The Remorseful Day
Page 26
Life was a funny old business.
Sixty-seven
To run away from trouble is a form of cowardice; and, whilst it is true that the suicide braves death, he does it not for some noble object but to escape some ill.
(Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics)
The following morning Lewis was pleased with himself. Before Morse arrived, he'd turned to the Police Gazette's “Puzzle Corner” and easily solved the challenge there:
“Initially—”that was the clue; and once you twigged it, the answer stared you in the face vertically.
Morse made an appearance at 9:10 A.M., looking (in Lewis's view) a little fitter than of late.
“Want to test your brain, sir?”
“Certainly not!”
Lewis pushed the puzzle across the desk, and Morse considered it, though for no more than a few seconds:
“Do you know the answer?”
“Easy! ‘Initially,’ sir—that's what you've got to think about. Just look at the first letters. Cyclist? Get it?”
“I thought the question was what would an intelligent cyclist's thought be.”
“I don't quite follow.”
“Not difficult surely, Lewis? You've just got the answer wrong, that's all. Any intelligent cyclist, any bright bus driver—anyone!—would think exactly the same thing immediately.”
“They would?”
“The question's phony. Based on a false premise, isn't it? Based on the assumption that the facts you've been given are true.”
“You mean they're not?”
“Tosca? Written by Verdi?”
Oh dear! “You were quick to spot that.”
Morse grinned. “Not really. They often ask me to submit a little brainteaser to the Gazette.”
“You mean—?”
Morse nodded. “And talking of false premises, that's been a big part of our trouble. We've both been trying to check up on such a lot of things, haven't we? But there's one thing we've been prepared to accept without one ha'poth of evidence. So we'll get on to that without delay. Couple of cars we'll need. I'll just give Dixon a ring—”
Lewis got to his feet. “I can deal with all that, sir.” “Si’ down, Lewis! I want to talk to you.”
Through the glass-paneled door Dixon finally saw the silhouette moving toward him: a woman in a wheelchair who brusquely informed him that she knew nothing of the whereabouts of her son. He had not been home the previous evening. He had a key. He was sometimes out all night, yes. No, she didn't know where. And if it was of any interest to the police, she didn't care—didn't bloody well care.
There was no reply to PC Kershaw's importunate ringing and knocking. But at last he was able to locate the mildly disgruntled middle-aged woman who looked after the two “lets”; and who accompanied him back to the ground-floor flat. She appeared to have little affection for either of the two lessees, although when she opened the door she must have felt a horrified shock of sympathy for one of them.
Christine Coverley lay supine on a sheepskin rug in front of an unlit electric fire. She was wearing a summery, sleeveless, salmon-pink dress, her arms very white, hands palm-upward, with each of her wrists slashed deeply and neatly across. A black-handled kitchen knife lay beside her left shoulder.
Young Kershaw was unused to such horrors; and over the next few days the visual image was to refigure repeatedly in his nightmares. Two patches on the rug were deeply steeped in blood; and Kershaw was reminded of the Welsh hill farm where he'd once stayed and where the backs of each of the owner's sheep had been daubed with a dye of the deepest crimson.
No note was found by Kershaw; indeed no note was found by anyone afterward. It was as if Christine had left this world with a despair she'd found incommunicable to anyone: even to her parents; even to the uncouth lout who penetrated her so pleasurably now, though at first against her will; even to the rather nice police inspector who'd seemed to her to understand so much about her. Far too much … including (she'd known it!) the fact that she had lied. Roy could never have been cycling along Sheep Street when Barron fell to his death because at that very moment he had been in bed with her …
Sixty-eight
It is not the criminal things which are hardest to confess, but the ridiculous and the shameful.
