The Remorseful Day

by Colin Dexter

  Courteously if somewhat cautiously received, Lewis listened carefully as one of the Bank's important personages spelled out the situation with (as was stressed) utter confidentiality, with appropriate delicacy, and with (for Lewis) a leavening of incomprehensible technicalities. In simple terms it amounted to this: Mr. Frank Harrison, currently on furlough, was currently also, if unofficially, on suspension from his duties with the Bank on suspicion, as yet unsubstantiated, of misappropriation of monies: viz. an unexplained black hole of some £520,000 in his department's investment portfolios.

  Sixty-four

  Refrain to-night

  And that shall lead a kind of easiness

  To the next abstinence: the next more easy;

  For use almost can change the stamp of nature.

  (Shakespeare, Hamlet)

  Sloane Square … Gridlock … Siren … Gridlock … Siren …

  It is not a matter for any surprise that car drivers occasionally contract one of the minor strains of the road-rage virus—even that patient man in the siren-assisted police car who finally pulled over on to the hard shoulder of the M40 and rang his chief.

  “Been stuck in traffic, sir. Be with you in about an hour.”

  “Lewis! Can't you hear the wireless? It's five-past seven—bang in the middle of The Archers. It can wait, surely!”

  Lewis supposed it could; and would have said so. But the phone was dead.

  Wireless! Huh! Everybody called it a “radio” these days—well, everybody except Morse and one or two of the old ‘uns, like Strange. Yes, come to think of it, Morse and Strange were the oldest of the HQ lot, with Strange six months the older and due for retirement that next month.

  The road was free and Lewis drove fast. It could wait—of course it could—the news about Harrison Senior. Perhaps it didn't matter all that much; and as Morse frequently reminded him nothing really mattered very much at all in the end. But he was looking forward to a swapping of notes. There had been some interesting developments, certainly on his own side; and he doubted not that Morse's researches that day had generated a few new ideas. Not that they needed any more high-flown ideas really, he decided, as a sudden torrential downpour called for more terrestrial concentration. He reduced his speed to 80 mph.

  At 7:20 P.M. Morse was sitting back in the black-leather armchair, knowing that only a few of the pieces in the jigsaw remained to be fitted. Earlier in the case the top half of the puzzle had presented itself as a monochrome blue, like the sky earlier that evening, although of late the weather had become sultry, as though a thunderstorm were brewing. But the jigsaw's undifferentiated blue had been duly broken by a solitary seagull or two, by a piece of soft-white cloud, and later perhaps (when Lewis arrived?) by what Housman so memorably had called “the orange band of eve.” He felt almost happy. There was something else, too: he would quite certainly wait until that arrival before having his first drink of the day. It was quite easy really (as he told himself) to refrain from alcohol for a limited period.

  The storm reached North Oxford fifty minutes later, traveling from the southwest at a pace commensurate with Lewis's speed along the M40.

  It may have had something to do with Wagner, but Morse enjoyed the intensity and the electricity of a thunderstorm, and he watched with deep pleasure the plashing rain and the dazzling flashes in the lightning-riven sky. From his viewpoint by the window of his flat, a slightly sagging telephone wire cut the leaden heavens in two; and he watched as a succession of single drops of rain ran along the wire before finally falling off, reminding him of soldiers crossing a river on rope-harness, and finally dropping off on the other side. As he had once done himself.

  Crossing the river …

  His mother would never speak of “dying”: always of “crossing the river.” It was a pleasing conceit; a pleasing metaphor. If he'd been a poet, he might have written a sonnet about that telephone-wire just outside. But Morse wasn't a poet. And the storm now ceased as suddenly as it had started.

  And the front-door bell was ringing.

