The Remorseful Day

by Colin Dexter

  She was tempted to get up and—well, just leave. Just get out of there. Her case was on the plane by now though—suits, dresses, lingerie, shoes—but it could be returned perhaps? She still had her handbag with its far more important items: cards, keys, diary, money …

  But she felt sure the PC at the door would never let her out. That's why he was there. Why else?

  An announcement over the lounge Tannoy informed her that first-class passengers for British Airways Flight 338 to Paris should now proceed to Gate 3; and a dozen or so people were draining their drinks and gathering up their hand luggage. But for Maxine Ridgway it was now a feeling of deep sadness that had overtaken those earlier minutes of indecision and despair. She was no fool. She knew by heart the role she'd been asked to play in the Ritz; and she'd accepted the bargain, because it would have been a bargain.

  She was not even bothering to wonder what she should do next when she heard the voice behind her: “Come on, sweetheart! You heard the announcement. Gate 3.”

  With her mind in a mingled state of amazement and relief, she picked up her hand luggage and followed him to the exit-doors, where there was now no sign of PC Kershaw, the man who had seemed to have a greater familiarity with Holy Writ than she had herself.

  “Routine check, that's all,” asserted Frank Harrison. “Just like the man said.”

  Seventy

  I cried for madder music and for stronger wine,

  But when the feast is finished and the lamps expire,

  Then falls thy shadow, Cynara! the night is thine;

  And I am desolate and sick of an old passion,

  Yea hungry for the lips of my desire:

  I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

  (Dowson, Non Sum Qualis Eram

  Bonae Sub Regno Cynarae)

  “Let him go, Kershaw. Let him catch his flight.”

  “You think that's wise, sir?”

  “What?”

  “I just wondered—”

  “Look, lad! If I ever have to look to you as a fount of wisdom, it'll be the day you're dry behind the ears. Is that clear?”

  “Sir!”

  Morse put down the phone. It was 6:10 P.M.

  “Do you think that was fair, sir?” asked Lewis.

  “Probably not,” conceded Morse.

  It had been Lewis, an hour earlier, who had received the call from the Bank: profound apology; embarrassing recantation; chagrin unspeakable! Over £500,000 indeed was still unaccountably missing; but not, not from Harrison's department. Inquiries subsequent to Lewis's visit had now established that any embezzlement or misappropriation of funds was most definitely not to be laid at the door of one of the Bank's most experienced, most trusted, most valued blah blah blah. It was a call in which Morse was most interested, now repeating (with some self-congratulation) what he had earlier maintained: that Frank Harrison might well be, most likely was, capable of murder; but that it was quite out of character, definitely infra dignitatem, for him to stoop to cooking the books and fiddling the balance-and-loss ledgers.

  “Do you think you may be wrong, sir?”

  “Certainly not. He'll be back from Paris, believe me! There's no hiding place for him. Not from me, there isn't.”

  “You think he murdered his wife?”

  “No. But he knows who did. You know who did. But we've got to get some evidence. We've been checking alibis—recent ones. But we've got to check those earlier alibis again.”

  “Who are you thinking of?”

  “Of whom am I thinking?” (Morse recalled the suspicion he'd voiced in his earlier notes.) “I'm thinking of the only other person apart from Frank Harrison who had a sufficient motive to kill Yvonne.”

  “You mean—?”

  “Do you ever go to the pictures?”

  “They don't call it the ‘pictures’ any more.”

  “I went to the pictures a year and a bit ago to see The Full Monty.”

  “Surely not your sort of—?”

  “Exactly my sort of thing. I laughed and I cried.”

  “Oh yes.” (The penny had dropped.) “Simon Harrison said he'd gone—”

  “ ‘Said,’ yes.”

  “Said he'd gone with someone else, didn't he? A girlfriend.”

  “Wasn't checked though, as far as I can see.”

  “Understandable, isn't it? Nobody ever really thought of someone inside the family—”

  “Oh yes they did. Frank Harrison was one of their first suspects.”