(Rousseau, Confessions)
Lewis had not been surprised—no, certainly not that. But disappointed? Yes. Oh yes! And Morse had been aware of his reaction, clearly anticipating it, yet saying nothing to lessen the impact of the revelation. The relationship between them would never be quite the same again, Lewis realized that. It wasn't at all the fact that Morse had driven out one evening (two evenings? ten evenings?) to meet a seductively attractive woman. Lewis had seen the sharply focused photographs of her body stretched out on the bed that night; and it could be no great wonder that many a man, young and old alike, had lusted after a woman such as that. No, it was something else. It was the out-of-character, underhand way that Morse had allowed the dishonest subterfuge to linger on and on from the beginning of the case.
Indeed Morse had been less than wholly forthcoming in his confession even now, Lewis was fairly sure of it. Yes, Morse agreed, he had gained access to the file containing the intimate correspondence addressed to Y H. Yes, he had “appropriated” the handcuffs, police handcuffs, with a number stamped on them that could easily be traced back to the officer issued with them, in this case to Morse himself. And yes (he readily admitted it) he had “withdrawn” the relevant sheet of the issue-numbers kept at HQ. As far as the partial letter was concerned (Morse accepted immediately that it was in his own hand) Lewis had hoped, in an old-fashioned sort of way, that Morse had in fact never been invited to Lower Swinstead, in spite of his own plea for some communication from her; in spite of that almost school-boyish business about looking through his mail every morning in the hope of finding something from her. And that was about it. Morse had wanted to cover up something of which he was rather ashamed and very embarrassed; just wanted his own name, previously his own good name, never to be associated with the life—and the death—of Yvonne Harrison. He'd been careless about leaving that single page of a longer letter but (as he asked Lewis to agree) it was hardly an incriminating piece of evidence. What Morse stoutly refused to accept was that what he had done, however cowardly and dishonest and foolish, had in any way jeopardized the course of the original inquiry, which he now had the nerve to assert had been conducted with almost unprecedented incompetence. Such arrogance was of course not all that unusual; yet in the present circumstances it seemed to Lewis quite gratuitously cheap.
Leaving all such considerations aside though, what stuck in Lewis's throat was that initial, duplicitous refusal on Morse's part to have anything to do with the original case. Agreed, once he had been drafted on to what seemed to both Lewis and Strange the second half of the same case, Morse had risen to his accustomed heights of logical analysis and depths of human understanding. Agreed, he had (as usual) been several furlongs ahead of the field—and, for once, on the right racecourse from the “off.”
Who else but Morse could have put forward the quite extraordinary hypotheses made earlier that morning about the murder of J. Barron, Builder? The hypothesis (seemingly confirmed) that Roy Holmes—who'd do almost anything to get drugs and who'd do absolutely anything when he was on drugs—was having a sexual relationship with Christine Coverley; the hypothesis (seemingly confirmed) that the weirdly incongruous partnership had resulted from some incident or series of incidents at school; that the youth had agreed, for money, to make a statement to the police about a supposedly accidental collision with a high ladder—a statement that was wholly untrue, because Roy Holmes had been nowhere near Sheep Street that morning; the hypothesis (to be confirmed!) that it was Frank Harrison who had murdered Barron, and who had engineered an ingenious scheme whereby all suspicion would be diverted both from himself and from Simon—the scheme itself probably prompted by another son, by Allen Thomas, who regularly gathered a good deal of
information from his vantage point in the Maiden's Arms and who regularly passed it on to his father, the man at the center of everything.
Lewis nodded to himself. No wonder Frank Harrison had gone to earth somewhere. Not for long though, surely. He had nowhere to go; nowhere to hide. Airports and seaports had been apprised of his passport number, and photographs would be on their way. Unless it was too late.
It was Morse's suggestion that the two of them together should interview Roy Holmes and Christine Coverley, with Lewis invited to do most of the talking with the youth. “I detest him, Lewis! And you're better at those sorts of things than I am.” It was flattering, but it didn't work. Morse was sadly wrong if he thought he could so easily re-establish some degree of integrity in the eyes of his sergeant.
