by Colin Dexter
Photographs of the three young men involved in the Eastern Ring Road accident had appeared on page 2 of The Star (September 22), a free newspaper distributed throughout Oxford each Thursday. Below these photographs, a brief article had made no mention whatsoever of the concomitant circumstances of the 'accident.' But it was the dolichocephalic face of Kevin Costyn, appropriately positioned between his dead partner-in-crime, to the left, and his amputee partner-in-crime, to the right, that had caught the attention of one of the attendants at the Pitt Rivers Museum. In particular it had been the sight of the small crucifix earring that had jerked his jaded memory into sudden overdrive. Earlier the police had questioned all of them about whether they could remember anything unusual, or anyone unusual, on that Wednesday afternoon when Cabinet 52 had been forced. Like each of his colleagues, he'd had to admit that he couldn't.
But now he could.
Just before the museum closed, on Thursday, September 22, he walked along the passage, up the stone steps, and diffidently knocked on the door of the Administrator (capital 'A').
Late that same afternoon Morse asked Lewis an unusual question.
'If you had to get a wedding present, what sort of thing would you have in mind—for the bride?'
'You don't do it that way, sir. You buy a present for both of them. They'll have a list, like as not—you know, dinner service, saucepans, set of knives—'
'Very funny!'
'Well, if you don't want to lash out too much you can always get her a tin-opener or an orange-squeezer.'
'Not exactly much help in times of trouble, are you?'
'Ellie Smith, is it?'
'Yes.' Morse hesitated. 'It's just that I'd like to buy her something . . . for herself.'
'Well, there's nothing to stop you giving her a personal present—just forget the wedding bit. Perfume, say? Scarf? Gloves? Jewellery, perhaps? Brooch? Pendant?'
'Ye-es. A nice little pendant, perhaps . . .'
'So long as her husband's not going to mind somebody else's present hanging round her neck all the time.'
'Do people still get jealous these days, Lewis?'
'I don't think the world'll get rid of jealousy in a hurry, sir.'
'No. I suppose not,' said Morse slowly.
Five minutes later the phone rang.
It was the Administrator.
In the Vaults Bar at The Randolph at lunchfime on Friday, September 23, Ellie Smith pushed her half-finished plate of lasagne away from her and lit a cigarette.
'Like I say, though, it's nice of him to agree, isn't it?'
'Oh, give it a rest, Ellie! Don't start talking about him again.'
'You jealous or something?
Ashley Davies smiled sadly.
'Yeah, I suppose I am.'
She leaned towards him, put her hand on his arm, and gently kissed his left cheek.
'You silly noodle!'
'Perhaps everybody feels a bit jealous sometimes.'
'Yeah.'
'You mean you do?'
Ellie nodded. 'Awful thing—sort of corrosive. Yuk!'
There was a silence between them.
'What are you thinking about?' he asked.
Ellie stubbed out her cigarette, and pushed her chair back from the table. 'Do you really want to know?'
'Please tell me.'
'I was just wondering what she's like that's all.'
'Who are you talking about?'
'Mrs. Morse.'
The sun had drifted behind the clouds, and Ashley got up and paid the bill.
A few minutes later, her arm through his, they walked along Cornmarket, over Carfax, and then through St. Aldate's to Folly Bridge, where they stood and looked down at the waters of the Thames.
'Would you like to go on a boat trip?' he asked.
'What, this afternoon?'
'Why not? Up to Iffley Lock and back? Won't take. long.'
'No. Not for me.'
'What would you like to do?'
She felt a sudden tenderness towards him, and wished to make him happy.
'Would you like to come along to my place?'
