The Riddle Of The Third Mile (7 page)

It was on Wednesday, 23rd July, two days after his abortive phone-call to Lonsdale, that Morse himself, in mid-afternoon, received the news, recognizing Sergeant Lewis’s voice immediately.

‘We’ve got a body, sir-or at least part-’

‘Where are you?’

‘Thrupp, sir. You know the-’

‘Course I know it!’

‘I think you’d better come.’

‘I’ve got a lot of correspondence to get on with
you
handle things, can’t you?’

“We fished it out of the canal.’

‘Lots of people chuck ‘emselves into -’

‘I don’t think this one drowned himself, sir,’ said Lewis quietly.

So Morse got the Lancia out of the yard, and drove the few miles out to Thrupp.

Two miles north of police headquarters in Kidlington, on the main A423 road to Banbury, an elbow turn to the right leads, after only three hundred yards or so, to the Boat Inn, which, together with about twenty cottages, a farm, and a depot of the Inland Waterways Executive, comprises the tiny hamlet of Thrupp. The inn itself, only some thirty yards from the waters of the Oxford Canal, has served generations of boatmen, past and present. But the working barges of earlier times, which brought down coal from the Midlands and shipped up beer from the Oxford breweries, have now yielded place to the privately owned long-boats and pleasure-cruisers which ply their way placidly along the present waterway.

Chief Inspector Morse turned right at the inn, then left along the narrow road stretching between the canal and a row of small, grey-stoned, terraced cottages, their doors and multi-paned windows painted a clean and universal white. At almost any other time, Thrupp would have seemed a snugly secluded little spot; but already Morse could see the two white police cars pulled over on to the tow-path, beside a sturdy-looking drawbridge; and an ambulance, its blue light flashing, parked a little further ahead, where the road petered out into a track of grass-grown gravel. It is strange to relate (for a man in his profession) that in addition to incurable acrophobia, arachnophobia, myophobia, and ornithophobia, Morse also suffered from necrophobia; and had he known what awaited him now, it is doubtful whether he would have dared to view the horridly disfigured corpse at all.

A knot of thirty or so people, most of them from the gaudily painted houseboats moored along the waterway, stood at a respectful distance from the centre of activities; and Morse, pushing his way somewhat officiously through, came face to face immediately with a grim-looking Lewis.

‘Nasty business, sir!’

‘Know who it is?’

‘Not much chance.’

‘What? You can
always
tell who they are – doesn’t matter how long they’ve been in the water. You know that, surely? Teeth, hair, finger-nails, toe-nails-’

‘You’d better come and look at him, sir.’

‘Ha! Know it’s a “him” do we? Well, that’s something. Reduces the population by about 50 per cent at a stroke that does.’

‘You’d better come and look at him,’ repeated Lewis quietly.

A uniformed police constable and two ambulance men moved aside as Morse walked towards the green tarpaulin sheet that covered a body recently fished from the murky-looking water. For a few moments, however, he was more than reluctant to pull back the tarpaulin. Instead, his dark eyebrows contracted to a frown as mentally he traced the odd configuration of the bulge beneath the winding-sheet. Surely the body had to be that of a child, for it appeared to be about three and a half feet long-no more; and Morse’s up-curved nostrils betokened an even grislier revulsion. Adult suicide was bad enough. But the death of a child-agh! Accident?
Murder?

Morse told the four men standing there to shield him from the silent onlookers as he pulled back the tarpaulin and – after only a few seconds – replaced it. His cheeks had grown ashen pale, and his eyes seemed stunned with horror. He managed only two hoarsely spoken words: ‘My God!”

He was still standing there, speechless and shaken, when a big, battered old Ford braked sharply beside the ambulance, from it emerging a mournful, humpbacked man who looked as though he should have taken late retirement ten years earlier. He greeted Morse with a voice that matched his lean, lugubrious mien.

‘I thought I’d find you in the bar, Morse.’

‘They’re closed.’

‘You don’t sound very cheerful, old man?’

Morse pointed vaguely behind him, towards the sheet, and the police surgeon immediately knelt to his calling.

