by Colin Dexter
The Riddle Of The Third Mile
Colin Dexter
Once again Oxford becomes the scene of the crime as Inspector Morse investigates a baffling case involving a mysterious disappearance, an unidentified corpse, and a brutal murder.
Colin Dexter
The Riddle Of The Third Mile
The sixth book in the Inspector Morse series, 1983
THE FIRST MILE
CHAPTER ONE
Monday, 7th July
In which a veteran of the ElAlamein offensive finds cause to recall the most tragic day of his life.
There had been the three of them-the three Gilbert brothers: the twins, Alfred and Albert; and the younger boy, John, who had been killed one day in North Africa. And it was upon his dead brother that the thoughts of Albert Gilbert were concentrated as he sat alone in a North London pub just before closing time: John, who had always been less sturdy, more vulnerable, than the formidable, inseparable, and virtually indistinguishable pair known to their schoolmates as “Alf ‘n’ Bert”; John, whom his elder brothers had always sought to protect; the same John whom they had not been able to protect that terrible day in 1942.
It was in the early morning of 2nd November that “Operation Supercharge” had been launched against the Rahman Track to the west of El Alamein. To Gilbert, it had always seemed strange that this campaign was considered by war historians to be such a miraculous triumph of strategic planning, since from his brief but not unheroic participation in that battle he could remember only the blinding confusions around him during that pre-dawn attack. ‘The tanks must go through’ had been the previous evening’s orders, filtered down from the red-tabbed hierarchy of Armoured Brigade to the field officers and the NCOs of the Royal Wiltshires, into which regiment Alf and Bert had enlisted in October 1939, soon to find themselves grinding over Salisbury Plain in the drivers’ seats of antique tanks-both duly promoted to full corporals, and both shipped off to Cairo at the end of 1941. And it had been a happy day for the two of them when brother John had joined them in mid-1942, as each side built up reinforcements for the imminent show-down.
On that morning of 2nd November, at 0105 hours, Alf and Bert moved their tanks forward along the north side of Kidney Ridge, where they came under heavy fire from the German 88s and the Panzers dug in at Tel Aqqaqir. The guns of the Wiltshires’ tanks had spat and belched their shells into the enemy lines, and the battle raged furiously. But it was an uneven fight, for the advancing British tanks were open targets for the antitank weapons and, as they nosed forward, they were picked off piecemeal from the German emplacements.
It was a hard and bitter memory, even now; but Gilbert allowed his thoughts full rein. He could do so now. Yes, and it was important that he should do so.
About fifty yards ahead of him, one of the leading tanks was burning, the commander’s body sprawled across the hatch, the left arm dangling down towards the main turret, the tin-helmeted head spattered with blood. Another tank, to his left, lurched to a crazy standstill as a German shell shattered its left-side track, four men jumping down and sprinting back towards the comparative safety of the boundless, anonymous sands behind them.
The noise of battle was deafening as shrapnel soared and whistled and plunged and dealt its death amidst the desert in that semi-dawn. Men shouted and pleaded and ran-and died; some blessedly swiftly in an instantaneous annihilation, others lingeringly as they lay mortally wounded on the bloody sand. Yet others burned to death inside their tanks as the twisted metal of the hatches jammed, or shot-up limbs could find no final, desperate leverage.
Then it was the turn of the tank immediately to Gilbert’s right-an officer leaping down, clutching a hand that spurted blood, and just managing to race clear before the tank exploded into blinding flame.
Gilbert’s turret-gunner was shouting down to him.
‘Christ! See that, Bert? No wonder they christened these fuckin’ things “Tommycookers”!’
‘You just keep giving it to the bastards, Wilf!’ Gilbert had shouted back.
But he received no reply, for Wilfred Barnes, Private in the Royal Wiltshire Yeomanry, had spoken his last words.
The next thing Gilbert saw was the face of Private Phillips as the latter wrestled with the driver’s hatch and helped him out.
‘Run like hell, corporal! The other two have had it.’
