The Remorseful Day

by Colin Dexter

  Everywhere heard will be the judgement-call:

  But at God's altar, oh! remember me.

  (Matthew Arnold)

  Morse opened the front door. “And there's me hoping for a rest day, like they tell me they have in the middle of test matches.”

  But, in truth, he had not tried overhard to have much of a rest day …

  Early that morning (as we have seen), he had rung Sergeant Dixon and given him a list of duties.

  At 10 A.M. he had received a middle-aged, palely intelligent gentleman from Lloyds Bank, a guru on (inter alia) wills, dispositions, codicils, and covenants.

  “From what you tell me, Mr. Morse, you're not exactly going to bequeath a large fortune, are you? And with no relatives, no immediate dependents, no unmanageable debts—well, you might just as well write down a few things on half a page of A4. Save yourself money that way. Do it now, if you like. Just write a few simple sentences—'I leave the house to blank, the bank balance to blank, the books and records to blank, the residual estate to blank.’ That'll cover things for now—and you say you do want things covered? Just sign it, I'll witness it, and I'll see it's carried through, in case, you know … Then we can flesh it out a bit later.”

  “No problems really then?”

  “No. We shall, as a bank, charge a small commission of course. But you expected that.”

  “Oh yes, Mr. Daniel. I'd expected that,” said Morse.

  At 11:15 A.M. he had taken the 2A bus down the Banbury Road as far as Keble Road, where he alighted and walked across the Woodstock Road to the Radcliffe Infirmary, where he was directed up to an office on the first floor.

  “Yes? How can I help you?” The woman behind the desk seemed to be a fairly important personage with carefully coiffured grey hair and carefully clipped diction.

  “I'm thinking of leaving my body to the hospital.”

  “You've come to the right place.”

  “What's the drill?”

  She took a form from a drawer. “Just fill this in.”

  “Is that all?”

  “Make sure you tell your wife and your children and your GP. You'll avoid quite a few problems that way.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Of course, I ought to tell you we may not want your body. The situation does, er, fluctuate. But you'd expected that.”

  “Oh yes, I'd expected that,” said Morse.

  “And you must make sure you die somewhere fairly locally. We can't come and collect you from Canada, you know.”

  Perhaps it was a bleak joke.

  “No, of course not.”

  It had been a joyless experience for Morse, who now walked slowly down St. Giles toward The Randolph. He'd thought at the very least they'd have shown a little gratitude. Instead, he felt as though they were doing him a favor by agreeing (provisionally!) to accept a corpse that would surely be presenting apprentice anatomists and pathologists with some appreciably interesting items: liver, kidneys, lungs, pancreas, heart…

  In the Chapters’ Bar, Ailish Hurley, his favorite barmaid, greeted him in her delightful Irish brogue; and two pints of bitter later, as he walked round into Magdalen Street and almost immediately caught a bus back up to the top of the Banbury Road, he felt that the world was a happier place than it had been half an hour earlier.

  Once home, he treated himself to a small(ish) Glenfiddich, deciding that his liquid intake of calories that lunchtime would nicely balance his dosage of insulin. Yes, things were looking up, and particularly so since the phone hadn't rung all day. What a wonderful thing it would be to go back to the days pre telephone (mobile and immobile alike), pre FAX, pre e-mail!

  And, to cap it all, he'd bought himself a video—in front of which, in midafternoon, he'd fallen fairly soundly asleep, though at some point half-hearing, as he thought, a slippery flop through the letter-box.

  It was an hour later when he opened the envelope and read Dixon's notes on Simon Harrison; on Paddy Flynn; on Mrs. Holmes.

  Interesting!

  Interesting!

  Interesting!

  And very much as he'd thought…

  Only one thing was worrying him slightly. Why hadn't Lewis been in touch? He didn't want Lewis to get in touch but… perhaps he did want Lewis to get in touch. So he rang Lewis himself only to discover that the phone was out of order. Or was it? He banged the palm of his right hand against his forehead. He'd rung Dixon early that morning from the bedroom; then he'd had to go downstairs to check an address in the phone book, finishing the call there, and forgetting to replace the receiver in the bedroom. He'd done it before. And he'd do it again. It was not a matter of any great moment. He'd ring Lewis himself—not that he had anything much to say to him; not for the minute anyway.

