Morse’s Greatest Mystery and other stories

1

There were longish periods now when the A34 was quiet, almost completely free of the swishing traffic. Only up there along the lay-by, two “Long Vehicle” lorries ahead, was there still any continuum of activity — where at the side of a converted white caravan a single electric light bulb illuminated MACS SNAX — Open 24 Hour’s,

Though with little formal education behind him, Danny had still felt the itch to transpose that single apostrophe from the last word to the first when, three-quarters of an hour earlier, he’d walked along to the serving-hatch and ordered a cup of tea and a Melton Mowbray pork-pie. Two other drivers had stood there then, chatting in desultory fashion and intermittently stamping their feet, their white plastic cups of piping-hot tea steaming brightly in the cold air of that late-January night. But apart from swopping first names, the three of them had said little to each other.

Now, back in the cab of the furniture van, Danny began to realize how very cold he was. Yet he told himself that “cold” was only a relative concept and was trying to convince himself that he was only relatively cold. As with many things in life, it was all a question of mind over matter. His feet felt bloody frozen — Christ, they did. But they weren’t really frozen, were they, Danny boy? What if he were standing barefoot on the far North Pole? He’d always believed there was just that one square yard of ice and snow comprising yer actual North Pole, and no one yet had managed to persuade him otherwise.

There were two newspapers in the cab: the Daily Telegraph (oddly?) and a late edition of The Oxford Mail. And newspapers were super for insulation, everyone knew that. Just stick a few sheets all the way round between your shirt and your jumper...

He looked at his wrist-watch: half-past midnight, just gone.

It had been most unlike him to make one mistake — let alone two — on such an important day. How stupid, in the first place, to have left his faithful old army greatcoat behind! And absolutely bloody stupid to have drunk more than a little too much that lunchtime, because more than a little had amounted to more than a lot and he had spent far more than he could really afford of his meagre savings.

At a service station just north of Oxford he had stopped to buy two litre bottles of Spring Water — as well as The Oxford Mail — prior to pulling into the next lay by, just before the M40 interchange. It was a bit naïve, he knew, but he’d always believed that considerable quantities of water must significantly, and soon, serve to dilute and thereby to diminish the alcoholic level in the human bloodstream. And so it was that, an hour earlier, he’d forced himself to swallow all that flat and tasteless fluid to the final drop.

How come he’d been so careless?

Nervousness partly; and partly the exhilaration of the chase — of the fox keeping a few furlongs ahead of the yapping hounds. Perhaps the fox wasn’t really exhilarated at all though — just frightened. Like he was, if he were honest with himself.

Just a bit.

Yet as he now sat behind the steering-wheel in the darkened cab, he couldn’t really believe he’d find himself in much trouble with the police that night. He wasn’t sure whether they could nick him for being over the limit in charge of a stationary vehicle. But they’d still need some reason for breathalysing him, wouldn’t they? They’d have one if they spotted the number-plate, of course. But that was a pretty unlikely possibility, he reckoned. He hadn’t read much of The Oxford Mail, but he’d seen one of its front-page headlines — OXON POLICE “UNABLE TO COPE” WITH CRIME — and at least that was a nugget of encouragement in a naughty old world. A vehicle, so it seemed, was stolen every something seconds in the Thames Valley region and that was very good news indeed — considerably lengthening the odds against him being caught.

No. There was something else that was worrying him much more: the wretched “tachometer” just to the left of the steering-wheel — a device (as he was now learning) that showed details of speeds and times, of stoppings and startings. He just couldn’t understand the thing, that was the trouble. Nor the pile of paper discs, looking like so many CDs, that stood beside it — discs marked “Freightchart,” with lines and spaces and boxes for Name and Base and Destination and Cargo and Date and Mileage and God knows what else. Confusing. Unfamiliar. He could gauge all the other risks all right; but not this one. Perhaps the police couldn’t give him a random breath-test. But could they give him a random tacho-test?

He switched on the dimmish light in the roof of the cab and picked up one of the white discs, noting that two lines had already been completed, presumably in the cheap blue Biro that lay beside the pile: SMITH, JOHN; Southampton.

Danny shook his head; and turned to The Oxford Mail again.

