The Remorseful Day

Chapter thirteen

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.