  It was after 10 P.M. when, with Lewis now gone, Morse took stock of the situation—with renewed interest, though (truth to tell) with little great surprise. Lewis had declined the offer of alcohol, and Morse had decided to prolong his own virtually unprecedented abstinence. He felt tired, and at 10:30 P.M. decided that he would be early abed. So many times had he been counseled that beer made a lumpy mattress, that spirits made a hard pillow, and that in general alcohol was the stuff that nightmares were made of. So, if that were true, he could perhaps expect to be sleeping the sleep of the just that night. It would be a new experience.

  He put on the RSPB video, and once again watched the wonderful albatross gliding effortlessly across the Antarctic wastes. So relaxing …

  At 11:15 he switched off the bedroom light and turned as ever on to his right-hand side, conscious of a clear head, a freshness of mind, and a gently slumbrous lassitude.

  Wonderful.

  In spite of his occasional disillusionment about being cast up on to the shores of light in the first place, it would be wholly untrue to say that Morse was over-eager to embark on that final journey to that further land. Indeed, like the majority of mortals, he was something of a hypochondriac; and that night he found himself becoming increasingly fearful about his own physical well-being. Or ill-being.

  The illuminated green figures on the alarm clock showed 2:42 A.M. when he finally abandoned the unequal struggle. His mind was an uncontrollable whirligig at St. Giles Fair, and the indigestion pains in his chest and in his arms were hard and unrelenting. He got up, poured himself a glass of Alka-Seltzer, poured himself a glass of the single malt, took up his medium-blue Parker pen, and resumed the exegesis he'd been writing when Lewis had interrupted him, deciding however to cross out the last (and uncompleted) sentence:

  It was embarrassing for me to talk to you about this and I know that you in turn found it equally embarrassing to—

  There would be ample time to put that part of the record straight in the days ahead.

  Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow …

  Sixty-five

  Jealousy is that pain which a man feels from the apprehension that he is not equally beloved by the person whom he entirely loves.

  (Addison, The Spectator)

  Simon H. is not a good liar, and I dragged some of the truth out of him. He is genuinely very deaf, and the telephone must always be a nightmare for him. So what's he got a mobile for? Even people with good hearing often have trouble with one. But, remember, even someone who's stone deaf can communicate to some degree with someone on the other end, because he's always able to speak if not to hear.

  Many people must have wanted Barron dead. And no one more so than Frank Harrison, who'd learned that Barron would soon be working up at some giddy height in a quietish street in Burford. The job had been mentioned, among other places no doubt, in the Maiden's Arms. And one person in that pub was in regular communication with Frank H.: Allen Thomas, that soon-to-be-married youth who regularly wastes his substance on the fruit machine. How come? Like so many others in this case, he's dependent on Frank H.—his father, remember!—who (rumor!) has just bought him a small flat in Bicester, and who has pretty certainly been making him a regular allowance for many years.

  The plan had been a reasonably simple one—with one snag. Both the Harrisons, Senior and Junior, had some knowledge of Barron's ladder technique from the several times he had worked at the family home: specifically his habit of tying the top of his ladders to something firm up there in the heights. It would seem likely that he'd do the same again, and there'd be little point in giving the ladder one great hefty push if it wouldn't topple to the ground. Some recce was therefore required; and Simon picked up his father that Monday morning in Oxford and drove him the twenty miles to Burford, leaving the car at the western end of Sheep Street, and then jogging up and down the opposite side of the street in tracksuit and trainers, noting that Barron was moving the ladder along eve
ry twelve minutes or so, and predictably re-roping the top each time. The only possibility then was to catch Barron after he'd re-climbed the ladder and was refixing the rope. A minute or so? Not much more. But enough. Simon's job was to phone his father, mobile to mobile, and just say “Now!” Nothing else. He hadn't the spunk he says (I believe him) to perform the deed himself; and it was his father, also in jogging kit, who would run along the pathway there and topple Barron to a death that in Simon's view was fully deserved and long overdue.

  That was the plan. Something like it. So I believe.