  He was about to pick up the phone when the doorbell rang.

  Fifty-eight

  It remains quite a problem to play the clarinet with false teeth, because there is great difficulty with the grip (this may even result in the plate being pulled out!). In addition there are problems with the breathing, because it is difficult to project a successful airstream.

  (Paul Harris, Clarinet Basics)

  “Been trying to get you all day, sir.”

  “I've had other things to do, you know.”

  “You just said you'd wanted a rest day.”

  “Come in! Fancy a quick noggin?”

  Lewis hesitated. “Why not?”

  “Ye gods! You must have had a bad day—or was it a good day?”

  “I've had a good day, and so have you.”

  Morse now listened quietly to the extraordinary news from Andrews, though without any sign of triumphalism.

  Equally quietly he slowly read through Lewis's typed reports. Then read them a second time.

  “Your orthography has come on enormously since they put that spell-check system into the word processor.”

  “Don't you have any problems with spellings—sometimes?”

  “Only with ‘proceed'.”

  “Where does this all leave us, sir?”

  “Things are moving fast.”

  “We're getting near the end, you mean?”

  “We were always near the end.”

  “So what do you think happened?”

  “Shan't ever know for certain, shall we? With all three of them dead, all three of them murdered—”

  “Only two, surely?”

  “If you say so, Lewis. If you say so.” 224

  “You're not suggesting—?”

  But Morse was not to be deflected:

  “There were three people who had a vested interest in Yvonne Harrison's murder: Repp, Barron, and Flynn. Repp—because he'd been casing the property for a burglary; because he happened to be there on the night of the murder; and because he knew who the murderer was. Barron—a man with an SAS background, who'd found a woman who could gratify his sexual fantasies, and who also knew who the murderer was—because he was the fellow in bed with Yvonne that night. Flynn—the fellow who lied about the events that night and who, like the other two, knew who the murderer was. The three of them had got their clutches into the only person who could pay their price, the person who did pay their price: Frank Harrison. He was becoming a fatter and fatter cat in his banking business, so they thought—and, rightly it seems. So they were ready to up the stakes. And on the day Repp was released, they'd agreed to meet and coordinate some plan of action. But things went wrong. Pretty certainly they somehow discovered that they'd each been treated differently—dangerously differently; and bitterness, jealousy, rivalry, all surfaced, and there was one almighty row. I've said all this before! They'd stopped, perhaps in a lay-by along the A34—take your pick!—and Barron got his Stanley knife out and threatened Flynn, the man who'd just happened to be at the taxi-rank that night, and who was now overplaying his hand. And soon it must have occurred to the other two that half a cake is considerably better than a third of one; and Flynn was murdered and dumped at Redbridge in those black bags, the ones the owner of t
he car was originally going to cart off to the rubbish dump.”

  “Waste Disposal Centre.”

  “After that? Who knows? But suddenly the situation was becoming more dangerous still. If half a cake is better than a third, what about a whole cake? So the two of them must have wrangled about the best way to capitalize on Flynn's beneficial departure … But how and why and when and where things went on from there, I've no more idea than you have—and that's not saying much, is it?”

  “No,” said Lewis flatly.

  Morse looked at his sergeant, and smiled wearily:

  “You're annoyed, aren't you?”

  “Annoyed? What about?”

  “Dixon.”

  “Why didn't you tell me?”

  “You'd've accused me of wasting police resources. Do you know what I got him to do today?”

  “Vaguely.”

  “Well, let me tell you, specifically. First, I asked him to do a bit of fourth-grade clerical stuff at Oxpens, and get copies of those attending lipreading classes these last five years. And he did it. Very efficiently. He found Simon Harrison's name there, for three years; and Paddy Flynn's there, for two years—overlapping. Very interesting that, because they must have known each other!