The main editorial picked up the page-one article on car-related crime, and Danny smiled to himself as he read the last few sentences:

Danny inclined his head slightly to the right and wondered what exactly the manufacturers could do — given the nature of electric current. And already it was considerably more difficult than the editor was suggesting. Four minutes it had taken him with this particular van at Southampton — a ramshackle heap that’d have about as much chance with a police car as a moped would with Nigel Mansell.

Brrr... was it cold, though! And getting colder.

He could have turned on the engine for a quarter of an hour or so, but he was reluctant to waste any diesel. There was a long journey north ahead of him; and while he reckoned he’d be safe enough on the busy daytime motorways, he didn’t really want to stop again. At the same time he daren’t drive any further, either — not until he’d had a few hours’ rest; or kip, if he were lucky. Twice, only an hour or so since, he’d almost fallen asleep at the wheel, his eyes slowly drooping downwards... and further downwards, until his head followed them, only — suddenly! — to jerk upright in panic as consciousness reasserted itself.

Death had never figured prominently among his deepest fears, but he’d hardly had much of an innings as yet. And with all that cargo sitting there just behind him, well, it would have been criminal — extra criminal — to take any needless risks.

Thinking of all that cargo, though...

Why’d it taken him so long to think of it?

Earlier he’d leafed through the bundle of inventories and invoices, and counted at least — what, eighty? — eighty or more oriental rugs and carpets from Turkey, from Persia, from the Caucasus, from places sounding like Something-stan, with prices ranging from £4,500 (several such from Isfahan) to the cheapest (huh!) at only a thousand or so apiece. Danny’s skill at scoring for his local darts team had once been legendary and his mind dwelt lovingly now on those accumulated spondulicks.

But the carpets weren’t just precious, were they? They’d be warm, too. Climb into the back, lie down under a couple of those beautifully embroidered beauties and — like his mum used to say — he’d soon be as snug as a bug in a rug.

A Persian rug.

There was no key to be found for the rear doors, but opening locks was Danny’s hobby; his specialism. Some few people, he knew, could finish a fiendish crossword puzzle in a matter of minutes; a few others could spot a master-move to some complex chess problem in hardly any time at all. And he was like that with opening locks.

Only quicker.

And immediately disappointed.

Inside, no neatly laid-out pile of carpets presented itself for him to lie on, like the princess on the mattresses. Instead, facing him, from floor to ceiling, lying lengthways along the sides of the van, stood a honeycomb of tightly packaged carpets rolled up in their thick cardboard cylindrical wrappings. Jes-us! Even with an outsize Stanley knife it’d probably take him half an hour to liberate only one of them. And he couldn’t just slide one out and carve it up in the middle of the lay-by, now could he?

Aagh! Forget it.

He walked back, clambered up the two metal footholds, and sat once more in the front cab, now grown even chillier. One bit of luck, though. The Daily Telegraph proved to be a pretty substantial broadsheet, and he was dividing the multipaged wodge in half when he spotted the headline, in the Home News section, and was soon reading the article beneath it:

Characteristically, Danny tilted his head to the right, and glanced through the article again. Then nodded to himself. There were people who couldn’t cope with life outside the Rules and Regulations of an institution — just as there were people (hadn’t he just read it?) who couldn’t quite cope with all this crime. And it was easy to read between the lines of that last couple of sentences, wasn’t it? “No need to clap the darbies round the poor sod’s wrists. Nah! He’ll probably soon be knocking on the gates o’ the nearest nick hisself.”

Funny old business, life. Full o’ pitfalls — full of opportunities, too. Just watch out for the first — and make sure you grab hold o’ the second. Common sense, innit? That’s what his dad had told him.

Danny clasped his hands, left over right, and rubbed them vigorously together against the numbing cold. And even as he did so, he found himself looking down at the lower knuckles of his upper hand.

2

“I coulda scored the bloody thing in me carpet slippers, honest I could.”

“You reckon?”

“And if Oxford hadn’t buggered up that last-minute penalty—”

“You’da won a fortune.”

“Third divi on the treble-chance.”

“About sixpence.”

“We’ve gone decimal, Sarge — remember?”

PC Watson accelerated up the slip-road into the A34 (N) from the Pear Tree roundabout, noting as he did so the miraculously civilized deceleration of a couple of cars behind him.

“Better take a gander somewhere, I s’pose,” suggested Sergeant Hodges a couple of miles further on, pointing to one of the several lay-bys on the twin-track road that led up to the M40 interchange.

