Inspector Morse 13 The Remorseful Day
Page 12
"no. "
"How many of those compactor bins do you get from Redbridge every day?"
"Depends."
"Today?"
"Four or five? I could check."
"No. No need."
Morse watched as the yellow-painted BOMAG tractors were once again setting
about their dismal business, the metal teeth of their giant wheels compacting
the recently deposited mounds; and then, with a fair-weather frontage
reminiscent of a snow plough pushing forward the levelled rubbish towards its
burial ground.
For the moment Morse said nothing more, suddenly and strangely aware that, if
he half-closed his eyes, the piles of refuse around him could almost appear
like some wondrously woven multi-coloured quilt, black and white mostly, but
interspersed with vivid little patches of blue and red and yellow.
It was Rice who spoke: "If anybody'd see anything it'd be those chaps on the
levellers. They're looking forward at all the rubbish, see?
Your normal truck driver, he's not even looking backwards at it. "
"You wouldn't be able to pin-point the place where any lorry-loads from
Redbridge . .. ?"
The site manager shook his head.
"No chance."
"If you had enough personnel though?"
"How many?"
"Five or six?"
"Five or six hundred, you mean?"
Morse decided to quit the unequal struggle. He kicked a hole in one of the
black plastic bags at his feet, and briefly surveyed the nauseating mixture
of spaghetti and tomatoes that oozed therefrom, like the innards of a
road-squashed rabbit.
109
"If you'd like to stay?" suggested Rice, without enthusiasm. You
never know. We had a load of brand-new cameras dumped here once. "
"I've never had a camera myself," admitted Morse.
"I just hope you appropriated one for yourself."
Rice smiled, forgivingly.
"You don't really know much about the rules in a place like this, do you,
sir?"
Morse lifted his eyes from the ground towards the giant cooling-towers of
Didcot Power Station which stood sentinel on the immediate landscape, only a
few hundred yards away.
"No, I don't," he said quietly.
As he drove back along the A34 into Oxford, Morse doubted he'd expressed
adequate thanks to Greenways Waste Management He was (he acknowledged the
fact) never a man renowned for voicing much gratitude. He'd even dismissed,
and that cursorily. Rice's thoughtful offer of issuing a memo to everyone
working either permanently or temporarily on the site, acquainting them with
the situation.
But Morse felt unable to feel too self-critical, because he knew there was no
'situation'. And he repeated to himself this recently corroborated
conviction as he turned on the car radio, and listened again to the slow
movement of Bruckner's Seventh.
When later that same afternoon Lewis arrived back at Kidling- ton HQ, he felt
more pleased, more excited, and (yes! ) more confident in himself than he'd
been for a long, long while. In almost all previous cases he'd usually
reached first base only to find that Morse was already sprinting off to
second base; and so on, and so on, all round the baseball pitch. So now he
decided to do a little sprinting for himself.
First, he rang Redbridge - only to discover that Morse had already visited
the site.
Second, he rang Sutton Courtenay only to discover that
Morse had already visited the site, and where he'd pronounced that any search
of said site was quite certainly foredoomed to failure.
So Lewis had coolly countermanded these instructions. It was as if he -Lewis
was taking charge of the case. Well, he was, wasn't he? "
ni
chapter twenty-five Sometimes it is that searchers spot The kind of thing
they'd rather not (Lessing, Nathan der Weise) during 'jammie' jarnold's
twenty-two years' service on the Sutton Courtenay site, he'd seen most
things. Not every- thing. For example, he'd never caught a glimpse of that
sack of notes the Metropolitan Police were certain had been deposited in one
of the trucks on that long train which arrived in the early hours of each
morning from Brentford, via a branch line from Didcot, with its thousands of
tons of the capital's refuse. Four hundred and fifty thousand pounds, they'd
said, in fivers and tenners. Yes, Jammie had kept his eyes wide open on that
occasion; had occasionally climbed down from his cab to prod anything that
seemed even minimally promising.
If, on balance, it was a steady old job, it was also a job that was un
memorable and predictably monotonous. For this reason, neither Jammie nor
his colleagues in the team ofBOMAC tractor-operators had dismissed as so much
negligible bumf the single Xeroxed sheet which had been handed out that
Saturday morning, both to permanent on-site personnel and to every
dumper-truck driver entering the site from the far quarters of Oxfordshire.
