by Colin Dexter
And that's almost it, Lewis.
There remains just the one final matter to settle. The murder weapon was never found. But the path report, as you'll recall, gave some indication of the type of weapon used. There were perhaps two blows only to Yvonne's head. The first rendered the right cheekbone shattered and the bridge of the nose broken. The second, the more vicious and it seems the fatal blow, crashed across the base of the skull, doubtless as Yvonne tried to turn her head away in desperate self-defense. The suggestion made was that some sort of “tubular metal rod” was in all probability the cause of such injuries.
An arm crutch!
How do I know this? I don't. But I shall be inordinately surprised if I am not very close indeed to the truth. And—how many times this has happened?—it was you, Lewis, who did the trick for me again! Remember? You were reining back some fanciful notions of mine about Sarah tearing down to the cinema to buy a ticket, and you said that she wasn't going to be tearing about anywhere that night, because she'd sprained her ankle rather badly; and that if she were doing anything it would be hobbling about. Yes. Hobbling about on one of those metal arm crutches they'd probably issued her with from the Physiotherapy Department. (Will you find out, Lewis, if and when the arm crutch was returned?)
I realize that it won't be easy to establish Sarah's guilt, but we've got the long-awaited interview with her father to look forward to. He'll be a worthy opponent, I know that, but I'm beginning to suspect that even he has almost had enough by now. If I'm overoptimistic about such an outcome, there'll still be Sarah herself. It will be a surprise if the pair of them haven't been in close touch in recent days and weeks, and I've got a feeling that like her father she's almost ready herself to emerge from the hell she must have been going through for so long. Quite apart from judicial convictions and punishments, guilt brings its own moral retribution. We all know that.
One thing is certain. This will be—has been—my last case. I am now determined to retire and to take life a little more gently and sensibly. We've tackled so many cases together, old friend, and I'm very happy and very proud to have worked with you for so long.
That's it. The time is now 12:45 A.M., and suddenly I feel so very weary.
All the manuscript notes were with Strange within the half-hour.
And Lewis had nothing further to do with the investigation.
Eighty
I am retired. I am to be met with in trim gardens. I am already come to be known by my vacant face and careless gesture, perambulating at no fixed pace nor with any settled purpose. I walk about; not to and from.
(Charles Lamb, Last Essays of Elia)
It seemed there was little to cloud the bright evening at the end of August, that same year, when Strange held his retirement party. The Chief Constable (no less!) had toasted his farewell from the Force, paying a fulsome tribute to his colleague's many years of distingished service in the Thames Valley CID, crowned, as it had been, with yet another significant triumph in the Yvonne Harrison murder case.
For his part, Strange had spoken reasonably wittily and blessedly briefly and had included a personal tribute to Chief Inspector Morse:
“I don't think we're going to see his like again in a hurry, and people of lesser intellect like me should be grateful for that. And it's good to have with us here his faithful friend and, er, drinking companion” (muted amusement) “Sergeant Lewis” (Hear-Hear! all round). “Morse had no funeral service and no memorial service, just as he wished; but I make no apology for remembering him here this evening because, quite simply, he had the most brilliant mind I ever encountered in the whole of my police career … Well now. All that remains for me is to thank you for coming along to see me off; to say thank you for the lawn mower and the book” (he held aloft a copy of Sir David Attenborough's The Life of Birds) “and to remind you there's a splendid buffet next door, including a special plate of doughnuts for one of our number.” (Much laughter, and much subsequent applause.)
Lewis had clapped as much as the rest of them, but he had no wish to stay too long amid the backslapping and the reminiscences; and soon made his way upstairs to the deserted canteen where he sat in a corner drinking an orange juice, wishing to be alone with his thoughts for a while …
The conclusion to the Harrison case had proved pretty much, though far from exactly, as Morse had predicted. Two hours after her father had been taken to HQ for questioning, Sarah Harrison (refusing to see her father) had presented herself voluntarily and made a full confession to the murder of her mother, making absolutely no apology for anything—except for causing her father (she knew it!) all that pain and agony of spirit. What would happen to her now, she said, would not really amount to imprisonment at all; but, in a curious sort of way, to a kind of liberation.
And perhaps it had been much the same, albeit rather later, for Frank Harrison himself, who (less eloquently than his daughter) had by degrees unburdened himself of his manifold sins and wickednesses, including the subsequent murder of his wife's lover, John Barron …
His actions, after receiving his daughter's frantic, frenetic phone call on the night of Yvonne's murder, had been straightforward. Train to Oxford; then taxi to Lower Swinstead, whence Barron had long since fled; and where Repp, though still around, remained unseen. Harrison had paid off Flynn, expecting him to drive away forthwith; thereafter very quickly dispatching his distraught daughter home. Coolly and ruthlessly he'd taken over. Confusion!—that was the only hope; and the only plan. Yvonne was already handcuffed, presumably for some bizarre bondage session, and what a blessing that had been! He'd tied a gag lightly around her mouth; gone on to the patio and smashed in the glass of the French window from the outside before unlocking it; he'd turned the lights on, every one of them, and yanked out the TV and the telephone leads, both upstairs and down; and finally, with illogical desperation, he'd decided to activate the burglar alarm, since even if no one heard it, it would be recorded (so he believed).
