Inspector Morse 13 The Remorseful Day
Page 6
the collections and do the sorting before bringing everything to Oxford."
"Scores of villages though, sir."
"Go and fetch Sergeant Dixon!"
"Know where he is?"
"Give you three guesses."
"In the canteen?"
"In the canteen."
"Eating a doughnut?"
"Doughnuts, plural."
It was like some of the responses she'd learned so well from the Litany.
"I'll go and find him."
"And send him straight to me."
"The Lord be with you."
"And with thy spirit."
"You do go to church, sir!"
"Only for funerals."
Sergeant Dixon was not so corpulent as Chief Superintendent Strange.
But there was not all that much in it; and the pair of them would have made
uncomfortable co-passengers in economy-class seating on an airline. Plenty
of room, though, as Dixon drove out alone to Carterton in a marked police
car. He'd arranged a meeting with the manager of the sorting 47
office
there. A manageress, as it happened, who quickly and competently answered
his questions about the system operating in West Oxfordshire.
Yes, since the Burfbrd office had been closed, Carterton had assumed postal
responsibility for a pretty wide area. Dixon was handed a printed list of
the Oxon districts now covered; was informed how many postmen were involved;
where the collection points were, and how frequently the boxes were emptied;
how and when the accumulated bags of mail were brought back to Carterton, and
how they were there duly sorted and categorized but not franked before being
sent on to Oxford.
"Any way a particular letter can be traced to a particular post-box?"
"No, none."
"Traced to a particular village?"
"No."
Dixon was not an officer of any great intellectual capacity; indeed Morse had
once cruelly described him as 'the lowest- watt bulb in the Thames Valley
Force'. He had only five years to go before retirement, and he knew that his
recent elevation to the rank of sergeant was as high as he could ever hope to
climb. Not too bad, though, for a man who had been given little
encouragement either from home or from school: if he'd made something of
himself he'd made something of himself himself, as he'd once put things. Not
the most elegant of sentences. But 'elegance' had never been a word
associated with Sergeant Dixon.
And yet, as he looked down at his outsize black boots, buffed and bulled, he
was thinking as hard as he'd thought for many a moon. He was fully aware of
the importance of his present enquiries, and he felt gratified to have been
given the job. How good it would be if he could impress his superiors
something (he knew) he'd seldom done in his heretofore somewhat nondescript
career.
So he took his time as he sat in that small postal office; took his time as
he wrote down a few words in his black notebook; then another few words; then
asked another question; then another. .
When finally he drove back to Oxford, Sergeant Dixon was feeling rather
pleased with himself.
That letter-cum-envelope was still exercising Strange's mind to its limits;
but there seemed no cause for excitement. In late morning he had driven down
to the Fingerprint Department at St Aldate's in Oxford only to learn that
there was little prospect of further enlightenment. The faint, over-smeared
prints offered no hope: the envelope itself must have been handled by the
original correspondent, by the collecting post- man, by the sorter, by the
delivering postman, by a member of the HQ post department, by Strange's
secretary, by Strange himself and probably by a few extra intermediary
persons to boot. How many fingers there, pray?
Forget it?
Forget it!
Handwriting? Only those red-felt capitals on the cover. Was it worth
getting in some under-employed graphologist to estimate the correspondent's
potential criminality? To seek possible signs of his (? ) childhood
neglect, parental abuse, sexual perversion, drugs . . .
Forget it?
Forget it!
The typewriter? God! How many typewriters were there to be found in
Oxfordshire? In any case. Strange held the view that in the early years of
the new millennium the streets of the UK's major cities would be lined with
past-sell-by-date typewriters and VDUs and computers and the rest. And how
was he to find an obviously ancient typewriter for God's sake, one with a
dred and overworked ribbon of red and black?
49
He might as well try to trace the animal-inventory from the Ark.
Forget it?
Forget it!
What Strange needed now was new ideas.
What Strange needed now was Morse to be around.
chapter eleven Take notice, lords, he has a loyal breast, For you have seen
him open 't. Read o'er this; And after, this: and then to breakfast with
What appetite you have (Shakespeare, Henry VUT) detective sergeant lewis of
the Thames Valley CID kept himself pretty fit very fit, really in spite of a
diet clogged daily with cholesterol. Quite simply, he had long held the view
that some things went with other things. He had often heard, for example,
that caviare was best washed down with iced champagne, although in truth his
personal experience had occurred somewhat lower down the culinary ladder with
fried eggs necessarily complemented with chips and HP sauce; and (at
breakfast time) with bacon, buttered mushrooms, well- grilled tomatoes, and
soft fried bread. And, indeed, such was the breakfast that Mrs Lewis had
prepared at 7. 15 a. m. on Monday, 20 July 1998.
