Morse's Greatest Mystery

by Colin Dexter

  “ ‘Mr. Smith’?” suggested Danny quietly.

  3

  If the Custody Suite at Bicester Police Station is not a match for the British Airways Club Class lounge at Heathrow, it is at least a well-lit, well-ventilated room—separated from the cell-area, and affording its present occupant a comfortable enough introit into his temporary detention.

  In the presence of the arrested person himself (in the presence, too, of PC Watson) Sergeant Russell, the Custody Officer, standing in shirt-sleeves at a tall desk, has recited the statutory “Notice to Accused Persons,” and is now completing the Custody Record, as the law requires of him. Russell is an older man, a stickler for procedure, and he fills in the lengthy sections with scrupulous care. He has already made the decision to authorize the continued custody of the prisoner.

  “Let me just put it to you once more, lad. What’s your real name?”

  “Told you, din I? How many more times I got to tell you?”

  Russell sighs wearily. There is little he can do if the man persists in such manifest falsehoods.

  Yet Danny does so persist; has been so persisting for the past half-hour—ever since he’d slid a letter addressed to him beneath the driver’s seat in the front of the cab; ever since he’d jumped down into the strong arms of the law. Literally so.

  “Still no news of your address?”

  “No fixed abode, innit? Told you, din I? I’m a new-age traveller.”

  “Occupation, then—Traveller.’ OK?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And you travelled down here in a vehicle stolen from a depot in Southampton at approximately 9:35 P.M. yesterday evening, right?”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Relax! I’ve got to put summat down here, that’s all—in the ‘Grounds for Detention’ bit. Don’t you understand that?”

  Russell collects together his sheets of white A4, and prepares to call it a day. Or a night. “I just hope the Southampton boys’ve got as much patience as I have, that’s all.”

  “Do we fingerprint him?” asks Watson.

  “We do not! We follow the rule-book; and the rule-book says he’s got the right to a nice hot cuppa, if he wants one.”

  Danny very much wants one, for his mouth is dry. But he is suddenly frightened and in danger of losing his self-control.

  “You can’t bloody keep me ’ere!” The voice has grown harsh, the muscles are tightened in the neck. There is, for the first time since the arrest, a strong hint of a tightly coiled spring within the prisoner’s sinewy frame. His head moves forward over the desk which separates him from his interlocutor.

  “Constable!” Russell is fully prepared; he experiences no fear as he steps towards the door at the back of the room which leads to his office. “Put the cuffs on him, will you? I shan’t be more’n a minute or two—”

  “No!”

  As suddenly as it has appeared, the tension has now gone. The voice is quiet once more; the muscles once more relaxed. The man breathes out a long, deep sigh, then holds up his hands in a gesture of mock surrender.

  And Russell steps back to the desk, lays down the Custody Record, and takes out his pen again.

  “OK. Let’s be having things, lad.”

  Ten minutes later, from his own office, Sergeant Russell has introduced himself, and is speaking on the telephone to a Senior Prison Officer at Winchester.

  “You’ve got somebody there who’s just scarpered, I think? Rather you haven’t got somebody there, if you see what I mean. Name o’ Smithson.”

  “Oh God, no!”

  “Pardon?”

  “Just keep him, will you?”

  “We are keeping him. He’s here—at Bicester—locked in his cell.”

  “Excellent! As I say, just keep him there.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means we don’t want him back here, that’s what.”

  “I’m not with you.”

  “Either keep him, or lose him, that’s what I’m saying. Yes … Not a bad idea that, Sergeant. Why don’t you just lose him, and do us all a bloody favour?”

  There is a chuckle at the Winchester end of the line before the voice continues, in a more serious vein, to explain these strange rejoinders.

