Colin Dexter - Morse’s Greatest Mystery and other stories

“Pretty accurate, they tell me, at such close range as this, Professor!”

Rawlins said nothing, his eyes seemingly mesmerized as he stared at the cylinder-chamber. But now the revolver was no longer pointing at him; for with slow deliberation Summerson turned it round upon himself and brought the tip of the shining barrel up against his own right temple, where the index finger of his right hand finally exacted that minimal extra pressure on the double-action trigger, and the hammer drove against the cylinder-chamber.

The children had eaten half an hour previously, and Florence Rawlins looked down sadly at the juiceless fillet that lay beneath the low-burning grill. Why couldn’t Frank be more thoughtful?

Six o’clock.

Ten past.

Twenty past.

At half-past six she rang his private office number, but there was no reply.

“Fine! Fine!” The young gynaecologist had repeated. “No problems. Now you’ll promise not to smoke, won’t you?” “I promise.” Of course she wouldn’t smoke! Her thoughts drifted back happily to Rawlins... With a father like Rawlins, it would surely be a boy — and pretty certainly a clever little boy, at that! She’d longed to be a mother ever since she’d been a young girl, when she’d played incessantly, obsessively almost, with her dollies — dressing them, combing their lank locks, bending their stiff joints before propping them up against the backs of chairs...

Six weeks after that first ante-natal clinic, an oblong parcel was delivered to the Rawlinses’ residence, where later in the day the Professor of Forensic Medicine inspected its contents with enthusiasm. The new case would naturally take pride of place, perhaps just inside the front entrance, he thought. He fitted the revolver carefully inside the specially constructed case, closed the glass cover, and held the exhibit up against some imaginary hook on the facing wall. Not a bad reward, really, for being trapped into exercising his dubiously enviable knack of procreating male offspring with even the most perfunctory ejaculation. And even that extraordinary afternoon when young Summerson had pointed the revolver at his heart hadn’t been all that traumatic an experience really, because long before the final, cosmically anticlimactic “click” he had known (as any expert in the field would have known) that there were no bullets in the open chambers of the revolver — not a single one. For all that though, it had been a great relief when the revolver had at last been lowered, and a genuine surprise when Summerson had presented it to him across the desk — reward for services rendered, so to speak. And he really had needed those two large whiskys, although he’d afterwards agreed with a worried, tearful Florence that he should have told her he’d be late.

On September 29 of that same year, a baby was delivered on the third floor of the Maternity Hospital up at Headington, and the young father had the name all ready. The gunsmith from Guildford may not have bothered to work out any mathematical odds, but John Summerson had calculated the chances of a penny coming down heads for a seventh time; and at 128:1, they’d seemed to him wildly improbable.

They called the lovely little girl “Francesca.”

There were longish periods now when the A34 was quiet, almost completely free of the swishing traffic. Only up there along the lay-by, two “Long Vehicle” lorries ahead, was there still any continuum of activity — where at the side of a converted white caravan a single electric light bulb illuminated MACS SNAX — Open 24 Hour’s,

Though with little formal education behind him, Danny had still felt the itch to transpose that single apostrophe from the last word to the first when, three-quarters of an hour earlier, he’d walked along to the serving-hatch and ordered a cup of tea and a Melton Mowbray pork-pie. Two other drivers had stood there then, chatting in desultory fashion and intermittently stamping their feet, their white plastic cups of piping-hot tea steaming brightly in the cold air of that late-January night. But apart from swopping first names, the three of them had said little to each other.

Now, back in the cab of the furniture van, Danny began to realize how very cold he was. Yet he told himself that “cold” was only a relative concept and was trying to convince himself that he was only relatively cold. As with many things in life, it was all a question of mind over matter. His feet felt bloody frozen — Christ, they did. But they weren’t really frozen, were they, Danny boy? What if he were standing barefoot on the far North Pole? He’d always believed there was just that one square yard of ice and snow comprising yer actual North Pole, and no one yet had managed to persuade him otherwise.

There were two newspapers in the cab: the Daily Telegraph (oddly?) and a late edition of The Oxford Mail . And newspapers were super for insulation, everyone knew that. Just stick a few sheets all the way round between your shirt and your jumper...

He looked at his wrist-watch: half-past midnight, just gone.

It had been most unlike him to make one mistake — let alone two — on such an important day. How stupid, in the first place, to have left his faithful old army greatcoat behind! And absolutely bloody stupid to have drunk more than a little too much that lunchtime, because more than a little had amounted to more than a lot and he had spent far more than he could really afford of his meagre savings.

At a service station just north of Oxford he had stopped to buy two litre bottles of Spring Water — as well as The Oxford Mail — prior to pulling into the next lay by, just before the M40 interchange. It was a bit naïve, he knew, but he’d always believed that considerable quantities of water must significantly, and soon, serve to dilute and thereby to diminish the alcoholic level in the human bloodstream. And so it was that, an hour earlier, he’d forced himself to swallow all that flat and tasteless fluid to the final drop.

How come he’d been so careless?

Nervousness partly; and partly the exhilaration of the chase — of the fox keeping a few furlongs ahead of the yapping hounds. Perhaps the fox wasn’t really exhilarated at all though — just frightened. Like he was, if he were honest with himself.

Just a bit.

Yet as he now sat behind the steering-wheel in the darkened cab, he couldn’t really believe he’d find himself in much trouble with the police that night. He wasn’t sure whether they could nick him for being over the limit in charge of a stationary vehicle. But they’d still need some reason for breathalysing him, wouldn’t they? They’d have one if they spotted the number-plate, of course. But that was a pretty unlikely possibility, he reckoned. He hadn’t read much of The Oxford Mail , but he’d seen one of its front-page headlines — OXON POLICE “UNABLE TO COPE” WITH CRIME — and at least that was a nugget of encouragement in a naughty old world. A vehicle, so it seemed, was stolen every something seconds in the Thames Valley region and that was very good news indeed — considerably lengthening the odds against him being caught.

No. There was something else that was worrying him much more: the wretched “tachometer” just to the left of the steering-wheel — a device (as he was now learning) that showed details of speeds and times, of stoppings and startings. He just couldn’t understand the thing, that was the trouble. Nor the pile of paper discs, looking like so many CDs, that stood beside it — discs marked “Freightchart,” with lines and spaces and boxes for Name and Base and Destination and Cargo and Date and Mileage and God knows what else. Confusing. Unfamiliar. He could gauge all the other risks all right; but not this one. Perhaps the police couldn’t give him a random breath-test. But could they give him a random tacho-test?