MEMO FROM SITE MANAGER
Thames Valley Police have advised of the possibility of a human body,
probably bagged, being recently conveyed from the Red- bridge Centre in
Oxford. Everyone is asked to be extra vigilant and to report anything
unusual (or usual, provided its a body).
(Morse himself would have been pleased to write such a succinct note though
inserting, of course, an apostrophe in the humorous parenthesis. ) Just
after the start of the shift, a colleague shouted across at Jammie, waving a
copy of the memo.
"Better keep your eyes open!"
"What's the reward?"
"Night with Sophia Loren in the Savoy."
"Bit young for me."
"I still reckon you'll keep your eyes open."
"Yeah! I reckon."
"Like looking for a needle in an 'aystack though."
"Like finding a shadow in the black-out, as me of' mum used to say."
"I like that, Jammie. Sort o' poetic, like."
Jamold braked his tractor at 10. 05 a. m. and jumped down from his cab on
to the semi-levelled, semi-compacted mound of recently deposited rubbish. It
was not that the specific item he'd spotted was unusual in any way. In fact,
any pair of shoes was a very common sight: thousands of pairs were ever to be
observed on every part of the site, worn down, worn out, worn beyond any
possible repair. But there were unusual aspects about this particular pair
of shoes. For a start, they looked comparatively new and were clearly of
good quality; then, they were the only objects sticking out of a large black
bag; what's more, they seemed strangely reluctant to drop out of that large
"3
black bag, as if (perhaps?) they might be attached, permanently, to
something inside that large black bag.
Jarnold shouted over to a colleague.
"Come over 'ere a sec!"
But already he had half-torn one side of the plastic.
"Christ!"
He turned away to vomit full-throatedly over a piece of conveniently
positioned carpeting.
Had he been dining with Miss Loren at the Savoy, this would have caused
considerable consternation. Not here, though. Not at the land-fill site at
Sutton Courtenay in Oxfordshire.
chapter twenty-six undergraduate: But you're blowing up the wrong tyre, sir.
It's the back one that's flat.
don: Goodness me. " You mean the two of them are not connected?
(Freshman seeking to assist his tutor outside Trinity College, Oxford) morse
(for some reason) was in that Saturday morning when Lewis knocked on his
office door just after ten.
"Spare a few minutes, sir?"
"C'm in! I've finished the crossword."
"How long?"
"Let's just say the brain is deteriorating."
"Thirty thousand brain-cells a day we lose after thirty, so you told me once."
Morse nodded morosely.
"I just thought I was the exception, that's all. Si' down!"
Lewis did so, and took a deep breath.
"I've been following you, sir."
Morse looked across at his sergeant uncomprehendingly.
"You were at Debbie Richardson's house before me; you were at the Maiden's
Arms before me; you were at Bulling- don before me; you were at Redbridge -
before me; you were out at Sutton Courtenay before me. You've been one move
ahead of me all the time."
"5
" Only oneT "Why couldn't you just tell me?"
"Tell you what?" asked Morse.
"And don't forget that time when it was me following you: from Bullingdon.
At exactly the distance recommended in the Highway Code."
"Which is?"
"Next question?"
"You will be taking on the case, won't you?"
"Next question?"
"Why not?"
"Pass."
"You're getting people's backs up here, you know that?"
"Nothing new about that."
"But surely ?"
"Listen!" Unblinking blue eyes glared across the desk.
"I am not taking on the Harrison case."
"I was just hoping you'd help me, that's all."
"Yes?"
"Well, do you mind me asking you if ... if you've got any personal interest
in all of this?"
"Nil." If there had been a quick flicker of unease in Morse's eyes, it was
as quickly gone.
"But you know a lot about it, don't you? So you must have some idea about
what happened on the night she was murdered?"
"Ideas plural."
"There was a logical sequence of events, as you would say."
"There was a concatenation of events, yes, with each link of the chain
causally connected to its predecessor."
"What do you think happened that night?"
"Not much argument about that, is there?"
"You'd agree with this, then?" Lewis produced a sheet of A4 on which he had
typed a timetable for the day of the murder:
7 a. m. -l p. m. Yvonne on early shift at JR2 Ward 7C I. 15-2 p. m.
