The Remorseful Day

by Colin Dexter

  He finally rose from the creased and crumpled sheets, and was shaving, just as rosy-fingered Dawn herself was rising over the Cutteslowe Council Estate.

  At 6 A.M. he once more measured his blood-sugar level, now dipped dramatically from 24.4 at 1 A.M. to 2.8. Some decent breakfast was evidently required, and a lightly boiled egg with toast would fit the bill nicely. But Morse had no eggs; no slices of bread either. So, perforce, it had to be cereal. But Morse could find no milk, and there seemed no option but to resort to the solitary king-sized Mars bar which he always kept somewhere in the flat. For an emergency. In rebus extremis, like now. But he couldn't find it. Then—bless you St. Anthony!—he discovered that the Co-op milkman had already called; and he had a great bowl of Corn Flakes, with a pleasingly cold pint of milk and several liberally heaped spoonsful of sugar. He felt wonderful.

  Sometimes life was very good to him.

  At 6:45 A.M. he considered (not too seriously) the possibility of walking up from his North Oxford flat to the A40 Ring Road, and thence down the gentle hill to Kidlington. About—what?—thirty-five to forty minutes to the HQ building. Not that he'd ever timed himself, for he'd never as yet attempted the walk.

  Didn't attempt the walk that morning.

  After administering his first insulin dosage of the day, he drove up to Police HQ in the Jaguar.

  Far quicker.

  In his office, as he reread the final findings of the two postmortems (sic), Morse decided, as he usually did, that there was no point whatsoever in his trying to unjumble the physiological details of the lacerations inflicted on the visceral organs of each body. He had little interest in the stomach; had no stomach for the stomach. In fact he was more familiar with the ninefold stomach of the bovine ilk (this because of crossword puzzles) than with its mono-chambered human counterpart. Did it really matter much to know exactly how Messrs. Flynn and Repp had met their ends? But yes, of course it did! If the technicalities pointed to a particular type of weapon; if the weapon could be accurately identified and then found; and if, finally, it could be traced to someone who was known to have had such a weapon and who had the opportunity of wielding it on the day of the murders …

  Hold on though, Morse! Be fair! Amid a plethora of caveats, Dr. Hobson had pointed to a fairly specific type of weapon, had she not? And he read again the paragraph headed “Tentative Conclusions.”

  Morse suddenly stopped reading, sat back in his chair, and placed his hands on his head, fingers interlinked, as he'd done so often at his teacher's bequest in his infant class. And what had been a faraway look in his eyes now gradually focused into an intense gaze as he considered the implications of the extraordinary idea which had suddenly occurred to him…

  Very soon he was rereading the whole report from Forensics, where almost all the earlier findings had been confirmed, although there remained much checking to be done. Prints of Flynn, prints of Repp, prints of the car owner, and several other prints as yet to be identified. Doubtless some of these latter would turn out to be those of the car owner's family. But (Morse read the last sentence of the report again): “One set of fingerprints, repeated and fairly firm, may well prove to be of considerable interest.”

  He leaned back again in his chair, pleasingly weary and really quite pleased with himself, because he knew whose fingerprints they were.

  Oh yes!

  Forty

  Odd instances of strange coincidence are really not all that odd perhaps.

  (Queen Caroline's advocate, speaking in the House of Lords)

  Morse jerked awake as Lewis entered the office just before 8 A.M., wondering where he was, what time it was, what day it was. Yet it had been a wonderful little sleep, the deep and dreamless sleep that Socrates anticipated after swallowing the hemlock.

  “No crossword this morning, sir?”

  “Shop wasn't open.”

  “Why don't you pay a paperboy?”

  “Because, Lewis, a little occasional exercise …”

  Lewis sat down. “Do you mind if I ask you something?”

  Morse pointed to the reports laid out on the desk. “You've read these?”

  Lewis nodded. “But, like I say, I've got something to ask you.”

  “And I've got something to tell you. Is that all right, Lewis?” The voice was suddenly harsh. “You'll remember from all our times together how coincidence occurs in life far more frequently than anyone—except me—is prepared to accept. Coincidence isn't unusual at all. It's the norm. Just like those consecutive numbers cropping up in the National Lottery every week. But in this case the coincidence is even odder than usual.”

