Morse's Greatest Mystery

by Colin Dexter

  Six weeks after that first ante-natal clinic, an oblong parcel was delivered to the Rawlinses’ residence, where later in the day the Professor of Forensic Medicine inspected its contents with enthusiasm. The new case would naturally take pride of place, perhaps just inside the front entrance, he thought. He fitted the revolver carefully inside the specially constructed case, closed the glass cover, and held the exhibit up against some imaginary hook on the facing wall. Not a bad reward, really, for being trapped into exercising his dubiously enviable knack of procreating male offspring with even the most perfunctory ejaculation. And even that extraordinary afternoon when young Summerson had pointed the revolver at his heart hadn’t been all that traumatic an experience really, because long before the final, cosmically anticlimactic “click” he had known (as any expert in the field would have known) that there were no bullets in the open chambers of the revolver—not a single one. For all that though, it had been a great relief when the revolver had at last been lowered, and a genuine surprise when Summerson had presented it to him across the desk—reward for services rendered, so to speak. And he really had needed those two large whiskys, although he’d afterwards agreed with a worried, tearful Florence that he should have told her he’d be late.

  On September 29 of that same year, a baby was delivered on the third floor of the Maternity Hospital up at Headington, and the young father had the name all ready. The gunsmith from Guildford may not have bothered to work out any mathematical odds, but John Summerson had calculated the chances of a penny coming down heads for a seventh time; and at 128:1, they’d seemed to him wildly improbable.

  They called the lovely little girl “Francesca.”

  THE

  CARPET-BAGGER

  He who is conceived in a cage

  Yearns for the cage.

  (Yevtushenko, Monologue of a Blue Fox on an Alaska Animal Farm)

  1

  There were longish periods now when the A34 was quiet, almost completely free of the swishing traffic. Only up there along the lay-by, two “Long Vehicle” lorries ahead, was there still any continuum of activity—where at the side of a converted white caravan a single electric light bulb illuminated MACS SNAX—Open 24 Hour’s,.

  Though with little formal education behind him, Danny had still felt the itch to transpose that single apostrophe from the last word to the first when, three-quarters of an hour earlier, he’d walked along to the serving-hatch and ordered a cup of tea and a Melton Mowbray pork-pie. Two other drivers had stood there then, chatting in desultory fashion and intermittently stamping their feet, their white plastic cups of piping-hot tea steaming brightly in the cold air of that late-January night. But apart from swopping first names, the three of them had said little to each other.

  Now, back in the cab of the furniture van, Danny began to realize how very cold he was. Yet he told himself that “cold” was only a relative concept and was trying to convince himself that he was only relatively cold. As with many things in life, it was all a question of mind over matter. His feet felt bloody frozen—Christ, they did. But they weren’t really frozen, were they, Danny boy? What if he were standing barefoot on the far North Pole? He’d always believed there was just that one square yard of ice and snow comprising yer actual North Pole, and no one yet had managed to persuade him otherwise.

  There were two newspapers in the cab: the Daily Telegraph (oddly?) and a late edition of The Oxford Mail. And newspapers were super for insulation, everyone knew that. Just stick a few sheets all the way round between your shirt and your jumper …

  He looked at his wrist-watch: half-past midnight, just gone.

  It had been most unlike him to make one mistake—let alone two—on such an important day. How stupid, in the first place, to have left his faithful old army greatcoat behind! And absolutely bloody stupid to have drunk more than a little too much that lunchtime, because more than a little had amounted to more than a lot and he had spent far more than he could really afford of his meagre savings.

  At a service station just north of Oxford he had stopped to buy two litre bottles of Spring Water—as well as The Oxford Mail—prior to pulling into the next lay by, just before the M40 interchange. It was a bit naïve, he knew, but he’d always believed that considerable quantities of water must significantly, and soon, serve to dilute and thereby to diminish the alcoholic level in the human bloodstream. And so it was that, an hour earlier, he’d forced himself to swallow all that flat and tasteless fluid to the final drop.

