The Riddle Of The Third Mile (10 page)

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.

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?’

‘Continent mostly, sir-and Greece.’

‘You think it’s all those topless beaches, perhaps?’

For a few seconds the young porter leered as though he were about to produce a dirty postcard from one of the innumerable pigeon-holes, but he quickly resumed his dignity. ‘I wouldn’t know about that, sir.’

‘What about Dr Browne-Smith? Is he still away?’

‘I’ve not seen him in college since we had a note from him… and then we had a-just a minute.’He went over to his desk and returned to the ‘Enquiries’ window with a sheaf of papers. In spite of having to read them upside-down, Morse was able to read some of the messages clearly: ‘Professor M. Liebermann-back 6th August. All post to Pension Heimstadt, Friederichstrasse 14, Zurich’; ‘Mr G. Westerby-off to Greece until end of August. Keep all mail at the Lodge’; ‘Dr Browne-Smith…’

‘Here we are, sir.’

Morse took the handwritten sheet and read the few words: ‘Away untill further notice no forwarding adress.’ Mentally deleting an T, inserting a ‘d’, and introducing a major stop into mid-message, Morse handed the sheet back. ‘Phone message, was it?’

‘Yes, sir. Yesterday, I think it was-or Tuesday.’

‘You took it yourself?’

The porter nodded.

‘It was Dr Browne-Smith who rang?’

‘I think so, yes.’

‘You know him well?’

The young man shrugged. ‘Pretty well.’

‘You’d recognize his voice all right?’

‘Well-’

‘How long have you been here?’

‘More than three months now.’

‘Just let me have the key to his rooms, will you?’ Morse pointed peremptorily to a bunch of keys hanging beside the pigeon-holes, and the porter did as he was told.

The book-lined room to which Morse admitted himself was shady and silent as the grave. Everywhere there were signs of the academic pursuits to which Browne-Smith had devoted his life: on the desk, a large stack of typescript of what appeared to be a forthcoming opus on Philip, father of Alexander the Great, and scores of photographs, slides, and postcards; on a bookcase beside the desk a marble bust of a sombre-featured Cicero; on the few square yards of the walls still free from books, many black-and-white photographs of temples, vases and statuary. But nothing untoward; nothing out of place.

Leading off this main room were two other rooms: one a bleakish-looking, rather dirty WC; the other a small bedroom, containing a single bed, hundreds more books, a white washbasin and a large mahogany wardrobe. The door of the wardrobe creaked noisily as Morse opened it and looked vaguely along the line of suits and shirts. He told himself he should have brought a tape-measure, but he accepted the fact that usually such forward-planning was quite beyond him. Apart from patting a few pockets, his only other interest appeared to lie in a very large selection of socks, whence he abstracted a brand-new pair and stuffed them in his pocket.

Back in the main room, his eyes wandered along the shelves and into the alcoves (failing to observe the small cooking-ring); but again he seemed mildly satisfied. He picked up a virgin sheet of paper, flicked it into the portable typewriter which stood beside the typescript, and clumsily tapped his way through the leap of the lazy, brown fox over the something or other. Morse couldn’t quite remember it all, but he knew he’d got most of the letters included.

As he closed the door behind him (forgetting to re-lock it), he felt a few more sudden jabs in his lower jaw; and, although that unsettled July had at last turned hot and sunny, he pulled his scarf round his throat once more as he stood on the wide, wooden landing. He looked around him, first up the stairs, then down them; then across to the room immediately opposite, where the name G. D. Westerby was printed above the door. Yes! He had seen that name ten minutes ago in the Porters’ Lodge; and the owner of that name was, at that very moment, sunning himself on some Aegean island, surely. Yet the door stood slightly open, and Morse stepped silently across the landing and listened.

There was someone there. For a few seconds Morse felt a childlike shudder of fear, but only (he told himself) because of his recent prying in the quiet rooms behind him. Anyway, it would only be some staircase-scout doing a bit of tidying up, dusting… But suddenly the rustling noises ceased, succeeded by the more reassuring clean-cut metallic clacks of hammer upon nails; and Morse felt better. Pushing open the door he saw a room very similar to the one he had just left, except that tea-chests and packing crates (most of them with address labels already attached) were bestrewn over almost the whole of the carpet-area, in the midst of which a youth of no more than sixteen or seventeen, dressed in a khaki overall, was inexpertly fixing a lid to one of the wooden crates. As Morse came in, the youth looked up; but only it seemed from curiosity, for he promptly returned to his amateurish hangings.

‘Excuse me, is Mr-er-Westerby in?’

‘On holiday, I think,’ said the spotty-faced youth.

