CHAPTER ELEVEN
Wherein such diverse activities as dentistry, crossword-solving, and pike-angling make their appropriate contributions to Morse’s view of things.
‘You’ve not been looking after these too well, have you, Mr Morse?’
Since at this point, however, the dapperly dressed dentist had his patient’s mouth opened to its widest extremities, Morse was able only to produce a strained grunt from his swollen larynx.
‘You ought to cut out the sugar,’ continued the dentist, surveying so many signs of incipient decay, ‘and some dental floss wouldn’t come amiss with all this… Ah! I reckon that’s the little fellow that’s been causing you-’ He tapped one of the lower-left molars with a blunt instrument, and the recumbent Morse was almost levitated in agony. ‘Ye-es, you’ve got a nasty little infection there… does that hurt?’
Again Morse’s body jumped in agonizing pain, before the chair was raised to a semi-vertical slant and he was ordered to ‘rinse out”.
‘You’ve got a nasty little infection there, as I say…’
Everything with the dentist appeared to warrant the epithet ‘little’, and Morse would have been more gratified had it been suggested to him that he was the victim of a massive great bloody infection stemming from an equally massive great bloody tooth that even now was throbbing mightily. He continued to sit in the chair, but the dentist himself was writing something across at his desk.
‘Aren’t you going to take it out?’ asked Morse.
The dentist continued writing. ‘We try to preserve as many teeth as we can these days, you know. And it’s particularly important for you not to lose many more. You haven’t got too many left, have you?’
‘But it’s giving me -’
‘Here’s a prescription for a little pencillin. Don’t worry! It’ll soon sort out the infection and get that little swelling down. Then if you come and see me again in-a week, shall we say?’
‘A week?
‘I can’t do anything till then. If I took it out now-well, let’s say you’d have to be a brave man, Mr Morse.’
‘Would I?’ said Morse weakly. He finally rose from the chair, and his eyes wandered to the shelf of plaster-casts of teeth behind the dentist’s desk, the upper jaws resting on the lower, a few canines missing here, a few molars there. It all seemed rather obscene to Morse, and reminded him of his junior-school history books, with their drawings of skulls labelled with such memorable names as Eoanthropus dawsoni, Pithecanthropus erectus, and the rest.
The dentist saw his interest and reached down a particularly ugly cast, snapping the jaws apart and together again like a ventriloquist at a dumb-show. ‘Remarkable things teeth, you know. No two sets of teeth can ever be the same. Each set-well, it’s unique, like fingerprints.’ He looked at the squalid lump of plastering with infinite compassion, and it seemed quite obvious that teeth obsessed not only his working life but his private soul as well.
Morse stood beside him, waiting for the prescription; and when the dentist got to his feet Morse became surprisingly aware of how small a man the dentist was. Had it been the white coat that had given him the semblance of being taller? Had it been the fact that the last thing Morse had earlier been interested in was whether the kindly man who’d readily agreed to see one of his most irregular clients was a dwarf or a giant? Yet there was something else, wasn’t there?
Morse’s mind suddenly grasped it as he stood waiting at the Summertown chemist’s. It had been when the dentist had been sitting at his desk-yes. Because the length of his back was that of a man of normal height; and so it must have been the legs…
‘Are you a pensioner, sir?’ asked the young assistant as she took his prescription. (My God! Could he really look as old as that?)
After an exhortation to stick religiously to the stated dosage, and also to be sure to complete the course, Morse was soon on his way to Kidlington, quite convinced now of the perfectly obvious fact that whoever had dismembered the corpse had been at desperate pains to conceal its identity.
Teeth? The murderer would have left a means of certain identification – ‘unique’, as his little torturer had said. Hands? If they had been deformed in any way, or one of them had? It was difficult for fellow humans to forget deformity. Legs? What if that exciting idea that had occurred to him at the chemist’s…
But he was at HQ now, and the need for instant action was at hand. He swallowed twice the specified dosage of tablets, told himself that the marvellous stuff was already engaged in furious conflict with the ‘little infection’, and finally greeted Lewis at 9.30 a.m.
‘You said you’d be here by eight, sir.’
‘Your lucky to see me at all!’ Morse snapped, as he unwrapped his scarf and bared his bulging jaw.
‘Bad tooth, sir?’
‘Not just bad, Lewis. It’s the worst bloody tooth in England!’
The missus always swears by-’
Forget what your missus says! She’s not a dentist, is she?’
So Lewis forgot it, and sat down silently.
Soon Morse was feeling better, and for an hour he discussed with Lewis both the letter and the curious thoughts that had been occurring to him.
‘Someone certainly seems to be making it difficult for us,’ said Lewis; and the sentence did little more than state in simple English the even simpler thought that had gradually dawned on Morse’s mind. But for Lewis life was full of surprises, since he now heard Morse ask him to repeat exactly that same sentence. And as he did so, Lewis saw the familiar sight of his chief looking out over the concreted yard, or wherever it was those eyes, unblinking, stared with more than a hint of deeper understanding.
‘Or it could be just the opposite,’ Lewis heard him mumble enigmatically.
‘Pardon, sir?’
‘Do you reckon a cup of coffee would upset this tooth of mine?’
‘Be all right, unless it’s too hot.’
‘Nip and get a couple of cups.”
After Lewis had gone, Morse unfolded The Times and looked at the crossword. 1 across: “He lived perched up, mostly in sites around East, shivering (6,8).” Anagram, obviously: “mostly in sites” round “e”. Yes! He quickly wrote in “Simon Stylites” -only to find himself one letter short. Of course! It was Simeon Stylites, and he was about to correct the letters, when he stopped.
It couldn’t be, surely!
He wrote a circle of letters in the bottom margin of the newspaper, crossed off a few letters, then a few more-and stopped again. Not only could it be, it was! What an extraordinary-
‘I told her to stick some extra cold milk in, sir.’
‘Did you sugar it?’
‘You do take sugar, don’t you?’
‘Bad for the teeth – surely you know that?’
‘Shall I go and-’
‘No-siddown. I’ve got something to show you. Oh God! This coffee’s cold!’
‘You haven’t done much of the crossword.’
‘Haven’t I?’ Morse was smiling serenely, and he thrust the paper across to Lewis who looked down uncomprehendingly at the almost illegible alterations in the top row of squares. But Lewis was happy. The chief was on to something- the chief was always on to something, and that was good. That’s why he enjoyed working with Morse. Being on the receiving end of all the unpredictability, all the irascibility, all the unfairness-it was a cheap price to pay for working with him. And now he whistled softly to himself as Morse explained the riddle of the circle of letters he had printed.