by Colin Dexter
‘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.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
We have an exact transcript of the long letter, which was without salutation or subscription, studied by Chief Inspector Morse and by Sergeant Lewis, in the mid-morning of Monday, 28th July.
‘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 fro
m such a dryasdustest man as me.
‘Where are we then? Ah, yes. I went. I went through the doors that had been clearly labelled for my attention, and I knew where I was going; I knew exactly. It will be of little value to you so have a comprehensive account of subsequent events, although (to be fair to myself) they were not particularly sordid. The whole drama (I must admit it) was played with a carefully rehearsed verisimilitude, with myself acting a role that was equally carefully rehearsed. Yet at one stage (if I may continue -the metaphor), I forgot my lines completely. And so, perhaps, would you have done. For a devastatingly lovely woman-a Siren fit to beguile the wily Ulysses himself- was almost, almost rob me of my robe of honour; and, perhaps more importantly to rob me of my one defence-an army revolver which I had kept since my days in the desert, and which was even now still bulging reassuringly in my jacket-pocket.
‘But things are getting out of sequence, and we must go back. Who was the man I had seen on Staircase T at Lonsdale College? You will have to know. Yes, I am afraid you will have to know.
‘I was a young officer in the desert during the battle of El Alamein. I was, I think, a good officer, in the sense that I tried to look after the men in my charge, left little to needless chance, enforced the orders I was given and faced the enemy with the conviction that this conflict-this one, surely-was as fully justified as any in the, annals of Christendom. But I knew one thing that no one else could know. I knew that at heart I was a physical coward; and I always feared the thought that, if there were to come a time when I should be called upon to show a personal, an individual-as against a communal, corporate-act of courage, well, I knew that I would fail. And that moment came. And I failed. It came-I need not relate the shameful details-when a man pleaded with me to risk my own life in trying to save the life of a man who was trapped in a fiercely burning tank. But enough of that. It hurts me deeply, even now, to recall my cowardice.
‘Let us now switch forward again. It was all phoney: I soon began to realize that. There were those two bottles of everything, for example: two of them-in whatever the client (in this case, me) should happen to indulge. Why two? The one of them about two thirds empty (or is it one third full?); the other completely intact, with the plastic seal fixed round its top. Why go, then, to the new bottle for the first, perfunctory drinks? I didn’t know, but I soon began to wonder. And then her accent! Oh dear! Had she been at an audition, any director worth a tuppence of salt would have told her to flush her Gallic vowels down the nearest ladies’ lavatory. And then at one point she opened her handbag-a handbag she must have owned for twenty years. A professional whore with an aged handbag? And not only that. She was introduced to me by an unconvincing old hag as “Yvonne”; so why are the faded gilt initials on the inside flap of her handbag clearly printed “W.S.”? You see where all this suspicion is leading? But I had my revolver. I was going to be all right. I was all right. (How I hate underlining words in typescript- but often it is necessary.) It was only when this lovely girl (oh dear, she was lovely!) poured my final drink from the other bottle (not the bottle I had drunk from before) that I knew exactly what my situation was. I asked her to open the curtains a little, and whilst she was doing this I poured the (doubtless doctored) contents of my glass inside my trousers, in order that the impression should be given that I had been incapable of controlling myself. (I know you will understand the sense of what, so delicately, I have tried to express.) You must understand that at this point she was quite openly and wantonly naked, and I myself quite justifiably aroused.
‘After that? If I may say so, I performed my part professionally. Making vaguely somnolent noises, I now assumed the role of a man (as the Americans have it) in a totally negative response situation. Then the woman left me; and after hearing whispered communications on the other side of the door, I sensed that someone else was in the room. Let us leave it there.
‘I am getting tired with this lengthy typing, but it is important that I should go on a little longer.
‘You were a fool when you were an undergraduate-wasting, as you did, the precious talent of a clear, clean mind. It was me (or do you prefer “I”?) who marked some of your Greats papers, and even amidst the widespread evidence of your appalling ignorance there were moments of rare perception and sensitivity. But since that time you have made a distinguished reputation for yourself as a man of the Detective (as Dickens has it), and I was anxious that it should be a worthy brain that was to be pitted against my own. Why else should the body be discovered where it was? Who made sure that it should be found at Thrupp-a place almost in your own back-yard? You will, I suspect, have almost certainly discovered by now why I was not able to leave the head and the hands for your inspection? Yes, I think so. You would have been quite certain that it was not my body had I done so, and I wished to sharpen up your brain, for (believe me!) it will need to be as sharp as the sword of Achilles before your work is finished. Here then is a chance for you to show the sort of quality that was apparent in your early days at Oxford. Perhaps this case of yours will afford for you the opportunity to kill an ancient ghost, since I shall quite certainly (albeit posthumously) award you a “first” this time if you can grasp the inevitable (and basically so simple) logic of all these strange events.
