Colin Dexter - Morse’s Greatest Mystery and other stories

The escape had caused no little embarrassment to the officers concerned, and (worse still) would almost certainly hit the national headlines the following day. Thus it was that Chief Inspector Page of Thames Valley CID (no less) had little compunction in summoning the now off-duty officers Russell, Hodges, and Watson, to his office in Kidlington at 11 A.M. to review the matter — and the cleaner’s discovery.

The spelling and punctuation were both a bit shaky, but the import of the letter could hardly have given a clearer answer to what had hitherto seemed the increasingly bewildering question of the escaped man’s identity:

The Torygraph did it, very useful paper and a lot of criminals vote tory. It was Smithson give me the idea because we got the same name see. If he got nicked he gets good treatment but if I got nicked no, so what about him and me changing places for a little wile and no harm done is it? Besides, probably gives me a best chance of scarpering — lots of that now days, perhaps its the resession to blame like for every thing else. There was just that one problem, that tatoo I read about and when you coppers thought I was filling in the old tacko with the blue byro I was just writing out them four letters on the old nuckles see, easy! Then I done a pretty good job really with all that stuff about me name, dont you think so? Well well Danny Smithson boy, I wonder where you are, have you desided to keep out this time, why not?

I’ll leave this letter in the bottom blanket because I’ve got ideas with the top one. If I get away what a big laugh for me when you find it, and if I dont its your turn for the big laugh

Samuel (Danny) Lambert

PS you can give me old comb and spare hanky to Oxfam or the Sally army, its up to you

Newly recruited to the Force, PC Watson was; glad to have someone to chat with — even a subdued looking Sergeant Russell — as they stood in the lunch queue in the HQ canteen.

“Rotten bit o’ luck, Sarge...” he began.

“You make your own luck, lad. I shoulda been far more careful checking out that tattoo.”

“I was thinking more about both of ’em being named ‘Danny.’ ”

“Nick named, you mean — one of ’em.”

“Yeah. I mean, there’s your ‘Pongo’ Warings...”

“And your ‘Nobby’ Clarks...”

“How come your ‘Danny’ Lamberts, though?”

“Dunno.”

The queue moved a couple of feet, and the plainclothes man in front of them turned round to proffer a suggestion:

“Might be someone from Stamford? Stamford in Lincolnshire? Lamberts there often get called ‘Danny,’ after Daniel Lambert — fellow who weighed fifty-two stone odd — still in the Guinness Book of Records.”

“Who’s he when he’s at home?” asked Watson, after they’d been served.

“You don’t know?”

Watson shook his head.

“That, my lad, was Chief Inspector Morse.”

Watson frowned slightly. He’d never heard of the man; yet for a fleeting second he’d thought he’d almost recognized the profile as that grey head had turned towards them in the queue...

Next morning, the Governor of HM Prison Winchester received a full report of the case, now becoming widely known as the “Cock-up at Bicester Corral,” including a photocopy of the letter found in the escapee’s cell. He immediately summoned the Senior Prison Officer from D Wing, where Smithson had spent so many comparatively contented months and years.

“You’ll be interested in this.” The Governor handed over the file.

Price, a thick-set Irishman, sat down and began reading.

“No news of our Danny?” interrupted the Governor.

Price shook his head. Then, halfway through the letter, his eyes suddenly widened with a new and startling notion.

“You don’t think, sorr...?” he began slowly, pointing to the letter.

The Governor groaned, permitting himself also, albeit briefly, to contemplate the unimaginable.

“Don’t tell me that! Please! Don’t tell me it’s Smithson’s writing?”

Price studied the writing of the letter again. “Yes, sorr. I’m sorry. But I’m pretty sure it is.”

And for a few moments the two men sat there in silence, each of them visualizing their erstwhile prisoner perched aloft in the cabin of a stolen van, and carefully over-tracing his own tattoos with a cheap blue Biro pen...

Not too carefully — not carefully at all really — Morse looked down at the man lying supine on the double bed, dressed only in an unbuttoned white shirt, Oxford-blue pants, and black socks. The paleness of the man’s skin precluded the probability of any recent holiday on the Greek islands — with only the dullish-red V below the throat suggesting the possibility of any life outside the executive-suited higher echelons of British management.

Late forties, by the look of him; a firmly built man, with a pleasantly featured, clean-shaven face, and frizzy, grey-flecked hair. The jacket of a subfusc herring-bone suit was hanging inside the open-doored wardrobe, a maroon tie over it; and neatly aligned at the near side of the bed was a pair of soft black leather shoes.

A methodical, successful businessman, thought Morse.

A quiet knock on the door of Room 231 of The Randolph Hotel heralded the arrivals of Sergeant Lewis and Dr. Laura Hobson — the latter immediately stepping forward to peer down at the dead man’s face. Blood was still seeping slowly from a deep gash that slanted over the closed right eye like some monstrous acute accent. But there was no other sign of red in the face, for the lips were a palish shade of purple.

“Probably had a heart attack,” volunteered the pathologist.

Lewis looked down at the Corby trouser-press, standing to the left of the bathroom door, on which a pair of subfusc herring-bone trousers were draped over the opened leaf.

“Probably bashed his head on that?” suggested Lewis.

And Morse nodded.

The cream paint of the left-hand door-jamb was splashed with elongated flecks of scarlet, and two feet inside the bathroom itself, on the blue-and-white-tiled floor, was a patch of darkly dried blood.

“If he’d tripped it could have brought on a heart attack, don’t you think, sir?”

Again Morse nodded. “And if he’d had a heart attack he could have tripped and cracked his head, yes.”

Turning her head momentarily towards them, Dr. Hobson put the situation rather more simply: “Which came first — the chicken or the egg?”

“The chicken?” said Morse.

But the blonde pathologist was clearly in favour of an each-way bet. “Like as not it happened contemporaneously.”

Lewis’s eyebrows shot up. “Big word, that.”

Dr. Hobson smiled at him, attractively. “I’ve finished with it for now, Sergeant. It’s all yours if you’d like to have it.”

On the dressing table to the right of the bathroom door, beside the phone, lay two items which had been recovered from the bathroom floor: a calibrated syringe, its orange hood still in place over the needle; and the glass fragments of what had been a small phial, some three inches long, which had contained (as indicated by its label) “Human Actrapid Insulin” — the colourless liquid having almost completely seeped away into a layer of white tissue-paper.

For a minute or so longer, Chief Inspector Morse stood exactly where he was, visualizing much — visualizing almost everything, perhaps — of what had happened there on the threshold of the bathroom, his eyes finally concentrating on the telephone, its receiver cradled firmly on its base.