  How come he’d been so careless?

  Nervousness partly; and partly the exhilaration of the chase—of the fox keeping a few furlongs ahead of the yapping hounds. Perhaps the fox wasn’t really exhilarated at all though—just frightened. Like he was, if he were honest with himself.

  Just a bit.

  Yet as he now sat behind the steering-wheel in the darkened cab, he couldn’t really believe he’d find himself in much trouble with the police that night. He wasn’t sure whether they could nick him for being over the limit in charge of a stationary vehicle. But they’d still need some reason for breathalysing him, wouldn’t they? They’d have one if they spotted the number-plate, of course. But that was a pretty unlikely possibility, he reckoned. He hadn’t read much of The Oxford Mail, but he’d seen one of its front-page headlines—OXON POLICE “UNABLE TO COPE” WITH CRIME—and at least that was a nugget of encouragement in a naughty old world. A vehicle, so it seemed, was stolen every something seconds in the Thames Valley region and that was very good news indeed—considerably lengthening the odds against him being caught.

  No. There was something else that was worrying him much more: the wretched “tachometer” just to the left of the steering-wheel—a device (as he was now learning) that showed details of speeds and times, of stoppings and startings. He just couldn’t understand the thing, that was the trouble. Nor the pile of paper discs, looking like so many CDs, that stood beside it—discs marked “Freightchart,” with lines and spaces and boxes for Name and Base and Destination and Cargo and Date and Mileage and God knows what else. Confusing. Unfamiliar. He could gauge all the other risks all right; but not this one. Perhaps the police couldn’t give him a random breath-test. But could they give him a random tacho-test?

  He switched on the dimmish light in the roof of the cab and picked up one of the white discs, noting that two lines had already been completed, presumably in the cheap blue Biro that lay beside the pile: SMITH, JOHN; Southampton.

  Danny shook his head; and turned to The Oxford Mail again.

  The main editorial picked up the page-one article on car-related crime, and Danny smiled to himself as he read the last few sentences:

  The truth is that some of us, especially in the present cold snap, find it difficult enough to start our cars anyway—in spite of the considerable advantage of possessing our own car-keys. So how is it that even some comparatively incompetent car thief can enter our vehicles in a matter of seconds, twist a couple of wires together (so we’re told), and be seen two minutes later outpacing a pursuing police car along the nearest motorway? Come on, you manufacturers! Let’s have a bit more resource and ingenuity in a fully committed nationwide crusade against this growing social evil.

  Danny inclined his head slightly to the right and wondered what exactly the manufacturers could do—given the nature of electric current. And already it was considerably more difficult than the editor was suggesting. Four minutes it had taken him with this particular van at Southampton—a ramshackle heap that’d have about as much chance with a police car as a moped would with Nigel Mansell.

  Brrr … was it cold, though! And getting colder.

  He could have turned on the engine for a quarter of an hour or so, but he was reluctant to waste any diesel. There was a long journey north ahead of him; and while he reckoned he’d be safe enough on the busy daytime motorways, he didn’t really want to stop again. At the same time he daren’t drive any further, either—not until he’d had a few hours’ rest; or kip, if he
were lucky. Twice, only an hour or so since, he’d almost fallen asleep at the wheel, his eyes slowly drooping downwards … and further downwards, until his head followed them, only—suddenly!—to jerk upright in panic as consciousness reasserted itself.

  Death had never figured prominently among his deepest fears, but he’d hardly had much of an innings as yet. And with all that cargo sitting there just behind him, well, it would have been criminal—extra criminal—to take any needless risks.

  Thinking of all that cargo, though …

  Why’d it taken him so long to think of it?

  Earlier he’d leafed through the bundle of inventories and invoices, and counted at least—what, eighty?— eighty or more oriental rugs and carpets from Turkey, from Persia, from the Caucasus, from places sounding like Something-stan, with prices ranging from £4,500 (several such from Isfahan) to the cheapest (huh!) at only a thousand or so apiece. Danny’s skill at scoring for his local darts team had once been legendary and his mind dwelt lovingly now on those accumulated spondulicks.

