The Remorseful Day

by Colin Dexter

  Kein Problem.

  He half-filled a tumbler with Glenfiddich, then topped it up with commensurate tap water. Such dilution (a recent innovation) would, as Morse knew, mark him out in the eyes of many a Scot as a sacrilegious Sassenach. But according to his GP, the liver preferred things that way; and Morse's liver (according to the same source) was in need of a bit of tender loving care, along with his heart, kidneys, stomach, pancreas, lungs.

  Lungs…

  Well, at least he'd finally managed to pack up smoking, a filthy habit, as he now recognized; but one which had given him almost as much pleasure as any other vice in life. And he knew that were he privy to the date and time of an early Judgment Day (the following Monday, say) he would set off immediately to the nearest newsagent's to buy in a store of cigarettes. And he almost did so now, as if he could already hear the trumpets sounding on the other side.

  In the living room, he selected Bruno Walter's early recording of Die Walküre, with Lauritz Melchior and Lotte Lehmann singing the roles of Siegmund and Sieglinde. Wonderful! So Morse turned the volume control to maximum as he listened to the anagnorisis at the end of Act I, and heard neither of the telephone calls made to his ex-directory number that afternoon, conscious only that he was falling deliciously asleep as the benighted brother and sister rushed off into the forest to beget Siegfried …

  It was coming up to 2:45 P.M. when Morse jerked abruptly awake, disappointed that his semi-erotic dream was prematurely terminated: a dream of a woman seated intimately close to him—a dream of Debbie Richardson, with legs provocatively crossed, the texture of the cheap black stockings tautly stretched along her upper thighs.

  Wonderful!

  But even as she'd leaned toward him, he'd voiced his deep anxiety: “Aren't you frightened someone will come in?”

  “No one'll come in. Harry won't be comin’ back. Ever. I'll get you another drink. Just—stay—where—you—are.”

  So Morse had stayed where he was, awaiting her return with impatience, and with an empty glass beside him. And when he awoke, he was still sitting there alone, awaiting her return with impatience, and with an empty glass beside him.

  Wagner had long since run his course, and finally Morse got to his feet and turned off the CD player. He felt tired, hot, thirsty—and a sharp pain in his chest betokened another bout of indigestion. In the bathroom, he cleaned his teeth and dropped three Alka-Seltzer tablets into a glass of water; then he filled up the washbasin and thrice dipped his head into the cold water. The tablets had fizzed and dissolved and he downed the dosage at a single draught. Thence to his bedroom, where he took his blood-sugar level: 24.8—almost off the scale. His own fault, since he'd forgotten to inject himself at lunchtime—making up for it now, though, with an extra four units of Actrapid insulin. Just to be on the safe side. Back in the bathroom, he drank two further glasses of cold water, acknowledging how surprisingly pleasing was its taste, since water had seldom figured prominently in his drinking habits. Finally he decided that a couple of Paracetamol would be appropriate. So he shook out the tablets on to his palm; shook out three in fact—and decided to take the three. Just to be on the safe side.

  Suddenly he was feeling much better, his faith in this curious combination of assorted medicaments seemingly justified once more. Suddenly, too, he decided to follow his consultant's somewhat despairing exhortation to take a bit of exercise occasionally. Why not? It was a warm and gentle summer's day.

  In the small entrance hall, he noticed the figure “2” on the window of his Ansafone. Pressing “Play” he listened to the first message:

  Morse? Janet! Ten-past one Saturday afternoon. Good news! I hope to be back in Oxford on the 14th. So you'll be able to take me somewhere? To bed perhaps? Give me a ring—soon. Bye!

  Any semiremembrance of Debbie Richardson was lingering no longer, and Morse smiled happily to himself. He would ring immediately. But the second message had followed without a pause, and he was destined not to ring Sister McQueen that afternoon.

  Instead he dialed HQ and finally got through to the young PC who had driven him out to Bullingdon the previous morning in an unmarked police car.

