by Colin Dexter
“Too old for you.”
“Single.”
“Gracious, yes! Far too independent a spirit for marriage … Anyway, have a good weekend! Anything exciting on?”
“Important, perhaps, rather than exciting. We've got a meeting up at Hook Norton tomorrow at the Pear Tree Inn. We're organizing another Countryside March.”
“That's the ‘rural pursuits’ thing, isn't it? Foxhunting—”
“Among other things.”
“The ‘toffs and the serfs.’”
Sarah shook her head with annoyance. “That's just the sort of comment we get from the urban chattering-classes!”
“Sorry!” Turner held up his right hand in surrender. “You're quite right. I know next to nothing about foxhunting, and I'm sure there must be things to be said in favor of it. But—please!—don't go and tell Morse about them. We just happened to be talking about foxhunting the last time he was here—it was in the news—and I can't help remembering what he said.”
“Which was?” she asked coldly.
“First, he said he'd never thought much of the argument that the fox enjoys being chased and being pulled to little pieces by the hounds.”
“Does he think the chickens enjoy being pulled to little pieces by the fox?”
“Second, that the sort of people who hunt do considerably more harm to themselves than they do to the animals they hunt. He said they run a big risk of brutalizing themselves… dehumanizing themselves.”
The two of them, master and pupil, looked at each other over the desk for an awkward while; and the Professor of Diabetes Studies thought he may have seen a flash of something approaching fury in the dark-brown eyes of his probationary consultant.
It was the latter who spoke first:
“Mind if I say something?”
“Of course not.”
“I'm surprised, that's all. I fully, almost fully, accept your criticisms of my professional manner and my strategy with patients. But from what you've just said you sometimes seem to talk to your patients about other things than diabetes.”
“Touché.”
“But you're right… Robert. I've been getting too chatty, I realize that. And I promise that when I see Mr. Morse I'll try very hard, as you suggest, to instill some sort of disciplined regimen into his daily life.”
Turner said nothing in reply. It was a good thing for her to have the last word: she'd feel so much better when she came to think back on the interview. As she would, he knew that. Many times. But he allowed himself a few quietly spoken words after the door had closed behind her:
“Oh Lady in Pink—Oh lovely Lady in Pink! There is very, very little chance of a disciplined regimen in Morse's life.”
Chapter Seven
Whoever could possibly confuse “Traffic Lights” and “Driving Licence?” You could! Just stand in front of your mirror tonight and mouth those two phrases silently to yourself.
(Lynne Dubin, The Limitations of Lip-reading)
Disabilities, like many sad concomitants of life, are often cloaked in euphemism. Thus it is that the “blind” and the “impotent” and the “deaf” are happily no longer amongst us. Instead, in their respective clinics, we know our fellow outpatients as those affected by impaired vision; as victims of chronic erectile dysfunction; as citizens with a serious hearing impediment. The individual members of such groups, however, know perfectly well what their troubles are. And in the latter category, they tend to prefer the monosyllabic “deaf,” although they realize that there are varying degrees of deafness; realize that some are very deaf indeed.
Like Simon Harrison.
He had been a six-year-old (it was 1978) attending a village school in Gloucestershire when an inexplicably localized outbreak of meningitis had given cause for most serious concern in the immediate vicinity. And in particular to two families there: to the Palmer family in High Street, whose only daughter had tragically died; and to the Harrison family in Church Lane, whose son had slowly recovered in hospital after three weeks of intensive care, but with irreversible long-term deafness: twenty-five percent residual hearing in the left ear; and almost nothing in the right.
Thereafter, for Simon, social and academic progress had been seriously curtailed and compromised: like an athlete being timed for the hundred-meters sprint over sand dunes wearing army boots; like a pupil, with thick wadges of cotton-wool in each ear, seeking to follow instructions vouchsafed by a tutor from behind a thickly paneled door.
Oh God! Being deaf was such a dispiriting business.
But Simon was a fighter, and he'd tried hard to make the best of things. Tried so hard to master the skills of lip reading; to learn the complementary language of “signing” with movements of fingers and hands; to present a wholly bogus facial expression of comprehension in the company of others; above all, to come to terms with the fact that silence, for those who are deaf, is not merely an absence of noise, but is a wholly passive silence, in which the potential vibrancy of active silence can never again be appreciated. Deafness is not the brief pregnant silence on the radio when the listener awaits the Greenwich time-signal; deafness is a radio set that is defunct, its batteries dead and nonrenewable.
Few people in Simon's life had understood such things; and in his early teens, when the audiographical readings had begun to dip even more alarmingly, fewer and fewer people had been overly sympathetic.
Except his mother, perhaps.
And the reason for such lack of interest in the boy had not been difficult to fathom. He was an unattractive, skinny-limbed lad, with rather protuberant ears, and a whiny, nasal manner of enunciating his words, as though his disability were not so much one of hearing as one of speaking.
Yet it would be an exaggeration to portray the young Harrison as a hapless adolescent, so often mishearing, so often misunderstood. His school fellows were not a gang of unmitigated bullies; nor were his teachers an uncaring crew. No. It was just that no one seemed to like him much; certainly no one seemed to love him.
