Read The Remorseful Day Online
Authors: Colin Dexter
The Remorseful Day (31 page)
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.
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 surprisingly) 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!”
“Guess what one of the shop assistants found when she got to work this morning?”
“Pair of handcuffs?”
“Pair of
something
, sir. Pair of red trainers! Almost brand-new. This woman had read in the
Oxford Mail
about the Burford jogger and she thought…”
“You know something, Lewis? That's very interesting. Very interesting indeed. I'll be with you straightaway.”
With much talk will they tempt thee, and smiling upon thee will get out thy secrets.
(
Ecclesiasticus
, ch. XIII, v. 11)
“You know, come to think of it, Lewis, we could do all of this now, couldn't we? Just the two of us.”
“No Dixon?”
“No Dixon.”
Lewis smiled outwardly and inwardly as he looked down at the action plan. It seemed to him a sensible and fair division of a good deal of labor. For example, he himself had spoken only very briefly with Sarah Harrison; Morse had not as yet spoken at all with Simon Harrison. Both matters now to be dealt with. And all leading up to the two of them, Morse and Lewis, meeting Frank Harrison a.s.a.p. after these and a few other checks and visits had been made. Harrison!—“the corner-stone, the kingpin, the pivot,” as Morse had asserted, before running out of synonyms. “We've got plenty of time for all this—well, no, perhaps we haven't. So we can be pretty direct, but not sharp. Smile occasionally. No aggressiveness, no hostility, no belligerence,” Morse had asserted, before running out of synonyms again.
It all suited Lewis nicely. If Morse's philosophy in life was to aim high even if the target was altogether missed, he personally preferred to aim low in the hope at least of hitting something.
The voluntary (mornings only) help at the Oxford Animal Sanctuary Shop (Gifts Welcome) lived only a few hundred yards away in Osberton Road: a widow, a cat lover, an intelligent witness—Mrs. Gerrard. It was just
that, as every weekday morning, she'd walked down to South Parade to buy the
Daily Telegraph
, about 8 o'clock before opening the shop, and she'd seen this—
“Yes?” Lewis smiled.
—well, this youngish fellow—smartly dressed, suit and tie—and he put this Sainsbury's plastic bag in the doorway there. She couldn't describe him any better than that really; but she remembered his car, parked for a few seconds on the double-yellows alongside the shop. She wouldn't have noticed that either—except that it was the same make as hers, a Toyota Carina, P-Reg., a different color though: hers was a turquoisy color, his was silvery-grey. The trainers she had put carefully aside, under the counter in the shop.
No one in North Oxford with a Toyota was likely to drive unnecessarily far afield for any servicing and repairs, since there was a specialist garage in Summer-town itself; and it took Lewis only a few minutes to learn that the owner of a silvery-grey P-Reg. Carina was a regular and esteemed customer of the company, a man named Simon Harrison.
Simultaneously Morse was driving himself in the Jaguar through the low range of open hills that border Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire. His old pathologist friend, Max, had once told him that two pleasures grew ever deeper with advancing age, the pleasures of the belly and the pleasures of natural beauty. And Morse found himself concurring with the latter proposition as he turned right at the roundabout and drove down into Burford.
Christine Coverley was clearly surprised to see him, and clearly not happy.
“It's all a bit untidy—”
Morse smiled. “Can I come in?”
“I haven't got long, I'm afraid.”
“It won't take long, I promise.”
“How can I… ?”
“What were you doing last Monday morning? Between, say, nine and eleven?”
“Not the faintest, have I? Nobody could remember exactly—”
“Did you go out—for a newspaper, shopping, seeing someone?”
“I don't know. Like I say—”
“Can you have a look in your diary for me?”
“That wouldn't help.”
“What wow Whelp?”
“I don't know what you're getting at. Look, Inspector.” She glanced down at her wristwatch with what appeared incipient panic. “Could we talk some other time,
please?
You see I've got—”
But it was too late.
There was the scratch of a key in the Yale lock and the front door was quickly opened and as quickly closed, and a youth entered from the narrow hallway to stand in the doorway of the single bedsit room.
With staring eyes he looked first at Morse and then at Christine Coverley: “What the fuck?”
“ You haven't increased your word power much since we last—” began Morse. But Roy Holmes had disappeared even more rapidly than he'd appeared.
In the stillness that followed the crash of the front door closing, Morse sat down in one of the armchairs, and gestured the speechless schoolmistress to seat herself in the other.
“Please tell me all about it,” he said, with no hint of aggressiveness or any of its synonyms. “If you don't, I'm sorry but I shall have to take you down to Police HQ.”
After his twinkling Irish eyes had scrutinized Lewis's ID, Mr. Tony Marrinan, the manager of The Randolph, was wholly cooperative; and very soon the outline of Frank Harrison's recent stay was revealed. Double-room booked with, as staff recalled her, a sultrily attractive if less than attractively mannered partner—late twenties, perhaps; meals taken together quite regularly in the Spires Restaurant—details available, if Sergeant Lewis wanted to see them.
As Sergeant Lewis did.
