The Riddle Of The Third Mile

by Colin Dexter

  Lewis nodded and prepared to leave. ‘Nuisance, teeth are, yes. Nothing much worse than an abscess on one of your front teeth, you know.’

  The porter looked strangely at Lewis for a few seconds, for the words he had just heard were almost exactly (he could swear it) the words he had heard from the afflicted furniture-remover.

  He told Lewis so… and Lewis told Morse, in the Mitre. Yet neither of them realized, at least for the present, that this brief and seemingly insignificant little episode was to have a profound effect upon the later stages of the case.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Friday, 25th July

  Our two detectives have not yet quite finished with the implications of severe dismemberment.

  The case was working out well enough, thought Lewis, as he drove Morse back through Summertown. The shops were in the same order as they’d been two hours earlier when he had driven past them: the RAG building, Budgens, Straw Hat Bakery, Allied Carpets, Chicken Barbecue… yes, just the same. It was only a question of seeing them in reverse order now, tracing them backwards, as it were. Just like this case. Morse had traced things backwards fairly well thus far, if somewhat haphazardly… And he wanted to ask Morse two questions, though he knew better than to interrupt the great man’s thoughts in transit.

  In Morse’s mind, too, far more was surfacing from the murky waters of a local canal than a bloated, mutilated corpse that had been dragged in by a boat-hook as it threatened to drift down again and out of reach. Other things had been surfacing all the way along the towpath, as clue had followed clue. One thing at least was fairly firmly established: the murderer-whoever that might be-had either been quite extraordinarily subtle, or quite – inordinately stupid, in going to the lengths of dismembering a body, and then leaving it in its own clothes. If it was in its own suit… Lewis had done his job; and Lewis was sure that the *nt was Browne-Smith’s. But what about the body? Oh yes, •deed – but what about the body?

  Back in Morse’s office, Lewis launched into his questions: ‘It’s pretty certainly Browne-Smith’s body, don’t you think, sir?’

  ‘Don’t know.’

  ‘But surely-’

  ‘I said I don’t bloody know!’

  So, Lewis, after a decent interval, asked his other question: ‘Don’t you think it’s a bit of a coincidence that you and this Gilbert fellow should have a bad tooth at the same time?’

  Morse appeared to find this an infinitely more interesting question, and he made no immediate reply. Then he shook his head decisively. ‘No. Coincidences are far more commonplace than any of us are willing to accept. It’s this whole business of chance, Lewis. We don’t go in much for talking about chance and luck, and what a huge part they play in all our lives. But the Greeks did-and the Romans; they both used to worship the goddess of luck. And if you must go on about coincidences, you just go home tonight and find the forty-sixth word from the beginning of the forty-sixth psalm, and the forty-sixth word from the end of it- and see what you land up with! Authorized Version, by the way.’

  ‘Say that again, sir?’

  ‘Forget it, Lewis! Now, listen! Let’s just get back to this case we’re landed with and what we were talking about at lunch-time. If our murderer wants his victim to be identified, he does not-repeat not chop his head off. Quite apart from the facial features-features that could be recognized by some myopic moron from thirty yards away-you’ve got your balding head, your missing mandibles, and whatever-even the angle of your ears; and all of those things are going to lead to a certain identification. Somebody’s going to know who he is, whether he’s been floating in the Mississippi for a fortnight, or whether he’s been up in Thrupp for three months. Agreed? And if our murderer is still anxious for his corpse to be identified, he does not – repeat not cut his hands off, either. Because that removes at one fell chop the one thing we know that gives him a unique and unquestionable individuality-his fingerprints!’

  ‘What about the legs, sir?’

  ‘Shut up a minute! And for Christ’s sake try to follow’ I’m telling you! It’s hard enough for me!’

  ‘I’m not finding much trouble, sir.’

  ‘All I’m saying is that if the murderer wants the body to be recognized, he doesn’t chop off his head and he doesn’t chop off his hands-agreed?’

  Lewis nodded: he agreed.

  ‘And yet, Lewis, there are two other clues that lead quite dearly to a positive identification of the body; the suit-quite certainly now it seems it was Browne-Smith’s suit; and then the letter- almost as certainly that was written to Browne-Smith. All right, it wasn’t all that obvious; but you’d hardly need to be a Shylock-’

  ‘ “Sherlock”, sir.’

  ‘You see what I’m getting at, though?’

  Lewis pondered the question, and finally answered, ‘No.’

  Morse, too, was beginning to wonder whether he himself was following the drift of his own logic, but he’d always had the greatest faith in the policy of mouthing the most improbable notions, in the sure certainty that by the law of averages some of them stood a more reasonable chance of being nearer to the truth than others. So he burbled on.

  ‘Just suppose for a minute, Lewis, that the body isn’t Browne-Smith’s, but that somebody wanted it to look like his. All right? Now, if the murderer had left us the head, or the hands or both, then we could have been quite sure that the body wasn’t Browne-Smith’s, couldn’t we? As we know, Browne-Smith was suffering from an incurable brain-tumour, and with a skull stuc on the table in front of him even old Max might have been able to tell us there was something not all that healthy round the cerebral cortex-even if the facial features were badly disfigured. It’s just the same with the hands-quite apart from fingerprints. Browne-Smith lost most of his right index-finger in the war, and not even your micro-surgeons can stick an artificial digit on your hand without even a delinquent like Dickson spotting it. So, if the hands, or at least the right hand, had been left attached to the body, and if all the fingers were intact -then again we’d have been quite sure that the body wasn’t Browne-Smith’s. You follow me? The two things that could have proved that the body wasn’t his are both deliberately and callously removed.’