He'd done enough. Almost enough. Just the police now. He had to ring the police, immediately; and suddenly he realized he couldn't ring them—he'd just made sure of that himself. But there was his mobile, the mobile on which he'd already rung Sarah several times from the train and once from Flynn's taxi. He could always lose it though: and the longer he waited to ring for help, the better the chances for that confusion he'd tried so hard to effect. In detective stories he'd often read of the difficulties pathologists encountered in establishing the time parameters for any murder. Yes! He'd just go up to the main road and walk (run!) the half-mile or so to the next house. Which indeed he was doing when he heard the voice at the gate that led to the drive. He remembered Flynn's words exactly:
“I t'ink you moight be needin’ a little help, sorr?”…
Epilogue
Certainly the gods are ironical: they always punish one for one's virtues rather than for one's sins.
(Ernest Dowson, Letters)
“Didn't you want any food?”
“No thank you, sir. I've got a meal waiting at home.”
“Ah yes. Of course.”
“And I didn't particularly want to watch Dixon eating doughnuts.”
“No, I understand.” Strange lowered himself rather gingerly on to the inappropriately small chair opposite. “Talking of eating, Lewis, what the hell's eating you, pray?”
As he'd requested (and as we have seen) Lewis had nothing further to do with the Harrison case. He had tried, and with some considerable success, to distance himself from the whole affair, even from thinking about it. There was just that one persistent, niggling worry that tugged away at his mind like some overindulged infant tugging away at its mother's skirts in a supermarket: the knowledge that Morse, on his own admission, and for the first time in their collaboration, had acted dishonestly and dishonorably.
He looked up at Strange.
“What makes you think something's eating me?”
“Come on, Lewis! I wasn't born yesterday.”
So Lew
is told him.
Told him of the unease he'd felt from the beginning of the case: that Morse had known far too little about it, and then again far too much; that Morse had originally voiced such vehement opposition to taking on the case, and yet had spent the last days of his life doing little else than trying to fathom its complexity.
“And that's all that's been bothering you?”
“All?”
“Look! Tell me! What's the very worst thing you think he could have done? There's this attractive nurse pulling him through a serious illness in hospital—a place where patients can get a bit low, and a bit vulnerable. Nurses, too, for that matter. And she fell for him a bit—”
“How do you know that?”
“She told me so. She told me one night in hospital when she was looking after me! Morse fell for her a bit, too—anybody would!—and after he's discharged he writes and asks her why she's not been in touch with him. But she doesn't write back, although she keeps his letter. Know why, Lewis? Because she doesn't really know how to cope with being in love herself.”
“How do you know that?”
“Does it matter? When she was murdered—well, you know the rest. Morse was on another case at the time—you were on it with him, for God's sake! And he said it was too much for the pair of you to take on another.”
“Only after he'd found his own letter.”
“Lewis!”
“Only after he'd recognized the handcuffs.”
“Lewis! Listen! Nothing Morse did then—nothing—affected that inquiry in the slightest way. Yvonne had kept some letters from her men friends, the kinkies and the straights alike. She certainly didn't keep any from Barron. Maybe because he never wrote any, I dunno. Maybe because she just didn't want to.”
“Just the ones from her favorite clients.”
“You know that. You've seen them.”
“Some of them,” said Lewis slowly.
“Well I saw all the bloody letters!”
“Including the one from Morse.”
“Not a crime you know, writing a letter. It was immaterial anyway, as I keep trying to tell you.” Strange looked exasperated. “It's just that it would have been awkward, wouldn't it? Bloody awkward! I wanted to protect the silly sod. You never thought he was a saint, did you?”
Lewis was silent for a while. No. He'd never thought of Morse as a possible candidate for sanctification.
But there was something wrong about what he'd just heard.
“So you saw the letter before Morse saw it, is that what you're saying?”
“Morse never saw the letter, not till you showed him that page of it. You see, Lewis, I took it—not Morse.”
“And you didn't check—”
“Couldn't have done, could I? It was a longish letter. But I didn't read it, so I wouldn't have spotted if there was any gap.”
“So it was you who kept some of the evidence separate?”
“Afraid so, yes. I was scared stiff one of my letters might be there, if you want the truth. And as things turned out it just became impossible for me to put that stuff back in the folder while the original inquiry was still going on.”
“So you got a new box-file when the case was reopened…”
Strange nodded. “Always felt guilty about it but—”
“Why didn't Morse spot the page you'd missed?”
