The Riddle Of The Third Mile (11 page)

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

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

‘Well, you believed him, didn’t you?’

‘Yeah – course.’

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

‘He didn’t take anything.’

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

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

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

‘I dunno. He just typed-’

‘He
what?’

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

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

‘Yeah.’

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

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

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

‘It was t
he police.’

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

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

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

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

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

‘Get on with it!’

‘Dead before immersion-’

‘You
do
surprise me.’

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

‘He was carried there, you mean?’

‘I said “probably”.’

‘In the boot of a car?’

‘How the hell do I know!’

‘Anything else?’

‘Dismembered
after
death-pretty certain of that.’

‘Brilliant,’ mumbled Morse.

‘And that’s almost it, old man.’

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

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

‘Not poisoned?’ asked Morse more quietly.

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

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

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

‘And some kippers. You interested in kippers?’

‘For breakfast?’

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

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

‘We live in a strange world.’

‘Nothing else?’

‘As I said, that’s almost the lot.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘It won’t help much.’

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

‘What do I do with the corpse?’

‘Put it in the bloody deep-freeze!’

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

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

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

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

‘Well,
find
out!’ snapped Morse.

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

‘No! Do it now!’

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

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

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

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

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

Morse just nodded, and sat back almost happily.

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Pardon?’

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

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

‘See that second one, Lewis?’

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

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

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

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

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

‘Whew!’

‘So your next job-’

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

‘Oh yes, Lev/is.
It was Westerby’s.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘But we had a note from him.’

‘Which he didn’t write.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘I don’t remember seeing-’

‘Did he have a car?’

‘Big, black, thirsty Daimler.’

‘Where’s that now?’

‘I’ve no idea.’

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

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

‘Yes, I think I do.’

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

‘He was a bore, you mean?’

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

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

‘Over his dead body!”

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

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

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

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

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