No snack bar here. Just the black hulks of two juggernauts; and tucked in behind them an old man in an old car studying an old map.

“Need any help, sir?”

“No!”

Sod you then, thought Watson, as he moved forward past the two container-lorries.

At the far end of the lay-by — not spotted earlier — was a Jaguar of indeterminate colour: “indeterminate” partly because during the hours of darkness light reflected oddly from the metallic sheen of some cars; and partly because Watson was in any case wholly colour-blind between the reds and the blues.

But he made no further advance as he saw the grey head of the driver jerk round and the dusky-headed young maiden beside him hasten to fasten up the buttons on her blouse.

“Any joy?” asked Hodges.

Watson shook his head as he got back into the car. “Well, ’cept for the fellow up front there in the Jag, perhaps.”

Half a mile or so further along, Hodges nodded again to his left, and this time the Vauxhall Senator pulled in behind a furniture van.

“Coffee for me, Barry. Not too much milk, and two sugars, please.”

But Watson was no more than a few seconds into his mission before he stopped and stared. When (only an hour since) he’d glanced through the briefing-files and the traffic telexes back in Kidlington Police HQ, the last three letters of one particular stolen vehicle had caught his notice. How otherwise? For those last three letters were the initials of his own name, Barry Robert Watson; and here, on the van in front of him, was the registration number C 674 BRW.

There was always an awful lot of luck needed in apprehending villains, Watson had already learnt that — unless you were looking for a ginger-bearded giant, with a wooden leg, and a dinosaur tattooed on his balding head. And this was a bit of luck. Surely so.

Back in the police car, Hodges rang through to the Control Room at HQ, where within only a few seconds an operator read from his Police National Computer screen that the said vehicle, reg. C 674 BRW, had been stolen earlier that evening in Southampton. The number had appeared in the Thames Valley briefing-files only because there seemed to be some suggestion that the vehicle might be heading north. Along the A34. Up into Oxfordshire.

His head cushioned on his arms, the driver appeared to be deeply asleep, since only after a series of staccato raps on the cab window did he raise his head above the steering-wheel.

“This your vehicle?” bawled Watson.

“Wha’?”

“Police!”

The driver slowly wound down his window. “Wha’s the trouble, mate?”

“This your vehicle?”

“Wha’, this? I wouldn’t have it if you gev it me!”

“Let’s see your licence, please.”

“What licence?”

“Not your bloody dog licence, is it!”

“You got so many days on producin’ yer licence, you know that.”

“Haven’t got one — is that what you’re saying?”

“Not on me, no.”

“What’s your name?” (It was Hodges who took over now.)

“John Smith.”

“Sorry, yeah. Shoulda known.”

“Anything else I can help you with?”

“You’d better get down and come along with us.”

“Have I got any option, mate?”

“Not much.”

“Hold on a tick, then. I’d better just fill in the old tacho thing here. Got to keep yer records up to date, you know — ’specially if you get delayed a bit.”

“Yeah, well, let’s say you look like getting delayed a bit.”

Beckoning Watson to the other side of the van, and with one foot now on the lower foot-hold, Hodges raised himself to look into the cab, where he saw the driver filling in a white tachometer disc — writing slowly and innocently enough with a cheap blue Biro.

The driver of the lorry in front walked back to the van.

“Everything OK, Officer?”

Hodges nodded and stepped down. “No problems.”

“Everything OK, Danny?” continued the other, as the cab-door now opened.

“Fine, yeah! Just forgot me licence, din I?”

“ ‘Danny,’ eh?” remarked Sergeant Hodges as he steered the man into the near-side rear seat of the Vauxhall, conscious that the slimly built, quietly spoken man beside him hardly fitted the stock profile of any tearaway joyrider.

“Yeah! What do we call you?” added PC Watson over his shoulder.

“ ‘Mr. Smith’?” suggested Danny quietly.

3

If the Custody Suite at Bicester Police Station is not a match for the British Airways Club Class lounge at Heathrow, it is at least a well-lit, well-ventilated room — separated from the cell-area, and affording its present occupant a comfortable enough introit into his temporary detention.