  “Get the same car, Kershaw—nice, comfy seats—and pick me up from home quam celerrime.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Smartish!”

  “Sir, I was just going off duty when you rang and I've—”

  “Make it five minutes!”

  Deeply puzzled, Morse walked back into the sitting room where he sat in the black-leather armchair; and where his right hand reached for whiskey once more as mentally he rehearsed that second, quite extraordinary message on the Ansafone:

  Sir? Lewis here—half-past one, nearly—I'm out at Sutton Courtenay. Please come along as soon as you can—for my sake if nobody else's. I think you should get here before we move the body. You see, sir, it isn't the body of Harry Repp.

  Twenty-eight

  Alas, poor Yorick!—I knew him, Horatio.

  (Shakespeare, Hamlet)

  It was just after 4 P.M. that same Saturday afternoon when Morse and Lewis finally sat down together in the requisitioned office of the site manager.

  “Straightaway I knew it wasn't him, sir, when I saw his arms. Harry Repp had this tattoo: all twisted chains and anchors, you know—a sort of…” Lewis undulated his hands vertically, as if tracing a woman's willowy figure.

  “Convoluted involvement,” suggested Morse gently.

  “Well, this fellow's not got any, has he? Anyway he's much smaller, only—what?—five-four, five-five. Doesn't weigh much either—eight, nine stone? No more.”

  Morse nodded. “And he's got different colored hair, and he's got a port-wine stain on his neck, and he's not wearing Repp's clothes, and his shoes are three sizes smaller—”

  “All right. I wasn't expecting the Queen's Medal!”

  At which Eddie Andrews, the 2i/c senior SOCO, knocked on the door and entered the office, at once uncertain whether to address himself to Morse or to Lewis. He decided on the former:

  “Safe, I reckon, to move him now? Dr. Hobson says there's not much else she can do here.”

  Morse shrugged. “You'd better ask Sergeant Lewis. He's in charge.”

  And Lewis rose to the occasion. “Yes, move him. Thank you.”

  As he was about to leave, Andrews noticed the TV set.

  “Mind if I just see how Northants are getting on in the cricket?”

  “Important to you, is it?” queried Morse mildly.

  Andrews was digitally discovering Sport (Cricket) on Ceefax when the office door burst open to admit a florid-faced Chief Superintendent Strange, an officer resolutely determined to retain the appellation “Chief,” whatever most of his collateral colleagues in the Force were doing.

  “You've ruined my afternoon's golf, Lewis! You know that?”

  Surprisingly, the words were spoken with little sign of animus. But before Lewis could respond in any way, Strange was addressing Morse in considerably sharper tones:

  “And how exactly do you come to be here?”

  “Same as you really, sir. Ruined my day, too. I was just indulging in a little Egyptian PT—”

  “After indulging in a lot of Scottish whiskey by the smell of it!”

  “—when Lewis here rang and asked me to come along. Well, he's been a faithful soul most of the time, so…”

  “So you just came along as a sort of personal favor?”

  “That's about it.” (Andrews sidled silently from the room.)

  “Well let me tell you one thing, matey. You won't be staying on as a personal favor—is that clear? You'll be staying on because you're in charge of this case—because that's an order. You may have had some excuse as far as the Harrison case was concerned: I could just about understand that.” (Strange's voice had momentarily dropped to a semisympathetic register.) “But you've no bloody excuse now. And if you decide to get on your high horse again and start arguing the toss with me, you'll be up before the Chief Constable firs
t thing Monday morning!”

  “The Chief's on furlough,” interposed a brave Lewis.

  “Shut up, Lewis! And he'll have your guts for garters, Morse. So that's settled. All you've got to do is sober up and put your thinking cap on.”

  “I usually think better when—” But Morse's disquisition on his personal style of ratiocination was cut short by a further knock, with Dr. Hobson's pretty head appearing round the door.

  “Oh, sorry! It's just—”

  “Come in!” growled Strange, his jowls still wobbling.

  “Just thought I'd check. We've got him outside and Andrews says it's OK if—”

  “Who is he?” asked Strange.

