse) ‘yes’ (unease, quite certainly, in the manager’s eyes) ‘all right’ (sudden relief in the manager’s face?).

Morse’s hand flashed across the table and snatched the receiver, but he heard only the dull, quiet purr of the dialling tone.

‘Only the wife, Inspector. She wants me to take five pounds of potatoes home. Run out, she says. You know how these women are.’

Something had happened, Morse knew that. The young manager had got a shot of confidence from somewhere, and Morse began to wonder whether his patrons, Michael, Raphael and Gabriel, might not, after all, be called upon to fight his cause. He heard the door open quietly behind him-but not to admit the roundly bosomed Racquel with a further double Scotch. In the doorway stood a diminutive Chinaman of about thirty years of age, his brown arms under the white, short-sleeved shirt as sleek and sinewy as the limbs of a Derby favourite in the Epsom paddock. It seemed to Morse a little humiliating to be cowed into instant submission by such a hominid; but Morse was. He rose to his feet, averted his gaze – the twin slits of horizontal hostility in the Chinaman’s face, thanked the manager civilly for his co-operation, rueing the fact that he was himself now far too decrepit even to enlist in the kung-fu classes advertised weekly in the Oxford Times. But the Chinaman guided him gently back to his chair; and it was more than half an hour (a period, however, of unmolested confinement before Morse was allowed to leave the Topless Bar, whence he emerged into the upper world just after 1 p.m., deeply and gratefully inhaling the foul fumes of the cars that circled Piccadilly Circus, and crossing carefully to its west side, where he had a wait of only two minutes outside the Cafe” Royal before a taxi pulled up in front of him.

‘Where to, guv?’

Morse told him, infinitely preferring “guv” to “mate”.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

In which Morse views a luxury block of flats in central London, catching an enigmatic glimpse of one of its tenants and looking longer upon our second corpse.

Morse had been sitting for over half an hour, pondering these and other things, when the extraordinary thought crossed his mind that he was in the middle of a park in the middle of opening hours with a pub only fifty yards away on the corner of the square. Yet somehow he sensed that events were gathering pace, and he walked past the Duke of Cambridge, went up the steps of Number 29, and rang the bell once more. This tune he was in luck, for after a couple of minutes the great black door was opened.

‘Yis, guv?”

He was a mournful-looking man in his mid-sixties, sweating slightly, wearing a beige-coloured working overall, carrying a caretakker’s long-handled floor-mop, and fiddling with the controls of a stringed, National Health hearing-aid.

Morse explained who he was and, upon producing his identification, was reluctantly admitted across the threshold, man (announcing himself as Hoskins- pronounced ‘oskins) informed Morse that he had been the porter in the flats for over a year now: 8.45 a.m. to 4.30 p.m., Tuesdays to Fridays, his job consisting mainly of keeping an eye on the porperties and doing a bit of general cleaning during working hours. ‘Nice little job, guv.’

‘Still some flats for sale, I see?’

‘No-not nah. Both of ‘em sold. Should ‘a’ taken the notice darn, really-still, it’s good for business, I s’pose.’

‘Both of them sold?’

‘Yis, guv. One of ‘em’s a gent from Oxford-bought it a coupla months back, ‘e did.’

‘And the other one?’

‘Few days ago. Some foreign gent, I think it is.’

‘The one from Oxford-that’s Mr Westerby, isn’t it?’

‘You know ‘im, then?’

‘Is he in?’

‘No. I ‘aven’t seen ‘im since ‘e came to look rarnd, like.’ The man hesitsted. ‘Nuffin wrong, is there?’

‘Everything’s wrong, Mr Hoskins, I’m afraid. You’d better show me round his flat, if you will.’

Rather laboriously the man led the way up the stairs to the first floor, produced a key from his overall pocket, and opened the door across from the landing with the apprehension of a man who expects to cast his eye upon a carpet swimming with carnage. But the pale-grey carpeting in the small (and otherwise completely unfurnished) ante-room provided evidence only of a recent, immaculate hoovering.

‘Main room’s through there, guv.’

Inside this second room, half a dozen pieces of heavy, mahogany furniture stood at their temporary sites around the walls, whilst the floor space was more than half covered by oblong wooden crates, several piled on top of others-crates each labelled neatly with the name and new address of a G. O. Westerby, Esq., MA; crates which Morse had recognized immediately, especially the one, already opened, which had contained the head of Gerardus Mercator (now standing on the | mantelpiece).

‘Mr Westerby already been here?’

‘Not seen ‘im guv. But o’ course, ‘e might “a” come later – after I was off. Looks like it, don’t it?’

Morse nodded, looking aimlessly around the room, and then trying the two fitted wardrobes, both of which were unlocked, empty, dusty. And Morse frowned, knowing that somewhere something was wrong. He pointed back to the ante-room. ‘Did you hoover the carpet in there?’

