“Who knifes her?” asked Lewis quietly.
Morse shook his head. “I haven’t the faintest idea. I know what, though. I know I’m missing something!”
For a few moments the look on Morse’s face was potentially belligerent — like that of Boswell in the story; and Lewis felt diffident about asking the favour.
Yet his wife had insisted that he did.
“I hope you won’t mind, sir, but if I could take a couple of hours off this lunchtime? The wife—”
Morse’s eyebrows rose. “Doesn’t she know you’re in the middle of a murder enquiry? What’s she want you to do? Take her a bag of spuds home?”
Lewis hesitated: “It’s just that, well, there’s this great big crack that’s appeared overnight in the kitchen wall and the wife’s worried stiff that if we don’t—”
“Bit of subsidence, you reckon?” (The pedantic Morse gave the stress to the first of the three syllables.)
“More like an earthquake, sir.”
For several seconds Morse sat utterly immobile in his chair, as if petrified before the sight of the Gorgon. And for the same several seconds Lewis wondered if his chief had suffered some facial paralysis.
Then Morse’s lips slowly parted in a beatific smile. “Lewis, my old friend, you’ve done it again! You’ve gone-and-done-it-once-again! I think I see it. Yes, I think I see all of it!”
The happily bewildered Lewis sat back to learn the nature of his latest involuntary feat; but any enlightenment would have to wait awhile — that much was clear.
“Don’t you let that missus of yours down!” beamed Morse. “She’s one in a million, remember that! Get off and sort things out with the surveyor or something—”
“Or the demolition squad.”
“—and get back here” (Morse looked at his watch) “two o’clock, say?”
“You’re sure—?”
“Absolutely. I’ve got a few important things to do here. And, er, just ask Dixon to come in, will you? And Palmer, if he’s there?”
Lewis’s euphoria was dissipating rapidly; but he had no opportunity to remonstrate, for Morse had already dialled a number and was asking if he was through to the Atlas Department of the Oxford University Press.
Sergeant Lewis returned to Kidlington HQ just before 2 P.M., almost three hours later, having finally received some reasonable reassurance that the Lewis residence was in minimal danger of imminent collapse. And at least Mrs. Lewis was now somewhat happier in her mind.
It soon became apparent to Lewis that during his absence someone — the doughnut-addicted Dixon? the pea-brained Palmer? — had been back out to Jowett Place; and Morse himself (what else had he been up to?) now sat purring like some cream-crammed orange-eyed longhair as he surveyed the evidence before him on his desk — ready, it appeared, to lead the way along the path of true enlightenment.
“Clue Number One.” Morse opened the magnum opus of Diogenes Small and lovingly contemplated the bookmark: “Greetings from Erzincan.” “All right, Lewis?”
“Clue Number Two.” He held up the postcard from Tashkent, turned it over, and read out its brief message once more:” “Travelling C 250 K E.” Not too bright, were we? It means exactly what it says: Travelling about two hundred and fifty kilometres east, east of Tashkent, where we find, Lewis — the Susamyr Valley in Kirgyzstan.
“Clue Number Three. Dear old Toot-and-come-in — another postcard, another message, pretty certainly in the same handwriting: ‘Cairo’s bloody hot but wish you were here.’ Remember? Signed ‘B.’
“Clue Number Four.” Morse picked up the couplet from “Last Poems.” “Lines from a love poem, Lewis — with the seas between the pair of them — written from Los Angeles — the place to which the letter was re-addressed by Mrs. S-G in the story. Remember? And we know why he went to all these places, don’t we?”
Lewis didn’t. But he nodded.
Why not?
“Then there was Clue Number Five — that walloping great clue you found straightaway: the fact that Sheila Poster had worked in the Geology Department here. Huh! I was blind.
“Then there was Clue Number Six... from The Times crossword yesterday... Well, no, perhaps that was just a coincidence.
“And to cap it all you tell me about those almighty cracks in your bedroom wall...”
“Crack — only one crack, sir — in the kitchen, actually.”
Morse waved his right hand as if dismissing such trivial inaccuracies as of minor moment.
“And, Lewis, the dates all match — all of ’em. In each case they fall about ten days or a fortnight after the events — I’ve checked ’em with a lovely girl called Eunice Gill in the OUP cartographical section.”
(What hadn’t Morse done, Lewis was beginning to wonder.)
“And she faxed me this,” continued Morse.
Lewis took the sheet and read a newspaper paragraph, dated 28.xi.92:
Following the major earth tremors which recently shook central Los Angeles, seismologists from all over the world, including the UK, will be assembling in Sacramento early in the new year to discuss improvements in the forecasting of potential disasters. No conference of similar scale has previously been held, and its anticipated 6-week duration reflects the urgency which is attached to this cosmic problem.
It had all taken Lewis far too long, of course; but now he let the information sink in. And finally he spoke:
“So what we need is a list of the delegates at the conference. Shouldn’t take—”
But he got no further, for Morse handed him a sheet on which the members of the UK delegation were listed.
“Good man — Sergeant Dixon — you know,” said Morse.
Lewis ignored the tribute. “None of ’em with the initial ‘B,’ though.”
“Why not try ‘R’?” asked Morse quietly.
So an embarrassed Lewis tried “R,” and looked again at the middle name of the five: Robert Grainger, D.Phil., MA.
“So all we need is to find out his address—”
“Cumnor Hill, Lewis. Not far off, is it? Palmer traced him. Good man — Palmer — you know.”
Part four
White on a throne or guarded in a cave
There lives a prophet who can understand
Why men were born...
(James Elroy Flecker, The Golden Journey to Samarkand)
“Why do you think he did it?” asked Lewis as they drove along the Botley Road.
“Grainger’s possible motives, you mean? Well, he was hot favourite for the chair in Geology — you’ve just discovered that for yourself. Great honour, you know, having a professorial chair at Oxford. Biggest prize of the lot. For some people.”
Lewis nodded, for he half understood now, and himself took up the thread: “And Sheila Poster was going to ruin it all. Just as he’s going to claim his birthright, he’s suddenly faced with the prospect of scandal and failure and divorce... and the nightmare of some squawking infant into the bargain.”