by Colin Dexter
waves of that physical lust which so often excited him. Yet the brief
holiday had been her choice, and she knew diat she wouldn't regret having
made it. She enjoyed being with him: he was good fun and intelligent and
well read and sdll handsome and sdll excellent in bed and yes! - he was rich.
They moved nearer the counter, neither of them too
anxious to speak a phenomenon not uncommon with persons queuing, as if
their concentration were required for the transactions ahead.
But she volunteered some incidental information: "Accident there was, near
Stokenchurch, and I tried to ' Gently he ran a hand through her silken hair.
"Sweetheart? Forget it!"
"It's just that we must have been stuck there half an hour and we saw one of
the other passengers pointed it out a beautiful bird of prey there. A red
kite."
"Tell me later!"
There was now just the one business-suited man in front of them.
"Where have you booked us?"
"The best."
"And the best air-tickets ?"
"Sh! Nothing but the best for you. Why not? Just think of me! No wife.
No blackmailing kids. No problems at work. Nothing to spend money on for a
day or two except on you. I'm a rich man, sweetheart. I thought I'd told
you."
"Tickets, please?"
The smiling young lady scrutinized the perfectly valid tickets.
"Passports, please?"
The young lady scrutinized the perfectly valid passports.
"Smoking?"
"Non-smoking."
"Window-centre? Centre-aisle?"
"Centre-aisle."
"Luggage?"
Frank Harrison lugged the great case on to the track way beside the desk.
"Only the one?"
"Yes."
"You know where the club-lounge is? "
323
"Yes." "Enjoy your flight, sir, and enjoy your stay in Paris!"
He handed her a glass of champagne, and two glasses clinked. "Here's to a
wonderful little break together. Ritz here we come!"
He leaned across and kissed her on the soft, un lips ticked mouth a long,
yearning kiss. His eyes closed. Her eyes closed.
"Mr Harrison?" A tap on the shoulder.
"Mr Frank Harrison?"
"What ?"
A uniformed police officer stood beside the small table: "I'm sorry, sir, but
we need to speak to you. Routine check."
"Thames Valley Police, is this?"
"That's right, sir."
"What exactly ?"
"It's not just that. Your employers want to speak to you as well."
Harrison's eyes squinted in bewilderment.
"What the hell do they want? I'm on official furlough, for God's sake.
They'll have to wait till I get back."
"Will you come this way, sir? Please!"
A second uniformed policeman young, dark-haired stood just inside the
entrance to the executive lounge; was still standing there a quarter of an
hour later when Maxine, after drinking the one and then the other glass of
champagne, went over to speak to him.
"Do you mind telling me, Officer, by whose authority ?"
"Not mine, miss," said PC Kershaw.
"Please believe me. I also am a man under authority."
"You haven't answered my question."
"I'm from Thames Valley we both are."
"Who sent you here?"
"The CID."
"Who?"
"Chief Inspector Morse."
"Who's he when he's in his office?"
"He's an important man."
"Very important?"
"Oh yes!" Kershaw nodded with a reverential smile.
"You talk as if he's God Almighty."
"Some people think he is."
"Do you?"
"Not always."
"How long will you be keeping Mr Harrison?"
"I just don't know, Mrs Ridgway."
Maxine poured herself a further glass of champagne, and pondered as she sat
alone at the small table. They knew her name too . . .
He wasn't a particularly lucky man to associate with, Frank Harrison.
The last time she'd been with him, over a year ago, he'd had that phone call
from well, he'd never said who from to tell him that his wife had been
murdered . . .
She was tempted to get up and well, just leave. Just get out of there. Her
case was on the plane by now though suits, dresses, lingerie, shoes but it
could be returned perhaps? She sdll had her handbag with its far more
important items: cards, keys, diary, money . . .
But she felt sure the PC at the door would never let her out. That's why he
was there. Why else?
An announcement over the lounge Tannoy informed her that first-class
passengers for British Airways Flight 338 to Paris should now proceed to Gate
3; and a dozen or so people were draining their drinks and gathering up their
hand luggage. But for Marine Ridgway it was now a feeling of deep sadness
that had overtaken those earlier minutes of indecision and 325
any
embezzlement or misappropriation of funds was most definitely not to be laid
at the door of one of the Bank's most experienced, most trusted, most valued
blah blah blah.
