Colin Dexter - The Riddle Of The Third Mile

1. What were the real facts about that far-off day in the desert when Browne-Smith had faced his one real test of character-and (apparently) failed so lamentably?

2. Where exactly did Westerby (a name cropping up repeatedly now) fit into the increasingly complex pattern?

3. Who was the person whom Browne-Smith had met after his anti-climactic sexual encounter with the pseudonymous “Yvonne”?

4. And (still, to Morse the most vital question of all) whose was the body they had found?

Obviously the strands of these inquiries would interweave at many points; but it seemed sensible to the two detectives that each should make his own investigations for a day or two, with Lewis concentrating his attentions on the first two areas, and Morse on the second two.

Lewis spent most of the morning on the telephone, ringing,

amongst other numbers, those of the War Office, the Ministry of Defence, the HQ of the Wiltshire Regiment, and the Territorial Unit at Devizes. It was a long, frustrating business; but by lunch-time he had a great deal of information, much of it useless, but some of it absolutely vital.

First, he discovered more about Browne-Smith: Captain, acting Major, (Royal Wiltshires); served North Africa (1941-42); wounded El Alamein; Italy (1944-45); awarded the MC (1945).

Second, he learned something about Gilbert. There had been three Gilbert brothers, Albert, Alfred, and John. All had fought at El Alamein; the first two, both full corporals, had survived the campaign (although both of them had been wounded); the third, the youngest brother, had died in the same campaign. That was all.

But it couldn’t be quite all, Lewis knew that. And it was from the Swindon branch of the British Legion that he learned the address of a man in the Wiltshires who must certainly have known the Gilbert brothers fairly well. Immediately after lunch, Lewis was driving out along the A420.

‘Yes, I knew ‘em, Sergeant – s’funny, I wur a sergeant, too, you know. Yes, there wur Alf ‘n’ Bert – like as two peas in a pod, they wur. One of ‘em, ‘e got a bit o’ the ol’ shrapnel in the leg, and I ‘ad a bit in the ‘ead. We wur at base ‘ospital for a while together, but I can’t quite recolleck… Real lads, they wur – the pair of ‘em!’

‘Did you know the other one?’ asked Lewis.

‘Johnny! That wur ‘is name. I didn’t know ‘im very well, though.’

‘You don’t know how he was killed?”

‘No, I don’t.’

‘They were all tank-drivers, weren’t they?’

‘All of’em-like me.’

‘Was he killed in his tank?’

For the second time the old soldier looked rather vague and puzzled, and Lewis wondered whether the man’s memory could be relied upon.

‘There wur a bit of an accident as I recolleck. But ‘e wurn’t with us that morning, Sergeant – not when we all moved up long Kidney Ridge.’

‘You don’t remember what sort of accident?’

‘No. It wur back at base, I seem to… But you get a lot of accidents in wartime, Sergeant. More’n they tell the folk back ‘ome in Blighty.’

He was an engaging old boy; a sixty-nine-year-old widower for whom, it seemed, the war had been the only intermission of importance in a largely anonymous life, for there was no real sadness in him as he recalled those weeks and months of fighting in the desert-only an almost understandable nostalgia. So Lewis wrote down the facts, such as they were, in his painstakingly slow long-hand, and then took his leave.

Morse was away from the office when Lewis returned at 4.30 p.m and of this fact he was strangely glad. All the way back from Swindon he had been wondering what that ‘accident’ might have been. He suspected that had Morse been there he would of guessed immediately; and it was a pleasant change to be able tackle the problem at his own, rather slower, pace. He rang the War Office once again, was put through to the Archives section, and soon began to realize that he was on to something important.

‘Yes we might be able to help in some way. You’re Thames Valley Police you say?’

‘That’s right’

‘Why are you asking for information about this man?’

‘It’s in connection with a with a murder, sir.’

‘I see what’s your number? Can’t be too careful in these things -you’ll know all about that.’ He spoke with the bark of a machine-gun.

So Lewis gave him his number and was rung back inside thirty seconds, and was given an extraordinary piece of information. Private John Gilbert of the Royal Wiltshires had not been killed in the El Alamein campaign. He had played no part in it. The night before the offensive, he had taken his army rifle, placed the muzzle inside his mouth, and shot himself through the brain. The incident had been hushed up on the highest orders; and that for obvious reasons. A few had known, of course – had to know. But “officially” John Gilbert died on active service in the desert, and that is how his family and his friends had been informed.

‘This is all in the strictest confidence, you understand that?’

‘Of course, sir.’

‘Never good for morale, that sort of thing, eh?’

Morse was having a far less fruitful day. He realized that with the first of his self-imposed assignments he could for the present make little headway, since that would necessitate some far from disagreeable investigations in Soho-a journey he had planned for the morrow. Which only left him with the same old tantalizing problem that had monopolized his mind from the beginning: the identity of the corpse. From the embarrassment of clues contained in Browne-Smith’s letter, the shortest odds must now be surely on the man whom Browne-Smith had finally encountered in London. But who was that man? Had it been Gilbert, as the letter so obviously suggested? Or was the body Westerby’s? If Browne-Smith had killed anyone, then Westerby was surely the most likely of candidates. Or was the body that of someone who had not yet featured in the investigations? Some outsider? Someone as yet unknown who would make a dramatic entry only towards the finale of Act Five? A sort of deus ex machinal Morse doubted this last possibility-and amidst his doubts, quite suddenly the astonishing thought flashed through his mind that there might just be a fourth possibility. And the more Morse pondered the idea, the more he convinced himself that there was: the possibility that the puffed and sodden salt-white corpse was that of Dr Browne-Smith.

On the way home that evening, Lewis decided to risk his w &’s wrath, to face the prospect of almost certainly reheated daps-and to call on Simon Rowbotham in Botley.

Simon Rowbotham invited him into the small terraced bouse in which he lived with his mother. But Lewis declined, learning over the doorstep that Simon had been one of three anglers who had spotted the body, and that it was he, Simon, who had readily volunteered to dial the police in lieu of looking further upon the horror just emerging from the waters. He often fished out along the banks at Thrupp, a good place for specialists such as himself. As it happened, they were just about to form a new angling club there, for which he had volunteered his services as secretary. In fact (just as Lewis had called) he had been checking a proof of the new association’s letter-head for the printer. They had managed to persuade a few well-known people to support them; and clearly, for Simon Rowbotham, the world was entering an exciting phase.

Lewis waited until 8.30 p.m. before ringing Morse (who had been strangely absent somewhere since lunch-time). He found him at his flat and promptly reported on his day’s work.

When he had finished, Morse could hardly keep the excitement out of his voice. ‘Just go over that bit about John Gilbert again, will you, Lewis?’