The Remorseful Day (34 page)

The time, as Morse saw, was 3:40
A.M.
, almost exactly one hour after he'd started writing. He was feeling pleasantly tired, and he knew he would slip into sleep so easily now. Yet he wanted to go (as Flecker had said) “always that little further”; and perhaps more immediately to the point he wanted to pour himself a further Scotch—which he did before resuming.

Morse, who had been deeply asleep at his study desk, his head pillowed on folded arms, jerked awake just before 7:30
A.M.
, feeling wonderfully refreshed.

Life was a funny old business.

The following morning Lewis was pleased with himself. Before Morse arrived, he'd turned to the
Police Gazette's
“Puzzle Corner” and easily solved the challenge there:

“Initially—”that was the clue; and once you twigged it, the answer stared you in the face vertically.

Morse made an appearance at 9:10
A.M.
, looking (in Lewis's view) a little fitter than of late.

“Want to test your brain, sir?”

“Certainly not!”

Lewis pushed the puzzle across the desk, and Morse considered it, though for no more than a few seconds:

“Do
you
know the answer?”

“Easy! ‘Initially,’ sir—that's what you've got to think about. Just look at the first letters. Cyclist? Get it?”

“I thought the question was what would an
intelligent
cyclist's thought be.”

“I don't quite follow.”

“Not difficult surely, Lewis? You've just got the answer wrong, that's all. Any intelligent cyclist, any bright bus driver—anyone!—would think exactly the same thing immediately.”

“They would?”

“The
question's
phony. Based on a false premise, isn't it? Based on the assumption that the facts you've been given are true.”

“You mean they're not?”

“Tosca?
Written by
Verdi?”

Oh dear! “You were quick to spot that.”

Morse grinned. “Not really. They often ask me to submit a little brainteaser to the
Gazette.”

“You mean—?”

Morse nodded. “And talking of false premises, that's been a big part of our trouble. We've both been trying to check up on such a lot of things, haven't we? But there's
one
thing we've been prepared to accept without one ha'poth of evidence. So we'll get on to that without delay. Couple of cars we'll need. I'll just give Dixon a ring—”

Lewis got to his feet. “I can deal with all that, sir.” “Si’ down, Lewis! I want to talk to you.”

Through the glass-paneled door Dixon finally saw the silhouette moving toward him: a woman in a wheelchair
who brusquely informed him that she knew nothing of the whereabouts of her son. He had not been home the previous evening. He had a key. He was sometimes out all night, yes. No, she didn't know where. And if it was of any interest to the police, she didn't care—didn't bloody well
care.

There was no reply to PC Kershaw's importunate ringing and knocking. But at last he was able to locate the mildly disgruntled middle-aged woman who looked after the two “lets”; and who accompanied him back to the ground-floor flat. She appeared to have little affection for either of the two lessees, although when she opened the door she must have felt a horrified shock of sympathy for one of them.

Christine Coverley lay supine on a sheepskin rug in front of an unlit electric fire. She was wearing a summery, sleeveless, salmon-pink dress, her arms very white, hands palm-upward, with each of her wrists slashed deeply and neatly across. A black-handled kitchen knife lay beside her left shoulder.

Young Kershaw was unused to such horrors; and over the next few days the visual image was to refigure repeatedly in his nightmares. Two patches on the rug were deeply steeped in blood; and Kershaw was reminded of the Welsh hill farm where he'd once stayed and where the backs of each of the owner's sheep had been daubed with a dye of the deepest crimson.

No note was found by Kershaw; indeed no note was found by anyone afterward. It was as if Christine had left this world with a despair she'd found incommunicable to anyone: even to her parents; even to the uncouth lout who penetrated her so pleasurably now, though at first against her will; even to the rather nice police inspector who'd seemed to her to understand so much about her. Far too much … including (she'd known it!) the fact that she had lied. Roy could never have been cycling along Sheep Street when Barron fell to his death because at that very moment he had been in bed with her …

Lewis had not been surprised—no, certainly not that. But disappointed? Yes. Oh yes! And Morse had been aware of his reaction, clearly anticipating it, yet saying nothing to lessen the impact of the revelation. The relationship between them would never be quite the same again, Lewis realized that. It wasn't at all the fact that Morse had driven out one evening (two evenings? ten evenings?) to meet a seductively attractive woman. Lewis had seen the sharply focused photographs of her body stretched out on the bed that night; and it could be no great wonder that many a man, young and old alike, had lusted after a woman such as that. No, it was something else. It was the out-of-character, underhand way that Morse had allowed the dishonest subterfuge to linger on and on from the beginning of the case.

