'How're you feeling, sir?'
'Just change the first letter of my name from 'M'
'You should be in bed.'
Morse looked at his wristwatch. 'Nearest pub, Lew We need to think a little.'
Morse was comparatively unfamiliar with the part of O. ford in which he now found himself. In his own undergm uate days, it had seemed a long way out, being dubbed 'Bridge Too Far'--on the farther side, the eastern side, ti wrong side, of Magdalen Bridge--beyond the pale, as were. Yet even then, three decades earlier, it had been ( it still was) a cosmopolitan, commercial area of fascinati contrasts: of the drab and the delightful; of boarded- premises and thriving small businesses; of decay m regenemtion--a Private Sex Shop at the city-centre en and a police station at the far Ring Road end, with alm( everything between, including (and particularly) a string highly strred Indian resmur. Icluding, now trusted), a local pub selling real ale.
Lewis himself knew the area well; and after turning right at the T-junction, he almost immediately turned left it0 Marsh Road, pulling up there beside the Marsh Hua'ier.
Ashley Davies, he thought, would almost certaiol Y have approved.
The Good Pubs of Oxford guide always reserved its high. est praise for those hostelries where conversation was not. peded (let alone wholly precluded) by stentorian juke. boxes. And certainly Morse was gratified to find n O music here. Yet he appeared to Lewis clearly ill-at-ease as he started--well, almost finished really--s first swift pint Fuller's 'London Pride.'
'What's worrying you, sir?'
'I dunno. I've just got a sort of premonition--'
'Didn't know you believed in them.'
'---, about this copy-cat-crime business. You knorr, you get a crime report in the press--somebody pinching a baby from outside a supermarket, say--and before you can say 'Ann Robinson' somebody else's having a go at the same thing.'
Lewis followed the drift of Morse's thought. 'The article we placed in the Oxford Mail?'
'Perhaps.'
'You mean, we shouldn't perhaps...?'
'Oh, no! It was our duty to print that. And for all we know it could still produce something. Though I dot, bt it.'
Morse drained his beer before continuing: 'You know, that knife's somewhere, isn't it? The knife that someone stuck into Mc Clure. The knife that Brooks stucl C into Mc Clure. That's the infuriating thing for me. Knowing that the bloody thing's somewhere, even if it's at the bottom of the canal.'
'Or the Cherwell.'
'Or the Isis.'
'Or the gravel-pits...'
But the conversation was briefly interrupted whilst Lewis, on the landlord's announcement of Last Orders, w now despatched to the bar for the second round.
Perhaps it was Morse's bronchial affliction which was fecting his short-term memory, since he appeared to be st feting under the misapprehension that it was he who h purchased the first.
Whatever the case, however, Morse quite certain looked happier as he picked up his second pint, and pick up the earlier conversation.
'Brooks wouldn't have been too near any water, wou ha T'
'Not that far off, surely. And he'd have to go over Ma dalen Bridge on his way home, anyway.'
'On his blood-saddled bike...'
'All he'd need to do was drop his knife over the brid! there--probably be safe till Kingdom Come.'
Morse shook his head. 'He'd have been worried abo being seen.'
Lewis shrugged. 'He could have waited till it was dark 'It was bloody morning, Lewis!'
'He could'ye ditched it earlier. In a garden or som where.'
'No! We'd have found it by now, surely.'
'We're still trying,' said Lewis, quietly.
'You know'--Morse sounded weary--'it's not quite easy as you think--getting rid of things. You get a gui] complex about being seen. I remember a few weeks a L trying to get rid of an old soldier in a rubbish-bin in Ba bury Road. And just after I'd dropped it in, somebody knew drove past in a car, and waved...'
'He'd seen you?'
'What makes you think it was a 'he'?'
'You felt a bit guilty?'
Morse nodded. 'So it's vitally important that we fred fl knife. I just can't see how we're going to make a case against Brooks unless we can find the murder weapon.'
'Have you thought of the other possibility, sir?'
'What's that?' Morse looked up with the air of a Profe sor of Mathematics being challenged by an innumera