  But the countdown had been aborted because (Simon himself a witness) a bicycle, the front wheel jerked up repeatedly from the ground, was lurching its way along the path, and under the ladder, and into the ladder. Surplus to requirements therefore was the plan the Harrisons had plotted. Or so we are led to believe. Why such a proviso? Because I shall be surprised if any plan devised by the opportunistic Frank Harrison has ever come to a sorry nothing. Is it possible therefore that the accident of Barron's death was not quite so “accidental” after all? Already Frank Harrison had accomplished something far more complex—his manipulation of the evidence surrounding his wife's murder, when it was imperative for him to establish one crucial fact: that no other living soul was present when he went into his house that night. But three other people knew this fact was untrue; and all three of them—whichever way intercommunication was effected—were subsequently rewarded for their roles in the conspiracy of complicity and silence.

  Back to my proviso.

  Can it be that Frank Harrison trawled his net even wider and dragged in the cyclist who sent Barron down to his death, the boy Holmes—the brother of Harrison's son Allen?

  We turn now to the Harrison clan itself.

  Our researchers have given us several pointers to the relationships within that family. The marriage itself had long been loveless: he with a string of mistresses in his Pavilion Road flat in London; she with a succession of straight or kinky but always besotted bedmates, with whom she fairly regularly dallied with mutual delight. And, doubtless, profit. Of the two children, Simon was clearly the mother's favorite—a boy who had battled bravely with his disability; a boy for whom his mother had found an affection considerably deeper than that for her daughter Sarah—a young lady who was very attractive physically, very bright academically, very talented musically, who from her early years had almost everything going for her, and who (unlike her brother) needed far less of her mother's tender loving care. Both children, as well as their parents, were probably fully aware of the imbalance here; and tacitly and tactfully accepted it.

  At the time of their mother's murder, both the children had left home several years earlier. Sarah had already qualified as a doctor specializing with considerable distinction in the treatment of diabetes. And Simon had landed a surprisingly good job in publishing, and was now financially independent—if not emotionally independent, because he still yearned for that unique love his mother had always shown him; a love that had meant everything to him in those long years of an ever-struggling school life in which he knew with joyous assurance that it was he—Simon!—who'd acquired the monopoly of a mother's love, more of it even than his father had ever had. He called to see her regularly, of course he did. But she probably always insisted that he ring her beforehand. No reason to ask why, surely? Simon was completely unaware of his mother's vesper-tinal divertissements.

  But Frank certainly knew all about them, and they served as some sort of excuse and justification for his own adulterous liaisons. He didn't much care anyway. Perhaps he could shrug things off fairly easily. But Simon couldn't. Simon turned up unexpectedly one evening and found his mother lying on that very same bed where as a young boy (perhaps as an older boy?) he'd snuggled in beside her when his dad was away; and where he'd seen a man straddled across her on his elbows and his knees.

  I doubt it had been exactly like that, though. More likely he'd seen a man bouncing down the stairs toward him, jerking up his trousers and fastening up his flies. A man he knew: Barron! Then he'd found his mother lying in the bedroom there: naked, gagged, handcuffed, with a pornographic video probably still running on the TV. Shell-shocked with disbelief and disillusionment, in the white heat of a furious jealousy—yes!—he murdered his mother.

  Sixty-six

  We might now be stepping through a dark door with no bottom on the other side, and fall flat on our faces.

  (A member of the Honolulu City Council,

  quoted by the Press Corps)

  Conscious that he was writing with increasing fluency, Morse poured himself another tumbler of single malt and resumed his narrative:

  With regard to events immediately thereafter, we can only guess. But at some point Simon rang his father in predictable panic. He had very few people he could call on. But he could call on his father—and there was a special loop-system on the telephone there. And Frank H. got to the house as quickly as any man could have done that night. His BMW was in for servicing, that was checked; and I now believe (a bit late in the day) that the sequence of events was precisely as he claimed: taxi » Paddington; train » Oxford; Oxford (enter Flynn!) » Lower Swinstead.

