The Riddle Of The Third Mile

by Colin Dexter

  On the first landing, she turned to him again, her eyes assessing him shrewdly, like a tailor mentally measuring some wealthy customer. Then, after looking along the corridor to left and right, she appeared to decide where the most appropriate prospects lay, for she opened the door immediately across the landing with a brusqueness which seemed clearly to betoken her mistress-ship of the establishment.

  At a table immediately inside the room on the left sat a woman of some forty summers, blonde and big-breasted, wearing a low-cut, full-length purple gown; and, as the lady of the house introduced her client, she stood up and slowly smiled.

  ‘You’re free, I think, this afternoon, Yvonne?’

  ‘Thees eevening, also, madame, eef you weesh it.’ The blonde smiled bewitchingly again, showing her beautifully even teeth. She was exquisitely made up, a moist lipstick marking the contours of her sensuous mouth, her hair piled immaculately on top of her finely-boned head.

  ‘Is Paula free, too?’

  ‘She weel be, madame. She ‘ave a client for lernch, but she weel be free aftair.”

  ‘Well-’ (madame spoke directly to Browne-Smith) ‘-if you’re happy to stay here with Yvonne, sir?’

  He swallowed and nodded his unequivocal assent.

  ‘Good. I’ll leave you, then. But you are to have everything you want, sir-I hope you understand that? Absolutely everything.’

  ‘I’m most grateful.’

  She turned to go. ‘You must know Mr-er-Sullivan very well, sir?’

  ‘I was just able to do him a little favour, that’s all. You know how these things are.’

  ‘Of course. And you promise to let me know if there’s anything that Yvonne here can’t-’

  ‘I don’t think you need worry.”

  Then madame was gone, and the back of Browne-Smith’s throat felt parched as he fought to stem the flood of erotic imaginings that threatened to swamp him. He had little help from the woman who, briefly resuming her seat in order to make some entry in a red leather-bound diary on the table, leant forward as she did so and revealed even to the most casual glance that beneath her dress she was wearing little else-at least above her rather ample hips.

  ‘I am weeth you now, sir.’ She rose from her chair and walked round to him. ‘Let me take your coat.’

  Browne-Smith took off the light brown summer raincoat he had worn continuously since leaving Oxford, and watched her as she folded it neatly over her left arm, slid her right hand under his elbow, and guided him over to a door at the far end of the room.

  Compared with the somewhat austere and sparsely furnished room they had just left, this inner room was lavishly and (to Browne-Smith’s tastes) rather luridly equipped. Two blood-red lamps, affixed to the inner wall, cast a subdued light around, and thick, yellow curtains, drawn fully across the single window, cut out all but the narrowest chink of natural light. The other furnishings were gaudily provocative with a cohort of multi-coloured cushions covering the long, low settee, and, behind that, bright yellow sheets and pillows on the widely welcoming bed, its coverlet already turned back. Opposite the settee was a tall, well-stocked, drinks cabinet, its doors standing open; and beside it a film projector, pointing a protruding snout towards the white expanse of wall to the left of the curtained casement. Pervading all was the heavy, heady smell of some sweet scent, and Browne-Smith felt a semi-permanent, priapic push between his loins.

  ‘You’d like a dreenk?’

  She went over to the cabinet and recited a comprehensive choice: whisky, gin, campari, vodka, rum, martini…

  ‘Whisky, please.’

  ‘Glenfeeddich?’

  ‘My favourite.’

  ‘And mine.’

  There seemed to be two bottles of each drink, one of them as yet unopened, as though the liquid capacity of even the most dedicated toper had been nobly anticipated. And he watched her (why was he puzzled?) as she ripped the seal off a new bottle, poured out a half-tumbler of the pale malt whisky, and brought it over to him.

  ‘Aren’t you going to have one, er-’

  ‘Eevone. Please call me “Eevone”. I call you “sir”-because, madame, she inseest on eet. But for me-Eevone!’

  Even as she spoke, Browne-Smith found himself thinking, albeit vaguely, that her French accent was carefully cultivated and-yes, completely phoney. But why worry about that? More important, for his own fastidious tastes, was the fear that someone else might enter the room. So he took a large gulp of Scotch and voiced his anxiety.