In the presence of the arrested person himself (in the presence, too, of PC Watson) Sergeant Russell, the Custody Officer, standing in shirt-sleeves at a tall desk, has recited the statutory “Notice to Accused Persons,” and is now completing the Custody Record, as the law requires of him. Russell is an older man, a stickler for procedure, and he fills in the lengthy sections with scrupulous care. He has already made the decision to authorize the continued custody of the prisoner.

“Let me just put it to you once more, lad. What’s your real name?”

“Told you, din I? How many more times I got to tell you?”

Russell sighs wearily. There is little he can do if the man persists in such manifest falsehoods.

Yet Danny does so persist; has been so persisting for the past half-hour — ever since he’d slid a letter addressed to him beneath the driver’s seat in the front of the cab; ever since he’d jumped down into the strong arms of the law. Literally so.

“Still no news of your address?”

“No fixed abode, innit? Told you, din I? I’m a new-age traveller.”

“Occupation, then — Traveller.’ OK?”

“Yeah.”

“And you travelled down here in a vehicle stolen from a depot in Southampton at approximately 9:35 P.M. yesterday evening, right?”

“Who told you that?”

“Relax! I’ve got to put summat down here, that’s all — in the ‘Grounds for Detention’ bit. Don’t you understand that?”

Russell collects together his sheets of white A4, and prepares to call it a day. Or a night. “I just hope the Southampton boys’ve got as much patience as I have, that’s all.”

“Do we fingerprint him?” asks Watson.

“We do not! We follow the rule-book; and the rule-book says he’s got the right to a nice hot cuppa, if he wants one.”

Danny very much wants one, for his mouth is dry. But he is suddenly frightened and in danger of losing his self-control.

“You can’t bloody keep me ’ere!” The voice has grown harsh, the muscles are tightened in the neck. There is, for the first time since the arrest, a strong hint of a tightly coiled spring within the prisoner’s sinewy frame. His head moves forward over the desk which separates him from his interlocutor.

“Constable!” Russell is fully prepared; he experiences no fear as he steps towards the door at the back of the room which leads to his office. “Put the cuffs on him, will you? I shan’t be more’n a minute or two—”

“No!”

As suddenly as it has appeared, the tension has now gone. The voice is quiet once more; the muscles once more relaxed. The man breathes out a long, deep sigh, then holds up his hands in a gesture of mock surrender.

And Russell steps back to the desk, lays down the Custody Record, and takes out his pen again.

“OK. Let’s be having things, lad.”

Ten minutes later, from his own office, Sergeant Russell has introduced himself, and is speaking on the telephone to a Senior Prison Officer at Winchester.

“You’ve got somebody there who’s just scarpered, I think? Rather you haven’t got somebody there, if you see what I mean. Name o’ Smithson.”

“Oh God, no!”

“Pardon?”

“Just keep him, will you?”

“We are keeping him. He’s here — at Bicester — locked in his cell.”

“Excellent! As I say, just keep him there.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means we don’t want him back here, that’s what.”

“I’m not with you.”

“Either keep him, or lose him, that’s what I’m saying. Yes... Not a bad idea that, Sergeant. Why don’t you just lose him, and do us all a bloody favour?”

There is a chuckle at the Winchester end of the line before the voice continues, in a more serious vein, to explain these strange rejoinders.

Daniel Smithson had joined the army at the age of sixteen, as a boy-soldier; become a mercenary in Africa at the age of twenty-two; served in the SAS for six years after that; and then... and then served somewhere else — in prison, for virtually the whole of the past twelve years, his offences ranging from petty theft to hefty larceny. And (and this was the real point) the magistrates and the judges and the prison authorities were all becoming increasingly undecided about how to deal with the fellow. What he’d do was this. He’d keep his nose immaculately clean, cause no trouble to anybody, and end up by getting a “trusty” job. Then, well, he’d bugger off a day or two before he was due for release. Huh! Once outside, he’d pinch as much as his pockets could accommodate, nick a car, live it up for a few days; then (inevitably) get rearrested, and return to his old haunts and his old mates, with the Prison Governor treating him like the Prodigal Son. The simple truth was that Smithson just couldn’t settle down outside the prison walls: he needed — enjoyed! — the stable routine of a familiar nick. Though not a big fellow, he was a strong and wiry one, and his SAS history had reached the prison well ahead of him. No one buggered about (if that was the right word) with Mr. Danny Smithson.

