Morse pushed a 5p piece into the payphone in the foyer and asked for Bell. But Bell wasn't in, and the desk sergeant didn't know exactly where he was. He knew where Bell was making for though: there'd been a murder and-

'You got the address, Sergeant?'

'Just a minute, sir. I've got it here… it was somewhere down in Jericho… one of those little roads just off Canal Street, if I remember…'

But Morse had put down the phone several words ago.

'Don't tell me you've had another meeting at the Clarendon Institute, sir,' said Walters.

Morse ignored the question. 'What's the trouble?'

'Jackson, sir. He's dead. Been pretty badly knocked about.'

He pointed a thumb towards the ceiling. 'Want to see him?'

'Bell here yet?'

'On his way. He's been over to Banbury for something, but he knows about it. We got in touch with him as soon as we heard.'

'Heard?'

'Another anonymous phone call.'

'When was that?'

'About a quarter past nine.'

'You sure of that?' Morse sounded more than a little puzzled.

'It'll be booked in-the exact time, I mean. But the message was pretty vague and…'

'Nobody took much notice, you mean?'

'It wasn't that, sir. But you can't expect them to follow up everything-you know, just like that. I mean…'

'You mean they're all bloody incompetent,' snapped Morse. 'Forget it!'

Morse ascended the mean, narrow, little flight of stairs and stood on the miniature landing outside the front bedroom. Jackson's body lay across the rumpled bedclothes, his left leg dangling over the side, his bruised and bleeding head turned towards the door. The floor of the small room at the side of the single bed was strewn with magazines.

'I've not really had a good look around, sir,' ventured Walters. 'I thought I'd better wait for the inspector. Not much we could have done for him, is there?'

Morse shook his head slowly. The man's head lay in a large sticky-looking stain of dark red blood, and to Morse George Jackson appeared very, very dead indeed.

'I'll tell you exactly when he died, if you like,' volunteered Morse. But before he could fill in the dead man's timetable, the door below was opened and slammed, and Bell himself was lumbering up the stairs. His greeting was predictable.

'What the 'ell are you doing here, Morse?'

For the next hour the biggest difficulty was for the three policemen, the two fingerprint men, and the photographer to keep out of one another's way in the rooms of the tiny house. Indeed, when the humpbacked police surgeon arrived, he flatly refused to look at the corpse unless everyone else cleared out and went downstairs; and when he finally descended from his splendid isolation, his findings appeared to have done little to tone down his tetchiness.

'Between half-past seven and nine, at a guess,' he replied to Bell's inevitable question.

Walters looked quizzically at Morse, who sat reading one of the glossy 'porno' magazines he had brought from upstairs.

'You still sex-mad, I see, Morse,' said the surgeon.

'I don't seem to be able to shake it off, Max.' Morse turned over a page. 'And you don't improve much, either, do you? You've been examining all our bloody corpses for donkey's years, and you still refuse to tell us when they died.'

'When do you think he died?' From his tone the surgeon seemed far more at ease than at any time since he'd entered.

'Me? What's it matter what I think? But if you want me to try to be a fraction more precise than you, Max, I'd say-mm-I'd say between a quarter past seven and a quarter to eight.'

The surgeon allowed himself a lop-sided grin. 'Want a bet, Morse?'

'You can't loose with your bloody bets, can you? What's your bet? He died sometime tonight-is that it?'

'I think-think, mind you, Morse-that he might well have died a little later than you're suggesting; though why anyone should take an atom of notice of your ideas, God only knows. What really astounds me is that with your profound ignorance of pathology and its kindred sciences you have the effrontery to have any ideas at all.'

'What's your bet, Max?' asked Morse in the mildest tones.

The surgeon mused. 'Off the record, this is agreed? I'll say between er- No! You only allowed yourself half an hour, didn't you? So, I’ll do the same. I'll say between a quarter past eight and a quarter to nine. Exactly one hour later than you.'

'How much?'

'A tenner?'

The two men shook hands on it, and the surgeon left.

'Very interesting!' mumbled Bell, but Morse appeared to have resumed his reading. In fact, however, Morse's mind was peculiarly active as he turned the pages of the lurid and crudely explicit magazine. After all, he was at least contemplating one of the few clues furnished at the scene of the crime: mags (pornographic); mags (piscatorial); fingerprints (Jackson's); body (Jackson's)-and little else of much importance. A bare, stark murder. No obvious motive; no murder weapon; a crudely commonplace scene; well, that was what Bell would be thinking. With Morse it was quite different. He was confident he knew the solution even before the problem had been posed, and his cursory look round Jackson's bedroom had done little more than to corroborate his convictions: he knew the time of the murder, the weapon of the murder, the motive of the murder-even the name of the murderer. Poor old Bell!

Morse was still thinking, ten minutes later, that he had probably missed the boat in life and should have been a very highly paid and inordinately successful writer of really erotic pornography-when Walters came back into the room and reported to Bell.

Jackson, it appeared, had been seen around in Jericho that evening: at half-past five he had called in the corner grocery store for a small loaf of brown bread; at a quarter to seven he had gone across to Mrs. Purvis's to try to normalise the flushing functions of her recently installed water closet; at above five past eight-

'What!'cried Morse.

'-at about five past eight, Jackson went across to the Printer's Devil and bought a couple of pints of-'

'Nonsense.'

'But he did, sir! He was there. He played the fruit-machine for about ten minutes and finally left about twenty past eight.'

Morse's body sank limply into the uncomfortable armchair. Had he got it all wrong? All of it? For if Jackson was blowing the froth off his second pint and feeding l0p's into the slot after eight o'clock, then without the slimmest shadow of doubt it could assuredly not have been Charles Richards who murdered George Alfred Jackson, late resident of 10 Canal Reach, Jericho, Oxford.

'Better have that tenner ready, Morse!' said Bell.