The man’s face (Morse could have sworn it) had paled a few degrees. ‘No-I just, as I said, look after the general cleaning, like-stairs and that sort o’ thing.’

But Morse sensed that the man was lying, and found no difficulty in guessing why: a caretaker in a block of flats like this… half a dozen wealthy and undomesticated men… a few nice little backhanders now and again just to dust and to clean… Yes, Morse could imagine the picture all right; and it might well be that a caretaker in such a block of fiats would know rather more about one or two things than he was prepared to admit. Yet Morse was singularly unsuccessful in eliciting even the slightest piece of information, and he changed the course of his questioning.

‘Did you show Mr Westerby round here?’

‘No, chap from the agents, it was-young fellow.’

‘Always the same young fellow, is it?’

‘Pardon, sir?’ \

‘You say they’ve just sold the other flat?’

‘Ah I see. No, I wasn’t ‘ere then.’

‘It’s not Mr Gilbert himself, is it-this young fellow you mention?’

‘I wouldn’t know-1 never met ‘im personally, like.’

‘I see.’ Again Morse sensed that the man was holding something back, and again he aimed blindly in the dark. ‘You know when Mr Westerby called again… when was it, about a week, ten days ago?’

‘I told you, sir. I only saw ‘im the once-the day ‘e looked round the place.’

‘I see.’ But Morse saw nothing, apart from the fact that far from hitting any bull’s-eye he’d probably missed the target altogether. Without any clear purpose he proceeded to look into the small kitchen, and then into the bathroom; but the only thing that mildly registered in his mind was that the parquet flooring in each was sparklingly clean, and he felt quite convinced now that Hoskins (almost certainly in contravention of his contract) was working a very profitable little fiddle for himself with his mop and his cleansing-fluid.

So it was that slowly and disconsolately Morse followed what he now saw as the marginally devious little caretaker down the broad staircase towards the front door. And at that point, had it not been for one fortuitous occurrence, perhaps the simple yet quite astounding truth of the present case might never have beached upon the shores of light. For Morse had heard a lift descending, and now he saw a dark-skinned, grey-suited man emerge from the side of the entrance-hall.

‘Arteraoon, sir,’ said Hoskins, touching some imaginary lock on his balding pate.

The affluent-looking Arab was walking in the opposite direction from the front door, and as he watched him Morse whispered to his companion: ‘Where’s he going?’

‘There’s a back entrance ‘ere, guv…’

But Morse hardly heard, for the Arab himself had looked over his shoulder, and was in turn looking back towards Morse with a puzzled, vaguely worried frown.

‘Who’s he?’ asked Morse very quietly.

‘ ‘e lives on the-’

But again Morse was not listening, for his thoughts- were travelling via the unsuspected lift towards the higher storeys. ‘He finishes work early, doesn’t he?’

‘ ‘e can afford to, guv.’

‘Yes. Like you can, sometimes, Hoskins! Take me up to the flat that’s just been sold!’

The small but extraordinarily efficient lift brought them swiftly up to the top storey, where Hoskins nervously fingered a bouquet of silvery keys, finally finding the correct one, and pushing open the door for the policeman to enter.

Things were at last falling into place in Morse’s mind, and as they stood by the opened door his aim was more deliberate.

‘Did they give you the afternoon off, Hoskins ?

‘What afternoon, guv?’ the man protested. But not for long.

It had been on the Friday, he confessed. He’d had a phone call, and been given a couple of fivers-huh! -just for staying away from the place.

Morse was nodding to himself as he entered the rooms. Yes… the Gilbert twins: one of them a housing agent; the other a removals man. Sell some property-and recommend a highly reputable and efficient removals firm; buy some property-and also recommend the same paragon of pantechniconic skills. Very convenient, and very profitable. Over the years the two brothers must have worked a neatly dovetailed little business…

Now, again, Morse looked around him at a potentially luxurious flat in central London: the small entrance hall, the living room, the bedroom, the kitchen, the bathroom – all newly decorated. No carpets yet, though; no curtains, either. But there was not a flick of cigarette ash, not even a forgotten tin-tack, on the light-oak boards, as spotless as those of an army barrack floor before the CO’s inspection.

‘You’ve been cleaning in here, too?’ asked Morse.

The walls were professionally painted in lilac emulsion, the doors and fitted cupboards in brilliant-white gloss. And Morse, suddenly thinking back to his own bachelor flat with the heavy old walnut suite his mother had left him, began to envisage some lighter, brighter, modernistic furniture for himself as he opened one of the fitted wardrobes in the bedroom with its inbuilt racks and airy, deep recesses. And not just one of them!

But the second one was locked.

‘You got the key for this, Hoskins?’

No, sir. I only keep the keys for the doors. If people wants to lock things up…’

‘Let’s look in the kitchen!’

Beside the sink, Morse found a medium-sized screwdriver, the only object of any kind abandoned (it seemed) by the previous owner.

