The Riddle Of The Third Mile

Morse nodded. ‘Did it not occur to you, my lad, that after getting this fellow’s name you ought to have got his address? In the book of rules, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, sir, but-’

‘Why didn’t he want to keep talking, tell me that.’

‘Probably ran out of 10p’s.’

‘He could have rung you again later.’

“Probably thought he’d-he’d already done his duty,’

‘More than you did, eh?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Why didn’t he stay there at Thrupp?’

‘Not everybody likes seeing-sort of drowned people.’

Morse conceded the point, and moved on. ‘What do they fish for there?’

‘They say there’s a few biggish pike up by the bridge.’

‘Really? Who the hell’s “they”?’

“Well, one of my lads, sir. He’s been fishing for pike up there a few times.’

‘Keen fisherman, is he?’

Dickson was feeling more at ease now. ‘Yes, sir, he’s joined the Oxford Pike Anglers’ Association.’

‘I see. Is the fellow who rang you up a member, too?’

Dickson swallowed hard. ‘I don’t know, sir.’

‘Well, bloody well find out, will you!’

Morse walked away a few steps from the flustered Dickson; then he walked back. ‘And I’ll tell you something else, lad. If your man Rowbotham is a member of whatever it’s called, I’ll buy you every bloody doughnut in the canteen. And that’s a promise!’

Morse walked over to the canteen, ordered another cap of coffee with plenty of milk, smoked a cigarette, assessed the virulence of his gnathic bacteria, noted the pile of approximately thirty-five doughnuts on the counter, and returned to his office.

It was Lewis who was beaming with pleasure now. ‘Got it, I reckon sir!’ He showed Morse the list he made. ‘Only four digits and so there are only the ten numbers. What do you think?’

Morse read the list:

8080-J. Pettiford, Tobacconist, Piccadilly

8081-Comprehensive Assurance Co., Shaftesbury Avenue

8082-ditto

8083-ditto

8084-Douglas Schwartz, Reproductions, Old Compton Street

8085 – Ping Hong Restaurant, Brewer Street

8086-Claude & Mathilde, Unisex Hairdressers, Lower Regent Street

8087-Messrs Levi & Goldstein, Antiquarian Books, Tottenham Court Road

8088-The Flamenco Topless Bar, Soho Terrace

There’s one missing, Lewis.’

‘You want me to-?’

‘I told you to try them all, I think.’

But whoever was renting number 8089 was clearly away from base, and Morse told Lewis to forget it.

‘We are not, my friend, exactly driving through the trackless wastes of the Sahara with a broken axle, you agree? Now, if you can just make one more call and find out the price of a cheap-day second-class return to Paddington-’

‘Are we going there?’

‘Well, one of us’ll have to, Lewis, and it’s important for you to stay here, isn’t it, because I’ve got one or two very interesting little things I want you to look into. So I’ll -er-perhaps go myself.’

‘It won’t do your tooth much good.’

‘Ah! That reminds me,’ said Morse. ‘I think it’s about time I took another pill or two.’

CHAPTER TWELVE

Thursday, 24th July

A brief interlude in which Sergeant Lewis takes his first steps into the Examination Schools, the Moloch of Oxford’s testing apparatus.

It was late morning when, from its frontage on the High, Sergeant Lewis entered the high-roofed, hammer- beamed lobby of the Examination Schools. Never before had there been occasion for him to visit this grove of Academe, and he felt self-conscious as his heavy boots echoed over the mosaics of the marble floor, patterned in green and blue and orange. At intervals, in front of the oak panelling that lined the walls, were stationed the white and less-than-animated busts of former University Chancellors, former loyal servants of the monarchy, and sundry other benefactors. And along the walls themselves was a series of ‘faculty’ headings: Theology, Philosophy, Oriental Studies, Modern History, and the rest; below which, behind glass, were pinned a line of notices announcing the names of those candidates adjudged to have satisfied, in varying degrees, the appropriate panels of the faculties’ examiners.

On the Literae Hutnaniores (“Greats”) board (as Morse had assured him he would) Lewis duly found a long list of names, categorized into Class I, Class II, Class III, and Pass Degree. He noticed, too (as Morse had assured him he would), that a young lady by the name of Summers (Jane) of Lonsdale College, had secured a place in the first of these aforesaid categories. Then, doing precisely as he had been told, Lewis looked to the bottom of the list, where he saw the signatures of seven examiners. A few of them were barely legible. But one of them was conspicuously clear: the neatly penned signature of O. M. A. Browne-Smith. So Lewis made a brief entry in his notebook, and wondered why Morse had bothered to send him on this particular errand.

An attendant was seated in an office to the left of the lobby, and Lewis was soon enlisting this man’s ready assistance in learning something of the processes involved in the evolution of the class-lists. What happened, it seemed, was this. After candidates had finished their written examinations, mark coordination meetings were held by each of the examining panels, where “classes” were provisionally allotted, and where borderline candidates at each class-boundary were considered for vivas, especially those candidates hovering between a first and a second; finally, but then only the day before the definitive lists were due to be published, the chairman of the examiners (and no one else) was fully in possession of all the facts. At that point it was the duty of the chairman of examiners to summon his colleagues together in order to make a corporate, meticulous check of the final lists, and then to entrust the agreed document to one of the senior personnel of the Schools, whose task it now was to deliver the document for printing to the Oxford University Press. Immediately this was done, five copies of the lists were redelivered to the waiting panel, who would usually be sitting around drinking tea and eating a few sandwiches during the hour or so’s interval. There would follow the long and tedious checking of all results, the spellings of names, and the details of index-numbers and colleges, before the chairman would read aloud to his colleagues the final version, down to the last diaeresis and comma. Only then, if all were correct, would the chairman summon the Clerk of the Schools, in whose august presence each of the five copies would be signed in turn by each of the examiners. Then, at long last, the master-copy would be posted in the lobby of the Schools.

Lewis thanked the attendant, and clattered out across the entrance hall, where examinees, parents, and friends were still clustered eagerly round the notice-boards. For the first time in his life he felt a little envy for those