  * * *

  Daniel Smithson had joined the army at the age of sixteen, as a boy-soldier; become a mercenary in Africa at the age of twenty-two; served in the SAS for six years after that; and then … and then served somewhere else—in prison, for virtually the whole of the past twelve years, his offences ranging from petty theft to hefty larceny. And (and this was the real point) the magistrates and the judges and the prison authorities were all becoming increasingly undecided about how to deal with the fellow. What he’d do was this. He’d keep his nose immaculately clean, cause no trouble to anybody, and end up by getting a “trusty” job. Then, well, he’d bugger off a day or two before he was due for release. Huh! Once outside, he’d pinch as much as his pockets could accommodate, nick a car, live it up for a few days; then (inevitably) get rearrested, and return to his old haunts and his old mates, with the Prison Governor treating him like the Prodigal Son. The simple truth was that Smithson just couldn’t settle down outside the prison walls: he needed—enjoyed!—the stable routine of a familiar nick. Though not a big fellow, he was a strong and wiry one, and his SAS history had reached the prison well ahead of him. No one buggered about (if that was the right word) with Mr. Danny Smithson.

  “Oh no, Sergeant. No one.”

  One thing has been troubling Russell during the recital of the Winchester prisoner’s CV: the fact that his man hardly looks the part of some ex-SAS paratrooper, or whatever; and Russell puts his thoughts into words.

  “You sure we’ve got the right fellow—the fellow you’re talking about?”

  “Put him on the line, if you like. I’ll soon tell you.”

  “No, I don’t think I can allow that.”

  “Easy enough to tell, anyway. He’s got some letters tattooed on the back of one of his hands—left hand, I think it is. They mentioned it in the papers. Hold on! Shan’t be a tick.”

  In fact four minutes drag by before the Prison Officer reads from a folder; and Russell listens carefully.

  “I’ll go and check straightaway. Shan’t be a tick.”

  Danny is not asleep. He sits on the side of the bed, staring at the floor—and looking up with no apparent interest as Russell unlocks the door.

  “Just lift up your hands, will you, Danny Boy.”

  The prisoner lifts up his hands as if, once again, he is surrendering to the foe.

  “Good. Now turn your hands round, please.”

  So Danny turns his hands round; and on the lower joints of the fingers on his left hand Russell reads the letters I-L-Y-K.

  This time it is the Winchester end which has waited through four long minutes.

  “Well?”

  “Yep—it’s him, all right. When’ll you be coming to fetch him?”

  “Not before breakfast, I’ll tell you that! We’ll let you know.”

  “OK.”

  “By the way, what exactly are you holding him on?”

  “Theft of vehicle; theft of goods in transit; driving without a licence; driving without—”

  “Same old stuff.”

  “Same old sentence, like as not.”

  “Unless some judge suddenly decides to show a bit o’ sense and refuses to lock the silly sod away again.”

  Russell is not prepared to enter any penological discussion, and prepares to sign off.

  “Thanks anyway. Will you be coming yourself?”

  “Me? God, no. I’ll be seeing him soon enough.”

  “And no handcuffs, you say.”

  “That’s it. No need. Let him have a stroll round Bicester after breakfast by all means—no problem. No cuffs, though. He’s one of those who can’t stand any physical contact with people. Know what I mean?”

  “Doesn’t sound as if he’ll give us any trouble, anyw
ay.”

  “I wouldn’t go quite so far as that.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Nothing really. Just don’t be surprised if he—well, if he strings you along a bit. Know what I mean? He’s a bit of a joker is our Danny. Always was. Probably ask you for a bottle of champers for breakfast—say it’s doctor’s orders.”

  “We do a nice little line in tea-bags down here in Bicester.”

  “Cheers then.”

  “Cheers.”

  PC Watson has finished his report, and now looks in for the last time at his prisoner.

  “Anything you want?”

  Danny shakes his head. “Unless you’d like to gimme me Biro back.”

  Returning to the Custody Suite, Watson passes on the request; and Sergeant Russell looks down, first at the cash envelope, then at the property bag—from the latter finally taking out the cheap blue pen with which Danny had written on the tacho-disc.

  “No harm, I suppose. He probably wants to write a poem on the loo-paper.”

