Morini disappears and secretly travels to London

Morini’s disappearance and secret journey to London place friendship under the strain of uncertainty: Pelletier and Espinoza fear that something has happened to him, while Morini chooses solitude and asks Norton to keep his whereabouts from them. The episode begins with an empty hotel room and a midnight departure, then moves through the friends’ increasingly anxious attempts to find him before finally revealing that he has been in London, alone and on his own terms.

Departure from Montreux

After visiting Edwin Johns, Pelletier, Espinoza, and Morini return to Montreux and spend the night at the Hotel Helvetia. The three are tired and initially decide not to go out to dinner. Later, Espinoza calls Pelletier from his room because he is hungry and plans to look for somewhere open. Pelletier joins him and asks whether he has tried Morini. Espinoza says that he called, but no one answered. They conclude that Morini must have gone to sleep.

The next morning, Morini is absent from his room. The hotel clerk reports that the computer records him as having paid his bill and left at midnight, while Pelletier and Espinoza were eating at an Italian restaurant. Morini had come down to reception and asked for a car. The clerk cannot say where he went. This unexplained departure is the first concrete sign that Morini has not merely missed a meeting: he has left the hotel deliberately, without telling his companions his destination.

The Search and Its Restraint

Pelletier and Espinoza check hospitals in and around Montreux before traveling by train to Geneva. From the airport, they call Morini’s apartment in Turin, but reach only the answering machine. They leave and return to their respective cities without an answer. Once back in Madrid, Espinoza calls Pelletier; both men continue leaving short messages, increasingly hopeless in tone, on Morini’s machine.

By the second day, their worry has deepened into anguish. They consider flying to Turin and notifying the authorities if they cannot find him, but hold back because they do not want to act rashly or appear foolish. The third day brings more calls and deliberation rather than new information. They weigh Morini’s mental health against their knowledge of his maturity and common sense, yet neither consideration tells them where he is or whether they should intervene.

On the fourth day, Pelletier calls the University of Turin. The young Austrian who answers the phone has no idea where Morini might be and says that the department secretary has gone out for breakfast. Pelletier relays the exchange to Espinoza, who calls the department as well. He reaches a German literature student, but the office is empty and the secretary is still absent. The repeated dead ends make their search feel both urgent and faintly absurd: even the ordinary routines of the university become obstacles to finding a friend.

After another conversation, Pelletier and Espinoza agree to wait a few days rather than give in to what they call vulgar hysteria. They remind one another that Morini is free to do what he chooses and that there is nothing they can, or should, do to prevent it. The decision brings them a night of good sleep, but it does not end their concern. The next morning Espinoza again calls the German department, without success; later, Pelletier raises whether they should tell Norton. They decide to protect Morini’s privacy until they have more concrete information.

Contact and the London Revelation

Two days later, Pelletier calls Morini’s apartment almost reflexively. This time someone answers: it is Morini. Pelletier’s astonished response gives way to delight and relief, as though the friends have woken from a bad dream. Morini’s voice sounds as it always has. Pelletier says he must inform Espinoza immediately, but the conversation does not disclose where Morini has been.

The answer comes later, when Norton tells Pelletier and Espinoza that Morini had been in London during his disappearance. He spent his first two days there alone and did not call her. When he eventually did, he invited her to lunch. The revelation explains the unexplained departure without turning it into a rescue story: Morini has been away, but he has been moving through the city by choice and has remained beyond his friends’ reach because he did not contact them.

Morini describes visiting museums and wandering through unfamiliar neighborhoods. He compares their atmosphere to Chesterton stories, while insisting that the neighborhoods no longer have anything to do with Chesterton, though the spirit of Father Brown still seems to hover over them in a nonreligious way. His account makes his solitude a period of walking, reading, and observation rather than a disclosed emergency. Norton, however, imagines him spending long hours in a hotel room, reading and looking out at the backs of buildings. The difference between what Morini reports and what Norton pictures preserves an uncertainty around the private experience of his absence.

Norton, London, and Secrecy

When Norton meets Morini, he is sitting in his wheelchair in a hotel lobby with a package on his lap. They go to a Brazilian vegetarian restaurant in Notting Hill that Norton has recently discovered. She asks what he has been doing and why he did not call. Morini says London accommodates disabled people better than Turin, where wheelchair users encounter obstacles. The contrast gives his choice of London a practical dimension as well as a personal one: the city offers a different experience of moving through public space.

His London days include secondhand bookshops, where he buys several books without naming them, and two visits to Sherlock Holmes’s house. Baker Street, he says, seems timeless to him as a middle-aged Italian reader of detective stories. He also gives Norton a book about Brunelleschi, illustrated with photographs. The gift becomes part of their renewed contact, but it does not erase the fact that he spent two days in the city without calling her.

They meet again the following day outside a theater. Morini has bought two tickets at the hotel, and they see a comedy that Norton finds vulgar and bad but that makes them laugh. Morini cannot follow some of the cockney slang; Norton later explains the parts he missed. Their subsequent outings include dinner and Morini’s visits to Kensington Gardens and the Italian Gardens in Hyde Park. His account of exploring London remains inseparable from his limited access to its streets and conversations, while Norton’s imagined picture of him sitting quietly in the park shows how little she can know of his time alone.

Departure and Aftermath

The next day, Morini tells Norton that he must leave, and she drives him to the airport. There, speaking casually, he offers an interpretation of why Edwin Johns cut off his right hand: Johns did it for money. Norton then asks, for the first time, how Pelletier and Espinoza are. Morini replies that he would prefer them not to know he is in London. Norton accepts the condition and promises that his secret is safe, asking only that he call when he reaches Turin. He says he will.

That request recasts the disappearance as more than a failure of communication. Morini has resumed contact with Norton while deliberately keeping Pelletier and Espinoza outside the circle of people who know where he has been. His friends’ anguish and their careful decision not to violate his freedom coexist with his direct wish for secrecy. The episode ends not with an explanation of his motive for leaving, but with a bounded promise to call after reaching Turin. The immediate fear is relieved; the silence between Morini and his friends remains part of the event’s outcome.