  “Don't know. I had a tentative feel round his pockets. No wallet, though, no cards—”

  “He's pretty easily recognizable though?”

  “Oh, yes. His face is fine. It's his stomach that's all a gory mess where the knife or whatever it was went in.”

  “At least we've got a good mug shot of him then.”

  “Probably identify him straightaway. I got this from his trouser pocket.”

  Strange looked down at a white “Cardholder's Copy” receipt from Oddbins of Banbury Road, itemizing the purchase of a crate of Guinness, the number of the Visa credit card printed below in a faded indigo.

  “There we are, Lewis! Shouldn't be too difficult, should it?” He handed over the receipt with an unconvincing smile. “Unless you manage to lose that, of course.”

  It was a hurtful dig. But the patient Lewis briefly examined the evidence himself and sought to put a finger on the fairly obvious:

  “Not much chance this afternoon, sir. Saturday? The banks'll all be shut.”

  “What? For Christ's sake, man! We've put someone on the moon, remember? And you say we can't trace a credit-card number because it's a bloody Saturday! Is that what you're telling me?”

  Morse had remained silent during these exchanges; and remained so now, his brain already galloping several furlongs ahead of the field. And Lewis, after such a withering rebuke, also remained silent, holding the receipt tightly, like a punter clutching a winning betting slip. Only Strange, it appeared, was willing to break the awkward silence as he turned again to Dr. Hobson.

  “They're just carting him off, you say?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, let us know—let Chief Inspector Morse know—what you come up with. Sooner the quicker. Understood?”

  “Of course.”

  The assembled personages rose to their feet; and matters at Sutton Courtenay were seemingly now at an end.

  But not so; not quite.

  It was Morse, at last, who made his brief though extraordinarily significant contribution to the afternoon's developments.

  “Sir, I think you ought to have a look at him.”

  “I don't like dead bodies any more than you do, Morse.”

  “I know that, but…”

  “But what?”

  “… but you ought to have a look at him.” Morse spoke his words slowly and quietly. “You see, I think it's quite possible that you'll recognize him.”

  Frequently afterward, in the post-Morse years, would Sergeant Lewis recall that afternoon at the fill-in site in Oxfordshire: when Chief Superintendent Strange had looked at the bloodless face of a murdered man; and when his erstwhile ruddy cheeks had paled to chalky white.

  “Bloody ‘ell! I knew him, Morse. I interviewed him twice in the Harrison murder inquiry.”

  When the top brass had finally dispersed, Eddie Andrews let himself back into the now deserted office, turned on the TV, found Sport (Cricket) on Ceefax and noted with quiet satisfaction that Northamptonshire were really doing rather well that day.

  Twenty-nine

  CALIPH: And now how shall we employ the time of waiting for our deliverance?

  JAFAR: I shall meditate upon the mutability of human affairs.

  MASRUR: And I shall sharpen my sword upon my thigh.

  HASSAN: And I shall study the pattern of this carpet.

  CALIPH: Hassan, I will join thee: Thou art a man of taste.

  (James Elroy Flecker, Hassan)

  Most patiently—no, most impatiently—had PC Ker-shaw been waiting for his passenger to emerge from the closeted consultations. Like some starry-eyed teenager he had been looking forward so much to his first date with Susan Ho, a delightful, delicately featured Chinese girl, a researcher at Oxford's Criminological Department; and although he had been able to contact her after Morse's diktat, neither he nor she had been particularly pleased.

  He opened the passenger door as Morse approached.

  “It's all right, Kershaw. Sergeant Lewis'll be taking me back to Oxford.”

  “You mean—?”

  “I mean you can bugger off, yes.”

  “Couldn't you have told me earlier, sir? I've been …”

  But his voice trailed off as he found Morse's blue eyes looking straight at him; uncomprehending, cold.

  Lewis was grinning wryly as he pushed the police car into first gear. “You never treated even me as bad as that.”

  “Cocky young sod! University graduate, God help us!”

