The Remorseful Day

epilogue

“Didn’t you want any food?”

“No thank you, sir. I’ve got a meal waiting at home.”

“Ah yes. Of course.”

“And I didn’t particularly want to watch Dixon eating doughnuts.”

“No, I understand.” Strange lowered himself rather gingerly on to the inappropriately small chair opposite. “Talking of eating, Lewis, what the hell’s eating you, pray?”

As he’d requested (and as we have seen) Lewis had nothing further to do with the Harrison case. He had tried, and with some considerable success, to distance himself from the whole affair, even from thinking about it. There was just that one persistent, niggling worry that tugged away at his mind like some overindulged infant tugging away at its mother’s skirts in a supermarket: the knowledge that Morse, on his own admission, and for the first time in their collaboration, had acted dishonestly and dishonorably.

He looked up at Strange.

“What makes you think something’s eating me?”

“Come on, Lewis! I wasn’t born yesterday.”

So Lewis told him.

Told him of the unease he’d felt from the beginning of the case: that Morse had known far too little about it, and then again far too much; that Morse had originally voiced such vehement opposition to taking on the case, and yet had spent the last days of his life doing little else than trying to fathom its complexity.

“And that’s all that’s been bothering you?”

“All?”

“Look! Tell me! What’s the very worst thing you think he could have done? There’s this attractive nurse pulling him through a serious illness in hospital — a place where patients can get a bit low, and a bit vulnerable. Nurses, too, for that matter. And she fell for him a bit—”

“How do you know that?”

“She told me so. She told me one night in hospital when she was looking after me! Morse fell for her a bit, too — anybody would! — and after he’s discharged he writes and asks her why she’s not been in touch with him. But she doesn’t write back, although she keeps his letter. Know why, Lewis? Because she doesn’t really know how to cope with being in love herself.”

“How do you know that?”

“Does it matter? When she was murdered — well, you know the rest. Morse was on another case at the time — you were on it with him, for God’s sake! And he said it was too much for the pair of you to take on another.”

“Only after he’d found his own letter.”

“Lewis!”

“Only after he’d recognized the handcuffs.”

“Lewis! Listen! Nothing Morse did then — nothing — affected that inquiry in the slightest way. Yvonne had kept some letters from her men friends, the kinkies and the straights alike. She certainly didn’t keep any from Barron. Maybe because he never wrote any, I dunno. Maybe because she just didn’t want to.”

“Just the ones from her favorite clients.”

“You know that. You’ve seen them.”

“Some of them,” said Lewis slowly.

“Well I saw all the bloody letters!”

“Including the one from Morse.”

“Not a crime you know, writing a letter. It was immaterial anyway, as I keep trying to tell you.” Strange looked exasperated. “It’s just that it would have been awkward, wouldn’t it? Bloody awkward! I wanted to protect the silly sod. You never thought he was a saint, did you?”

Lewis was silent for a while. No. He’d never thought of Morse as a possible candidate for sanctification.

But there was something wrong about what he’d just heard.

“So you saw the letter before Morse saw it, is that what you’re saying?”

“Morse never saw the letter, not till you showed him that page of it. You see, Lewis, I took it — not Morse.”

“And you didn’t check—”

“Couldn’t have done, could I? It was a longish letter. But I didn’t read it, so I wouldn’t have spotted if there was any gap.”

“So it was you who kept some of the evidence separate?”

“Afraid so, yes. I was scared stiff one of my letters might be there, if you want the truth. And as things turned out it just became impossible for me to put that stuff back in the folder while the original inquiry was still going on.”

“So you got a new box-file when the case was reopened...”

Strange nodded. “Always felt guilty about it but—”

“Why didn’t Morse spot the page you’d missed?”

“Perhaps he didn’t look all that carefully. Not his way usually, was it? Perhaps he wasn’t too interested in the literary shortcomings of her other admirers. Not very fond of spelling mistakes, now was he...? or perhaps he just felt the letters were too private, like he’d hoped his own letter would be. How do I know? What I do know is that he wasn’t looking for a list of lovers who might have been in bed with Yvonne that night. Somehow he was convinced he knew who the man was. He told me who it was; and he told you who it was. And he was right.”

Lewis nodded.

But the supermarket brat was giving a final tug.

