The Remorseful Day

Chapter twenty-seven

After an excited, if somewhat dispirited, Lewis had dropped him off at Oddbins, Morse picked up two bottles of single-malt Glenfiddich (“£4 Off When Two Are Purchased”); then walked further down the Summertown shops to Boots, where he bought two large boxes of Alka-Seltzer (sixty tablets in all) and two packets of extra-strength BiSoDoL (sixty tablets in all), reckoning that such additional medicaments might keep him comparatively fit for a further fortnight. But in truth his acid indigestion and heartburn were getting even worse. All right, it was a family affliction; but it gave little comfort to know that father and paternal grandfather had both endured agonies from hiatal hernia — a condition not desperately serious perhaps, but certainly far more painful than it sounded. The cure — so simple! — had been repeatedly advocated by his GP: “Just pack up the booze!” And indeed Morse had occasionally followed such advice for a couple of days or so; only to assume, upon the temporary disappearance of the symptoms, that a permanent cure had been effected; and that a resumption of his erstwhile modus vivendi was thenceforth justified.

He would try again soon.

Not today, though.

He walked down South Parade to the Woodstock Road, turned right, and soon found himself at the Woodstock Arms, where the landlord rightly prided himself on a particularly fine pint of Morrell’s Bitter — of which Morse took liberal advantage that early Saturday lunchtime. The printed menu and the chalked-up specials on the board were strong temptations to many a man. But not to Morse. These past two decades he had almost invariably taken his lunchtime calories in liquid form; and he did so now. Most of the habitués he knew by sight, if not by name; but after a few perfunctory nods he settled himself in a corner of the wall-seating, and thought of many things...

Instinctively (or so he told himself) he’d known that Harry Repp was doomed to die from the moment he’d left Bullingdon. Harry had known too much. Harry had been a bit player — a bit more than a bit player in the drama that had been enacted on the evening Yvonne Harrison was murdered. But Harry had decided to remain silent. And the reason for such silence was probably the reason for many a silence — money. Someone had ensured that Harry’s discreet silence had been profitably rewarded. On his release Harry had probably decided that the goose could soon be persuaded to change the golden eggs from medium to large. But he’d miscalculated: something had happened — probably there’d been some communication during the last few weeks of his imprisonment — that had cast a cloud of fear over his impending release; justifiable fear, since he now lay stiff and cold amidst the trash and the filth of Sutton Courtenay.

It seemed a predictable outcome though far from an inevitable one, and Morse felt no real cause for any self-recrimination. Lewis would go along there — was probably there already; would join the SOCOs and supervise the necessary procedures; would draw a few tentative, temporary conclusions; would report to Strange; and all in all would probably do as good a job as any other member of the Thames Valley CID in seeking the motive for Repp’s murder.

He ordered himself a third pint, conscious that the world seemed a considerably kindlier place than heretofore. He even found himself listening to the topics of conversation around him: darts, bar-billiards, Aunt Sally, push-penny... and perhaps (he thought) his own life might have been marginally enriched by such innocent divertissements.

Perhaps not, though.

Leaving the Woodstock Arms, he slowly walked the few hundred yards north to Squitchey Lane, where he turned right toward his bachelor flat.

No messages on the Ansafone; no letters or notes pushed through the letter-box. A free afternoon! — for which, in his believing days, he would have given thanks to the Almighty. His dark-blue Oxford University diary was beside the phone, and he looked through the following week’s engagements. Not much there either, really: just that diabetes review at the Radcliffe Infirmary at 9 A.M. on Monday morning. Only an hour or so that; but the imminent appointment disturbed him slightly. He had promised his consultant, and promised himself, that he would present a faithful record of his blood-sugar measurements over the previous fortnight. But he had failed to do so, and there was little he could now do to remedy the situation except to take half a dozen such measurements in the remaining interval of thirty-six hours and to extrapolate backward therefrom, in order to present a neatly tabulated series of satisfactory readings. He’d done it before and he would do it again.

Kein Problem.

