The Remorseful Day

Chapter fifty-eight

“Been trying to get you all day, sir.”

“I’ve had other things to do, you know.”

“You just said you’d wanted a rest day.”

“Come in! Fancy a quick noggin?”

Lewis hesitated. “Why not?”

“Ye gods! You must have had a bad day — or was it a good day?”

“I’ve had a good day, and so have you.”

Morse now listened quietly to the extraordinary news from Andrews, though without any sign of triumphalism.

Equally quietly he slowly read through Lewis’s typed reports. Then read them a second time.

“Your orthography has come on enormously since they put that spell-check system into the word processor.”

“Don’t you have any problems with spellings — sometimes?”

“Only with ‘proceed’.”

“Where does this all leave us, sir?”

“Things are moving fast.”

“We’re getting near the end, you mean?”

“We were always near the end.”

“So what do you think happened?”

“Shan’t ever know for certain, shall we? With all three of them dead, all three of them murdered—”

“Only two, surely?”

“If you say so, Lewis. If you say so.”

“You’re not suggesting—?”

But Morse was not to be deflected:

“There were three people who had a vested interest in Yvonne Harrison’s murder: Repp, Barron, and Flynn. Repp — because he’d been casing the property for a burglary; because he happened to be there on the night of the murder; and because he knew who the murderer was. Barron — a man with an SAS background, who’d found a woman who could gratify his sexual fantasies, and who also knew who the murderer was — because he was the fellow in bed with Yvonne that night. Flynn — the fellow who lied about the events that night and who, like the other two, knew who the murderer was. The three of them had got their clutches into the only person who could pay their price, the person who did pay their price: Frank Harrison. He was becoming a fatter and fatter cat in his banking business, so they thought — and, rightly it seems. So they were ready to up the stakes. And on the day Repp was released, they’d agreed to meet and coordinate some plan of action. But things went wrong. Pretty certainly they somehow discovered that they’d each been treated differently — dangerously differently; and bitterness, jealousy, rivalry, all surfaced, and there was one almighty row. I’ve said all this before! They’d stopped, perhaps in a lay-by along the A34 — take your pick! — and Barron got his Stanley knife out and threatened Flynn, the man who’d just happened to be at the taxi-rank that night, and who was now overplaying his hand. And soon it must have occurred to the other two that half a cake is considerably better than a third of one; and Flynn was murdered and dumped at Redbridge in those black bags, the ones the owner of the car was originally going to cart off to the rubbish dump.”

“Waste Disposal Centre.”

“After that? Who knows? But suddenly the situation was becoming more dangerous still. If half a cake is better than a third, what about a whole cake? So the two of them must have wrangled about the best way to capitalize on Flynn’s beneficial departure... But how and why and when and where things went on from there, I’ve no more idea than you have — and that’s not saying much, is it?”

“No,” said Lewis flatly.

Morse looked at his sergeant, and smiled wearily:

“You’re annoyed, aren’t you?”

“Annoyed? What about?”

“Dixon.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“You’d’ve accused me of wasting police resources. Do you know what I got him to do today?”

“Vaguely.”

“Well, let me tell you, specifically. First, I asked him to do a bit of fourth-grade clerical stuff at Oxpens, and get copies of those attending lipreading classes these last five years. And he did it. Very efficiently. He found Simon Harrison’s name there, for three years; and Paddy Flynn’s there, for two years — overlapping. Very interesting that, because they must have known each other!

“Second, I asked Dixon to find out more about Flynn. Flynn was known as an amateur entertainer round the local pubs and clubs in Oxfordshire, playing the clarinet and compering his little pop group. Till about three years ago, when things started to go wrong: he began to experience trouble with his hearing — something that later compromised his job with Radio Taxis; and at about the same time, according to the postmortem details, he had a lot of dental trouble which meant he had to have all his top-front teeth extracted. And that’s not a good thing for a clarinet player.”

“It’s not?”

“Well-known fact. Louis Armstrong had the same sort of trouble.”

“He was a trumpet player!”

“Same sort of thing! Then I asked Dixon to look into Mrs. Holmes’s background. I had the impression when we spoke to her that she might have been a most attractive woman when she was younger; and I just wondered... I got Dixon to check up on her, that’s all. Seems she used to live in Lower Swinstead before she moved to Burford and, well, look at things for yourself.”

Lewis read Dixon’s notes:

“They don’t call them ‘illegitimate’ these days, and it should be ‘Register’ Office.”

Morse nodded. “You’re missing the main point, though.”

“I am?”

“Remember when we were in the village pub? Remember Biffen greeting his customers?”

Yes. Lewis remembered that “Evening, Mr. Thomas”: the young fellow forever playing the fruit machine, the young fellow who had spoken to him in the car park.

“You mean they’re half-brothers? Roy Holmes and Alan Thomas?”

“Why not full brothers — with the same father? I knew there was something familiar about young Holmes... Anyway, there it is. Elizabeth Thomas was an unmarried mum in the village; Alan was already seven when his younger brother was born; and everybody knew him as Alan Thomas. So he kept the name when his mother married a few months later, and kept it when he went along with the family to live in Burford.”

“Interesting enough — but is it important?”

“I don’t know,” said Morse slowly. “I just don’t know. But it throws up one or two new ideas.”

“If you say so, sir. Aren’t you going to offer me another Scotch, by the way?”

What a strange day it had been! Even stranger, perhaps, in that Morse now left his own glass unreplenished.

“Shall I tell you something else, Lewis? You’d never believe it, but I’ve been watching the telly this afternoon. I picked up one of those RSPB videos.”

“You mean you know how to work the machine?”

“It’s Strange’s fault. Genuine bird-watcher, Strange! He told me the sparrow population in North Oxford’s down by fifty percent these last few years; and he told me the sparrow hawks along Squitchey Lane are getting fatter. So I bought this video on birds of prey — you know, eagles, falcons, hobbies, merlins, red kites... did you hear me, Lewis? Red kites.”

Lewis looked puzzled. “I’m not with you.”

“Your interview with Simon Harrison. He’s a phoney bird-watcher, that fellow. Said he’d been off to Llandudno to try to spot a red kite. Llandudno! He meant Llandovery, Lewis — that was the only home of the red kite in the UK until they introduced a few near Stokenchurch.”

“I didn’t know you were an expert—”

“I’m not. And nor is Simon Harrison. His alibi for Monday morning’s worthless. He wouldn’t know a red kite from a red cabbage.”

Unaccustomedly relaxed, Lewis sipped his Glenfiddich and involuntarily repeated an earlier comment: “Interesting enough — but is it important?”

“I just don’t know,” said Morse slowly, himself now involuntarily repeating an earlier comment: “But it throws up one or two new ideas...”

“Perhaps they’ve all been telling us a few lies, sir... except Mrs. Barron, perhaps.”

Morse smiled. “Don’t you mean especially Mrs. Barron?”