The Way Through The Woods

Michaels standing and staring after them, a look of considerable puzzlement on his face.

They were almost the first customers in the White Hart, and Morse ordered a pint of Best Bitter for himself.

'Which would you prefer, sir? We've got-'

'Whatever the locals drink.'

'Straight glass or handle?'

'Straight. Optical illusion, I know, but it always looks as if it holds more.'

'Both hold exactly-'

But Morse had turned to Lewis: 'You'd better not have too much. You're driving, remember.'

'Orange juice – that'll be fine, sir.'

'And, er…' Morse fiddled in his trouser pockets. 'I don't seem to have any coins on me. I'm sure the landlord doesn't want to change a twenty this early in the day.'

'Plenty of change-' began the landlord, but Morse had turned to the wall with his pint and was studying a medieval map of the old parishes around Wytham…

At the time Morse was lifting his first pint, Alasdair McBryde was standing beside reception at the Prince William Hotel in Spring Street, just opposite Paddington railway station. After leaving Oxford -with what a frenetic burst of mental and physical energy! – he had driven the swiftly, chaotically loaded van via the M40 up to London, where he'd parked it in a lock-up garage off the Seven Sisters Road before taking the tube, and a suitcase, to Paddington – to the Prince William. It gave him considerable confidence that he could, if necessary, be standing in front of the departure board of the mainline BR station within one minute of stepping outside this hotel – or if need be by jumping outside it, for the sole window of his en suite bedroom was no more than six feet above the pavement.

The hotel proprietor was a small, perpetually semi-shaven Italian who spent half his working hours at reception studying the racing columns of the Sporting Life. He looked up as McBryde took out his wallet.

'You stay another day, Mr Mac?'

'Mc' had been the only part he could read of the semi-legible scrawl with which his guest had signed the register. And there was no typed name on any cheque to help; no cheque at all – just the two crisp twenty-pound notes he received each day for the following night's B & B, with the repeated injunction (as now) from Mr Mac: 'Give the change to the breakfast girl!' Not a big tip though, for the daily rate was ?39.50.

Soon Luigi Bertolese was again reading through the runners in the 2 p.m. at Sandown Park, and looking especially at a horse there named 'Full English', with some moderate form behind him. He looked down too at one of the twenties, and wondered if the Almighty had whispered a tip in his ear.

*

'So you see, old friend? You see?' Morse beamed hugely as he finished his second pint. 'It was all due you Again!'

Lewis could see: for once was able to see perfectly clearly. And this for him was the joy of working with the strange man called Morse; a man who was somehow able to extricate himself from the strait-jacketing circumstances of any crime and to look at that crime from some exterior vantage point. It wasn't fair really! Yet Lewis was very proud to know that he, with all his limitations, could sometimes (as now) be the catalytic factor in the curious chemistry of Morse's mind.

'You having any lunch, sir?'

Morse had been talking for half an hour or so, quietly, earnestly, excitedly. It was now 12.15 pm

'No. Today I'll take my calories in liquid form.'

'Well, I think I'll get myself-'

'Here!' Morse took the precious twenty-pound note from his wallet. 'Don't go mad with it! Get yourself a cheese sandwich or something – and another pint for me.' He pushed his glass across the slightly rickety table. 'And get a beer-mat or something and stick it under one of these legs.'

For a few seconds as he stood at the bar Lewis looked back at his chief. Several other customers were now seated around, and one youth looked almost embarrassingly blissful as he gazed into the bespectacled eyes of the rather plain young woman sitting beside him. He looked, Lewis decided, almost as happy as Chief Inspector Morse.

chapter forty-five

His addiction to drinking caused me to censure Aspern Williams for a while, until I saw as true that wheels must have oil unless they run on nylon bearings. He could stay still and not want oil, or move – if he could overcome the resistance

(Peter Champkin,, The Waking Life of Aspern Williams)

in her laboratory, Dr Laura Hobson had now begun to write her report, after resuming her analysis of the Wytham bones. Not really 'resuming' though, for the bones had hardly left her over the weekend. Quite early on she'd spotted the slight groove on the lower-left rib: it might have been the sharp incision of a rodent's tooth, of course; but it looked so distinctive, that thinly V-shaped mark. It was almost as if someone had deliberately made a notch in the rib – with a knife or similar instrument. It might be important? But no, that was the wrong way of looking at things. It might be important – no question mark; and Laura was oddly anxious to score a few Brownie-points on her first real enquiry. In any case she'd very much like to ingratiate herself a little with the strange policeman who had monopolized her thoughts these last few days. It was odd how you couldn't shake someone out of your mind, however hard you tried. And for Laura that weekend Morse should, she felt, have been reported to the Monopolies' Commission…

Once more she studied the scene-of-crime photographs, and she could identify quite easily the bone that was engaging her interest now. It had obviously lain in situ – not disseminated as so many of the others; and she felt fairly certain that the incision which her patient investigation had revealed was unlikely to have been caused by the tooth of some wild creature, tearing away a morsel from the still-fleshed bones. Could the notch have been caused by a knife, she wondered: after all, she was working, was she not, upon a murder'? So if it wasn't the foxes or the badgers or the birds…Again she adjusted the focus of the powerful microscope upon the top of the rib-bone, but she knew there could never be any definite forensic findings here. The very most she would suggest in her report was that the marked incision made slantwise across the top of the bottom-left rib-bone might possibly have been caused by some incisor tooth, or more probably some sharp implement – a knife, say. And if it were a knife that had been driven through the lower chest, it could well be, probably was, the cause of death. The body would have bled a good deal, with the blood saturating the clothing (if any?) and then seeping into the soil beneath the body; and not even the intervening months of winter, not even the last of the leaves and the accumulating debris from the growth all round, would ever completely obliterate such traces. That angle, though, was being pursued in the University Agricultural Research Station (coincidentally situated out at Wytham) and doubtless she would be hearing something soon. So what, though? Even if there were clear signs of blood to be found there, at the very most she would have a blood group, and Morse would be able to assume that the body had been murdered in situ. Big deal.

Morse! She'd heard he was a bit of a stickler for spelling and punctuation, and she wanted to make as good an impression as she could. Halfway down the first page of her report she was doubtful about one word, and spying a