The Remorseful Day - читать бесплатно онлайн полную версию книги автора Colin Dexter (Chapter seventy-three) #74

Chapter seventy-three

When I have fears that I may cease to be

Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain...

(Keats, Sonnet)

Slowly Morse walked homeward from the Woodstock Arms, disappointed (as we have seen) if not wholly surprised, that the favorite in the Harrison Stakes had fallen (like Devon Loch) within sight of the winning post. But now, at last (or so he told himself), Morse guessed the whole truth. And feeling pleasingly over-beered, he had earlier taken the unusual step of ordering a bar snack and had enjoyed his liberally horse-radished beef sandwiches. He thought he would probably sleep well enough that night. After a while. Not just for a minute though. Truth was that he felt eager to continue (to finish off?) the notes he’d already been making on the Harrison murder, just in case something happened; just in case no one would be aware of the sweetly logical solution that had formulated itself in his mind that day.

Much earlier (Morse knew it) he should have paid far more attention to the thing that had puzzled him most about the Harrison murder: motive. Until now, Simon had fitted that bill pretty well, since Morse was sure that the mother-son relationship had been very close; much too close. Good thinking, that! Then, that very afternoon, a busty lusty lass sitting with Simon in the three-and-sixpennies had innocently scuppered his carefully considered scheme of things.

Once home, Morse poured himself a modestly liberal measure of Glenfiddich, and changed into a gaudily striped pair of pajamas that blossomed in white and purple and red... before continuing, indeed completing, his written record.

This evening in Lower Swinstead I spoke at quite some length with Mr. Bert Bagshaw. Why did I not follow my first instincts? Had I done so, I would have realized that any clues to that (most elusive) motivation for the murder of Yvonne Harrison would ever be likely to lie in the immediate locality itself, rather than in some external rape or alien burglary. Hardy’s yokels usually knew all about the goings-on in the Wessex villages; and their role is paralleled today by the likes of the Alfs and the Berts in the Cotswold public houses. Although I now know who murdered Yvonne Harrison, it will not be easy to prove the guilt of the accused party. I am reminded of the Greek philosopher Protagoras, who found it difficult to be dogmatic about the existence of the gods, partly because of the obscurity of the subject matter, and partly because of the brevity of human life.

But herewith I give my final thoughts on the murder of Yvonne Harrison, that crisply uniformed nurse who looked after me in hospital once (but once!) with such tempting, loving care...

He finished writing an hour later at 12:45 A.M.

Or perhaps, to be accurate, he wrote no more thereafter.

At which hour Lewis was somewhat uneasily asleep, not at all sure in his mind whether things were going well or going ill. Morse had insisted that it should be he, Lewis, who would be on hand when Frank Harrison and his lady passed through Arrivals at Heathrow. No problem there though. Still thirty-six hours to go before the scheduled British Airways flight was due to land, and Morse had been adamant that Harrison would be on that flight, and not flitting off to Katmandu or the Cayman Islands. Yet one thing was ever troublously disturbing Lewis’s thoughts: the real nature of the puzzling and secret relationship that had clearly existed between Morse and Yvonne Harrison.