In police investigations, there is almost always a coveted job and one that is rather less so. Unfortunately, it is not always possible to know which is which; in their investigation of Marina Hartner's flat, Hathaway was pleased to discover he'd drawn the long straw.

"Complete waste of time," the inspector grumbled in disgust after he'd questioned the neighbours and joined Hathaway in the small, tidy flat. "The neighbour reckons Marina is either Polish or Venezuelan...and can we have a word with the council about her recycling bin?"

Hathaway had just laid his hands upon something that made his part of the job most worthwhile. He held the murdered girl's passport over his shoulder for the inspector to see and said, "Czech Republic."

"You might have given me a shout," Lews said sounding disgruntled. Hathaway was unperturbed. Having just found the passport, he could hardly have been expected to use it to rescue the inspector from his interview with a chatty and spectacularly unhelpful neighbour—even if that would have been what the sergeant would have wanted to do.

"Sorry," he said uncontritely. "What seems to be the problem with the recycling bins?" He didn't let Lewis' aggrieved sigh or dirty look spoil the moment but went on, "Seems that she moved to England two years ago, and there are pay slips in her name from somewhere called The Grapevine?"

"Oh, that's that pub over by the Sheldonian," Lewis said without having to pause and give it any thought. Not surprising that. After all of his years in Oxford, Lewis knew it inside and out, and after all his years with Morse…there couldn't be a drinking establishment anywhere in the vicinity where Lewis hadn't sampled the orange juice and paid for a pint or two of their finest. "Anything else?" Lewis asked hopefully. "Letters? Diary?"

"No, not yet. There might be something in the laptop. And there's this," he said reaching out for the book he'd found earlier, "Dorian Crane's first book, Halfwoods. Did you meet him last night?"

"Yeah," Lewis said sounding singularly unimpressed. "He signed his new one for our Lyn as it happens."

"Might be worth something one day," Hathaway said. All too prophetic words for the book which was almost certainly destined to hit the top of the charts before its author's sensational death headed straight to a cult classic after it. Lewis' Lyn could have flogged her signed birthday copy for thousands of pounds. But the book's future worth held no interest to Lewis for he'd just spotted the bottle of perfume sitting on the closet shelf next to its wrappings and signed card. They would never be worth flogging, but it was their first real lead in the investigation.

"All love, Ned," Lewis read. "Ned?"

"Short for Edward," Hathaway supplied, and it wasn't the unfortunate shape of his face that gave him a smug look when Lewis growled at him in response. And the day just kept getting better and better from there.

There was the lovely Kelly at the Grapevine who seemed to enjoy tweaking Lewis as much as Hathaway.

"You're not Immigration?" she asked.

"Certainly not, Kelly," Hathaway assured her. "Better suits."

She smiled as she ran an appraising eye over the pair of them and pronounced, "Yours, maybe." Hathaway allowed himself a smile of his own when Lewis couldn't help looking down at his suit which was, of course, perfectly acceptable. Still, she'd been helpful enough, supplying them with what information she could willingly enough. Marina had been edgy whenever her work status had come up, had generated a lot of attention from the male customers of the pub without seeming to favour anyone in particular, she'd left work around nine the evening before without saying where she was going or who she might see wherever that was, she'd never mentioned an Edward or a Ned, and the only number she'd supplied had been for the payphone at her place. By the time they were ready to thank her for her help and get on with their work, Professor Jassim had called to report a missing mirror.

The professor had no way of knowing that having his stolen property complaint sent to a senior CID officer of Lewis' rank and experience (by Morse's rating system, definitely a three-folder man*) and having that officer immediately show up at his door was highly unusual. He invited the pair into his college rooms without any foreboding qualms.

"I know you from somewhere," Lewis said. (He had by then forgiven Hathaway his 'your suit's perfectly serviceable, Sir…a new tie, maybe' jibe the sergeant hadn't been able to resist giving him on the way to the college. At least the sergeant thought he had…but maybe he really had better plan to buy the man a new tie—a very nice, new tie—this coming Christmas.)

