Morse's Greatest Mystery and Other Stories (25 page)

“Oh no, Sergeant. No one.”

One thing has been troubling Russell during the recital of the Winchester prisoner’s CV: the fact that his man hardly looks the part of some ex-SAS paratrooper, or whatever; and Russell puts his thoughts into words.

“You sure we’ve got the right fellow—the fellow you’re talking about?”

“Put him on the line, if you like. I’ll soon tell you.”

“No, I don’t think I can allow that.”

“Easy enough to tell, anyway. He’s got some letters tattooed on the back of one of his hands—left hand, I think it is. They mentioned it in the papers. Hold on! Shan’t be a tick.”

In fact four minutes drag by before the Prison Officer reads from a folder; and Russell listens carefully.

“I’ll go and check straightaway. Shan’t be a tick.”

Danny is not asleep. He sits on the side of the bed, staring at the floor—and looking up with no apparent interest as Russell unlocks the door.

“Just lift up your hands, will you, Danny Boy.”

The prisoner lifts up his hands as if, once again, he is surrendering to the foe.

“Good. Now turn your hands round, please.”

So Danny turns his hands round; and on the lower joints of the fingers on his left hand Russell reads the letters I-L-Y-K.

This time it is the Winchester end which has waited through four long minutes.

“Well?”

“Yep—it’s him, all right. When’ll you be coming to fetch him?”

“Not before breakfast, I’ll tell you that! We’ll let you know.”

“OK.”

“By the way, what exactly are you holding him on?”

“Theft of vehicle; theft of goods in transit; driving without a licence; driving without—”

“Same old stuff.”

“Same old sentence, like as not.”

“Unless some judge suddenly decides to show a bit o’ sense and refuses to lock the silly sod away again.”

Russell is not prepared to enter any penological discussion, and prepares to sign off.

“Thanks anyway. Will you be coming yourself?”

“Me? God, no. I’ll be seeing him soon enough.”

“And no handcuffs, you say.”

“That’s it. No need. Let him have a stroll round Bicester after breakfast by all means—no problem. No cuffs, though. He’s one of those who can’t stand any physical contact with people. Know what I mean?”

“Doesn’t sound as if he’ll give us any trouble, anyway.”

“I wouldn’t go quite so far as that.”

“What do you mean?”

“Nothing really. Just don’t be surprised if he—well, if he strings you along a bit. Know what I mean? He’s a bit of a joker is our Danny. Always was. Probably ask you for a bottle of champers for breakfast—say it’s doctor’s orders.”

“We do a nice little line in tea-bags down here in Bicester.”

“Cheers then.”

“Cheers.”

PC Watson has finished his report, and now looks in for the last time at his prisoner.

“Anything you want?”

Danny shakes his head. “Unless you’d like to gimme me Biro back.”

Returning to the Custody Suite, Watson passes on the request; and Sergeant Russell looks down, first at the cash envelope, then at the property bag—from the latter
finally taking out the cheap blue pen with which Danny had written on the tacho-disc.

“No harm, I suppose. He probably wants to write a poem on the loo-paper.”

At 8:20
A.M.
the minibus from Winchester arrived in the front yard of Bicester Police Station, where one of the two prison personnel immediately alighted and reported to the Information Desk.

Everything was ready.

Driven now into the yard behind the main building (“Police Vehicles Only”), the minibus was backed up alongside the wall, its rear window coming to a halt only a few feet from the single external door of the Custody Suite.

The prisoner had not after all ordered champers for breakfast; instead he had done splendid justice to the sausages and beans brought to him an hour earlier. Yet he did make one request when the cell door was again unlocked for his departure, just after 8:30
A.M.
Two spare blankets were folded beside the bed, and he’d asked if he could have one to put round him on the journey. He had no overcoat; it was a cold morning.

Not very much to ask at all really, was it?

It had all happened so very suddenly that no one afterwards had any particularly clear picture of the events. But it went something like this …

As he was walking through the exit door from the Custody Suite, the blanket which the prisoner was holding
about his head and shoulders was dramatically whisked away and equally dramatically whipped over the head and shoulders of the tall, bearded officer who was about to unlock the near-side door of the minibus. Then, dodging lightly past him, the prisoner sprinted the thirty or so yards to the tall beech-hedge which enclosed the rear yard. The hedge was strengthened by a six-foot meshed-wire fence—the fence, in turn, supported every six or seven yards by concrete posts. These posts were some five feet in height, finishing a foot or so below the top of the hedge. One of the posts—and only one—was itself strengthened by a concrete strut which formed an angle of 45 degrees to the ground and which joined the post roughly halfway up, looking rather like a lambda in the Greek alphabet.

At full speed the prisoner leapt at this structure, his left foot landing firm on the top of the strut, his right foot equally firm on the top of the post; and then, propelled by such twin leverage, he had cleared the beech-hedge by several inches, landing neatly on the grass of a school playing-field beyond. Someone later said it was a bit like watching a Russian gymnast clearing a vaulting-horse at the Olympics.

The prisoner was gone.

Neither of the heavy Winchester men could hope to match such a nimble-footed feat of levitation; and it was ten minutes before a wailing police car, forced to take the long way round the front of the station, was crisscrossing the maze of streets in the King’s End estate behind, where (it was believed) the prisoner was last sighted.

