‘Oh.’
‘He lives in Botley, so it says.’
‘I don’t give a sod if he lives in Bootle.’
‘Pardon, sir?’
‘Thanks for letting me know, anyway.’
‘Remember what you said about those doughnuts, sir?’
‘No, I forget,’ said Morse, and put the receiver down.
‘Shall I go out and see him?’ asked Lewis quietly.
‘What the hell good would that do?’ snapped Morse, thereafter lapsing into sullen silence.
Since it was marked “Strictly Private and Confidential”, the Registry had not opened the bulky white envelope, and it was lying there on Morse’s blue blotting-pad when later the two men returned from coffee. Inside the envelope was a further sealed envelope (addressed, like the outer cover, to Chief Inspector E. Morse), and a covering letter from the Manager of the High Street branch of Barclays Bank, dated 26th July. It read as follows:
Dear Sir,
We received the sealed envelope enclosed on Monday, 21st July, with instructions that it be posted to you personally on Saturday, 26th July. We trust you agree that we have discharged our obligation.
Yours faithfully…
Morse handed the note over to Lewis. ‘What do you make of that?’
‘Seems a lot of palaver to me, sir. Why not just post it straight to you?’
‘I dunno,’ said Morse. ‘Let’s hope it’s full of fivers.’
‘Aren’t you going to open it?’
‘Interesting,’ said Morse, apparently unhearing. ‘If this letter reached the bank on Monday, the 21st, it was probably written on Sunday, the 20th-and Max says that’s the likeliest day that someone put the corpse
‘But it’s probably nothing to do with the case.’
‘Well, we’ll soon know.’ Morse slit the envelope and began reading and apart from a solitary “My God!” (after the first few lines of the typewritten script) he read in utter silence, as totally engrossed, it seemed, as a dedicated pornophilist in a sex shop.
When he had finished the long letter, he wore that look of almost sickening self-satisfaction frequently found on the face of any man whose judgement has been called into question, but thereafter proved correct.
Lewis took the letter now, immediately turning to the last page. There’s no signature, sir.’
‘Read it-just read it, Lewis,’ said Morse blandly, as he reached for the phone and dialled the number of the bank.
‘Manager please’
‘He’s rather tied up at the minute. Could you-’
‘Constable of Oxfordshire here, lad. Just tell him to get to the phone please.’ (Lewis had by now read the first page of the letter.)
‘Can I help you?’ asked the manager.
‘I want to know whether Dr Browne-Smith-Dr O. M. A. Browne-Smith-of Lonsdale College is one of your clients.’
‘Yes, he is.’
‘We received a letter from you today, sir, and it’s my duty to] ask you if it was Dr Browne-Smith himself who asked you to forward it to us.’
‘Ah, the letter, yes. I hoped the Post Office wouldn’t keep yon waiting too long.’
‘You haven’t answered my question, sir.’
‘No, I haven’t. And I can’t, I’m afraid.’
‘I think you can, sir, and I think you will-because we’re caught up in a case of murder.’
‘Murder? You’re not-you’re not saying Dr Browne-Smith’s been murdered, surely?’
‘No, I didn’t say that.’
‘Could you tell me exactly who it is that’s been murdered?’
Morse hesitated-for too long. ‘No, I can’t, not just for the present. Inquiries are still at a very – er – delicate stage, and that’s why we’ve got to expect the co-operation of everyone concerned-people like yourself, sir.’
The manager was also hesitant. ‘It’s very difficult for me. You see, it involves the whole question of the confidentiality of the bank.’
Morse sounded surprisingly mild and accommodating. ‘I understand,
‘Yes, I see that. But I shall have to take the matter up with the bank’s legal advisers, of course.’
‘Very sensible, sir. And thank you for your co-operation.’
Lewis, who had been half-reading the letter (with continued amazement) and also half-listening to this strange telephone conversation, now looked up to see Morse smiling serenely and waiting patiently for him to finish.
When he had done so, but before he had the chance to pass any comment, Morse asked him to give Barclays another ring. and tell them he was Chief Inspector Morse, and to find out whether they had a second client on their books: a Mr George Westerby, of Lonsdale.
The answer was quick and unequivocal: yes, they had.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
‘Perhaps it is not too much to expect that you have made the necessary investigations? It would scarcely need an intellect as (potentially) powerful as your own accurately to have traced the sequence of events thus far. After all, you had my suit, did you not? That, most surely, should have led your assistants to my (agreed, rather limited) wardrobe at Lonsdale, where (I assume) the waist-band inches and the inside-leg measurements have already been minutely matched. But let us agree: the body was not mine. I did try, perhaps amateurishly, to make you think it was; yet I had little doubt that you would quickly piece together a reasonably coherent letter, the torn half of which I left in the back pocket of the trousers. You might therefore have had the reasonable suspicion that the corpse was me – but not for long, if I assess you right.
‘But whichever way it is (either your thinking of me as one of the dead or as one of the non-dead), I see it my duty to inform you that I am alive, at least for a little while longer. (You will have discovered that, too?) Whose, then, is the body you found in the waters out at Thrupp? For it is not, most certainly not, my own. I repeat-whose is it? To find the answer to that question must be your next task, and it is a task in which I am prepared (even anxious) to offer some co-operation. As a child, did you ever play the game called “treasure-hunt”, wherein a clue would lead from A to B? From, let us say, a little message hidden underneath a stone to a further message pinned behind a maple tree? Well, let us go on a little, shall we? From B to C, as it were.
‘I received the letter and immediately acted upon it. All very odd, was it not? I knew the girl mentioned, of course, for she was one of my own pupils; and, what is more, she was a girl acknowledged by all to be the outstanding classic of the year – if not of the decade. This was common knowledge, and it was totally predictable (why bother to ask me?) that her marks in the Greats papers would be higher than any of her contemporaries of either sex. Therefore the request to communicate (and that to some anonymous third party) this particular girl’s result only a week or so before the publication of class-lists struck me as rather suspicious. (A poorly constructed