  (Lewis raised his eyebrows a little.)

  “Let's go back to Yvonne Harrison's murder. She was a woman with exceptional sex drive, but she certainly wasn't just the deaf-and-dumb nymphomaniac with a bedroom just above the public bar that many a man has fantasized about. Oh, no. She was highly intelligent, highly desirable, like the woman in the Larkin poem with the “lash-wide stare,” who in turn was attracted by a variety of men. A lot of men. So many men that over the years she inevitably came across a few paying clients with kinky preferences. I doubt she ever went in for S and M, but it looks very likely that a bit of bondage was on her list of services, probably with a hefty surcharge. It's well known that some men only find sexual satisfaction with women who put on a show of being utterly submissive and powerless. It gives these men the only sense of real power they're ever likely to experience in life, because the object of their desire is lying there defenseless, unstruggling, sometimes unspeak-ing, too. Not uncommon, that, Lewis. And you can read all about it in Krafft-Ebing's case studies…”

  (Lewis's eyebrows rose significantly.)

  “… although, as you know, I'm no great expert in such matters. In fact, come to think of it, I can't even remember whether he's got one or two ‘b's in his name. But it means there's a pretty obvious explanation of two of the items that puzzled our previous colleagues: a pair of handcuffs, and a gag not all that tightly tied. The woman offering such a specialist service is never going to answer back, never going to scratch your eyes out—and Yvonne Harrison had just about the longest fingernails …”

  (Lewis's eyebrows rose a lot.)

  “On the night of the murder she had a client in bed with her, and if ever there was a locus classicus for what they call coitus interruptus, this was it, because someone interrupted the proceedings. Or at the very least, someone saw them there in bed together.”

  “Harry Repp?”

  “Repp was certainly there at some point. But I think he kept his cool and kept his distance that night. I think he realized there could well be something in it for himself. He was right, too. Because what he saw that night—what he later kept from the police—was going to prove very profitable, as you discovered, Lewis. Five hundred pounds a month from someone just for exercising his professional skills as a burglar in staying well out of sight and keeping his eyes wide open. Exactly what he saw, we shan't know, shall we? Unless he told Debbie Richardson, which I doubt.”

  “What do you think he saw?”

  “Pretty obvious, isn't it?”

  “You mean he saw who murdered Mrs. Harrison?”

  Morse nodded.

  “And you think you know who…?”

  Morse nodded.

  But Lewis shook his head. “It's all so wishy-washy, what you've just said. I don't know where to start. When was she murdered? Who rang her husband? Who set off the burglar alarm? Who—?”

  “Lewis! We, remember, are investigating something else. But if any study of the first case facilitates the solving of the second? So be it! And it does, as you'll agree.”

  “I will?”

  Morse nodded again. “Three people were coinciden-tally involved in a clever and profitable deception that night, each of them able and willing to throw his individual spanner into any reconstruction the CID could reasonably come up with. First, there was Flynn, our corpus primum, who told as many lies as anybody: both about
the time he picked Frank Harrison up from Oxford Station, and about what he noticed—or more probably the person he saw—when he got to Lower Swinstead. Second, there was Repp, our corpus secundum, who told us no lies at all, but only because he told us nothing at all. Third …”

  Morse hesitated, and Lewis looked across the desk expectantly.

  “There's this third man of ours, and a man most unlikely to become our corpus tertium. Once Repp was out of jail, the three of them—Repp himself, Flynn, and this third man—they all arranged to meet together. They'd done pretty well so far out of their conspiracy of silence, and they were all keen on continuing to squeeze the milk cow even drier. So they did meet—a meeting where things went tragically wrong. Greed … jealousy … personal antipathies… whatever! Two of them had an almighty row in the car in which they were traveling together. And one of them, probably in a layby somewhere, knifed one of the others: one of them knifed Flynn. And the remaining two disposed of the body neatly enough at Redbridge—the rubbish bags proving very handy, I should think. So any profits no longer needed to be split three ways. And now the talk between the two of them must have been all about a fifty-fifty share of the spoils, and how it could be effected. But somewhere in the discussion there was one further almighty row; and this time it was Repp who had his innards ripped open.”