  “Second, I asked Dixon to find out more about Flynn. Flynn was known as an amateur entertainer round the local pubs and clubs in Oxfordshire, playing the clarinet and compering his little pop group. Till about three years ago, when things started to go wrong: he began to experience trouble with his hearing—something that later compromised his job with Radio Taxis; and at about the same time, according to the postmortem details, he had a lot of dental trouble which meant he had to have all his top-front teeth extracted. And that's not a good thing for a clarinet player.”

  “It's not?”

  “Well-known fact. Louis Armstrong had the same sort of trouble.”

  “He was a trumpet player!”

  “Same sort of thing! Then I asked Dixon to look into Mrs. Holmes's background. I had the impression when we spoke to her that she might have been a most attractive woman when she was younger; and I just wondered … I got Dixon to check up on her, that's all. Seems she used to live in Lower Swinstead before she moved to Burford and, well, look at things for yourself.”

  Elizabeth Jane Thomas (b. 7.11.53)

  1976 (Feb.) Son b. (Alan) illeg.

  1983 (March) Son b. (Roy) illeg.

  1983 (Dec.) m. Kenneth Holmes (Registry Office)

  1991 (Sept.) Husband killed in pile-up on A40—same accident that caused all her trouble

  Lewis read Dixon's notes:

  “They don't call them ‘illegitimate’ these days, and it should be ‘Register’ Office.”

  Morse nodded. “You're missing the main point, though.”

  “I am?”

  “Remember when we were in the village pub? Remember Biffen greeting his customers?”

  Yes. Lewis remembered that “Evening, Mr. Thomas”: the young fellow forever playing the fruit machine, the young fellow who had spoken to him in the car park.

  “You mean they're half-brothers? Roy Holmes and Alan Thomas?”

  “Why not full brothers—with the same father? I knew there was something familiar about young Holmes… Anyway, there it is. Elizabeth Thomas was an unmarried mum in the village; Alan was already seven when his younger brother was born; and everybody knew him as Alan Thomas. So he kept the name when his mother married a few months later, and kept it when he went along with the family to live in Burford.”

  “Interesting enough—but is it important?”

  “I don't know,” said Morse slowly. “I just don't know. But it throws up one or two new ideas.”

  “If you say so, sir. Aren't you going to offer me another Scotch, by the way?”

  What a strange day it had been! Even stranger, perhaps, in that Morse now left his own glass unreplenished.

  “Shall I tell you something else, Lewis? You'd never believe it, but I've been watching the telly this afternoon. I picked up one of those RSPB videos.”

  “You mean you know how to work the machine?”

  “It's Strange's fault. Genuine bird-watcher, Strange! He told me the sparrow population in North Oxford's down by fifty percent these last few years; and he told me the sparrow hawks along Squitchey Lane are getting fatter. So I bought this video on birds of prey—you know, eagles, falcons, hobbies, merlins, red kites… did you hear me, Lewis? Red kites.”

  Lewis looked puzzled. “I'm not with you.”

  “Your interview with Simon Harrison. He's a phoney bird-watcher, that fellow. Said he'd been off to Llandudno to try to spot a red kite. Llandudno! He meant Llan-dovery, Lewis—that was the only home of the red kite in the UK until they introduced a few near Stokenchurch.”

  “I didn't know you were an expert—”

  “I'm not. And nor is Simon Harrison. His alibi for Monday morning's worthless. He wouldn't know a red kite from a red cabbage.”

  Unaccustomedly relaxed, Lewis sipped his Glenfid-dich and involuntarily repeated an earlier comment: “Interesting enough—but is it important?”

  “I just don't know,” said Morse slowly, himself now involuntarily repeating an earlier comment: “But it throws up one or two new ideas …”

  “Perhaps they've all been telling us a few lies, sir … except Mrs. Barron, perhaps.”

  Morse smiled. “Don't you mean especially Mrs. Barron?”