“Plenty of letters and none of them any help, I agree, sir. But just the one pair of handcuffs! And Morse realized there’d be no problem in tracing them, so he destroyed the issue list. And we both know why, don’t we, sir? Because they were his.”

“Come off it, Lewis! There’s a hundred and one worse things in life than him giving some bloody cuffs he’d never used once in his life to some woman who’d asked him for them — whatever the reason.”

Slowly shaking his head, Lewis stared down at the canteen carpet disconsolately.

“It’s just that he seems not quite the man...”

“And you can’t forgive him for that.”

“Course I can forgive him! Just a bit of a jolt, that’s all. Can’t you understand that? After all those years we were together?”

“That’s what’s really eating you, isn’t it? Be honest! It’s just that you don’t think as much of old Morse as you used to.”

“Not quite as much, no.”

Strange struggled to his feet. “Must be off. Good to talk. I’d better get back downstairs.”

Lewis got to his feet. “Mrs. Lewis sends her very best wishes, sir.”

The two policemen shook hands, and the interesting exchange was apparently over.

But not so.

Halfway to the canteen exit, Strange suddenly turned round and came back to the table.

“Do you remember those issue lists for handcuffs, Lewis?”

“It’s a long time ago...”

“Well, they’re just handwritten lists, kept up to date in a series of columns: date, name, rank, serial number. Just like this.” Strange took a folded sheet of A4 from an inside pocket. “But you remember the serial number on the pair you found in Morse’s drawer?”

“Nine-two-two.”

He handed the sheet to Lewis. “You’ve got a good memory!”

“Where did you get this?”

“Someone took it from HQ, Lewis. Morse did!”

Lewis looked down at the list, but could find no mention of Morse’s name. Could see another name though — at the seventh entry down, along with the other details in the neatly ruled lines:

“You mean...?”

“I mean, Lewis, that Morse knew I was having an affair with Yvonne Harrison. I don’t know how he knew, but he always tended to know things, didn’t he? He pinched that form, and he kept it till after the wife’s funeral. Then he gave it to me. Said it would be useless without the cuffs, which he said he was going to keep anyway, just in case I ever did anything bloody stupid. And he said exactly what I said to you a few minutes ago: nothing — nothing — that happened then had affected the inquiry in the slightest way. Is that clear, Lewis?”

Yes it was clear. “You’re saying that all Morse did was to save you... and save Mrs. Strange...”

“It would have broken her to pieces,” said Strange very quietly. “And me. Would have broken both of us to pieces.”

“She never knew?”

“Never had the faintest idea. Thanks to Morse.”

Lewis was silent.

“Just like you, eh? About lots of things. You never had the faintest idea, for example, that I re-opened the Harrison case on the basis of a couple of bogus telephone calls, now did you?”

“You mean—?”

“I mean there were no telephone calls. I made ‘em up myself. Both of ‘em.”

“I just didn’t realize...”

“Nobody did, except Morse of course. He guessed straightaway. But I’d like to bet he never told you! He just didn’t want to let me down, that’s all.”

“Why didn’t he tell me all this though? It would have made such a lot of difference... at the end...”

“I dunno. Always an independent sod, wasn’t he? And always had that great big streak of loyalty and integrity somewhere deep inside him. But you don’t need me to tell you that. So he was never worried too much about what people thought of him. He certainly didn’t give two monkeys what I thought of him, at least most of the time. In fact the only person he did want to think well of him was you, Lewis. So let me tell you something else. It’s one helluva job having to live with guilt, as I’ve done. Almost everybody discovers the same, you know that. Frank Harrison did, didn’t he? Sarah Harrison, too. It’s something I hope you’ll never have to go through yourself. Not that you ever will. Nor did Morse though. He once told me that the guiltiest he ever felt in his life was when a couple of the lads saw him flicking through a girlie magazine in the Summertown newsagent’s. So... So just keep thinking well of him, Lewis — that’s all I ask.”

The former Chief Superintendent lumbered across the still-deserted canteen to join the jollifications below.

But Lewis sat where he was.

Apart from the middle-aged woman at the counter reading the Sun, there seemed no one else there. And after looking around him as guiltily as Morse must have done in the Summertown newsagent’s, for a little while, in his desolation, he wept silently.