Inspector Morse 13 The Remorseful Day

by Colin Dexter

  pace. Thus far, the facts, and the glosses on the facts, formulated

  themselves as follows in Lewis's mind: First. The shiny orange-red Stanley

  knife had been purchased, together with other items, from a hardware shop in

  Burford on the Saturday of the previous week (receipt unearthed in Barren's

  Expenses File). Barren could still have been a murderer of course, he could!

  - but quite certainly not with the knife he'd used that same morning as he

  stood almost atop the topmost section of the ladder and twisted the blade

  into the rotting, unresisting sill of the dormer window in Sheep Street.

  Second. The stains on the overalls Ban-on had been wearing that morning had

  quite certainly not been human blood; but almost certainly smears of paint

  patented under the brand- name Cremosin, two-pint tins of which were found in

  Barren's garage, a space now used exclusively for building and decorating

  materials.

  Third. On the morning of the Friday when Flynn and Repp had been murdered,

  Barron had left home around his usual time to spend some of the morning in

  Thame, where two properties were inviting tenders for renovation, for which

  Barron had been keen to submit his own estimates. Necessarily of course,

  this evidence had been taken from Barren's wife, Linda; and yet (already) a

  dated parking ticket for four hours that morning (South Oxon DC, Cattle

  Market) had been found in Barren's van evidence, if anything, to substantiate

  the claim that the builder had paid for a fairly extensive stay in the centre

  of Thame on July the 24th.

  Fourth. There appeared, as yet, no evidence whatever that Barron had

  received any monies from anywhere to match the payments so regularly stashed

  into the balances of both Flynn and Repp. In short, i/Barron had been the

  third man ifhe had duly received his own share of the spoils for the

  conspiracy of silence there was no sign of it, so far.

  They were not in any way decisive, these findings and non- findings.

  The trouble was they all seemed to be pointing in the same direction.

  Or were they?

  For example (thought Lewis), it was surely to be expected that Barron would

  have got rid of the murder weapon and bought himself a new knife if in fact

  he had used the former for the murders.

  For example (thought Lewis), it was most unlikely that Barron had only one

  pair of overalls And if someone with an extravagantly fanciful mind (Morse! )

  could entertain the idea that a pair of white overalls covered with red paint

  was a good disguise for a soaking of blood . . . well, it could be,

  perhaps.

  For example (thought Lewis), why buy a four-hour parking ticket in Thame on

  the day of the murders unless to create an alibi? Builders would usually

  have little difficulty in parking outside the properties in question. All

  right, parking was getting a nightmare everywhere, even for police cars, but.

  . .

  For example (thought Lewis), why shouldn't Barren, like Flynn perhaps, have

  received his pay-offs in bank-notes, and kept them? No need to pay them into

  a bank or a building society. Why not put them in the loft? In the

  wardrobe? In a milk jug in the fridge? Like a few other self-employed

  builders, Barren might well be playing a canny little game with casual

  receipts, with ready-cash payments, with VAT evasions. And, if so, he would

  certainly not be over-anxious to account for any largish sums of money

  regularly entrusted to some official depository.

  Lewis himself had felt pretty certain that Ban-on was their man; Morse was

  absolutely convinced. And yet the evidence thus far gathered seemed to be

  stacking up a little bit the wrong way. Lewis knew it. He had ever been a

  champion of the cumulative- evidence approach to crime: a piece-by-piece

  aggregation against a suspect that gradually mounted into an impressively

  documented pile that could be forwarded to the DPP. All right! Morse's

  method was occasionally very different. Yet many of the murders that the

  pair of them had solved together had been relatively uncomplicated: no real

  mystery, no real cunning, no real deviousness, no carefully woven web of

  deceit. Domestic stuff, next-door-neighbour stuff, most of it, with the

  husband returning home unexpectedly from work and finding his spouse abed

  with postman, milkman, gas man . . . builder?

  But whichever way one looked at things, any direct evidence against the

  builder was proving surprisingly difficult to come by.

  At 8. 45 p. m. " tired and hungry, Lewis decided that whatever further

  developments there were to be and they were coming in all the time - he would

  have to take a break; and he drove home to Headington. But only after trying

  Morse's number once more. Ringing tone. No answer.

  Morse came into HQ three-quarters of an hour later, and rang Lewis's home

  number immediately. Ringing tone. Answer.

  Resignedly, about to start his eggs and chips, Lewis brought Morse up to date

  with the information received, suggesting that it was, at this point, all a

  bit ambivalent and equivocal, although in truth Lewis made use of neither of

  these epithets himself.

  Morse sounded mildly interested, giving his own verdict in somewhat pompous

  terms. He asserted that the character of the human condition was indeed

  'ambiguity', the virtually inseparable mixture of the true and the false.

