by Colin Dexter
Morse sounded mildly interested, giving his own verdict in somewhat pompous terms. He asserted that the character of the human condition was indeed “ambiguity,” the virtually inseparable mixture of the true and the false. But in the present case such apparent contradictions could be explained so very easily—in fact in exactly the way Lewis himself had just explained them. “And,” continued Morse, “you can be quite sure of one thing—no, two things: Bar-ron murdered the pair of ‘em; then somebody murdered Barron. Get that clear in your head, and we might make a bit of progress. OK? I'll see you in the morning.”
“Sir! Before you ring off. We tried to get you several times earlier but there was the engaged tone all the time.”
“That's funny. I only remember making the one call.”
“I thought perhaps—you know, you seemed a bit whacked …”
“You'd be wrong, Lewis. I nearly spent some time in bed. Not quite, though. Goodnight.”
* * *
The dramatic news came in at twenty minutes to midnight, as Morse sat at home making out a rough draft of his will. He'd no immediate relatives remaining, none at all; and therefore instructions for the postmortem dissemination of all his worldly goods should not present too much of a complication. Nor did they. And he was writing out a fairish copy of a simple second draft—when the phone rang.
“What?”
…
“What?”
…
It was two minutes later before he spoke again:
“I'll be over straightaway.”
Forty-eight
We trust we are not guilty of sacrilege in suggesting that the teaching of Religious Knowledge in some schools would pose an almighty challenge even for the Almighty Himself.
(From the Introduction to Religious Education
in Secondary Schools: 1967-87, HMSO)
Roy Holmes, aged fifteen, was a crudely disruptive pupil at school, a truculently uncooperative son in the Witney Street house he shared with his invalid mother, and a menace wherever he walked in the wider community. He took drugs; he was an inveterate and skillful shoplifter; he regularly snapped the stems of newly planted trees striving to establish themselves; he spat disgusting gobbets of phlegm on most of the pavements in Burford. In short, Roy Holmes was an appalling specimen of humankind. He deserved to have no real friends at all in life; and he had none.
Except one.
* * *
Ms. Christine Coverley, aged twenty-seven, in her second year at Burford Secondary School, was not an impressive personage. A small, skinny, flat-chested, spotty-chinned, mousy-haired woman, she could scarcely have expected admirers anywhere—either among her fellow male members of staff, or among the motley collection of pupils, especially the boys, she was timetabled to teach. And, indeed, she had no such admirers.
Except one.
To complicate her incompetence as a teacher, she had been appointed faute de mieux to teach Religious Knowledge, a task wholly beyond her ability. Her classes taunted her mercilessly; and on more than one occasion such was the uproar in her classroom that teachers in adjacent rooms had barged in—only to find, with deep embarrassment, that a nominal teacher was already present there; and with even deeper embarrassment for Ms. Coverley herself, resulting in fevered nightmares and anguish of soul that was often unbearable. One class, 4 Remove (Holmes's class), was even worse than the others—a group of pagan half-wits, of both sexes, whose interest in the pronouncements of major and minor prophets alike was nil. Over the year her hebdomadal clash with these monsters had been a terrifying ordeal; and the situation was quite hopeless. But no—not quite hopeless. Each night of term she would kneel in her bedsit and beseech the Almighty to grant her some deliverance from such despair. And one day her prayer had been answered.
In the middle of the summer term, at the end of one of her spectacularly disastrous lessons with 4 Remove, her eyes smarting with tears of humiliation, she had stopped the cocky, surly Holmes as he was about to leave the room:
“Roy! I know I'm useless. I wouldn't be though—if I got a bit of help, but I don't get any help from anyone. I just want some help. And there's someone who could help me so easily if he wanted to. You, Roy!”
She turned away, wiped her moist cheeks, picked up her books, and left the empty classroom.
But Roy Holmes stood where he was, immobile. For the first time in his life someone had asked him for help—him—the despair of mother, vicar, social workers, headmaster, police; and suddenly he'd felt oddly, unprecedentedly moved, conscious somewhere deep inside himself of a compassion he'd never known and could scarcely recognize.
If, as Ms. Coverley believed, her God sometimes moved in a mysterious way, it was not quite so dramatic as the way in which Roy Holmes was soon to move. In the next RK lesson one of the boys in the back row had been particularly foul-mouthed and disruptive, whilst Holmes had remained completely silent. After school that day, the youth in question returned home with a bleeding mouth, two broken teeth, and one bruised and hugely swollen eye. No one knew who was responsible. But then no one needed to know, since everyone knew who was responsible.
The nightmares were over, and Ms. Coverley's last few weeks of the summer term were almost happy ones. Yet she knew that she was not the stuff that teachers are made of, and her resignation was received with relief by the headmaster. For the time being she decided to stay on in Burford, renewing the let on her ground-floor bedsit for a further two months.
The bell rang at 11:15 P.M. and Roy Holmes, somewhat the worse for drink or drugs or both, stood at the door when she opened it. His words were the words she had used to him, almost exactly so:
“I just want some help. And there's someone who can help me, if she wants to. You!”
