‘Very illuminating,’ said Morse. ‘You say that not even the chairman would know the final results until a few hours before the lists are put up?’
Lewis nodded: ‘That’s right.’
‘But doesn’t that cock up just about everything?’
‘Unless, sir,’ Lewis now felt happy with himself, ‘she was way out at the top of the list- the star of the whole show, sort of thing.’
‘Mm. We could ring up the chairman?’
‘Which I have done, sir.’
It was Morse himself who was happy now. The penicillin was working its wonders, and he felt strangely content. ‘And she was the top of the list, of course?’
Lewis, too, knew that life was sometimes very good. ‘She was, sir. And if you want my opinion-’
‘Of course, I do!’
‘ – if this girl’s uncle or whatever turns out to own a sex-club in Soho, we’ve probably found the key to the case, and the sooner we get up there the better.’
‘You’ve got a good point there, Lewis. On the other hand it’s vital for one of us to stay here.’
‘Vital for me, I suppose?’
But Morse ignored the sarcasm, and adumbrated for the next half-hour to his sergeant a few of the stranger thoughts that had criss-crossed his brain throughout the day.
It was getting late now; and, when Lewis left, Morse was free once more to indulge his own thoughts. At one time his mind would leap like a nimble-footed Himalayan goat; at another, it would stick for minutes on end like a leaden-footed, diver in a sandbank. It was time to call it a day, that was obvious.
He was not quite finished, however, and before he left his office he did two things.
First, he amended his reconstruction of the fifth line of the tornm letter so that it now read:
both you and me. My ward, Jane Summers of Lonsdale
Second, he took a sheet of paper and wrote the following short piece (reproduced below as it appeared in the Oxford Mail the following day):
CLUE TO MURDER
Customers of Marks and Spencers in the Oxford area are being asked to join in the hunt for the murderer of a 60-year-old man found in the canal at Thrupp. The bloodstained socks on the body (not yet identified) have been traced as one of just 2,500 pairs distributed around a handful of M & S stores in the Oxford region. The socks were of navy-blue cotton, with two light blue rings round the tops. Anyone who might have any information is asked to ring Kidlington 4343.
Only after dictating this absurd news-item (comma included) did Morse finally leave his office that day to return to his bachelor flat. There he played through the first act of Die Walkure and began to make significant inroads into the bottle just purchased from Augustus Barnett. When, at midnight, he looked around for his pyjamas, he couldn’t quite remember why he had bothered the newspaper editor; yet he knew that when a man was utterly at a loss about what he should do, it was imperative that he should do something- like the motorist stuck in a snowdrift who decided to activate his blinkers alternately.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Discussion of identity, and of death, leads the two detectives gradually nearer to the truth,
Lewis came in early the next morning (although not so early as Morse), and immediately got down to reading the medical report from the lab.
‘Gruesome all this, isn’t it, sir?’
‘Not read it,’ replied Morse.
‘You know, chopping a chap’s head off.’
‘It’s one way of killing someone. After all, the experiment has been tried on innumerable occasions and found to be invariably fatal.’
‘But the head was cut off after he was dead-says so here.’
‘I don’t give two monkeys how he was killed. It’s the why that we’ve got to sort out. Why did someone chop his head off-just tell me that, for a start.’
‘Because we’d have identified him, surely. His teeth would have been there and-’
‘Come off it! Helluva job that’d be, hawking some dental chart round a few million dentists-’
‘Thousands, you mean.’
‘ – and perhaps he didn’t have any teeth, like sometimes I wish I hadn’t.’
‘It says here that this chap might have been killed somewhere else and taken out to the canal later.’
‘So?’
‘What do people usually get carried around in?’ asked Lewis.
‘Cars?’ (Morse hardly enjoyed being catechized himself.)
‘Exactly! So if the body was too big to get into the boot of the car____________________’
‘You cut him down to size.’
‘That’s it. It’s like one of those ghost things, sir. You sort of tuck the head underneath the arm.”
‘Where’s the head now, then?’
‘Somewhere in the canal.’
‘The frogmen haven’t found it.’
‘Heads are pretty heavy, though. It’s probably stuck way down in the mud.’
‘What about the hands, Lewis? You reckon we’re going to find them neatly folded next to the head? Or is some poor little beggar going to find them in his fishing-net?’
‘You don’t seem to think we’re going to find them, sir.’
Morse was showing signs of semi-exasperation. ‘You’re missing the bloody point, Lewis! I’m not asking where they are. I’m asking why someone chopped them off.’
‘Same as before. Must be because someone could have identified them. He may have had a tattoo on the back of his wrist or something.’
Morse sat quite still. He knew even then that Lewis had made a point of quite extraordinary significance, and his mind, like some downhill skier, had suddenly leaped into the air across a ridge and landed neatly upon a track of virgin snow…
Lewis’s voice seemed to reach his ears as if through a wadge of tightly packed cotton wool. ‘And what about the legs, sir. Why do you think they were chopped off?’
‘You mean you know?’ Morse heard himself saying.
‘Hardly that, sir. But it’s child’s play these days’ for the forensic boys to find a hundred-and-one things on clothes, isn’t it? Hairs and threads and all that sort of thing-’
‘Even if it’s been in water for a few days?’
‘Well, it might be more difficult then, I agree. But all I’m saying is that if we knew whose the body was-’
‘We do, Lewis. You can be sure of that- surer than ever. It’s Browne-Smith’s.’
‘All right. If it’s Browne-Smith’s body, then we shan’t have much trouble in finding out if it’s Browne-Smith’s suit, shall we?’
Morse was frowning in genuine puzzlement. ‘You’re losing me, Lewis.’
‘All I’m trying to say, sir, is that if someone carefully chopped off this fellow’s head and his hands to stop us finding out who he was-’
‘Yes?’
‘ – well, I don’t reckon he would have left the fellow dressed in his own suit.’
‘So someone dressed the corpse in someone else’s suit, is that it?’
‘Yes. You see, a lot of people could wear each other’s jackets. I mean, I could wear yours-you’re a bit fatter than I am round the middle, but it’d fit in a way. And with a jacket in the water a few days, it’d probably shrink a bit anyway, so no one’s going to notice too much. But-’ and here Lewis paused dramatically ‘-if people start wearing each other’s trousers, sir-well, you could find a few problems, couldn’t you? They might be too long, or too short; and it wouldn’t be difficult for anyone to see almost immediately that the suit was someone else’s. Do you see what I mean? I think the dead man must have been several inches shorter, or several inches taller, than the fellow whose suit he was dressed in! And that’s why the legs were chopped off. So as I see it, sir, if we can find out whose suit it is, we shall know one thing for certain: the owner of the suit isn’t the corpse-he’s probably the murderer!’