CHAPTER TWENTY

An extremely brief envoi to the first part of the case.

At five minutes to four the next morning, Morse awoke and looked at his bedside clock. It seemed quite impossible that it should be so early, for he felt completely refreshed. He got out of bed and drew the curtains, standing for several minutes looking down on the utterly silent road, only a hundred yards from Banbury Road roundabout… the road that led north out to Kidlington, and thence past the Thames Valley Police HQ up to the turn for Thrupp, where the waters would now be topping and plopping gently against the houseboats as they lay at fheir overnight moorings.

Morse went into the bathroom, noticed that his jaw was almost normal again, swallowed the last of the penicillin tablets and returned to bed, where he lay on his back, his hands behind his head… There were still many pieces of flotsam that needed to be salvaged before the wreck of a man’s life could wholly bereconstructed… salvaged from those canal waters -which changed their colour from green to grey to yellow to to white… Morse almost dozed off again, momentarily imagining that he saw the outlines of a cunningly plotted murder, with himself-yes, Morse!-at the centre of a beautifully calculated deception. Of one thing he was now utterly sure: that, quite contrary to Lewis’s happy convictions about the identity of the dead man, the man they had found was quite certainly not Dr Browne-Smith of Lonsdale.

Thereafter, Morse was impatient for the morning and for traffic noise and for the sight of people catching buses. Ovid, in the arms of his lover, had cried out to the midnight horses to gallop slow across the vault of heaven. But Morse was without a lover; and at a quarter to five he got up, made himself a cup of tea and looked out once again at the quiet street below, where he sensed a few vague flutterings and stirrings from the chrysalis of night.

And Morse sensed rightly. For the next morning, like Browne-Smith before him, he received a long letter; a strange and extremely exciting letter.

THE SECOND MILE

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Morse, having been put on the right track by the wrong clues, now finds his judgement almost wholly vindicated.

Morse opened the door of his office a few minutes after eight to find Lewis reading the Daily Mirror.

‘You seem very anxious to further our inquiries this morning, Lewis.’

Lewis folded up the newspaper. ‘I’m afraid you’ve made a bad mistake, sir.’

‘You mean you are busy on the case?’

‘Not only that, sir. As I say, you’ve made a bad mistake.’

‘Nonsense!’

‘I was trying to do the coffee-break crossword and there was a clue there that just said “Carthorse (anagram)”-’ ‘ “Orchestra”,’ interrupted Morse. ‘I know that, sir. But “Simon Rowbotham” is not an anagram of “O.M.A. Browne-Smith”!’

‘Of course it is!’ Morse immediately wrote down the letters, was checking them off one by one when suddenly he stopped. ‘My God! You’re right. There’s an “o” instead of an “e” isn’t there?’

‘It was only by chance I checked it when I was-’

But Morse wasn’t listening. Was he wrong, after all his mighty thoughts and bold deductions? Was Lewis right-with his simple minded assertion that the case was becoming quite unnecessarily complicated? He shook his head in some dismay. Perhaps (he clutched at straws), perhaps if he himself had made a mistake over an anagram, so might Browne-Smith have done in concocting a completely bogus name? But he couldn’t convince even himself for a second, and the truth was that he felt lost.

At eight-thirty the phone rang, an excited voice announcing itself as Constable Dickson.

‘I’ve just been reading last week’s Oxford Times, sir.’

‘Not on duty, I hope.’

‘I’m off duty, sir. I’m at home.’

‘Oh.’

‘I’ve found him!’

‘Found who?’

‘Simon Rowbotham. I was reading the angling page-and his name’s there. He came second in a fishing match out at King’s Weir last Sunday.’

‘Oh.’

‘He lives in Botley, so it says.’

‘I don’t give a sod if he lives in Bootle.’

‘Pardon, sir?’

‘Thanks for letting me know, anyway.’

‘Remember what you said about those doughnuts, sir?’

‘No, I forget,’ said Morse, and put the receiver down.

‘Shall I go out and see him?’ asked Lewis quietly.

‘What the hell good would that do?’ snapped Morse, thereafter lapsing into sullen silence.

Since it was marked “Strictly Private and Confidential”, the Registry had not opened the bulky white envelope, and it was lying there on Morse’s blue blotting-pad when later the two men returned from coffee. Inside the envelope was a further sealed envelope (addressed, like the outer cover, to Chief Inspector E. Morse), and a covering letter from the Manager of the High Street branch of Barclays Bank, dated 26th July. It read as follows:

Dear Sir,

We received the sealed envelope enclosed on Monday, 21st July, with instructions that it be posted to you personally on Saturday, 26th July. We trust you agree that we have discharged our obligation.

Yours faithfully…

Morse handed the note over to Lewis. ‘What do you make of that?’

‘Seems a lot of palaver to me, sir. Why not just post it straight to you?’

‘I dunno,’ said Morse. ‘Let’s hope it’s full of fivers.’

‘Aren’t you going to open it?’

‘Interesting,’ said Morse, apparently unhearing. ‘If this letter reached the bank on Monday, the 21st, it was probably written on Sunday, the 20th-and Max says that’s the likeliest day that someone put the corpse in the canal.’

‘But it’s probably nothing to do with the case.’

‘Well, we’ll soon know.’ Morse slit the envelope and began reading and apart from a solitary “My God!” (after the first few lines of the typewritten script) he read in utter silence, as totally engrossed, it seemed, as a dedicated pornophilist in a sex shop.

When he had finished the long letter, he wore that look of almost sickening self-satisfaction frequently found on the face of any man whose judgement has been called into question, but thereafter proved correct.

Lewis took the letter now, immediately turning to the last page. There’s no signature, sir.’

‘Read it-just read it, Lewis,’ said Morse blandly, as he reached for the phone and dialled the number of the bank.

‘Manager please’

‘He’s rather tied up at the minute. Could you-’

‘Constable of Oxfordshire here, lad. Just tell him to get to the phone please.’ (Lewis had by now read the first page of the letter.)

‘Can I help you?’ asked the manager.

‘I want to know whether Dr Browne-Smith-Dr O. M. A. Browne-Smith-of Lonsdale College is one of your clients.’

‘Yes, he is.’

‘We received a letter from you today, sir, and it’s my duty to] ask you if it was Dr Browne-Smith himself who asked you to forward it to us.’

‘Ah, the letter, yes. I hoped the Post Office wouldn’t keep yon waiting too long.’

‘You haven’t answered my question, sir.’

‘No, I haven’t. And I can’t, I’m afraid.’

‘I think you can, sir, and I think you will-because we’re caught up in a case of murder.’

‘Murder? You’re not-you’re not saying Dr Browne-Smith’s been murdered, surely?’