  But in the present case such apparent contradictions could be explained so

  very easily in fact in exactly the way Lewis himself had just explained them.

  "And," continued Morse, 'you can be quite sure of one thing no, two things:

  Barren murdered the pair of 'em; then somebody murdered Barren. Get that

  clear in your head, and we might make a bit of progress. OK? I'll see you

  in the morning. "

  "Sir! Before you ring off. We tried to get you several times earlier but

  there was the engaged tone all the time."

  "That's funny. I only remember making the one call."

  "I thought perhaps you know, you seemed a bit whacked.. ."

  "You'd be wrong, Lewis. I nearly spent some time in bed. Not quite, though.

  Goodnight."

  The dramatic news came in at twenty minutes to midnight, as Morse sat at home

  making out a rough draft of his will. He'd no immediate relatives remaining,

  none at all; and therefore instructions for the post-mortem dissemination of

  all his worldly goods should not present too much of a complication. Nor did

  they. And he was writing out a fairish copy of a simple second draft when

  the phone rang. "What?"

  "What?"

  It was two minutes later before he spoke again: "I'll be over straightaway."

  chapter forty-eight We trust we are not guilty of sacrilege in suggesting

  that the teaching of Religious Knowledge in some schools would pose an

  almighty challenge even for the Almighty Himself (From the Introduction to

  Religious Education in Secondary Schools:

  1967-87, HMSO)

  roy holmes, aged fifteen, was a crudely disruptive pupil at school, a

  truculently unco-operative son in the Witney Street house he shared with his

  invalid mother, and a menace wherever he walked in the wider community. He

  took drugs; he w
as an inveterate and skilful shoplifter; he regularly snapped

  the stems of newly planted trees striving to establish themselves; he spat

  disgusting gobbets of phlegm on most of the pavements in Burfbrd. In short,

  Roy Holmes was an appalling specimen of humankind.

  He deserved to have no real friends at all in life; and he had none.

  Except one.

  Ms Christine Coveriey, aged twenty-seven, in her second year at Burfbrd

  Secondary School, was not an impressive personage. A small, skinny,

  flat-chested, spotty-chinned, mousy-haired woman, she could scarcely have

  expected admirers anywhere - either among her fellow male members of staff,

  or among the motley collection of pupils, especially the boys, she was time

  tabled to teach. And, indeed, she had no such admirers.

  Except one.

  To complicate her incompetence as a teacher, she had been appointed faute de

  mieux to teach Religious Knowledge, a task wholly beyond her ability. Her

  classes taunted her mercilessly; and on more than one occasion such was the

  uproar in her classroom that teachers in adjacent rooms had barged in only to

  find, with deep embarrassment, that a nominal teacher was already present

  there; and with even deeper embarrassment for Ms Coverley herself, resulting

  in fevered nightmares and anguish of soul that was often unbearable. One

  class, 4 Remove (Holmes's class), was even worse than the others a group of

  pagan half wits of both sexes, whose interest in the pronouncements of major

  and minor prophets alike was nil.

  Over the year her hebdomadal clash with these monsters had been a terrifying

  ordeal; and the situation was quite hopeless. But no not quite hopeless.

  Each night of term she would kneel in her bed sit and beseech the Almighty to

  grant her some deliverance from such despair.

  And one day her prayer had been answered.

  In the middle of the summer term, at the end of one of her spectacularly

  disastrous lessons with 4 Remove, her eyes smarting with tears of

  humiliation, she had stopped the cocky, surly Holmes as he was about to leave

  the room: "Roy! I know I'm useless. I wouldn't be though if I got a bit of

  help, but I don't get any help from anyone. I just want some help.

  And there's someone who could help me so easily if he wanted to. You, Roy! "

  She turned away, wiped her moist cheeks, picked up her books, and left the

  empty classroom.

  But Roy Holmes stood where he was, immobile. For the first time in his life

  someone had asked him for help him the despair of mother, vicar, social

  workers, headmaster, police; and suddenly he'd felt oddly, unprecedentedly

  moved, conscious somewhere deep inside himself of a compassion he'd never

  known and could scarcely recognize.

  If, as Ms Coverley believed, her God sometimes moved in a mysterious way,

  it was not quite so dramatic as the way in which Roy Holmes was soon to move.

  In the next RK lesson one of the boys in the back row had been particularly

  foul- mouthed and disruptive, whilst Holmes had remained completely silent.

  After school that day, the youth in question returned home with a bleeding

  mouth, two broken teeth, and one bruised and hugely swollen eye. No one knew

  who was responsible.

  But then no one needed to know; since everyone knew who was responsible.