He half-filled a tumbler with Glenfiddich, then topped it up with commensurate tap water. Such dilution (a recent innovation) would, as Morse knew, mark him out in the eyes of many a Scot as a sacrilegious Sassenach. But according to his GP, the liver preferred things that way; and Morse’s liver (according to the same source) was in need of a bit of tender loving care, along with his heart, kidneys, stomach, pancreas, lungs.

Lungs...

Well, at least he’d finally managed to pack up smoking, a filthy habit, as he now recognized; but one which had given him almost as much pleasure as any other vice in life. And he knew that were he privy to the date and time of an early Judgment Day (the following Monday, say) he would set off immediately to the nearest newsagent’s to buy in a store of cigarettes. And he almost did so now, as if he could already hear the trumpets sounding on the other side.

In the living room, he selected Bruno Walter’s early recording of Die Walküre, with Lauritz Melchior and Lotte Lehmann singing the roles of Siegmund and Sieglinde. Wonderful! So Morse turned the volume control to maximum as he listened to the anagnorisis at the end of Act I, and heard neither of the telephone calls made to his ex-directory number that afternoon, conscious only that he was falling deliciously asleep as the benighted brother and sister rushed off into the forest to beget Siegfried...

It was coming up to 2:45 P.M. when Morse jerked abruptly awake, disappointed that his semi-erotic dream was prematurely terminated: a dream of a woman seated intimately close to him — a dream of Debbie Richardson, with legs provocatively crossed, the texture of the cheap black stockings tautly stretched along her upper thighs.

Wonderful!

But even as she’d leaned toward him, he’d voiced his deep anxiety: “Aren’t you frightened someone will come in?”

“No one’ll come in. Harry won’t be comin’ back. Ever. I’ll get you another drink. Just — stay — where — you — are.”

So Morse had stayed where he was, awaiting her return with impatience, and with an empty glass beside him. And when he awoke, he was still sitting there alone, awaiting her return with impatience, and with an empty glass beside him.

Wagner had long since run his course, and finally Morse got to his feet and turned off the CD player. He felt tired, hot, thirsty — and a sharp pain in his chest betokened another bout of indigestion. In the bathroom, he cleaned his teeth and dropped three Alka-Seltzer tablets into a glass of water; then he filled up the washbasin and thrice dipped his head into the cold water. The tablets had fizzed and dissolved and he downed the dosage at a single draught. Thence to his bedroom, where he took his blood-sugar level: 24.8 — almost off the scale. His own fault, since he’d forgotten to inject himself at lunchtime — making up for it now, though, with an extra four units of Actrapid insulin. Just to be on the safe side. Back in the bathroom, he drank two further glasses of cold water, acknowledging how surprisingly pleasing was its taste, since water had seldom figured prominently in his drinking habits. Finally he decided that a couple of Paracetamol would be appropriate. So he shook out the tablets on to his palm; shook out three in fact — and decided to take the three. Just to be on the safe side.

Suddenly he was feeling much better, his faith in this curious combination of assorted medicaments seemingly justified once more. Suddenly, too, he decided to follow his consultant’s somewhat despairing exhortation to take a bit of exercise occasionally. Why not? It was a warm and gentle summer’s day.

In the small entrance hall, he noticed the figure “2” on the window of his Ansafone. Pressing “Play” he listened to the first message:

Any semiremembrance of Debbie Richardson was lingering no longer, and Morse smiled happily to himself. He would ring immediately. But the second message had followed without a pause, and he was destined not to ring Sister McQueen that afternoon.

Instead he dialed HQ and finally got through to the young PC who had driven him out to Bullingdon the previous morning in an unmarked police car.

“Get the same car, Kershaw — nice, comfy seats — and pick me up from home quam celerrime.”

“Pardon?”

“Smartish!”

“Sir, I was just going off duty when you rang and I’ve—”

“Make it five minutes!”

Deeply puzzled, Morse walked back into the sitting room where he sat in the black-leather armchair; and where his right hand reached for whiskey once more as mentally he rehearsed that second, quite extraordinary message on the Ansafone: