Colin Dexter - The Riddle Of The Third Mile

Then something stirred in Lewis’s mind__If all these people were so anxious to preserve their rights and their privacy; if all those sharp eyes there were jealously watching the waterfront for the first signs of any territorial trespass-then,

in this quiet cul-de-sac that led to nowhere, where there was hardly room enough to execute a six-point turn in a car… yes! Surely, someone must have seen something? For the body must quite certainly have been pushed into the canal from the back of a car. How else? And yet Lewis, who had himself earlier questioned the tenants, had learned nothing of any strange car. Understandably, not every cottage had been inhabited at the time; the owners of some had been away -boating, or shopping in Oxford, or waiting in high places in large cities to motor down for a weekend of rural relaxation in their quiet country cottages.

Lewis had now reached the end of his walk, looking down as he did so at the water wherein the hideous body had been found. From this perusal he learned nothing. As he made his way back, however, he saw that the third cottage from the far end was “For Sale”, and he began to wonder whether such a property might not perhaps make a nice little investment for himself and the missus when he retired. Retired… And suddenly an exciting thought occurred to him. He knocked loudly on the door of the house for sale. No answer. Then he knocked at the house next door, which was opened by a freckle-faced lad of about twelve years of age.

‘Is your mum in-or your dad?’

‘No.’

‘I was just trying to find out something about the house here.’ Lewis pointed to the empty property.

‘They want twenny thousand forrit-and it’s got a leaky roof.’

‘Lot of money,’ said Lewis.

‘Not worth it. It’s been on the market a couple of months.’

Lewis nodded, sizing up this embryo property-evaluator. ‘You live here?’

The boy nodded.

‘Did you know the people next door-before it was for sale?’

‘Not “people”.’

‘No?’

The young lad looked vaguely suspicious, but he blinked and agreed: ‘No.’

‘Look!’ said Lewis. ‘I’m a policeman and-’

‘I know. I saw you when you was here before.’

‘Shouldn’t you have been at school?’

‘I had the measles, didn’t I? I was watching from the bedroom.”

‘You didn’t see anything sort of suspicious-before that, I mean?’

The boy shook his head.

‘You say it wasn’t “people” next door?’

‘He’s not in any trouble, is he?’ The freckled face looked up at Lewis anxiously, as if it were a matter of deep concern to him that any trouble might have befallen the previous owner of the house next door.

‘Not so far as I know.’

The boy looked down at the threshold and spoke quietly: ‘He was good to me. Took me out in his Metro to King’s Weir, once. Super fisherman he was-Mr Westerby.’

A Jaguar’s horn blared imperiously as Lewis turned left on to the main road down to Kidlington, and he knew his mind was full of other things. He had just discovered a quite extraordinarily significant link between Westerby and the waterfront at Thrupp. And if someone had taken a body from London to Thrupp in a car (as someone must have done), there would have been no suspicions aroused by the familiar sight of a red Metro. No trouble at all. Not if that someone who had brought the body had lived there himself. What was more, this was the only car that had cropped up in the case so far, for Dr Browne-Smith had sold his large, black Daimler…

Lewis turned into HQ and sat down at Morse’s desk, giving his bubbling thoughts the chance to simmer down. The green box-file containing the few documents on the case was lying open before him, and he riffled through the sheets – most of them his own reports. In fact (he told himself) there were only two real clues, anyway, whatever anyone might say: the suit, and the torn letter. Yes… and that torn letter was here, in his hands now – together with Morse’s neatly written reconstruction of the whole. He looked down at the torn half once more, and the final “G” in line 7 and the final “J” in line 15 suddenly shot out at him from the page. Could it be?

He parked the police car half on the pavement outside the Examination Schools and felt like a nervous punter in a betting-shop who can hardly bear to read the latest 1,2,3 The lists were still posted around the entrance hall, and quickly he found the board announcing the final honours list for Geography and read through the names. Whew! It not only could be-it was. “Jennifer Bennet”. There she perched at the top of the list – that wonderful girl beginning with “J” whom he had found on a board beginning with “G”. And the college-Lonsdale. Lewis could hardly believe his eyes, or his luck. And there was more to come, for the bottom name of the examining sextet was none other than Westerby’s!

It was an excited Lewis who drove back to Kidlington; but, even as he drove, the conflicting nature of his morning’s findings was slowly becoming apparent to him. Most of what he had discovered was pointing with an insistent regularity in one direction-in the direction of George Westerby. And with Browne-Smith as the body and Westerby as the murderer, almost everything fitted the facts beautifully. Except… except that last bit. Because if the letter had been written to Westerby and not to Browne-Smith… oh dear! Lewis was beginning to feel a little lost. He wondered if Morse had spent such a successful morning in London. He doubted it-doubted it genuinely. But how he longed to talk to Morse!

Back in the office, Lewis typed up his findings and although spelling had never been Lewis’s strong suit, yet he felt rather pleased with his present reports, particularly with his little vignette of Westerby:

Londoner. Little dapper bumshious fellow -slightly deaf- pretty secretive. Tends to squint a bit, but this may be the usual cigarette at the corner of his mouth.

Unable to get any answer from the house in Cambridge Way, Morse now reflects upon his meeting with the manager of the Flamenco Topless Bar.

Like Browne-Smith before him, Morse walked slowly up the shallow steps of Number 29 and rang the bell. But he, too, heard no sound of ringing on the other side of the great black door. He rang again, noticing as he did so the same board that Browne-Smith must have seen, with its invitation to apply to “Brooks & Gilbert (Sole Agents)”. Almost imperceptibly he nodded; almost imperceptibly he smiled. But there was still no sign of any movement in the house, and he bent down to look through the highly polished brass letter-box. He could make out the light-olive carpeting on the wide staircase that faced him; but the place seemed ominously silent. He walked across the street lad looked up at the four-storied building, admiring the clean-cut architecture, and the progressively foreshortened oblongs of the window-frames, behind which – as far as he could see – there was not the slightest tell-tale twitching of the curtainings. So he walked away along the street, entered a small park, and sat down on a bench, where he communed for many minutes with the pigeons, and with his thoughts. On the taxi-journey he had sought in his mind to minimize the risks he had already run that moring; and yet, as he now began to realize, those risks had been decidedly dangerous, especially after he had walked through the door marked “Private”… He’d started off in the quiet monotone of a man whose authority was beyond that of other men: ‘It matters to me not a single fart in the cosmos, lad, whether you tell me about it here and now, or in one of the cells of Her Majesty’s nearest nick.’