‘Think this’ll open it, Hoskins?’

‘I-I don’t want to get you in any trouble, sir-or me. I shouldn’t really ‘ave… I just don’t think it’s right to mess up the place and damage things, sir.’

(The “sir”s were coming thick and fast)

It was time, Morse thought, for some reassurance. ‘Look, Hoskins, this is my responsibility. I’m doing my duty as a police officer-you’re doing your duty as a good citizen. You understand that?’

The miserable man appeared a modicum mollified and nodded silently. And indeed it was he, after a brief and ineffectual effort from Morse, who proved the more successful; for he managed to insert the screwdriver far enough into the gap between the side of the cupboard door and the surrounding architrave to gain sufficient leverage. Then, with a joint prizing, the lock finally snapped, the wood splintered, and the door swung slowly open. Inside, slumped on the floor of the deep recess, was the body of a man, the head turned towards the wall; and almost exactly half-way between the shoulder-blades was a round hole in the dead man’s sports-jacket, from which was oozing still a steady drip of bright-red blood, feeding a darker pool upon the floor. Almost squeamishly, Morse inserted his left hand under the lifeless, lolling head… and turned it towards him.

‘My God!’

For a few moments the two men stood looking down on the face that stared back up at them with open, bulging eyes.

‘Do you know who it is?’ croaked Morse.

‘I never seen him before, sir. I swear I ‘aven’t.’ The man was shaking all over, and Morse noticed the ashen-grey pallor in his cheeks and the beads of sweat upon his forehead.

‘Take it easy, old boy!’ said Morse in a kindly, understanding voice. ‘Just tell me where the nearest telephone is-then you’d better get off home for a while. We can always-’

Morse was about to lay a comforting hand upon the man’s shoulder; but he was already too late, for now he found another body slumped about his feet.

Five minutes later, after dialling 999 from the telephone in the sitting room, and after sending the old boy off home (having elicited a full name and home address from those gibbering lips), Morse stood once again looking down at the corpse in the cupboard recess. A tiny triangle of white card was showing above the top pocket of the jacket, and Morse bent down to extract it. There were a dozen or so similar cards there, but he took only one and read it-his face betraying only the grimmest -confirmation. He’d known anyway, because he’d recognized the face immediately. It was the face of the man whom Morse had last (and first) seen in the rooms of George Westerby, Geography don at Lonsdale College, Oxford: the face of A. Gilbert, Esq., late proprietor of the firm Removals Anywhere.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Morse meets a remarkable woman, and learns of another woman who might be more remarkable still.

On the left sat a very black gentleman in a very smart pin-striped suit, studying the pink pages of the Financial Times; on the right sat a long-haired young brunette, wearing enormous earrings, and reading Ulysses; in the middle sat Morse, impatiently fingering a small white oblong card; and all the while the tube-train clattered along the stations on the northbound Piccadilly line.

To Morse it seemed an inordinately long journey, and one during which he found it almost impossible to concentrate his mind. Perhaps it had been improper for him (as the plain-clothes sergeant had diffidently hinted) to have fled the scene of the recent crime so precipitately; quite certainly it had bordered upon the criminally negligent (as the plain-clothes sergeant had more forcefully asserted) that he had allowed the one and only other witness to have left the premises in Cambridge Way – whatever the state of shock that had paralysed the man’s frame. But at least Morse had explained where he was going-had even given the address and the telephone number. And he could always do his best to explain, to apologize… later.

Arsenal. (Nearly there.)

The brunette’s eyes flickered over Morse’s face, but flashed back immediately to Bloom, as though the latter were a subject of considerably greater interest.

Finsbury Park. (Next stop.)

Suddenly Morse stiffened bolt upright in his seat, and this time it was the gentleman from the city whose bloodshot eyes turned suspiciously towards his travelling companion, as though he half expected to find a man in the initial throes of an epileptic fit.

That screwdriver… and that small, round hole in the middle of those sagging shoulder-blades… and he, Morse, a man who had lectured so often on proper procedure in cases of homicide, he had just left his own fine set of fingerprints around the bulbous handle of-the murder-weapon! Oh dear! Yes, there might well come, and fairly soon, the time for more than an apology, more than a little explanation.

For the moment, however, Morse was totally convinced that be was right (as indeed for once he was) in recognizing the signs of a tide in the affairs of men that must be taken at the flood; and when he emerged from the underground into the litter-strewn streets of Manor House, he suspected that the gods were smiling happily upon him, for almost immediately he spotted Berry-wood Court, a tall tenement block only some hundred yards away down Seven Sisters Road.

