‘You sure!’

‘Yep. Swindon police, it was. Said he was dead when the ambulance got there.’

‘But they’re sure it’s him?’

‘That’s what they said, Sarge-sure as eggs is eggs.’ Lewis put down the phone. It would be impossible to contact Morse in transit: he never drove anything other than his privately owned Lancia. Would Morse be surprised? He’d certainly looked surprised about an hour ago on learning of the death of Westerby. So what about this? What about Dickson’s latest information? That the body just recovered from a shallow embankment on the Didcot-Swindon railway-line was certainly that of Oliver Browne-Smith, late fellow of Lonsdale College, Oxford.

About the time that Lewis received his last call that morning, Morse was turning left at Hanger Lane on to the North Circular. He’d still (he knew) a further half-hour’s driving in front of him, and with a fairly clear road he drove in a manner that verged occasionally upon the dangerous. But already he was too late. It had been a quarter of an hour earlier that the ambulance had taken away the broken body that lay directly beneath a seventh-storey window in Berrywood Court, just along the Seven Sisters Road.

Later the same afternoon, a business executive, immaculately dressed in a pin-striped suit, walked into the farthest cubicle of the gentlemen’s toilet at the Station Hotel, Paddington. When he pulled the chain, the cistern seemed to be working perfectly, as though the presence of a pair of human hands as yet was causing little problem to the flushing mechanism.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

In which Morse and Lewis retrace their journey as far as the terminus of the first milestone.

It was with growing impatience that Lewis waited from 8.15 a.m. onwards. Morse had arrived back in Oxford late the previous evening and had called in to see him, readily accepting Mrs Lewis’s offer to cook him something, and thereafter settling down to watch television with the joyous dedication of a child. He had refused to answer Lewis’s questions, affirming only that the sun would almost certainly rise on the morrow, and that he would be in the office-early.

At 9 a.m. there was still no sign of him, and for the umpteenth time Lewis found himself thinking about the astonishing fact that, of the four dubiously associated and oddly assorted men who had played their parts in the case, not one of them could now lay the slightest claim to be mistaken for the corpse that still lay in Max’s deep-refrigeration unit: Browne-Smith had died of a brain haemorrhage beside a railway-track; Westerby had been strangled to death in a cheap hotel near Paddington; Alfred Gilbert had been found murdered in a room a couple of floors above Westerby’s flat in Cambridge Way; and Albert Gilbert had thrown himself from a seventh-storey window in Berry-wood Court. So the same old question still remained unanswered, and the simple truth was that they were running out of bodies.

But there were one or two items that Lewis had discovered for himself, and at 9.30 a.m. he browsed through his neatly typed reports once more. He’d learned, for example-from the manager of the topless bar-that Browne-Smith seemed to have been unaccountably slow in identifying himself by the agreed words: ‘It’s exactly twelve o’clock, I see.’ Then (after applying a good deal of pressure) he’d learned from the same source that the “cine” equipment had definitely not been returned to the bar the next day; in fact, it had been nearer a week before any of the bar-clients could indulge their voyeuristic fantasies again. There was a third fact, too: that neither the manager nor any of his hostesses had previously set eyes upon the man with the brownish beard who had sat beside the bar that fateful Friday when Browne-Smith had been tempted down from Oxford…

Morse finally arrived just before 9.45 a.m., his lower lip caked with blood.

‘Sorry to be late. Just had her out. No trouble. Hardly felt a thing. “Decayed beyond redemption”-that’s what the little fellow said.’ He sat down expansively in his chair. ‘Well, where do you want me to start?’

‘At the beginning, perhaps?”

‘No. Let’s start before then, and get a bit of the background clear. While you were off gallivanting in London, Lewis, I called in to see your pal at the Examination Schools, and I asked him just one thing: I asked him what he thought were the potential areas for any crooked dealings in this whole business of the final lists. And he made some interesting suggestions. First, of course, there’s the possibility of someone getting results ahead of the proper time. Now this isn’t perhaps one of the major sins; but, as you told me yourself, all that waiting can become a matter of great anxiety: sometimes perhaps enough anxiety to make one or two people willing to pay-pay in some way-for learning results early. That’s only the start of it, though. You see if there’s some undergraduate who’s nearly up to the first-class honours bracket, he’s put forward for a viva-voce examination, but he’s never told which particular part of his work he’s going to be re-examined in. Now, if he did know, he’d be able to swot up on that side of things and get ready to catch all the hand-grenades they lobbed at him. Agreed? But let’s go on a stage further. Our budding “first” would be an even shorter-odds favourite if he knew the name of the man who was going to viva him: he could soon find out this fellow’s hobby-horses, read his books, and generally tune himself in to the right wavelength. Which leads on to the final consideration. If he did know exactly who it was who was going to settle his future, there’d always be the potential for a bit of bribery, the offer of money in return for that glowing recommendation for a “first”. You see, Lewis? The whole process is full of loop-holes! I’m not saying anyone wriggles through ‘em: I’m just telling you they’re there. And, depending on what the rewards are, there might be a few susceptible dons who could feel tempted to go along with one or two suggestions, don’t you think?’

Lewis nodded. ‘Perhaps a few might, I suppose.’

‘No “perhaps”, Lewis- just a few did!’

Again Lewis nodded-rather sadly-and Morse continued.

‘Then we found a corpse with a great big question-mark on the label round its neck.’

‘It hadn’t got a neck, sir.’

‘That’s true.’

‘And there isn’t a question-mark any longer?’

‘Patience, Lewis!’

‘But we had the letter to go on.’

‘Even that, though. If we hadn’t had a line on things to start with, the whole thing would have been a load of gobbledygook. Would you have made much of it without-’

‘I wouldn’t have made anything of it, anyway.’

‘Don’t underestimate yourself, Lewis-let me do it for you!’

‘What about that blood-donor business?’

‘Ah! Now if you’ve been a donor for a good many years you get a lot of little tiny marks-’

‘As a matter of fact I got my gold badge last year-for fifty times, that is-in case you didn’t know.’

‘Oh!’

‘So I don’t really need you to tell me much about that.’

‘But you do. Do you know when you have to pack up giving blood? What age, I mean?^’

‘No.’

‘Well, you bloody should! Don’t you read any of the literature? It’s sixty-five.’

Lewis let the information sink in. ‘You mean that Browne-Smith wouldn’t have been on the current records…’

‘Nor Westerby. They were both over sixty-five.”

‘Ye-es. I should have looked in the old records.’

‘It’s all right. I’ve already checked. Browne-Smith was a donor until a couple of years ago. Westerby never: he’d had jaundice and that put him out of court, as I’m sure you’ll know!’