But not sighted again.

The loo-paper in the cells at Bicester may by no means be described as “Savoy Soft,” stiffly reluctant as it is to accommodate itself to the contours of the average human backside. Yet (as Sergeant Russell had earlier intimated) it makes unexpectedly fine writing-paper; and it was two sheets of this paper which one of the cleaners found just before lunchtime that same day—between the folds of the remaining blanket in the cell which had housed the escaped prisoner.

The escape had caused no little embarrassment to the officers concerned, and (worse still) would almost certainly hit the national headlines the following day. Thus it was that Chief Inspector Page of Thames Valley CID (no less) had little compunction in summoning the now off-duty officers Russell, Hodges, and Watson, to his office in Kidlington at 11
A.M.
to review the matter—and the cleaner’s discovery.

The spelling and punctuation were both a bit shaky, but the import of the letter could hardly have given a clearer answer to what had hitherto seemed the increasingly bewildering question of the escaped man’s identity:

Newly recruited to the Force, PC Watson was; glad to have someone to chat with—even a subdued looking Sergeant Russell—as they stood in the lunch queue in the HQ canteen.

“Rotten bit o’ luck, Sarge …” he began.

“You make your own luck, lad. I shoulda been far more careful checking out that tattoo.”

“I was thinking more about both of ’em being named ‘Danny.’ ”

“Nick
named, you mean—one of ’em.”

“Yeah. I mean, there’s your ‘Pongo’ Warings …”

“And your ‘Nobby’ Clarks …”

“How come your ‘Danny’ Lamberts, though?”

“Dunno.”

The queue moved a couple of feet, and the plainclothes man in front of them turned round to proffer a suggestion:

“Might be someone from Stamford? Stamford in
Lincolnshire? Lamberts there often get called ‘Danny,’ after Daniel Lambert—fellow who weighed fifty-two stone odd—still in the
Guinness Book of Records.”

“Who’s
he
when he’s at home?” asked Watson, after they’d been served.

“You don’t know?”

Watson shook his head.

“That, my lad, was Chief Inspector Morse.”

Watson frowned slightly. He’d never heard of the man; yet for a fleeting second he’d thought he’d almost recognized the profile as that grey head had turned towards them in the queue …

Next morning, the Governor of HM Prison Winchester received a full report of the case, now becoming widely known as the “Cock-up at Bicester Corral,” including a photocopy of the letter found in the escapee’s cell. He immediately summoned the Senior Prison Officer from D Wing, where Smithson had spent so many comparatively contented months and years.

“You’ll be interested in this.” The Governor handed over the file.

Price, a thick-set Irishman, sat down and began reading.

“No news of our Danny?” interrupted the Governor.

Price shook his head. Then, halfway through the letter, his eyes suddenly widened with a new and startling notion.

“You don’t think, sorr …?” he began slowly, pointing to the letter.

The Governor groaned, permitting himself also, albeit briefly, to contemplate the unimaginable.

“Don’t tell me
that!
Please! Don’t tell me it’s
Smithson’s
writing?”

Price studied the writing of the letter again. “Yes, sorr. I’m sorry. But I’m pretty sure it is.”

And for a few moments the two men sat there in silence, each of them visualizing their erstwhile prisoner perched aloft in the cabin of a stolen van, and carefully over-tracing his own tattoos with a cheap blue Biro pen …

Not too carefully—not carefully at all really—Morse looked down at the man lying supine on the double bed, dressed only in an unbuttoned white shirt, Oxford-blue pants, and black socks. The paleness of the man’s skin precluded the probability of any recent holiday on the Greek islands—with only the dullish-red V below the throat suggesting the possibility of any life outside the executive-suited higher echelons of British management.

Late forties, by the look of him; a firmly built man, with a pleasantly featured, clean-shaven face, and frizzy, grey-flecked hair. The jacket of a subfusc herring-bone suit was hanging inside the open-doored wardrobe, a maroon tie over it; and neatly aligned at the near side of the bed was a pair of soft black leather shoes.

A methodical, successful businessman, thought Morse.

A quiet knock on the door of Room 231 of The Randolph Hotel heralded the arrivals of Sergeant Lewis and Dr. Laura Hobson—the latter immediately stepping
forward to peer down at the dead man’s face. Blood was still seeping slowly from a deep gash that slanted over the closed right eye like some monstrous acute accent. But there was no other sign of red in the face, for the lips were a palish shade of purple.

“Probably had a heart attack,” volunteered the pathologist.

Lewis looked down at the Corby trouser-press, standing to the left of the bathroom door, on which a pair of subfusc herring-bone trousers were draped over the opened leaf.

“Probably bashed his head on that?” suggested Lewis.

And Morse nodded.

The cream paint of the left-hand door-jamb was splashed with elongated flecks of scarlet, and two feet inside the bathroom itself, on the blue-and-white-tiled floor, was a patch of darkly dried blood.

“If he’d tripped it could have brought on a heart attack, don’t you think, sir?”

Again Morse nodded. “And if he’d had a heart attack he could have tripped and cracked his head, yes.”

Turning her head momentarily towards them, Dr. Hobson put the situation rather more simply: “Which came first—the chicken or the egg?”

“The chicken?” said Morse.

But the blonde pathologist was clearly in favour of an each-way bet. “Like as not it happened contemporaneously.”