The Remorseful Day (2 page)

Apart (of course) from Wagner, apart from Mozart's compositions for the clarinet, Schubert was one of the
select composers who could occasionally transport him to the frontier of tears. And it was Schubert's turn in the early evening of Wednesday, July 15, 1998, when—
The Archers
over—a bedroom-slippered Chief Inspector Morse was to be found in his North Oxford bachelor flat, sitting at his ease in Zion and listening to a Lieder recital on Radio 3, an amply filled tumbler of pale Glen-fiddich beside him. And why not? He was on a few days' furlough that had so far proved quite unexpectedly pleasurable.

Morse had never enrolled in the itchy-footed regiment of truly adventurous souls, feeling (as he did) little temptation to explore the remoter corners even of his native land, and this principally because he could now imagine few if any places closer to his heart than Oxford—the city which, though not his natural mother, had for so many years performed the duties of a loving foster parent. As for foreign travel, long faded were his boyhood dreams that roamed the sands round Samarkand; and a lifelong pterophobia still precluded any airline bookings to Bayreuth, Salzburg, Vienna—the trio of cities he sometimes thought he ought to see.

Vienna …

The city Schubert had so rarely left; the city in which he'd gained so little recognition; where he'd died of typhoid fever—only thirty-one.

Not much of an innings, was it—thirty-one?

Morse leaned back, listened, and looked semicontent-edly through the French window. In
The Ballad of Reading Gaol
, Oscar Wilde had spoken of that little patch of blue that prisoners call the sky; and Morse now contemplated that little patch of green that owners of North Oxford flats are wont to call the garden. Flowers had always meant something to Morse, even from his schooldays. Yet in truth it was more the nomenclature of the several species, and their context in the works of the great poets, that had compelled his imagination: fast-fading violets, the globèd peonies, the fields of asphodel… Indeed Morse was fully aware of the etymology and the mythological associations of the asphodel,
although quite certainly he would never have recognized one of its kind had it flashed across a Technicolor screen.

It was still true though: as men grew older (so Morse told himself) the delights of the natural world grew ever more important. Not just the flowers, either. What about the birds?

Morse had reached the conclusion that if he were to be reincarnated (a prospect which seemed to him most blessedly remote), he would register as a part-time Quaker and devote a sizeable quota of his leisure hours to ornithology. This latter decision was consequent upon his realization, however late in the day, that life would be significantly impoverished should the birds no longer sing. And it was for this reason that, the previous week, he had taken out a year's subscription to
Bird-watching;
taken out a copy of the RSPB's
Birdwatchers' Guide
from the Summertown Library; and purchased a secondhand pair of 152/1000m binoculars (£9.90) that he'd spotted in the window of the Oxfam Shop just down the Banbury Road. And to complete his program he had called in at the Summertown Pet Store and taken home a small wired cylinder packed with peanuts—a cylinder now suspended from a branch overhanging his garden. From
the
branch overhanging his garden.

He reached for the binoculars now and focused on an interesting specimen pecking away at the grass below the peanuts: a small bird, with a greyish crown, dark-brown bars across the dingy russet of its back, and paler underparts. As he watched, he sought earnestly to memorize this remarkable bird's characteristics, so as to be able to match its variegated plumage against the appropriate illustration in the
Guide.

Plenty of time for that though.

He leaned back once more and rejoiced in the radiant warmth of Schwarzkopf's voice, following the English text that lay open on his lap: “You holy Art, when all my hope is shaken …”

When, too, a few moments later, his mood of pleasurable melancholy was shaken by three confident
bursts on a front-door bell that to several of his neighbors sounded considerably over-decibeled, even for the hard-of-hearing.

“Not disturbing you?”

Morse made no direct reply, but his resigned look would have been sufficiently eloquent for most people.

Most
people.

He opened the door widely—perforce needed so to do—in order to accommodate his unexpected visitor within the comparatively narrow entrance.

“I
am
disturbing you.”

“No, no! It's just that…”

“Look, matey!” (Chief Superintendent Strange cocked an ear toward the lounge.) “I don't give a dam if I'm disturbing
you;
pity about disturbing old Schubert, though.”

For the dozenth time in their acquaintance, Morse found himself quietly re-appraising the man who first beached and then readjusted his vast bulk in an armchair, with a series of expiratory grunts.

Morse had long known better than to ask Strange whether he wanted a drink, alcoholic or nonalcoholic. If Strange wanted a drink, of either variety, he would ask for it, immediately and unambiguously. But Morse did allow himself one question:

“You know you just said you didn't give a dam. Do you know how you spell ‘dam’?”

“You spell it ‘d—a—m.’ Tiny Indian coin—that's what a dam is. Surely you knew that?”

For the thirteenth time in their acquaintance …

“Is that a single malt you're drinking there, Morse?”

It was only after Morse had filled, then refilled, his visitor's glass that Strange came to the point of his evening call.

“The papers—even the tabloids—have been doing me proud. You read
The Times
yesterday?”

“I never read
The Times.”

“What? The bloody paper's there—there!—on the coffee table.”

“Just for the crossword—and the Letters page.”

“You don't read the obituaries?”

