by Colin Dexter
“Hello! Chief Inspector Morse, isn't it? My daughter tells me she saw you recently. But perhaps you don't know me.”
“ Let's say we've never been officially introduced, Mr. Harrison.”
“Ah! You do know me. I know you, of course, and Sergeant Lewis has been to see me. You probably sent him.”
“As a matter of fact I did.”
“I realize you weren't yourself involved in my wife's murder case but, er …”
Harrison was by some three inches or so the taller of the two, and Morse felt slightly uncomfortable as a pair of pale-grey eyes, hard and unsmiling, looked slightly down on him.
“… but I'd heard about you. Yvonne spoke about you several times. She'd looked after you once when you were in hospital. Remember?”
Morse nodded.
“Quite taken by you, she was. ‘A sensitive soul'—I think that's what she called you; said you were interesting to talk to and had a nice voice. Told me she was going to invite you out to one of her, er, soirées. When I was away, of course.”
“I should hope so. Wouldn't have wanted any competition, would I?”
“Did you have any competition?”
“The only time I ever met Yvonne again was in the Maiden's Arms,” said Morse gently, unblinking blue eyes now looking slightly upward into the strong, cleanshaven face of Harrison senior.
As Strange struggled to squeeze his bulk between seat and steering wheel, Morse looked back and saw that the funeral guests were almost all departed. But Linda Bar-ron stood there still, in close conversation with Frank Harrison—both of them now stepping aside a little as another black Daimler moved smoothly into place outside the chapel, with another light-brown, lily-bedecked coffin lying lengthways inside, the polished handles glinting in the sun.
Morse found himself pondering on the funeral. “I wonder why he put in an appearance.”
“Who? Frank Harrison? Why shouldn't he? Lived in the same village—had him in to do those house repairs—”
“Knew his wife had been in bed with him.”
“Fasten your seat belt, Morse!”
“Er, before we drive off, there's something—”
“Fasten your seat belt! Know what that's an anagram of, by the way? ‘Truss neatly to be safe.’ Clever, eh? Somebody told me that once. You probably.”
For a few seconds Morse looked slightly puzzled.
“Couldn't have been me. It's got to be ‘belts.’ Otherwise there's one V short.”
“Just put the bloody thing on!”
But Morse left the bloody thing off as he looked directly ahead of him and completed his earlier sentence: “Just before we drive off, sir, there's something I ought to mention. It's about Lewis. I'm fairly sure he's beginning to get some odd ideas about my being involved in some way with Yvonne Harrison.”
It was Strange's turn to look directly ahead of him.
“And you think I wasn't aware of that?” he asked quietly.
Sixty
Have respect unto the covenant: for the dark places of the earth are full of the habitations of cruelty.
(Psalm 74, v. 20)
Once in Charlton Kings, a suburb on the eastern side of Cheltenham, Sergeant Lewis had followed the map directions carefully (he loved that sort of thing), turning right from the A40 through a maze of residential streets, and finally driving the unmarked police car past the sign on the whitewashed wall beside the gateway—“Sisters of the Covenant: Preparatory Boarding School for Girls—”and along the short graveled drive that led to a large, detached Georgian house.
Destination reached; and purpose, shortly afterward, fulfilled.
With a few extra suggestions from Morse, Lewis had found it comparatively easy to fill in most of the picture. The Barrons’ GP had professional and wholly proper reasons for his guarded reticence. But other sources had been considerably less cautious with their help and information: the Burford Social Services, the NSPCC, the headmistress of the village primary school, the local Catholic priest, and, last of all, the middle-aged nun, dressed in a chocolate-brown habit and white wimple, who was expecting him and who found little difficulty in answering his brief, pointed questions.
Five nuns, all of them resident, looked after the school, which was specifically dedicated to the physical and spiritual well-being of girls between the ages of four and eleven (currently eighteen of them) who for varied reasons—poverty, indifference, criminality, cruelty—had been ill-used in their family homes. In spite of a modest benefaction, the school was a place of limited resources, at least in human terms, and was appropriately designated “Private,” with the majority of parents paying fees of between £1,000 and £1,500 per term.
Alice Barron, yes—now aged six—was one of the pupils there, referred to the school by her mother. She had been abused, not sexually, it seemed, but certainly physically; certainly psychologically.
No, Alice was not one of our Lord's brightest intellects; in fact she was in some ways a slow-witted child. This may have been the result of her home environment, but probably only partially so. Her younger sister (the teaching staff had learned) was as bright as the proverbial button; and such a circumstance could well have accounted to some degree for an impatient, expectant, aggressive parent to have …
“The father, you mean?”
“You're putting words into my mouth, Sergeant.”
“But if you were a betting woman—which I know you're not, of course …”
“What on earth makes you think that?” Her eyes momentarily glinted with humor. “But if I were, I would not be putting much money on the mother, no.”
“How are the accounts for each term settled?”
“I looked that up, as you asked me. I can't be quite sure, but I suspect it's been in cash.”
“Isn't that unusual?”
“Yes, it is.”
“Does Alice know about her father's death?”