Except his mother, perhaps.
But Simon did have some residual hearing, as we have seen; and the powerful hearing aids he wore were themselves far more valuable than any sympathy the world could ever offer. And when, after many a struggle, he left school with two A-level certificates (a C in English and a D in History) he very soon had a job.
Still had a job.
In the early 1990s, Oxfordshire's potential facilities for business and industry had attracted many leading national and international companies. During those years, for example, the county could boast the largest concentration of printing and publishing companies outside the metropolis; and it was to one of these, the Daedalus Press in North Oxford, that on leaving school Simon had applied for the post of apprentice proofreader. And had been successful, principally (let it be admitted) because of the employers’ legal obligation to appoint a small percentage of semidisabled applicants. Yet the “apprentice” appellation was very soon to be deleted from Simon's job description, for he was proving to be surprisingly and encouragingly competent: accurate, careful, neat—a fair combination of qualities required in a proofreader. And with any luck (so it was thought) experience would gradually bring with it that needful extra dimension of tedious pedanticism.
On the morning of Friday, July 17, he found on his desk a photocopied extract from some unspecified tabloid which some unspecified colleague had left, and which he read through with keen attention; then read through a second time, with less interest in its content, it appeared, than in its form, since his proofreading pen applied itself at five points in the article.
Chief Inspector Morse had not as yet encountered Simon Harrison, but he would have been reasonably impressed by the proofreader's competence. Only reasonably, of course, since he himself was a man who somewhere, somehow, had acquired the aforementioned dimension of “tedious pedanticism,” and would have made three further amendments. And, of course, would have corrected that gross anachronism, since historical accuracy had engaged him from t
he age of ten, when he had taken it upon himself to memorize the sequence of the American presidents, and the dates of the kings and queens of England.
Chapter Eight
Bankers are just like anybody else,
Except richer.
(Ogden Nash, I'm a Stranger Here Myself)
The London offices of the Swiss Helvetia Bank are tucked away discreetly just behind Sloane Square. The brass plaque pinpointing visitors to these premises, albeit highly polished, is perhaps disproportionately small. Yet in truth the Bank has little need to impress its potential clients. On the contrary. Such clients have every need to impress the Bank.
Just after 4 P.M. on Friday, July 17, a smartly suited man in his late forties waved farewell to the uniformed guard at the security desk and walked out into the sunshine of a glorious summer's day. Traffic was already heavy; but that was of no concern to Frank Harrison, one of six portfolio and investment managers of SHB (London). His company flat was only a few minutes' walk away in Pavilion Road.
Earlier in the day he'd been very much what they paid him so handsomely for being—shrewd, superior, trustworthy—when his secretary had poured coffee for a small, grey-haired man and for his larger, much younger, cosmetically exquisite wife.
“You realize that SHB deals principally with portfolio investments of, well, let's say, over a million dollars? Is that, er… ?”
The self-made citizen from South Carolina nodded. “I think you can feel assured, sir, that we shall be able to meet that figure—ah!—fairly easily, shan't we, honey?”
He'd taken his wife's heavily diamonded left hand in his own and smiled, smiled rather sweetly, as Harrison thought.
And he himself had smiled, too—rather sweetly, as he hoped—as mentally he calculated the likely commission from his latest client.
Almost managed a smile again now, as he stopped outside Sloane Square Underground Station and bought a copy of the Evening Standard, flicking through the sheets, almost immediately finding the only item that appeared to interest him, then swiftly scanning the brief article before depositing the paper in the nearest litter bin. Had he been at all interested in horse-racing, he might have noticed that Carolina Cutie was running in the 4:30 at Kempton Park. But it had been many years since he had placed a bet with any bookie—instead now spending many hours of each working day studying on his office's computer screens the odds displayed from the London, New York, and Tokyo stock exchanges.
Considerably safer.
And recently he'd been rather lucky in the management of his clients’ investments.
And the bonuses were good.
He let himself into his flat, tapped in the numbers on the burglar alarm, and walked into the kitchen, where he poured himself a large gin with a good deal of ice and very little tonic. But he'd never had any drinking problem himself. Unlike his wife. His murdered wife.
Lauren had promised to be along about 6 P.M., and she'd never been late. He would call a taxi… well, perhaps they'd spend an hour or so between the sheets first, although (if truth were told) he was not quite so keenly aware of her sexual magnetism as he had been a few months earlier. Passion was coming off the boil. It usually happened. On both sides, too. It had happened with Yvonne, with whom he'd scaled the heights of sexual ecstasy, especially in the first few months of their marriage. Yet even during those kingfisher days he had been intermittently unfaithful to her; had woken with heart-aching guilt in the small hours of so many worryful nights—until, that is, he had discovered what he had discovered about her; and until he had fallen in love with a woman who was living so invitingly close to him in Lower Swinstead.
The front doorbell rang at 5:50 P.M. Ten minutes early. Good sign! He felt sexually ready for her now; tossed back the last mouthful of his second gin; and went to greet her.
“You're in the paper again!” she blurted, almost accusingly, brandishing the relevant page of the Evening Standard in front of his face after the door was closed behind them.