The sun had slipped out from behind the clouds, and was shining brightly once more.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
Cambridge has espoused the river, has opened its arms to the river, has built some of its finest Houses alongside the river. Oxford has turned its back on the river, for only at some points downstream from Folly Bridge does the Isis glitter so gloriously as does the Cam
(J. J. SMITHFIELD-WATERSTONE,
Oxford and Cambridge: A Comparison)
THE TWO RIVERS, the Thames (or Isis) and the Cherwell, making their confluence just to the south of the city centre, have long provided enjoyable amenities for Oxford folk, both Town and Gown: punting, rowing, sculling, canoeing, and pleasure-boating. For the less athletic, and for the more arthritic, the river-cruise down from Folly Bridge via the Iffley and Sandford locks to Abingdon, has always been a favourite.
For such a trip, Mr. Anthony Hughes, a prosperous accountant now living out on Boar's Hill, had booked two tickets on a fifty-passenger streamer, the lffley Princess, timetabled to sail from Folly Bridge at 9:15 a.m. on Sunday, September 25.
The previous evening he had slowly traced the course of the river on the Ordnance Survey Map, pointing out to his son such landmarks as the Green Bank, the Gut, the concrete bridge at Donnington, Haystack Corner, and the rest, which they would pass before arriving at Iffley Lock.
For young James, the morrow's prospects were magical. He was in several ways an attractive little chap—earnest, bespectacled, bright—with his name down for the Dragon School in North Oxford, a preparatory school geared (indeed, fifth-geared) to high academic and athletic excellence. The lad was already exhibiting an intelligent and apparently insatiable interest both in his own locality and in the Universe in general. Such Aristotelian curiosity was quite naturally a great delight to his parents; and the four-and-a-half year old young James was picking up, and mentally hoarding, bits of knowledge with much the same sort of regularity that young Jason was picking up, and physically hurling, bits of brick and stone around the Cutteslowe Estate.
Spanning the fifty-yard-wide Isis, and thus linking the Iffley Road with the Abingdon Road, Donnington Bridge was a flattish arc of concrete, surmounted by railings painted, slightly incongruously, a light Cambridge-blue. And as the lffley Princess rounded the Gut, young James pointed to the large-lettered SOMERVILLE, followed by two crossed oars, painted in black on a red background, across the upper part of the bridge, just below the parapet railings.
'What's that, Dad?'
But before the proud father could respond, this question was followed by another:
'What's that, Dad?'
Young James pointed to an in-cut, on the left, where a concrete slipway had been constructed to allow owners of cars to back the boats they were towing directly down into the river. There, trapped at the side of the slipway, was what appeared to be an elongated bundle, a foot or so below the surface of the nacre-green water. And several of the passengers on the port side now spotted the same thing: something potentially sinister; something wrapped up; but something no longer wholly concealed.
Fred Andrews, skipper of the lffley Princess, pulled over into Salters' Boat Yard, only some twenty yards below the bridge. He was an experienced waterman, and decided to dial 999 immediately. It was only after he had briefly explained his purpose to his passengers that an extraordinarily ancient man, seated in the bow of the boat, and dressed in a faded striped blazer, off-white flannels, and a straw boater, produced a mobile telephone from somewhere about his person, and volunteered to dial the three nines himself.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
It's a strong stomach that has no turning
(OLIVER HERFORD)
FROM DONNINGTON BRIDGE ROAD, Lewis turned right into Meadow Lane, then almost immediately left, along a broad track, where wooden structures on the right housed the Sea Cadet Corps and the Riverside Cen
tre. Ahead of him, painted in altemate bands of red and white, was a barrier, open now and upright; and beyond the barrier, four cars, one Land-Rover, and one black van; and a group of some fifteen persons standing round something—something covered with greyish canvas.
Forty or fifty other persons were standing on the bridge, just to the left, leaning over the railings and surveying the scene some fifty feet below them, like members of the public watching the Boat Race on one of the bridges between Mortlake and Putney. And seated silently beside Lewis, Morse himself would willingly have allowed any one these ghoulish gawpers to look in his stead beneath the canvas, at the body just taken from the Thames.
