Colin Dexter - The Riddle Of The Third Mile

She shook her head. ‘In his sort of business you’re off all the time. I know he’s got a few jobs on in the Midlands-and one in Scotland-but he’s always on the move. He just turns up here when he gets back.’

At this point, Morse felt a curious compassion for Emily Gilbert, for she seemed to him a brave sort of woman-yet one who would need to be even braver very soon. He knew, too, that time was running out; knew he had to find out more before he broke the cruel news.

‘Just tell me anything you can, please, about this other woman-this “Yvonne”. Anything you can remember.’

‘I’ve told you-I don’t-’

‘Didn’t you talk together?’

‘Well, yes-but-’

‘You don’t have any idea where I can find her?’

‘I think she lives south of the Thames somewhere.’

‘No name of the road? No number of the house? Come on! Think, woman!’

But Morse had pushed things too far, for Mrs Gilbert now broke down and wept, and Morse was at a loss as to what to do, or what to say. So he did nothing; and such masterly inactivity proved to be the prudent course, for very soon she had wiped her wide and pleasing eyes and apologized sweetly for what she called her “silliness”.

‘Have you any children?’ asked Morse.

She shook her head sadly.

It was hardly the most propitious moment, but Morse now rose from the sofa and placed his right hand firmly on her shoulder. ‘Please be brave, Mrs Gilbert! I’ve got to tell you, I’m afraid, that your husband is dead.’

With a dramatic, convulsive jerk, her right hand snapped up to meet Morse’s, and he felt the sinewy vigour of her fingers as they sought to clutch the comfort of his own. Then Morse told her, in a very quiet, gentle voice, as much (and as little) as he knew.

When he had finished, Mrs Gilbert asked him no questions, but got up from her chair, walked over to the window, lit a cigarette, and stared out over the long, bleak reservoir that lay below, where a swan glided effortlessly across the still waters. Then, finally, she turned towards him, and for the first time Morse realized that she must have been an adequately attractive woman… some few little summers ago. Her eyes, still glistening with tears, sought his.

‘I lied to you, Inspector, and I shouldn’t have done that. I know that other woman, you see. My husband occasionally gets-got involved in his brother’s-well, let’s say his brother’s… side of things, and he met her in one of the clubs a few weeks ago. I-I found out about it. You see-he wanted to leave me and -and-and go and live with her.

‘But she-’

Mrs Gilbert broke off, and Morse nodded his understanding.

‘But she didn’t want him.’

‘No, she didn’t.’

‘Did you tell him you’d found out?’

Mrs Gilbert smiled a wan sort of smile and she turned back to the window, her eyes drifting over and beyond the reservoir to where a DC10 droned in towards Heathrow. ‘No! I wanted to keep him. Funny, isn’t it? But he was the only thing I had.’

‘It blew over?’

‘Not really very much time for that, was there?’

Morse sat and looked once more at this very ordinary woman he had come to visit, and his mind drifted back to Molly Bloom in Ulysses, and he knew that Mrs Gilbert, too, was a woman who had offered, once, a presence and a bosom and a rose.

‘Please tell me about this other woman.’

‘I don’t know her real name-they call her “Yvonne” at the clubs. But I know her initials-W.S.-and I know where she lives – 23A Colebourne Road, just south of Richmond Road. It’s only about five minutes walk from the tube-station…’

‘You went to see her?’

‘You don’t know much about women, do you?’

‘No, perhaps not,’ agreed Morse. But he was impatient now. He felt like a man with an enormously ‘distended bladder who has been kept talking on the phone for half an hour, and he walked across to the door. ‘Will you be all right, Mrs Gilbert?’

‘Don’t worry about me, Inspector. I’ll give the GP a ring when you’ve gone, and he’ll give me a few tablets. They should take care of me for a little while, shouldn’t they?’

‘Yes, I’m sure they will. I know how you must be feeling-’

‘Of course you don’t! You’ve not the faintest idea. It’s not today-it’s not tonight. It’s tomorrow. Can’t you see that? You tell me Albert’s dead, and in an odd sort of way it doesn’t register. It’s a shock, isn’t it? And I’d be more than happy to live through one shock after another, but…’

The tears were running freely again, and suddenly she moved towards him and buried her head on his shoulder. And Morse stood there by the door, awkward and inept; and (in his own strange way) almost loving the woman who was weeping out her heart against him.

It was several minutes before he was able to disengage himself and finally to stand upon the threshold of the opened door. ‘Please look after yourself, Mrs Gilbert.’

‘I will. Don’t worry about that.’

‘If there’s anything I can do to help…’

She almost smiled. ‘Be gentle with the girl, Inspector. You see, I know you’re anxious to get away from here and see her, and I just want you to know that she’s the loveliest girl-woman-I’ve ever met in all my life-that’s all.’

Tears were spurting again now, and Morse leaned forward and kissed her lightly on the forehead, in the sure knowledge that this woman had somewhere touched his feelings deeply. And as he walked slowly away up the road towards Manor House tube-station he doubted whether Albert Gilbert had ever really known the woman he had asked to marry him.

For all his conviction that the tide was running fully in his favour, the open doors of the Manor Hotel proved irresistible, and Morse wondered as he drained his pints and watched the pimps and prostitutes walk by whether, in a life so full of strange coincidence, he might at last be facing the wildest and most wonderful coincidence of them all: “W.S”! Browne-Smith had mentioned those initials… and Emily Gilbert had just repeated them… and those were the selfsame glorious initials of a girl whom once he’d known, and loved too well.

Twenty minutes after Morse had left the seventh floor of Berrywood Court, a key was inserted into the outer door of the Gilberts’ flat, and a man walked in and flung his jacket carelessly down upon the sofa.

Two minutes later, Albert Gilbert, of Removals Anywhere, was talking (somewhat incoherently) over the phone to his GP, explaining how, for no apparent reason, his wife had fainted quite away on his return, and desperately demanding some instructions, since even now she showed no signs of sense or sanity returning.

All men, even those of a pessimistic nature, fall victim at certain points in their lives to the most extravagant of hopes.

As Mrs Gilbert had told him, Colebourne Road was no more than five minutes’ walk from East Putney tube station. But Morse appeared in no hurry, and when he reached the street-sign he stopped awhile and stood beneath it, deep in thought. Surely he couldn’t be so utterly and stupidly sentimental as to harbour even the faintest hope that he was just about to see once more the woman whom he’d worshipped all those years ago. No, he told himself, he couldn’t. And yet a wild, improbable hope lived on; and as if to nourish the hope, he entered the Richmond Arms on the corner of the street and ordered a double Scotch. As he drank, his thoughts went back to the time when he’d visited his old mother in the Midlands, and gone off to an evening Methodist service to see if a girl, a very precious girl, was still in her place in the choir-stalls, still raising her eyes to his at the end of each verse of every hymn and smiling at him sweetly and seraphically. But she hadn’t been there-hadn’t been there for thirty years, perhaps-and he’d sat by a pillar alone that night. Morse walked to the bar, (‘Same again, please-Bell’s’), and the name of Wendy Spencer tripped trochaically across his brain… It couldn’t be the same woman, though. It wasn’t the same woman. And yet, ye gods-if gods ye be-please make it her!