The Remorseful Day

by Colin Dexter

  “Have a look at that, Babs!” he said proudly, making as if to hand the sheet across the desk. “May well be what we've been waiting for—from my appeal, you know.”

  “Won't there be some fingerprints on it?” she asked tentatively.

  “Ah!”

  “You can get fingerprints from paper?”

  “Get almost anything from anything these days,” mumbled Strange. “And what with DNA, forensics, psychological profiling—soon be no need for us detectives any more!”

  But in truth he appeared a little abashed as he held the top of the sheet between his thumb and forefinger and leaned forward over the desk; and Barbara Dean leaned forward herself and read the undated letter, typed on a patently antiquated machine through a red/black ribbon long past its operative sell-by date, with each keyed character unpredictably produced in either color.

  “Bit illiterate?” suggested Strange.

  “I wonder if he really is,” said Barbara, replacing her spectacles in their case.

  “You should wear ‘em more often. You've got just the face for specs, you know. Hasn't anyone ever told you that?”

  No one ever had, and Barbara hoped she wasn't blushing.

  “Thank you.”

  “Well?”

  “I'm not in the Crime Squad, sir.”

  “But you don't think he'd last long in the typing pool?”

  “You fairly sure it's a ‘he’?”

  “Sounds like it to me.”

  Barbara nodded.

  “Not much of a typist, like I say.”

  “Spelling's OK—'recognize,’ and so on.”

  “Can't spell ‘was.’”

  “That's not really spelling though, is it? You sometimes get typists who are sort of dyslexic with some words. They try to type ‘was,’ say, and they hit the ‘s’ before the ‘a.’ Do things like that regularly but they don't seem to notice.”

  “Ah!”

  “Grammar's not so hot, I agree. Probably good enough to pass GCSE, I suppose, sir.”

  “Does anyone ever fail GCSE?”

  “Could do with a bit more punctuation too, couldn't it?”

  “Dunno. Not as much as Morse'd put in.”

  “Who do you think ‘The Ringer’ is?”

  “Ringer? One who rings, isn't it? Chap who's been ringing us up, like as not.”

  “Does the postmark help?”

  “Oxford. Not that that means anything. It could have been posted anywhere in our patch of the Cotswolds… Carterton! Yes. That's where they take the collections and do the sorting before bringing everything to Oxford.”

  “Scores of villages though, sir.”

  “Go and fetch Sergeant Dixon!”

  “Know where he is?”

  “Give you three guesses.”

  “In the canteen?”

  “In the canteen.”

  “Eating a doughnut?”

  “Doughnuts, plural.”

  It was like some of the responses she'd learned so well from the Litany.

  “I'll go and find him.”

  “And send him straight to me.”

  “The Lord be with you.”

  “And with thy spirit.”

  “You do go to church, sir!”

  “Only for funerals.”

  Sergeant Dixon was not so corpulent as Chief Superintendent Strange. But there was not all that much in it; and the pair of them would have made uncomfortable copassengers in economy-class seating on an airline. Plenty of room, though, as Dixon drove out alone to Carterton in a marked police car. He'd arranged a meeting with the manager of the sorting office there. A manageress, as it happened, who quickly and competently answered his questions about the system operating in West Oxfordshire.

  Yes, since the Burford office had been closed, Carter-ton had assumed postal responsibility for a pretty wide area. Dixon was handed a printed list of the Oxon districts now covered; was informed how many postmen were involved; where the collection points were, and how frequently the boxes were emptied; how and when the accumulated bags of mail were brought back to Carterton, and how they were there duly sorted and categorized—but not franked—before being sent on to Oxford.

  “Any way a particular letter can be traced to a particular post-box?”

  “No, none.”

  “Traced to a particular village?”

  “No.”