It was a call in which Morse was most interested, now repeating (with some
self-congratulation) what he had earlier maintained: that Frank Harrison
might well be, most likely was, capable of murder; but that it was quite out
of character, definitely infra dignitatem, for him to stoop to cooking the
books and fiddling the balance-and-loss ledgers.
"Do you think you may be wrong, sir?"
"Certainly not. He'll be back from Paris, believe me! There's no
hiding-place for him. Not from me, there isn't."
"You think he murdered his wife?"
"No. But he knows who did. You know who did. But we've got to get some
evidence. We've been checking alibis recent ones. But we've got to check
those earlier alibis again."
"Who are you thinking of?"
"Of whom am I thinking?" (Morse recalled the suspicion he'd voiced in his
earlier notes. ) "I'm thinking of the only other person apart from Frank
Harrison who had a sufficient motive to kill Yvonne
"You mean ?"
"Do you ever go to the pictures?"
"They don't call it the " pictures" any more."
"I went to the pictures a year and a bit ago to see The Full Monty."
"Surely not your sort of ?"
"Exactly my sort of thing. I laughed and I cried."
"Oh yes." (The penny had dropped. ) "Simon Harrison said he'd gone ' '"
Said", yes."
"Said he'd gone with someone else, didn't he? A girlfriend."
"Wasn't checked though, as far as I can see."
"Understandable, isn't it? Nobody ever really thought of someone inside the
family."
"Oh yes they did. Frank Harrison was one of their first suspects."
"But with those signs of burglary, the broken window, the burglar alarm .. ."
Morse nodded.
"At first almost everything pointed to an outside job.
But then it slowly began to look like something else: a lover, a tryst, a
sex-session, a quarrel, a murder . . . "
"And now we're coming back to the family, you say."
"No one seems to have bothered to get a statement from the young lady Simon
Harrison took to t
he pictures that evening."
"Perhaps we could still trace her, sir?"
Yes. "
"It's a long time ago though. She'd never remember ' " Of course she would!
It was all over the papers: "Woman Murdered" and she'd been with that same
woman's son the evening when it happened. She could never forget it! "
"It's still a long time ' " Lewis! I don't eat all that much as you know.
But when I'm cooking for myself- ' (Lewis's eyebrows rose. ) ' -1 always
make sure the plate's hot. I can't abide eating off a cold plate. "
"You mean we could heat the plate up again?"
"The plate's already hot again. She's still around. She's a proud, married
mum now living in Witney."
"How do you know all that?"
"You can't do everything yourself, Lewis."
"Dixon, you mean?"
"Good man, Dixon! So we're going to see her tonight. Just you and
I. "
"You think Simon murdered his mum."
"No doubt about that. Not any longer, Lewis," said Morse quietly.
"Just because he found her in bed with someone . . ."
"With Barron. I know that, Lewis."
329
Never before had Lewis been so hesitant in asking Morse a question:
"Did . . . did Mrs Hamson ever tell you that she was . . . seeing
Barron?"
Morse hesitated hesitated for far too long.
"No. No, she never told me that."
Lewis waited a while, choosing his words carefully and speaking them slowly:
"If she had told you, would you have been as jealous as Simon Harrison?"
Again Morse hesitated.
"Jealousy is a dreadfully corrosive thing. The most powerful motive of all,
in my view, for murder - more powerful than ' The phone rang once more and
Morse answered.
Kershaw.
"They'll soon be winging their way across the channel, sir. Anything more
you want me to do?"
"Yes. Have a pint of beer, just the one, then bugger off home."
Morse put down the phone.
"Good man, Kershaw! Bit of an old woman though. Reminds me of my Aunt
Gladys in Ainwick, my last remaining relative. Well, she was. Dead now."
"I think he'll do well, yes."
"Kershaw? Should do. He got a First in History from Keble."
"Bit more than me, sir."
"Bit more than me, Lewis."
The phone was ringing again.
Strange.
"Morse? You've let him out of the country, I hear?"
"Yes. We need a bit more time and a bit more evidence before we bring him
in."
"I agree," said Strange, unexpectedly.
"No good just. .."
"He'll be back for the day of reckoning."
"You think so?"
