Colin Dexter - The Riddle Of The Third Mile

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months later he learned that he had failed Greats; and, although the news was no surprise, he departed from Oxford a withdrawn and silent young man, bitterly belittled, yet not completely broken in spirit.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.

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’…