The Riddle Of The Third Mile

by Colin Dexter

‘Course not! It’s a bit of a squash in here, isn’t it?’

  ‘You enjoying the play?’

  ‘Yes. Are you?’

  ‘Oh yes! I’m a great Marlowe fan. So’s Sheila, here. Er-I’m sorry. Perhaps you don’t know each other?’

  ‘I don’t know you, either!’ said Morse.

  ‘There you are! What did I tell you?’ It was the dark girl who had taken up the conversation. She smiled at Morse: ‘Wendy here said she recognized you. She says you live next door to her.’

  ‘Really?’ Morse stood there, gaping ineffectually.

  A bell sounded in the bar, signalling the start of the last act; and Morse, calling upon all his courage, asked the two girls if they might perhaps like to have a drink with him after the performance.

  ‘Why not?’ It was the saturnine Sheila who had answered. ‘We’d love to, Wendy, wouldn’t we!’

  It was agreed that the trio should meet up again in the cocktail-bar of the Randolph, a stone’s throw away, just along the street.

  For Morse, the last act seemed to drag its slow length interminably along, and he left the theatre well before the end. The name “Wendy” was re-echoing through his mind as once the woods had welcomed “Amaryllis”. With the bar virtually deserted, he sat and waited expectantly. Ten minutes. Fifteen minutes. The bar was filling up now, and twice, with some embarrassment, Morse had assured other customers that, yes, there was someone sitting in each of the empty seats at his table.

  She came at last-Sheila, that is-looking around for him, coming across, and accepting his offer of a drink.

  ‘What will-er- Wendy have?’

  ‘She won’t be coming, I’m afraid. She says she’s sorry but she suddenly remembered-’

  But Morse was no longer listening, for now the night seemed drear and desolate. He bought the girl a second drink; then a third. She left at ten-thirty to catch her bus, and Morse watched with relief as she waved half-heartedly to him from the bar entrance.

  It was trying to snow as Morse walked slowly back to St John Street, but he stopped where he knew he would stop. On the right of the door of Number 22, he saw four names, typed and slotted into folders, a plastic bell-push beside each one of them. The first name was ‘Miss W. Spencer (Top Floor)’, but no light shone at the highest window, and Morse was soon climbing the stairs to his cold bed-sitter.

  For the next three days he spent much of the time hanging about in the vicinity of St John Street, missing lectures, missing meals, and missing, too, any sight of the woman he was aching to see once more. Had she been called away? Was she ill? The whole gamut of tragic forebodings presented itself to his mind as he frittered away his hours and his energies in fruitless and futile imaginings. On the fourth evening he walked over to the Randolph, drank two double Scotches, walked back to St John Street, and with a thumping heart rang the bell at the top of the panel. And, when the door opened, she was standing there, a smile of gentle recognition in her eyes.

  ‘You’ve been a long time,’ she said.

  ‘I didn’t quite know-’

  ‘You knew where to find me-I told you that.’

  ‘I-’

  ‘It wasn’t you who made the first move, was it?’

  ‘I-’

  ‘Would you like to come in?’

  Impetuously-even that first night-Morse told her that he loved her; and she, for her part, told him how very glad she was that they had met. After that, their days and weeks and months were spent in long, idyllic happiness: they walked together across the Oxfordshire countryside; went to theatres, cinemas, concerts, museums; spent much time in pubs and restaurants; and, after a while, much time in bed together, too. But, during those halcyon days, both were neglecting the academic work that was expected of them. At the end of the Trinity term, Morse was gently reminded by his tutor that he might be in danger of failing to satisfy the examiners the following year unless he decided to mount a forceful assault upon the works of Plato during the coming vacation. After a similar interview with her own supervisor, Wendy Spencer was firmly informed that unless her thesis began to show more obvious signs of progress, her grant-and therewith her doctorate-would be in serious jeopardy.

  Surprisingly, perhaps, it was Morse who saw the more clearly the importance of some academic success-and who sought the more anxiously to promote it. But such success was not to be. Just before the Christmas vac a tearful Wendy announced that her doctorate was terminated; her grant, w.e.f. January 1st, withheld. Yet the two of them lived on very much as before: Wendy stayed on in her digs, and almost immediately got a job as a waitress in the Randolph; Morse tried hard to curb his beer consumption and occasionally read the odd chapter of Rate’s Republic.

