Inspector Morse 13 The Remorseful Day

by Colin Dexter

  virtually nothing to do with the tenant of the downstairs flat a middle-aged

  account- ant who, rain or shine, would walk each day down to St Clements,

  across Magdalen Bridge, and up the High to his

  firm's offices in King

  Alfred Street. He knew Flynn by sight, of course, but only exchanged words

  when occasionally they encountered each other in the narrow entrance hall.

  Of Flynn's lifestyle, he had no knowledge at all: no ideas about the

  activities in which his fellow-tenant might have been engaged. Well, just

  one little observation, perhaps, since not infrequently there was a car

  parked outside the semi always a different car, and almost always gone the

  following morning. Lewis's notes had read: "Has no knowledge ofF's

  professional or leizure time activities'. But he'd consulted his dictionary,

  ever kept beside him, in case Morse decided to look at his notes, and quickly

  corrected the antepenultimate word.

  By all accounts Flynn had led a pretty private, almost secretive life. He

  was quite frequently spotted in the local hostelries, quite frequently

  spotted in the local bookmakers, though never, apparently, the worse for

  excessive liquor or for excessive losses. His name figured nowhere in police

  records as even the pettiest of crooks, although he was mentioned in

  dispatches several times as the taxi driver who had picked up Frank Harrison

  from Oxford Railway Station on the night of Yvonne's murder. Radio Taxis had

  been his employer at the time; but he had been suspected of (possibly)

  fabricating fares for his own aggrandisement, and duly dismissed- without

  rancour, it appeared, and certainly without recourse to any industrial

  tribunal.

  Dismissed too, subsequently, by the proprietors of Maxim Removals, a firm of

  middle-distance hauliers, 'for attempted trickery with the tachometer'.

  (Lewis had spelled the last word correctly, having checked it earlier. )

  Since that time, five months previously, Flynn had reported regularly to the

  DSS office at the bottom of George Street. But lacking any testimonials to

  his competence and integrity, his attempts to secure further employment in

  any field of motor transport had been unsuccessful, his completed application

  forms seldom reaching even the slush-pile. It was all rather

  sad, as the woman regularly dealing with the Flynn file had testified.

  He'd been thirty-two when, seven years earlier, he'd married Josie Newton,

  and duly fathered two daughters upon that lady - although (this the testimony

  of a brother in Belfast) the offspring had appeared so dissimilar in

  temperament, coloration, and mental ability, that there had been many doubts

  about their common paternity.

  Josie Flynn had been unable or unwilling to offer much in the way of

  'character-profiling' of her late husband (they'd never divorced); had scant

  interest in the manner of his murder; and, quite certainly, no interest in

  attending his 'last rites', whatever form these latter might take. Although

  he had treated her with ever-increasing indifference and contempt, he had

  never (she acknowledged it) abused her physically or sexually. In fact sex,

  even in the early months of their relation- ship, had never been a dominant

  factor in his life; nor, for that matter, had power or success or social

  acceptability or drink or even happiness. Just plain money. She'd not seen

  him for over two years; nor had her daughters she'd seen to that. It was

  (again) all rather sad, according to Sergeant Dixon's report. Mr Paddy Flynn

  may not have been the ideal husband, but perhaps Ms Josephine Newton (now her

  preferred appellation was hardly a paragon of rectitude in the marital

  relationship.

  "Not exacly a saint herself?" as Dixon's hand- written addendum had

  suggested. And Lewis smiled to himself again, feeling a little superior.

  It had been Lewis himself (no Morse beside him) who had visited Flynn's

  upstairs flat: smell of cigarette smoke every- where; sheets on the single

  bed rather grubby; dirty cutlery and plates in the kitchen sink, but not too

  many of them; the top surface of the cooker in sore need of Mrs Lewis; soiled

  shirts, underpants, socks, handkerchiefs, in a neat pile behind the bathroom

  door; a minimal assemblage of trousers, jackets,

  shirts, underclothes, in a

  heavy wardrobe; a Corby trouser- press; eleven cans of Guinness in the

  otherwise sparsely stocked refrigerator; not a single book anywhere; two

  copies of the Mirror opened at the Racing pages; a TV set, but not even the

  statutory hard-core video; one CD, Great Arias from Puccini, but no CD player

  for Flynn to have gauged their magnitude; no pictures on the walls; no

  personal correspondence; and very little in the way of official

  communications, apart from Social Security forms: no sign of any bank account

  or credit facility.

  Nothing much to go on.

  And yet Lewis had sensed from the start that there was something missing.

  Sensed that he knew where that 'some- thing missing' might well be.

  And it was.

  Most petty crooks had little in the way of imagination, having two or three

  favoured niches wherein to conceal their ill-gotten gains. And Paddy Flynn

  proved no exception. The small, brown-leather case was on the top shelf of

  the old mahogany wardrobe, tucked away on the far left, beneath a pair of

  faded-green blankets.

