The Remorseful Day

Chapter sixty-seven

The following morning Lewis was pleased with himself. Before Morse arrived, he’d turned to the Police Gazette’s “Puzzle Corner” and easily solved the challenge there:

“Initially—” that was the clue; and once you twigged it, the answer stared you in the face vertically.

Morse made an appearance at 9:10 A.M., looking (in Lewis’s view) a little fitter than of late.

“Want to test your brain, sir?”

“Certainly not!”

Lewis pushed the puzzle across the desk, and Morse considered it, though for no more than a few seconds:

“Do you know the answer?”

“Easy! ‘Initially,’ sir — that’s what you’ve got to think about. Just look at the first letters. Cyclist? Get it?”

“I thought the question was what would an intelligent cyclist’s thought be.”

“I don’t quite follow.”

“Not difficult surely, Lewis? You’ve just got the answer wrong, that’s all. Any intelligent cyclist, any bright bus driver — anyone! — would think exactly the same thing immediately.”

“They would?”

“The question’s phony. Based on a false premise, isn’t it? Based on the assumption that the facts you’ve been given are true.”

“You mean they’re not?”

“Tosca? Written by Verdi?”

Oh dear! “You were quick to spot that.”

Morse grinned. “Not really. They often ask me to submit a little brainteaser to the Gazette.”

“You mean—?”

Morse nodded. “And talking of false premises, that’s been a big part of our trouble. We’ve both been trying to check up on such a lot of things, haven’t we? But there’s one thing we’ve been prepared to accept without one ha’poth of evidence. So we’ll get on to that without delay. Couple of cars we’ll need. I’ll just give Dixon a ring—”

Lewis got to his feet. “I can deal with all that, sir.”

“Si’ down, Lewis! I want to talk to you.”

Through the glass-paneled door Dixon finally saw the silhouette moving toward him: a woman in a wheelchair who brusquely informed him that she knew nothing of the whereabouts of her son. He had not been home the previous evening. He had a key. He was sometimes out all night, yes. No, she didn’t know where. And if it was of any interest to the police, she didn’t care — didn’t bloody well care.

There was no reply to PC Kershaw’s importunate ringing and knocking. But at last he was able to locate the mildly disgruntled middle-aged woman who looked after the two “lets”; and who accompanied him back to the ground-floor flat. She appeared to have little affection for either of the two lessees, although when she opened the door she must have felt a horrified shock of sympathy for one of them.

Christine Coverley lay supine on a sheepskin rug in front of an unlit electric fire. She was wearing a summery, sleeveless, salmon-pink dress, her arms very white, hands palm-upward, with each of her wrists slashed deeply and neatly across. A black-handled kitchen knife lay beside her left shoulder.

Young Kershaw was unused to such horrors; and over the next few days the visual image was to refigure repeatedly in his nightmares. Two patches on the rug were deeply steeped in blood; and Kershaw was reminded of the Welsh hill farm where he’d once stayed and where the backs of each of the owner’s sheep had been daubed with a dye of the deepest crimson.

No note was found by Kershaw; indeed no note was found by anyone afterward. It was as if Christine had left this world with a despair she’d found incommunicable to anyone: even to her parents; even to the uncouth lout who penetrated her so pleasurably now, though at first against her will; even to the rather nice police inspector who’d seemed to her to understand so much about her. Far too much... including (she’d known it!) the fact that she had lied. Roy could never have been cycling along Sheep Street when Barron fell to his death because at that very moment he had been in bed with her...