‘I shall make no further communication to you; and I advise you not to try to track me down, for you will not find me.
‘Post Scriptum. I have just read this letter through and wish to apologize for the profusion of brackets. (I am not often over-influenced by the work of Bernard Levin.)’
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Monday, 28th July
Investigations proceed with a nominal line drawn down the middle of needful inquiries.
So many clues now, and as Morse and Lewis saw things there were four main areas of inquiry:
1. What were the real facts about that far-off day in the desert when Browne-Smith had faced his one real test of character-and (apparently) failed so lamentably?
2. Where exactly did Westerby (a name cropping up repeatedly now) fit into the increasingly complex pattern?
3. Who was the person whom Browne-Smith had met after his anti-climactic sexual encounter with the pseudonymous “Yvonne”?
4. And (still, to Morse the most vital question of all) whose was the body they had found?
Obviously the strands of these inquiries would interweave at many points; but it seemed sensible to the two detectives that each should make his own investigations for a day or two, with Lewis concentrating his attentions on the first two areas, and Morse on the second two.
Lewis spent most of the morning on the telephone, ringing,
amongst other numbers, those of the War Office, the Ministry of Defence, the HQ of the Wiltshire Regiment, and the Territorial Unit at Devizes. It was a long, frustrating business; but by lunch-time he had a great deal of information, much of it useless, but some of it absolutely vital.
First, he discovered more about Browne-Smith: Captain, acting Major, (Royal Wiltshires); served North Africa (1941-42); wounded El Alamein; Italy (1944-45); awarded the MC (1945).
Second, he learned something about Gilbert. There had been three Gilbert brothers, Albert, Alfred, and John. All had fought at El Alamein; the first two, both full corporals, had survived the campaign (although both of them had been wounded); the third, the youngest brother, had died in the same campaign. That was all.
But it couldn’t be quite all, Lewis knew that. And it was from the Swindon branch of the British Legion that he learned the address of a man in the Wiltshires who must certainly have known the Gilbert brothers fairly well. Immediately after lunch, Lewis was driving out along the A420.
‘Yes, I knew ‘em, Sergeant – s’funny, I wur a sergeant, too, you know. Yes, there wur Alf ‘n’ Bert – like as two peas in a pod, they wur. One of ‘em, ‘e got a bit o’ the ol’ shrapnel in the leg, and I ‘ad a bit in the ‘ead. We wur at base ‘ospital for a while together, but I can’t quite recolleck… Real lads, they wur – the
pair of ‘em!’
‘Did you know the other one?’ asked Lewis.
‘Johnny! That wur ‘is name. I didn’t know ‘im very well, though.’
‘You don’t know how he was killed?”
‘No, I don’t.’
‘They were all tank-drivers, weren’t they?’
‘All of’em-like me.’
‘Was he killed in his tank?’
For the second time the old soldier looked rather vague and puzzled, and Lewis wondered whether the man’s memory could be relied upon.
‘There wur a bit of an accident as I recolleck. But ‘e wurn’t with us that morning, Sergeant – not when we all moved up long Kidney Ridge.’
‘You don’t remember what sort of accident?’
‘No. It wur back at base, I seem to… But you get a lot of accidents in wartime, Sergeant. More’n they tell the folk back ‘ome in Blighty.’
He was an engaging old boy; a sixty-nine-year-old widower for whom, it seemed, the war had been the only intermission of importance in a largely anonymous life, for there was no real sadness in him as he recalled those weeks and months of fighting in the desert-only an almost understandable nostalgia. So Lewis wrote down the facts, such as they were, in his painstakingly slow long-hand, and then took his leave.
Morse was away from the office when Lewis returned at 4.30 p.m and of this fact he was strangely glad. All the way back from Swindon he had been wondering what that ‘accident’ might have been. He suspected that had Morse been there he would of guessed immediately; and it was a pleasant change to be able tackle the problem at his own, rather slower, pace. He rang the War Office once again, was put through to the Archives section, and soon began to realize that he was on to something important.