suppose, sir.'
'Does anyone ever/at/GCSE?'
'Could do with a bit more punctuation too, couldn't it?'
'Dunno. Not as much as Morse'd put in.'
'Who do you think
'The Ringer' is? '
'Ringer? One who rings, isn't it? Chap who's been ringing us up, like as
not.'
'Does the postmark help?'
'Oxford. Not that that means anything. It could have been posted anywhere
in our patch of the Cotswolds ... Carterton! Yes. That's where they take
the collections and do the sorting before bringing everything to Oxford.'
'Scores of villages though, sir.'
'Go and fetch Sergeant Dixon!'
'Know where he is?'
'Give you three guesses.'
'In the canteen?'
'In the canteen.'
'Eating a doughnut?'
'Doughnuts, plural.'
It was like some of the responses she'd learned so well from the Litany.
'I'll go and find him.'
'And send him straight to me.'
'The Lord be with you.'
'And with thy spirit.'
'You do go to church, sir!'
'Only for funerals.'
Sergeant Dixon was not so corpulent as Chief Superintendent Strange.
But there was not all that much in it; and the pair of them would have made
uncomfortable co-passengers in economy-class seating on an airline. Plenty
of room, though, as Dixon drove out alone to Carterton in a marked police
car. He'd arranged a meeting with the manager of the sorting 47
office
there. A manageress, as it happened, who quickly and competently answered
his questions about the system operating in West Oxfordshire.
Yes, since the Burfbrd office had been closed, Carterton had assumed postal
responsibility for a pretty wide area. Dixon was handed a printed list of
the Oxon districts now covered; was informed how many postmen were involved;
where the collection points were, and how frequently the boxes were emptied;
how and when the accumulated bags of mail were brought back to Carterton, and
how they were there duly sorted and categorized but not franked before being
sent on to Oxford.
'Any way a particular letter can be traced to a particular post- box?'
'No, none.'
'Traced to a particular village?'
'No.'
Dixon was not an officer of any great intellectual capacity; indeed Morse had
once cruelly described him as 'the lowest- watt bulb in the Thames Valley
Force'. He had only five years to go before retirement, and he knew that his
recent elevation to the rank of sergeant was as high as he could ever hope to
climb. Not too bad, though, for a man who had been given little
encouragement either from home or from school: if he'd made something of
himself he'd made something of himself himself, as he'd once put things. Not
the most elegant of sentences. But 'elegance' had never been a word
associated with Sergeant Dixon.
And yet, as he looked down at his outsize black boots, buffed and bulled, he
was thinking as hard as he'd thought for many a moon. He was fully aware of
the importance of his present enquiries, and he felt gratified to have been
given the job. How good it would be if he could impress his superiors
something (he knew) he'd seldom done in his heretofore somewhat nondescript
career.
So he took his time as he sat in that small postal office; took his time as
he wrote down a few words in his black notebook; then another few words; then
asked another question; then another. .
When finally he drove back to Oxford, Sergeant Dixon was feeling rather
pleased with himself.
That letter-cum-envelope was still exercising Strange's mind to its limits;
but there seemed no cause for excitement. In late morning he had driven down
to the Fingerprint Department at St Aldate's in Oxford only to learn that
there was little prospect of further enlightenment. The faint, over-smeared
prints offered no hope: the envelope itself must have been handled by the
original correspondent, by the collecting post- man, by the sorter, by the
delivering postman, by a member of the HQ post department, by Strange's
secretary, by Strange himself and probably by a few extra intermediary
persons to boot. How many fingers there, pray?
Forget it?
Forget it!
Handwriting? Only those red-felt capitals on the cover. Was it worth