  Then? Probably we'll never really know. But five people, three of them now dead, they knew: Barron, who'd been disturbed in medio coitu; Flynn, the petty crook who just happened to be on hand; Repp, the burglar who'd been watching the property all evening; Frank H.; and Simon H. himself. Simon doesn't seem to me the caliber of fellow who could stay long at such a ghastly scene on his own; and I think it's more than likely that his father rang Sarah and told her to get along there posthaste, on the way buying a cinema ticket as an alibi for Simon. Certainly when I met Sarah I felt strongly that she probably knew who had murdered her mother. The trouble was that the three outsiders also knew: Repp and Barron, who were both local men—and Flynn, who'd met Simon in the lipreading classes at Oxpens, and who must have seen him there that night.

  What then was the family plan of campaign?

  The two (or three) of them were determined to create the maximum amount of confusion—their only hope. The murder couldn't be concealed; but the waters around it could be made so muddied that any investigation was likely to shoot off into several blind alleys. We may postulate that a gag was tied around Yvonne's mouth (as I recall the report: “no longer tight as if she had worked it looser in her desperation”); that a pair of handcuffs was snapped around her wrists; that one of the panes of the French window was smashed in from the outside. Why Yvonne's carefully folded clothes were not scattered all over the floor, I just don't know, because “attempted rape” would have seemed a wholly probable explanation of the murder.

  When and how the circling vultures closed in for their shares of the kill—your guess, Lewis, is (almost) as good as mine. Some early liaison there must have been with Barron in order to establish the telephone alibi. Flynn probably just stayed around that night—a petty crook going through a bad patch, and naming his price immediately. I suspect that Repp, a real pro, held his hand for a couple of days or so before threatening to spill at least half the can of beans… unless he could be persuaded otherwise.

  Whatever the case, financial arrangements were made, and as far as we know faithfully met. After the murder of his wife, much money was diverted from the assets of Frank H. into other channels, although I'm still surprised to learn that there may well have been some serious misappropriation of funds at the Swiss Helvetia Bank.

  All of which leaves one or two (or three!) points unresolved.

  First, the burglar alarm. Now on his train trip from London Frank H. must have had thoughts galore. Several times he would have phoned home from the train, and Sarah must surely have been there to take the calls. And it was probably from the back of the taxi that Frank had the clever idea of ringing Sarah and telling her he would be ringing again, when the taxi was only half a minute or so from home, and asking her (Flynn wouldn't have heard, would he?) to turn on the burglar alarm. It
was a clever idea, let's agree on that. It certainly and understandably caused huge confusion in the original police inquiry. The only person not wholly confused was Strange. It was he, from the word go, who suggested that the alarm might well have been set off deliberately by the murderer himself. (Never underrate that man, Lewis!)

  The time, as Morse saw, was 3:40 A.M., almost exactly one hour after he'd started writing. He was feeling pleasantly tired, and he knew he would slip into sleep so easily now. Yet he wanted to go (as Flecker had said) “always that little further”; and perhaps more immediately to the point he wanted to pour himself a further Scotch—which he did before resuming.

  There is one more thing to consider, and it is of vital importance, as well as being (almost!) the only thing about which I was less than honest with you. That is, the extraordinary relationship between a drink-doped, drug-doped juvenile lout and an insignificant-looking little schoolma'am: between Roy Holmes and Christine Coverley. Something must have happened, probably at school, which had forged a wholly improbable but strangely strong bond between them—including a sexual relationship (she confessed as much). That's the reason she stayed on in Burford after the end of the summer term. Why is this important? Because we have been making one fundamental assumption in our inquiries which thus far has been completely unverified by any single independent witness. But truth will out! And first, and forthwith, we shall call in on Ms. Coverley for further questioning. How wise it was to hold our horses before facing Frank Harrison with a whole

  (Here the narrative breaks off.)

  Morse, who had been deeply asleep at his study desk, his head pillowed on folded arms, jerked awake just before 7:30 A.M., feeling wonderfully refreshed.