  Dixon was not an officer of any great intellectual capacity; indeed Morse had once cruelly described him as “the lowest-watt bulb in the Thames Valley Force.” He had only five years to go before retirement, and he knew that his recent elevation to the rank of sergeant was as high as he could ever hope to climb. Not too bad, though, for a man who had been given little encouragement either from home or from school: if he'd made something of himself he'd made something of himself himself, as he'd once put things. Not the most elegant of sentences. But “elegance” had never been a word associated with Sergeant Dixon.

  And yet, as he looked down at his outsize black boots, buffed and bulled, he was thinking as hard as he'd thought for many a moon. He was fully aware of the importance of his present inquiries, and he felt gratified to have been given the job. How good it would be if he could impress his superiors—something (he knew) he'd seldom done in his heretofore somewhat nondescript career.

  So he took his time as he sat in that small postal office; took his time as he wrote down a few words in his black notebook; then another few words; then asked another question; then another …

  When finally he drove back to Oxford, Sergeant Dixon was feeling rather pleased with himself.

  That letter-cum-envelope was still exercising Strange's mind to its limits; but there seemed no cause for excitement. In late morning he had driven down to the Fingerprint Department at St. Aldate's in Oxford—only to learn that there was little prospect of further enlightenment. The faint, oversmeared prints offered no hope: the envelope itself must have been handled by the original correspondent, by the collecting postman, by the sorter, by the delivering postman, by a member of the HQ post department, by Strange's secretary, by Strange himself—and probably by a few extra intermediary persons to boot. How many fingers there, pray?

  Forget it?

  Forget it!

  Handwriting? Only those red-felt capitals on the cover. Was it worth getting in some underemployed graphologist to estimate the correspondent's potential criminality? To seek possible signs of his (?) childhood neglect, parental abuse, sexual perversion, drugs… ?

  Forget it?

  Forget it!

  The typewriter? God! How many typewriters were there to be found in Oxfordshire? In any case, Strange held the view that in the early years of the new millennium the streets of the UK's major cities would be lined with past-sell-by-date typewriters and VDUs and computers and the rest. And how was he to find an obviously ancient typewriter for God's sake, one with a tired and overworked ribbon of red and black? He might as well try to trace the animal inventory from the Ark.

  Forget it?

  Forget it!

  What Strange needed now was new ideas.

  What Strange needed now was Morse to be around.

  Chapter Eleven

  Take notice, lords, he has a loyal breast,

  For you have seen him open ‘t. Read o ‘er this;

  And after, this: and then to breakfast with

  What appetite you have.

  (Shakespeare, Henry VIII)

  Detective Sergeant Lewis of the Thames Valley CID kept himself pretty fit—very fit, really—in spite of a diet clogged daily with cholesterol. Quite simply, he had long held the view that some things went with other things. He had often heard, for example, that caviar was best washed down with iced champagne, although in truth his personal experience had occurred somewhat lower down the culinary ladder—with fried eggs necessarily complemented with chips and HP sauce; and (at breakfast time) with bacon, buttered mushrooms, well-grilled tomatoes, and soft fried bread. And, indeed, such was the breakfast that Mrs.
Lewis had prepared at 7:15 A.M. on Monday, July 20, 1998.

  It will be of no surprise, therefore, for the reader to learn that Sergeant Lewis felt pleasingly replete when, just before 8 A.M., he drove from Headington down the Ring Road to the Cutteslowe roundabout, where he turned north up to Police HQ at Kidlington. No problems. All the traffic was going the other way, down to Oxford City.

  He was looking forward to the day.

  He'd known that working with Morse was never going to be easy, but he couldn't disguise the fact that his own service in the CID had been enriched immeasurably because of his close association, over so many years now, with his curmudgeonly, miserly, oddly vulnerable chief.

  And now? There was the prospect of another case: a big, fat, juicy puzzle—like the first page of an Agatha Christie novel.

  Most conscientiously, therefore (after Strange had spoken to him), Lewis had read through as much of the archive material as he could profitably assimilate; and as he drove along that bright summer's morning he had a reasonably clear picture of the facts of the case, and of the hitherto ineffectual glosses put upon those facts by the CID's former investigating officers.