‘I’m -er-one of his colleagues. I was very much hoping to catch him before he went.’ This explanation appeared unworthy of further comment, for the youth merely nodded and drove yet another nail askew into the wooden lath.

Almost exactly the same layout of rooms as opposite-even the similar positioning of the working desk, with a similar pile of typescript, and exactly the same model of portable typewriter. And Morse knew in a flash what he was about to do, although he had almost no idea of why he did it.

‘I’ll just leave a note for him, lad, if you’ll let me through.’

From his pocket he took out the sheet he had just typed, and put the lazy, brown fox through his faltering paces once more.

‘Your firm’s moving the old boy, I see.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Lot of stuff-he always kept a lot of stuff.’

‘Books!’ (Clearly the youth had as yet no great respect for literature.)

The crate that was in the process of being lidded was doubtless packed with objects that were eminently breakable, since three quarters of its contents appeared to be wrapped in crumpled newspaper. And there was another crate, alongside, presumably designated for a similar purpose, with a battalion of cut-glass objects, still unwrapped, surrounding it on the carpet. But other objects had already been deposited in this second crate-bulkier objects; and one in particular that lay snugly in the middle, swathed in past editions of
The Times.
It was about the shape of a medium-sized goldfish bowl, almost the size of a-yes!-almost the size of a head.

‘I’m glad to see you’re being careful with the old boy’s valuables,” Morse heard himself saying as he knelt down beside this crate and, with a shaking hand, touched the packaged article, where his probing fingers soon felt the configurations of a human nose and a human mouth.

‘What’s this?’ he managed to ask.

The youth looked across at him. ‘Mr Gilbert told me to be very careful about that.’

‘Who’s Mr Gilbert?’

‘I’m
Mr Gilbert!’

Morse almost panicked as he turned to the door and saw a man of about sixty, perhaps-grey-flannelled and shirt-sleeved, with a pair of gold-rimmed, half-glasses on his nose, and a pair of no-nonsense eyes behind them. But there was something else about him-the first thing that anyone would notice: for, like Morse, he wore a scarf that draped his lower jaw.

‘Hullo, Mr Gilbert. I’m – ah – one of Westerby’s colleagues here. He asked me to look in from time to time to see, you know, that the stuff was being stowed away carefully.’

‘We’re looking after that all right, sir.’

‘He’s got some valuable things here-’

‘Have no fears, sir! We’re looking after everything beautifully.’ With agility he picked his way across the room and stood above the still-kneeling Morse. ‘You know we get more fusspots in this business, especially with the women-’

‘But some of this stuff-well, you just couldn’t replace it, could you?’

‘No?’ Mr Gilbert’s tone sounded too knowledgeable for Morse to demur. I’ll tell you one thing, sir. Almost all my clients would prefer to collect their insurance money.’

‘Perhaps so.’ Morse rose to his feet, and as he did so Gilbert’s shrewd eyes seemed to measure him for crating, like some melancholy undertaker surveying a corpse for coffining. ‘It’s just that he asked me-’

‘Look around and check up, sir! We’re only too anxious to give every satisfaction-aren’t we, Charlie?’

The young assistant nodded. ‘Yes, Mr Gilbert.’

Almost involuntarily Morse’s eyes were drawn down once again to the head in the unlidded crate, and Gilbert’s eyes were following.

‘He’s all right. Don’t worry about him, sir. Took us a good ten minutes to put him to bed.’

‘What is it?’ asked Morse weakly.

‘You want me to-?’ There was annoyance in Gilbert’s face.

Morse nodded.

If it had taken ten minutes to put this particular valuable finally to rest, it took less than ten seconds to resurrect it. And it
was
a head, a marble head of Gerardus Mercator, the Flemish geographer- a head chopped off at the neck, like the head of the man who had been dragged from the canal out at Thrupp.

A somewhat foolish-looking Morse now hastened to take his leave, but before doing so he sought briefly to mitigate the awkward little episode. He addressed himself to Gilbert: “You’re a fellow sufferer, I see.’

For a second or two Gilbert’s eyes looked puzzled – suspicious almost. ‘Ah-the scarf-yes! Abscess. But the dentist won’t
touch it. What about you, sir?’

So Morse told him, and the two men chatted amiably enough for a couple of minutes. Then Morse departed.

From the window, Gilbert watched Morse as he walked towards the Lodge.

‘How the hell did he get in?’

‘I must have left the door open.’

‘Well, you’re going to have to learn to keep doors
shut
in this business – understand? One of the first rules of the trade, that is. Still, you’ve not been with us long, have you?’

‘Month.’ The youth looked surly, and Gilbert’s tone was deliberately softer as he continued.

‘Never mind -no harm done. You don’t know who he is, do you?’

‘No. But I saw him go into the room opposite, then I heard him come out again.’