  ‘We shan’t be interrupted, shall we?’

  ‘Non, non! Madame, you raymember, she say you ‘ave everything you want? So? Eef you want me to lock the door, I lock eet. Eef you want Paula, per’aps, you ‘ave Paula, OK? But I ‘ope you want me, non?’

  Phew!

  She went over to the door and turned the key, went over to the cabinet and poured herself a gin and dry martini, and finally came to sit beside him on the settee, her thigh pressing closely against his own. She clinked their glasses: ‘I’m sure we ‘ave a good time together, eh? I always like it eef I dreenk.’

  Browne-Smith took a further gulp of his Scotch, sensing even at this early stage that the alcohol was having an unwontedly powerful effect upon him.

  ‘I feel you up a leetle?’

  Momentarily he misunderstood her pronunciation of that second word; but when she took his glass he nodded in happy acquiescence, watching her in a wonderful anticipation as she walked away.

  ‘You like my dress?’ She was in front of him now, the replenished glass in her left hand. ‘Eet show off my figure, non?’

  ‘You have a lovely figure.’

  ‘You theenk so? But eet ees so ‘ot in ‘ere. You take off your coat, per’aps?’ She leaned over him, helping to remove his jacket, the dress soft against him, her body soft, the lighting soft; and he sat there passively as she slid her hands beneath the cuffs of his shirt, and deftly unfastened the cufflinks (Oxford University) before pushing the sleeves slowly up the arms. ‘Just to see eef you ‘ave a leede, what you call eet, “tattoo”?’

  ‘No, I haven’t, actually.’

  ‘Nor ‘ave I. But soon you weel be able to see for yourself, non?’ She sat closely beside him again, and Browne-Smith gulped back another large mouthful of his drink and willed himself to relax for a while. But she gave him little chance, taking his right hand and placing it on the shoulder of her dress.

  ‘You like that?’ she asked.

  My God! His hand fumbled for a few seconds with the material of the dress, and then slipped tentatively beneath it, feeling the soft flesh around her neck.

  ‘Can I-?’

  ‘You can do anytheeng,’ Even as she spoke those blissful words her eyes sparkled, and she jumped to her feet, pulling him up in turn with both hands. ‘But we ‘ave a leetle feelm first, OK?’

  Reluctantly, Browne-Smith did as he was bidden, taking his seat in an upright chair in front of the projector, and seeking to prepare himself for the voyeuristic aperitif. Clearly the pattern of events she’d suggested was not an unusual one; she, doubtless, must occasionally feel the need for some erotic stimulus. It was rather sad, this last fact, but he was too intelligent a man to feel surprised.

  The scenes now witnessed on the white patch of wall beside the yellow curtaining were wilder by a dozen leagues than the few X-certificated films that Browne-Smith had paid to see at the ABC cinema during the Oxford vacations. It was a pity that the woman wasn’t seated close to him; but (as she’d explained) unless she continually made some slight adjustments to the focusing mechanism, the technicolour delineation tended to drift out of true.

  It was all so strangely deja vu.

  A man, in a smartly cut business suit; a beautiful blonde in a full-length, purple gown; a few intimate drinks on a multi-cushioned settee; the man’s hand slipping slowly inside the low-cut bodice and hoisting there from a bronzed, globed breast; then a teasingly slow, provocative undress on the part of the blonde, followed by much mutual grasping and gasping-befo
re a finale that was fully orchestrated by climactic groans and an energetic spurting of semen.

  The whirring, clicking projector was now switched off, and he felt her hands on his shoulders from behind.

  ‘You like eet again?’ She came round and sat on his knees. ‘Or would you rather ‘ave me?’

  He swallowed the first ‘You!’, but managed the second.

  ‘There ees a long zeep at the back of my dress-that’s eet. Just pull down-pull! Yes, that’s eet!’

  Browne-Smith felt the sinuous movement of her hips pressing down on him as his fingers ventured across her naked back; and then she got up and walked over to the bed.

  ‘Come and let me undress you.’