  From the very start (as Lewis learned) several theories, including of course burglary, had been entertained, although none of such theories had made anywhere near complete sense. There had been no observable signs of any struggle, for example. And although Yvonne Harrison was found naked, handcuffed, and gagged, she had apparently not been raped or tortured. In addition, it appeared most unlikely that she had been forcibly stripped of the clothes she'd been wearing, since the skimpy lace bra, the equally skimpy lace knickers, the black blouse, and the minimal white skirt were found neatly folded beside her bed.

  Had she been lying there completely unclothed when some intruder had disturbed her? Surely it was an unusually early hour for her to be abed; and if she had been abed then, and if she had heard the front doorbell, or heard something, it seemed quite improbable that she would have confronted any burglar or (unknown?) caller without first putting something on to cover a body fully acknowledged to be beautiful. Such considerations had led the police to speculate on the likelihood of the murderer being well known to Mrs. Harrison; and indeed to speculate on the possibility of the murderer living in the immediate and very circumscribed vicinity, and of being rather too well known to Mrs. Harrison. Her husband was away from home a good deal, and few of the (strangely uncooperative?) villagers would have been too surprised, it seemed, if his wife conveniently forgot her marriage vows occasionally. In fact it had not been difficult to guess that most of the villagers, though loath to be signatories to any specific allegations, were fairly strongly in favor of some sort of “lover theory.” Yet although the Harrisons often appeared more than merely geographically distanced, no evidence was found of likely divorce proceedings.

  Once Mr. Frank Harrison, with a very solid (if very unusual) alibi, had been eliminated from the inquiries, painstakingly strenuous investigations had produced (as one of the final reports admitted) no sustainable line of positive inquiry …

  As he pulled off right, into Thames Valley Police HQ, Lewis was smiling quietly to himself. Morse would very soon have established some “sustainable line of positive inquiry.” Even if it was a wrong line.

  So what?

  Morse was very often wrong—at the start.

  So what?

  Morse was almost always right—at the finish.

  Chapter Twelve

  Yet ev'n these bones from insult to protect

  Some frail memorial still erected nigh,

  With uncouth rhimes and shapeless sculpture deck ‘d,

  Implores the passing tribute of a sigh.

  (Thomas Gray, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard)

  The following is an extract from The Times, Monday, July 20, 1998:

  Chapter Thirteen

  Ponderanda sunt testimonia, non numeranda.

  (All testimonies aggregate

  Not by their number, but their weight.)

  (Latin proverb)

  Most of the Thames Valley Police personnel were ever wont to pounce quickly upon any newspaper clipping concerning their competence, or alleged lack of competence. And that morning Lewis had been almost immediately apprised of the article in The Times—which he'd read and assimilated swiftly; far more swiftly (he suspected) than Morse would read it when he took it along at 8:30 A.M. The Chief was a notoriously slow reader, except of crossword clues.

  Lewis remembered the case well enough; certainly remembered the frustration and disappointment that many of his CID colleagues had felt when lead after lead had appeared to peter out. Yes, he'd often experienced frustration himself, but seldom any prolonged disappointment; for which he was grateful—profoundly grateful—to Morse.

  Most usually (Lewis knew it well) a murder investigation revolved around corroborated suspicion. A clue was pursued; a suspect targeted; an alibi checked; a motive weighed in the balances; a response to questioning interpreted as surly, cocky, devious, frightened … It was all cumulative—that was the word!—a series of pieces in the jigsaw that seemed to form a coherent pattern sufficiently convincing for a formal charge to be brought; for a dossier to be sent to the DPP; for a period of remand, further questioning, sometimes further evidence, with nothing cropping up in the interim to vitiate the central police hypothesis: that in all probability the arrested suspect was guilty as hell.

  That was the usual pattern.