  But the carpets weren’t just precious, were they? They’d be warm, too. Climb into the back, lie down under a couple of those beautifully embroidered beauties and—like his mum used to say—he’d soon be as snug as a bug in a rug.

  A Persian rug.

  There was no key to be found for the rear doors, but opening locks was Danny’s hobby; his specialism. Some few people, he knew, could finish a fiendish crossword puzzle in a matter of minutes; a few others could spot a master-move to some complex chess problem in hardly any time at all. And he was like that with opening locks.

  Only quicker.

  And immediately disappointed.

  Inside, no neatly laid-out pile of carpets presented itself for him to lie on, like the princess on the mattresses. Instead, facing him, from floor to ceiling, lying lengthways along the sides of the van, stood a honeycomb of tightly packaged carpets rolled up in their thick cardboard cylindrical wrappings. Jes-us! Even with an outsize Stanley knife it’d probably take him half an hour to liberate only one of them. And he couldn’t just slide one out and carve it up in the middle of the lay-by, now could he?

  Aagh! Forget it.

  He walked back, clambered up the two metal footholds, and sat once more in the front cab, now grown even chillier. One bit of luck, though. The Daily Telegraph proved to be a pretty substantial broadsheet, and he was dividing the multipaged wodge in half when he spotted the headline, in the Home News section, and was soon reading the article beneath it:

  TRUSTY ABSCONDS

  Wiltshire Police report the escape of Daniel Smithson from Winchester Gaol, where most recently he was serving a four-year sentence for robbery.

  For the last three months it appears that Smithson had been privileged to enjoy the maximum range of freedom within the prison régime, and indeed during the past week had been working in a garden adjacent to the prison with a brick wall only some four feet high separating him from the outside world.

  Although prison authorities are unwilling to give specific details, it is understood that the ex-soldier Smithson, who for the last twelve years has seen little except the inside of a cell in one of HM prisons, was due for release shortly.

  Aged forty-three, he is five feet seven inches in height, of slim-to-medium build, and has shortish brown hair. Lightly tattooed on the back of the lower knuckles of the left hand are the letters I-L-Y-K, supposed by fellow prisoners to commemorate a former girlfriend: “I Love You Kate.”

  The escapee has no record of any criminal violence, and it is the view of the prison officers at Winchester that he poses no threat whatsoever to the public at large. An early re-arrest is expected.

  Characteristically, Danny tilted his head to the right, and glanced through the article again. Then nodded to himself. There were people who couldn’t cope with life outside the Rules and Regulations of an institution—just as there were people (hadn’t he just read it?) who couldn’t quite cope with all this crime. And it was easy to read between the lines of that last couple of sentences, wasn’t it? “No need to clap the darbies round the poor sod’s wrists. Nah! He’ll probably soon be knocking on the gates o’ the nearest nick hisself.”

  Funny old business, life. Full o’ pitfalls—full of opportunities, too. Just watch out for the first—and make sure you grab hold o’ the second. Common sense, innit? That’s what his dad had told him.

  Danny clasped his hands, left over right, and rubbed them vigorously together against the numbing cold. And even as he did so, he found himself looking down at the lower knuckles of his upper hand.

  2

  “I coulda scored the bloody thing in me carpet slippers, honest I could.”

  “You reckon?”

  “And if Oxford hadn’t buggered up that last-minute penalty—”

  “You’da won a fortune.”

  “Third divi on the treble-chance.”

  “About sixpence.”

  “We’ve gone decimal, Sarge—remember?”

  PC Watson accelerated up the slip-road into the A34 (N) from the Pear Tree roundabout, noting as he did so the miraculously civilized deceleration of a couple of cars behind him.

  “Better take a gander somewhere, I s’pose,” suggested Sergeant Hodges a couple of miles further on, pointing to one of the several lay-bys on the twin-track road that led up to the M40 interchange.

