by Colin Dexter
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Thursday, 24th July
Wherein such diverse activities as dentistry, crossword-solving, and pike-angling make their appropriate contributions to Morse’s view of things.
‘You’ve not been looking after these too well, have you, Mr Morse?’
Since at this point, however, the dapperly dressed dentist had his patient’s mouth opened to its widest extremities, Morse was able only to produce a strained grunt from his swollen larynx.
‘You ought to cut out the sugar,’ continued the dentist, surveying so many signs of incipient decay, ‘and some dental floss wouldn’t come amiss with all this… Ah! I reckon that’s the little fellow that’s been causing you-’ He tapped one of the lower-left molars with a blunt instrument, and the recumbent Morse was almost levitated in agony. ‘Ye-es, you’ve got a nasty little infection there… does that hurt?’
Again Morse’s body jumped in agonizing pain, before the chair was raised to a semi-vertical slant and he was ordered to ‘rinse out”.
‘You’ve got a nasty little infection there, as I say…’
Everything with the dentist appeared to warrant the epithet ‘little’, and Morse would have been more gratified had it been suggested to him that he was the victim of a massive great bloody infection stemming from an equally massive great bloody tooth that even now was throbbing mightily. He continued to sit in the chair, but the dentist himself was writing something across at his desk.
‘Aren’t you going to take it out?’ asked Morse.
The dentist continued writing. ‘We try to preserve as many teeth as we can these days, you know. And it’s particularly important for you not to lose many more. You haven’t got too many left, have you?’
‘But it’s giving me -’
‘Here’s a prescription for a little pencillin. Don’t worry! It’ll soon sort out the infection and get that little swelling down. Then if you come and see me again in-a week, shall we say?’
‘A week?
‘I can’t do anything till then. If I took it out now-well, let’s say you’d have to be a brave man, Mr Morse.’
‘Would I?’ said Morse weakly. He finally rose from the chair, and his eyes wandered to the shelf of plaster-casts of teeth behind the dentist’s desk, the upper jaws resting on the lower, a few canines missing here, a few molars there. It all seemed rather obscene to Morse, and reminded him of his junior-school history books, with their drawings of skulls labelled with such memorable names as Eoanthropus dawsoni, Pithecanthropus erectus, and the rest.
The dentist saw his interest and reached down a particularly ugly cast, snapping the jaws apart and together again like a ventriloquist at a dumb-show. ‘Remarkable things teeth, you know. No two sets of teeth can ever be the same. Each set-well, it’s unique, like fingerprints.’ He looked at the squalid lump of plastering with infinite compassion, and it seemed quite obvious that teeth obsessed not only his working life but his private soul as well.
Morse stood beside him, waiting for the prescription; and when the dentist got to his feet Morse became surprisingly aware of how small a man the dentist was. Had it been the white coat that had given him the semblance of being taller? Had it been the fact that the last thing Morse had earlier been interested in was whether the kindly man who’d readily agreed to see one of his most irregular clients was a dwarf or a giant? Yet there was something else, wasn’t there?
Morse’s mind suddenly grasped it as he stood waiting at the Summertown chemist’s. It had been when the dentist had been sitting at his desk-yes. Because the length of his back was that of a man of normal height; and so it must have been the legs…
‘Are you a pensioner, sir?’ asked the young assistant as she took his prescription. (My God! Could he really look as old as that?)
After an exhortation to stick religiously to the stated dosage, and also to be sure to complete the course, Morse was soon on his way to Kidlington, quite convinced now of the perfectly obvious fact that whoever had dismembered the corpse had been at desperate pains to conceal its identity.
Teeth? The murderer would have left a means of certain identification – ‘unique’, as his little torturer had said. Hands? If they had been deformed in any way, or one of them had? It was difficult for fellow humans to forget deformity. Legs? What if that exciting idea that had occurred to him at the chemist’s…
But he was at HQ now, and the need for instant action was at hand. He swallowed twice the specified dosage of tablets, told himself that the marvellous stuff was already engaged in furious conflict with the ‘little infection’, and finally greeted Lewis at 9.30 a.m.
