‘Just suppose for a minute, Lewis, that the body isn’t Browne-Smith’s, but that somebody wanted it to look like his. All right? Now, if the murderer had left us the head, or the hands or both, then we could have been quite sure that the body wasn’t Browne-Smith’s, couldn’t we? As we know, Browne-Smith was suffering from an incurable brain-tumour, and with a skull stuc on the table in front of him even old Max might have been able to tell us there was something not all that healthy round the cerebral cortex-even if the facial features were badly disfigured. It’s just the same with the hands-quite apart from fingerprints. Browne-Smith lost most of his right index-finger in the war, and not even your micro-surgeons can stick an artificial digit on your hand without even a delinquent like Dickson spotting it. So, if the hands, or at least the right hand, had been left attached to the body, and if all the fingers were intact -then again we’d have been quite sure that the body wasn’t Browne-Smith’s. You follow me? The two things that could have proved that the body wasn’t his are both deliberately and callously removed.’
Lewis frowned, just about managing to follow the line of Morse’s argument. ‘But what about the suit? What about the letter?’
‘All I’m saying, Lewis, is that perhaps someone’s been trying mighty hard to convince us that it was Browne-Smith’s body, that’s all.’
‘Aren’t you making it all a bit too complicated?’
‘Could be,’ conceded Morse.
‘I’m just a bit lost, you see, sir. We’re usually looking for a murderer, aren’t we? We’ve never had all this trouble with a body before.’
Morse nodded. ‘But we’re getting to know more about the murderer all the time! He’s a very clever chap. He tries to lead us astray about the identity of the body, and he very nearly succeeds.’
‘So?’
‘So he’s almost as clever as we are; and most of the clever people I know are-guess where, Lewis!’
‘In the police force?’
Morse allowed himself a weak smile, but continued with his previous earnestness. ‘In the University of Oxford! And what’s more, I reckon I’ve got a jolly good idea about exactly which member of the University it is!’
‘Uh?’ Lewis looked across at his chief with surprise-and suspicion.
But Morse was off again. ‘Let’s just finish off this corpse. We’re left with those legs, right? Now we’ve got some ideas about the head and the hands, but why chop the legs off?’
‘Perhaps he lost a toe in a swimming accident off Bermuda or somewhere. Got his foot caught in the propeller of a boat or something.’
Morse was suddenly very still in his chair, for Lewis’s flippant answer had lit another sputtering fuse. He reached for the phone, rang through on an internal extension to Superintendent Strange, and (to Lewis’s complete surprise) asked for two more frogmen-if possible immediately-to search the bottom of the canal by Aubrey’s Bridge.
‘Now about those legs,’ resumed Morse. ‘At what point would you say they were chopped off?’
‘Well, sort of here, sir.’ Lewis vaguely put his hand on his femur. ‘About half-way between -’
‘Between pelvis and patella, that’s right. Half-way, through, you say? if we don’t know how long his thighs were to start with, where exactly is that “half-way” of yours? It may have been meant to look half-way-’
‘That’s what I told you this morning, sir.’
‘I know you did, yes! All I’m doing is to stick a bit more clarity into your thinking. You don’t mind, I hope?’
‘My mind’s perfectly clear already, sir. He might have been a shorter man or a taller man, and, because Browne-Smith’s about five-eleven, the odds are probably on him being shorter. It’s the length of the femur, you see, that largely determines the height.’
‘Oh!’ said Morse. ‘You don’t happen to know how tall Westerby is-or was?’
‘Five-five, sir-about that. I asked the college secretary very nice girl.’
‘Oh!’
‘And I agree with all you’ve said, sir. Head, hands, legs -you’ve explained them all. If the murderer wanted us to think the body was Browne-Smith’s, perhaps he couldn’t have left any of them.’
The tables were turned now, and it was Morse’s turn to look ‘You don’t think all this is getting a bit too complicated do you, Lewis?’
‘Far too complicated. We’ve got the suit and we’ve got the letter-both of them Browne-Smith’s-and we know that he’s gone missing somewhere. That would be quite enough for me, sir. But you seem to think that the man we’re after is almost as clever as you are.’
Morse did not reply immediately, and Lewis noticed the look of curious exhilaration in the Chief Inspector’s face. What, he wondered, had he suddenly thought of now?
Dickson called in a few minutes later to report that no one by the name of Simon Rowbotham was registered in the membership of the Pike Anglers’ Association or in the membership of any other fishing-club in the vicinity of Oxford; and Lewis was disappointed with this news, for it gave a little more weight to the one freakish objection to his own firm view that the corpse they had found must be Browne-Smith’s: the objection (as Morse had pointed out to him the previous morning) that “Simon Rowbotham” was an exact anagram of “O.M.A. Browne-Smith”.
CHAPTER TWENTY
An extremely brief envoi to the first part of the case.
At five minutes to four the next morning, Morse awoke and looked at his bedside clock. It seemed quite impossible that it should be so early, for he felt completely refreshed. He got out of bed and drew the curtains, standing for several minutes looking down on the utterly silent road, only a hundred yards from Banbury Road roundabout… the road that led north out to Kidlington, and thence past the Thames Valley Police HQ up to the turn for Thrupp, where the waters would now be topping and plopping gently against the houseboats as they lay at fheir overnight moorings.
Morse went into the bathroom, noticed that his jaw was almost normal again, swallowed the last of the penicillin tablets and returned to bed, where he lay on his back, his hands behind his head… There were still many pieces of flotsam that needed to be salvaged before the wreck of a man’s life could wholly bereconstructed… salvaged from those canal waters -which changed their colour from green to grey to yellow to to white… Morse almost dozed off again, momentarily imagining that he saw the outlines of a cunningly plotted murder, with himself-yes, Morse!-at the centre of a beautifully calculated deception. Of one thing he was now utterly sure: that, quite contrary to Lewis’s happy convictions about the identity of the dead man, the man they had found was quite certainly not Dr Browne-Smith of Lonsdale.
Thereafter, Morse was impatient for the morning and for traffic noise and for the sight of people catching buses. Ovid, in the arms of his lover, had cried out to the midnight horses to gallop slow across the vault of heaven. But Morse was without a lover; and at a quarter to five he got up, made himself a cup of tea and looked out once again at the quiet street below, where he sensed a few vague flutterings and stirrings from the chrysalis of night.
And Morse sensed rightly. For the next morning, like Browne-Smith before him, he received a long letter; a strange and extremely exciting letter.