They had struggled only some forty yards before flinging themselves down as another shell kicked up the sand just ahead of them, spewing its steel fragments in a shower of jagged metal. And when Gilbert finally looked up, he found that Private Phillips, too, was dead-a lump of twisted steel embedded hi his lower back. For several minutes after that, Gilbert sat where he was, severely shocked but apparently uninjured. His eyes looked down at his legs, then at his arms; he felt his face and his chest; then he tried to wriggle his toes in his army boots. Just thirty seconds ago there had been four men. And now there was only one-him. His first conscious thought (which he could recall so vividly) was a feeling of ineffable anger; but almost immediately his heart rejoiced as he saw a fresh wave of 8th Armoured Brigade tanks moving up through the gaps between the broken or blazing hulks of the first assault formation. Only gradually did a sense of vast relief surge through him – relief that he had survived, and he said a brief prayer to his God in gratitude for coming through.
Then he heard the voice.
‘For Christ’s sake, get out of here, corporal!’ It was the officer with the bleeding hand, a lieutenant in the Wiltshires-a man who was known as a stickler for discipline, and a bit pompous with it; but not an unpopular officer, and indeed the one who the night before had relayed to his men the Montgomery memorandum.
‘You a’right, sir? Gilbert asked.
‘Not too bad.’ He looked down at his hand, the right index finger hanging only by a tissue of flesh to the rest of his hand. ‘What about you?’
‘I’m fine, sir.’
‘We’ll get back to Kidney Ridge-that’s about all we can do.’ Even here, amid the horrifying scenes of carnage, the voice was that of a pre-war wireless announcer, clipped and precise -what they called an “Oxford” accent.
The two men scrambled through the soft sand for a few hundred yards before Gilbert collapsed.
‘Come on! What’s the matter with you, man?’
‘I dunno, sir. I just don’t seem…’ He looked down at his left trouser-leg, where he had felt the fire of some intense pain; and he saw that blood had oozed copiously through the rough khaki. Then he put his left hand to the back of his leg and felt the sticky morass of bleeding flesh where half his calf had been shot away. He grinned ruefully:
‘You go on, sir. I’ll bring up the rear.’
But already the focus had changed. A tank which had seemed to be bearing down upon them suddenly slewed round upon its tracks so that now it faced backwards, its top completely sheared away. Its engine, however, still throbbed and growled, the gears grinding like the gnashing of tortured teeth in hell. But Gilbert heard more than that. He heard the voice of a man crying out in the agony of some godforsaken despair, and he found himself staggering towards the tank as it lurched round yet again in a spurting spray of sand. The man in the driver’s seat was alive! Thereafter Gilbert forgot himself completely: forgot his leg-wound, forgot his fear, forgot his relief, forgot his anger. He thought only of Private Phillips from Devizes…
The hatch was a shattered weld of hot steel that just would not open-not yet. Almost it came; and the sweat showered down Gilbert’s face as he swore and wrenched and whimpered at his task. The petrol-tank ignited with a soft, almost apologetic ‘whush’, and Gilbert knew it was a matter only of seconds before another man was doomed to death inside a Tommyco
oker.
‘For Chrissake!’ he yelled to the officer behind him. ‘Help! Please! I’ve-nearly-’He wrenched for the last time at the hatch, and the sweat poured again on to his bulging, vein-ridged forearms.
‘Can’t you fuckin’ well see? Can’t you -’ His voice tailed off in desperation, and he fell to the sand, overwhelmed by failure and exhaustion.
‘Leave it, corporal! Come away! That’s an order?
So Gilbert crawled away across the sand and wept in frenetic despair, his grimed face looking up to see through his tears the glaze in the officer’s eyes… the glaze of frozen cowardice. But he remembered little else except the screaming of that burning fellow soldier. And it was only later that he thought he’d recognized the voice-for he hadn’t seen the face.
He was picked up (so they told him) soon after this by an army truck, and the next thing he could remember was lying comfortably in very white sheets and red blankets in a military hospital. They didn’t tell him until two weeks later that his brother John, tank driver with the 8th Armoured Brigade, had been killed in the second-phase offensive.
