The Remorseful Day (7 page)

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.

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

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.

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?”

“But why start the week off in such a foul mood?”

“Why
not
, pray?”

“I don't know. It's just that, you know—another case for us to solve perhaps? Gives you a good feeling, that.”

Morse nodded reluctantly.

“So why agree to it, if you've no stomach for it?”

Morse looked down at the threadbare carpet—a carpet stopping regularly six inches from the skirting boards. “I'll tell you why. Strange's carpet goes right up to the wall—you've noticed that? So if you ever get up to Super status, which I very much doubt, you just make
sure you get a carpet that covers the whole floor—and a personal parking space while you're at it!”

“At least you've got your name on the door.”

“Remember that fellow in Holy Writ, Lewis? ‘I also am a man set under authority.’ I'm just like him—
under
authority. Strange doesn't
ask
me to do something: he tells me.”

“You could always have said no.”

“Stop sermonizing me! That case stinks of duplicity and corruption: the family, the locals, the police—shifty and thrifty with the truth, the whole bloody lot of them.”

“You sound as if you know quite a bit about it already.”

“Why shouldn't I? About a local murder like that? I do occasionally pick up a few things from my fellow officers, all right? And if you remember I
was
on the case right at the beginning, if only for a very short while. And why was that? Because we were on
another
case. Were we not?”

Lewis nodded. “Another murder case.”

“Murder's always been our business.”

“So why—?”

“Because the case is old and tired, that's why.”

“Who'll take it on if we don't?”

“They'll find another pair of idiots.”

“So you're going to tell the Super… ?”

“I've already
told
you. Give it a rest!”

“Why are you so sharp about it all?”

“Because I'm like the case, Lewis. I'm old and tired myself.”

The ringing of the telephone on Morse's desk cut across the tetchy stichomythia.

“Morse?”

“Sir?”

“You ready?”

“Half-past nine, you said.”

“So what?”

“It's only—”

“So what?”

“Shall I bring Sergeant Lewis along?”

“Please yourself.”

The phone was dead.

“That was Strange.”

“I could hear.”

“I'd like you to come along. All right with you?”

Lewis nodded. “I'm a man under authority too.”

“Lew-is! Quote it accurately: ‘a man
set
under authority.’”

“Sorry!”

But Morse was continuing with the text, as if the well-remembered words brought some momentary respite to his peevishness: “ ‘Having under me soldiers, and I say unto one, Go and he goeth; and to another, Come and he cometh'.”

“Lewis cometh,” said Lewis quietly.

“C'm in!

C'm in!” It was 8:45
A.M.