Mrs Emily Gilbert, an unlovely woman in her late fifties (her teeth darkly stained) capitulated quickly to Morse’s urgent questioning. She’d known it was all silly; and she’d told her husband it might be dangerous as well. But it was just a joke, he’d said. Some joke! She’d met another woman there in Camabridge Way-an attractive Scandanavian-looking woman who (so Mrs G. had thought) had been hired from one of the beetter-class clubs in Soho. They’d both been briefed by Albert (her husband) and-well, that was it really. This man had come to the place, and she (Mrs G.) had left the pair of them together in a first-floor flat (yes, Mr Westerby’s flat). Then, after an hour or so, Albert had come up to tell her (she was waiting in an empty top-floor flat) that he was very pleased with the way things had gone, that she (Mrs G.) was a good old girl, and that the odd little episode could now be happily forgotten.

She had a strangely intense and rather pleasing voice, and Morse found himself gradually reassessing her. ‘This other woman,’ he asked, ‘what was her name?’

‘I was told to call her “Yvonne”.’

‘She didn’t tell you where she lived? Where she worked?’

‘No. But she was “class”-you know what I mean? She was sort of tasteful-beautifully made-up, lovely figure.’

‘You don’t know where she lives?’

‘No. Albert’ll probably be able to tell you, though.’

‘Do you know where he is, Mrs Gilbert?’

She shook her head. ‘In his sort of business you’re off all the time. I know he’s got a few jobs on in the Midlands-and one in Scotland-but he’s always on the move. He just turns up here when he gets back.’

At this point, Morse felt a curious compassion for Emily Gilbert, for she seemed to him a brave sort of woman-yet one who would need to be even braver very soon. He knew, too, that time was running out; knew he had to find out more before he broke the cruel news.

‘Just tell me anything you can, please, about this other woman-this “Yvonne”. Anything you can remember.’

‘I’ve told you-I don’t-’

‘Didn’t you talk together?’

‘Well, yes-but-’

‘You don’t have any idea where I can find her?’

‘I think she lives south of the Thames somewhere.’

‘No name of the road? No number of the house? Come on! Think, woman!’

But Morse had pushed things too far, for Mrs Gilbert now broke down and wept, and Morse was at a loss as to what to do, or what to say. So he did nothing; and such masterly inactivity proved to be the prudent course, for very soon she had wiped her wide and pleasing eyes and apologized sweetly for what she called her “silliness”.

‘Have you any children?’ asked Morse.

She shook her head sadly.

It was hardly the most propitious moment, but Morse now rose from the sofa and placed his right hand firmly on her shoulder. ‘Please be brave, Mrs Gilbert! I’ve got to tell you, I’m afraid, that your husband is dead.’

With a dramatic, convulsive jerk, her right hand snapped up to meet Morse’s, and he felt the sinewy vigour of her fingers as they sought to clutch the comfort of his own. Then Morse told her, in a very quiet, gentle voice, as much (and as little) as he knew.

When he had finished, Mrs Gilbert asked him no questions, but got up from her chair, walked over to the window, lit a cigarette, and stared out over the long, bleak reservoir that lay below, where a swan glided effortlessly across the still waters. Then, finally, she turned towards him, and for the first time Morse realized that she must have been an adequately attractive woman… some few little summers ago. Her eyes, still glistening with tears, sought his.

‘I lied to you, Inspector, and I shouldn’t have done that. I know that other woman, you see. My husband occasionally gets-got involved in his brother’s-well, let’s say his brother’s… side of things, and he met her in one of the clubs a few weeks ago. I-I found out about it. You see-he wanted to leave me and -and-and go and live with her.

‘But she-’

Mrs Gilbert broke off, and Morse nodded his understanding.

‘But she didn’t want him.’

‘No, she didn’t.’

‘Did you tell him you’d found out?’

Mrs Gilbert smiled a wan sort of smile and she turned back to the window, her eyes drifting over and beyond the reservoir to where a DC10 droned in towards Heathrow. ‘No! I wanted to keep him. Funny, isn’t it? But he was the only thing I had.’

‘It blew over?’

‘Not really very much time for that, was there?’

Morse sat and looked once more at this very ordinary woman he had come to visit, and his mind drifted back to Molly Bloom in Ulysses, and he knew that Mrs Gilbert, too, was a woman who had offered, once, a presence and a bosom and a rose.

‘Please tell me about this other woman.’

‘I don’t know her real name-they call her “Yvonne” at the clubs. But I know her initials-W.S.-and I know where she lives – 23A Colebourne Road, just south of Richmond Road. It’s only about five minutes walk from the tube-station…’

‘You went to see her?’

‘You don’t know much about women, do you?’

‘No, perhaps not,’ agreed Morse. But he was impatient now. He felt like a man with an enormously ‘distended bladder who has been kept talking on the phone for half an hour, and he walked across to the door. ‘Will you be all right, Mrs Gilbert?’

‘Don’t worry about me, Inspector. I’ll give the GP a ring when you’ve gone, and he’ll give me a few tablets. They should take care of me for a little while, shouldn’t they?’