“Not yet, no.”
“Do you think this whole business is going to … ?”
“Difficult to tell, isn't it? She's improving, right enough. She's stopped wetting her bed, and she doesn't scream so loudly in the night.”
“But if you were going to have another bet?”
“If I were a bookmaker, I'd lay you even money on it.”
As he drove back up to the A40, Lewis felt fairly sure he knew only a quarter as much about horse racing (and probably about life) as Sister Benedicta.
Sixty-one
character (n.) handwriting, style of writing: Shakes. Meas. for M. Here is the hand and seal of the Duke. You know the character, I doubt not.
(Small's Enlarged English Dict., 18th ed.)
Back at HQ Lewis found a handwritten note for his personal attention:
It was in Morse's hand, that small, neatly formed upright script that was recognizable anywhere; as indeed, for that matter, was Strange's hand—large, spidery, with a perpetual list to starboard, and often only semilegible.
But Lewis was unconcerned. He would type up a report on his wholly satisfactory morning's work. And then he would sit back and let things slowly sink in, for it had now become clear that the Repp-Flynn-Barron mystery was solved. Completely solved now, with the knowledge that it was Linda Barron who had taken the hush money; Linda Barron who must have insisted that if her husband ever thought of siphoning some of it off for himself she would expose him for the child abuser that he was, and expose him to Social Services, to the police, to the folk in the village, to the Press. And she would have meant it, for she was past caring. My God, yes! And Barron had agreed.
Yes…
The big moments in the case were over; and he rang Mrs. Lewis and asked her to have the chip-pan ready half an hour earlier than usual.
Yes…
In a strange kind of way, his confidence in himself had grown steadily throughout the present case, in spite of a few irritations like Dixon! And there was that one thing that had been interesting him and troubling him, in equal measure, for some considera
ble time now. Very soon he'd have to face up to telling Morse of his suspicions. But not just yet. He'd need to know a bit more about the Harrison murder first; especially about the contents of that fourth green box-file which had mysteriously added itself to the documents in the case, and which now sat alongside the other three on a shelf in Morse's office. Perhaps a bit later that afternoon, since Morse was unlikely to return.
What if he did, anyway?
Yes…
Lewis sat back after typing his report, his thoughts dwelling on the case that to all intents and purposes had now closed. He was right, wasn't he? But there were just one or two tiny items he hadn't as yet checked; and he knew that his conscience would be niggling him about them. No time like the present.
But not much luck. Still, those alibis for the Monday morning didn't much matter any longer. Or rather non-alibis, since neither Harrison Senior nor Harrison Junior had any alibi at all. And whilst Sarah Harrison did have an alibi, it still remained unchecked.
He rang the Diabetes Centre in the Radcliffe Infirmary, with almost immediate if unexpected success, since Professor Turner (clearly not a Monday-Friday medic) now confirmed everything that Miss Harrison herself had affirmed: “In fact, Sergeant, she had to take over some of my patients mid-morning when I was summoned by my superiors—”
“Do you have any superiors, sir?”
On reflection, Lewis was more than a little pleased with that last question: just the sort of thing Morse would have asked. Was he, Lewis, just a little—after all this time—moving gradually nearer to Morsean wavelength?
At a quarter past four he walked along the corridor to Morse's office, to cast a fresh eye (so he promised himself) on that bizarre, that puzzling, that haunting evening of Yvonne Harrison's murder—the source of so much trouble and tragedy.
Very soon he was virtually certain that he had seen none of the contents of that fourth box-file before; and had convinced himself that this was not merely a matter of some redistribution of the case documents. The file contained the sort of personal items that many women, and doubtless many men, keep in one of the locked drawers of their desks or bureaus, often with some sense of guilt.
There were all the usual things that from experience Lewis had known so well: letters, many of them in their original envelopes, some from women, most of them from men; photographs, many of them of Yvonne herself (one topless) with a variety of men friends; postcards from many a quarter of the globe, but mostly from Greece and Switzerland; three slim (unopened) bottles of perfume; various receipts for the purchase of ultraexpensive clothes and shoes. But for all the variety of material there, the box was scarcely half-full, and Lewis took his time. He looked at the photographs reasonably quickly (not quite so quickly at one of them, perhaps), before reading slowly (though not as slowly as Morse would have done) through the letters.
Then he saw it:
That was all. Just one small page of a longer letter. No date, no address, no salutation, no valediction, no name—nothing. And yet everything. Because the letter was written in that small, neatly formed upright script that was recognizable everywhere in the Thames Valley Police HQ.
As he reread the page, Lewis was suddenly aware of another presence in the office; and looked up to find Chief Inspector Morse standing silently in the doorway.
Sixty-two
Don't tell me, sweet, that I'm unkind
Each time I black your eye,
Or raise a weal on your behind—
I'm just a loving guy.
We both despise the gentle touch,
So cut out the pretence;
You wouldn ‘t love it half as much
Without the violence.