Indeed Morse had been less than wholly forthcoming in his confession even now, Lewis was fairly sure of it. Yes, Morse agreed, he
had
gained access to the file containing the intimate correspondence addressed to Y H. Yes, he
had
“appropriated” the handcuffs, police handcuffs, with a number stamped on them that could easily be traced back to the officer issued with them, in this case to Morse himself. And yes (he readily admitted it) he
had
“withdrawn” the relevant sheet of the issue-numbers kept at HQ. As far as the partial letter was concerned (Morse accepted immediately that it was in his own hand) Lewis had hoped, in an old-fashioned sort of way, that Morse had in fact
never
been invited to Lower Swinstead, in spite of his own plea for some
communication from her; in spite of that almost school-boyish business about looking through his mail every morning in the hope of finding something from her. And that was about it. Morse had wanted to cover up something of which he was rather ashamed and very embarrassed; just wanted his own name, previously his own good name, never to be associated with the life—and the death—of Yvonne Harrison. He'd been careless about leaving that single page of a longer letter but (as he asked Lewis to agree) it was hardly an incriminating piece of evidence. What Morse stoutly refused to accept was that what he had done, however cowardly and dishonest and foolish, had in any way jeopardized the course of the original inquiry, which he now had the nerve to assert had been conducted with almost unprecedented incompetence. Such arrogance was of course not all that unusual; yet in the present circumstances it seemed to Lewis quite gratuitously cheap.

Leaving all such considerations aside though, what stuck in Lewis's throat was that initial, duplicitous refusal on Morse's part to have anything to do with the original case. Agreed, once he had been drafted on to what seemed to both Lewis and Strange the second half of the
same
case, Morse had risen to his accustomed heights of logical analysis and depths of human understanding. Agreed, he had (as usual) been several furlongs ahead of the field—and, for once, on the right racecourse from the “off.”

Who else but Morse could have put forward the quite extraordinary hypotheses made earlier that morning about the murder of J. Barron, Builder? The hypothesis (seemingly confirmed) that Roy Holmes—who'd do almost anything to
get
drugs and who'd do absolutely anything when he was
on
drugs—was having a sexual relationship with Christine Coverley; the hypothesis (seemingly confirmed) that the weirdly incongruous partnership had resulted from some incident or series of incidents at school; that the youth had agreed, for money, to make a statement to the police about a supposedly accidental collision with a high ladder—a
statement that was wholly untrue, because Roy Holmes had been nowhere near Sheep Street that morning; the hypothesis (to
be
confirmed!) that it was Frank Harrison who had murdered Barron, and who had engineered an ingenious scheme whereby all suspicion would be diverted both from himself and from Simon—the scheme itself probably prompted by another son, by Allen Thomas, who regularly gathered a good deal of information from his vantage point in the Maiden's Arms and who regularly passed it on to his father, the man at the center of everything.

Lewis nodded to himself. No wonder Frank Harrison had gone to earth somewhere. Not for long though, surely. He had nowhere to go; nowhere to hide. Airports and seaports had been apprised of his passport number, and photographs would be on their way. Unless it was too late.

It was Morse's suggestion that the two of them together should interview Roy Holmes and Christine Coverley, with Lewis invited to do most of the talking with the youth. “I detest him, Lewis! And you're better at those sorts of things than I am.” It was flattering, but it didn't work. Morse was sadly wrong if he thought he could so easily re-establish some degree of integrity in the eyes of his sergeant.

In midmorning, Lewis left the office without asking Morse if he would like a coffee. He knew that the omission would be noted; he knew that Morse would feel the hurt.

Not so.

When Lewis returned ten minutes later, he found Morse leaning back and beaming happily.

“Fetch me a coffee, will you, Lewis! No sugar—we diabetics, you know … Something to celebrate.”
The Times
was folded back in quarters in front of him, the crossword grid completely filled in. “Six and a half minutes! I've never done it quicker.”

“Shouldn't that be ‘more quickly’?”

“Good man! You're learning at last. You see it's a
question, as I've told you, of the comparative adjective and the comparative adverb. If you say—”

The phone rang.

Dixon.

For the moment Roy Holmes was not to be found: he wasn't at home; he wasn't anywhere. Did Morse want him to keep looking?

“What the hell do you think?” Morse had snapped at him. “You remember the old proverb? If at first you don't succeed, don't take up hang gliding.”

The brief telephone conversation pleased Lewis, and for a few seconds he wondered if he was being a little unfair in his judgment on Morse. But only for a few seconds.

“Not the only one we can't find, sir.”

“Frank Harrison, you mean? Ye-es. I'm a bit puzzled about him. He might be a crook—he
is
a crook—but he's not a fool. He's an experienced, hard-nosed, single-minded, rich banker, and if you're all those things you don't suddenly put your fingers in the—”

The phone rang.

Kershaw.

Morse listened, saying nothing; but the eyes that lifted to look across the desk into Lewis's face, if not wholly surprised, seemed very disappointed and very sad. Much as two hours earlier Lewis's own eyes had looked.

In midafternoon (Morse was no longer at HQ) the phone rang.

Swiss Helvetia Bank.

“Could we speak to Superintendent Lewis, please?”

“Sergeant Lewis speaking.”