The Remorseful Day

Chapter seventy-eight

Morse had always been more closely attuned to life’s adagios than its allegros; and his home reflected such a melancholic temperament. The pastel-colored walls, haunted by the music of Wagner, Bruckner, and Mahler, were decorated with somber-toned reproductions of Rembrandt, Vermeer, and Atkinson Grimshaw; and lined, in most rooms both upstairs and down, with long shelves of the poets and the novelists.

The whole place now seemed so very still as Lewis picked up two pints of semiskimmed Co-op milk from the porch, picked up four letters from the doormat, and entered.

In the study upstairs there were several signs (as Lewis already knew) of a sunnier temperament: the room was decorated in a sun-bed tan, terra-cotta, and white, with a bright Matisse hanging on the only wall free of the ubiquitous books, CDs, and cassettes. A red angle-lamp stood on the desk with, beside it, a bottle of Glenfiddich, virtually empty, and a cut-glass tumbler, completely empty. Morse had timed his exit fairly satisfactorily.

Lewis sat down and quickly looked through the letters: BT; British Diabetic Association; Lloyds Bank; Oxford Brookes University. Nothing too personal perhaps in any of them, but he left them there unopened. He fully realized there would be quite a few details to be sorted out soon by someone. Not by him though. He had but the single mission there.

In the second drawer down on the right, he found six photographs and took them out. An old black-and-white snap of a middle-aged man and woman, the man showing facial lineaments similar to Morse’s. A studio portrait of a fair-haired young woman, with a written message on the back: “Like you I wish so much that things could have been different — love always — W.” Another smaller photograph, with a brief sentence in Morse’s own hand: “Sue Widdowson before she was arrested.” A holiday shot of a young couple on a beach somewhere, the dark-headed bronzed young woman in a white bikini smiling broadly, the young man’s right arm around her shoulders, and (again) some writing on the back “I only look happy. I miss you like crazy!!! Ellie.” Clipped to a photograph of a smartly attractive woman, in the uniform of a hospital sister, was a brief letter under a Carlisle address and telephone number: “I understand. I just can’t help wondering how we would have been together, that’s all. I’d have had to sacrifice a bit of independence too you know! Always remember my love for you. J.” Only the one other photograph: that of Morse and Lewis standing next to each other beside the Jaguar, with no writing on the back at all.

Lewis tried the Carlisle number; with no success.

On the floor to the right of the desk lay a buff-colored folder, its contents splayed out somewhat, as if perhaps it may have been knocked down accidentally; and he picked it up. On the front was written: “For the attn. of Lewis.”

The top sheet was the printed form d1/d2, issued by the Department of Human Anatomy in South Parks Road, the second section duly signed by the donor; and countersigned by the same man who had witnessed the validity of the second single sheet of A4 to which Lewis now turned his attention:

For several minutes, Lewis sat where he was, unmoving, but deeply moved. Why in heaven Morse should have shown such bitterness toward the Church, he couldn’t know; and wouldn’t know. And why on earth Morse had remembered him with such...

His thoughts still in confusion, Lewis tried the Carlisle number again; again without success.

He washed out the empty tumbler in the bathroom, and returned to the study, where he poured himself the last half-inch of Glenfiddich, sat down again, silently raised his glass, and drained it.

He looked down at the several sheets of paper remaining in the folder, marked on the first page “Notes on the Harrison Case,” and all written in Morse’s hand, that same small upright script that Lewis had found in the Harrison files. He’d go through it all later though. For the moment he placed the other two single sheets on the top, and was preparing to leave, when he opened the second drawer down again, took out the photograph of the Jaguar, and slipped it into the folder — on top of everything else.

And noticed something else there, pushed to the back of the drawer.

A pair of handcuffs.