  Lewis frowned, just about managing to follow the line of Morse’s argument. ‘But what about the suit? What about the letter?’

  ‘All I’m saying, Lewis, is that perhaps someone’s been trying mighty hard to convince us that it was Browne-Smith’s body, that’s all.’

  ‘Aren’t you making it all a bit too complicated?’

  ‘Could be,’ conceded Morse.

  ‘I’m just a bit lost, you see, sir. We’re usually looking for a murderer, aren’t we? We’ve never had all this trouble with a body before.’

  Morse nodded. ‘But we’re getting to know more about the murderer all the time! He’s a very clever chap. He tries to lead us astray about the identity of the body, and he very nearly succeeds.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So he’s almost as clever as we are; and most of the clever people I know are-guess where, Lewis!’

  ‘In the police force?’

  Morse allowed himself a weak smile, but continued with his previous earnestness. ‘In the University of Oxford! And what’s more, I reckon I’ve got a jolly good idea about exactly which member of the University it is!’

  ‘Uh?’ Lewis looked across at his chief with surprise-and suspicion.

  But Morse was off again. ‘Let’s just finish off this corpse. We’re left with those legs, right? Now we’ve got some ideas about the head and the hands, but why chop the legs off?’

  ‘Perhaps he lost a toe in a swimming accident off Bermuda or somewhere. Got his foot caught in the propeller of a boat or something.’

  Morse was suddenly very still in his chair, for Lewis’s flippant answer had lit another sputtering fuse. He reached for the phone, rang through on an internal extension to Superintendent Strange, and (to Lewis’s complete surprise) asked for two more frogmen-if possible i
mmediately-to search the bottom of the canal by Aubrey’s Bridge.

  ‘Now about those legs,’ resumed Morse. ‘At what point would you say they were chopped off?’

  ‘Well, sort of here, sir.’ Lewis vaguely put his hand on his femur. ‘About half-way between -’

  ‘Between pelvis and patella, that’s right. Half-way, through, you say? if we don’t know how long his thighs were to start with, where exactly is that “half-way” of yours? It may have been meant to look half-way-’

  ‘That’s what I told you this morning, sir.’

  ‘I know you did, yes! All I’m doing is to stick a bit more clarity into your thinking. You don’t mind, I hope?’

  ‘My mind’s perfectly clear already, sir. He might have been a shorter man or a taller man, and, because Browne-Smith’s about five-eleven, the odds are probably on him being shorter. It’s the length of the femur, you see, that largely determines the height.’

  ‘Oh!’ said Morse. ‘You don’t happen to know how tall Westerby is-or was?’

  ‘Five-five, sir-about that. I asked the college secretary very nice girl.’

  ‘Oh!’

  ‘And I agree with all you’ve said, sir. Head, hands, legs -you’ve explained them all. If the murderer wanted us to think the body was Browne-Smith’s, perhaps he couldn’t have left any of them.’

  The tables were turned now, and it was Morse’s turn to look ‘You don’t think all this is getting a bit too complicated do you, Lewis?’

  ‘Far too complicated. We’ve got the suit and we’ve got the letter-both of them Browne-Smith’s-and we know that he’s gone missing somewhere. That would be quite enough for me, sir. But you seem to think that the man we’re after is almost as clever as you are.’

  Morse did not reply immediately, and Lewis noticed the look of curious exhilaration in the Chief Inspector’s face. What, he wondered, had he suddenly thought of now?

  Dickson called in a few minutes later to report that no one by the name of Simon Rowbotham was registered in the membership of the Pike Anglers’ Association or in the membership of any other fishing-club in the vicinity of Oxford; and Lewis was disappointed with this news, for it gave a little more weight to the one freakish objection to his own firm view that the corpse they had found must be Browne-Smith’s: the objection (as Morse had pointed out to him the previous morning) that “Simon Rowbotham” was an exact anagram of “O.M.A. Browne-Smith”.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Saturday, 26th July

  An extremely brief envoi to the first part of the case.

  At five minutes to four the next morning, Morse awoke and looked at his bedside clock. It seemed quite impossible that it should be so early, for he felt completely refreshed. He got out of bed and drew the curtains, standing for several minutes looking down on the utterly silent road, only a hundred yards from Banbury Road roundabout… the road that led north out to Kidlington, and thence past the Thames Valley Police HQ up to the turn for Thrupp, where the waters would now be topping and plopping gently against the houseboats as they lay at fheir overnight moorings.

  Morse went into the bathroom, noticed that his jaw was almost normal again, swallowed the last of the penicillin tablets and returned to bed, where he lay on his back, his hands behind his head… There were still many pieces of flotsam that needed to be salvaged before the wreck of a man’s life could wholly bereconstructed… salvaged from those canal waters -which changed their colour from green to grey to yellow to to white… Morse almost dozed off again, momentarily imagining that he saw the outlines of a cunningly plotted murder, with himself-yes, Morse!-at the centre of a beautifully calculated deception. Of one thing he was now utterly sure: that, quite contrary to Lewis’s happy convictions about the identity of the dead man, the man they had found was quite certainly not Dr Browne-Smith of Lonsdale.

  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.

  THE END OF THE FIRST MILE

  THE SECOND MILE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Monday, 28th July

  Morse, having been put on the right track by the wrong clues, now finds his judgement almost wholly vindicated.

  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.’