  “You know who this ‘third’ man was, you're saying?”

  “So do you. We mentioned him when you produced that admirable schema of yours for the night of Yvonne's murder.”

  “You're saying there was somebody else there that night?”

  “There was always somebody else, Lewis, wasn't there? The man in bed with Yvonne Harrison.”

  “If you say so, sir.”

  “You see, the major problem our lads had was the timing of the murder. Her body wasn't examined until several hours later, and all the pathological guesswork had to be married with the evidence gleaned at the time, or gleaned later. For example, with the fact that someone was in bed with Yvonne at some specific time that night, although nobody really tried to discover who that person was—until I did. For example, again, with the fact that someone had tried to ring her twice that night, at 9 P.M. when the line was engaged, and again half an hour later when the phone rang unanswered. And if you add all this together, you'll find that the person who sorely misled the police, the person who was in bed with her, and the person who murdered both Paddy Flynn and Harry Repp—was one and the same man.”

  There fell a silence between the two of them, broken finally by Lewis. “You're sure about all this?”

  “Only ninety-five percent sure.”

  “We'd better get our skates on then.”

  “Hold your horses! One or two things I'd like you to check first, just to make it one hundred percent.”

  “So we've got a little while?”

  “Oh, yes. No danger of anyone murdering him—not today, anyway. So this afternoon'll be fine. Get out to Lower Swinstead—take someone with you, mind!—and bring him back here. OK?”

  “Fine. Only one thing, sir. You forgot to tell me his name.”

  “Did I? Well, you've guessed it anyway. He's got a little business out there, hasn't he? A little building business. ‘J. Barron, Builder,’ as it says on his van.”

  Forty-one

  But when he once attains the utmost round,

  He then unto the ladder turns his back,

  Looks in the clouds, scorning the base degrees

  By which he did ascend.

  (Shakespeare, Julius Caesar)

  Twenty miles west of Oxford, twenty miles east of Cheltenham, lies the little Cotswold town of Burford. It owes its architectural attractiveness to the wealth of the wool merchants in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; and up until the end of the eighteenth century the small community there continued to thrive, especially the coaching inns which regularly served the E-W travel. But the town was no longer expanding, with the final blow delivered in 1812, when the main London road, which crossed the High Street (the present-day Sheep Street and Witney Street), was rerouted to the southern side of the town (the present-day A40). But Burford remains an enchanting place, as summer tourists will happily testify as they turn off at the A40 roundabout. Picturesque tea shops, craft shops, public houses—all built in the locally quarried, pale-honey-colored limestone—line the steeply curving sweep of the High Street that leads to the bridge at the bottom of the hill, under which runs the River Windrush, with all the birds and the bright meadows and cornfields around Oxfordshire.

  Mrs. Patricia Bayley, aged seventy, had lived for only three years in Sheep Street (vide supra), a pleasingly peaceful, tree-lined road, first left as one descended the hill. The house-date, 1687, had been carved (now almost illegibly) in the greyish and pitted stone above the front door of the three-storied, mullion-windowed building. Her husband, a distinguished anthropologist from University College, Oxford, had died (aged sixty-seven) only two months after his retirement, and only four months after buying the Sheep Street property. Often, since then, she had considered leaving the house and buying one of the older persons’ flats that had been springing up for the last decade all over North Oxford, for her present house was unnecessarily extensive and inappropriate for her solitary needs. Yet the children and the grandchildren (especially the latter) loved to stay there with her and to find themselves lost amid the random rooms. Only one real problem: she'd have to do something about the windows. There could be no Council permission for replacement windows, but the casements were quite literally falling apart. And the whole of the exterior just had to be repainted, from the gutterings along the top to the front door at the bottom. Should she get it all done? Three weeks earlier she'd stood and surveyed the scene. Could she ever find anywhere else so pleasingly attractive as this?

  No! She'd stay.