(Roy Dean, Lovelace Bleeding)
Anyone wishing to take up Morse's earlier promise of being available the following Monday morning would have been disappointed, since he had put in no appearance by lunchtime. Yet he was not idle during those morning hours; and any visitor to the bachelor flat would have found him seated at his desk for much of the time; and for a fair proportion of that time found him writing quite busily and (as we have seen) very neatly. His old typewriter (with its defective “e” and “t”) sat at his elbow; but he had never mastered the keyboard skills with any real confidence, and he wrote now in longhand with a medium-blue Biro.
For Priority Consideration
Several things have happened these last few days which have prompted me to put down in writing my own thoughts on the present state of play.
First, I've been waking up every day recently, after some nightmarish nights, with a premonition that some disaster is imminent. Whether death comes into such a category, I'm not sure. I can't agree with Socrates, though, that death is a blessing devoutly to be wished, even if it is (as I hope it is, as I believe it is) one long completely dreamless sleep. For the very fact of being alive is surely the best thing that's happened to (almost) all of us.
Second, the last murder case entrusted to the pair of us has been (one or two loose ends though) satisfactorily resolved. Repp and Flynn were murdered by Barron, and the murderer himself is now dead. So any further insight into the original Harrison murder from their angles is wholly precluded.
Third, I'm certain that Frank Harrison has been the paymaster. It's high time we brought him into HQ for intensive questioning, either directly about the murder of his wife, or at the very least about some culpable complicity of her murder.
Fourth, I'm also convinced that Yvonne H. was murdered by one of her own family. Nothing else makes any sense at all, not to me anyway. That murder was not premeditated: few of them are. It was committed spontaneously, viciously, involuntarily perhaps, by whichever of the three it was who found Yvonne Harrison in a situation that was utterly unexpected—kinkiness, perversion, degradation, all rolled up into one.
On the face of it, the husband is the outsider of the three, so you will appreciate, Lewis, that in my book he's the favorite. It's the “why” that worries me, though. He wasn't and isn't anybody's fool, and he must have known more than enough about his wife's tastes in bondage and possibly masochism. So I just can't see blazing jealousy as his motive, especially since, as I strongly suspect, he regularly experienced the (reported) joys of extramarital sex himself.
A confession here.
Quite a few times I've found myself looking at the faces of people concerned with this case and thinking I'd seen them somewhere before. I thought it might be the result of interbreeding in a small community—no wonder some of the villagers are pretty tight-lipped! And I was right. That fruit-machine addict, for example: Allen Thomas. That's how you spell his name by the way, Lewis. I found it in the village-school records: Allen Alfred Thomas. Unusual these days, that spelling of “Allen.” And “Alfred” belongs more to the first half of the century, doesn't it? I also found out (well, Dixon found out) that the Christian names of Elizabeth Jane Thomas's father were “Harold Alfred”; and that someone else in the village had a father with the Christian names “Joseph Allen.” That someone else was Frank Harrison. And (believe me!) he was the father of the lad, and Elizabeth decided to give him a couple of Christian names that, at least for herself, could confer some little pretense of legitimacy of her illegitimate son. (I wonder if his father gives him a fruit-machine allowance?)
Let's turn to the Harrison children.
Either of them could have murdered their mother. What would be the motive, though? I just can't see Sarah suddenly turning to murder because she finds her mother abed with one of her many lovers. What does it really matter to her that her mother enjoys a bit of biting and bondage occasionally? Shocked and disgusted? Yes, she'd certainly have been both. But driven to murder? No. There's something about her, though—something that tells me that she's up to her very smooth neck in things.
What about Simon Harrison? As we know he's always been a bit of a mummy's darling: a boy disad-vantaged because of early deafness; a boy always needing extra understanding and extra love, and who found it (hardly surpris
ingly) from his mother. I'd guess myself that for Simon this relationship had always been very precious. Sacrosanct almost. I'd also guess that he had no notion whatsoever of his mother's idiosyncratic tastes in sexual gratification. Then one night, the night of the murder, he'd driven out to see her. And why not? Just to say hello, perhaps? Like his sister, he had a key to the front door, and he entered the house and disturbed the copulating couple—copulating in the most extraordinary circumstances; and he would have been shocked and disgusted (like his sister) but heartbroken, too, and disillusioned and betrayed. His mother performing those things with some plebeian local builder!
Where does all this lead us? First and foremost to an early, long-overdue, full-scale interview with Frank Harrison. Not too early though. Our colleagues got nowhere with him and we, Lewis, are a pair of bloodhounds very late on the scene, with the scent gone very cold.
Fifth, there's this business of the letter you found in the Harrison file. As I told you, I take full responsibility for the fact that some items originally discovered at the Harrison murder scene were subsequently, as they say, found to be missing. It was embarrassing for me to talk to you about this and I know that you in turn found it equally embarrassing to—
Morse laid down his pen and answered the phone:
“Lewis! What do you want?”
“You OK, sir?”
“Why shouldn't I be?”
“It's just that—well, you know that animal charity shop on the corner of South Parade and Middle Way…”
“I am not an animal lover, Lewis.”
“Well, people leave things there, by the door, things for the shop to sell for charity—”
“Get on with it!”
