He was in several ways an attractive little chap--earnest, bespectacled, bright--with his name down for the Dragon School in North Oxford, a preparatory school geared (in-deed, fifth-geared) to high academic and athletic excellence.
The lad was already exhibiting an intelligent and apparently insatiable interest both in his own locality and in the Uni-verse in general. Such Aristotelian curiosity was quite nat-urally a great delight to his parents; and the four-and-a-half year old young James was picking up, and mentally hoarding, bits of knowledge with much the same sort of regular-ity that young Jason was picking up, and physically hurling, bits of brick and stone around the Cutteslowe Estate.
Spanning the fifty-yard-wide Isis, and thus linking the Iffiey Road with the Abingdon Road, Donnington Bridge was a flatfish arc of concrete, surmounted by railings painted, slightly incongruously, a light Cambridge-blue. And as the lffiey Princess rounded the Gut, young James pointed to the large-lettered SOMERVILLE, followed by two crossed oars, painted in black on a red background, across the upper part of the bridge, just below the parapet railings. 'What's that, Dad?'
But before the proud father could respond, this question was followed by another: 'What's that, Dad?'
Young James pointed to an in-cut, on the left, where concrete slipway had been constructed to allow owners cars to back the boats they were towing directly down into the river. There, trapped at the side of the slipway, was what appeared to be an elongated bundle, a foot or so be-low the surface of the nacre-green water. And several of the passengers on the port side now spotted the same thing: something potentially sinister; something wrapped up; but something no longer wholly concealed.
Fred Andrews, skipper of the lffiey Princess, pulled ove into Salters' Boat Yard, only some twenty yards below the bridge. He was an experienced waterman, and decided t dial 999 immediately. It was only after he had briefly plained his purpose to his passengers that an extraordinarily ancient man, seated in the bow of the boat, and dressed a faded striped blazer, off-white flannels, and a stray THE DAUGHTEF OF CAIN 23 boater, produced a mobile telephone from somewhere abo his person, and volunteered to dial the three nines himsel Chapter Fifty-five It's a strong stomach that has no turning (OLIVER HERFORD)
From Donnington Bridge Road, Lewis turned right in' Meadow Lane, then almost immediately left, along a brot track, where wooden structures on the right housed the Se Cadet Corps and the Riverside Centre. Ahead of him, paint in altemate bands of red and white, was a barrier, open no and upright; and beyond the barrier, four cars, one Lane Rover, and one black van; and a group of some fifteen pe sons standing round something---something covered wi greyish canvas.
Forty or fifty other persons were standing on the bridg, just to the left, leaning over the railings and surveying t? scene some fifty feet below them, like members of the put lic watching the Boat Race on one of the bridges betwee Mortlake and Putney. And seated silently beside Lewi Morse himself would willingly have allowed any one these ghoulish gawpers to look in his stead beneath the cz vas, at the body just taken from the Thames.
Events had moved swiftly after the first emergency call St. Aldate's. PC Carter had arrived within ten minutes in white police car and had been more than grateful for ti advice of the Warden of the Riverside Centre, a dark, thicl set man, who had dealt with many a body during his twenty-five years' service there. The Underwater Search Unit had been summoned from Sulhamstead; and in due course a doctor. The body, that of a man, still sheeted in plastic, but now in danger of slithering out of its wrapping of carpet, had been taken from the water, placed at the top of the slipway--and promptly covered up, untouched. St. Aldate's CID had been contacted immediately, and Inspec-tor Morrison had arrived to join a scene-of-crimes officer, and a police photographer. With the arrival of a cheerful young undertaker, just before noon, the cast was almost complete.
Apart from Morse and Lewis,
The reasons for such a sequence of events was clear enough to those directly and closely involved; clear even to a few of the twitchers, with their powerful binoculars, who had swelled the ranks of the bridge spectators. For this was clearly not a run-of-the-mill drowning. Even through the triple layers of plastic sheeting in which the body was wrapped, one thing stood out clearly (literally stood out clearly): the broad handle of a knife which appeared to be wedged firmly into the dead man's back. And when, under Morrison's careful directions--after many photographic flashings, from many angles--the stitching at the top of the improvised body-bag had been painstakingly unpicked, and one pocket of the corpse had been painstakingly picked (as it were), the identity of the man was quickly established.
On the noticeboard in the foyer of St. Aldate's station was pinned a photograph of a 'Missing Person' whom the police were most anxious to trace; and beneath the photo-graph there appeared a name, together with a few physical details. But it was not the corpse's blackened features which Morrison had recognised; it was the name he found in the sodden wallet.
The name of Edward Brooks.
Thus was a further relay of telephone-calls initiated. Thus was Morse himself now summoned to the scene.
Sometimes procedures worked well; and sometimes (as now) there was every reason for the police to be congratu lated on the way situations were handled. On this occasion one thing only (perhaps two?) had marred police profes-sionalism.
PC Carter, newly recruited to the Force, had been reason-ably well prepared for the sight of a body, pticularly one so comparatively well preserved as this one. What he had been totally unprepared for was the indescribable stench which had emanated from the body even before the Inspec-tor had authorised the opening of the envelope: a stench which was the accumulation, it seemed, of the dank depths of the river, of blocked drains, of incipient decomposition--of death itself. And PC Carter had turned away, and vomited rather noisily into the Thames, trusting that few had observed the incident.
But inevitably almost everyone, including the audience in the gods, had noticed the brief, embarrassing incident.
It was Morse's tma now.
Phobias are common enough. Some persons suffer from arachnophobia, or hypsophobia, or myophobia, or ptero phobia Well-nigh everyone suffers occasionally from thanatophobia; many from necrophobia--although Morse was not really afraid of dead bodies at all, or so he told himself.
What he really suffered from was a completely new phobia, one that was all his own: the fear of being sick at the sight of bodies which had met their deaths in strange or terrible circumstances. Even Morse, for all his classical education, was unable to coin an appropriately descriptive, or etymologically accurate, term for such a phobia: and even had he been so able, the word would certainly have been pretentiously polysyllabic.
Yet, for all his weakness, Morse was a far more experienced performer than PC Carter; and hurriedly taking the Warden to one side, he had swiftly sought directions to the nearest Ioo. It was not, therefore, into the Thames, but