Then Albert Gilbert had been almost sure; but even now, he wasn’t quite sure. He knew one thing, though, for nothing could erase from his cerebral cortex the name of the officer who, one morning in the desert, in the battle for the ridge at Tel El Aqqaqir, had been tried in the balance of courage-and been found wanting. Lieutenant Browne-Smith, that was the name. Funny name, really, with an ‘e’ in the middle. A name he’d never seen again, until recently.
Until very recently indeed.
CHAPTER TWO
Wednesday, 9th July
We are in the University of Oxford, at the marks-meeting of the seven examiners appointed for ‘Greats’.
‘He would have walked a first otherwise,’ said the Chairman. He looked down again at the six separate assessments, all of them liberally sprinkled with alphas and beta plusses except for the one opposite Greek History, where stood a feeble-looking beta double minus/delta. Not, this last, the category of the finest minds.
‘Well, what do you think, gentlemen? Worth a viva, surely, isn’t he?’
With minimal effort, five of the other six men, seated at a large table bestrewn with scripts and lists and mark-sheets, raised the palms of their hands in agreement.
‘You don’t think so?’ The Chairman had turned towards the seventh member of the examining panel.
‘No, Chairman. He’s not worth it-not on this evidence.’ He flicked the script in front of him. ‘He’s proved quite conclusively to me that he knows next to nothing outside fifth- century Athens. I’m sorry. If he wanted a first, he ought to have done a bit more work than this.’ Again he flicked the script, an expression of disgust further disfiguring a face that had probably been sour from birth. Yet, as all those present knew, no one else in the University could award a delicate grading like B+/B+?+ with such confident aplomb, or justify it with such fierce conviction.
‘We all know, though, don’t we,’ (it was one of the other members) ‘that sometimes it’s a bit hit-and-miss, the questions we set, I mean-especially in Greek History.’
‘I set the questions,’ interrupted the dissident, with some heat. There’s never been a fairer spread.’
The Chairman looked very tired. ‘Gentlemen. We’ve had a long, hard day, and we’re almost at the finishing-post. Let’s just-’
‘Of course he’s worth a viva,’ said one of the others with a quiet, clinching authority. ‘I marked his Logic paper-it’s brilliant in places.’
‘I’m sure you’re right,’ said the Chairman. ‘We fully take your point about the history paper, Dr Browne-Smith, but…’
‘So be it-you’re the Chairman.’
‘Yes, you’re quite right. I am the Chairman and this man’s going to get his viva!’
It was a nasty little exchange, and the Logic examiner immediately stepped in with a peace proposal. ‘Perhaps, Dr Browne-Smith, you might agree to viva him yourself?’
But Browne-Smith shook his aching head. ‘No! I’m biased against the fellow-and all this marking-it’s been quite enough for me. I’m doing nothing else.’
The Chairman, too, was anxious to end the meeting on a happier note: ‘What about asking Andrews? Would he be prepared to take it on?’
Browne-Smith shrugged. ‘He’s quite a good young man.’
So the Chairman wrote his final note: ‘To be vivaed by Mr Andrews (Lonsdale), 18th July’; and the others began to collect their papers together.
‘Well, thank you all very much gentlemen. Before we finish, though, can we just think about our final meeting? Almost certainly it’s got to be Wednesday 23rd or Thursday 24th.’
Browne-Smith was the only one of the panel who hadn’t taken out his diary; and when the meeting was finally fixed for 10 a.m. on Wednesday the 23rd, he appeared to take no notice whatsoever.
The Chairman had observed this. ‘All right with you, Dr Browne-Smith?’
‘I was just about to say, Chairman, that I’m afraid I probably shan’t be with you for the final meeting. I should very much like to be, of course, but I-I’ve got to be… Well, I probably shan’t be in Oxford.’