In midmorning, Lewis left the office without asking Morse if he would like a coffee. He knew that the omission would be noted; he knew that Morse would feel the hurt.
Not so.
When Lewis returned ten minutes later, he found Morse leaning back and beaming happily.
“Fetch me a coffee, will you, Lewis! No sugar—we diabetics, you know … Something to celebrate.” The Times was folded back in quarters in front of him, the crossword grid completely filled in. “Six and a half minutes! I've never done it quicker.”
“Shouldn't that be ‘more quickly’?”
“Good man! You're learning at last. You see it's a question, as I've told you, of the comparative adjective and the comparative adverb. If you say—”
The phone rang.
Dixon.
For the moment Roy Holmes was not to be found: he wasn't at home; he wasn't anywhere. Did Morse want him to keep looking?
“What the hell do you think?” Morse had snapped at him. “You remember the old proverb? If at first you don't succeed, don't take up hang gliding.”
The brief telephone conversation pleased Lewis, and for a few seconds he wondered if he was being a little unfair in his judgment on Morse. But only for a few seconds.
“Not the only one we can't find, sir.”
“Frank Harrison, you mean? Ye-es. I'm a bit puzzled about him. He might be a crook—he is a crook—but he's not a fool. He's an experienced, hard-nosed, single-minded, rich banker, and if you're all those things you don't suddenly put your fingers in the—”
The phone rang.
Kershaw.
Morse listened, saying nothing; but the eyes that lifted to look across the desk into Lewis's face, if not wholly surprised, seemed very disappointed and very sad. Much as two hours earlier Lewis's own eyes had looked.
In midafternoon (Morse was no longer at HQ) the phone rang.
Swiss Helvetia Bank.
“Could we speak to Superintendent Lewis, please?”
“Sergeant Lewis speaking.”
Sixty-nine
SEC. OFF.: Antonio, I arrest thee at the suit of Count Orsino.
ANT.: You do mistake me, sir.
FIRST OFF.: No, sir, no jot.
(Shakespeare,Twelfth Night)
At 5:20 P.M. he was still standing beside his minimal hand luggage a few yards from the Euro-Class counter at Heathrow's Terminal 4, looking around him with as yet dismissable anxiety, but with gradually increasing impatience. 5:10 P.M.—that was when they'd agreed to meet, giving them ample time, once through the fast-track channel, to have some gentle relaxation together in the British Airways Lounge before boarding the 18:30 Flight 338.
Paris …
A long time ago he and Yvonne had gone to Paris on their honeymoon: lots of love, lots of sex, lots of sightseeing, lots of food and wine. A whole fortnight of it, although he'd known even then that just a week of it would have been rather better. It was not difficult (he already knew it well) to get bored even in the presence of a mistress; and he'd begun to realize on that occasion that it was perfectly possible to grow just a little wearied even in the company of a newly wed wife. There had been one or two incidents, too, when he'd thought Yvonne was experiencing similar thoughts … especially that time one evening when she'd quite obviously been exchanging long looks with a moustachioed Frenchman who looked exactly like Proust. He'd called her “a flirtatious bitch” when they got to their hotel room; and when she'd glared back at him and told him they'd make a “bloody good pair” one way or another …
There would be no trouble like that with Maxine: only two and a half days—just right, that! And she was a real honey, a law professor from Yale, aged forty-two, divorced, a little oversexed, a little overweight, and hugely desirable.
She finally appeared, pulling an inordinately large suitcase on wheels.
“You're late!” His tone was a combination of anger and relief; and he immediately moved forward ahead of her to the back of the short queue at the first-class counter.
“You didn't get my message, did you? I tried and tried—”
“Like I told you? On the mobile?”
“It wasn't working. I think you'd forgotten—”
“Christ!” Harrison took his mobile from an inside pocket, tapped a few digits, then another few; then repeated the blasphemy: “Christ! I'd had enough of the bloody mobile recently and—”
“And you forgot that we'd agreed—”
“Sorry! Say you'll forgive me!”
