Free The Riddle Of The Third Mile by Colin Dexter Page B

difficult now that almost all of them accepted women, but…
    Suddenly Morse sat at his desk quite motionless, the blood tingling across his shoulders. Could it be that “G- “? It needn’t be Geography or Geology or Geophysics or whatever. And it wasn’t. It was Greatsl And that “J-”? That wasn’t Judith or Joanna or Jezebel. It was Jane-the girl the Master had indiscreetly mentioned to him! And that would solve the college automatically: it was Lonsdalel
    Phew!
    The telephone number wouldn’t be much of a problem, either, since Lewis could soon sort that out. If it was a four-digit group, that would only mean ten possibilities; and if it was five digits, that was only a hundred; and Lewis was a very patient man…
    But the tooth was jabbing its pain along his jaw once more, and he made his way home, where doubling (as he invariably did) thedosage of all medical nostrums he took six Aspros, washed them down well with whisky, and went to bed. But at 2 a.m. we findhim sittingup in bed, his hand caressing his jaw, the pain jumping in his gum like some demented dervish. And at 8a.m. we find him standing outside a deserted dentist’s premises in North Oxford,an inordinately long scarf wrapped round his jaw, waiting desperately for one of the receptionists to arrive.

CHAPTER ELEVEN
Thursday, 24th July
     
    Wherein such diverse activities as dentistry, crossword-solving, and pike-angling make their appropriate contributions to Morse’s view of things.
     
    ‘You’ve not been looking after these too well, have you, Mr Morse?’
    Since at this point, however, the dapperly dressed dentist had his patient’s mouth opened to its widest extremities, Morse was able only to produce a strained grunt from his swollen larynx.
    ‘You ought to cut out the sugar,’ continued the dentist, surveying so many signs of incipient decay, ‘and some dental floss wouldn’t come amiss with all this… Ah! I reckon that’s the little fellow that’s been causing you-’ He tapped one of the lower-left molars with a blunt instrument, and the recumbent Morse was almost levitated in agony. ‘Ye-es, you’ve got a nasty little infection there… does that hurt?’
    Again Morse’s body jumped in agonizing pain, before the chair was raised to a semi-vertical slant and he was ordered to ‘rinse out”.
    ‘You’ve got a nasty little infection there, as I say…’
    Everything with the dentist appeared to warrant the epithet ‘little’, and Morse would have been more gratified had it been suggested to him that he was the victim of a massive great bloody infection stemming from an equally massive great bloody tooth that even now was throbbing mightily. He continued to sit in the chair, but the dentist himself was writing something across at his desk.
    ‘Aren’t you going to take it out?’ asked Morse.
    The dentist continued writing. ‘We try to preserve as many teeth as we can these days, you know. And it’s particularly important for you not to lose many more. You haven’t got too many left, have you?’
    ‘But it’s giving me -’
    ‘Here’s a prescription for a little pencillin. Don’t worry! It’ll soon sort out the infection and get that little swelling down. Then if you come and see me again in-a week, shall we say?’
    ‘A week?
    ‘I can’t do anything till then. If I took it out now-well, let’s say you’d have to be a brave man, Mr Morse.’
    ‘Would I?’ said Morse weakly. He finally rose from the chair, and his eyes wandered to the shelf of plaster-casts of teeth behind the dentist’s desk, the upper jaws resting on the lower, a few canines missing here, a few molars there. It all seemed rather obscene to Morse, and reminded him of his junior-school history books, with their drawings of skulls labelled with such memorable names as Eoanthropus dawsoni, Pithecanthropus erectus, and the rest.
    The dentist saw his interest and reached down a particularly ugly cast, snapping the jaws apart and together again like