"I know so."
"And in the interim?"
"He'll be having a beano kisses, wine, roses.
"But when the feast is finished and the lamps expire . . ." You know the
Dowson poem, sir? "
"Course I bloody do!"
"Well, I don't think he'll ever be really happy with any of these other women
of his."
"This one sounds like a bit of all right though."
"I'd still like to bet he wakes up in the small hours sometimes and thinks
back on the woman he loved more than any of them, feeling a bit desolate ' '
- and sick of an old passion."
"Exactly."
"Yvonne, you mean?"
"No, not Yvonne, sir. Elizabeth Elizabeth Jane Thomas."
chapter seventy-one What more pleasant setting than the cinema for sweetly
deodorized bodies to meet, unzip, and commune?
(Malcolm Muggeridge, The Most of Malcolm Mu^eridy) sylvia marsden (nee
prentice) was temporarily living with her mother in a pleasantly appointed
semi on a housing estate at Witney. And it was her mother (Lewis had phoned
earlier) who had answered the door and shown the two detectives into the
lounge where the buxom Sylvia, blouse open, was breast-feeding a very new
baby not in the slightest degree disconcerted to be thus interrupted in her
maternal ministrations, one hand splayed across an engorged nipple, the
fingers of the other playing lovingly around the lips of the suckling infant.
An awkwardly embarrassed Morse moved slowly round the room, simulating deep
interest in the tasteless bric-a-brac that cluttered every surface and shelf
in the brightly decorated room; whilst Lewis stood above the mother and
child, smiling quasi-paternally and drawing the back of his right
index-finger lightly across the cherubic cheek: "Little treasure, isn't he?
What's his name?"
"She's a she, actually aren't you, Susie?"
"Ah yes, of course!"
Morse temporarily declined to take a seat but accepted, strangely enough, the
offer of coffee, and began his questioning whilst looking through the
window on to the neatly kept back garden.
"We're just having to make one or two further enquiries, Mrs Marsden ' " Call
me Sylvia! "
"It's about one of your former boyfriends ' " Simon, yes, I know. That
Sergeant Dixon told me. Nice man, isn't he?
He got on ever so well with Mum. "
Morse nodded, aware of the probable reason.
"It's a long time ago now, I realize . . ."
"Not really. Not for me it isn't. The night Simon's mum was murdered?
Can't forget something like that, can you? "
"That's good news, Sylvia. Now that night, that evening, the 9th ' " Oh no!
You've got it wrong. It was the 8th - the night Mrs Harrison was murdered.
I'm quite sure of that. My birthday, wasn't it? Simon took me to the ABC in
Oxford. Super film! All about these male strippers ' "Did the police ever
ask you about it?"
"No. Why should they?"
Sylvia rebuttoned her blouse, and as Morse turned at last to face her, Lewis
could see the disappointment on his face.
Mrs Prentice (nee Jones) who had clearly been listening keenly from the
adjacent kitchen, now brought in two cups of coffee.
"I can remember that," she volunteered.
"Like she says, that was your birthday, wasn't it, Sylv?"
"How did you find Simon, Mrs Prentice?" asked Lewis.
"I liked him. He used to come in sometimes but I think he felt a bit... you
know, with his hearing."
"He didn't come in that night?"
"No. I remember it well. Like Sylv says well, not something you forget, is
it? I saw him though, after he'd brought her back. And I heard the pair of
'em whispering on the doorstep. Nice boy, really.
Could have done worse, couldn't you, Sylv? "
"I did better. Mum, OE>' 333
Clearly there was less than complete family
agreement on the merits of baby Susie's official father and Morse swallowed
his coffee quickly and, as ever, Lewis followed his chief's lead dutifully.
In the car outside they sat for some time in silence.
"You knew it was the 8th, sir. Why ?"
"Just to test her memory."
There was another long silence.
"Looks as if we've been wrong, sir."
"Looks as if I've been wrong."
"Alibis don't come much better than that."
"No."
"You know when Mrs Whatshername said she heard the pair of 'em whispering
outside, she probably heard more of the conversation than Simon ever did!"
Morse nodded with a wry grin. 'you don't think there's any chance that
somebody bribed our Sylvia and Sylvia's mum . . . ? "
"Not the remotest. Do you?"