‘Phew!
Very
interesting!’

Morse, his back still turned on the corpse, heard himself mutter something that vaguely concurred with such a finding, and thereafter left his sanguine colleague utterly in peace.

Slowly and carefully the surgeon examined the body, methodically entering notes into a black pocket-book. Much of what he wrote would be unintelligible to one unversed in forensic medicine. Yet the first few lines were phrased with frightening simplicity:

First appearances: male (60-65?); Caucasian; torso well nourished (bit too well?); head (missing) severed from shoulders (amateurishly?) at roughly the fourth cervical vertebra; hands 1. & r. missing, the wrists cut across the medial ligaments; legs l. & r. also missing, severed from torso about 5-6 inches below hip-joint (more professionally done?); skin – ‘washerwoman effect’…

Finally, and with some difficulty, the surgeon rose to his feet and stood beside Morse, holding his lumbar regions with both
hands as though in chronic agony.

‘Know a cure for lumbago, Morse?’

‘I thought
you
were the doctor.’

‘Me? I’m just a poorly paid pathologist.’

‘You get lumbago in
mid-summer?’

‘Mid-
every
-bloody-season!’

‘They
say a drop of Scotch is good for most things.’

‘I thought you said they’re closed.’

‘Emergency, isn’t it?’ Morse was beginning to feel slightly better’.

One of the ambulance men came up to him. ‘All right to take it away?’

‘Might as well.’

‘No!’ It was the surgeon who spoke. ‘Not for the moment. I want to have a few words with the chief inspector here first.’

The ambulance man moved away and the surgeon sounded unwontedly sombre. ‘You’ve got a nasty case on your hands here, Morse, and-well, I reckon you ought to have a look at one or two things while we’re
in situ,
as it were-you
were
a classicist once, I believe? Any clues going’ll pretty certainly be gone by the time I start carving him up.’

‘I don’t think there’s much point in that, Max. You just give him a good going-over-that’ll be fine!’

In kindly fashion, Max put a hand on his old friend’s shoulder. ‘I know! Pretty dreadful sight, isn’t it? But I’ve missed things in the past-you know that! And if-’

‘All right. But I need a drink first, Max.’

‘After.
Don’t worry-I know the landlord.’

‘So do I,’ said Morse.

‘OK, then?’

‘OK!’

But, as the surgeon drew back the tarpaulin once more, Morse found himself quite incapable of looking a second time at that crudely jagged neck. Instead he concentrated his narrowed eyes upon the only limbs that someone –
someone
(already the old instincts were quickened again)-had felt it safe to leave intact. The upper part of the man’s body was dressed in a formal, dark-blue, pin-striped jacket, matching the material of the truncated trousers below; and, beneath the jacket,
in
a white shirt, adorned with a plain rust-red tie-rather awkwardly fastened. Morse shuddered as the surgeon peeled off the sodden jacket, and placed the squelching material by the side of the dismembered torso.

‘You want the trousers too?-what’s left of ‘em?’

Morse shook his head. ‘Anything in the pockets?’

The surgeon inserted his hands roughly into the left and right pockets; but his fingers showed through the bottom of each, and Morse felt as sick as some sensitively palated patient in the dentist’s chair having a wax impression taken of his upper jaw.

‘Back pocket?’ he suggested weakly.

‘Ah!’ The surgeon withdrew a sodden sheet of paper, folded over several times, and handed it to Morse. ‘See what I mean? Good job we-’

‘You’d have found it, anyway.’

‘Think so? Who’s the criminologist here, Morse? They pay
me
to look at the bodies-not a lump of pulp like that. I’d have sent the trousers to Oxfam, like as not-better still, the Boy Scouts, eh?’

Morse managed to raise a feeble grin, but he wanted the job over.

‘Nothing else?’

Max shook his head; and as Morse (there being nothing less nauseating to contemplate) looked vaguely down along the outstretched arms, the surgeon interrupted his thoughts.

‘Not much good, arms, you know. Now if you’ve got teeth -which in our case we have not got-or-’

But Morse was no longer listening to his colleague’s idle commentary. ‘Will you pull his shirt-sleeves up for me, Max?’