  Fifty-nine

  Wherever God erects a house of prayer,

  The Devil always builds a chapel there;

  And ‘twill be found, upon examination,

  The latter has the largest congregation.

  (Daniel Defoe, The True-born Englishman)

  Mrs. Linda Barron walked steadily up the aisle between the small assembly of mourners, her arm linked through that of her mother, both women dutifully dressed in bible-black suits…

  On the whole, it hadn't been quite the ordeal she'd expected: in practical terms, the shock of it all continued to cocoon a good half of her conscious thoughts; whilst emotionally she had long since accepted that her love for her husband was as dead as the man who had been lying there in the coffin—until mercifully the curtains had closed, and the show was over. He would have enjoyed the hymn though, “He Who Would Valiant Be,” for he had been valiant enough (she'd learned that from his army friends)—as well as vain and domineering and unfaithful. Yes, she'd found herself moved by the hymn; and the tears ought to have come.

  But they hadn't.

  Outside, in the clear sunshine, she whispered quickly into her mother's ear. “Remember what I said. The kids are fine, if anybody asks. OK?”

  But the grandmother made no reply. She was the very last person in the world to let the little ones down, especially the one of them. As for Linda, she girded up her loins in readiness for the chorus of commiseration she would have to cope with.

  And indeed several of the family and friends of her late husband, J. Barron, Builder, had already emerged through the chapel doors, including Thomas Biffen, Landlord, whose creased white shirt was so tight around the neck that he had been forced to unfasten the top button beneath the black tie; including the perennial opponents, Alf and Bert, who had exchanged no words in the chapel, but whose thoughts were perhaps in tune during the service as each of them must have mused on their imminent mortality, and the prospects of encountering that great cribbage player in the sky.

  Including Frank Harrison.

  Chief Superintendent Strange, who had been seated in the back row next to Morse, was the last but one to leave. His thoughts had roamed irreverently throughout the short service, and the superannuated minister's apparent confidence in the resurrection of the dead had filled him more with horror than with hope. He thought of his wife and of her death and experienced that familiar sense of the guilt that still remained to be expiated. The hymn was all right, although he'd gone himself for “Praise My Soul, the King of Heaven” in the Instructions for My Funeral stapled to h
is last will and testament. But on the whole he dreaded church services almost as much as did the man seated beside him; and he could think of nothing more detestable than a funeral.

  Morse himself had been sickened by the latest version (Series Something) of the Funeral Service. Gone were those resonant cadences of the AV and the Prayer Book: those passages about corruption putting on incorruptibility and the rest of it, which as a youth he'd found so poignant and powerful. They'd even had a cheerful hymn, for heaven's sake! Where was that wonderfully sad and sentimental hymn he'd chosen for his own farewell: “O Love That Wilt Not Let Me Go”? Chosen, that is, before he'd recently decided to leave his body for medical science, although that decision itself was now in considerable doubt. In particular that little clause in sub-section 6 of Form D1 still stuck in his craw: “Should your bequest be accepted …”

  He pointedly avoided the priest who'd presided—a man (in Morse's view) excessively accoutred in ecclesiastical vestments, and wholly lacking in any sensitivity to the English language. But he did have a quick word of sympathy with the widow, shaking her black-gloved hand firmly before turning to her mother.

  “Mrs. Stokes?” he asked quietly.

  “Yes?”

  Morse introduced himself. “My sergeant called to see your daughter—”

  “Oh yes.”

  “—when you were there looking after the children, I believe. Very kind of you. Must be a bit wearisome … I wouldn't know, though.”

  “It's a pleasure really.”

  “Who's looking after them today?”

  “Oh they're, er … you know, a friend, a neighbor. Won't be for long anyway.”

  “No.”

  Morse turned away, following in Strange's steps toward the car park.

  She was lying, of course—Morse knew that. There was only one of the Barron children at home that day; as there had been when Lewis had called. The elder of the two, Alice, was away somewhere. That much, though very little else, Lewis himself had been able to learn from the Barrons’ GP the previous day. Morse thought he knew why, and another piece of the jigsaw had slipped into place.