  The nightmares were over, and Ms Coverley's last few weeks of the summer term

  were almost happy ones. Yet she knew that she was not the stuff that

  teachers are made of, and her resignation was received with relief by the

  headmaster. For the time being she decided to stay on in Burfbrd, renewing

  the let on her ground-floor bed sit for a further two months.

  The bell rang at 11. 15 p. m. and Roy Holmes, somewhat the worse for drink

  or drugs or both, stood at the door when she opened it. His words were the

  words she had used to him, almost exactly so: "I just want some help. And

  there's someone who can help me, if she wants to. You!"

  It wasn't a lot he had to say; not a lot she had to say to the duty-sergeant,

  half an hour later, when she rang Burfbrd Police Station; and not a lot when

  he, in turn, rang Thames Valley HQ, almost immediately put through to the

  home number of the man in charge of the enquiry into the death ofJ. Barren,

  Builder.

  Roy Holmes, a pupil of Burfbrd Secondary School, aged fifteen, living at 29A

  Witney Street, had been riding his mountain bike along the footway on the

  southern side of Sheep Street at approximately 10 a. m. that Monday, 3

  August. By the youth's own admission he was showing off, expectorating

  regularly, terrorizing any pedestrians, riding no-handed when he'd decided to

  defy all superstition and ride beneath

  the ladder he saw in front of him when he'd badly misjudged whatever he'd

  misjudged when he'd collided sharply with the bottom of the ladder when the

  whole thing had jerked sideways and when a man had toppled from the top of

  the ladder and landed on the compacted pathway outside "Collingwood' ...

  chapter forty-nine " Cod save thee, ancient Mariner! From thejunds, that

  plague thee thus! -- Why look' st thou so? " -- " With my cross-bow I shot

  the Albatross. "

  (Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner') the following morning, Morse

  had been early summoned to the presence, summoned to Caesar's tent.

  "Won't do, will it, Morse. Just won't do! You tell us to go and bring

  Ban-on in. And why? Because you say he's knifed Flynn and Repp. Fine!

  There's three of 'em, you say, originally involved in the cover-up over the

  Harrison murder, three of 'em prepared to stick to their stories for a fee of

  course. Then suddenly we find two of 'em murdered, and somebody somebody.

  Morse thinks this'll be as good an opportunity as any to finish off number

  three. So whoever this somebody is, he decided he's been forking out way

  over the odds anyway, and he goes ahead with his plan. He's been living with

  three albatrosses round his neck, and suddenly he finds somebody else has cut

  the strings off two of 'em. Too good an opportunity to be missed.

  All adds up, doesn't it? Except, matey, for one thing: Barren's death turns

  out to be a bloody accident. Just some teenage lout. . "

  Strange took a breather, gulped down the last of his coffee,

  and stuck another chocolate biscuit in his mouth: "Fancy a coffee?"

  "No."

  "They'll be open in an hour, you mean?"

  "Fifty minutes, actually."

  Strange suddenly sounded extremely pleased with himself: "Did you actually

  say " actually", Morse?"

  Oh dear.

  It was Strange who broke the ensuing silence.

  "Where are we, in all this?" he asked softly.

  "I dunno. I felt convinced that the same fellow Barron - had murdered both

  of them, both Flynn and Repp. I thought the motive was a pretty familiar one

  money. You know, there's nothing much worse in life than people doing the

  same job and getting paid at different rates. It happens in every office, in

  every profession in the land.

  Anger . . jealousy . . . bitterness . . . usually controllable but

  potentially dynamite. And I thought Barron had found out he wasn't doing

  half so well as his partners in
crime. "

  "And who exactly is this golden goose?"

  "You know that as well as I do."

  I do? "

  "Oh, yes," replied Morse quietly.

  A knock at the door heralded PC Kershaw, the fast-track recruit with a First

  in History from Keble who'd driven Morse out to Sutton Courtenay, and whose

  duties for the present consisted mostly of supplying the Chief Superintendent

  with regular coffee and chocolate biscuits.

  "Anything I can do for you, sir?"

  "Yes," growled Strange.

  "Bugger off!" Then, turning back to Morse: "Are you making any progress?"

  "Early days. We've not even had the final path reports yet. Life's full of

  surprises."

  "And disappointments."

  "That too, yes."

  "Well if it wasn't Ban-on . . ."

  "Dunno. But I'm sure the key figure in both cases is one and the same person

  the man who was in bed with Yvonne Harrison the night she was murdered."

  "You don't think it was Repp?"

  "No. As I see it. Repp had been recce-ing the property, maybe for several

  nights. It was going to be a gift for any professional burglar like him.

  And he knew pretty well all that went on that night ' " Knew the fellow who

  was in bed with Yvonne? "

  "Yes. But I don't think it was Repp or any other burglar who disturbed the