It will be of no surprise therefore for the reader to learn that Sergeant
Lewis felt pleasingly replete when, just before 8 a. m. " he drove from
Headington down the Ring Road to the Cutteslowe roundabout, where he turned
north up to Police HQ, at Kidlington. No problems. All the traffic was
going the other way, down to Oxford City.
He was looking forward to the day.
He'd known that working with Morse was never going to be 51
easy, but he
couldn't disguise the fact that his own service in the CID had been enriched
immeasurably because of his close association, over so many years now, with
his curmudgeonly, miserly, oddly vulnerable chief.
And now? There was the prospect of another case: a big, fat, juicy puzzle
like the first page of an Agatha Christie novel.
Most conscientiously therefore (after Strange had spoken to him) Lewis had
read through as much of the archive material as he could profitably
assimilate; and as he drove along that bright summer's morning he had a
reasonably clear picture of the facts of the case, and of the hitherto
ineffectual glosses put upon those facts by the CID's former investigating
officers.
From the very start (as Lewis learned) several theories, including of course
burglary, had been entertained, although none of such theories had made
anywhere near complete sense. There had been no observable signs of any
struggle, for example. And although Yvonne Harrison was found naked,
addition, it appeared most unlikely that she had been forcibly stripped of
the clothes she'd been wearing, since the skimpy lace bra, the equally skimpy
lace knickers, the black blouse, and the minimal white skirt, were found
neatly folded beside her bed.
Had she been lying there completely unclothed when some intruder had
disturbed her? Surely it was an unusually early hour for her to be a-bed;
and if she had been abed then, and if she had heard the front-door bell, or
heard something, it seemed quite improbable that she would have confronted
any burglar or (unknown? ) caller without first putting something on to
cover a body fully acknowledged to be beautiful. Such considerations had led
the police to speculate on the likelihood of the murderer being well known to
Mrs Harrison; and indeed to speculate on the possibility of the murderer
living in the immediate and very circumscribed vicinity, and of being rather
too well known to Mrs Harrison. Her husband was away
from home a good deal, and few of the (strangely unco- operative? )
villagers would have been too surprised, it seemed, if his wife conveniently
forgot her marriage vows occasionally. In fact it had not been difficult to
guess that most of the villagers, though loth to be signatories to any
specific allegations, were fairly strongly in favour of some sort of 'lover-
theory'. Yet although the Harrisons often appeared more than merely
geographically distanced, no evidence was found of likely divorce proceedings.
Once Mr Frank Harrison, with a very solid (if very unusual) alibi, had been
eliminated from the enquiries, painstakingly strenuous investigations had
produced (as one of the final reports admitted) no sustainable line of
positive enquiry . As he pulled off right, into Thames Valley Police HQ,
Lewis was smiling quietly to himself. Morse would very soon have established
some 'sustainable line of positive enquiry'. Even if it was a wrong line.
So what?
Morse was very often wrong at the start.
So what?
Morse was almost always right at the finish.
53
chapter twelve Yet ev'n these bones from insult to protect Some frail
memorial still erected nigh, With uncouth rhimes and shapeless sculpture
deck'd, Implores the passing tribute of a sigh (Thomas Gray, Elegy Written in
a Country Churchyard) the following is an extract from The Times, Monday 20
July 1998:
A VILLAGE MURDER
Two psychics and a hypnotist have already been involved in the case.
It has caught the attention of the Still a Mystery series on ITV, although it
has yet to be promoted to the Premier Division of such classical unsolved
cases as the disappearance of Lord Lucan, the fate of the racehorse Shergar,
or the quest for the Holy Grail itself.