‘Yes, I’m sure they will. I know how you must be feeling-’

‘Of course you don’t! You’ve not the faintest idea. It’s not today-it’s not tonight. It’s tomorrow. Can’t you see that? You tell me Albert’s dead, and in an odd sort of way it doesn’t register. It’s a shock, isn’t it? And I’d be more than happy to live through one shock after another, but…’

The tears were running freely again, and suddenly she moved towards him and buried her head on his shoulder. And Morse stood there by the door, awkward and inept; and (in his own strange way) almost loving the woman who was weeping out her heart against him.

It was several minutes before he was able to disengage himself and finally to stand upon the threshold of the opened door. ‘Please look after yourself, Mrs Gilbert.’

‘I will. Don’t worry about that.’

‘If there’s anything I can do to help…’

She almost smiled. ‘Be gentle with the girl, Inspector. You see, I know you’re anxious to get away from here and see her, and I just want you to know that she’s the loveliest girl-woman-I’ve ever met in all my life-that’s all.’

Tears were spurting again now, and Morse leaned forward and kissed her lightly on the forehead, in the sure knowledge that this woman had somewhere touched his feelings deeply. And as he walked slowly away up the road towards Manor House tube-station he doubted whether Albert Gilbert had ever really known the woman he had asked to marry him.

For all his conviction that the tide was running fully in his favour, the open doors of the Manor Hotel proved irresistible, and Morse wondered as he drained his pints and watched the pimps and prostitutes walk by whether, in a life so full of strange coincidence, he might at last be facing the wildest and most wonderful coincidence of them all: “W.S”! Browne-Smith had mentioned those initials… and Emily Gilbert had just repeated them… and those were the selfsame glorious initials of a girl whom once he’d known, and loved too well.

Twenty minutes after Morse had left the seventh floor of Berrywood Court, a key was inserted into the outer door of the Gilberts’ flat, and a man walked in and flung his jacket carelessly down upon the sofa.

Two minutes later, Albert Gilbert, of Removals Anywhere, was talking (somewhat incoherently) over the phone to his GP, explaining how, for no apparent reason, his wife had fainted quite away on his return, and desperately demanding some instructions, since even now she showed no signs of sense or sanity returning.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

All men, even those of a pessimistic nature, fall victim at certain points in their lives to the most extravagant of hopes.

As Mrs Gilbert had told him, Colebourne Road was no more than five minutes’ walk from East Putney tube station. But Morse appeared in no hurry, and when he reached the street-sign he stopped awhile and stood beneath it, deep in thought. Surely he couldn’t be so utterly and stupidly sentimental as to harbour even the faintest hope that he was just about to see once more the woman whom he’d worshipped all those years ago. No, he told himself, he couldn’t. And yet a wild, improbable hope lived on; and as if to nourish the hope, he entered the Richmond Arms on the corner of the street and ordered a double Scotch. As he drank, his thoughts went back to the time when he’d visited his old mother in the Midlands, and gone off to an evening Methodist service to see if a girl, a very precious girl, was still in her place in the choir-stalls, still raising her eyes to his at the end of each verse of every hymn and smiling at him sweetly and seraphically. But she hadn’t been there-hadn’t been there for thirty years, perhaps-and he’d sat by a pillar alone that night. Morse walked to the bar, (‘Same again, please-Bell’s’), and the name of Wendy Spencer tripped trochaically across his brain… It couldn’t be the same woman, though. It wasn’t the same woman. And yet, ye gods-if gods ye be-please make it her!

Morse’s heart was beating at an alarming rate and his throat felt very dry as he rang the bell of Number 23. There was a light downstairs, a light upstairs; and the odds were very strongly on her being in.

‘Yes?’ The door was opened by a youngish, dark-complexioned woman.

‘I’m a police inspector, Miss-’

‘Mrs-Mrs Price.’

‘Ah yes-well, I’m looking for someone I think lives here. I’m not quite sure of her name but -’

‘I can’t help you much then, can I?’

‘I think she’s sometimes called “Yvonne”.’

‘There’s no one here by that name.’

‘The door had already closed an inch or two, but now there was another voice. ‘Anything I can do to help?’

A taller woman was standing behind Mrs Price, a woman in a white bathrobe, a woman with freshly showered and almost shining skin, a woman awkwardly re-making the tumbled beauty of her hair.

‘He says he’s a police inspector-says he’s looking for someone called “Yvonne”,’ explained an aggressive Mrs Price.

‘Do you know her surname. Inspector?’

Morse looked at the white-clad woman who now had moved towards the centre of the doorway, and a crushing wave of disappointment broke over him. ‘Not yet, I’m afraid. But I know she lives here-or she was staying-staying here until very recently.’

‘Well you must have got it wrong-’ began Mrs Price.

But the woman in white was interrupting her: ‘Leave this to me Angela-it’s all right. I think I may be able to help you, inspector. Won’t you come in?’

