by Colin Dexter
submissive and powerless. It gives these men the only sense of real power
they're ever likely to experience in life, because the object of their desire
is lying there de fenceless un struggling sometimes un speaking too. Not
uncommon, that, Lewis. And you can read all about it in Kraft-Ebing's
case-studies . . . "
(Lewis's eyebrows rose significantly. ) '. . . although, as you know, I'm
no great expert in such matters. In fact, come to think of it, I can't even
remember whether he's got one or two 'b's in his name. But it means there's
a pretty obvious explanation of two of the items that puzzled our previous
colleagues: a pair of handcuffs, and a gag not all that tightly tied. The
woman offering such a specialist service is never going to answer back, never
going to scratch your eyes out and Yvonne Harrison had just about the longest
fingernails . . . "
(Lewis's eyebrows rose a lot. ) "On the night of the murder she had a client
in bed with her, and if ever there was a locus classic us for what they call
coitus interrupt us this was it, because someone interrupted the proceedings.
Or at the very least, someone saw them there in bed together. "
"Harry Repp?"
"Repp was certainly there at some point. But I think he kept his cool and
kept his distance that night. I think he realized there could well be
something in it for himself. He was right, too. Because what he saw that
night what he later kept from the police was going to prove very profitable,
as you discovered, Lewis. Five hundred pounds a month from someone just
for exercising his professional skills as a burglar in staying well out of
sight and keeping his eyes wide open.
Exactly what he saw, we shall't know, shall we? Unless he told Debbie
Richardson, which I doubt. "
"What do you think he saw?"
"Pretty obvious, isn't it?"
"You mean he saw who murdered Mrs Harrison?"
Morse nodded.
"And you think you know who . . . ?"
Morse nodded.
But Lewis shook his head.
"It's all so wishy-washy, what you've just said. I don't know where to
start. When was she murdered? Who rang her husband? Who set off the
burglar alarm? Who- ?"
"Lewis! We, remember, are investigating something else. But if any study of
the first case facilitates the solving of the second? So be it! And it
does, as you'll agree."
"I will?"
Morse nodded again.
"Three people were coincidentally involved in a clever and profitable
deception that night, each of them able and willing to throw his individual
spanner into any reconstruction the CID could reasonably come up with.
First, there was Flynn, our corpus primum, who told as many lies as anybody:
both about the time he picked Frank Harrison up from Oxford Station, and
about what he noticed or more probably the person he saw when he got to Lower
Swinstead. Second, there was Repp, our corpus secundum, who told us no lies
at all, but only because he told us nothing at all. Third . .
"
Morse hesitated, and Lewis looked across the desk expectantly.
"There's this third man of ours, and a man most unlikely to become our corpus
tertium. Once Repp was out of jail, the three of them Repp himself, Flynn,
and this third man they all arranged to meet together. They'd done pretty
well so far out of their conspiracy of silence, and they were all keen on
continuing to squeeze the milch-cow even drier. So they did meet a meeting
where things went tragically wrong. Greed . .. jealousy . . . personal
antipathies . .
whatever! Two of them had an almighty row in the car in which they were
travelling together. And one of them, probably in a lay-by somewhere, knifed
one of the others: one of them knifed Flynn. And the remaining two disposed
of the body neatly enough at Redbridge the rubbish bags proving very handy, I
should think. So any profits no longer needed to be split three ways. And
now the talk between the two of them must have been all about a fifty-fifty
share-out of the spoils, and how it could be effected. But somewhere in the
discussion there was one further almighty row; and this time it was Repp who
had his innards ripped open. "
"You know who this " third" man was, you're saying?"
"So do you. We mentioned him when you produced that admirable schema of
yours for the night of Yvonne murder."
"You're saying there was somebody else there that night?"
"There was always somebody else, Lewis, wasn't there? The man in bed with
Yvonne Harrison."
"If you say so, sir."
"You see, the major problem our lads had was the timing of the murder. Her
body wasn't examined until several hours later, and all the pathological
guesswork had to be married with the evidence gleaned at the time, or gleaned
later. For example, with the fact that someone was in bed with Yvonne at
some specific time that night, although nobody really tried to discover who
that person was until I did. For example, again,
with the fact that someone had tried to ring her twice that night, at 9 p.
m. when the line was engaged, and again half an hour later when the phone
rang unanswered. And if you add all this together, you'll find that the
person who sorely misled the police, the person who was in bed with her, and
the person who murdered both Paddy Flynn and Harry Repp was one and the same
man. "
There fell a silence between the two of them, broken finally by Lewis.
