Free Morse's Greatest Mystery and Other Stories by Colin Dexter Page A

than I—”
    “Always will be, sir.”
    “Everything ready?” asked the Governor as they stood by the reception desk.
    “The van’s out the front, sir,” said the pretty blonde receptionist. Evans winked at her; and she winked back at him. It almost made his day.
    A silent prison officer handcuffed the recaptured Evans, and together the two men clambered awkwardly into the back seat of the prison van.
    “See you soon, Evans.” It was almost as if the Governor were saying farewell to an old friend after a cocktail party.
    “Cheerio, sir. I, er, I was just wonderin’. I know your German’s pretty good, sir, but do you know any more o’ these modern languages?”
    “Not very well. Why?”
    Evans settled himself comfortably on the back seat, and grinned happily. “Nothin’, really. I just ’appened to notice that you’ve got some O-level Italian classes comin’ up next September, that’s all.”
    “Perhaps you won’t be with us next September, Eivans.”
    James Roderick Evans appeared to ponder the Governor’s words deeply. “No. P’r’aps I won’t,” he said.
    As the prison van turned right from Chipping Norton on to the Oxford road, the hitherto silent prison officer unlocked the handcuffs and leaned forward towards the driver. “For Christ’s sake get a
move
on! It won’t take ’em long to find out—”
    “Where do ye suggest we make for?” asked the driver, in a broad Scots accent.
    “What about Newbury?” suggested Evans.

DEAD AS A DODO

    “Why,” said the Dodo, “the best way to explain it is to do it.” (And as you might like to try the thing yourself, some winter day, I will tell you how the Dodo managed it.)
    (Lewis Carroll,
Alice in Wonderland
)
    It was more from necessity than from kindliness, just after 5 P.M. on a rain-soaked evening in early February 1990, that Chief Inspector Morse of the Thames Valley Police leaned over and opened the Jaguar’s near-side door. One of his neighbours from the North Oxford bachelor flats was standing at the bus stop, was getting very wet—and was staring hard at him.
    “Most kind!” said Philip Wise, inserting his kyphotic self into the passenger seat.
    Morse grunted a vague acknowledgement as the car made a few further slow yards up the Banbury Road in the red-tail-lighted queue, his wipers clearing short-lived swaths across the screen. Only three quarters of a mile to go, but at this time of day twenty minutes would be par for the progressively paralytic crawl to the flats. Never an easy conversationalist himself—indeed, known occasionally to lapse into total aphasia when driving a car—Morsewas glad that Wise was doing all the talking. “Something quite extraordinary’s happened to me,” said the man in the dripping mackintosh.
    In retrospect, Morse was aware that he’d listened, at least initially, with no more than polite passivity. But listen he had done.
    Philip Wise had gone up to Exeter College, Oxford, in October 1938; and in due course his linguistic abilities (particularly in German) had ensured for him, when war broke out a year later, a cushy little job in an Intelligence Unit housed on the outskirts of Bicester. For two years he had lived there in a disagreeable and draughty Nissenhut; and when the chance came of his taking digs back in Oxford, he’d jumped at it. Thus it was that in October 1941 he had moved into Crozier Road, a sunless thoroughfare just off the west of St. Giles’; and it was there that he’d first met Miss Dodo Whitaker (“Only the one ‘t’, Inspector”) who had a tiny top-floor bedsitter immediately above his own room in the grimy four-storey property that stood at number 14.
    Why on earth she’d been saddled with a name like “Dodo,” he’d never discovered—nor enquired; but she was certainly a considerably livelier specimen than the defunct
Didus ineptus
of Mauritius. Although physically hardly warranting any second glance, especially in the wartime “Utility” boiler-suit she