  “But with those signs of burglary, the broken window, the burglar alarm …”

  Morse nodded. “At first almost everything pointed to an outside job. But then it slowly began to look like something else: a lover, a tryst, a sex session, a quarrel, a murder …”

  “And now we're coming back to the family, you say.”

  “No one seems to have bothered to get a statement from the young lady Simon Harrison took to the pictures that evening.”

  “Perhaps we could still trace her, sir?”

  “Yes.”

  “It's a long time ago though. She'd never remember—”

  “Of course she would! It was all over the papers: ‘Woman Murdered'—and she'd been with that same woman's son the evening when it happened. She could never forget it!”

  “It's still a long time—”

  “Lewis! I don't eat all that much as you know. But when I'm cooking for myself—”

  (Lewis's eyebrows rose.)

  “—I always make sure the plate's hot. I can't abide eating off a cold plate.”

  “You mean we could heat the plate up again?”

  “The plate's already hot again. She's still around. She's a proud, married mum now living in Witney.”

  “How do you know all that?”

  “You can't do everything yourself, Lewis.”

  “Dixon, you mean?”

  “Good man, Dixon! So we're going to see her tonight. Just you and I.”

  “You think Simon murdered his mum.”

  “No doubt about that. Not any longer, Lewis,” said Morse quietly.

  “Just because he found her in bed with someone …”

  “With Barron. I know that, Lewis.”

  Never before had Lewis been so hesitant in asking Morse a question:

  “Did … did Mrs. Harrison ever tell you that she was… seeing Barron?”

  Morse hesitated—hesitated for far too long.

  “No. No, she never told me that.”

  Lewis waited a while, choosing his words carefully and speaking them slowly: “If she had told you, would you have been as jealous as Simon Harrison?”

  Again Morse hesitated. “Jealousy is a dreadfully corrosive thing. The most powerful motive of all, in my view, for murder—more powerful than—”

  The phone rang once more and Morse answered.

  Kershaw.

  “They'll soon be winging their way across the channel, sir. Anything more you want me to do?”

  “Yes. Have a pint of beer, just the one, then bugger off home.”

  Morse put down the phone.

  “Good man, Kershaw! Bit of an old woman though. Reminds me of my Aunt Gladys in Alnwick, my last remaining relative. Well, she was. Dead now.”

  “I think he'll do well, yes.”

  “Kershaw? Should do. He got a First in History from Keble.”

  “Bit more than me, sir.”

  “Bit more than me, Lewis.”

  The phone was ringing again.

  Strange.

  “Morse? You've let him out of the country, I hear?”

  “Yes. We need a bit more time and a bit more evidence before we bring him in.”

  “I agree,” said Strange, unexpectedly. “No good just…”

  “He'll be back for the day of reckoning.”

  “You think so?”

  “I know so.”

  “And in the interim?”

  “He'll be having a beano—kisses, wine, roses. ‘But when the feast is finished and the lamps
expire …’ You know the Dowson poem, sir?”

  “Course I bloody do!”

  “Well, I don't think he'll ever be really happy with any of these other women of his.”

  “This one sounds like a bit of all right though.”

  “I'd still like to bet he wakes up in the small hours sometimes and thinks back on the woman he loved more than any of them, feeling a bit desolate—”

  “—and sick of an old passion.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Yvonne, you mean?”

  “No, not Yvonne, sir. Elizabeth—Elizabeth Jane Thomas.”

  Seventy-one

  What more pleasant setting than the cinema for sweetly deodorized bodies to meet, unzip, and commune?

  (Malcolm Muggeridge, The Most

  of Malcolm Muggeridge)

  Sylvia Marsden (née Prentice) was temporarily living with her mother in a pleasantly appointed semi on a housing estate at Witney. And it was her mother (Lewis had phoned earlier) who had answered the door and shown the two detectives into the lounge where the buxom Sylvia, blouse open, was breast-feeding a very new baby—not in the slightest degree disconcerted to be thus interrupted in her maternal ministrations, one hand splayed across an engorged nipple, the fingers of the other playing lovingly around the lips of the suckling infant.

