The Riddle Of The Third Mile (15 page)

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

And Morse sensed rightly. For the next morning, like Browne-Smith before him, he received a long letter; a strange and extremely exciting letter.

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.

‘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.