Lunches in staff canteen 2. 15-4 p. m. (? ) Drives down to Oxford
shopping at MS and Austin Reed 4. 00(? )-4. 30 p. m. Drives home
avoiding main traffic exodus 6-7 p. m. Evening meal of mushroom omelette 9.
00p. m. Local builder rings number engaged or phone off hook 9. 10p. m.
Frank H gets phone call and catches 21. 48 Paddington to Oxford train 9. 30
p. m. Builder rings again ringing- tone but no reply II. 00 p. m. F H
gets taxi to Lower Swinstead 11. 20p. m. Discovers wife naked, gagged,
handcuffed and dead Morse glanced at the sheet in perfunctory fashion.
"You ought to use the Oxford comma more."
"Pardon?"
"The presumption was is that somewhere between nine and half-past..."
' Pathologist's report seemed to confirm that. "
"Would I had your faith in pathologists!"
"Not just that though, is it? The whole thing hangs together. Pretty well
everything there's confirmed: statements from the hospital; receipts from the
two shops; post-mortem details on the meal; phone calls checked out ' "
Nonsense! The builder? First time the number's engaged? Second time nobody
answers? How the hell do you check that? "
"You can't check absolutely everything ' " What about the husband? Odd sort
of call, wasn't it? Drop 117
whatever you're doing and get here
double-quick! So who was it who rang him? "
"That's what I'm asking you, sir."
"His number couldn't have been too well known. He was renting a flat, wasn't
he?"
"Still is."
"But somebody knew it and rang him. Did we check the phone records of the
suspects?"
"What suspects?"
"The two children?"
"They weren't suspects. And if they were, why shouldn't they ring their dad
occasionally?"
"How did he pay for his train journey?"
"No credit-card record must have paid cash. And for the taxi ride.
Anyway, he'd got the best alibi of anybody: taxi driver remembers the time
exactly. He was just listening to the 11 o'clock news-headlines. "
"Was the train a bit late that night? If it's the one I some- times catch,
it's due in at 22.53."
"Too late to find out, sir."
"Rubbish! Too difficult, possibly. But they keep all these times of
arrivals: they make statistical tables out of 'em, for heaven's sake."
"Must've been on time, surely?"
"What? Seven minutes for somebody in one helluva rush? From Platform 2 to
the taxi-rank? It'd only take a geriatric like me a couple of minutes."
"Perhaps there was a queue."
"Was there a queue?"
"Dunno. Perhaps he nipped into the snack-bar."
"Closed."
"I don't quite see what you're getting at."
"What is essential, Lewis, is usually invisible to the outward eye."
"Which doesn't help me much, does it?"
"All right. Get back to your facts."
"She was burgled. At some point that evening the back patio window was
smashed in from the outside and somebody was after something. The TV was
unplugged ' " But not taken. "
' so he was probably disturbed. He must have thought the place was empty.
Probably none of the lights would have been on not then anyway. Midsummer,
wasn't it? Sunset was about a quarter-past nine I looked it up. " (Morse
nodded approvingly.) " I know some people always leave one or two lights on
anyway when they go out ' "But she didn't go out."
"No. So as I say the burglar must have thought the coast was clear, and must
have been prepared for the alarm to ring it's quite a way to the next house
while he grabbed a few of the valuables, smartish like."
"The alarm was ringing when Harrison got there, wasn't it?
Twenty-past eleven. "
Lewis nodded.
"Two hours or so after she was murdered."
"And the alarm would cut out automatically after twenty minutes' ringing?"
"Yes."
"So?"
"I dunno, sir. But it seems we didn't discount the theory that the murderer
might have set it off himself."
"You mean two hours la terT " I don't know what I mean. "
"Pretty little puzzle."
"You're not trying to help me, are you? You've usually got some theory or
other of your own."
Morse smiled amiably.
"The obvious one. Mrs H surprised a burglar and the burglar panicked and
murdered her. Or perhaps . . ." (the smile had faded) '. . perhaps she
was enteritaining one of her lovers that
night and things went wrong
things went sadly wrong. That's all I've got to offer: the burglar theory
and the lover theory. What else is there? "
"Maybe a bit of both, sir? Say she was in bed with some fellow when she
heard the window being smashed in and . .."
"Could well be."
"You see, she'd not had sex that night, sir certainly not been raped or
tortured or physically assaulted. Clothes all neatly folded by the side of