‘Might take a bit of skin with ‘em. Depends how long-’

‘Shut up!’

The surgeon carefully unfastened the cuff-links and pushed the sleeves slowly up the slender arms. ‘Not exactly a weight-lifter, was he?’

‘No.’

The surgeon looked at Morse curiously. ‘You expecting to find a tattoo or something, with the fellow’s name stuck next to his sweetheart’s?’

‘You never know your luck, Max. There might even be a name-tape on his suit somewhere.’

‘Somehow I don’t reckon you’re going to have too much luck in this case,’ said the surgeon.

‘Perhaps not…’ But Morse was hardly listening. He felt the sickness rising to the top of his gullet, but not before he’d noticed the slight contusion on the inner hollow between the left biceps and the forearm. Then he suddenly turned away from the body and retched up violently on the grass.

Sergeant Lewis looked on with a sad and vulnerable concern. Morse was his hero, and always would be. But even heroes had their momentary weaknesses, as Lewis had so often learned.

It was later that same afternoon that Morse, Lewis, and the police surgeon presented themselves at the Boat Inn, where the landlord, sensibly circumspect, informed the trio that it would of course be wholly improper for him to serve any alcoholic beverages at the bar; on the other hand the provision of three chairs in a back room and a bottle of personally purchased Glenfiddich might not perhaps be deemed to contravene the nation’s liquor laws.

‘How long’s he been dead?’ was Morse’s flatly spoken, predictable gambit, and the surgeon poured himself a liberal tumbler before deigning to reply.

‘Good question! I’ll have a guess at it tomorrow.’

Morse poured himself an equally liberal portion, his sour expression reflecting a chronic distrust in the surgeon’s calling.

‘A week, perhaps?’

The surgeon merely shrugged his shoulders.

‘Could be longer, you mean?’

‘Or shorter.’

‘Oh Christ! Come off it, Max!’ Morse banged the bottle on
on the table, and Lewis wondered if he himself might be offered a dram. He would have refused, of course, but the gesture
would have been gratifying.

The surgeon savoured a few sips with the slow dedication of a man testing a dubious tooth with a mouthwash, before turning to Morse, his ugly face beatified: ‘Nectar, old man!’

Morse, likewise, appeared temporarily more interested in the whisky than in any problems a headless, handless, legless corpse might pose to the Kidlington CID. ‘They tell me the secret’s in the water of those Scottish burns.’

‘Nonsense! It’s because they manage to get
rid
of the water.’

‘Could be!’ Morse nodded more happily now. ‘But while we’re talking of water, I just asked you-’

‘You know nothing about water, Morse. Listen! If you find a body immersed in fresh water, you’ve got the helluva job finding out what happened. In fact, one of the trickiest problems in forensic medicine-about which you know bugger-all, of course-is to prove whether death
was
due to drowning.’

‘But this fellow wasn’t drowned. He had his head-’

‘Shut up, Morse. You asked how long he’d been in the canal, right? You didn’t ask me who sawed his head off!’

Morse nodded agreement.

‘Well,
listen,
then! There are five questions I’m paid to ask myself when a body’s found immersed in water, and in this particular case you wouldn’t need a genius like me to answer most of them. First, was the person alive when entering the water? Answer: pretty certainly, no. Second, was death due to immersion? Answer: equally certainly, no. Third, was death rapid? Answer: the question doesn’t apply, because death took place elsewhere. Fourth, did any other factors contribute to death? Answer: almost certainly, yes; the poor fellow was likely to have been clinically dead when somebody chopped him up and chucked him in the canal. Fifth, where did the body enter the water? Answer: God knows! Probably where it was found-as most of them are. But it could have drifted a fair way, in certain conditions. With a combination of bodily gases and other internal reactions, you’ll often find a corpse floating up to the surface and then-’

‘But Morse interrupted him, turning to Lewis: ‘How
did
we find him?’

‘We had a call from a chap who was fishing there, sir. Said he’d seen something looking like a body half-floating under the water, just where we found him.’