The Remorseful Day (38 page)

“Looks like it, I'm afraid.”

“You're in the best of hands, you know that.”

“I'm going to need a bit more than that.”

“Look, Morse. Don't you think it would be a good thing … don't you think I ought—?”

But Morse was shaking his head in some agitation.

“No! Please! If you really want to help …”

“Course! Course, I do!”

“Can you ask Lewis … ?”

“Course! Just you keep hold of the hooks, old mate! And that's an order. Don't forget I'm still your superior officer.”

“Lewis!” Morse spoke the name very quietly but quite clearly. His eyes were open, and his lips moved as if he were about to say something.

But if such were the case, he never said it; and Lewis decided to do what so many people have done beside a hospital bed; decided to speak a few comforting thoughts aloud:

“You've got the top load of quacks in Oxfordshire looking after you, sir. All you've got to do—promise me!—is to do what they say and … And what I really want to say is thank-you for …”

But Lewis could get no further.

And in any case Morse had closed his eyes and turned his head away to face the pure-white wall.

Just a little word from Morse would have been enough.

But it wasn't to be.

A nurse was standing beside him, testing his lipread-ing skills once more: “I'm afraid we must ask you to go…”

At 4:20
P.M.
Morse seemed to rally a little and held his hand up for the nurse.

“I'm allowed a drop more Scotch?” he whispered.

She poured out the miserably small contents of the second miniature and held a jug of water over the glass.

“Yes?”

“No,” said Morse.

She put her arm around his shoulders, pulled him toward her, and held the glass to his lips. But he sipped
so little that she wondered whether he'd drunk a single drop; and as he coughed and spluttered she took the glass away and for a few moments held him closely to her, and felt profoundly sad as finally she eased the white head back against the pillows.

For just a little while, Morse opened his eyes and looked up at her.

“Please thank Lewis for me …”

But so softly spoken were the words that she wasn't quite able to catch them.

The call came through to Sergeant Lewis just after 5
P.M.

Before leaving for Heathrow, Lewis had informed Chief Superintendent Strange that it would not be at all sensible, in fact it would be wholly inappropriate, for him to continue as a protagonist, virtually
the
protagonist, in the Harrison case: he was exhausted mentally, physically, emotionally; and, well… he just begged for a rest. And Strange had granted his request.

“I'm going to put someone in charge who's considerably more competent than you and Morse ever were.”

“Yourself, sir?”

“That's it,” smiled Strange sadly. “You have two or three days off—from tomorrow. You could take the missus to South Wales.”

“I said I needed a rest, sir! And there are one of two things that Morse …”

“Make a few calls you mean—yes. And go through his diary and see what dates…”

“I don't think there'll be many of those.”

“You don't?” asked Strange quietly.

“And I haven't got much of a clue how he was going to tackle Frank Harrison.”

Strange lumbered round the table and placed a vast hand on Lewis's shoulder. “You've got a key?”

Lewis nodded.

“Just bring Harrison Senior straight to me. Then …”

Lewis nodded. He was full up to the eyes; and left without a further word.

On journeys concerned with potential criminals or criminal activity, CID personnel were never advised, and were seldom permitted, to travel alone. And the following morning Lewis was not wholly unhappy to be traveling alongside a familiar colleague, albeit alongside Sergeant Dixon. After the first few obligatory words, the pair of them had lapsed into silence.

There was never likely to be any risk of missing the returning couple at the Arrivals exit. Nor was there. And it was Lewis who read from his prepared notes, as unostentatiously as he could: “Mr. Frank Harrison, it is my duty as a police officer to inform you that I am authorized to remand you into temporary custody on two counts: first, on suspicion of the murder of Mr. John Barron of Lower Swinstead on the 3rd of August, 1998; second, on suspicion of the murder of your wife, Yvonne Harrison, on the 8th July 1997. It is also my duty to tell you—”

“Forget it, Sergeant. You told me what to expect. Just a couple of favors though, if that's all right? Won't take long.”

“What have you got in mind?” In truth, Lewis had neither the energy nor the enthusiasm to initiate any determined pursuit had Frank Harrison and partner
decided to make a dash for it and vault the exit barriers. But that was never going to happen. Nor did it.

“Well, it's the car, first of all. I left it—”

“All taken care of, sir. Or it will be.”

“Thank you. Second thing, then. You know the one thing I really missed in Paris? A pint of real ale, preferably brewed in Burton-on-Trent. The bars are open here and…”

“OK.”

Dixon stood beside him as Harrison ordered a pint of Bass and a large gin and tonic (and, of course, nothing else) whilst Lewis sat at a nearby table, momentarily alone with Maxine Ridgway.

“You know,” she said very firmly, “you're quite wrong about one thing. I don't know too much about Frank's life, but it does just so happen I was with him the night that his wife was murdered. We were together in his London flat! I was there when the phone rang and when he ordered a taxi to Paddington—”

Frank Harrison was standing by the table now: “Why don't you learn to keep your mouth shut, woman!” But his voice was resigned rather than angered, and if he had contemplated throwing the gin and tonic in her face, it was only for a second or two.

He sat down and drank his beer.

The damage had been done.

