“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 copassengers 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 office there. A manageress, as it happened, who quickly and competently answered his questions about the system operating in West Oxfordshire.
Yes, since the Burford office had been closed, Carter-ton 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 schooclass="underline" 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 inquiries, 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, oversmeared prints offered no hope: the envelope itself must have been handled by the original correspondent, by the collecting postman, 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 getting in some underemployed graphologist to estimate the correspondent’s potential criminality? To seek possible signs of his (?) childhood neglect, parental abuse, sexual perversion, drugs...?
Forget it?
Forget it!
The typewriter? God! How many typewriters were there to be found in Oxfordshire? In any case, Strange held the view that in the early years of the new millennium the streets of the UK’s major cities would be lined with past-sell-by-date typewriters and VDUs and computers and the rest. And how was he to find an obviously ancient typewriter for God’s sake, one with a tired and overworked ribbon of red and black? He might as well try to trace the animal inventory from the Ark.
Forget it?
Forget it!
What Strange needed now was new ideas.
What Strange needed now was Morse to be around.
Chapter eleven
Take notice, lords, he has a loyal breast,
For you have seen him open ’t. Read o ’er this;
And after, this: and then to breakfast with
What appetite you have.
Detective Sergeant Lewis of the Thames Valley CID kept himself pretty fit — very fit, really — in spite of a diet clogged daily with cholesterol. Quite simply, he had long held the view that some things went with other things. He had often heard, for example, that caviar was best washed down with iced champagne, although in truth his personal experience had occurred somewhat lower down the culinary ladder — with fried eggs necessarily complemented with chips and HP sauce; and (at breakfast time) with bacon, buttered mushrooms, well-grilled tomatoes, and soft fried bread. And, indeed, such was the breakfast that Mrs. Lewis had prepared at 7:15 A.M. on Monday, July 20, 1998.
It will be of no surprise, therefore, for the reader to learn that Sergeant Lewis felt pleasingly replete when, just before 8 A.M., he drove from Headington down the Ring Road to the Cutteslowe roundabout, where he turned north up to Police HQ at Kidlington. No problems. All the traffic was going the other way, down to Oxford City.
He was looking forward to the day.
He’d known that working with Morse was never going to be easy, but he couldn’t disguise the fact that his own service in the CID had been enriched immeasurably because of his close association, over so many years now, with his curmudgeonly, miserly, oddly vulnerable chief.
And now? There was the prospect of another case: a big, fat, juicy puzzle — like the first page of an Agatha Christie novel.
Most conscientiously, therefore (after Strange had spoken to him), Lewis had read through as much of the archive material as he could profitably assimilate; and as he drove along that bright summer’s morning he had a reasonably clear picture of the facts of the case, and of the hitherto ineffectual glosses put upon those facts by the CID’s former investigating officers.
From the very start (as Lewis learned) several theories, including of course burglary, had been entertained, although none of such theories had made anywhere near complete sense. There had been no observable signs of any struggle, for example. And although Yvonne Harrison was found naked, handcuffed, and gagged, she had apparently not been raped or tortured. In addition, it appeared most unlikely that she had been forcibly stripped of the clothes she’d been wearing, since the skimpy lace bra, the equally skimpy lace knickers, the black blouse, and the minimal white skirt were found neatly folded beside her bed.