Colin Dexter - The Daughters of Cain

Fred Andrews, skipper of the Iffley Princess , pulled over into Salters’ Boat Yard, only some twenty yards below the bridge. He was an experienced waterman, and decided to dial 999 immediately. It was only after he had briefly explained his purpose to his passengers that an extraordinarily ancient man, seated in the bow of the boat, and dressed in a faded striped blazer, off-white flannels, and a straw boater, produced a mobile telephone from somewhere about his person, and volunteered to dial the three nines himself.

From Donnington Bridge Road, Lewis turned right into Meadow Lane, then almost immediately left, along a broad track, where wooden structures on the right housed the Sea Cadet Corps and the Riverside Centre. Ahead of him, painted in alternate bands of red and white, was a barrier, open now and upright; and beyond the barrier, four cars, one Land-Rover, and one black van; and a group of some fifteen persons standing round something — something covered with greyish canvas.

Forty or fifty other persons were standing on the bridge, just to the left, leaning over the railings and surveying the scene some fifty feet below them, like members of the public watching the Boat Race on one of the bridges between Mortlake and Putney. And seated silently beside Lewis, Morse himself would willingly have allowed any one of these ghoulish gawpers to look in his stead beneath the canvas, at the body just taken from the Thames.

Events had moved swiftly after the first emergency call to St Aldate’s. PC Carter had arrived within ten minutes in a white police car and had been more than grateful for the advice of the Warden of the Riverside Centre, a dark, thick-set man, who had dealt with many a body during his twenty-five years’ service there. The Underwater Search Unit had been summoned from Sulham-stead; and in due course a doctor. The body, that of a man, still sheeted in plastic, but now in danger of slithering out of its wrapping of carpet, had been taken from the water, placed at the top of the slipway — and promptly covered up, untouched. St Aldate’s CID had been contacted immediately, and Inspector Morrison had arrived to join a scene-of-crimes officer, and a police photographer. With the arrival of a cheerful young undertaker, just before noon, the cast was almost complete.

Apart from Morse and Lewis.

The reasons for such a sequence of events was clear enough to those directly and closely involved; clear even to a few of the twitchers, with their powerful binoculars, who had swelled the ranks of the bridge spectators. For this was clearly not a run-of-the-mill drowning. Even through the triple layers of plastic sheeting in which the body was wrapped, one thing stood out clearly ( literally stood out clearly): the broad handle of a knife which appeared to be wedged firmly into the dead man’s back. And when, under Morrison’s careful directions — after many photographic flashings, from many angles — the stitching at the top of the improvised body-bag had been painstakingly unpicked, and one pocket of the corpse had been painstakingly picked (as it were), the identity of the man was quickly established.

On the noticeboard in the foyer of St Aldate’s station was pinned a photograph of a ‘Missing Person’ whom the police were most anxious to trace; and beneath the photograph there appeared a name, together with a few physical details. But it was not the corpse’s blackened features which Morrison had recognized; it was the name he found in the sodden wallet.

The name of Edward Brooks.

Thus was a further relay of telephone-calls initiated. Thus was Morse himself now summoned to the scene.

Sometimes procedures worked well; and sometimes (as now) there was every reason for the police to be congratulated on the way situations were handled. On this occasion one thing only (perhaps two?) had marred police professionalism.

PC Carter, newly recruited to the Force, had been reasonably well prepared for the sight of a body, particularly one so comparatively well preserved as this one. What he had been totally unprepared for was the indescribable stench which had emanated from the body even before the Inspector had authorized the opening of the envelope: a stench which was the accumulation, it seemed, of the dank depths of the river, of blocked drains, of incipient decomposition — of death itself. And PC Carter had turned away, and vomited rather noisily into the Thames, trusting that few had observed the incident.

But inevitably almost everyone, including the audience in the gods, had noticed the brief, embarrassing incident.

It was Morse’s turn now.

Phobias are common enough. Some persons suffer from arachnophobia, or hypsophobia, or myophobia, or pterophobia… Well-nigh everyone suffers occasionally from thanatophobia; many from necrophobia — although Morse was not really afraid of dead bodies at all, or so he told himself. What he really suffered from was a completely new phobia, one that was all his own: the fear of being sick at the sight of bodies which had met their deaths in strange or terrible circumstances. Even Morse, for all his classical education, was unable to coin an appropriately descriptive, or etymologically accurate, term for such a phobia: and even had he been so able, the word would certainly have been pretentiously polysyllabic.

Yet, for all his weakness, Morse was a far more experienced performer than PC Carter; and hurriedly taking the Warden to one side, he had swiftly sought directions to the nearest loo. It was not, therefore, into the Thames, but into a lone lavatory-pan in the Riverside Centre, that Chief Inspector Morse vomited, late that Sunday morning.

‘Been in the river about a fortnight, they reckon,’ ventured Lewis when Morse finally emerged.

‘Good! That fits nicely,’ replied the pale-faced Morse.

‘You OK, sir?’

‘Course I’m bloody OK, man!’ snapped Morse.

But Lewis was not in the least offended, for he and Morse were long acquainted; and Lewis knew all his ways.

If a few minutes earlier it had been his stomach that was churning over, it was now the turn of Morse’s brain; and somehow he managed, at least for a while, to look down again at the semi-sealed body. Heavy condensation between the plastic layers was preventing any close inspection of the knife stuck into the corpse’s back. But Morse was determined to be patient: better than most, he knew the value of touching nothing further there; and to be truthful he had been more than a little surprised that Morrison had gone as far as he had.

Nothing further, therefore, was touched until the arrival of the police pathologist, Dr Laura Hobson, whose bright-red Metro joined the little convoy of vehicles half an hour later. Briefly she and Morse conversed. After which, with delicate hands, she performed a few delicate tasks; whilst Morse walked slowly from the scene, along a track between a line of trees and the riverbank, up to a building housing the Falcon Rowing Club, some seventy yards upstream to his right. Here he stood looking around him, wondering earnestly what exactly he should be looking for.

After returning to the slipway, he took the Warden to one side and put to him some of the questions that were exercising his mind. Where perhaps might the corpse have been pushed into the river? How could the corpse have been conveyed to such a spot? In which direction, and how far, could the corpse have been conveyed by the prevailing flow of the waters?