“Oh no, Sergeant. No one.”

One thing has been troubling Russell during the recital of the Winchester prisoner’s CV: the fact that his man hardly looks the part of some ex-SAS paratrooper, or whatever; and Russell puts his thoughts into words.

“You sure we’ve got the right fellow — the fellow you’re talking about?”

“Put him on the line, if you like. I’ll soon tell you.”

“No, I don’t think I can allow that.”

“Easy enough to tell, anyway. He’s got some letters tattooed on the back of one of his hands — left hand, I think it is. They mentioned it in the papers. Hold on! Shan’t be a tick.”

In fact four minutes drag by before the Prison Officer reads from a folder; and Russell listens carefully.

“I’ll go and check straightaway. Shan’t be a tick.”

Danny is not asleep. He sits on the side of the bed, staring at the floor — and looking up with no apparent interest as Russell unlocks the door.

“Just lift up your hands, will you, Danny Boy.”

The prisoner lifts up his hands as if, once again, he is surrendering to the foe.

“Good. Now turn your hands round, please.”

So Danny turns his hands round; and on the lower joints of the fingers on his left hand Russell reads the letters I–L-Y-K.

This time it is the Winchester end which has waited through four long minutes.

“Well?”

“Yep — it’s him, all right. When’ll you be coming to fetch him?”

“Not before breakfast, I’ll tell you that! We’ll let you know.”

“OK.”

“By the way, what exactly are you holding him on?”

“Theft of vehicle; theft of goods in transit; driving without a licence; driving without—”

“Same old stuff.”

“Same old sentence, like as not.”

“Unless some judge suddenly decides to show a bit o’ sense and refuses to lock the silly sod away again.”

Russell is not prepared to enter any penological discussion, and prepares to sign off.

“Thanks anyway. Will you be coming yourself?”

“Me? God, no. I’ll be seeing him soon enough.”

“And no handcuffs, you say.”

“That’s it. No need. Let him have a stroll round Bicester after breakfast by all means — no problem. No cuffs, though. He’s one of those who can’t stand any physical contact with people. Know what I mean?”

“Doesn’t sound as if he’ll give us any trouble, anyway.”

“I wouldn’t go quite so far as that.”

“What do you mean?”

“Nothing really. Just don’t be surprised if he — well, if he strings you along a bit. Know what I mean? He’s a bit of a joker is our Danny. Always was. Probably ask you for a bottle of champers for breakfast — say it’s doctor’s orders.”

“We do a nice little line in tea-bags down here in Bicester.”

“Cheers then.”

“Cheers.”

PC Watson has finished his report, and now looks in for the last time at his prisoner.

“Anything you want?”

Danny shakes his head. “Unless you’d like to gimme me Biro back.”

Returning to the Custody Suite, Watson passes on the request; and Sergeant Russell looks down, first at the cash envelope, then at the property bag — from the latter finally taking out the cheap blue pen with which Danny had written on the tacho-disc.

“No harm, I suppose. He probably wants to write a poem on the loo-paper.”

4

At 8:20 A.M. the minibus from Winchester arrived in the front yard of Bicester Police Station, where one of the two prison personnel immediately alighted and reported to the Information Desk.

Everything was ready.

Driven now into the yard behind the main building (“Police Vehicles Only”), the minibus was backed up alongside the wall, its rear window coming to a halt only a few feet from the single external door of the Custody Suite.

The prisoner had not after all ordered champers for breakfast; instead he had done splendid justice to the sausages and beans brought to him an hour earlier. Yet he did make one request when the cell door was again unlocked for his departure, just after 8:30 A.M. Two spare blankets were folded beside the bed, and he’d asked if he could have one to put round him on the journey. He had no overcoat; it was a cold morning.

Not very much to ask at all really, was it?

It had all happened so very suddenly that no one afterwards had any particularly clear picture of the events. But it went something like this...

As he was walking through the exit door from the Custody Suite, the blanket which the prisoner was holding about his head and shoulders was dramatically whisked away and equally dramatically whipped over the head and shoulders of the tall, bearded officer who was about to unlock the near-side door of the minibus. Then, dodging lightly past him, the prisoner sprinted the thirty or so yards to the tall beech-hedge which enclosed the rear yard. The hedge was strengthened by a six-foot meshed-wire fence — the fence, in turn, supported every six or seven yards by concrete posts. These posts were some five feet in height, finishing a foot or so below the top of the hedge. One of the posts — and only one — was itself strengthened by a concrete strut which formed an angle of 45 degrees to the ground and which joined the post roughly halfway up, looking rather like a lambda in the Greek alphabet.