Although the murder of Yvonne Harrison has long been out of the immediate
headlines, we are led to believe that the box-files concerning the case,
stacked on the shelves at Thames Valley Police HQ, are definitely not
accumulating layer upon layer of undisturbed dust. After all it is only just
over a year since the body of Mrs Harrison was discovered in the living room
of her Grade-II-listed Georgian house, set in four acres of wooded ground in
the Cotswold village of Lower Swinstead. The home,
"The Windhovers', was sold for 350,000 fairly soon after the murder,
and the family have long since left the quiet leafy village all except
Yvonne, of course, who is buried in the small, neatly mown churchyard of St
Mary's, where, in the form of a Christian cross, a low, wooden stake is the
only memorial to the body reposing beneath it:
RIP. YVONNE HARISON 1947-1997
Perhaps, when the ground is sufficiently settled, the murdered woman will
have some worthier monument. But for the present the grave shows little if
any sign of tender loving care, and flowers no longer adorn this
semi-neglected spot.
Yvonne Harrison, a fully qualified nurse, had resumed work in Oxford after
her two children had left home, and on the evening of her murder had returned
to an empty house, her husband Frank, as normally during the week, spending
his time in his London apartment
"The Windhovers' had been broken into a few years earlier, when TV sets,
video-equipment, radios, a computer, and sundry electrical items had been
stolen. As a result, the Harrisons had installed a fairly sophisticated
burglar alarm, with 'panic-buttons' in the main bedroom and beside the main
entrance door; had enlisted in the local Neighbourhood Watch group; and had
acquired a Rottweiler puppy, christened Rodney, who had subsequently displayed a healthier taste for Walkers Crisps than for any unwelcome visitors,
and who had sadly been run over a few months previously.
With the smashed rear window, the burglary theory was at first the favourite,
although there was no apparent theft of several readily displayed items of
silverware and non-too-subtly concealed pieces of jewellery. What was far
more obvious to those who 55
entered the house later that night was a body
the body of Yvonne Harrison, lying on the bed in the main bedroom: naked,
hand- cuffed, and gagged. And dead.
What immediately caught public interest was the fact that the man who
discovered the body was none other than the murdered woman's husband.
A somewhat delayed post-mortem established that Yvonne Harrison had probably
been murdered by some sort of 'tubular metal rod' two or three hours before
her body was discovered at 11. 20 p. m. " and fairly certainly not after
9.30 p.m. Independent evidence corroborated the pathologist's findings. A
local builder, Mr John Barren, had rung Mrs Harrison at 9 p.m. - on the dot,
as instructed. But he had heard only the 'engaged' signal. At about 9.30
p.m. he had rung again; but although he had persisted there had been no
reply. The phone was quite certainly ringing at the other end. Either the
Ansaphone had not been activated ... or else the lady of the house was not
alive to take the call.
Another call however had been made more successfully that evening. An
extraordinarily puzzling call. At just after 9 p. m. Yvonne's husband
picked up his phone in Pavilion Road, London, to hear a man's voice informing
him that his wife was in trouble and that he ought to get out there
immediately. Normally he would have driven home post-haste in his BMW. But
with the car in for repairs, he took a taxi to Paddington where he caught the
9. 48 train to Oxford, arriving at 10. 50, where he took another taxi for
the ten-mile journey out to Lower Swinstead.
Late-night traffic was thin, and when Mr Patrick Flynn braked his Radio Taxi
outside
"The Windhovers' at 11.20 p.m. he saw a village mansion ablaze with lights
turned on in almost every room, and the burglar-alarm box emitting sharp blue
flashes and a con ting- uous ringing. The front door stood open ... and the
rest is history.
Or it was history until a fortnight ago, when two anonymous phone calls were
received at Thames Valley Police H
Q, where it is the view of Chief
Superintendent Strange that promising new lines of enquiry may soon be opened.
It is surely universally to be hoped that the identity of Yvonne Harrison's
murderer will finally be revealed; and that on some more permanent memorial
in St Mary's churchyard the name of the murdered woman will be spelt
correctly.
chapter thirteen Pmcltranda sunt testimmia, nm nwrncrania (All testimonies
aggregate Not by their number, but their weight) (Latin proverb) most of the
Thames Valley Police personnel were ever wont to pounce quickly upon any
newspaper clipping concerning their competence, or alleged lack of
competence. And that morning Lewis had been almost immediately apprised of
the article in The Times which he'd read and assimilated swiftly; far more
swiftly (he suspected) than Morse would read it when he took it along at 8.
30 a. m. The Chief was a notoriously slow reader, except of crossword clues.
Lewis remembered the case well enough; certainly remembered the frustration
and disappointment that many of his CID colleagues had felt when lead after
lead had appeared to peter out. Yes, he'd often experienced frustration
himself, but seldom any prolonged disappointment; for which he was grateful -