The Riddle Of The Third Mile

In which Morse and Lewis retrace their journey as far as the terminus of the first milestone.

It was with growing impatience that Lewis waited from 8.15 a.m. onwards. Morse had arrived back in Oxford late the previous evening and had called in to see him, readily accepting Mrs Lewis’s offer to cook him something, and thereafter settling down to watch television with the joyous dedication of a child. He had refused to answer Lewis’s questions, affirming only that the sun would almost certainly rise on the morrow, and that he would be in the office-early.

At 9 a.m. there was still no sign of him, and for the umpteenth time Lewis found himself thinking about the astonishing fact that, of the four dubiously associated and oddly assorted men who had played their parts in the case, not one of them could now lay the slightest claim to be mistaken for the corpse that still lay in Max’s deep-refrigeration unit: Browne-Smith had died of a brain haemorrhage beside a railway-track; Westerby had been strangled to death in a cheap hotel near Paddington; Alfred Gilbert had been found murdered in a room a couple of floors above Westerby’s flat in Cambridge Way; and Albert Gilbert had thrown himself from a seventh-storey window in Berry-wood Court. So the same old question still remained unanswered, and the simple truth was that they were running out of bodies.

But there were one or two items that Lewis had discovered for himself, and at 9.30 a.m. he browsed through his neatly typed reports once more. He’d learned, for example-from the manager of the topless bar-that Browne-Smith seemed to have been unaccountably slow in identifying himself by the agreed words: ‘It’s exactly twelve o’clock, I see.’ Then (after applying a good deal of pressure) he’d learned from the same source that the “cine” equipment had definitely not been returned to the bar the next day; in fact, it had been nearer a week before any of the bar-clients could indulge their voyeuristic fantasies again. There was a third fact, too: that neither the manager nor any of his hostesses had previously set eyes upon the man with the brownish beard who had sat beside the bar that fateful Friday when Browne-Smith had been tempted down from Oxford…

Morse finally arrived just before 9.45 a.m., his lower lip caked with blood.

‘Sorry to be late. Just had her out. No trouble. Hardly felt a thing. “Decayed beyond redemption”-that’s what the little fellow said.’ He sat down expansively in his chair. ‘Well, where do you want me to start?’

‘At the beginning, perhaps?”

‘No. Let’s start before then, and get a bit of the background clear. While you were off gallivanting in London, Lewis, I called in to see your pal at the Examination Schools, and I asked him just one thing: I asked him what he thought were the potential areas for any crooked dealings in this whole business of the final lists. And he made some interesting suggestions. First, of course, there’s the possibility of someone getting results ahead of the proper time. Now this isn’t perhaps one of the major sins; but, as you told me yourself, all that waiting can become a matter of great anxiety: sometimes perhaps enough anxiety to make one or two people willing to pay-pay in some way-for learning results early. That’s only the start of it, though. You see if there’s some undergraduate who’s nearly up to the first-class honours bracket, he’s put forward for a viva-voce examination, but he’s never told which particular part of his work he’s going to be re-examined in. Now, if he did know, he’d be able to swot up on that side of things and get ready to catch all the hand-grenades they lobbed at him. Agreed? But let’s go on a stage further. Our budding “first” would be an even shorter-odds favourite if he knew the name of the man who was going to viva him: he could soon find out this fellow’s hobby-horses, read his books, and generally tune himself in to the right wavelength. Which leads on to the final consideration. If he did know exactly who it was who was going to settle his future, there’d always be the potential for a bit of bribery, the offer of money in return for that glowing recommendation for a “first”. You see, Lewis? The whole process is full of loop-holes! I’m not saying anyone wriggles through ‘em: I’m just telling you they’re there. And, depending on what the rewards are, there might be a few susceptible dons who could feel tempted to go along with one or two suggestions, don’t you think?’

Lewis nodded. ‘Perhaps a few might, I suppose.’

‘No “perhaps”, Lewis- just a few did!’

Again Lewis nodded-rather sadly-and Morse continued.

‘Then we found a corpse with a great big question-mark on the label round its neck.’

‘It hadn’t got a neck, sir.’

‘That’s true.’

‘And there isn’t a question-mark any longer?’

‘Patience, Lewis!’

‘But we had the letter to go on.’

‘Even that, though. If we hadn’t had a line on things to start with, the whole thing would have been a load of gobbledygook. Would you have made much of it without-’

‘I wouldn’t have made anything of it, anyway.’

‘Don’t underestimate yourself, Lewis-let me do it for you!’

‘What about that blood-donor business?’

‘Ah! Now if you’ve been a donor for a good many years you get a lot of little tiny marks-’

‘As a matter of fact I got my gold badge last year-for fifty times, that is-in case you didn’t know.’

‘Oh!’

‘So I don’t really need you to tell me much about that.’

‘But you do. Do you know when you have to pack up giving blood? What age, I mean?^’

‘No.’

‘Well, you bloody should! Don’t you read any of the literature? It’s sixty-five.’

Lewis let the information sink in. ‘You mean that Browne-Smith wouldn’t have been on the current records…’

‘Nor Westerby. They were both over sixty-five.”

‘Ye-es. I should have looked in the old records.’

‘It’s all right. I’ve already checked. Browne-Smith was a donor until a couple of years ago. Westerby never: he’d had jaundice and that put him out of court, as I’m sure you’ll know!’

‘But the body wasn’t Browne-Smith’s.’

‘No?’ Morse smiled and wiped the blood gently from his mouth. ‘Whose was it then?’

But Lewis shook his head. ‘I’m just here to listen, sir.’

‘All right. Let’s start at the beginning. George Westerby is iust finishing his stint at Lonsdale. He’s looking for a place in London, and he finds one, and buys it. The estate agent tells him that all the removals from Oxford can easily be arranged, and that suits Westerby fine. He’s got two places: his rooms at Lonsdale, and his little weekend cottage out at Thrupp. So Removals Anywhere come on to the scene-and the supremely important moment in the case arrives: Bert Gilbert notices the name opposite Westerby’s rooms on T Staircase-the name of Dr O. M. A. Browne-Smith-the name of a man he’d always ranked among the legion of the damned – the man who’d been responsible for his younger brother’s death.

‘Now, very soon after this point-I’m sure of it! -we get a switch of brothers. Bert reports his extraordinary finding to his brother, and it’s Alfred-by general consent the abler of the two – who now takes over. He finds out as much as he can about Browne-Smith, and devises a plan that makes it ridiculously easy for Browne-Smith to go along with things. He writes a letter on Westerby’s typewriter -he’s in Westerby’s rooms whenever he likes now, remember -inviting Browne-Smith to do him a very small favour, and one that would entail no real compromise to Browne-Smith’s academic integrity. This offer, as we know, was taken up, and off Browne-Smith goes to London. But we also know-because he told us-that_; Browne-Smith played his own cards with equal cunning. And in the end Gilbert’s plan misfired-whatever that plan had been originally.

‘Gilbert came into the room to find that Browne-Smith wasn’t unconscious, as he’d expected. So they talked together straight away; and it wasn’t long before Gilbert discovered that the military records of young brother John were hardly a striking example of dedication to duty. In fact, far from being killed in action, he’d shot himself the night before El Alamein-and one of the few people who knew all this was Browne-Smith, John Gilbert’s platoon officer. So when the whole story was out at last, there couldn’t have been much wind left in the Gilberts sails, because it was quite clear to them that Browne-Smith hadn’t the slightest responsibility, direct or indirect, for the