  4

  At 8:20 A.M. the minibus from Winchester arrived in the front yard of Bicester Police Station, where one of the two prison personnel immediately alighted and reported to the Information Desk.

  Everything was ready.

  Driven now into the yard behind the main building (“Police Vehicles Only”), the minibus was backed up alongside the wall, its rear window coming to a halt only a few feet from the single external door of the Custody Suite.

  The prisoner had not after all ordered champers for breakfast; instead he had done splendid justice to the sausages and beans brought to him an hour earlier. Yet he did make one request when the cell door was again unlocked for his departure, just after 8:30 A.M. Two spare blankets were folded beside the bed, and he’d asked if he could have one to put round him on the journey. He had no overcoat; it was a cold morning.

  Not very much to ask at all really, was it?

  It had all happened so very suddenly that no one afterwards had any particularly clear picture of the events. But it went something like this …

  As he was walking through the exit door from the Custody Suite, the blanket which the prisoner was holding about his head and shoulders was dramatically whisked away and equally dramatically whipped over the head and shoulders of the tall, bearded officer who was about to unlock the near-side door of the minibus. Then, dodging lightly past him, the prisoner sprinted the thirty or so yards to the tall beech-hedge which enclosed the rear yard. The hedge was strengthened by a six-foot meshed-wire fence—the fence, in turn, supported every six or seven yards by concrete posts. These posts were some five feet in height, finishing a foot or so below the top of the hedge. One of the posts—and only one—was itself strengthened by a concrete strut which formed an angle of 45 degrees to the ground and which joined the post roughly halfway up, looking rather like a lambda in the Greek alphabet.

  At full speed the prisoner leapt at this structure, his left foot landing firm on the top of the strut, his right foot equally firm on the top of the post; and then, propelled by such twin leverage, he had cleared the beech-hedge by several inches, landing neatly on the grass of a school playing-field beyond. Someone later said it was a bit like watching a Russian gymnast clearing a vaulting-horse at the Olympics.

  The prisoner was gone.

  Neither of the heavy Winchester men could hope to match such a nimble-footed feat of levitation; and it was ten minutes before a wailing police car, forced to take the long way round the front of the station, was crisscrossing the maze of streets in the King’s End estate behind, where (it was believed) the prisoner was last sighted.

  But not sighted again.

  5

  The loo-paper in the cells at Bicester may by no means be described as “Savoy Soft,” stiffly reluctant as it is to accommodate itself to the contours of the average human backside. Yet (as Sergeant Russell had earlier intimated) it makes unexpectedly fine writing-paper; and it was two sheets of this paper which one of the cleaners found just before lunchtime that same day—between the folds of the remaining blanket in the cell which had housed the escaped prisoner.

  The escape had caused no little embarrassment to the officers concerned, and (worse still) would almost certainly hit the national headlines the following day. Thus it was that Chief Inspector Page of Thames Valley CID (no less) had little compunction in summoning the now off-duty officers Russell, Hodges, and Watson, to his office in Kidlington at 11 A.M. to review the matter—and the cleaner’s discovery.

  The spelling and punctuation were both a bit shaky, but the import of the letter could hardly have given a clearer answer to what had hitherto seemed the increasingly bewildering question of the escaped man’s identity:

  The Torygraph did it, very useful paper and a lot of criminals vote tory. It was Smithson give me the idea because we got the same name see. If he got nicked he gets good treatment but if I got nicked no, so what about him and me changing places for a little wile and no harm done is it? Besides, probably gives me a best chance of scarpering—lots of that now days, perhaps its the resession to blame like for every thing else. There was just that one problem, that tatoo I read about and when you coppers thought I was filling in the old tacko with the blue byro I was just writing out them four letters on the old nuckles see, easy! Then I done a pretty good job really with all that stuff about me name, dont you think so? Well well Danny Smithson boy, I wonder where you are, have you desided to keep out this time, why not?