  It took one DC just under twenty minutes to itemize the contents; a second DC

  just over thirty minutes to check the original itemization a cache of

  legitimate bank-notes, in fifties, twenties, tens, and fives. The confirmed

  tally was 17,465 and Lewis knew that Morse would be interested.

  And Morse, on being told, most decidedly had been interested.

  A similarly painstaking review of Repp and Richardson had taken up the whole

  of the Wednesday. Little new had come to light except for the unexpected (?

  ) discovery that an account with the Burfbrd and Cheltenham Building Society

  showed a robust balance of 14,350 held in the name of Deborah Richardson,

  with regular monthly deposits (as was confidentially ascertained) always made

  in cash. Debbie Richardson had

  smilingly refused to answer Lewis's questions concerning the provenance of

  such comparatively substantial income, stating her belief that everybody

  bishops, barmaids, presidents, prostitutes all deserved some measure of

  privacy. Yes, Lewis had agreed; but he knew that Morse would be interested.

  And Morse, on being told, most decidedly had been interested.

  The Thursday and Friday had been taken up largely with a preliminary scrutiny

  and analysis of the scores of reports and statements taken from prison

  officers, bus drivers, rubbish- dump employees, car-park attendants, forensic

  boffins, and so on and so on as well as from those members of the public who

  had responded to appeals for information. But so far there'd been little to

  show for the methodical police routine that Lewis had supervised. Vital,

  though!

  Criminal investigation was all about motives and relationships, about times

  and dates and alibis. It was all about building up a pattern from the pieces

  of a jig
saw. So many pieces, though. Some of them blue for the sky and the

  sea; some of them green and brown for the trees and the land; and sometimes,

  somewhere, one or two pieces of quirky coloration that seemed to fit in

  nowhere. And that, as Lewis knew, was where Morse would come in as he

  invariably did. It was almost as if the Chief Inspector had the ability to

  cheat: to have sneaked some quick glimpse of the finished picture even before

  picking up the individual pieces.

  Frequently when Lewis had seen him that week. Morse had been sitting in HQ,

  immobile and apparently immovable (apart from an hour or so over lunch times

  occasionally and almost casually abstracting a page or two of a report, of a

  statement, of a letter, from one of the bulging box-files on his desk, yvonne

  ha prison written large in black felt-tipped pen down each of the spines.

  Clearly (whatever else) Morse had come round to Strange's conviction that

  some causal connection between the cases had become overwhelmingly probable.

  But that was no surprise to Lewis.

  What had occasioned him puzzlement was the number of green box-files there,

  since he had himself earlier studied the same material when (he could swear

  it! ) there had only been three.

  184

  chapter thirty-nine Q: Doctor, how many autopsies have you performed on

  dead people? A: All of my autopsies are performed on dead people (Reported

  in the Massachusetts Lawyers' Journal after (for him) an unprecedented early

  hour of retirement that same Sunday evening, at 9. 30 p. m. Morse had

  awoken with a troublous headache. Assuming that the dawn was already

  breaking, he had confidently consulted his watch, to discover that it was

  still only 11. 30 p. m. Thereafter he had woken up at regular

  ninety-minute intervals, in spite of equally regular doses of Alka-Seltzer

  and Paracetamol - his mind, even in the periods of intermittent slumber,

  riding the merry-go- round of disturbing dreams; his blood sugar ridiculously

  high; his feet suddenly hot and just as suddenly icy-cold; an indigestion

  pain that was occasionally excruciating.

  Ovid (now almost becoming Morse's favourite Latin poet) had once begged the

  horses of the night to gallop slowly when- ever some delightfully compliant

  mistress was lying beside him. But Morse had no such mistress beside him;

  and even if he had, he would still have wished those horses of the night to

  complete their course as quickly as they could possibly manage it.

  He finally rose from the creased and crumpled sheets, and was shaving, just

  as rosy-fingered Dawn herself was rising over the Cutteslowe Council Estate.

  At 6 a. m. he once more measured his blood-sugar level, now

  dipped

  dramatically from 24. 4 at 1 a. m. to 2. 8. Some decent breakfast was

  evidently required, and a lightly boiled egg with toast would fit the bill

  nicely. But Morse had no eggs; no slices of bread either.

  So, perforce, it had to be cereal. But Morse could find no milk, and there

  seemed no option but to resort to the solitary king-sized Mars bar which he

  always kept some- where in the flat. For an emergency. In rebus extremis,

  like now. But he couldn't find it. Then bless you St Anthony! - he

  discovered that the Coop milkman had already called; and he had a great bowl

  of Corn Flakes, with a pleasingly cold pint of milk and several liberally

  heaped spoonsful of sugar. He felt wonderful.