  Her back was turned away from him as she shrugged the dress off her shoulders, bent down to slip off her black, high-heeled shoes, stepped professionally out of her dress, and folded it neatly over the chair at the foot of the bed. Then she turned fully towards him, and he felt an enormously urgent need to take her immediately; but still she teetered on the brink of things, and he thought of the mercilessly tortured Tantalus and the illicit grapes that dangled just above his lips.

  ‘One more lettk drink, per’aps?’

  Browne-Smith, now almost in a delirium of anticipation, watched her as she walked over to the cabinet, watched her as she poured the two drinks, watched her as her beautifully formed breasts bounced towards him once more.

  ‘Just lie there a leetle meenite. You can ‘ave me very soon.’

  She had disappeared through the only other door in the room, doubtless (judging by the flushing of water) a bathroom. And he, for his part, lay there almost fully clothed upon the yellow sheets, wondering in a hazily distanced sort of way just what was going on. Although his mouth seemed dry as the Sahara, he put down his drink untasted on the bedside-table, and for a while his mind grew clearer. Why had she used the other bottle of Glenfiddich? Perhaps… perhaps it had been watered down a bit? Just as the Bursar always said at a Gaudy: ‘Let them have the good stuff first.’

  When, after what seemed an eternity, she returned, he watched her again, leaning half-upright on his right elbow. But his request was the oddest she had ever heard.

  ‘Have you got any sort of cream, or something? My lips are awfully dry.’

  She fetched her handbag from the settee, opened the flap, and delved around for a few seconds. Then, unscrewing a circular container, she leaned over him, her breasts suspended only inches from his eyes, and smoothly smeared some cream along his lips.

  ‘That ees better, non? Dreenk up, darleeng!’

  She unfastened his tie; then unfastened the front of his shirt, one button at a time, at each stage her fingers splaying across his chest.

  For Browne-Smith these moments were almost unbearably erotic, and he knew that he had little hope of lasting out much longer. Yet he made one further quite extraordinary request. ‘Can you open the curtains-just a little bit?’

  When the woman returned she saw that the man’s jacket, hitherto folded at the foot of the bed, was now lying beside him; and as she looked down, at his motionless body, she saw the tell-tale stain that seeped around the front of his well-cut, dark-blue trousers. His eyes were closed and his breathing steady, the right hand hanging loosely over the side of the bed, the index finger missing below the proximal inter-phalangeal joint. His glass, on the table beside his head, was now empty. She gently took his right arm and lay it alongside his body. Almost, for a moment or so, she felt a pang of tenderness. Then she hurriedly redressed, unlocked the door of the room, went out, and spoke in whispers to a man standing outside-a man who was reading a book entitled Know Your Kochel Numbers.

  Her duties were done.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Friday, 11th July

  A woman of somewhat dubious morals seeks to relax, although such is her nature that she recalls too clearly, and too often, the duties she has been paid so handsomely to perform.

  In the latish evening of the day on which the events described in the previous chapter took place, a woman was seated alone in an upstairs flat, bedsitter-cum-bathroom-cum-kitchen, of a house situated in one of the many residential streets that lead south off the Richmond Road. Half an hour earlier she had walked from East Putney tube station, and now she felt tired. Piccadilly to Earls Court, change trains, across the Thames to Putney-how many times had she made that tiresome journey? It would have been so much easier to live in Soho, and there had been no lack of opportunity on that score! But she enjoyed her two lives-her two spheres of existence which intersected at (almost) no no single point. Here, in soberly bourgeois suburbia, she was a middle-aged woman with a job in the city. Here, she kept herself very much to herself, quietly, pleasantly, comfortably, dealing with rent and rates and household bills, and furnishing her few rooms at lavish expense. Yet these rooms were for her enjoyment only, since she had never invited another person into them,aceptfar the cleaning woman (two hours per week). Except, too, for the man who had come to see her only four days ago.

  The woman we are describing looked to be about forty, but was in fact some ten years older. Yet one could readily be forgiven for such misjudgement. She was a large breasted woman, with hips that had put on several inches over recent years, but her legs were finely graceful still, her ankles slim and firm. There were, certainly, a few tell-tale lines at the corners of her mouth, and again at the sides of her eyes; but the mouth itself was as delicately, deliciously sensitive as it had always been, and the eyes were normally as clear and bright as a summer’s noon in the Swedish hills.