The Chairman nodded a vague, uneasy understanding. ‘Well, we’ll try to do our best without you. Thank you, anyway, for all the help you’ve been-as ever.’ He closed the thick, black volume in front of him, and looked at his wrist-watch: 8.35 p.m. Yes, it had been a long, hard day. No wonder, perhaps, that he’d become a little snappy at the end.
Six members of the panel agreed to repair to the King’s Amis in Broad Street; but the seventh member, Dr Browne-Smith, begged leave to be excused. Instead, he left the Examination Schools, walked slowly along the High, and let himself through the back-door (‘Senior Fellows Only’) into Lonsdale College. Once in his rooms, he swallowed six Paracetamol tablets, and lay down fully-clothed upon his bed, where for the next hour his brain blundered around uncontrollably in his head. Then he fell asleep.
On the morning of the next day, Thursday, 10th July, he received a letter. A very strange and rather exciting letter.
CHAPTER THREE
Friday, 11th July
In which we learn of an Oxford don’s invitation to view the vice and viciousness of life in a notorious area of the metropolis.
Never throughout his life-almost sixty-seven years of it now-had Oliver Maximilian Alexander Browne-Smith (with an “e” and with hyphenation) MC, MA, D. Phil., really come to terms with his inordinately ponderous names. Predictably, in his prep-school days he had been nicknamed “Omar”; and now, with only one year before his University appointment was due to be statutorily terminated, he knew that amongst the undergraduates he had acquired the opprobrious sobriquet of “Malaria”, which was not so predictable and very much nastier.
It was some small surprise to him, therefore, to find how quickly he had managed to bring himself to terms, in a period of only a few weeks, with the fact that he would quite certainly be dead well within a twelvemonth (‘At the very outside, since you insist on the truth, Dr Browne-Smith’). What he did not realize, however, as he walked on to Platform One at Oxford Station, was that he would be dead within a shorter period than that so confidently predicted by his distinguished and expensive consultant.
A very much shorter period.
As he made his way to the rear end of the platform, he kept his eyes lowered, and looked with distaste at the empty beer cans and litter that bestrewed the “up” line. A few of his University colleagues, some from Lonsdale, were fairly frequent passengers on the 9.12 a.m. train from Oxford to Paddington, and the truth was that he felt no wish to converse with any of them. Under his left arm he held a copy of The Times, just purchased from the station bookstall; and in his right hand he held a brown leather briefcase. For a fine, bright morning in mid-July, it was surprisingly chilly.
The yellow-fronted diesel snaked its slow way punctually through the points just north of the station, and two minutes later he was seated opposite a yo
ung couple in a non-smoking compartment. Although an inveterate and incurable smoker himself, one who had dragged his wheezing lungs through cigarettes at the rate of forty-plus a day for fifty years, he had decided to impose upon himself some token abstinence during the hour-long journey that lay ahead of him. It seemed, somehow, appropriate. When the train moved out, he folded The Times over and started on the crossword, his mind registering nothing at all on the first three of the clues across. But on the fourth, a hint of a grin formed around his slightly lopsided mouth as he looked down again at the extraordinarily apposite words: ‘First thing in Soho tourist’s after? (8).’ He quickly wrote in ‘stripper’; and with more and more letters thenceforth making their horizontal and vertical inroads into the diagram-grid, the puzzle was finished well before Reading. Then, hoping that the couple opposite had duly noted his cruciverbalistic competence-if not the ugly stump of his right index finger, chopped off at the first joint – he leaned back in his seat as far as his longish legs would allow, closed his eyes, and concentrated his thoughts on the very strange reason that was drawing him to London that day.
At Paddington he was almost the last person to leave the train and, as he walked to the ticket barrier, he saw that it was still only 10.15 a.m. Plenty of time. He collected a Paddington-Reading-Oxford timetable from the Information Bureau, bought a cup of coffee at the buffet, where he lit a cigarette, and looked up the possible trains for his return journey. Curiously enough, he felt relaxed as he lit a second cigarette from the first, and wondered vaguely what times the pubs-and clubs-would be open in London. 11 a.m. perhaps? But that was a matter of no great moment.