chapter thirty-seven

the death of Max was still casting a cloak of gloom round Morse as he sat in his office the following morning. During the previous night his thoughts had been much preoccupied with death, and the mood persisted now. As a boy, he had been moved by those words of the dying Socrates, suggesting that if death were just one long, unbroken, dreamless sleep, then a greater boon could hardly be bestowed upon mankind. But what about the body? The soul might be able to look after itself all right, but what about the physical body? In Morse's favourite episode from The Iliad, the brethren and kinsfolk of Sarpedon had buried his body, with mound and pillar, in the rich, wide land of Lycia. Yes! It was fitting to have a gravestone and a name inscribed on it. But there were those stories that were ever frightening – stories about people prematurely interred who had awoken in infinite and palpitating terror with the immovable lid of the coffin only a few inches above them. No! Burning was better than burying, surely… Morse was wholly ignorant of the immediate procedures effected once the curtains closed over the light-wooded coffins at the crematoria… like the curtains closing at the end of G"otterd"ammerung, though minus the clapping, of course. All done and finished quickly, and if somebody wanted to sprinkle your mortal dust over the memorial gardens, well, it might be OK for the roses, too. He wouldn't mind a couple of hymns either: 'The day thou gavest', perhaps. Good tune, that. So long as they didn't have any prayers, or any departures from the Authorized Version of Holy Writ… Perhaps Max had got it right, neatly side-stepping the choice of interment or -incineration: the clever old sod had left his body to the hospital, and the odds were strongly on one or two of his organs giving them plenty to think about. Huh!

Morse smiled to himself, and suddenly looked up to see Strange standing in the doorway.

'Private joke, Morse?'

'Oh, nothing, sir.'

'C'mon! Life's grim enough.'

'I was just thinking of Max's liver-'

'Not a pretty sight!'

‘No.^!

'You're taking it a bit hard, aren't you? Max, I mean.'

'A bit. perhaps.'

'You seen the latest?'

Strange pushed a copy of The Times across the desk, with a brief paragraph on the front page informing its readers that 'the bones discovered in Wytham Woods are quite certainly not those of the Swedish student whose disappearance occasioned the original verses and their subsequent analysis in this newspaper. (See Letters, page 13):

'Anything to help us there?' asked Morse dubiously, opening the paper.

'Scraping the barrel, if you ask me,' said Strange.

Morse looked down at page 13:

From Mr Anthony Beaulah

Sir, Like the text of some early Greek love-lyric, the lines on the Swedish student would appear to have been pondered over in such exhaustive fashion that there is perhaps little left to say. And it may be that the search is already over. Yet there is one significant (surely?) aspect of the verses which has hitherto received scant attention. The collocation of 'the tiger' with 'the burning of the night' (lines 9 and 12) has indeed been commented upon, but in no specific context. In my view, sir, one should perhaps interpret the tiger (the cat) as staring back at drivers

in the darkness. And the brilliantly simple invention which has long steered the benighted driver through the metaphorical forest of the night? Cat's eyes!

I myself live too far away from Oxford to be able to test such a thesis. But might the police not interpret this as a genuine clue, and look for some stretch of road (in or around Wytham?) where cat's eyes have recently been installed?

Yours,

ANTHONY BEAULAH,

Felsted School,

Essex.

'Worth getting Lewis on it?' queried Strange, when Morse had finished reading.

.'Not this morning, sir. If you remember he's, er, on his holidays.' Morse looked at his wrist-watch. 'At this minute he's probably looking out of the window down at Jutland.'

'Why didn't you go, Morse? With all these Swedish blondes and that…'

'I thought it'd be good experience for him.'

'Mm.'

For a while the two were silent. Then Strange picked up his paper and made to leave.

'You made a will yet, Morse?'

'Not much to leave, really.'

'All those records of yours, surely?'

'Bit out of date, I'm afraid. We're all buying CDs now.'

'Perhaps they'll be out of date soon.'

Morse nodded. Strange was not in the habit of saying anything quite so perceptive.