‘You said you’d be here by eight, sir.’
‘Your lucky to see me at all!’ Morse snapped, as he unwrapped his scarf and bared his bulging jaw.
‘Bad tooth, sir?’
‘Not just bad, Lewis. It’s the worst bloody tooth in England!’
The missus always swears by-’
Forget what your missus says! She’s not a dentist, is she?’
So Lewis forgot it, and sat down silently.
Soon Morse was feeling better, and for an hour he discussed with Lewis both the letter and the curious thoughts that had been occurring to him.
‘Someone certainly seems to be making it difficult for us,’ said Lewis; and the sentence did little more than state in simple English the even simpler thought that had gradually dawned on Morse’s mind. But for Lewis life was full of surprises, since he now heard Morse ask him to repeat exactly that same sentence. And as he did so, Lewis saw the familiar sight of his chief looking out over the concreted yard, or wherever it was those eyes, unblinking, stared with more than a hint of deeper understanding.
‘Or it could be just the opposite,’ Lewis heard him mumble enigmatically.
‘Pardon, sir?’
‘Do you reckon a cup of coffee would upset this tooth of mine?’
‘Be all right, unless it’s too hot.’
‘Nip and get a couple of cups.”
After Lewis had gone, Morse unfolded The Times and looked at the crossword. 1 across: “He lived perched up, mostly in sites around East, shivering (6,8).” Anagram, obviously: “mostly in sites” round “e”. Yes! He quickly wrote in “Simon Stylites” -only to find himself one letter short. Of course! It was Simeon Stylites, and he was about to correct the letters, when he stopped.
It couldn’t be, surely!
He wrote a circle of letters in the bottom margin of the newspaper, crossed off a few letters, then a few more-and stopped again. Not only could it be, it was! What an extraordinary-
‘I told her to stick some extra cold milk in, sir.’
‘Did you sugar it?’
‘You do take sugar, don’t you?’
‘Bad for the teeth – surely you know that?’
‘Shall I go and-’
‘No-siddown. I’ve got something to show you. Oh God! This coffee’s cold!’
‘You haven’t done much of the crossword.’
‘Haven’t I?’ Morse was smiling serenely, and he thrust the paper across to Lewis who looked down uncomprehendingly at the almost illegible alterations in the top row of squares. But Lewis was happy. The chief was on to something- the chief was always on to something, and that was good. That’s why he enjoyed working with Morse. Being on the receiving end of all the unpredictability, all the irascibility, all the unfairness-it was a cheap price to pay for working with him. And now he whistled softly to himself as Morse explained the riddle of the circle of letters he had printed.
‘Do you want me to get on to it, sir?’
‘No, I’d rather you got on with those telephone numbers.’
‘Straight away, you mean?’
Morse gestured gently towards the phone on his desk, a smile spreading lopsidedly across his swollen mouth. ‘You said it was Dickson on the desk yesterday when we got the call from Thrupp?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, you get on with things here, Lewis. I’m just going t
o have a little chat with Dickson.’
If Lewis’s weakness in life was the smell of freshly-fried chips (and fast driving!), with Dickson it was the sight of amply-jammed doughnuts, and he sought to swallow his latest mouthful hastily as he saw Morse bearing down on him.
‘Fingers a bit sticky this morning, Dickson?’
‘Sorry, sir.’
‘Sugar is bad for the teeth, didn’t you know that?’
‘Do you eat a lot yourself, sir?’
For the next few minutes Morse questioned Dickson patiently about the informant who had telephoned HQ about the corpse in the water by Aubrey’s Bridge. The facts were clear. The man had not only given his name, he’d spelt it out; he hadn’t been absolutely sure that what he had seen was a human body, but it most decidedly looked like one; the call had been made from a phone-box, and after the second lot of ‘pip-pips’ the line had gone dead.