  She'd consulted the Yellow Pages and found Barron, J., Builder and Decorator; not so far away, either—at Lower Swinstead. She'd rung him and he'd called round to survey the job. He'd seemed a personable sort of fellow; and when he'd quoted a reasonable (if slightly steep) estimate for both the restructuring and the repainting, she'd accepted.

  He'd promised to be with her at 7:30 A.M. on Monday, August 3. And it was precisely at that time that he knocked in civilized manner on the front door of “Collingwood,” again admiring as he did so the dripstone molding above it.

  Born in North Oxford, Mrs. Bayley spoke her mind unapologetically: “You look as if you've just come straight from the abattoir, Mr. Barron!”

  The builder (rather a handsome man, she thought) grinned wryly as he looked down at overalls bespattered with scarlet paint. “Not my choice, Mrs. B. I'm with you, all the way. If there's a better combination of color than black and white and yellow, I don't know it.”

  Mrs. B. felt gratified. “Well, I'll let you get on then. I won't bother you—no one will bother you. It's all very quiet round here. Would you like some coffee later?”

  “Tea, if you don't mind, Mrs. B. Milk and two teaspoons of sugar, please. About ten? Smashing!”

  From the ground-floor window she watched him as he removed the aluminum ladders from the top of the van, stood there for a few seconds looking up at the dormer window, then shaking out the first extension and, by means of a rope and pulley at the bottom, elongating the ladder to its fullest extent with a second, smaller extension. For a few seconds he stood there, holding the loftily assembled structure at right angles to the ground; then easing the pointed top of the third stage—most carefully, lovingly almost—into place against the casement of the dormer window some thirty feet above, before finally firming the bottom of the ladder on the compacted gravel of the pathway which divided the front of the houses there from the wide stretch of grass leading to the edge of Sheep Street, some four or five feet below.

  For several minutes Mrs. B. stood by her front window on the ground floor, looking out a little anxiously to observe her builder's varied skills. Across the road, a solitary jogger in red train
ers was running reasonably briskly past the Bay Tree Hotel, his tracksuit hood over his head, as if he were trying to work up a sweat; or just perhaps to keep his ears warm, since there was an unseasonal nip in the air that morning. Mrs. B thought jogging a silly and dangerous way of keeping fit, though. She'd known the young North Oxford don who had written the hugely popular Joys of Jogging, and who had died aged twenty-seven, whilst on an early-morning not-so-joyful jog.

  Jogging was a dangerous business.

  Like climbing ladders.

  And Mrs. B.'s nerves could stand things no longer.

  She would repair to the second-floor back bedroom to continue with her quilting—as well as to quell the acute fear she felt for a man who (as she saw it) was risking his life at every second of his working day. But before doing so, she knew she had the moral duty to impart a few cautionary words of advice. And she opened the front door just as the builder was beginning his ascent, his left hand on a shoulder-high rung, his right hand grasping a narrowly serrated saw, a long chisel, and a red, short-handled Stanley knife.

  “You will be careful, won't you? Please!”

  The builder nodded, successively grasping each rung (each “round” as the firemen say) at a point just above his shoulders as he climbed with measured step, professionally, confidently, to the top of the triple-length ladder. He'd always enjoyed being up high, ever since the vicar of St. John the Baptist's in Burford had taken him and his fellow choirboys up to the top of the church. It was the first time in his young life he'd felt superior, felt powerful, as he traversed his way along the high places there with a strangely happy confidence, whilst the others inched their cautious way along the narrow ledges.

  It was just the same now.

  Once he had reached the top rung but three, he looked up and immediately decided he would be able to work at the top of the dormer without any trouble. Then he looked down, and saw that the ladder(s) beneath him, though sagging slightly in the middle (that was good), seemed perfectly straight and secure. Funny, really! Most people thought you were all right on heights just so long as you didn't look up or down. Rubbish! The only thing to avoid was looking laterally to left or right, when there really was the risk (at least for him) of losing all sense of the vertical and the horizontal. He dug his red Stanley knife into the upper lintel, then the lower sill; in each case, as he twisted the blade, finding the wooden texture crumble with ominous ease. Not surprising though, really, for he'd noticed the date above the door. He secured the top of the ladder to the gutterings—his normal practice—and began work.