  Ironically, it was one day before the anniversary of their first, wonderful evening together that Wendy received the telegram, informing her that her widowed mother had suffered a stroke, and that help was urgently required. So she had gone home-and stayed there. Scores of letters passed between the lovers during the dark months that followed; and twice Morse had made the journey to the West Country to see her. But he was very short of money now; and slowly he was learning to assimilate the truth that (for some reason) her mother was a more important figure in Wendy’s life than he was. His performances for his tutors were now so pathetically poor that his college exhibition was rescinded, and he had the humiliating task of writing to beg his county authority to make up the deficit. Then, three weeks before Greats, he had received his last letter from her: she could not see him again; she had almost ruined his life already; she had a duty to stay with her mother, and had irrevocably decided to do so; she had loved him-she had loved him desperately-but now they had come to the end; she implored him not to reply to her letter; she urged him to do himself some semblance of justice in his imminent examination; that would always be important for her. Morse had immediately sent a telegram, begging her to meet him once more. But he received no reply-and had no money for a further journey. In his despair, he did nothing-absolutely nothing.

  Two months later he learned that he had failed Greats; and, although the news was no surprise, he departed from Oxford a withdrawn and silent young man, bitterly belittled, yet not completely broken in spirit. It had been his sadly disappointed old father, a month or so before his death, who suggested that his only son might find a niche somewhere in the police force.

  Morse’s attractive young secretary came into the office and handed over his letters for signature.

  ‘Do you want to dictate the others, sir?’

  ‘A little later. I’ll give you a ring.’

  After she had gone, he continued his earlier train of thought-but not for long. In any case, there was nothing more to recall. Of Wendy Spencer he had never heard another word. She would still be alive, though, surely? Even at that minute -that very second-she’d be somewhere. He repeated to himself the line from “Wessex Heights”: ‘But time cures hearts of tenderness – and now I can let her go.’ It was a lie, of course. But so it had been for Hardy.

  Nor had Morse ever met any of his Greats examiners since he had first come down from Oxford. Yet even now he could remember with dramatic clarity the six names that were subscribed to the class-list on that bleak day some thirty years ago:

  Wells (Chairman)

  Styler

  Stockton

  Sherwin-White

  Austin

  Browne-Smith.

  During the following week Morse did nothing about bis tenuous promise to the Master. Well, virtually nothing. He had rung Lonsdale early on the Monday morning, but neither the Master, nor the Vice-Master, nor the Senior Fellow, nor the Bursar, was on the premises. Everyone had either gone or was about to be gone. With the heavy work over for another academic year, the corporate body of the University appeared to be taking a collective siesta. The thought suddenly occurred to Morse that this would be a marvellous time to murder a few of the doddery old bachelor dons. No wives to worry about their whereabouts; no families to ring their fathers from railway
stations; no landladies to whine about the unpaid rents. In fact, nobody would miss most of them at all-not, that is, until the middle of October.

  It was on Wednesday, 23rd July, two days after his abortive phone-call to Lonsdale, that Morse himself, in mid-afternoon, received the news, recognizing Sergeant Lewis’s voice immediately.

  ‘We’ve got a body, sir-or at least part-’

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘Thrupp, sir. You know the-’

  ‘Course I know it!’

  ‘I think you’d better come.’

  ‘I’ve got a lot of correspondence to get on with you handle things, can’t you?’

  “We fished it out of the canal.’

  ‘Lots of people chuck ‘emselves into -’

  ‘I don’t think this one drowned himself, sir,’ said Lewis quietly.

  So Morse got the Lancia out of the yard, and drove the few miles out to Thrupp.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Wednesday, 23rd July

  The necrophobic Morse reluctantly surveys a corpse, and converse with a cynical and ageing police surgeon.