In the back of the police car as it returned to Oxford, Lewis realized, with an added sadness, that Morse had been wholly wrong, as it now transpired, in his final analysis of the Harrison murder. Frank Harrison, if his lady friend were to be believed, just could
not
have murdered his wife that night; and the police must have been right, in the original inquiry, to cross him off their suspect list. It had all happened before, of course—many a time!—when Morse, after the revelation of some fatal flaw in his earlier reasoning, would find his mind leaping forward, suddenly, with inexplicable insight, toward the ultimate solution.

But those days had now gone.

It was not until the car was passing through the cutting in the Chilterns by Stokenchurch that Harrison spoke:

“Red kite country this is—now. Did you know that, Sergeant?”

“As a matter of fact I did, yes. I'm not into birds myself though. The wife puts some nuts out occasionally but…”

It may hardly be seen as a significant passage of conversation.

Harrison spoke again just after Dixon had turned off the M40 on to the A40 for Oxford.

“You know, I'm looking forward to seeing Morse again. I met him at Barron's funeral, but I don't think we got on very well… My daughter, Sarah, knows him though. He's one of her patients at the Radcliffe. She tells me he's a strange sort of fellow in some ways—interesting though, and
very
bright, but perhaps not taking all that good care of himself.”

Lewis remained silent.

“Why didn't he come up to Heathrow himself? Wasn't that the original idea?”

“Yes, I think it was.”

“Are we meeting at St. Aldate's or Kidlington?”

“He won't be meeting you anywhere, sir. Chief Inspector Morse is dead.”

After returning to HQ Lewis gave Strange an account of the quite extraordinary evidence so innocently (as it seemed) supplied by Maxine Ridgway.

But he could do no more.

For he had nothing more to give.

Unlike Morse, who had always professed enormous faith in pills—pills of all colors, shapes, and sizes—Lewis could hardly remember the last time he'd taken anything apart from the Vitamin C tablet he was bullied to swallow each breakfast-time. It had therefore been something of a surprise to learn that Mrs. L. kept such a copious supply of assorted medicaments; and retiring to bed unprecedentedly early that evening he had swallowed two Nurofen Plus tablets and slept like the legendary log.

At 10
A.M.
the following morning he drove up to the mortuary at the JR2.

The eyes were closed, but the expression on the
waxen face was hardly one of great serenity, for some hint of pain still lingered there. Like so many others contemplating a dead person, Lewis found himself pondering so many things as he thought of Morse's mind within the skull. Thought of that wonderful memory, of that sensitivity to music and literature, above all of that capacity for thinking laterally, vertically, diagonally—whateverwhichway that extraordinary brain should decide to go. But all gone now, for death had scattered that union of component atoms into the air, and Morse would never move or think or speak again.

Feeling slightly guilty, Lewis looked around him. But at least for the moment his only company was the dead. And bending down he put his lips to Morse's forehead and whispered just two final words: “Good-bye, sir.”

Morse had always been more closely attuned to life's adagios than its allegros; and his home reflected such a melancholic temperament. The pastel-colored walls, haunted by the music of Wagner, Bruckner, and Mahler, were decorated with somber-toned reproductions of Rembrandt, Vermeer, and Atkinson Grimshaw; and lined, in most rooms both upstairs and down, with long shelves of the poets and the novelists.

The whole place now seemed so very still as Lewis picked up two pints of semiskimmed Co-op milk from the porch, picked up four letters from the doormat, and entered.

In the study upstairs there were several signs (as Lewis already knew) of a sunnier temperament: the room was decorated in a sun-bed tan, terra-cotta, and white, with a bright Matisse hanging on the only wall free of the ubiquitous books, CDs, and cassettes. A red angle-lamp stood on the desk with, beside it, a bottle of Glenfiddich, virtually empty, and a cut-glass tumbler, completely empty. Morse had timed his exit fairly satisfactorily.

Lewis sat down and quickly looked through the letters: BT; British Diabetic Association; Lloyds Bank; Oxford Brookes University. Nothing too personal perhaps in any of them, but he left them there unopened. He fully realized there would be quite a few details to be sorted out soon by someone. Not by him though. He had but the single mission there.

In the second drawer down on the right, he found six photographs and took them out. An old black-and-white snap of a middle-aged man and woman, the man showing facial lineaments similar to Morse's. A studio portrait of a fair-haired young woman, with a written message on the back: “Like you I wish so much that things could have been different—love always—W.” Another smaller photograph, with a brief sentence in Morse's own hand: “Sue Widdowson before she was arrested.” A holiday shot of a young couple on a beach somewhere, the dark-headed bronzed young woman in a white bikini smiling broadly, the young man's right arm around her shoulders, and (again) some writing on the back “I only
look
happy. I miss you like crazy!!! Ellie.” Clipped to a photograph of a smartly attractive woman, in the uniform of a hospital sister, was a brief letter under a Carlisle address and telephone number: “I understand. I just can't help wondering how we would have been together, that's all.
I'd
have had to sacrifice a bit of independence too you know! Always remember my love for you. J.” Only the one other photograph: that of Morse and Lewis standing next to each other beside the Jaguar, with no writing on the back at all.

Lewis tried the Carlisle number; with no success.

On the floor to the right of the desk lay a buff-colored folder, its contents splayed out somewhat, as if perhaps it may have been knocked down accidentally; and he picked it up. On the front was written: “For the attn. of Lewis.”

The top sheet was the printed form d1/d2, issued by the Department of Human Anatomy in South Parks Road, the second section duly signed by the donor; and countersigned by the same man who had witnessed the validity of the second single sheet of A4 to which Lewis now turned his attention: