8082-ditto

8083-ditto

8084-Douglas Schwartz, Reproductions, Old Compton Street

8085 – Ping Hong Restaurant, Brewer Street

8086-Claude & Mathilde, Unisex Hairdressers, Lower Regent Street

8087-Messrs Levi & Goldstein, Antiquarian Books, Tottenham Court Road

8088-The Flamenco Topless Bar, Soho Terrace

There’s one missing, Lewis.’

‘You want me to-?’

‘I told you to try them all, I think.’

But whoever was renting number 8089 was clearly away from base, and Morse told Lewis to forget it.

‘We are not, my friend, exactly driving through the trackless wastes of the Sahara with a broken axle, you agree? Now, if you can just make one more call and find out the price of a cheap-day second-class return to Paddington-’

‘Are we going there?’

‘Well, one of us’ll have to, Lewis, and it’s important for you to stay here, isn’t it, because I’ve got one or two very interesting little things I want you to look into. So I’ll -er-perhaps go myself.’

‘It won’t do your tooth much good.’

‘Ah! That reminds me,’ said Morse. ‘I think it’s about time I took another pill or two.’

A brief interlude in which Sergeant Lewis takes his first steps into the Examination Schools, the Moloch of Oxford’s testing apparatus.

It was late morning when, from its frontage on the High, Sergeant Lewis entered the high-roofed, hammer-beamed lobby of the Examination Schools. Never before had there been occasion for him to visit this grove of Academe, and he felt self-conscious as his heavy boots echoed over the mosaics of the marble floor, patterned in green and blue and orange. At intervals, in front of the oak panelling that lined the walls, were stationed the white and less-than-animated busts of former University Chancellors, former loyal servants of the monarchy, and sundry other benefactors. And along the walls themselves was a series of ‘faculty’ headings: Theology, Philosophy, Oriental Studies, Modern History, and the rest; below which, behind glass, were pinned a line of notices announcing the names of those candidates adjudged to have satisfied, in varying degrees, the appropriate panels of the faculties’ examiners.

On the Literae Hutnaniores (“Greats”) board (as Morse had assured him he would) Lewis duly found a long list of names, categorized into Class I, Class II, Class III, and Pass Degree. He noticed, too (as Morse had assured him he would), that a young lady by the name of Summers (Jane) of Lonsdale College, hadsecured a place in the first of these aforesaid categories. Then,doing precisely as he had been told, Lewis looked to the bottom of the list, where he saw the signatures of seven examiners. A few of them were barely legible. But one of them was conspicuously clear: the neatly penned signature of O. M. A. Browne-Smith. So Lewis made a brief entry in his notebook, and wondered why Morse had bothered to send him on this particular errand.

An attendant was seated in an office to the left of the lobby, and Lewis was soon enlisting this man’s ready assistance in learning something of the processes involved in the evolution of the class-lists. What happened, it seemed, was this. After candidates had finished their written examinations, mark coordination meetings were held by each of the examining panels, where “classes” were provisionally allotted, and where borderline candidates at each class-boundary were considered for vivas, especially those candidates hovering between a first and a second; finally, but then only the day before the definitive lists were due to be published, the chairman of the examiners (and no one else) was fully in possession of all the facts. At that point it was the duty of the chairman of examiners to summon his colleagues together in order to make a corporate, meticulous check of the final lists, and then to entrust the agreed document to one of the senior personnel of the Schools, whose task it now was to deliver the document for printing to the Oxford University Press. Immediately this was done, five copies of the lists were redelivered to the waiting panel, who would usually be sitting around drinking tea and eating a few sandwiches during the hour or so’s interval. There would follow the long and tedious checking of all results, the spellings of names, and the details of index-numbers and colleges, before the chairman would read aloud to his colleagues the final version, down to the last diaeresis and comma. Only then, if all were correct, would the chairman summon the Clerk of the Schools, in whose august presence each of the five copies would be signed in turn by each of the examiners. Then, at long last, the master-copy would be posted in the lobby of the Schools.

Lewis thanked the attendant, and clattered out across the entrance hall, where examinees, parents, and friends were still clustered eagerly round the notice-boards. For the first time in his life he felt a little envy for those white-tied, subfusc-suited students so happily perched upon the topmost boughs of the tree of knowledge. But such thoughts were futile. Anyway, he had his second assignment ahead of him-at the Churchill Hospital.

Morse was out when he returned, and so for a change it was Lewis who had some little time in which to ponder how the case was going. On the whole, he thought that Morse was probably right. Far from being stranded in the Sahara, they were following a fairly well-directed route, with signposts at almost all the early stages-quite certainly at the Examination Schools; but not (Lewis reminded himself) at the Churchill, where his enquiries had yielded nothing, and where Morse’s confident predictions had clearly gone dramatically askew.

Quite fortuitously, Morse lights upon a set of college rooms which he had no original intention of visiting.

Morse himself had decided to postpone for a day or two the pleasures of a trip to Soho, and instead to make some more immediate inquiries in Oxford. Thus it is that just before midday he was parking the Lancia in one of the spaces at the back of Lonsdale (‘Reserved for Senior Fellows’), walking through the front gate (‘No Visitors’), and introducing himself at the Lodge. Here, a bowler-hatted porter, very young but already equipped with the requisite blend of servility and officiousness, was perfectly willing to answer the questions Morse put to him: yes, most of the undergrads had now gone down for the long vac; yes, most of the dons had also departed, amongst their number the Master, the Vice-Master, the Investments Bursar, the Domestic Bursar, the Senior Tutor, the Senior Fellow, the…

‘Off to the Bahamas, all of them?’

‘Continent mostly, sir-and Greece.’

‘You think it’s all those topless beaches, perhaps?’

For a few seconds the young porter leered as though he were about to produce a dirty postcard from one of the innumerable pigeon-holes, but he quickly resumed his dignity. ‘I wouldn’t know about that, sir.’

‘What about Dr Browne-Smith? Is he still away?’

‘I’ve not seen him in college since we had a note from him… and then we had a-just a minute.’He went over to his desk and returned to the ‘Enquiries’ window with a sheaf of papers. In spite of having to read them upside-down, Morse was able to read some of the messages clearly: ‘Professor M. Liebermann-back 6th August. All post to Pension Heimstadt, Friederichstrasse 14, Zurich’; ‘Mr G. Westerby-off to Greece until end of August. Keep all mail at the Lodge’; ‘Dr Browne-Smith…’