‘Is there a phone-box in Thrupp?’
‘On the corner, by the pub, sir.’
Morse nodded. ‘Did it not occur to you, my lad, that after getting this fellow’s name you ought to have got his address? In the book of rules, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, sir, but-’
‘Why didn’t he want to keep talking, tell me that.’
‘Probably ran out of 10p’s.’
‘He could have rung you again later.’
“Probably thought he’d-he’d already done his duty,’
‘More than you did, eh?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Why didn’t he stay there at Thrupp?’
‘Not everybody likes seeing-sort of drowned people.’
Morse conceded the point, and moved on. ‘What do they fish for there?’
‘They say there’s a few biggish pike up by the bridge.’
‘Really? Who the hell’s “they”?’
“Well, one of my lads, sir. He’s been fishing for pike up there a few times.’
‘Keen fisherman, is he?’
Dickson was feeling more at ease now. ‘Yes, sir, he’s joined the Oxford Pike Anglers’ Association.’
‘I see. Is the fellow who rang you up a member, too?’
Dickson swallowed hard. ‘I don’t know, sir.’
‘Well, bloody well find out, will you!’
Morse walked away a few steps from the flustered Dickson; then he walked back. ‘And I’ll tell you something else, lad. If your man Rowbotham is a member of whatever it’s called, I’ll buy you every bloody doughnut in the canteen. And that’s a promise!’
Morse walked over to the canteen, ordered another cap of coffee with plenty of milk, smoked a cigarette, assessed the virulence of his gnathic bacteria, noted the pile of approximately thirty-five doughnuts on the counter, and returned to his office.
It was Lewis who was beaming with pleasure now. ‘Got it, I reckon sir!’ He showed Morse the list he made. ‘Only four digits and so there are only the ten numbers. What do you think?’
Morse read the list:
8080-J. Pettiford, Tobacconist, Piccadilly
8081-Comprehensive Assurance Co., Shaftesbury Avenue
8082-ditto
8083-ditto
8084-Douglas Schwartz, Reproductions, Old Compton Street
8085 – Ping Hong Restaurant, Brewer Street
8086-Claude & Mathilde, Unisex Hairdressers, Lower Regent Street
8087-Messrs Levi & Goldstein, Antiquarian Books, Tottenham Court Road
8088-The Flamenco Topless Bar, Soho Terrace
There’s one missing, Lewis.’
‘You want me to-?’
‘I told you to try them all, I think.’
But whoever was renting number 8089 was clearly away from base, and Morse told Lewis to forget it.
‘We are not, my friend, exactly driving through the trackless wastes of the Sahara with a broken axle, you agree? Now, if you can just make one more call and find out the price of a cheap-day second-class return to Paddington-’
‘Are we going there?’
‘Well, one of us’ll have to, Lewis, and it’s important for you to stay here, isn’t it, because I’ve got one or two very interesting little things I want you to look into. So I’ll -er-perhaps go myself.’
‘It won’t do your tooth much good.’
‘Ah! That reminds me,’ said Morse. ‘I think it’s about time I took another pill or two.’
CHAPTER TWELVE
Thursday, 24th July
A brief interlude in which Sergeant Lewis takes his first steps into the Examination Schools, the Moloch of Oxford’s testing apparatus.
It was late morning when, from its frontage on the High, Sergeant Lewis entered the high-roofed, hammer-beamed lobby of the Examination Schools. Never before had there been occasion for him to visit this grove of Academe, and he felt self-conscious as his heavy boots echoed over the mosaics of the marble floor, patterned in green and blue and orange. At intervals, in front of the oak panelling that lined the walls, were stationed the white and less-than-animated busts of former University Chancellors, former loyal servants of the monarchy, and sundry other benefactors. And along the walls themselves was a series of ‘faculty’ headings: Theology, Philosophy, Oriental Studies, Modern History, and the rest; below which, behind glass, were pinned a line of notices announcing the names of those candidates adjudged to have satisfied, in varying degrees, the appropriate panels of the faculties’ examiners.
