The Riddle Of The Third Mile

‘That’s what I told you this morning, sir.’

‘I know you did, yes! All I’m doing is to stick a bit more clarity into your thinking. You don’t mind, I hope?’

‘My mind’s perfectly clear already, sir. He might have been a shorter man or a taller man, and, because Browne-Smith’s about five-eleven, the odds are probably on him being shorter. It’s the length of the femur, you see, that largely determines the height.’

‘Oh!’ said Morse. ‘You don’t happen to know how tall Westerby is-or was?’

‘Five-five, sir-about that. I asked the college secretary very nice girl.’

‘Oh!’

‘And I agree with all you’ve said, sir. Head, hands, legs -you’ve explained them all. If the murderer wanted us to think the body was Browne-Smith’s, perhaps he couldn’t have left any of them.’

The tables were turned now, and it was Morse’s turn to look ‘You don’t think all this is getting a bit too complicated do you, Lewis?’

‘Far too complicated. We’ve got the suit and we’ve got the letter-both of them Browne-Smith’s-and we know that he’s gone missing somewhere. That would be quite enough for me, sir. But you seem to think that the man we’re after is almost as clever as you are.’

Morse did not reply immediately, and Lewis noticed the look of curious exhilaration in the Chief Inspector’s face. What, he wondered, had he suddenly thought of now?

Dickson called in a few minutes later to report that no one by the name of Simon Rowbotham was registered in the membership of the Pike Anglers’ Association or in the membership of any other fishing-club in the vicinity of Oxford; and Lewis was disappointed with this news, for it gave a little more weight to the one freakish objection to his own firm view that the corpse they had found must be Browne-Smith’s: the objection (as Morse had pointed out to him the previous morning) that “Simon Rowbotham” was an exact anagram of “O.M.A. Browne- Smith”.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Saturday, 26th July

An extremely brief envoi to the first part of the case.

At five minutes to four the next morning, Morse awoke and looked at his bedside clock. It seemed quite impossible that it should be so early, for he felt completely refreshed. He got out of bed and drew the curtains, standing for several minutes looking down on the utterly silent road, only a hundred yards from Banbury Road roundabout… the road that led north out to Kidlington, and thence past the Thames Valley Police HQ up to the turn for Thrupp, where the waters would now be topping and plopping gently against the houseboats as they lay at fheir overnight moorings.

Morse went into the bathroom, noticed that his jaw was almost normal again, swallowed the last of the penicillin tablets and returned to bed, where he lay on his back, his hands behind his head… There were still many pieces of flotsam that needed to be salvaged before the wreck of a man’s life could wholly bereconstructed… salvaged from those canal waters -which changed their colour from green to grey to yellow to to white… Morse almost dozed off again, momentarily imagining that he saw the outlines of a cunningly plotted murder, with himself-yes, Morse!-at the centre of a beautifully calculated deception. Of one thing he was now utterly sure: that, quite contrary to Lewis’s happy convictions about the identity of the dead man, the man they had found was quite certainly not Dr Browne-Smith of Lonsdale.

Thereafter, Morse was impatient for the morning and for traffic noise and for the sight of people catching buses. Ovid, in the arms of his lover, had cried out to the midnight horses to gallop slow across the vault of heaven. But Morse was without a lover; and at a quarter to five he got up, made himself a cup of tea and looked out once again at the quiet street below, where he sensed a few vague flutterings and stirrings from the chrysalis of night.

And Morse sensed rightly. For the next morning, like Browne-Smith before him, he received a long letter; a strange and extremely exciting letter.

THE END OF THE FIRST MILE

THE SECOND MILE

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Monday, 28th July

Morse, having been put on the right track by the wrong clues, now finds his judgement almost wholly vindicated.

Morse opened the door of his office a few minutes after eight to find Lewis reading the Daily Mirror.

‘You seem very anxious to further our inquiries this morning, Lewis.’

Lewis folded up the newspaper. ‘I’m afraid you’ve made a bad mistake, sir.’

‘You mean you are busy on the case?’

‘Not only that, sir. As I say, you’ve made a bad mistake.’

‘Nonsense!’

‘I was trying to do the coffee-break crossword and there was a clue there that just said “Carthorse (anagram)”-’ ‘ “Orchestra”,’ interrupted Morse. ‘I know that, sir. But “Simon Rowbotham” is not an anagram of “O.M.A. Browne-Smith”!’

‘Of course it is!’ Morse immediately wrote down the letters, was checking them off one by one when suddenly he stopped. ‘My God! You’re right. There’s an “o” instead of an “e” isn’t there?’

‘It was only by chance I checked it when I was-’

But Morse wasn’t listening. Was he wrong, after all his mighty thoughts and bold deductions? Was Lewis right-with his simple minded assertion that the case was becoming quite unnecessarily complicated? He shook his head in some dismay. Perhaps (he clutched at straws), perhaps if he himself had made a mistake over an anagram, so might Browne-Smith have done in concocting a completely bogus name? But he couldn’t convince even himself for a second, and the truth was that he felt lost.

At eight-thirty the phone rang, an excited voice announcing itself as Constable Dickson.

‘I’ve just been reading last week’s Oxford Times, sir.’

‘Not on duty, I hope.’

‘I’m off duty, sir. I’m at home.’

‘Oh.’

‘I’ve found him!’

‘Found who?’

‘Simon Rowbotham. I was reading the angling page-and his name’s there. He came second in a fishing match out at King’s Weir last Sunday.’