The Remorseful Day

Chapter forty-seven

A wealth of police personnel and well-targeted inquiries had borne swift if, here and there, unexpected evidence — evidence which Sergeant Lewis (alone in his office late that Monday evening) was able to shift and to categorize at his own pace. Thus far, the facts, and the glosses on the facts, formulated themselves as follows in Lewis’s mind:

First. The shiny orange-red Stanley knife had been purchased, together with other items, from a hardware shop in Burford on the Saturday of the previous week (receipt unearthed in Barron’s Expenses File). Barron could still have been a murderer — of course, he could! — but quite certainly not with the knife he’d used that same morning as he stood almost atop the topmost section of the ladder and twisted the blade into the rotting, unresisting sill of the dormer window in Sheep Street.

Second. The stains on the overalls Barron had been wearing that morning had quite certainly not been human blood; but almost certainly smears of paint patented under the brand name Cremosin, two-pint tins of which were found in Barron’s garage, a space now used exclusively for building and decorating materials.

Third. On the morning of the Friday when Flynn and Repp had been murdered, Barron had left home around his usual time to spend some of the morning in Thame, where two properties were inviting tenders for renovation, for which Barron had been keen to submit his own estimates. Necessarily, of course, this evidence had been taken from Barron’s wife, Linda; and yet (already) a dated parking ticket for four hours that morning (South Oxon DC, Cattle Market) had been found in Barron’s van — evidence, if anything, to substantiate the claim that the builder had paid for a fairly extensive stay in the center of Thame on July 24.

Fourth. There appeared, as yet, no evidence whatever that Barron had received any monies from anywhere to match the payments so regularly stashed into the balances of both Flynn and Repp. In short, if Barron had been the third man — if he had duly received his own share of the spoils for the conspiracy of silence — there was no sign of it, so far.

They were not in any way decisive, these findings and non-findings. The trouble was they all seemed to be pointing in the same direction.

Or were they?

For example (thought Lewis), it was surely to be expected that Barron would have got rid of the murder weapon and bought himself a new knife if in fact he had used the former for the murders.

For example (thought Lewis), it was most unlikely that Barron had only one pair of overalls. And if someone with an extravagantly fanciful mind (Morse!) could entertain the idea that a pair of white overalls covered with red paint was a good disguise for a soaking of blood... well, it could be, perhaps.

For example (thought Lewis), why buy a four-hour parking ticket in Thame on the day of the murders unless to create an alibi? Builders would usually have little difficulty in parking outside the properties in question. All right, parking was getting a nightmare everywhere, even for police cars, but...

For example (thought Lewis), why shouldn’t Barron, like Flynn perhaps, have received his payoffs in banknotes, and kept them? No need to pay them into a bank or a building society. Why not put them in the loft? In the wardrobe? In a milk jug in the fridge? Like a few other self-employed builders, Barron might well be playing a canny little game with casual receipts, with ready-cash payments, with VAT evasions. And, if so, he would certainly not be overanxious to account for any largish sums of money regularly entrusted to some official depository.

Lewis himself had felt pretty certain that Barron was their man; Morse was absolutely convinced. And yet the evidence thus far gathered seemed to be stacking up a little bit the wrong way. Lewis knew it. He had ever been a champion of the cumulative-evidence approach to crime: a piece-by-piece aggregation against a suspect that gradually mounted into an impressively documented pile that could be forwarded to the DPP. All right! Morse’s method was occasionally very different. Yet many of the murders that the pair of them had solved together had been relatively uncomplicated: no real mystery, no real cunning, no real deviousness, no carefully woven web of deceit. Domestic stuff, next-door-neighbor stuff, most of it, with the husband returning home unexpectedly from work and finding his spouse abed with postman, milkman, gasman... builder?

But whichever way one looked at things, any direct evidence against the builder was proving surprisingly difficult to come by.

At 8:45 P.M., tired and hungry, Lewis decided that whatever further developments there were to be — and they were coming in all the time — he would have to take a break; and he drove home to Headington. But only after trying Morse’s number once more. Ringing tone. No answer.

Morse came into HQ three-quarters of an hour later and rang Lewis’s home number immediately. Ringing tone. Answer.

Resignedly, about to start his eggs and chips, Lewis brought Morse up to date with the information received, suggesting that it was, at this point, all a bit ambivalent and equivocal, although in truth Lewis made use of neither of these epithets himself.

Morse sounded mildly interested, giving his own verdict in somewhat pompous terms. He asserted that the character of the human condition was indeed “ambiguity,” the virtually inseparable mixture of the true and the false. But in the present case such apparent contradictions could be explained so very easily — in fact in exactly the way Lewis himself had just explained them. “And,” continued Morse, “you can be quite sure of one thing — no, two things: Barron murdered the pair of ‘em; then somebody murdered Barron. Get that clear in your head, and we might make a bit of progress. OK? I’ll see you in the morning.”

“Sir! Before you ring off. We tried to get you several times earlier but there was the engaged tone all the time.”

“That’s funny. I only remember making the one call.”

“I thought perhaps — you know, you seemed a bit whacked...”

“You’d be wrong, Lewis. I nearly spent some time in bed. Not quite, though. Goodnight.”

The dramatic news came in at twenty minutes to midnight, as Morse sat at home making out a rough draft of his will. He’d no immediate relatives remaining, none at all; and therefore instructions for the postmortem dissemination of all his worldly goods should not present too much of a complication. Nor did they. And he was writing out a fairish copy of a simple second draft — when the phone rang.

“What?”

...

“What?”

...

It was two minutes later before he spoke again:

“I’ll be over straightaway.”