“Well, perhaps just a glance sometimes.”

“To see if you're there?”

“To see if some of them are younger than me.”

“I don't follow you.”

“If they
are
younger, so a statistician once told me, I've got a slightly better chance of living on beyond the norm.”

“Mm.” Strange nodded vaguely. “You frightened of death?”

“A bit.”

Strange suddenly picked up his second half-full tumbler of Scotch and tossed it back at a draught like a visitor downing an initiatory vodka at the Russian Embassy.

“What about the telly, Morse? Did you watch
Newsroom South-East
last night?”

“I've got a TV—video as well. But I don't seem to get round to watching anything and I can't work the video very well.”

“Really? And how do you expect to understand what's going on in the great big world out there? You're supposed to
know
what's going on. You're a police officer, Morse!”

“I listen to the wireless—”

“Wireless?
Where've you got to in life, matey?
‘Radio’—that's what they've been calling it these last thirty years.”

It was Morse's turn to nod vaguely as Strange continued:

“Good job I got
this
done for you, then.”

Sorry, sir. Perhaps I am a bit behind the times—as well as
The Times.

But Morse gave no voice to these latter thoughts as he slowly read the photocopied article that Strange had handed to him. Morse always read slowly.

Had Morse's eyes narrowed slightly as he read the last few lines? If they had, he made no reference to whatever might have puzzled or interested him there.

“I trust it wasn't you who split the infinitive, sir?”

“You never suspected that, surely? We're all used to sloppy reporting, aren't we?”

Morse nodded as he handed back the photocopied article.

“No! Keep it, Morse—I've got the original.”

“Very kind of you, sir, but…”

“But it interested you, perhaps?”

“Only the bit at the end, about the Radcliffe.”

“Why's that?”

“Well, as you know, I was in there myself—after I was diagnosed.”

“Christ! You make it sound as if you're the only one who's ever been bloody diagnosed!”

Morse held his peace, for his memory needed no jogging: Strange himself had been a patient in the selfsame Radcliffe Infirmary a year or so before his own hospitalization. No one had known much about Strange's troubles. There had been hushed rumors about “en-docrinological dysfunction”; but not everyone at Police HQ was happy about spelling or pronouncing or identifying such a polysyllabic ailment.

“You know why I brought that cutting, Morse?”

“No! And to be honest with you, I don't much care. I'm on furlough, you know that. The quack tells me I'm run down—blood sugar far too high—blood pressure far too high. Says I need to have a quiet little rest-cure and try to forget the great big world out there, as you call it.”

“Some of us can't forget it though, can we?” Strange spoke the words very softly, and Morse got to his feet and turned off the CD player.

“Not one of your greatest triumphs that case, was it?”

“One of the few—very few, Morse—I got no-bloody-where with. And it wasn't exactly mine, either, as you know. But it was my responsibility, that's all. Still is.”

“What's all this got to do with me?”

Strange further expanded his gargantuan girth as he further expounded:

“I thought, you know, with the wife … and all that… I thought it'd help to stay in the Force another year. But…”

Morse nodded sympathetically. Strange's wife had died very suddenly a year previously, victim of a coronary thrombosis which should surely never have afflicted one so slim, so cautious, so physically fit. She'd been an
unlovely woman, Mrs. Strange—outwardly timid and inwardly bullying; yet a woman to whom by all accounts Strange had been deeply attached. Friends had spoken of a “tight” marriage; and most agreed that the widower would have been wholly lost on his own, at least for some while, had he jacked things in (as he'd intended) the previous September. And in the end he'd been persuaded to reconsider his position—and to continue for a further year. But he'd been uneasy back at HQ: a sort of supernumerary Super, feeling like a retired schoolmaster returning to a Common Room. A mistake. Morse knew it. Strange knew it.

“I still don't see what it's got to do with me, sir.”

“I want the case reopened—not that it's ever been closed, of course. It worries me, you see. We should have got further than we did.”

“I still—”

“I'd like you to look at the case again. If anyone can crack it,
you
can. Know why? Because you're just plain bloody lucky, Morse, that's why!
And I want this case solved.
”

Lucky?

Morse had always believed that luck played a bigger part in life than was acknowledged by many people—certainly
by those distinguished personages who saw their personal merit as the only cause of their appropriate eminence. Yet as he looked back over his own life and career Morse had never considered his own lot a particularly lucky one, not at least in what folk referred to as the affairs of the heart. Strange may have had a point though, for without doubt his record with the Thames Valley CID was the envy of most of his colleagues—his success rate the result, as Morse analyzed the matter, of all sorts of factors: a curious combination of hard thinking, hard drinking (the two, for Morse, being synonymous), hard work (usually undertaken by Sergeant Lewis), and, yes, a sprinkling here and there of good fortune. The Romans had poured their libations not only to Jupiter and Venus and their associate deities in the Pantheon, but also to Fortuna, the goddess of good luck.

Lucky, then?

Well, a bit.

It was high time Morse said something:

“Why the Lower Swinstead murder? What's wrong with the Hampton Poyle murder, the Cowley murder … ?”

“Nothing to do with me, either of ‘em.”

“That's the only reason then? Just to leave a clean slate behind you?”