  Two miles north of police headquarters in Kidlington, on the main A423 road to Banbury, an elbow turn to the right leads, after only three hundred yards or so, to the Boat Inn, which, together with about twenty cottages, a farm, and a depot of the Inland Waterways Executive, comprises the tiny hamlet of Thrupp. The inn itself, only some thirty yards from the waters of the Oxford Canal, has served generations of boatmen, past and present. But the working barges of earlier times, which brought down coal from the Midlands and shipped up beer from the Oxford breweries, have now yielded place to the privately owned long-boats and pleasure-cruisers which ply their way placidly along the present waterway.

  Chief Inspector Morse turned right at the inn, then left along the narrow road stretching between the canal and a row of small, grey-stoned, terraced cottages, their doors and multi-paned windows painted a clean and universal white. At almost any other time, Thrupp would have seemed a snugly secluded little spot; but already Morse could see the two white police cars pulled over on to the tow-path, beside a sturdy-looking drawbridge; and an ambulance, its blue light flashing, parked a little further ahead, where the road petered out into a track of grass-grown gravel. It is strange to relate (for a man in his profession) that in addition to incurable acrophobia, arachnophobia, myophobia, and ornithophobia, Morse also suffered from necrophobia; and had he known what awaited him now, it is doubtful whether he would have dared to view the horridly disfigured corpse at all.

  A knot of thirty or so people, most of them from the gaudily painted houseboats moored along the waterway, stood at a respectful distance from the centre of activities; and Morse, pushing his way somewhat officiously through, came face to face immediately with a grim-looking Lewis.

  ‘Nasty business, sir!’

  ‘Know who it is?’

  ‘Not much chance.’

  ‘What? You can always tell who they are – doesn’t matter how long they’ve been in the water. You know that, surely? Teeth, hair, finger-nails, toe-nails-’

  ‘You’d better come and look at him, sir.’

  ‘Ha! Know it’s a “him” do we? Well, that’s something. Reduces the population by about 50 per cent at a stroke that does.’

  ‘You’d better come and look at him,’ repeated Lewis quietly.

  A uniformed police constable and two ambulance men moved aside as Morse walked towards the green tarpaulin sheet that covered a body recently fished from the murky-looking water. For a few moments, however, he was more than reluctant to pull back the tarpaulin. Instead, his dark eyebrows contracted to a frown as mentally he traced the odd configuration of the bulge beneath the winding-sheet. Surely the body had to be that of a child, for it appeared to be about three and a half feet long-no more; and Morse’s up-curved nostrils betokened an even grislier revulsion. Adult suicide was bad enough. But the death of a child-agh! Accident? Murder?

  Morse told the four men standing there to shield him from the silent onlookers as he pulled back the tarpaulin and – after only a few seconds – replaced it. His cheeks had grown ashen pale, and his eyes seemed stunned with horror. He managed only two hoarsely spoken words: ‘My God!”

  He was still standing there, speechless and shaken, when a big, battered old Ford braked sharply beside the ambulance, from it emerging a mournful, humpbacked man who looked as though he should have taken late retirement ten years earlier. He greeted Morse with a voice that matched his lean, lugubrious mien.

  ‘I thought I’d find you in the bar, Morse.’

  ‘They’re closed.’

  ‘You don’t sound very cheerful, old man?’

  Morse pointed vaguely behind him, towards the sheet, and the police surgeon immediately knelt to his calling.

  ‘Phew! Very interesting!’

  Morse, his back still turned on the corpse, heard himself mutter something that vaguely concurred with such a finding, and thereafter left his sanguine colleague utterly in peace.

  Slowly and carefully the surgeon examined the body, methodically entering notes into a black pocket-book. Much of what he wrote would be unintelligible to one unversed in forensic medicine. Yet the first few lines were phrased with frightening simplicity:

  First appearances: male (60-65?); Caucasian; torso well nourished (bit too well?); head (missing) severed from shoulders (amateurishly?) at roughly the fourth cervical vertebra; hands 1. & r. missing, the wrists cut across the medial ligaments; legs l. & r. also missing, severed from torso about 5-6 inches below hip-joint (more professionally done?); skin – ‘washerwoman effect’…

  Finally, and with some difficulty, the surgeon rose to his feet and stood beside Morse, holding his lumbar regions with both hands as though in chronic agony.

  ‘Know a cure for lumbago, Morse?’