“Perhaps he didn't look all that carefully. Not his way usually, was it? Perhaps he wasn't too interested in the literary shortcomings of her other admirers. Not very fond of spelling mistakes, now was he … ? or perhaps he just felt the letters were too private, like he'd hoped his own letter would be. How do I know? What I do know is that he wasn't looking for a list of lovers who might have been in bed with Yvonne that night. Somehow he was convinced he knew who the man was. He told me who it was; and he told you who it was. And he was right.”
Lewis nodded.
But the supermarket brat was giving a final tug.
“Plenty of letters and none of them any help, I agree, sir. But just the one pair of handcuffs! And Morse realized there'd be no problem in tracing them, so he destroyed the issue list. And we both know why, don't we, sir? Because they were his.”
“Come off it, Lewis! There's a hundred and one worse things in life than him giving some bloody cuffs he'd never used once in his life to some woman who'd asked him for them—whatever the reason.”
Slowly shaking his head, Lewis stared down at the canteen carpet disconsolately.
“It's just that he seems not quite the man …”
“And you can't forgive him for that.”
“Course I can forgive him! Just a bit of a jolt, that's all. Can't you understand that? After all those years we were together?”
“That's what's really eating you, isn't it? Be honest! It's just that you don't think as much of old Morse as you used to.”
“Not quite as much, no.”
Strange struggled to his feet. “Must be off. Good to talk. I'd better get back downstairs.”
Lewis got to his feet. “Mrs. Lewis sends her very best wishes, sir.”
The two policemen shook hands, and the interesting exchange was apparently over.
But not so.
Halfway to the canteen exit, Strange suddenly turned round and came back to the table.
“Do you remember those issue lists for handcuffs, Lewis?”
“It's a long time ago …”
“Well, they're just handwritten lists, kept up to date in a series of columns: date, name, rank, serial number. Just like this.” Strange took a folded sheet of A4 from an inside pocket. “But you remember the serial number on the pair you found in Morse's drawer?”
“Nine-two-two.”
He handed the sheet to Lewis. “You've got a good memory!”
“Where did you get this?”
“Someone took it from HQ, Lewis. Morse did!”
Lewis looked down at the list, but could find no mention of Morse's name. Could see another name though—at the seventh entry down, along with the other details in the neatly ruled lines:
“You mean…?”
“I mean, Lewis, that Morse knew I was having an affair with Yvonne Harrison. I don't know how he knew, but he always tended to know things, didn't he? He pinched that form, and he kept it till after the wife's funeral. Then he gave it to me. Said it would be useless without the cuffs, which he said he was going to keep anyway, just in case I ever did anything bloody stupid. And he said exactly what I said to you a few minutes ago: nothing—nothing—that happened then had affected the inquiry in the slightest way. Is that clear, Lewis?”
Yes it was clear. “You're saying that all Morse did was to save you … and save Mrs. Strange …”
“It would have broken her to pieces,” said Strange very quietly. “And me. Would have broken both of us to pieces.”
“She never knew?”
“Never had the faintest idea. Thanks to Morse.”
Lewis was silent.
“Just like you, eh? About lots of things. You never had the faintest idea, for example, that I re-opened the Harrison case on the basis of a couple of bogus telephone calls, now did you?”
“You mean—?”
“I mean there were no telephone calls. I made ‘em up myself. Both of ‘em.”
“I just didn't realize …”
“Nobody did, except Morse of course. He guessed straightaway. But I'd like to bet he never told you! He just didn't want to let me down, that's all.”
“Why didn't he tell me all this though? It would have made such a lot of difference … at the end …”
“I dunno. Always an independent sod, wasn't he? And always had that great big streak of loyalty and integrity somewhere deep inside him. But you don't need me to tell you that. So he was never worried too much about what people thought of him. He certainly didn't give two monkeys what I thought of him, at least most of the time. In fact the only person he did want to think well of him was you, Lewis. So let me tell you something
else. It's one helluva job having to live with guilt, as I've done. Almost everybody discovers the same, you know that. Frank Harrison did, didn't he? Sarah Harrison, too. It's something I hope you'll never have to go through yourself. Not that you ever will. Nor did Morse though. He once told me that the guiltiest he ever felt in his life was when a couple of the lads saw him flicking through a girlie magazine in the Summer-town newsagent's. So … So just keep thinking well of him, Lewis—that's all I ask.”
The former Chief Superintendent lumbered across the still-deserted canteen to join the jollifications below.
But Lewis sat where he was.
Apart from the middle-aged woman at the counter reading the Sun, there seemed no one else there. And after looking around him as guiltily as Morse must have done in the Summertown newsagent's, for a little while, in his desolation, he wept silently.
A Fawcett Book
Published by The Ballantine Publishing Group