  No snack bar here. Just the black hulks of two juggernauts; and tucked in behind them an old man in an old car studying an old map.

  “Need any help, sir?”

  “No!”

  Sod you then, thought Watson, as he moved forward past the two container-lorries.

  At the far end of the lay-by—not spotted earlier—was a Jaguar of indeterminate colour: “indeterminate” partly because during the hours of darkness light reflected oddly from the metallic sheen of some cars; and partly because Watson was in any case wholly colour-blind between the reds and the blues.

  But he made no further advance as he saw the grey head of the driver jerk round and the dusky-headed young maiden beside him hasten to fasten up the buttons on her blouse.

  “Any joy?” asked Hodges.

  Watson shook his head as he got back into the car. “Well, ’cept for the fellow up front there in the Jag, perhaps.”

  Half a mile or so further along, Hodges nodded again to his left, and this time the Vauxhall Senator pulled in behind a furniture van.

  “Coffee for me, Barry. Not too much milk, and two sugars, please.”

  But Watson was no more than a few seconds into his mission before he stopped and stared. When (only an hour since) he’d glanced through the briefing-files and the traffic telexes back in Kidlington Police HQ, the last three letters of one particular stolen vehicle had caught his notice. How otherwise? For those last three letters were the initials of his own name, Barry Robert Watson; and here, on the van in front of him, was the registration number C 674 BRW.

  There was always an awful lot of luck needed in apprehending villains, Watson had already learnt that—unless you were looking for a ginger-bearded giant, with a wooden leg, and a dinosaur tattooed on his balding head. And this was a bit of luck. Surely so.

  Back in the police car, Hodges rang through to the Control Room at HQ, where within only a few seconds an operator read from his Police National Computer screen that the said vehicle, reg. C 674 BRW, had been stolen earlier that evening in Southampton. The number had appeared in the Thames Valley briefing-files only because there seemed to be some suggestion that the vehicle might be heading north. Along the A34. Up into Oxfordshire.

  His head cushioned on his arms, the driver appeared to be deeply asleep, since only after a series of staccato raps on the cab window did he raise his head above the steering-wheel.

  “This your vehicle?” bawled Watson.

  “Wha’?”

  “Police!”

  The driver slowly wound down his window. “Wha’s the trouble, mate?”

  “This your vehicle?”


  “Wha’, this? I wouldn’t have it if you gev it me!”

  “Let’s see your licence, please.”

  “What licence?”

  “Not your bloody dog licence, is it!”

  “You got so many days on producin’ yer licence, you know that.”

  “Haven’t got one—is that what you’re saying?”

  “Not on me, no.”

  “What’s your name?” (It was Hodges who took over now.)

  “John Smith.”

  “Sorry, yeah. Shoulda known.”

  “Anything else I can help you with?”

  “You’d better get down and come along with us.”

  “Have I got any option, mate?”

  “Not much.”

  “Hold on a tick, then. I’d better just fill in the old tacho thing here. Got to keep yer records up to date, you know—’specially if you get delayed a bit.”

  “Yeah, well, let’s say you look like getting delayed a bit.”

  Beckoning Watson to the other side of the van, and with one foot now on the lower foot-hold, Hodges raised himself to look into the cab, where he saw the driver filling in a white tachometer disc—writing slowly and innocently enough with a cheap blue Biro.

  The driver of the lorry in front walked back to the van.

  “Everything OK, Officer?”

  Hodges nodded and stepped down. “No problems.”

  “Everything OK, Danny?” continued the other, as the cab-door now opened.

  “Fine, yeah! Just forgot me licence, din I?”

  “ ‘Danny,’ eh?” remarked Sergeant Hodges as he steered the man into the near-side rear seat of the Vauxhall, conscious that the slimly built, quietly spoken man beside him hardly fitted the stock profile of any tearaway joyrider.

  “Yeah! What do we call you?” added PC Watson over his shoulder.