“Really?”
For the second time Harrison looked down at the headline, new clue to old murder; and pretended to read the article through.
“Well?” she asked.
“Well, what?”
“What have you got to tell me?”
“I'm going to take you out for a meal and then I'm going to take you upstairs to bed—or maybe the other way round.”
“I didn't mean that. You know I didn't.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I want you to tell me what happened. You've never spoken about it, have you? Not to me. And I want to know!” Her upper lip was suddenly tremulous. “So before we do anything else, you'd better—”
“Better what?” He snapped the words and his voice seemed that of a different man. “Listen, my sweetheart! The day you tell me what to do, that's the day we finish, OK? And if you don't get that message loud and clear” (paradoxically the voice had dropped to a whisper) “you'd better bugger off and forget we ever met.”
There were no tears in her eyes as she replied: “I can't do that, Frank. But there's one thing I can do: I'm going, as you so delicately put it, to bugger off!”
In full control of herself she turned the catch on the Yale lock, and the door closed quietly behind her.
Chapter Nine
He looked at me with eyes I thought
I was not like to find.
(A. E. Housman, More Poems, XLI)
It had been the previous day, Thursday, when after collecting her boss's mail Barbara Dean had walked along the corridor, white blouse as ever perfectly pressed, flicking through the eleven envelopes held in her left hand. And looking with particular attention (again!) at the one addressed with a scarlet felt-pen, in outsize capital letters, to:
The execution of this lettering gave her the impression of its being neither the work of a particularly educated nor of a particularly uneducated correspondent. Yet the lowercase legend along the top-left of the envelope—“Private and Confidencial” (sic)—would perhaps suggest the latter. Whatever the case though, the envelope was always going to be noticed—by whomsoever. It was like someone entering a lucky-dip postal competition with multicolored sketches adorning the periphery of the envelope; or like a lover mailing off a vastly outsize Valentine.
What would her boss make of it?
Barbara had been working at Police HQ for almost six years now and had enjoyed her time there—especially these past three years working as the personal secretary of Chief Superintendent Strange; and she was very sad that he would be leaving at the end of the summer. “Strange by name and strange by nature”—that's what she often said when friends had asked about him: an oddly contradictory man, that was for sure. He was a heavyweight, in every sense of the word; yet there were times when he handled things with a lightness of touch which was as pleasing as it was unexpected. His was the reputation of a blunt, no-nonsense copper who had not been born with quite the IQ of an Aristotle or an Isaac Newton; yet (in Barbara's experience) he could on occasion exhibit a remarkably compassionate insight into personal problems, including her own. All right (yes!) he was a big, blundering, awkward teddy bear of a man: a bit (a lot?) henpecked at home—until recently of course; a man much respected, if not particularly liked, by his fellow officers; and (from Barbara's point of view) a man who had never, hardly ever, sought to take the slightest advantage of her … well, of her womanhood. Just that once, perhaps?
It had been at the height of the summer heat wave of 1995. One day when she had been wearing the skimpiest outfit the Force could ever officially tolerate, she had seen in Strange's eyes what she thought (and almost hoped?) were the signs of some mild, erotic fantasy.
“You look very desirable, my girl!”
That's all he'd said.
Was that what people meant by “sexual harassment”?
Not that she'd mentioned it to anyone; but the phrase was much in the headlines that long, hot summer, and she'd heard some of the girls talking in the cantee
n about it.
“I could do with a bi’ o’ that sexual harássment!” confessed Sharon, the latest and youngest tyro in the typing pool.
That was the occasion when one of the senior CID officers seated at the far end of the table had got to his feet, drained his coffee, and come across to lay a gentle hand on Sharon's suntanned shoulder.
“You mean sexual hárassment, I think. As you know, we usually exercise the recessive accent in English; and much as I admire our American friends, we shouldn't let them prostitute our pronunciation, young lady!”
He had spoken quietly but a little cruelly; and the uncomprehending Sharon was visibly hurt.
“Pompous prick! Who the hell does he think he is?” she'd asked when he was gone.
So Barbara told her.
Not that she knew him personally, although his blue eyes invariably smiled into hers, a little wearily sometimes but ever interestedly, whenever the two of them passed each other in the corridors; and when she sometimes fancied that he looked at her as though he knew what she was thinking.
God forbid!
It was not of Morse, though, but of Strange that she was thinking that morning when she tapped the customary twice on his office door and entered. Sometimes, when he sat there behind his desk—tie slightly askew, a light shower of dandruff over the shoulders of his jacket, hairs growing a little too prominently from his ears and from his nostrils, white shirt rather less than white and less than smoothly ironed—it was then, yes, that she wished to mother him. She—Barbara!—less than half his age.
That he'd never had such a complicated effect on other women, she felt completely convinced.
Well, no; not completely convinced …
Chapter Ten
He was a self-made man who owed his lack of success to nobody.
(Joseph Heller, Catch-22)
“Probably some nutter!” growled Strange as he slipped a paper knife inside the top of the envelope and unfolded the single, thin sheet of paper contained therein. And for a while frowned mightily; then smiled.