  Sometimes life was very good to him.

  At 6. 45 a. m. he considered (not too seriously) the possibility of

  walking up from his North Oxford flat to the A40 Ring Road, and thence down

  the gentle hill to Kidlington. About what? - thirty-five to forty minutes

  to the HQ building. Not that he'd ever timed himself, for he'd never as yet

  attempted the walk.

  Didn't attempt the walk that morning.

  After administering his first insulin-dosage of the day, he drove up to

  Police HQ in the Jaguar.

  Far quicker.

  In his office, as he re-read the final findings of the two postmortems (sic).

  Morse decided, as he usually did, that there was no point whatsoever in his

  trying to un jumble the physiological details of the lacerations inflicted on

  the visceral organs of each body. He had little interest in the stomach; had

  no stomach for the stomach.

  In fact he was more familiar with the nine-fold stomach of the bovine ilk

  (this because of crossword puzzles) than with its mono-chambered human

  counterpart. Did it really matter much to know exactly how Messrs Flynn and

  Repp had met their ends? But yes, of course it did!

  If the technicalities pointed to a particular type of weapon; if the weapon

  could be accurately identified and then found; and if,

  finally, it could be traced to someone who was known to have had such a

  weapon and who had the opportunity of wielding it on the day of the murders .

  . .

  Hold on though, Morse! Be fair! Amid a plethora of caveats, Dr Hobson had

  pointed to a fairly specific type of weapon, had she not? And he read again

  the paragraph headed

  "Tentative Conclusions': The knife was quite probably not all that long,

  maybe no more than 6" -9", since in each case the lacerations seem the result

  of forceful twisting, as if the murderer had gripped a handle that was short

  and firm, say perhaps not much more than 1" -1%" in width. The knife-blade

  was fairly certainly short too (? W), but very sharp, with its end shaped in

  triangular fashion ([^). It could have been something like a Stanley knife,

  the sort of thing commonly used in DIY household jobs, carpentry, building,

  that sort of thing.

  Morse suddenly stopped reading, sat back in his chair, and placed his hands

  on his head, fingers inter linked as he'd done so often at his teacher's

  bequest in his infant class. And what had been a faraway look in his eyes

  now gradually focused into an intense gaze as he considered the implications

  of the extraordinary idea which had suddenly occurred to him . . .

  Very soon he was re-reading the whole report from Forensics where almost all

  the earlier findings had been confirmed, although there remained much

  checking to be done. Prints of Flynn; prints of Repp; prints of the

  car-owner; and several other prints as yet to be identified. Doubtless some

  of these latter would turn out to be those of the car-owner's family. But

  (Morse read the last sentence of the report again): "One set of

  fingerprints, repeated and fairly firm, may well prove to be of considerable

  interest'.

  He leaned back again in his chair, pleasingly weary and really quite pleased

  with himself, because he knew whose fingerprints they were.

  Oh yes!

  188

  chapter forty Odd instances of strange coincidence are really not all

  that odd perhaps (Queen Caroline's advocate, speaking in the House of Lords)

  morse jerked awake as Lewis entered the office just before 8 a. m. ,

  wondering where he was, what time it was, what day it was. Yet it had been a

  wonderful little sleep, the deep and dreamless sleep that Socrates

  anticipated after swallowing the hemlock.

  "No crossword this morning, sir?"


  "Shop wasn't open." "Why don't you pay a paper-boy?" "Because, Lewis, a

  little occasional exercise .. ."

  Lewis sat down.

  "Do you mind if I ask you something?" Morse pointed to the reports laid out

  on the desk. "You've read these? "

  Lewis nodded.

  "But, like I say, I've got something to ask you."

  "And I've got something to tell you. Is that all right, Lewis?" The voice

  was suddenly harsh.

  "You'll remember from all our times together how coincidence occurs in life

  far more frequently than anyone except me is prepared to accept. Coincidence

  isn't unusual at all. It's the norm. Just like those consecutive numbers

  cropping up in the National Lottery every week. But in this case the

  coincidence is even odder than usual."

  (Lewis raised his eyebrows a little. ) "Let's go back to Yvonne Harrison's

  murder. She was a woman with exceptional sex-drive; but she certainly wasn't

  just the deaf-and-dumb nymphomaniac with a bedroom just above the public bar

  that many a man has fantasized about. Oh, no. She was highly intelligent,

  highly desirable, like the woman in the Larkin poem with the 'lash-wide

  stare', who in turn was attracted by a variety of men.

  A lot of men. So many men that over the years she inevitably came across a

  few paying clients with kinky preferences. I doubt she ever went in for S

  and M, but it looks very likely that a bit of bondage was on her list of

  services, probably with a hefty surcharge. It's well known that some men

  only find sexual satisfaction with women who put on a show of being utterly