  Not with Morse though.

  For some reason Morse often shunned the standard heap-of-evidence approach. In fact Lewis had seldom if ever observed him, through distaste or idleness perhaps, riffle through any heap of dutifully transcribed statements, claiming (as Morse did) that since he could seldom remember what he'd been doing himself the previous evening, he found it difficult to give much credence to people who claimed to recall anything from a week last Wednesday—unless, of course, it was watching Coronation Street or listening to The Archers, or some similar regularly timetabled ritual.

  No, Morse seldom worked that way.

  The opposite, more often than not.

  With most prime suspects, if female, youngish, and even moderately attractive, Morse normally managed to fall in love, sometimes only for a brief term, yet sometimes throughout Michaelmas and Hilary and Trinity. Toward some other prime suspects, if men, Morse occasionally appeared surprisingly sympathetic, especially if he suspected that the quality of their lives had hardly been enhanced by getting hitched to some potential tart who had temporarily managed to camouflage her basic bitchiness …

  Lewis had a quick look at the Mirror, drained his coffee, and looked at his watch: 8:25 A.M. Time he got moving.

  As he walked out of the canteen, he (literally) bumped into the stout figure of Sergeant Dixon—“Dixon-delighting-in-doughnuts” as Homer would have dubbed him.

  “You see the thing on the Lower Swinstead thing?” (Variety was not a feature of Dixon's vocabulary.)

  Lewis nodded, and Dixon continued:

  “I was with him on that for a while. Poor ol’ Strange. He thought he knew who done it, but he couldn't prove it, could he? Poor ol’ Strange. Like I say, I was with him on that thing.”

  Lewis nodded again, then climbed the stairs, wondering how that Monday morning would turn out—knowing how Morse hated holidays; how little he normally enjoyed the company of others; how very much he enjoyed a very regular allotment of alcohol; how he avoided almost all forms of physical exercise. And knowing such things, Lewis realized that in all probability he would fairly soon be driving Morse out to the Muzak-free pub at Thrupp where a couple of pints of real ale would leave the Chief marginally mellower and where a couple of orange juices would leave the chauffeur (him!) unexcitedly unintoxicated.

  Fourteen

  The man who says to one, go, and he goeth, and to another, come, and he cometh, has, in most cases, more sense of restraint and difficulty than the man who obeys him.

  (John Ruskin, The Stones
of Venice)

  Lewis knocked deferentially on Morse's door before entering.

  “Welcome home, sir! Nice break?”

  “No!”

  “You don't sound very—”

  “Sh!”

  So Lewis sat down obediently in the chair opposite, as his chief contemplated the last clue: “Stiff examination (7)” A—T—P—Y; then immediately wrote in the answer and consulted his wristwatch.

  “Not bad, Lewis. Ten and a half minutes. Still it's usually a bit easier on Mondays.”

  “Well done.”

  “Have you done it, by the way?”

  “Pardon?”

  “That is a copy of today's Times you've got with you?”

  “They showed it to me in the canteen—”

  “Does Mrs. Lewis know that the first place you head for after breakfast is the canteen?”

  “Only for a coffee.”

  “Not a crime, I suppose.”

  “It's this article, sir—about the Harrison case.”

  “So?”

  “So you're not interested?”

  “No!”

  “But we're supposed to be reopening the case, sir—you and me.”

  “You and I, Lewis. And we are not.”

  “But the Super said you'd agreed.”

  “When am I supposed to have agreed?”

  “Last week—Tuesday.”

  “Last week—Wednesday! He came to see me on Wednesday.”

  “You mean … he hadn't seen you before he saw me?”

  “You're bright as a button this morning, Lewis.”

  “But you must have agreed, surely?”

  “In a way.”

  “So what's biting you?”

  Morse's blue eyes flashed across the desk. “I'd had too much Scotch, that's what! I'd been trying to enjoy myself. I was on a week's furlough, remember?”