"You're sure about all this?"
"Only ninety-five per cent sure."
"We'd better get our skates on then."
"Hold your horses! One or two things I'd like you to check first, just to
make it one hundred per cent."
"So we've got a little while?"
"Oh, yes. No danger of anyone murdering him- not today, anyway. So this
afternoon'll be fine. Get out to Lower Swinstead take someone with you,
mind! - and bring him back here. OK" ' "Fine. Only one thing, sir. You
forgot to tell me his name."
"Did I? Well, you've guessed it anyway. He's got a little business out
there, hasn't he? A little building business.
"J. Barren, Builder" , as it says on his van. "
FR1;chapter forty-one But when he once attains the utmost round, He then
unto the ladder turns his hack, Looks in the clouds, scorning the base dimes
By which he did ascend (Shakespeare, Julius Caesar) twenty miles west of
Oxford, twenty miles east of Cheltenham, lies the little Cotswold town of
Burford. It owes its architectural attractiveness to the wealth of the wool-
merchants in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; and up until the end of
the eighteenth century the small community there continued to thrive,
especially the coaching inns which regularly served the E-W travel. But the
town was no longer expanding, with the final blow delivered in 1812, when the
main London road, which crossed the High Street (the present-day Sheep Street
and Witney Street), was rerouted to the southern side of the town (the
present-day A40). But Burford remains an enchanting place, as summer
tourists will happily t
estify as they turn off at the A40 roundabout.
Picturesque tea shops, craft shops, public houses all built in the locally
quarried, pale- honey-coloured limestone line the steeply curving sweep of
the High Street that leads to the bridge at the bottom of the hill, under
which runs the River Windrush, with all the birds and the bright meadows and
corn fields around Oxfordshire.
Mrs Patricia Bayley, aged seventy, had lived for only three years in Sheep
Street {vide supra), a pleasingly peaceful, tree
lined road, first left as one descended the hill. The house-date, 1687, had
been carved (now almost illegibly) in the greyish and pitted stone above the
front door of the three-storeyed, mullion-windowed building. Her husband, a
distinguished anthropologist from University College, Oxford, had died (aged
sixty-seven) only two months after his retirement; and only four months after
buying the Sheep Street property. Often, since then, she had considered
leaving the house and buying one of the older-persons' flats that had been
springing up for the last decade all over North Oxford, for her present house
was unnecessarily extensive and inappropriate for her solitary needs. Yet
the children and the grandchildren (especially the latter) loved to stay
there with her and to find themselves lost amid the random rooms. Only one
real problem: she'd have to do something about the windows. There could be
no Council permission for replacement windows; but the casements were quite
literally falling apart. And the whole of the exterior just had to be
repainted, from the gutterings along the top to the front door at the bottom.
Should she get it all done? Three weeks earlier she'd stood and surveyed
the scene. Could she ever find anywhere else so pleasingly attractive as
this?
No! She'd stay.
She'd consulted the Yellow Pages and found Barron, J, Builder and Decorator;
not so far away, either at Lower Swinstead. She'd rung him and he'd called
round to survey the job. He'd seemed a personable sort of fellow; and when
he'd quoted a reasonable (if slightly steep) estimate for both the
restructuring and the repainting, she'd accepted.
He'd promised to be with her at 7. 30 a. m. on Monday 3 August. And it
was precisely at that time that he knocked in civilized manner on the front
door of
"Collingwood', again admiring as he did so the drip-stone moulding above it.
Born in North Oxford, Mrs Bayley spoke her mind unapol- ogerically: "You look
as if you've just come straight from the abattoir, Mr Barron!"
The builder (rather a handsome man, she thought) grinned wryly as he looked
down at overalls bespattered with scarlet paint.
"Not my choice, Mrs B. I'm with you, all the way. If there's a better
combination of colour than black and white and yellow, I don't know it."
Mrs B felt gratified.
"Well, I'll let you get on then. I won't bother you no one will bother you.
It's all very quiet round here. Would you like some coffee later?"
"Tea, if you don't mind, Mrs B. Milk and two teaspoons of sugar, please.
About ten? Smashing!"