Morse climbed the narrow stairs, noting the slim ankles of the woman who preceded him.

‘Would you like a drink?’ she asked, as they sat opposite each other in the small but beautifully furnished living-room.

‘Er-no. Perhaps not.’

‘You’ve had enough already, you mean?’

‘Does it show?’

She nodded-a faint smile upon lips that were thin and completely devoid of make-up. ‘It’s the “s”s that are always difficult, isn’t it? When you’ve had too much drink, I mean-or when you begin wearing false teeth.”

Morse looked at her own, most beautifully healthy teeth. ‘How would you know about that?’

‘I sometimes drink too much.’

Morse let it go, for things were going very nicely-the conversation moving already on to a plane of easy familiarity. But it wasn’t to last.

‘What do you want, Inspector?’ A hard, no-nonsense tone had come into her voice.

So Morse told her; and she listened in silence, occasionally crossing one naked leg over the other and then covering her knees with a sharp little tug at the robe, like some puritanical parson’s wife at a vicarage tea-party. And almost from the start Morse felt the virtual certainty that “Yvonne” had now been found-found sitting here in front of him, her head slightly to one side, sweeping up her blonde hair with her left hand and reinserting a few of the multitudinous pins with her right.

When Morse had finished the first part of his tale, she reached for her handbag. ‘Do you smoke, Inspector?’

Morse patted his jacket pocket, and suspected that he must have left his own recently purchased packet in the pub.

‘Here, have one of these.’ Her bag was open now, the flap towards him; and seeing the faded gilt initials Morse knew that his silly hope was finally extinguished.

‘You’re very kind,’ he heard himself say.

Had she seen something vulnerable in this strange inspector of police? In his mien? In his eyes? On his lips? Perhaps, indeed, she had, for her voice had been more gentle, and she now stood up and lit his cigarette, unconscious (or uncaring) that her robe was partly open at the top as she leaned towards him. Then she sat back in her chair again, and told him her own side of the story, still occasionally recrossing her lovely legs, but now no longer too concerned about concealing them.

She’d known Bert Gilbert for only a few weeks. He’d come into the sauna one morning-very much in control of himself-and asked her if she’d be willing to entertain a very special client of his; yes, at the address Morse had mentioned; and, yes, with a sequel much as he’d described it. After that Gilbert had obviously taken a liking to her, spent a fair amount of money on her, and wanted to keep seeing her. Had kept seeing her. But he’d got jealous and morose, and was soon telling her that he wanted her to pack up her job and go to live with him. For her part, the whole thing had been the old familiar story of an ageing man behaving like an infatuated schoolboy-and she’d told him so.

That was all.

‘What’s your name?’ asked Morse.

Her eyes were looking down at the thickly-piled carpet: “Winifred- Winifred Stewart. Not much of a name, is it? Some people are christened with horrid names.’

‘Mm.’

She looked up. ‘What’s your name?’

‘They call me Morse: Inspector Morse.’

‘But that’s your surname.’

‘Yes.’

‘You don’t want to tell me your Christian name?’

‘No.’

‘Like that, is it?’ (She was smiling.)

Morse nodded.

‘What about that drink? You’ve sobered up a bit, you know.’

But (quite amazingly) Morse had hardly heard her. ‘Do you – do you go with lots of men?’

‘Not lots, no. I’m a very expensive item.’

‘You earn a lot of money?’

‘More than you do.’ Her voice had grown harsh again, and Morse felt sad and dejected.

‘Do you get much pleasure from-er-’

‘From having sex with clients? Not much, no. Occasionally though-if you want me to be honest.’

‘I’m not sure I do,’ said Morse.

She stood up and poured herself a glass of dry Vermouth, without renewing her offer to the Chief Inspector. ‘You don’t know much about life, do you?’

‘Not much, no.’ He seemed to her to look so lost and tired now, and she guessed he must have had a busy day. But had she known it, his mind was working at a furious rate. There was something (he knew it!) that he’d been missing all the way along; something he doubted he would learn from this disturbingly attractive woman; something that she probably couldn’t tell him, anyway, even when she came (as he knew she would) to the second part of the tale she had to tell.

‘When did you last see Gilbert?’ he asked.

‘I’m not sure-’

‘You say you saw him quite a few times after you entertained his special client?’

It was puzzling to Morse how the tone of her voice could vary so vastly (and so suddenly) between the gentle and jarring. It was the latter again now.

‘You mean did I go to bed with him?’

Morse nodded. And for the first time she was aware of the cold, almost merciless eyes that stared upon her, and she felt the sensation of a psychological and almost physical stripping as she answered him, her top lip quivering.

‘Yes!’

‘Was that after you’d met your second special client?’

Her startled eyes looked into his, and then down to the Wilton again. ‘Yes,’ she whispered.

‘Please tell me all about that,’ said Morse quietly.