  I’ll leave this letter in the bottom blanket because I’ve got ideas with the top one. If I get away what a big laugh for me when you find it, and if I dont its your turn for the big laugh

  Samuel (Danny) Lambert

  PS you can give me old comb and spare hanky to Oxfam or the Sally army, its up to you

  Newly recruited to the Force, PC Watson was; glad to have someone to chat with—even a subdued looking Sergeant Russell—as they stood in the lunch queue in the HQ canteen.

  “Rotten bit o’ luck, Sarge …” he began.

  “You make your own luck, lad. I shoulda been far more careful checking out that tattoo.”

  “I was thinking more about both of ’em being named ‘Danny.’ ”

  “Nicknamed, you mean—one of ’em.”

  “Yeah. I mean, there’s your ‘Pongo’ Warings …”

  “And your ‘Nobby’ Clarks …”

  “How come your ‘Danny’ Lamberts, though?”

  “Dunno.”

  The queue moved a couple of feet, and the plainclothes man in front of them turned round to proffer a suggestion:

  “Might be someone from Stamford? Stamford in Lincolnshire? Lamberts there often get called ‘Danny,’ after Daniel Lambert—fellow who weighed fifty-two stone odd—still in the Guinness Book of Records.”

  “Who’s he when he’s at home?” asked Watson, after they’d been served.

  “You don’t know?”

  Watson shook his head.

  “That, my lad, was Chief Inspector Morse.”

  Watson frowned slightly. He’d never heard of the man; yet for a fleeting second he’d thought he’d almost recognized the profile as that grey head had turned towards them in the queue …

  Next morning, the Governor of HM Prison Winchester received a full report of the case, now becoming widely known as the “Cock-up at Bicester Corral,” including a photocopy of the letter found in the escapee’s cell. He immediately summoned the Senior Prison Officer from D Wing, where Smithson had spent so many comparatively contented months and years.

  “You’ll be interested in this.” The Governor handed over the file.

  Price, a thick-set Irishman, sat down and began reading.

  “No news of our Danny?” interrupted the Governor.

  Price shook his head. Then, halfway through the letter, his eyes suddenly widened with a new and startling notion.

  “You don’t think, sorr …?” he began slowly, pointing to the letter.

  The Governor groa
ned, permitting himself also, albeit briefly, to contemplate the unimaginable.

  “Don’t tell me that! Please! Don’t tell me it’s Smithson’s writing?”

  Price studied the writing of the letter again. “Yes, sorr. I’m sorry. But I’m pretty sure it is.”

  And for a few moments the two men sat there in silence, each of them visualizing their erstwhile prisoner perched aloft in the cabin of a stolen van, and carefully over-tracing his own tattoos with a cheap blue Biro pen …

  LAST CALL

  Wives invariably flourish when deserted; it is the deserting male who often ends in disaster.

  (William McFee)

  Not too carefully—not carefully at all really—Morse looked down at the man lying supine on the double bed, dressed only in an unbuttoned white shirt, Oxford-blue pants, and black socks. The paleness of the man’s skin precluded the probability of any recent holiday on the Greek islands—with only the dullish-red V below the throat suggesting the possibility of any life outside the executive-suited higher echelons of British management.

  Late forties, by the look of him; a firmly built man, with a pleasantly featured, clean-shaven face, and frizzy, grey-flecked hair. The jacket of a subfusc herring-bone suit was hanging inside the open-doored wardrobe, a maroon tie over it; and neatly aligned at the near side of the bed was a pair of soft black leather shoes.

  A methodical, successful businessman, thought Morse.

  A quiet knock on the door of Room 231 of The Randolph Hotel heralded the arrivals of Sergeant Lewis and Dr. Laura Hobson—the latter immediately stepping forward to peer down at the dead man’s face. Blood was still seeping slowly from a deep gash that slanted over the closed right eye like some monstrous acute accent. But there was no other sign of red in the face, for the lips were a palish shade of purple.

  “Probably had a heart attack,” volunteered the pathologist.

  Lewis looked down at the Corby trouser-press, standing to the left of the bathroom door, on which a pair of subfusc herring-bone trousers were draped over the opened leaf.