At the Headington roundabout Lewis was debating whether to call in for a few minutes and tell the missus he was safely home. But he didn’t. He knew the chief would be waiting.
During the previous two days Morse had hardly over-exerted himself, fully recognizing his own incompetence in such matters as mounting a man-hunt or supervising the search (yes -yet another one!) of the waters out at Thrupp. But he had done two things, in each case retracing the ground that Lewis had trodden before him. First, he had visited the Blood Transfusion Centre at the Churchill Hospital, where he asked to look through the current records; where after only a couple of minutes he nodded briefly; where he then asked to see the records for the previous five years, in this second instance spending rather longer before nodding again, pushing the drawers of the filing-cabinet to, thanking the clerk, and departing. Second, he’d driven down to the Examination Schools, where he spent more than an hour with the Curator, finally thanking him, too, and leaving with the contented look of a man who has found what he sought. Now, again, as he sat at his desk that Saturday morning, he looked contented -and with even better reason, for the call had come through at 9.30. He’d known there must be something in the waters of the Thrupp canal…
The sight of Lewis gladdened him even more. ‘Get some egg and chips while you were away?’
Lewis grinned. ‘Once or twice.’
‘Well, let’s hear from you. By the way, I hope you’ve noticed hardly any swelling at all now, is there?’
Twenty minutes later the phone rang. ‘Morse here. Can I help you?’ Lewis observed that the Chief Inspector’s pale, ill-shaven face was tautening as he listened. Listened only; till finally he said, ‘I’ll be there as soon as I can,’ and with a look of unwonted agitation slowly put the receiver down.
‘What was all that about, sir?’
‘That was London on the line- Westerby’s just been found -he’s been murdered-they found him this morning-in a bedroom near Paddington-strangled with packing-twine.’
It was Lewis’s turn now to reflect with puzzlement on this troublous news. From what Morse had told him earlier, the case was almost over-with just a few arrests to come. So what on earth did this mean? But already Morse was on his feet and looking in his wallet.
‘Look, Lewis! You just get those reports of yours sorted out and typed up -then get off home and see the missus. Nothing more for you today.’
‘You sure there’s nothing I can do?’
‘Not got a couple of fivers to spare, have you?’
After Morse had left, Lewis rang his wife to say that he’d be in for a latish lunch. Then, beginning to get his documents in order, he reached for Chambers’! Dictionary: Morse was a fanatic about spelling.
The phone rang ten minutes later: it was the police surgeon.
‘Not there? Where the ‘ell’s he got to, then?’
‘One or two complications in the case, I’m afraid.’
‘Well, just tell the old bugger, will you, that the leg he’s found would make the height about 5 foot 10 inches – 5 foot 11 inches. All right? Doesn’t help all that much, perhaps, but it might cut out a few of the little ‘uns.’
‘What leg?’ Lewis felt utterly confused.
‘Didn’t he tell you? Huh! Secretive sod, isn’t he’? He’s had half a dozen divers out this last couple of days… Still, he was right, I suppose. Lucky, though! Just tell him anyway-if he comes back.’
‘Perhaps he knew all the time,’ said Lewis quietly.
The phone was going all the time now. A woman’s voice was put through from the operator: but, no, she would speak to no one but Morse, Then Strange (himself, this time), who slammed down the receiver after learning that Morse had gone to London.
Then another woman’s voice-one Lewis thought he almost recognized: but she, too, refused to deal with any underling. Finally, a call came through from Dickson, on reception; a call that caused Lewis to jolt in amazement.
‘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.