For a few moments she said nothing; then she picked up her glass and quickly drained it.

‘Before I do-would you like to come to bed with me?’

‘No.’

‘Are you sure?’ She stood up and loosened her belt, allowing the sides of her bathrobe to fall apart before drawing them together again and retying the belt tightly around her waist.

‘Quite sure,’ lied Morse.

So Winifred Stewart (it was now past eight o’clock) told Morse about her second special client, a Mr Westerby, who also hailed from Oxford. And Morse listened very carefully, nodding at intervals and seemingly satisfied. But he wasn’t satisfied. It was all interesting-of course it was; but it merely corroborated what he’d already known, or guessed.

‘What about that drink?’ he asked.

Mrs Angela Price looked knowingly at her husband when she I finally heard the quiet voices on the doorstep. It was a quarter to midnight, and BBC 1 had already finished its transmission.

Lewis had finally gone to bed about ten minutes before Morse found a taxi on the Richmond Road. He’d hoped that Morse would have been back before now, and had tried repeatedly to get in touch with him, both at HQ and at his home. For he had received a remarkable piece of news that same afternoon from the young porter at Lonsdale, who had received a card by second post; a card from Greece; a card from Mr Westerby.

At 2a.m., Winifred Stewart was still lying awake. The night was sultry and she wore no nightdress as she lay upon her bed, covered by a lightweight sheet. She thought of Morse, and she felt inexpressibly glad that she had met him; longed, too, with one half of her mind, that he would come to visit her again. And yet knew, quite certainly, that if he did her soul would be completely bared and she would tell him all she knew. Two thirds of the tragic tale had now been told; and if ever he began to guess the final truth… Yet, with the other half of her mind she didn’t want him back – ever – for she was now a very frightened woman.

At 3 a.m. she went to the bathroom to take some Disprin tablets.

At 4 a.m. she was still awake, and suddenly she felt the night had grown so very cold.

CHAPTER THIRTY

In which ‘The Religion of the Second Mile’ is fully explained, and Morse is peremptorily summoned to his superior.

As he sat back comfortably in a first-class compartment of the 10 a.m. “125” from Paddington, Morse felt the residual glow of a great elation. For now (as he knew) the veil of the temple had been rent in twain.

The previous night he had missed the last train to Oxford and only just managed to find, on the highest floor of a cheap hotel, a cramped and claustrophobic room in which the water-pipes had groaned and gurgled through the early hours. But it was in this selfsame mean and miserable room that Morse, as he lay on his back in the darkness with both hands behind his head, had finally seen the amazing light of truth. Half occupied with the lovely woman he had left so recently, half with the other problems that beset him still, his mind had steadfastly refused to rest. He sensed that he was almost there, and the facts of the case raced round and round his brain like an ever-accelerating whirligig. The old facts… and the new facts.

Not that he had learned much that was surprisingly new from Mrs Emily Gilbert. Nor, for that matter, from Miss Winifred Stewart-except for the confirmation that she had, indeed, agreed to entertain a second special guest from Oxford whose name was Mr Westerby. There had been a few other things, though. She’d told him, for example, that Emily had been simultaneously wooed by each of the Gilbert brothers; that, of the two, Alfred was considerably the more interesting and cultured-particularly because of his love of music; but that it was Albert who had won the prize with his livelier, albeit coarser, ways. The brothers were still very much alike (she’d told him)-extraordinarily so in appearance-but if they’d been holidaying together in Salzburg Alfred would have gone to a Mozart concert and Albert to The Sound of Music… Yes, that was something new; but it hardly seemed to Morse of much importance. Far more important was what she hadn’t told him, for he had sensed the deep unease within her when she’d told him of her time with Westerby: not the unease of a woman telling obvious untruths; the unease, rather, of a woman telling something less than all she knew…

It was at that very point in his whirling thoughts that Morse had jerked himself up in his bed, switched on the bedside lamp, and reached for the only object of comfort that the sombre room could offer him: the Gideon Bible that rested there beside the lamp. In two minutes his fumbling and excited fingers had found what he was seeking. There it was- St Matthew, Chapter Five, Verse Forty-One: ‘And whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain.’ He remembered vividly from his youth a sermon on that very text-from a wild, Welsh minister: The Religion of the Second Mile’. And it was with the forty watt bulb shedding its feeble light over the Gideon Bible that Morse smiled to himself in unspeakable joy, like one who has travelled on a longer journey still – that third and final mile…

At last he knew the truth.

‘In two minutes we shall be arriving at Oxford station,’ came the voice over the microphone. ‘Passengers for Banbury, Birmingham, Charlbury…’ Morse looked at his watch: 10:1 a.m. No need for any great rush now-no need for any rush at all. He walked from the station up to the bus-stop in Cornmarket; and at 11.30 was back at Police HQ in Kidlington, where a relieved-looking Lewis awaited him.

‘Good time, sir?’