At full speed the prisoner leapt at this structure, his left foot landing firm on the top of the strut, his right foot equally firm on the top of the post; and then, propelled by such twin leverage, he had cleared the beech-hedge by several inches, landing neatly on the grass of a school playing-field beyond. Someone later said it was a bit like watching a Russian gymnast clearing a vaulting-horse at the Olympics.

The prisoner was gone.

Neither of the heavy Winchester men could hope to match such a nimble-footed feat of levitation; and it was ten minutes before a wailing police car, forced to take the long way round the front of the station, was crisscrossing the maze of streets in the King’s End estate behind, where (it was believed) the prisoner was last sighted.

But not sighted again.

5

The loo-paper in the cells at Bicester may by no means be described as “Savoy Soft,” stiffly reluctant as it is to accommodate itself to the contours of the average human backside. Yet (as Sergeant Russell had earlier intimated) it makes unexpectedly fine writing-paper; and it was two sheets of this paper which one of the cleaners found just before lunchtime that same day — between the folds of the remaining blanket in the cell which had housed the escaped prisoner.

The escape had caused no little embarrassment to the officers concerned, and (worse still) would almost certainly hit the national headlines the following day. Thus it was that Chief Inspector Page of Thames Valley CID (no less) had little compunction in summoning the now off-duty officers Russell, Hodges, and Watson, to his office in Kidlington at 11 A.M. to review the matter — and the cleaner’s discovery.

The spelling and punctuation were both a bit shaky, but the import of the letter could hardly have given a clearer answer to what had hitherto seemed the increasingly bewildering question of the escaped man’s identity:

Newly recruited to the Force, PC Watson was; glad to have someone to chat with — even a subdued looking Sergeant Russell — as they stood in the lunch queue in the HQ canteen.

“Rotten bit o’ luck, Sarge...” he began.

“You make your own luck, lad. I shoulda been far more careful checking out that tattoo.”

“I was thinking more about both of ’em being named ‘Danny.’ ”

“Nicknamed, you mean — one of ’em.”

“Yeah. I mean, there’s your ‘Pongo’ Warings...”

“And your ‘Nobby’ Clarks...”

“How come your ‘Danny’ Lamberts, though?”

“Dunno.”

The queue moved a couple of feet, and the plainclothes man in front of them turned round to proffer a suggestion:

“Might be someone from Stamford? Stamford in Lincolnshire? Lamberts there often get called ‘Danny,’ after Daniel Lambert — fellow who weighed fifty-two stone odd — still in the Guinness Book of Records.”

“Who’s he when he’s at home?” asked Watson, after they’d been served.

“You don’t know?”

Watson shook his head.

“That, my lad, was Chief Inspector Morse.”

Watson frowned slightly. He’d never heard of the man; yet for a fleeting second he’d thought he’d almost recognized the profile as that grey head had turned towards them in the queue...

Next morning, the Governor of HM Prison Winchester received a full report of the case, now becoming widely known as the “Cock-up at Bicester Corral,” including a photocopy of the letter found in the escapee’s cell. He immediately summoned the Senior Prison Officer from D Wing, where Smithson had spent so many comparatively contented months and years.

“You’ll be interested in this.” The Governor handed over the file.

Price, a thick-set Irishman, sat down and began reading.

“No news of our Danny?” interrupted the Governor.

Price shook his head. Then, halfway through the letter, his eyes suddenly widened with a new and startling notion.

“You don’t think, sorr...?” he began slowly, pointing to the letter.

The Governor groaned, permitting himself also, albeit briefly, to contemplate the unimaginable.

“Don’t tell me that! Please! Don’t tell me it’s Smithson’s writing?”

Price studied the writing of the letter again. “Yes, sorr. I’m sorry. But I’m pretty sure it is.”

And for a few moments the two men sat there in silence, each of them visualizing their erstwhile prisoner perched aloft in the cabin of a stolen van, and carefully over-tracing his own tattoos with a cheap blue Biro pen...