Colin Dexter: The Riddle Of The Third Mile

‘For Chrissake!’ he yelled to the officer behind him. ‘Help! Please! I’ve-nearly-’He wrenched for the last time at the hatch, and the sweat poured again on to his bulging, vein-ridged forearms.

‘Can’t you fuckin’ well see? Can’t you -’ His voice tailed off in desperation, and he fell to the sand, overwhelmed by failure and exhaustion.

‘Leave it, corporal! Come away! That’s an order?

So Gilbert crawled away across the sand and wept in frenetic despair, his grimed face looking up to see through his tears the glaze in the officer’s eyes… the glaze of frozen cowardice. But he remembered little else except the screaming of that burning fellow soldier. And it was only later that he thought he’d recognized the voice-for he hadn’t seen the face.

He was picked up (so they told him) soon after this by an army truck, and the next thing he could remember was lying comfortably in very white sheets and red blankets in a military hospital. They didn’t tell him until two weeks later that his brother John, tank driver with the 8th Armoured Brigade, had been killed in the second-phase offensive.

Then Albert Gilbert had been almost sure; but even now, he wasn’t quite sure. He knew one thing, though, for nothing could erase from his cerebral cortex the name of the officer who, one morning in the desert, in the battle for the ridge at Tel El Aqqaqir, had been tried in the balance of courage-and been found wanting. Lieutenant Browne-Smith, that was the name. Funny name, really, with an ‘e’ in the middle. A name he’d never seen again, until recently.

Until very recently indeed.

We are in the University of Oxford, at the marks-meeting of the seven examiners appointed for ‘Greats’.

‘He would have walked a first otherwise,’ said the Chairman. He looked down again at the six separate assessments, all of them liberally sprinkled with alphas and beta plusses except for the one opposite Greek History, where stood a feeble-looking beta double minus/delta. Not, this last, the category of the finest minds.

‘Well, what do you think, gentlemen? Worth a viva, surely, isn’t he?’

With minimal effort, five of the other six men, seated at a large table bestrewn with scripts and lists and mark-sheets, raised the palms of their hands in agreement.

‘You don’t think so?’ The Chairman had turned towards the seventh member of the examining panel.

‘No, Chairman. He’s not worth it-not on this evidence.’ He flicked the script in front of him. ‘He’s proved quite conclusively to me that he knows next to nothing outside fifth- century Athens. I’m sorry. If he wanted a first, he ought to have done a bit more work than this.’ Again he flicked the script, an expression of disgust further disfiguring a face that had probably been sour from birth. Yet, as all those present knew, no one else in the University could award a delicate grading like B+/B+?+ with such confident aplomb, or justify it with such fierce conviction.

‘We all know, though, don’t we,’ (it was one of the other members) ‘that sometimes it’s a bit hit-and-miss, the questions we set, I mean-especially in Greek History.’

‘I set the questions,’ interrupted the dissident, with some heat. There’s never been a fairer spread.’

The Chairman looked very tired. ‘Gentlemen. We’ve had a long, hard day, and we’re almost at the finishing-post. Let’s just-’

‘Of course he’s worth a viva,’ said one of the others with a quiet, clinching authority. ‘I marked his Logic paper-it’s brilliant in places.’

‘I’m sure you’re right,’ said the Chairman. ‘We fully take your point about the history paper, Dr Browne-Smith, but…’

‘So be it-you’re the Chairman.’

‘Yes, you’re quite right. I am the Chairman and this man’s going to get his viva!’

It was a nasty little exchange, and the Logic examiner immediately stepped in with a peace proposal. ‘Perhaps, Dr Browne-Smith, you might agree to viva him yourself?’

But Browne-Smith shook his aching head. ‘No! I’m biased against the fellow-and all this marking-it’s been quite enough for me. I’m doing nothing else.’

The Chairman, too, was anxious to end the meeting on a happier note: ‘What about asking Andrews? Would he be prepared to take it on?’

Browne-Smith shrugged. ‘He’s quite a good young man.’

So the Chairman wrote his final note: ‘To be vivaed by Mr Andrews (Lonsdale), 18th July’; and the others began to collect their papers together.

‘Well, thank you all very much gentlemen. Before we finish, though, can we just think about our final meeting? Almost certainly it’s got to be Wednesday 23rd or Thursday 24th.’

Browne-Smith was the only one of the panel who hadn’t taken out his diary; and when the meeting was finally fixed for 10 a.m. on Wednesday the 23rd, he appeared to take no notice whatsoever.

The Chairman had observed this. ‘All right with you, Dr Browne-Smith?’

‘I was just about to say, Chairman, that I’m afraid I probably shan’t be with you for the final meeting. I should very much like to be, of course, but I-I’ve got to be… Well, I probably shan’t be in Oxford.’

The Chairman nodded a vague, uneasy understanding. ‘Well, we’ll try to do our best without you. Thank you, anyway, for all the help you’ve been-as ever.’ He closed the thick, black volume in front of him, and looked at his wrist-watch: 8.35 p.m. Yes, it had been a long, hard day. No wonder, perhaps, that he’d become a little snappy at the end.

Six members of the panel agreed to repair to the King’s Amis in Broad Street; but the seventh member, Dr Browne-Smith, begged leave to be excused. Instead, he left the Examination Schools, walked slowly along the High, and let himself through the back-door (‘Senior Fellows Only’) into Lonsdale College. Once in his rooms, he swallowed six Paracetamol tablets, and lay down fully-clothed upon his bed, where for the next hour his brain blundered around uncontrollably in his head. Then he fell asleep.

On the morning of the next day, Thursday, 10th July, he received a letter. A very strange and rather exciting letter.

In which we learn of an Oxford don’s invitation to view the vice and viciousness of life in a notorious area of the metropolis.

Never throughout his life-almost sixty-seven years of it now-had Oliver Maximilian Alexander Browne-Smith (with an “e” and with hyphenation) MC, MA, D. Phil., really come to terms with his inordinately ponderous names. Predictably, in his prep-school days he had been nicknamed “Omar”; and now, with only one year before his University appointment was due to be statutorily terminated, he knew that amongst the undergraduates he had acquired the opprobrious sobriquet of “Malaria”, which was not so predictable and very much nastier.

It was some small surprise to him, therefore, to find how quickly he had managed to bring himself to terms, in a period of only a few weeks, with the fact that he would quite certainly be dead well within a twelvemonth (‘At the very outside, since you insist on the truth, Dr Browne-Smith’). What he did not realize, however, as he walked on to Platform One at Oxford Station, was that he would be dead within a shorter period than that so confidently predicted by his distinguished and expensive consultant.

A very much shorter period.

As he made his way to the rear end of the platform, he kept his eyes lowered, and looked with distaste at the empty beer cans and litter that bestrewed the “up” line. A few of his University colleagues, some from Lonsdale, were fairly frequent passengers on the 9.12 a.m. train from Oxford to Paddington, and the truth was that he felt no wish to converse with any of them. Under his left arm he held a copy of The Times, just purchased from the station bookstall; and in his right hand he held a brown leather briefcase. For a fine, bright morning in mid-July, it was surprisingly chilly.