into a lone lavatory-pan in the Riverside Centre, that Chief Inspector Morse vomited, late that Sunday morning.
'Been in the river about a formight, they reckon,' ventured Lewis when Morse finally emerged.
' 'Good!
That fits nicely,' replied the pale-faced Morse.
'You OK, Sir?'
'Course I'm bloody OK, man!' snapped Morse.
But Lewis was not in the least offended, for he and Morse were long acquainted; and Lewis knew all his ways.
Chapter Fifty-six
He could not be a lighterman or fiver-carrier; there was no clue to what he looked for, but he looked for something with a most intent and searching gaze (Ctt. RLES DICKENS, Our Mutual Friend)
If a few minutes earlier it had been his stomach that was churning over, it was now the turn of Morse's brain; and somehow he managed, at least for a while, to look down again at the serai-sealed body. Heavy condensation betwee: the plastic layers was preventing any close inspection of the knife stuck into the corpse's back. But Morse was deter-mined to be Patient: better than most, he knew the value touching nothittg further there; and to be truthful he had been more than a little surised that Mordson had gone a3 far as he had.
Nothing further, therefore, was touched until the arrival of the police Pathologist, Dr. Laura Hobson, whose bright-red Metro joined the little convoy of vehicles half an hour later. Briefly She and Morse conversed. After which, with delicate hands, she performed a few delicate tasks; while Morse walked slowly from the scene, along a track betweer a line of trees and the riverbank, up to a building housine the Falcon Rowing Club, some seventy yards upstream t his right. Here he stood looking around him, wondering earnestly what exactly he should be looking for.
After returning to the slipway, he took the Warden to one side and put to him some of the questions that were exer-cising his mind. Where perhaps might the corpse have been pushed into the river? How could the corpse have been conveyed to such a spot? In which direction, and how far, could the corpse have been conveyed by the prevailing flow of the waters?
The Warden proved to be intelligent and informative. Af-ter stressing the importance, in all such considerations, of time of year, weather conditions, river-temperature, volume of water, and frequency of fiver-traffic; after giving Morse a clear little lesson on buoyancy and flotation, he suggested a few likely answers. As follows.
The strong probability was that the body had not been shifted all that far by the prevailing flow; indeed, if it had been slightly more weighted down, the body might have rested permanently on the bottom; as things were, the body could well have been put into the river at a point just be-side the Falcon Rowing Club; certain it was that the body would not have drifted against the north-south movement of the tide. The only objection to such a theory was that it would have been an inordinately long way for anyone to carry such a weighty bundle. With the barrier locked down across the approach road to the slipway, no car (unless au-thorised) could even have reached the river at that point, let alone turned fight there and deposited a body sixty, seventy yards upstream.
Unless...
Well, there were just over a hundred members of the Riverside Club who possessed boats, who used the slipway fairly regularly, and who were issued with a key to the bar-tier.
Not infrequently (the Warden confessed) a boat-owner neglected to close the barrier behind him; or deliberately left it open for a colleague known to be sailing up behind.
And so... if the barrier happened to be left open--well, not much of a problem, was there?
'You know what I'd've done, Mr. Holmes, if I'd had to dispose of a body here?' Morse's eyes slowly rose to the top of Donnington Bridge, wbem public interest was, if anything, increasing, in spite of the makeshift screen which had now been erected around the body.
'You tell me.'
'I'd have driven here, about two o'clock in the morning, and pushed it over the bridge.'
'Helluva splash, you'd make,' said the Warden. 'Nobody around to hear it, though.'
'A few people around then, Inspector. You know who they are?'
Morse shook his head.
'Whree lots o' people, really: lovers, thieves, police.'
'Oh!' said Morse.
Twenty minutes later the young pathologist got to her feet the grim, grisly preliminary examination over.
'Mustn't do much more hem,' she reported. 'Been in the river between a week and a formight, I'd guess. Diffi-cult to say--he's pretty well preserved. Neat little job of packaging somebody did there. But we'll sort him out later.
)dl right?'
Morse nodded. 'We're in your hands.'
'Not much doubt he's been murdered, though--unless he died, then somebody stuck a knife in him, then wrapped him all up and put him in the river here.'
'Seems unlikely,' conceded Morse.
Dr. Hobson was packing up her equipment when Morse spoke again: 'You'll be sure not to touch the knife until--?'
'You've not got much faith in some of your colleagues, have you?'
She was an attractive young woman; and when first she had taken over from the sadly missed Max, Morse had
