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“Nah! Course I couldn’t. I knew roughly what it was all about, but we just Oped it’d throw a few spanners in the works — you know, sort of muddle everybody a bit.”

The Governor stood up. “Tell me one thing before we go. How on earth did you get all that blood to pour over your head?”

Evans suddenly looked a little happier. “Clever, sir. Very clever, that was — ’ow to get a couple o’ pints of blood into a cell, eh? When there’s none there to start off with, and when, er, and when the ‘invigilator,’ shall we say, gets searched before ’e comes in. Yes, sir. You can well ask about that, and I dunno if I ought to tell you. After all, I might want to use that particular—”

“Anything to do with a little rubber ring for piles, perhaps?”

Evans grinned feebly. “Clever, though, wasn’t it?”

“Must have been a tricky job sticking a couple of pints—”

“Nah! You’ve got it wrong, sir. No problem about that.”

“No?”

“Nah! It’s the clotting, you see. That’s the big trouble. We got the blood easy enough. Pig’s blood, it was — from the slaughter’ouse in Kidlington. But to stop it clotting you’ve got to mix yer actual blood” (Evans took a breath) “with one tenth of its own volume of 3.8 per cent trisodium citrate! Didn’t know that, did you, sir?”

The Governor shook his head in a token of reluctant admiration. “We learn something new every day, they tell me. Come on, m’lad.”

Evans made no show of resistance, and side by side the two men walked slowly down the stairs.

“Tell me, Evans. How did you manage to plan all this business? You’ve had no visitors — I’ve seen to that. You’ve had no letters—”

“I’ve got lots of friends, though.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Me German teacher, for a start.”

“You mean—? But he was from the Technical College.”

“Was ’e?” Evans was almost enjoying it all now. “Ever check up on ’im, sir?”

“God Almighty! There’s far more going on than I—”

“Always will be, sir.”

“Everything ready?” asked the Governor as they stood by the reception desk.

“The van’s out the front, sir,” said the pretty blonde receptionist. Evans winked at her; and she winked back at him. It almost made his day.

A silent prison officer handcuffed the recaptured Evans, and together the two men clambered awkwardly into the back seat of the prison van.

“See you soon, Evans.” It was almost as if the Governor were saying farewell to an old friend after a cocktail party.

“Cheerio, sir. I, er, I was just wonderin’. I know your German’s pretty good, sir, but do you know any more o’ these modern languages?”

“Not very well. Why?”

Evans settled himself comfortably on the back seat, and grinned happily. “Nothin’, really. I just ’appened to notice that you’ve got some O-level Italian classes comin’ up next September, that’s all.”

“Perhaps you won’t be with us next September, Eivans.”

James Roderick Evans appeared to ponder the Governor’s words deeply. “No. P’r’aps I won’t,” he said.

As the prison van turned right from Chipping Norton on to the Oxford road, the hitherto silent prison officer unlocked the handcuffs and leaned forward towards the driver. “For Christ’s sake get a move on! It won’t take ’em long to find out—”

“Where do ye suggest we make for?” asked the driver, in a broad Scots accent.

“What about Newbury?” suggested Evans.

Dead as a dodo

“Why,” said the Dodo, “the best way to explain it is to do it.” (And as you might like to try the thing yourself, some winter day, I will tell you how the Dodo managed it.)

(Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland)

It was more from necessity than from kindliness, just after 5 P.M. on a rain-soaked evening in early February 1990, that Chief Inspector Morse of the Thames Valley Police leaned over and opened the Jaguar’s near-side door. One of his neighbours from the North Oxford bachelor flats was standing at the bus stop, was getting very wet — and was staring hard at him.

“Most kind!” said Philip Wise, inserting his kyphotic self into the passenger seat.

Morse grunted a vague acknowledgement as the car made a few further slow yards up the Banbury Road in the red-tail-lighted queue, his wipers clearing short-lived swaths across the screen. Only three quarters of a mile to go, but at this time of day twenty minutes would be par for the progressively paralytic crawl to the flats. Never an easy conversationalist himself — indeed, known occasionally to lapse into total aphasia when driving a car — Morse was glad that Wise was doing all the talking. “Something quite extraordinary’s happened to me,” said the man in the dripping mackintosh.

In retrospect, Morse was aware that he’d listened, at least initially, with no more than polite passivity. But listen he had done.

Philip Wise had gone up to Exeter College, Oxford, in October 1938; and in due course his linguistic abilities (particularly in German) had ensured for him, when war broke out a year later, a cushy little job in an Intelligence Unit housed on the outskirts of Bicester. For two years he had lived there in a disagreeable and draughty Nissenhut; and when the chance came of his taking digs back in Oxford, he’d jumped at it. Thus it was that in October 1941 he had moved into Crozier Road, a sunless thoroughfare just off the west of St. Giles’; and it was there that he’d first met Miss Dodo Whitaker (“Only the one ‘t’, Inspector”) who had a tiny top-floor bedsitter immediately above his own room in the grimy four-storey property that stood at number 14.

Why on earth she’d been saddled with a name like “Dodo,” he’d never discovered — nor enquired; but she was certainly a considerably livelier specimen than the defunct Didus ineptus of Mauritius. Although physically hardly warranting any second glance, especially in the wartime “Utility” boiler-suit she almost invariably wore, she had the inestimable merit of being interesting. And sometimes, over half a glass of mild beer in the ill-lit bar at the rear of the Bird and Baby, her wonted nervousness would disappear, and in her rather deep, husky voice she would talk with knowledge, volubility, and wit, about the class-structure, about the progress of the war — and about music. Yes, above all about music. The pair of them had joined the Record Library, thereafter spending a few candle-lit evenings together in Dodo’s room listening to everything from Vivaldi to Wagner. On one occasion, Wise had almost been on the verge of telling her of the Platonic-plus pleasure he was beginning to experience in her company.

Almost.

Dodo had a brother called Ambrose who now and then managed to get a weekend leave-pass and come to stay with Dodo, usually (though quite unofficially) sleeping on the floor of her single room. Almost immediately, Philip Wise and Ambrose Whitaker became firm friends, spending (somewhat to Dodo’s annoyance) rather too many hours together drinking whisky — a commodity plentiful enough, if over-priced, in the Bird and Baby, but a rare one in the wilds of Bodmin, where Ambrose, with two stripes on each arm, spent his days initiating recruits into the mysteries of antiquated artillery pieces. He was a winsome, albeit somewhat raffish, sort of fellow whose attraction to alcohol apparently eclipsed even his love of music (Dodo spoke of Ambrose, amongst other things, as a virtuoso on the piano). Those weekends had flashed by, with Wise far too soon finding himself walking across Gloucester Green to see his friend off at the Great Western station late on Sunday afternoons.