It wasn't a lot he had to say; not a lot she had to say to the duty sergeant, half an hour later, when she rang Burford Police Station; and not a lot when he, in turn, rang Thames Valley HQ, almost immediately put through to the home number of the man in charge of the inquiry into the death of J. Barron, Builder.
Roy Holmes, a pupil of Burford Secondary School, aged fifteen, living at 29A Witney Street, had been riding his mountain bike along the footway on the southern side of Sheep Street at approximately 10 A.M. that Monday, August 3. By the youth's own admission he was showing off, expectorating regularly, terrorizing any pedestrians, riding no-handed—when he'd decided to defy all superstition and ride beneath the ladder he saw in front of him—when he'd badly misjudged whatever he'd misjudged—when he'd collided sharply with the bottom of the ladder—when the whole thing had jerked sideways—and when a man had toppled from the top of the ladder and landed on the compacted pathway outside “Collingwood” …
Forty-nine
“God save thee, ancient Mariner!
From the fiends, that plague thee thus!—
Why look'st thou so?”—“With my cross-bow
I shot the Albatross.”
(Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner)
The following morning, Morse had been early summoned to the presence, summoned to Caesar's tent.
“Won't do, will it, Morse. Just won't do! You tell us to go and bring Barron in. And why? Because you say he's knifed Flynn and Repp. Fine! There's three of ‘em, you say, originally involved in the cover-up over the Harrison murder, three of ‘em prepared to stick to their stories—for a fee of course. Then suddenly we find two of ‘em murdered, and somebody—somebody, Morse—thinks this'll be as good an opportunity as any to finish off number three. So whoever this somebody is, he decided he's been forking out way over the odds anyway, and he goes ahead with his plan. He's been living with three albatrosses round his neck, and suddenly he finds somebody else has cut the strings off two of ‘em. Too good an opportunity to be missed. All adds up, doesn't it? Except, matey, for one thing: Barron's death turns out to be a bloody accident. Just some teenage lout…”
Strange took a breather, gulped down the last of his coffee, and stuck another chocolate biscuit
in his mouth: “Fancy a coffee?”
“No.”
“They'll be open in an hour, you mean?”
“Fifty minutes, actually.”
Strange suddenly sounded extremely pleased with himself: “Did you actually say ‘actually,’ Morse?”
Oh dear.
It was Strange who broke the ensuing silence. “Where are we, in all this?” he asked softly.
“I dunno. I felt convinced that the same fellow—Barron—had murdered both of them, both Flynn and Repp. I thought the motive was a pretty familiar one—money. You know, there's nothing much worse in life than people doing the same job and getting paid at different rates. It happens in every office, in every profession in the land. Anger … jealousy … bitterness… usually controllable but potentially dynamite. And I thought Barron had found out he wasn't doing half so well as his partners in crime.”
“And who exactly is this golden goose?”
“You know that as well as I do.”
“I do?”
“Oh, yes,” replied Morse quietly.
A knock at the door heralded PC Kershaw, the fast-track recruit with a First in History from Keble who'd driven Morse out to Sutton Courtenay, and whose duties for the present consisted mostly of supplying the Chief Superintendent with regular coffee and chocolate biscuits.
“Anything I can do for you, sir?”
“Yes,” growled Strange. “Bugger off!” Then, turning back to Morse: “Are you making any progress?”
“Early days. We've not even had the final path reports yet. Life's full of surprises.”
“And disappointments.”
“That too, yes.”
“Well if it wasn't Barron …”
“Dunno. But I'm sure the key figure in both cases is one and the same person—the man who was in bed with Yvonne Harrison the night she was murdered.”
“You don't think it was Repp?”
“No. As I see it, Repp had been recceing the property, maybe for several nights. It was going to be a gift for any professional burglar like him. And he knew pretty well all that went on that night—”
“Knew the fellow who was in bed with Yvonne?”
“Yes. But I don't think it was Repp or any other burglar who disturbed the bondage session that evening. I think that was somebody else. And I think it's most likely that our lover-boy knew that someone else.”
“And in your book Barron was the lover-boy?”
“Well, he was doing a job for her—hanging about the place quite a bit—strong, good-looking sort of fellow—the husband away a good deal of the time …”
“But I'll say it again—what if it wasn't Barron?”
“Plenty of other candidates, surely?”
“Oh yes?”
Morse measured his words carefully. “I think that anyone meeting Yvonne Harrison, if she turned things on a bit—anyone, including me—would have given a month's beer money—”
“A week's in your case.”
“—for an hour or two between the sheets, or between the bedposts, or between anywhere else. By, er, by all accounts she was a … well, let's say she had the same effect on men as they tell me Viagra has on the impotent, or the victims of chronic erectile dysfunction, as they're known these days.”
“Really! So for all we know, this chap could have been a client from North Wales or somewhere.”
“More probably South Wales, sir.”
“And much more probably, somebody local.”
“Agreed.”
“Any ideas?”
“Well, the only fellow I've met in that little community who's topped up with surplus testosterone is the landlord of the Maiden's Arms.”