On the Literae Hutnaniores (“Greats”) board (as Morse had assured him he would) Lewis duly found a long list of names, categorized into Class I, Class II, Class III, and Pass Degree. He noticed, too (as Morse had assured him he would), that a young lady by the name of Summers (Jane) of Lonsdale College, had secured a place in the first of these aforesaid categories. Then, doing precisely as he had been told, Lewis looked to the bottom of the list, where he saw the signatures of seven examiners. A few of them were barely legible. But one of them was conspicuously clear: the neatly penned signature of O. M. A. Browne-Smith. So Lewis made a brief entry in his notebook, and wondered why Morse had bothered to send him on this particular errand.
An attendant was seated in an office to the left of the lobby, and Lewis was soon enlisting this man’s ready assistance in learning something of the processes involved in the evolution of the class-lists. What happened, it seemed, was this. After candidates had finished their written examinations, mark coordination meetings were held by each of the examining panels, where “classes” were provisionally allotted, and where borderline candidates at each class-boundary were considered for vivas, especially those candidates hovering between a first and a second; finally, but then only the day before the definitive lists were due to be published, the chairman of the examiners (and no one else) was fully in possession of all the facts. At that point it was the duty of the chairman of examiners to summon his colleagues together in order to make a corporate, meticulous check of the final lists, and then to entrust the agreed document to one of the senior personnel of the Schools, whose task it now was to deliver the document for printing to the Oxford University Press. Immediately this was done, five copies of the lists were redelivered to the waiting panel, who would usually be sitting around drinking tea and eating a few sandwiches during the hour or so’s interval. There would follow the long and tedious checking of all results, the spellings of names, and the details of index-numbers and colleges, before the chairman would read aloud to his colleagues the final version, down to the last diaeresis and comma. Only then, if all were correct, would the chairman summon the Clerk of the Schools, in whose august presence each of the five copies would be signed in turn by each of the examiners. Then, at long last, the master-copy would be posted in the lobby of the Schools.
Lewis thanked the attendant, and clattered out across the entrance hall, where examinees, parents, and friends were still clustered eagerly round the notice-boards. For the first time in his life he felt a little envy for those white-tied, subfusc-suited students so happily perched upon the topmost boughs of
the tree of knowledge. But such thoughts were futile. Anyway, he had his second assignment ahead of him-at the Churchill Hospital.
Morse was out when he returned, and so for a change it was Lewis who had some little time in which to ponder how the case was going. On the whole, he thought that Morse was probably right. Far from being stranded in the Sahara, they were following a fairly well-directed route, with signposts at almost all the early stages-quite certainly at the Examination Schools; but not (Lewis reminded himself) at the Churchill, where his enquiries had yielded nothing, and where Morse’s confident predictions had clearly gone dramatically askew.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Thursday, 24th July
Quite fortuitously, Morse lights upon a set of college rooms which he had no original intention of visiting.
Morse himself had decided to postpone for a day or two the pleasures of a trip to Soho, and instead to make some more immediate inquiries in Oxford. Thus it is that just before midday he was parking the Lancia in one of the spaces at the back of Lonsdale (‘Reserved for Senior Fellows’), walking through the front gate (‘No Visitors’), and introducing himself at the Lodge. Here, a bowler-hatted porter, very young but already equipped with the requisite blend of servility and officiousness, was perfectly willing to answer the questions Morse put to him: yes, most of the undergrads had now gone down for the long vac; yes, most of the dons had also departed, amongst their number the Master, the Vice-Master, the Investments Bursar, the Domestic Bursar, the Senior Tutor, the Senior Fellow, the…
‘Off to the Bahamas, all of them?’