  An awkwardly embarrassed Morse moved slowly round the room, simulating deep interest in the tasteless bric-a-brac that cluttered every surface and shelf in the brightly decorated room; whilst Lewis stood above the mother and child, smiling quasi-paternally and drawing the back of his right index finger lightly across the cherubic cheek:

  “Little treasure, isn't he? What's his name?”

  “She's a she, actually—aren't you, Susie?”

  “Ah yes, of course!”

  Morse temporarily declined to take a seat but accepted, strangely enough, the offer of coffee, and began his questioning whilst looking through the window on to the neatly kept back garden.

  “We're just having to make one or two further inquiries, Mrs. Marsden—”

  “Call me Sylvia!”

  “It's about one of your former boyfriends—”

  “Simon, yes, I know. That Sergeant Dixon told me. Nice man, isn't he? He got on ever so well with Mum.”

  Morse nodded, aware of the probable reason. “It's a long time ago now, I realize …”

  “Not really. Not for me it isn't. The night Simon's mum was murdered? Can't forget something like that, can you?”

  “That's good news, Sylvia. Now that night, that evening, the 9th—”

  “Oh no! You've got it wrong. It was the 8th—the night Mrs. Harrison was murdered. I'm quite sure of that. My birthday, wasn't it? Simon took me to the ABC in Oxford. Super film! All about these male strippers—”

  “Did the police ever ask you about it?”

  “No. Why should they?”

  Sylvia rebuttoned her blouse, and as Morse turned at last to face her, Lewis could see the disappointment on his face.

  Mrs. Prentice (née Jones), who had clearly been listening keenly from the adjacent kitchen, now brought in two cups of coffee. “I can remember that,” she volunteered. “Like she says, that was your birthday, wasn't it, Sylv?”

  “How did you find Simon, Mrs. Prentice?” asked Lewis.

  “I liked him. He used to come in sometimes but I think he felt a bit… you know, with his hearing.”

  “He didn't come in that night?”

  “No. I remember it well. Like Sylv says—well, not something you forget, is it? I saw him though, after he'd brought her back. And I heard the pair of ‘em whispering on the doorstep. Nice boy, really. Could have done worse, couldn't you, Sylv?”

  “I did better, Mum, OK?”

  Clearly there was less than complete family agreement on the merits of baby Susie's official father and Morse swallowed his coffee quickly and, as ever, Lewis followed his chief's lead dutifully.

  In the car outside they sat for some time in silence.

  “You knew it was the 8th, sir. Why—?”

  “Just to test her memory.”

  There was another long silence.

  “Looks as if we've been wrong, sir.”

  “Looks as if I've been wrong.”

  “Alibis don't come much better than that.”

  “No.”

  “You know when Mrs. Whatshername said she heard the pair of ‘em whispering outside, she probably heard more of the conversation than Simon ever did!”

  Morse nodded with a wry grin. “You don't think there's any chance that somebody bribed our Sylvia and Sylvia's mum … ?”

  “Not the remotest. Do you?”

  “No.”

  “Where do we go from here, sir?”

  “You can drop me off at the Woodstock Arms or …”

  “No. I meant with the case, sir.”

  “… or perhaps the Maiden's Arms.”

  It seemed that Morse was hardly listening.

  “I know you're disappointed, sir, but—”

  “Disappointed? Nonsense!”

  Some light-footed mouse had just scuttled across his scapulae; and when Lewis turned to look at him, it seemed as if someone had switched the electric current on behind his eyes.

  “Yes, Lewis. Just drive me out to Lower Swinstead.”

  Seventy-two

  Below me, there is the village, and looks how quiet and small!

  And yet bubbles o ‘er like a city, with gossip, scandal, and spite.

  (Tennyson, Maud)

  Unwontedly in a car, Morse was almost continuously talkative as they drove along: “Do you know that lovely line of Thomson's about villages ‘embosomed soft in trees’?”

  “Don't even know Thomson,” mumbled Lewis.