“You've interviewed him?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because I'm still trying to come to terms with the fact that it wasn't Barron. You see I still think he's the key to all this ridiculously complex business. But complex only because those involved deliberately made it complex.”
“Barron's phone calls, you mean? No luck there?”
“No. Change of BT office, change of procedure, change of monitoring, files reclassified … no hope! Wouldn't help anyway. All Barron said was that he'd rung her and the number was engaged; and then rung her again and the call wasn't answered. Neat, wasn't it? No record of anything.”
“He was lying, you think?”
“Yes.”
“What about the burglar alarm?”
“Thunderstorm, possibly—that sets ‘em off.”
“There wasn't a thunderstorm that night.”
“No? Probably a cat then—they set ‘em off too.”
“They hadn't got a cat.”
“Oh.”
Strange lumbered to his feet. “Look! You surely don't still think Barron's your man, do you?”
Morse smiled. “Don't I?”
Fifty
I can't tell a lie—not even when I hear one.
(John Bangs, 1862-1922)
In the world of detective fiction, alibis are frequently concocted in order to mystify the reader. In what is called the “real” world they usually provide an invaluable method of eliminating a few runners in an already limited field, thereby affording the police a better prospect of backing the likely winner. For (except in Morse's mind) an alibi is an alibi: if someone is seen in one place at one particular time, it seems highly improbable that this same someone may be seen in some other place at the same time. Yet it is sometimes difficult adequately to corroborate an alibi—viz, that plea of the criminal to have been in another place at the material time; and alibis may well be doubted, closely checked, and indeed, on occasion, be spectacularly broken.
This in various ways.
It is highly unlikely, for example, that a well-focused video camera will be in operation in that first particular place; and even if it is, some smart electronic alec may well be able to doctor the evidence. Almost always, therefore, corroboration will depend on the testimony of eyewitnesses who, even if honest, can be the victims of tricks of memory over times and sightings; or on the testimony of witnesses who are dishonest, and are willing to fabricate falsehoods—for friends, perhaps, or for a fee. The alibi problem is further complicated by the confident assertion of some mystic sects that one can, in fact, be in two places simultaneously, although the police are grateful that such bizarre beliefs are currently not widely embraced.
Morse himself championed the view that all alibis should probably be ignored in the first instance, on the not illogical grounds that if just one of them were suspect, it was sensible to assume that all of them were …
Such views (with variants) Sergeant Lewis had heard several times before, and it was therefore with some diffidence that he broached the subject the following morning.
“Don't you reckon it would be a good idea to get all these alibis sorted out a bit clearer?”
“A bit more clearly, Lewis.”
“The night Mrs. Harrison was murdered, the morning Flynn and Repp were murdered—”
“And don't forget Monday morning.”
“Barron, you mean? You surely don't still think—?” Morse held up his right hand in surrender. “You're right, perhaps. Let's make a list. Well, you make a list. Ready?”
He steepled his slim fingers in front of him and stared into the middle distance, though with little observable enthusiasm in his eyes:
“Frank Harrison
Simon Harrison
Sarah Harrison
Harry Repp
John Barron …”
“That's the short list?”
Morse nodded.
“OK. First I'll recheck where they all were, or where they were all supposed to be, first when Mrs. Harrison—”
“Already been done. You've read the files.”
“Weren't checked very thoroughly though, some of ‘em.”
“Long time ago, Lewis. People forget or want to forget or pretend to forget.”
“A day like that though, wh
en she was murdered? Biggest day in village history. Everybody remembers where they were, like when Kennedy was assassinated.”
“Nonsense, Lewis! People remember where they were and what they were doing at the time they heard of things like that. Agreed. But what else? Do you remember what you were doing for the rest of the day when Kennedy was shot? Do you?”
“No. I take your point, sir.”
“Who are you thinking of particularly?”
“Well the family got away with some pretty flimsy alibis, didn't they? Especially Simon and Sarah. No one seems to have checked them much at all.”
“Ye-es.”
“Simon said he got home from work about a quarter past five, had a meal, then went down to the ABC cinema in George Street to see The Full Monty. Still had his ticket if I remember rightly.”
Morse nodded and Lewis continued:
“Sarah? She was at a diabetes conference in the Rad-cliffe Infirmary that day—no doubt about that. And after it had finished she went over the road to the Royal Oak for a drink with a few friends—no doubt about that either—and then left for her flat in Jericho at about a quarter to seven, where she listened to The Archers, had a long hot bath, watched the Nine O ‘Clock News, and then had an early night.”
“Making no mention in the course of her evidence that she had a phone call in the middle of the evening, as a result of which she tore down to the ABC Cinema, bought a ticket for The Full Monty—”
“Probably no seats left that night, sir.”
“—bought a ticket and promptly tore it across the middle and then tore out of the place—”
“Sir! Not so much of this tearing about all over the shop! She'd sprained her ankle just before then and she'd probably be hobbling—”
“—she hobbled out of the cinema with a very valuable little alibi in her pretty little hand.”
“Alibi for Simon, you mean?”
“Or for herself.”
“You're losing me again, sir.”