‘Marvellous!’ said Morse, seating himself in the black leather chair and beaming benignly. ‘We expected you back yesterday.’

‘ “We”? Who’s that supposed to mean?’

‘The super was after your blood last night, sir-and this morning.’

‘Ah, I see.’

‘I said you’d ring him as soon as you got in.’

Morse dialled Strange’s number immediately. Engaged. ‘How about you, Lewis? You have a good time?’

‘I don’t know, sir. There’s this.’

He handed over the postcard he had picked up the previous I evening from Lonsdale, and Morse looked down at a glossy photograph of ancient stones. He turned the card over, and read that such crumbling masonry was nothing less than the remains of the royal palace of Philip II of Macedon (382-336 BC). Then he saw the large Hellas stamp, featuring sea shells set against a blue-green background; then the message, neatly penned and very brief: ‘Wonderful weather. Any mail to Cambridge Way. Staying on a further week. Regards to the Master-and to your good selves. G.W.’

‘Lovely place, Greece, Lewis.’

‘I wouldn’t know, I’m afraid.’

‘Perhaps Westerby doesn’t know either,’ said Morse slowly

‘Pardon, sir?’

‘You’d better keep it, of course-but he’s not in Greece. It’s; forgery-you can see that, surely!’

‘But-’

‘Look, Lewis! Look at that franking.’ Lewis looked closely but saw little more than a blackened circle, with whatever lettering there may have been so smudged that it was quite illegible. He could, though, just about decipher one or two of the letters: there was an “O” (certainly) and: “N” (possibly) near the beginning of one word, and the next word probably ended in an “E”. But he could make nothing of it, and looked up to find that Morse was smiling still.

‘I shouldn’t take too much notice of it, Lewis. It’s not too difficult to get hold of a Greek postage-stamp, is it? And then if you get a date-stamp and push it vaguely one way instead of banging it straight down you’ll get the same sort of blur as that. You see, someone just brought the card into the Lodge and left it handily upon a pile of mail. It’s all a fake! And, if you like, I’ll tell you where the date-stamp comes from: it comes from Lonsdale College.’

The phone rang before Lewis could make any answer, and a harsh voice barked across the line: ‘That you, Morse? Get over here-and get over here quick!’

‘I think you’re in the dog-house,’ said Lewis quietly.

But Morse appeared completely unconcerned as he rose to his feet and put his jacket on.

‘I’ll tell you something else about that card, Lewis. We know a man, don’t we, who’s been writing a book about our Mister Philip Two of Macedon-remember?’

Yes, Lewis did remember. Just as Morse had done, he’d seen the typescript on the desk in Browne-Smith’s room, as well as the pile of postcards that had lain beside it. And, as Morse walked across to the door, he felt annoyed and disappointed with himself. There was one thing Morse hadn’t mentioned, though.

‘Is the handwriting a fake as well, sir?’

^‘I haven’t the faintest idea,’ replied Morse. ‘Why don’t you go and find out, if you can? No rush, though. I think the super and I may well be in for rather a longish session.’

‘Siddown, Morse!’ growled Strange, his long gaunt face set grimly and angrily. ‘I heard last night-and again this morning – from the Metropolitan Commissioner.’ His eyes fixed Morse’s as he continued. ‘It seems that a member of my force- you Morse!-was witness to a major crime in London yesterday; that you left the scene of this crime without adequate explanation and in defiance of normal police procedures; that you allowed the only other witness of this crime to go off home – God! – a home incidentally which doesn’t exist; that you then went off to see a woman up in North London to tell her that her husband had just been murdered; and if all that’s not enough,’ the blood was rising in his face, ‘you couldn’t even get the name of the bloody corpse right!’

Morse nodded agreement, but said nothing.

‘You realize, don’t you, that this is an extremely serious matter?’ Strange’s voice was quieter now. ‘It won’t be in my hands, either.’

‘No, I understand that. And you’re right, of course-it’s a very serious matter. The only thing is, sir, I don’t think that even you quite understand how desperately serious it is.’

Strange had known Morse for many years and had marvelled many times at the exploits of this extraordinary and exasperating man. And there was something about the way in which Morse had just spoken that signalled a warning. It would be wise for him to listen, he knew that.

So he listened.

It was more than two hours later when Strange’s middle-aged secretary saw the door open and the two men emerge. Earlier she had been informed that, short of a nuclear explosion, her boss was not to be disturbed; and she did know a little (how not?) of the reason for Morse’s summons from on high. Yet now she saw that it was Strange’s face which looked, of the two, the more drained and set; and she bent her head a little closer to the clattering keys, as if her presence there might cause embarrassment. The two men had said nothing more to each other, she was sure of that-except that Strange had murmured a muted ‘Thank you’ as Morse had walked across the room. Then, after Morse was gone, and just before her boss had closed his office door, she thought she heard him speak once more: ‘My God!’