  “Remarkable things! Strange, intimate little places where there's more going on than anybody ever dreams of. You get illicit liaisons, hopeless love affairs, illegitimate offspring, wife-swapping, interbreeding, neighborly spite, class warfare—all that's for the insiders, though. If you're on the outside, they refuse to have anything to do with you. They clamp up. They present a united defensive front because they've got one thing in common, Lewis: the village itself. They're all members of the same football club. They may loathe each other's guts for most of the week, but come Saturday afternoon when they put on the same football shirts… Well, the next village better look out!”

  “Except Lower Swinstead doesn't have a football team.”

  “What are you talking about? They're all in the football team.”

  Lewis drove down the Windrush Valley into Lower Swinstead.

  “They don't all clamp up, anyway. Not to you, they don't. Compared with some of our lads you've squeezed a carton of juice out of ‘em already.”

  “But there's more squeezing to do, Lewis—just a little.”

  Unwontedly in a pub, Morse had already taken out his wallet at the bar, and Lewis raised no objection.

  “Pint of bitter—whatever's in the best nick.”

  “It's all in the best nick,” began Biffen.

  “And … orange or grapefruit, Lewis?”

  The fruit machine stood idle and the cribbage board was slotted away behind the bar. But the place was quite busy. Most of the customers were locals; most of them people who'd earlier been questioned about the Harrison murder; most of them members of the village team.

  On the pub's noticeboard at the side of the bar, underneath “Live Music Every Saturday,” was an amateurishly printed yellow poster advertising the current week's entertainment:

  “Popular?” asked Morse of the landlord.

  “Packed out we are, every Sat'day.”

  “Ever had Paddy Flynn and his group playing here?”

  “Paddy who?”

  “Flynn—the chap who was murdered.”

  “Ah yes. Read about it, o'course. But I don't think he were ever here, Inspector. You know, fifty-odd groups a year and—how many years is it I've—”

  “Forget it!” snapped Morse.
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  “The beer OK?”

  “Fine. How's Bert, by the way? Any better?”

  “Worse. Quack called to see him yesterday—just after we'd opened—told Bert's boy the old man oughta go in for a few days, like—but Bert told ‘em he wasn't going to die in no hospital.”

  For someone who knew almost nothing about some things, Thomas Biffen seemed to know an awful lot about others.

  “Where does he live?” asked Morse.

  It was Bert's son, a man already in his late fifties, who showed Morse up the narrow steepish steps to the bedroom where Bert himself lay, propped up against pillows, the backs of his hands, purple-veined and deeply foxed, resting on the top of the sheet.

  “Missing the cribbage, I bet!” volunteered Morse.

  The old face, yellowish and gaunt, lit up a little. “Alf'll be glad of a rest. Hah!” He chuckled deeply in his throat. “Lost these last five times, he has.” “You're a bit under the weather, they tell me.”

  “Still got me wits about me though. More'n Alf has sometimes.”

  “Still got a good memory, you mean?”

  “Allus had a good memory since I were at school.”

  “Mind if I ask you a few things? About the village? You know … gossip, scandal… that sort of thing? I had a few words with Alf, but I reckon his memory's not as sharp as yours.”

  “Never was, was it? Just you fire away, Inspector. Pleasure!”

  Lewis, who had been left in the car, leaned across and opened the passenger door.

  “Another member of the local football team?”

  Morse smiled sadly and shook his head. “I think he's in for a transfer.”

  “What exactly did he—?”

  “Get me home, Lewis.”

  On the speedy journey back to Oxford, the pair spoke only once, and then in a fairly brief exchange:

  “Listen, Lewis! We know exactly where Frank Harrison is; who's with him; how long he's booked in at his hotel; when his return flight is. So. I want you to make sure he's met at Heathrow.”

  “If he comes back.”

  “He'll be back. I want you to meet him. Charge him with anything you like, complicity in the murder of his missus; complicity in the murder of Barron—please yourself. Anything! But bring him back to me, all right? I've seldom looked forward—”