  Tonight, however, those selfsame eyes were dull and sombre. Seated in an armchair, she crossed her nyloned legs, rested her blonde head upon her left arm, and stared down for many minutes at the richly patterned Wilton carpet. She still felt that residual sense of triumph and achievement; but she felt, too, a certain tension and concern which, over the last few hours, had been growing inexorably into a sense of guilt-ridden remorse.

  It had all had its beginnings early on the previous Monday morning, almost immediately after the Sauna Select (just off Brewer Street) had opened its doors to the men who frequented that establishment. There was nothing common, nothing mean about it all; just a gentlemanly and a ladylike understanding that with little fuss and large finance the whole gamut of erotic refinements was readily available. Many of the steady if unspectacular clients were men of middle or late-middle age; some of them were undisguisedly and indisputably ancient. But all were wealthy, since that was the sine qua non of the business. How else could the management afford the princessly salaries of its four assorted hostesses? For (as the woman so often reminded herself) it was a big salary – far better than her former wages as a popular stripper in the Soho clubs, commuting with her bulky case of costumes from one cramped dais to another.

  It had been 10.35 a.m. when the man had come in. He’d wanted a sauna, he said; he wanted nothing else. That’s what they all said; but soon the moisture and the heat and the inhibitions slowly dissipating in a world of steam and relaxation would almost always lead to something else. And this man? He had assessed the four of them with an almost embarrassing thoroughness- their figures, their complexions, their eyes – and he had chosen her, thereafter being escorted to the steam-room, and thence to one of the private massage parlours (£20 extra) in which the expertly fingered and minimally clad girls would exercise their skills.

  He was sweating profusely under the belted white towelling that reached down to mid-thigh. She, for her part, cool and elegant, was dressed in the regulation white-cotton housecoat, with only the thinly transparent bra and pants beneath.

  ‘Would you like to lie down on the couch, sir? On your back, please.’

  He had said nothing at that stage, obeying her suggestions mechanically and closing his eyes as she stood behind him, her fingers gently massaging the muscles round his neck.

  ‘Nice?’

  ‘Lovely!’

  ‘Just relax!’ She insinuated her hands beneath the towel
ling and massaged his shoulders with the tips of her strong and beautifully manicured fingers, working down from the neck towards the armpits-repeatedly, gently, sensually. And then, as she’d done a thousand tunes before, she walked round the couch and stood at his side, leaning over him, the top two buttons of her tunic already unfastened.

  ‘Would you like me to undress while I massage you?’ Wonderful question! And almost invariably an offer that couldn’t be refused, even when the price of such an optional extra was clearly stated in advance.

  It was a surprise to the woman, therefore, when her apparently pliable and co-operative client had slowly sat up, swung his legs off the couch, leaned forward to fasten the buttons of her tunic, pulled the white towelling back over his shoulders, and said ‘No’.

  But there followed an even bigger surprise.

  ‘Look! I think I know you, and I certainly knew your father. Is it safe to talk here?’

  Her father! Yes, she could still remember him. Those interminable rows she had heard so often from her lonely bedroom when the amiable drunkard had finally reached home from the local-rows apparently forgotten by the following dawns, when the household moved about its normal business. Then, in 1939, he had been called up in the army, when she had been only eight years old; and his death, three years later, had seemed to her little more than the indefinite prolongation of an already lengthy period of absence from her life. There had been many reminders of him, of course: photographs, letters, clothes, shoes. But, truth to tell, the death of her father had been an event that was less than tragic and only dimly comprehended. But it had been otherwise for her mother, who had wept so often through those first few weeks and months. And it was largely to try to compensate for such an uneven burden of things that the young girl had tried so very hard with her schoolwork, helped so regularly with the housework, and even (later on) kept in check those symptoms of teenage rebelliousness that had threatened to swamp all sense of filial piety. As the years went by, she had gradually taken over everything from an increasingly neurotic and feckless mother, who had sunk into premature senility by her early fifties, arid into her grave before reaching her sixtieth year.