From the ground-floor window she watched him as he removed the aluminium
ladders from the top of the van, stood there for a few seconds looking up at
the dormer window, then shaking out the first extension and, by means of a
rope and pulley at the bottom, elongating the ladder to its fullest extent
with a second, smaller extension. For a few seconds he stood there, holding
the loftily assembled structure at right angles to the ground; then easing
the pointed top of the third stage most carefully, lovingly almost into place
against the casement of the dormer window some thirty feet above, before
finally fitting the bottom of the ladder on the compacted gravel of the
pathway which divided the front of the houses there from the wide stretch of
grass leading to the edge of Sheep Street, some four or five feet below.
For several minutes Mrs B stood by her front window on the ground floor,
looking out a little anxiously to observe her builder's varied skills.
Across the road, a solitary jogger in red trainers was running reasonably
briskly past the Bay Tree Hotel, his tracksuit hood over his head, as if he
were trying to work up a sweat; or just perhaps to keep his ears warm, since
there was an un seasonal nip in the air that morning. Mrs B thought jogging
a silly and dangerous way of keeping fit, though. She'd known the young
North Oxford don who had written the hugely popular Joys of Jogging, and who
had died aged twenty-seven, whilst on an early-morning not-s&joyful jog.
Jogging was a dangerous business.
Like climbing ladders.
And Mrs B's nerves could stand things no longer.
She would repair to the second-floor back-bedroom to continue with her
quilting as well as to quell the acute fear she felt for a man who (as she
saw it) was risking his life at every second of his working day. But before
doing so, she knew she had the moral duty to impart a few cautionary words of
advice. And she opened the front door just as the builder was beginning his
ascent, his left hand on a shoulder-high rung, his right hand grasping a
narrowly serrated saw, a long chisel, and a red, short-handled Stanley knife.
"You will be careful, won't you? Please! "
The builder nodded, successively grasping each rung (each 'round' as the
firemen say) at a point just above his shoulders as he climbed with measured
step, professionally, confidently, to the top of the triple-length ladder.
He'd always enjoyed being up high, ever since the vicar of St John the
Baptist's in Burfbrd had taken him and his fellow choir boys up to the top of
the church. It was the first time in his young life he'd felt superior, felt
powerful, as he traversed his way along the high places there with a
strangely happy confidence, whilst the others inched their cautious way along
the narrow ledges.
It was just the same now.
Once he had reached the top rung but three, he looked up and immediately
decided he would be able to work at the top of the dormer without any
trouble. Then he looked down, and saw that the ladders) beneath him, though
sagging slightly in the middle (that was good), seemed perfectly straight and
secure. Funny, really! Most people thought you were all right on heights
just so long as you didn't look up or down. Rubbish! The only thing to
avoid was looking laterally to left or right, when there really was the risk
(at least for him) of losing all sense of the vertical and the horizontal.
He dug his red Stanley knife into the upper lintel, then the lower sill; in
each case, as
he twisted the blade, finding the wooden texture crumble with
ominous ease. Not surprising though, really, for he'd noticed the date above
the door. He secured the top of the ladder to the gutterings - his normal
practice and began work.
At the appointed hour Mrs B boiled the kettle in the second- floor front (as
her husband had called it); squeezed a Typhoo bag with the kitchen tongs; and
stirred in two heaped spoonsful of sugar. Then, with the steaming cup and
&nb
sp; two digestive biscuits on a circular tray, she was about to make her way
downstairs when something quite extraordinary flashed across her vision: she
saw a pair of oblique parallel lines passing almost in slow motion across the
oblong frame of the second- floor window. So sharply was that momentary
configuration imprinted upon her retina that she was able to describe it so
very precisely later that same afternoon; was able to recall that
ear-splitting, skin-tingling shriek of terror as the man whose skull was
about to be smashed to pieces fell headfirst on to the compacted pathway
below, so very few yards from her own front door.
"Dead," the senior paramedic had told her quietly, six minutes only
after her panic-stricken call on 999. Incontrovertibly dead.
For the next hour or so Mrs Bayley wept almost uncontrollably.
Partly from shock. Partly, too, from guilt, because (as she repeatedly
reminded herself) it was her fault that he'd appeared upon the scene in the
first place. She'd found his name among the local builders and
house-renovators listed alphabetically in the Telephone Directory. In the
Yellow Pages, in fact. Exactly where Sergeant Lewis, also, had discovered
the address ofJ. Barron, Builder, together with a telephone num- her in
Lower Swinstead.
198
chapter forty-two And what is the use of a book without pictures or
conversations?