He looked down at her squarish, slightly prognathic face, her dark-brown silky hair cut short in a fringe across her broad forehead and above the quietly gentle eyes that were becoming tearful now, perhaps from her hectic rush, perhaps from the undeserved brusqueness of his greeting, but perhaps above all from the knowledge that his love for her homodyned only with the waves of that physical lust which so often excited him. Yet the brief holiday had been her choice, and she knew that she wouldn't regret having made it. She enjoyed being with him: he was good fun and intelligent and well read and still handsome and still excellent in bed and—yes!—he was rich.
They moved nearer the counter, neither of them too anxious to speak—a phenomenon not uncommon with persons queuing, as if their concentration were required for the transactions ahead. But she volunteered some incidental information:
“Accident there was, near Stokenchurch, and I tried to—”
Gently he ran a hand through her silken hair. “Sweetheart? Forget it!”
“It's just that we must have been stuck there half an hour and we saw—one of the other passengers pointed it out—a beautiful bird of prey there. A red kite.”
“Tell me later!”
There was now just the one business-suited man in front of them.
“Where have you booked us?”
“The best.”
“And the best air-tickets—?”
“Sh! Nothing but the best for you. Why not? Just think of me! No wife. No blackmailing kids. No problems at work. Nothing to spend money on for a day or two—except on you. I'm a rich man, sweetheart. I thought I'd told you.”
“Tickets, please?”
The smiling young lady scrutinized the perfectly valid tickets.
“Passports, please?”
The young lady scrutinized the perfectly valid passports.
“Smoking?”
“Nonsmoking.”
“Window-center? Center-aisle?”
“Center-aisle.”
“Luggage?”
Frank Harrison lugged the great case on to the trackway beside the desk.
“Only the one?”
“Yes.”
“You know where the club lounge is?”
“Yes.”
“Enjoy your flight, sir, and enjoy your stay in Paris!”
He handed her a glass of champagne, and two glasses clinked. “Here's to a wonderful little break together. Ritz—here we come!”
He leaned across and kissed her on the soft, unlipsticked mouth—a long, yearning kiss. His eyes closed. Her eyes closed.
“Mr. Harrison?” A tap on the shoulder. “Mr. Frank Harrison?”
“What—?”
A uniformed police officer stood beside the small t
able: “I'm sorry, sir, but we need to speak to you. Routine check.”
“Thames Valley Police, is this?”
“That's right, sir.”
“What exactly—?”
“ It's not just that. Your employers want to speak to you as well.”
Harrison's eyes squinted in bewilderment.
“What the hell do they want? I'm on official furlough, for God's sake. They'll have to wait till I get back.”
“Will you come this way, sir? Please!”
A second uniformed policeman—young, dark-haired—stood just inside the entrance to the executive lounge; was still standing there a quarter of an hour later when Maxine, after drinking the one and then the other glass of champagne, went over to speak to him.
“Do you mind telling me, Officer, by whose authority—?”
“Not mine, miss,” said PC Kershaw. “Please believe me. I also am a man under authority.”
“You haven't answered my question.”
“I'm from Thames Valley—we both are.”
“Who sent you here?”
“The CID.”
“Who?”
“Chief Inspector Morse.”
“Who's he when he's in his office?”
“He's an important man.”
“Very important?”
“Oh yes!” Kershaw nodded with a reverential smile.
“You talk as if he's God Almighty.”
“Some people think he is.”
“Do you?”
“Not always.”
“How long will you be keeping Mr. Harrison?”
“I just don't know, Mrs. Ridgway.”
Maxine poured herself a further glass of champagne, and pondered as she sat alone at the small table. They knew her name too …
He wasn't a particularly lucky man to associate with, Frank Harrison. The last time she'd been with him, over a year ago, he'd had that phone call from—well, he'd never said who from—to tell him that his wife had been murdered …