  “What's he doing with us?”

  “Dunno. Learning how to make a cup o’ tea, I shouldn't wonder.”

  “Exactly where I started.”

  “I hope he's better than you were.”

  “Isn't it about time you told—”

  “I just don't believe this!” said Morse as he picked up the single cassette that lay in the tray beside the gear lever, inserted it into the player, and subsequently sank back into his seat with the look of a man sublimely satisfied with life.

  “Just find out who usually drives this car, Lewis. He's a man after my own heart. I never realized we had such sensitivity in the Force. There's not much of it out there, you know.”

  For a moment it seemed that Lewis was going to speak. But clearly he thought better of it; and as he drove way above the speed limit down the A34 to Oxford, he listened, with considerable enjoyment himself, to the Prelude to Wagner's Parsifal, convinced that Morse was soundly albeit unsnoringly asleep.

  “Turn off here, Lewis.”

  “Next exit's best, sir—avoid the city traffic that way.”

  “Turn off here!”

  So Lewis turned off there, driving sedately now, up the Abingdon Road, past Christ Church, straight over through Cornmarket and Magdalen Street, where (as bidden) he turned left at the lights by the Martyrs’ Memorial and duly stopped (as bidden) on the double-yellows beneath the canopy of the Randolph, above which the Union Jack and the flag of the EC drooped languorously that late afternoon.

  Lewis was still in brave mood. “Like the Super said, don't you think you ought—”

  “Think? That's exactly why I'm here—to think! I can't think unless I'm given the chance to think. You don't imagine I drink just for the pleasure of it, do you?”

  * * *

  Morse sat back with his pint of bitter and stared serenely at the Ashmolean Museum just opposite in Beaumont Street. “If there's a bar anywhere in Britain with a better view than this…”

  Lewis hesitated awhile over his orange juice. “You ready to tell me how you knew it was Paddy Flynn?”

  “I didn't really know. Just that I always wondered about him a bit. Key witness, agreed? Picked up Frank Harrison from the railway station, then parked outside the house just when the burglar alarm was ringing.”

  Lewis nodded. “Only person to give Harrison a convincing alibi.”

  It was Morse's turn to nod. “That's why Strange interviewed him.”

  “Interviewed him twice.”

  “Suspicious mind, that man's got!”

  “But you're still not telling me how you guessed it was him.”

  “Full of guesses, what we do, isn't it? After the first couple of days, I only read about the case at second hand—”

  “Like me.”

  “—but I remember thinking I'd have put an each-way bet on some of th
e outsiders in the race: the builder—he gave himself and several others an alibi; the landlord at the Maiden's Arms—he's got the testosterone level of a randy billy goat; and then there was the taxi driver …”

  “Why him, though?”

  “Put yourself in his position. You pick up your fare outside the station and drive him out to Lower Swin-stead; and there you're asked if you want to earn a bit—a lot—of extra money. You don't really have to do much at all. Fellow says he's going into the house—his house, anyway—and the burglar alarm is going to ring. All you've got to do is to say, if you're questioned about things, that you heard the alarm ringing while you were parked outside. Not too difficult? The alarm was ringing by then. And you're offered—what? I dunno—twenty or thirty quid, two or three hundred quid? But the key point is that Flynn never fully realized how vital his testimony was going to be.”

  “Are you making it all up?”

  “Yes! So allow me to continue making it all up. Flynn's got little idea of why he's getting such a bonus for doing virtually bugger-all. But then he starts to read a few press reports; and unlike our boys he puts two and two together, and he smiles to himself because he knows the answer. And pretty soon he realizes he's sold himself stupidly cheap, and he decides he'll balance the books a bit better.”

  “Are you saying what I think you're saying? He's been trying to blackmail Frank Harrison?”

  Morse drained his pint. “Not sure. But I'd like to bet that someone that night was more than ready to pay his way out of trouble.”

  “Or her way.”

  “Could be, yes.” Morse contemplated an empty glass. “Is it your round or mine, by the way?”