Events had moved swiftly after the first emergency call to St. Aldate's. PC Carter had arrived within ten minutes in a white police car and had been more than grateful for the advice of the Warden of the Riverside Centre, a dark, thick-set man, who had dealt with many a body during his twenty-five years' service there. The Underwater Search Unit had been summoned from Sulhamstead; and in due course a doctor. The body, that of a man, still sheeted in plastic, but now in danger of slithering out of its wrapping of carpet, had been taken from the water, placed at the top of the slipway—and promptly covered up, untouched. St. Aldate's CID had been contacted immediately, and Inspector Morrison had arrived to join a scene-of-crimes officer, and a police photographer. With the arrival of a cheerful young undertaker, just before noon, the cast was almost complete.
Apart from Morse and Lewis,
The reasons for such a sequence of events was clear enough to those directly and closely involved; clear even to a few of the twitchers, with their powerful binoculars, who had swelled the ranks of the bridge spectators. For this was clearly not a run-of-the-mill drowning. Even through the triple layers of plastic sheeting in which the body was wrapped, one thing stood out clearly (literally stood out clearly): the broad handle of a knife which appeared to be wedged firmly into the dead man's back. And when, under Morrison's careful directions—after many photographic flashings, from many angles—the stitching at the top of the improvised body-bag had been painstakingly unpicked, and one pocket of the corpse had been painstakingly picked (as it were), the identity of the man was quickly established.
On the noticeboard in the foyer of St. Aldate's station was pinned a photograph of a 'Missing Person' whom the police were most anxious to trace; and beneath the photograph there appeared a name, together with a few physical details. But it was not the corpse's blackened features which Morrison had recognised; it was the name he found in the sodden wallet.
The name of Edward Brooks.
Thus was a further relay of telephone-calls initiated. Thus was Morse himself now summoned to the scene.
Sometimes procedures worked well; and sometimes (as now) there was every reason for the police to be congratulated on the way situations were handled. On this occasion one thing only (perhaps two?) had marred police professionalism.
PC Carter, newly recruited to the Force, had been reasonably well prepared for the sight of a body, particularly one so comparatively well preserved as this one. What he had been totally unprepared for was the indescribable stench which had emanated from the body even before the Inspector had authorised the opening of the envelope: a stench which was the accumulation, it seemed, of the dank depths of the river, of blocked drains, of incipient decomposition—of death itself. And PC Carter had turned away, and vomited rather noisily into the Thames, trusting that few had observed the incident.
But inevitably almost everyone, including the audience in the gods, had noticed the brief, embarrassing incident.
It was Morse's turn now.
Phobias are common enough. Some persons suffer from arachnophobia, or hypsophobia, or myophobia, or pterophobia . . . Well-nigh everyone suffers occasionally from thanatophobia; many from necrophobia—although Morse was not really afraid of dead bodies at all, or so he told himself. What he really suffered from was a completely new phobia, one that was all his own: the fear of being sick at the sight of bodies which had met their deaths in strange or terrible circumstances. Even Morse, for all his classical education, was unable to coin an appropriately descriptive, or etymologically accurate, term for such a phobia: and even had he been so able, the word would certainly have been pretentiously polysyllabic.
Yet, for all his weakness, Morse was a far more experienced performer than PC Carter; and hurriedly taking the Warden to one side, he had swiftly sought directions to the nearest Ioo. It was not, therefore, into the Thames, but into a lone lavatory-pan in the Riverside Centre, that Chief Inspector Morse vomited, late that Sunday morning.
'Been in the river about a formight, they reckon,' ventured Lewis when Morse finally emerged.
'Good! That fits nicely,' replied the pale-faced Morse.
'You OK, Sir?'
'Course I'm bloody OK, man!' snapped Morse.
