Chapter Two

“Not disturbing you?”

Morse made no direct reply, but his resigned look would have been sufficiently eloquent for most people.

Most people.

He opened the door widely—perforce needed so to do—in order to accommodate his unexpected visitor within the comparatively narrow entrance.

“I am disturbing you.”

“No, no! It's just that…”

“Look, matey!” (Chief Superintendent Strange cocked an ear toward the lounge.) “I don't give a dam if I'm disturbing you; pity about disturbing old Schubert, though.”

For the dozenth time in their acquaintance, Morse found himself quietly re-appraising the man who first beached and then readjusted his vast bulk in an armchair, with a series of expiratory grunts.

Morse had long known better than to ask Strange whether he wanted a drink, alcoholic or nonalcoholic. If Strange wanted a drink, of either variety, he would ask for it, immediately and unambiguously. But Morse did allow himself one question:

“You know you just said you didn't give a dam. Do you know how you spell ‘dam’?”

“You spell it ‘d—a—m.’ Tiny Indian coin—that's what a dam is. Surely you knew that?”

For the thirteenth time in their acquaintance …

“Is that a single malt you're drinking there, Morse?”

It was only after Morse had filled, then refilled, his visitor's glass that Strange came to the point of his evening call.

“The papers—even the tabloids—have been doing me proud. You read The Times yesterday?”

“I never read The Times.”

“What? The bloody paper's there—there!—on the coffee table.”

“Just for the crossword—and the Letters page.”

“You don't read the obituaries?”

“Well, perhaps just a glance sometimes.”

“To see if you're there?”

“To see if some of them are younger than me.”

“I don't follow you.”

“If they are younger, so a statistician once told me, I've got a slightly better chance of living on beyond the norm.”

“Mm.” Strange nodded vaguely. “You frightened of death?”

“A bit.”

Strange suddenly picked up his second half-full tumbler of Scotch and tossed it back at a draught like a visitor downing an initiatory vodka at the Russian Embassy.

“What about the telly, Morse? Did you watch Newsroom South-East last night?”

“I've got a TV—video as well. But I don't seem to get round to watching anything and I can't work the video very well.”

“Really? And how do you expect to understand what's going on in the great big world out there? You're supposed to know what's going on. You're a police officer, Morse!”

“I listen to the wireless—”

“Wireless? Where've you got to in life, matey? ‘Radio’—that's what they've been calling it these last thirty years.”

It was Morse's turn to nod vaguely as Strange continued:

“Good job I got this done for you, then.”

Sorry, sir. Perhaps I am a bit behind the times—as well as The Times.

But Morse gave no voice to these latter thoughts as he slowly read the photocopied article that Strange had handed to him. Morse always read slowly.

Had Morse's eyes narrowed slightly as he read the last few lines? If they had, he made no reference to whatever might have puzzled or interested him there.

“I trust it wasn't you who split the infinitive, sir?”

“You never suspected that, surely? We're all used to sloppy reporting, aren't we?”

Morse nodded as he handed back the photocopied article.

“No! Keep it, Morse—I've got the original.”

“Very kind of you, sir, but…”

“But it interested you, perhaps?”

“Only the bit at the end, about the Radcliffe.”

“Why's that?”

“Well, as you know, I was in there myself—after I was diagnosed.”

“Christ! You make it sound as if you're the only one who's ever been bloody diagnosed!”

Morse held his peace, for his memory needed no jogging: Strange himself had been a patient in the selfsame Radcliffe Infirmary a year or so before his own hospitalization. No one had known much about Strange's troubles. There had been hushed rumors about “en-docrinological dysfunction”; but not everyone at Police HQ was happy about spelling or pronouncing or identifying such a polysyllabic ailment.

“You know why I brought that cutting, Morse?”

“No! And to be honest with you, I don't much care. I'm on furlough, you know that. The quack tells me I'm run down—blood sugar far too high—blood pressure far too high. Says I need to have a quiet little rest-cure and try to forget the great big world out there, as you call it.”

“Some of us can't forget it though, can we?” Strange spoke the words very softly, and Morse got to his feet and turned off the CD player.

“Not one of your greatest triumphs that case, was it?”

“One of the few—very few, Morse—I got no-bloody-where with. And it wasn't exactly mine, either, as you know. But it was my responsibility, that's all. Still is.”

“What's all this got to do with me?”

Strange further expanded his gargantuan girth as he further expounded:

“I thought, you know, with the wife … and all that… I thought it'd help to stay in the Force another year. But…”

Morse nodded sympathetically. Strange's wife had died very suddenly a year previously, victim of a coronary thrombosis which should surely never have afflicted one so slim, so cautious, so physically fit. She'd been an unlovely woman, Mrs. Strange—outwardly timid and inwardly bullying; yet a woman to whom by all accounts Strange had been deeply attached. Friends had spoken of a “tight” marriage; and most agreed that the widower would have been wholly lost on his own, at least for some while, had he jacked things in (as he'd intended) the previous September. And in the end he'd been persuaded to reconsider his position—and to continue for a further year. But he'd been uneasy back at HQ: a sort of supernumerary Super, feeling like a retired schoolmaster returning to a Common Room. A mistake. Morse knew it. Strange knew it.

“I still don't see what it's got to do with me, sir.”

“I want the case reopened—not that it's ever been closed, of course. It worries me, you see. We should have got further than we did.”

“I still—”

“I'd like you to look at the case again. If anyone can crack it, you can. Know why? Because you're just plain bloody lucky, Morse, that's why! And I want this case solved.”