The professor nodded and said, "The Randolph last night. You apologized to me when I bumped into you…a very English courtesy."

"Oh. Yes," Lewis fumbled out with an embarrassed laugh.

Hathaway took pity on him and moved the conversation on, "You reported the theft of a mirror, Sir?"

"Yes. When I arrived this morning, it was gone," the professor said pointing where the distinctive, unfaded impression the missing mirror had left on the sun-bleached wall made Jassim's identification of their murder weapon more than redundant. Still, the sergeant flipped through the case file to hold out the crime photo to the professor.

"Sixteenth century Persian," Jassim said, taking the picture and sitting on the edge of his desk. "Is that blood?"

They quickly ascertained that any number of students and staff might have entered Jassim's always unlocked door (I never lock it. It's not fitting...or so I believed...to the ethos of this college) and seen the mirror hanging prominently on the wall, and just as many could have taken it, laid in wait for Marina Hartner, and used it to kill her on the riverbank.

As far as the inspector was concerned, that and the information that Uqbara had been a very important medieval city just outside of Baghdad in Jassim's native Iraq was all they were to learn of interest from Professor Jassim, though Hathaway enjoyed a few minutes recalling his student days under 'dear old' Lizzy Tronswick with the man. Too bad, really, they couldn't have left the professor then before he felt compelled to lie when Lewis called them both back from their old home week.

"I went straight home from the Randolph to my always patient wife." It would have saved them a good deal of time and trouble if the professor would have clarified that his 'straight' involved detouring around their murder victim. But that, too, was a question the good professor chose to answer with a lie.

"Do you know a Marina Hartner?" Lewis asked, and Jassim answered him with an emphatic shake of his head and a decisive 'no'. Sadly, neither of the detectives saw through his lies to call him on them.

As they left, Hathaway noted, "It's quite a coincidence, that. His mirror and an Iraqi place name at the murder scene..."

"Someone trying to incriminate him?" Lewis ventured.

"Or that's what he wants us to think."

Lewis let that go to ask, "Titus Bruckhardt...what sort of a name's that?"

Hathaway chose not to believe that Lewis' question was a gentle reprimand for sending their interview far off-topic. "He was a perennialist."

If the inspector had meant it as a rebuke, he was willing to not push it any further for he joked, "What do they believe in, low-maintenance gardening?"

"Hardly," Hathaway took off, "they propose that everlasting divine wisdom goes back to man's beginnings before religion. Burckhardt was especially interested in its relationship to Islam. I've got a book, actually, I could lend you."

"I'll pass, thanks," Lewis told him, and Hathaway realized he'd been going on a bit again. At this rate, Lewis was probably wondering if all the pennies in his pocket would be headless by the end of their investigation. Still, what had started off as a rather bad day had turned into quite an enjoyable one and it wasn't over yet. For there was the woman they ran into in the quad. Ginny.

"Just someone I met," Lewis explained trying to divert Hathaway's interest after she'd gone on her way, but Hathaway had seen the way they'd laughed and talked together and was sure there was something there he could use to get after his boss. Too bad he'd gotten a call as soon as they'd met up so he hadn't been privy to just what it was they'd laughed and talked about…still he wasn't a detective for nothing.

Just as well he had the enjoyment out of Lewis' meeting with Ginny for the case intruded on his day from there.

"No joy on the next of kin for Marina," he reported to Lewis.

"I want her positively identified before we release her name," Lewis said.

"Kelly from the Grapevine?" Hathaway offered.

Apparently, Lewis hadn't held the suit comment against the girl for he opted to give her a break. He decided they should call the doctor named on Marina's medical card instead. And if there were coincidences to be talked about concerning the case, they would come to discover that Lewis giving the formal identification duty to Dr. Jem Wishart was certainly one.

*Inspector Morse Last Seen Wearing