But Lewis was not in the least offended, for he and Morse were long acquainted; and Lewis knew all his ways.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
He could not be a lighterman or river-carrier; there was no clue to what he looked for, but he looked for something with a most intent and searching gaze
(CHARLES DICKENS, Our Mutual Friend)
IF A FEW MINUTES earlier it had been his stomach that was churning over, it was now the turn of Morse's brain; and somehow he managed, at least for a while, to look down again at the semi-sealed body. Heavy condensation between the plastic layers was preventing any close inspection of the knife stuck into the corpse's back. But Morse was determined to be patient: better than most, he knew the value touching nothing further there; and to be truthful he had been more than a little surprised that Morrison had gone as far as he had.
Nothing further, therefore, was touched until the arrival of the police Pathologist, Dr. Laura Hobson, whose bright-red Metro joined the little convoy of vehicles half an hour later. Briefly she and Morse conversed. After which, with delicate hands, she performed a few delicate tasks; while Morse walked slowly from the scene, along a track between a line of trees and the riverbank, up to a building housing the Falcon Rowing Club, some seventy yards upstream to his right. Here he stood looking around him, wondering earnestly what exactly he should be looking for.
After returning to the slipway, he took the Warden to one side and put to him some of the questions that were exercising his mind. Where perhaps might the corpse have been pushed into the river? How could the corpse have been conveyed to such a spot? In which direction, and how far, could the corpse have been conveyed by the prevailing flow of the waters?
The Warden proved to be intelligent and informative. After stressing the importance, in all such considerations, of time of year, weather conditions, river-temperature, volume of water, and frequency of river-traffic; after giving Morse a clear little lesson on buoyancy and flotation, he suggested a few likely answers. As follows.
The strong probability was that the body had not been shifted all that far by the prevailing flow; indeed, if it had been slightly more weighted down, the body might have rested permanently on the bottom; as things were, the body could well have been put into the river at a point just beside the Falcon Rowing Club; certain it was that the body would not have drifted against the north-south movement of the tide. The only objection to such a theory was that it would have been an inordinately long way for anyone to carry such a weighty bundle. With the barrier locked down across the approach road to the slipway, no car (unless authorised) could even have reached the river at that point, let alone turned fight there and deposited a body sixty, seventy yards upstream.
Unless . . .
Well, there were just over a hundred members of the Riverside Club who possessed boats, who used the slipway fairly regularly, and who were issued with a key to the barrier. Not infrequently (the Warden confessed) a boat-owner neglected to close the barrier behind him; or deliberately left it open for a colleague known to be sailing up behind. And so . . . if the barrier happened to be left open—well, no
t much of a problem, was there?
'You know what I'd've done, Mr. Holmes, if I'd had to dispose of a body here?' Morse's eyes slowly rose to the top of Donnington Bridge, where public interest was, if anything, increasing, in spite of the makeshift screen which had now been erected around the body.
'You tell me.'
'I'd have driven here, about two o'clock in the morning, and pushed it over the bridge.'
'Helluva splash, you'd make,' said the Warden.
'Nobody around to hear it, though.'
'A few people around then, Inspector. You know who they are?'
Morse shook his head.
'Three lots o' people, really: lovers, thieves, police.'
'Oh!' said Morse.
Twenty minutes later the young pathologist got to her feet the grim, grisly preliminary examination over.
'Mustn't do much more here,' she reported. 'Been in the river between a week and a fortnight, I'd guess. Difficult to say—he's pretty well preserved. Neat little job of packaging somebody did there. But we'll sort him out later. All right?'
Morse nodded. 'We're in your hands.'
'Not much doubt he's been murdered, though—unless he died, then somebody stuck a knife in him, then wrapped him all up and put him in the river here.'
'Seems unlikely,' conceded Morse.
Dr. Hobson was packing up her equipment when Morse spoke again:
'You'll be sure not to touch the knife until—?'
'You've not got much faith in some of your colleagues, have you?'
She was an attractive young woman; and when first she had taken over from the sadly missed Max, Morse had felt he could almost have fallen a little in love with her. But now he dreamed of her no longer.