  ‘I thought you were the doctor.’

  ‘Me? I’m just a poorly paid pathologist.’

  ‘You get lumbago in mid-summer?’

  ‘Mid-every-bloody-season!’

  ‘They say a drop of Scotch is good for most things.’

  ‘I thought you said they’re closed.’

  ‘Emergency, isn’t it?’ Morse was beginning to feel slightly better’.

  One of the ambulance men came up to him. ‘All right to take it away?’

  ‘Might as well.’

  ‘No!’ It was the surgeon who spoke. ‘Not for the moment. I want to have a few words with the chief inspector here first.’

  The ambulance man moved away and the surgeon sounded unwontedly sombre. ‘You’ve got a nasty case on your hands here, Morse, and-well, I reckon you ought to have a look at one or two things while we’re in situ, as it were-you were a classicist once, I believe? Any clues going’ll pretty certainly be gone by the time I start carving him up.’

  ‘I don’t think there’s much point in that, Max. You just give him a good going-over-that’ll be fine!’

  In kindly fashion, Max put a hand on his old friend’s shoulder. ‘I know! Pretty dreadful sight, isn’t it? But I’ve missed things in the past-you know that! And if-’

  ‘All right. But I need a drink first, Max.’

  ‘After. Don’t worry-I know the landlord.’

  ‘So do I,’ said Morse.

  ‘OK, then?’

  ‘OK!’

  But, as the surgeon drew back the tarpaulin once more, Morse found himself quite incapable of looking a second time at that crudely jagged neck. Instead he concentrated his narrowed eyes upon the only limbs that someone – someone (already the old instincts were quickened again)-had felt it safe to leave intact. The upper part of the man’s body was dressed in a formal, dark-blue, pin-striped jacket, matching the material of the truncated trousers below; and, beneath the jacket, in a white shirt, adorned with a plain rust-red tie-rather awkwardly fastened. Morse shuddered as the surgeon peeled off the sodden jacket, and placed the squelching material by the side of the dismembered torso.

  ‘You want t
he trousers too?-what’s left of ‘em?’

  Morse shook his head. ‘Anything in the pockets?’

  The surgeon inserted his hands roughly into the left and right pockets; but his fingers showed through the bottom of each, and Morse felt as sick as some sensitively palated patient in the dentist’s chair having a wax impression taken of his upper jaw.

  ‘Back pocket?’ he suggested weakly.

  ‘Ah!’ The surgeon withdrew a sodden sheet of paper, folded over several times, and handed it to Morse. ‘See what I mean? Good job we-’

  ‘You’d have found it, anyway.’

  ‘Think so? Who’s the criminologist here, Morse? They pay me to look at the bodies-not a lump of pulp like that. I’d have sent the trousers to Oxfam, like as not-better still, the Boy Scouts, eh?’

  Morse managed to raise a feeble grin, but he wanted the job over.

  ‘Nothing else?’

  Max shook his head; and as Morse (there being nothing less nauseating to contemplate) looked vaguely down along the outstretched arms, the surgeon interrupted his thoughts.

  ‘Not much good, arms, you know. Now if you’ve got teeth -which in our case we have not got-or-’

  But Morse was no longer listening to his colleague’s idle commentary. ‘Will you pull his shirt-sleeves up for me, Max?’

  ‘Might take a bit of skin with ‘em. Depends how long-’

  ‘Shut up!’

  The surgeon carefully unfastened the cuff-links and pushed the sleeves slowly up the slender arms. ‘Not exactly a weight-lifter, was he?’

  ‘No.’

  The surgeon looked at Morse curiously. ‘You expecting to find a tattoo or something, with the fellow’s name stuck next to his sweetheart’s?’

  ‘You never know your luck, Max. There might even be a name-tape on his suit somewhere.’

  ‘Somehow I don’t reckon you’re going to have too much luck in this case,’ said the surgeon.

  ‘Perhaps not…’ But Morse was hardly listening. He felt the sickness rising to the top of his gullet, but not before he’d noticed the slight contusion on the inner hollow between the left biceps and the forearm. Then he suddenly turned away from the body and retched up violently on the grass.