Colin Dexter - The Riddle Of The Third Mile

Lewis breathed deeply, and very slowly shook his head.

‘Well? Did you get Westerby’s typewriter? 1

‘It wasn’t there,’ growled Lewis. ‘The removal must have taken it. And don’t blame me for that! As I just said, sir, it would do me good just once in a while to get a bit of thanks for-’

‘Lew-is!’ beamed Morse. ‘When- when will you begin to understand the value of virtually everything you do for me? Why do you misjudge me all the time? Listen! I remember perfectly well that the first sentence I typed out was done on Browne-Smith’s typewriter, and the second on Westerby’s. Now, just think! Since it was the second, as we know, that matched the letter we found in the dead man’s pocket, it was on Westerby’s typewriter that someone wrote our letter. Agreed? And now you come and tell me it was typed on Browne-Smith’s? Well… you see what it all means, don’t you?’

Over the years, Lewis had become skilled in situations such as this, knowing that Morse, like some inexperienced schoolmaster, was far more anxious to parade his own cleverness than to elicit any halting answer from his dimmer pupils. So it was that Lewis, with a knowing nod, sat back to listen.

‘Of course you do! Someone changed those typewriters. And that, Lewis – does it not? – throws a completely new perspective on the whole case. And you know who’s given me that new perspective? You!’

Sergeant Lewis sat back helplessly in his chair, feeling like a man just presented with the Wimbledon Challenge Cup after losing the last point of the tennis match. So he bowed towards the royal box, and waited. Not for long either, since Morse seemed excited.

‘Tell me how you see this case, Lewis. You know-just in general.’

‘Well, I reckon Browne-Smith gets a letter from somebody who’s terribly anxious to know how someone’s got on in this examination, and he says if you’ll scratch my back I’ll scratch yours: just tell me that little bit early and I’ll see you get your little reward.’

‘And then?’

‘Well-like you, sir-this fellow Browne-Smith’s a bachelor: he’s quite tempted with the proposition put to him, and goes along with it.’

‘So?’

‘Well, then he finds out that the people who run these sex -places in Soho are pretty hard boys.’

‘I wish you wouldn’t start off every sentence with “With”’

‘You don’t sound very convinced, sir?’

‘Well, it all sounds a bit feeble, doesn’t it? I mean, going to all that trouble just to get a girl’s results a week or so early?’

‘But you wouldn’t understand these things. You’ve never had any children yourself, so you can’t begin to imagine what it’s like. I remember when my girls were expecting their eleven-plus results – then their O-Levels- waiting for the letter-box to rattle and then being scared to open the envelope; just hoping and praying there’d be some good news inside. It sort of gets you, sir-all that waiting. It’s always at the back of your mind, and sometimes you’d give anything just to know. You realize somebody knows-somebody typing out the results and putting them into envelopes and all the rest of it. And I tell you one thing, sir: I’d have given a few quid myself to save me all that waiting and all that worrying.”

Morse appeared temporarily touched by his sergeant’s eloquence. ‘Look, Lewis. If that’s all there is to it, why don’t we just ring up this girl’s father? You don’t honestly think he wrote that letter, do you?’

‘Jane Summers’s dad, you mean?’ Lewis shook his head. “Quite impossible, sir.’

Morse sat upright in his chair. ‘Why do you say that?’

‘Both her parents were killed in a car-crash six years ago-I rang up the college secretary. Very helpful, she was.’

‘Oh, I see.’ Morse unwound his scarf and looked a little lost. “Do you know, Lewis, I think you’re a bit ahead of me in this case.’

‘No! I’m miles behind, sir-as well you know. But in my opinion we shouldn’t rule out the parent angle altogether. She could only have been in her late teens when her parents died, and somebody must have had legal responsibility for her-an uncle or a guardian or something.’

Morse’s eyes were suddenly shining; and taking the torn letter from a drawer in his desk, he concentrated his brain upon it once more, his perusal punctuated by ‘Yes!’, ‘Of course!’, and finally ‘My son, you’re a genius!’; whilst Lewis himself sank back in his chair and dropped back a further furlong in the case

‘Very illuminating,’ said Morse. ‘You say that not even the chairman would know the final results until a few hours before the lists are put up?’

Lewis nodded: ‘That’s right.’

‘But doesn’t that cock up just about everything?’

‘Unless, sir,’ Lewis now felt happy with himself, ‘she was way out at the top of the list- the star of the whole show, sort of thing.’

‘Mm. We could ring up the chairman?’

‘Which I have done, sir.’

It was Morse himself who was happy now. The penicillin was working its wonders, and he felt strangely content. ‘And she was the top of the list, of course?’

Lewis, too, knew that life was sometimes very good. ‘She was, sir. And if you want my opinion-’

‘Of course, I do!’

‘ – if this girl’s uncle or whatever turns out to own a sex-club in Soho, we’ve probably found the key to the case, and the sooner we get up there the better.’

‘You’ve got a good point there, Lewis. On the other hand it’s vital for one of us to stay here.’

‘Vital for me, I suppose?’

But Morse ignored the sarcasm, and adumbrated for the next half-hour to his sergeant a few of the stranger thoughts that had criss-crossed his brain throughout the day.

It was getting late now; and, when Lewis left, Morse was free once more to indulge his own thoughts. At one time his mind would leap like a nimble-footed Himalayan goat; at another, it would stick for minutes on end like a leaden-footed, diver in a sandbank. It was time to call it a day, that was obvious.

He was not quite finished, however, and before he left his office he did two things.

First, he amended his reconstruction of the fifth line of the tornm letter so that it now read:

both you and me. My ward, Jane Summers of Lonsdale

Second, he took a sheet of paper and wrote the following short piece (reproduced below as it appeared in the Oxford Mail the following day):

CLUE TO MURDER

Customers of Marks and Spencers in the Oxford area are being asked to join in the hunt for the murderer of a 60-year-old man found in the canal at Thrupp. The bloodstained socks on the body (not yet identified) have been traced as one of just 2,500 pairs distributed around a handful of M & S stores in the Oxford region. The socks were of navy-blue cotton, with two light blue rings round the tops. Anyone who might have any information is asked to ring Kidlington 4343.

Only after dictating this absurd news-item (comma included) did Morse finally leave his office that day to return to his bachelor flat. There he played through the first act of Die Walkure and began to make significant inroads into the bottle just purchased from Augustus Barnett. When, at midnight, he looked around for his pyjamas, he couldn’t quite remember why he had bothered the newspaper editor; yet he knew that when a man was utterly at a loss about what he should do, it was imperative that he should do something- like the motorist stuck in a snowdrift who decided to activate his blinkers alternately.

Discussion of identity, and of death, leads the two detectives gradually nearer to the truth,