important personage with carefully coiffured grey hair and carefully clipped
diction.
'I'm thinking of leaving my body to the hospital.'
'You've come to the right place.'
What's the drill? '
She took a form from a drawer.
'Just fill this in.'
'Is that all?'
'Make sure you tell your wife and your children and your GP. You'll avoid
quite a few problems that way.'
'Thank you.'
'Of course, I ought to tell you we may not want your body. The situation
does, er, fluctuate. But you'd expected that.'
'Oh yes, I'd expected that,' said Morse.
'And you must make sure you die somewhere fairly locally. We can't come and
collect you from Canada, you know.'
Perhaps it was a bleak joke.
'No, of course not.'
It had been a joyless experience for Morse, who now walked slowly down St
Giles' towards The Randolph. He'd thought at the very least they'd have
shown a little gratitude. Instead, he felt as though they were doing him a
favour by agreeing (provisionally! ) to accept a corpse that would surely be
presenting apprentice anatomists and pathologists with some
appreciably interesting items: liver, kidneys, lungs, pancreas, heart. .
In the Chapters' Bar, Ailish Hurley, his favourite barmaid, greeted him in
her delightful Trish brogue; and two pints of bitter later, as he walked
round into Magdalen Street and almost immediately caught a bus back up to the
top of the Banbury Road, he felt that the world was a happier place than it
had been half an hour earlier.
Once home, he treated himself to a smallish Glenfiddich, deciding that his
liquid intake of calories that lunchtime would nicely balance his dosage of
insulin. Yes, things were looking up, and particularly so since the phone
hadn't rung all day. What a wonderful thing it would be to go back to the
days pre telephone (mobile and immobile alike), pre FAX, pre e-mail!
And, to cap it all, he'd bought himself a video in front of which, in mid
afternoon, he'd fallen fairly soundly asleep, though at some point
half-hearing, as he thought, a slippery flop through the letter-box.
It was an hour later when he opened the envelope and read Dixon's notes on
Simon Harrison; on Paddy Flynn; on Mrs Holmes.
Interesting!
Interesting!
Interesting!
And very much as he'd thought. .
Only one thing was worrying him slightly. Why hadn't Lewis been in touch?
He didn't want Lewis to get in touch but . . . perhaps he did want Lewis
to get in touch. So he rang Lewis himself only to discover that the phone
was out of order. Or was it? He banged the palm of his right hand against
his forehead. He'd rung Dixon early that morning from the bedroom; then he'd
had to go downstairs to check an address
in the phone book, finishing the
call there, and forgetting to replace the receiver in the bedroom. He'd done
it before. And he'd do it again. It was not a matter of any great moment.
He'd ring Lewis himself not that he had anything much to say to him; not for
the minute anyway.
He was about to pick up the phone when the door-bell rang.
266
chapter fifty-eight It remains quite a problem to play the clarinet with
false teeth, because there is great difficulty with the grip (this may even
result in the plate being pulled out! ). In addition there are problems
with the breathing, because it is difficult to project a successful airstream
(Paul Harris, Clarinet Basics) 'been trying to get you all day, sir. '
'I've had other things to do, you know.'
'You just said you'd wanted a rest day.'
'Come in! Fancy a quick noggin?'
Lewis hesitated.
'Why not?'
'Ye gods! You must have had a bad day or was it a good day?'
'I've had a good day, and so have you.'
Morse now listened quietly to the extraordinary news from Andrews, though
without any sign of triumphalism.
Equally quietly he slowly read through Lewis's typed reports. Then read them
a second time.
'Your orthography has come on enormously since they put that spell- check
system into the word-processor.'
'Don't you have any problems with spellings sometimes?'
'Only with ' proceed'.'
'Where does this all leave us, sir?'
'Things are moving fast.'
'We're getting near the end, you
