The Remorseful Day

Chapter sixty-eight

Lewis had not been surprised — no, certainly not that. But disappointed? Yes. Oh yes! And Morse had been aware of his reaction, clearly anticipating it, yet saying nothing to lessen the impact of the revelation. The relationship between them would never be quite the same again, Lewis realized that. It wasn’t at all the fact that Morse had driven out one evening (two evenings? ten evenings?) to meet a seductively attractive woman. Lewis had seen the sharply focused photographs of her body stretched out on the bed that night; and it could be no great wonder that many a man, young and old alike, had lusted after a woman such as that. No, it was something else. It was the out-of-character, underhand way that Morse had allowed the dishonest subterfuge to linger on and on from the beginning of the case.

Indeed Morse had been less than wholly forthcoming in his confession even now, Lewis was fairly sure of it. Yes, Morse agreed, he had gained access to the file containing the intimate correspondence addressed to Y H. Yes, he had “appropriated” the handcuffs, police handcuffs, with a number stamped on them that could easily be traced back to the officer issued with them, in this case to Morse himself. And yes (he readily admitted it) he had “withdrawn” the relevant sheet of the issue-numbers kept at HQ. As far as the partial letter was concerned (Morse accepted immediately that it was in his own hand) Lewis had hoped, in an old-fashioned sort of way, that Morse had in fact never been invited to Lower Swinstead, in spite of his own plea for some communication from her; in spite of that almost school-boyish business about looking through his mail every morning in the hope of finding something from her. And that was about it. Morse had wanted to cover up something of which he was rather ashamed and very embarrassed; just wanted his own name, previously his own good name, never to be associated with the life — and the death — of Yvonne Harrison. He’d been careless about leaving that single page of a longer letter but (as he asked Lewis to agree) it was hardly an incriminating piece of evidence. What Morse stoutly refused to accept was that what he had done, however cowardly and dishonest and foolish, had in any way jeopardized the course of the original inquiry, which he now had the nerve to assert had been conducted with almost unprecedented incompetence. Such arrogance was of course not all that unusual; yet in the present circumstances it seemed to Lewis quite gratuitously cheap.

Leaving all such considerations aside though, what stuck in Lewis’s throat was that initial, duplicitous refusal on Morse’s part to have anything to do with the original case. Agreed, once he had been drafted on to what seemed to both Lewis and Strange the second half of the same case, Morse had risen to his accustomed heights of logical analysis and depths of human understanding. Agreed, he had (as usual) been several furlongs ahead of the field — and, for once, on the right racecourse from the “off.”

Who else but Morse could have put forward the quite extraordinary hypotheses made earlier that morning about the murder of J. Barron, Builder? The hypothesis (seemingly confirmed) that Roy Holmes — who’d do almost anything to get drugs and who’d do absolutely anything when he was on drugs — was having a sexual relationship with Christine Coverley; the hypothesis (seemingly confirmed) that the weirdly incongruous partnership had resulted from some incident or series of incidents at school; that the youth had agreed, for money, to make a statement to the police about a supposedly accidental collision with a high ladder — a statement that was wholly untrue, because Roy Holmes had been nowhere near Sheep Street that morning; the hypothesis (to be confirmed!) that it was Frank Harrison who had murdered Barron, and who had engineered an ingenious scheme whereby all suspicion would be diverted both from himself and from Simon — the scheme itself probably prompted by another son, by Allen Thomas, who regularly gathered a good deal of information from his vantage point in the Maiden’s Arms and who regularly passed it on to his father, the man at the center of everything.

Lewis nodded to himself. No wonder Frank Harrison had gone to earth somewhere. Not for long though, surely. He had nowhere to go; nowhere to hide. Airports and seaports had been apprised of his passport number, and photographs would be on their way. Unless it was too late.

It was Morse’s suggestion that the two of them together should interview Roy Holmes and Christine Coverley, with Lewis invited to do most of the talking with the youth. “I detest him, Lewis! And you’re better at those sorts of things than I am.” It was flattering, but it didn’t work. Morse was sadly wrong if he thought he could so easily re-establish some degree of integrity in the eyes of his sergeant.

In midmorning, Lewis left the office without asking Morse if he would like a coffee. He knew that the omission would be noted; he knew that Morse would feel the hurt.

Not so.

When Lewis returned ten minutes later, he found Morse leaning back and beaming happily.

“Fetch me a coffee, will you, Lewis! No sugar — we diabetics, you know... Something to celebrate.” The Times was folded back in quarters in front of him, the crossword grid completely filled in. “Six and a half minutes! I’ve never done it quicker.”

“Shouldn’t that be ‘more quickly’?”

“Good man! You’re learning at last. You see it’s a question, as I’ve told you, of the comparative adjective and the comparative adverb. If you say—”

The phone rang.

Dixon.

For the moment Roy Holmes was not to be found: he wasn’t at home; he wasn’t anywhere. Did Morse want him to keep looking?

“What the hell do you think?” Morse had snapped at him. “You remember the old proverb? If at first you don’t succeed, don’t take up hang gliding.”

The brief telephone conversation pleased Lewis, and for a few seconds he wondered if he was being a little unfair in his judgment on Morse. But only for a few seconds.

“Not the only one we can’t find, sir.”

“Frank Harrison, you mean? Ye-es. I’m a bit puzzled about him. He might be a crook — he is a crook — but he’s not a fool. He’s an experienced, hard-nosed, single-minded, rich banker, and if you’re all those things you don’t suddenly put your fingers in the—”

The phone rang.

Kershaw.

Morse listened, saying nothing; but the eyes that lifted to look across the desk into Lewis’s face, if not wholly surprised, seemed very disappointed and very sad. Much as two hours earlier Lewis’s own eyes had looked.

In midafternoon (Morse was no longer at HQ) the phone rang.

Swiss Helvetia Bank.

“Could we speak to Superintendent Lewis, please?”

“Sergeant Lewis speaking.”