Colin Dexter - The Remorseful Day

So he took his time as he sat in that small postal office; took his time as he wrote down a few words in his black notebook; then another few words; then asked another question; then another...

When finally he drove back to Oxford, Sergeant Dixon was feeling rather pleased with himself.

That letter-cum-envelope was still exercising Strange’s mind to its limits; but there seemed no cause for excitement. In late morning he had driven down to the Fingerprint Department at St. Aldate’s in Oxford — only to learn that there was little prospect of further enlightenment. The faint, oversmeared prints offered no hope: the envelope itself must have been handled by the original correspondent, by the collecting postman, by the sorter, by the delivering postman, by a member of the HQ post department, by Strange’s secretary, by Strange himself — and probably by a few extra intermediary persons to boot. How many fingers there, pray?

Forget it?

Forget it!

Handwriting? Only those red-felt capitals on the cover. Was it worth getting in some underemployed graphologist to estimate the correspondent’s potential criminality? To seek possible signs of his (?) childhood neglect, parental abuse, sexual perversion, drugs...?

Forget it?

Forget it!

The typewriter? God! How many typewriters were there to be found in Oxfordshire? In any case, Strange held the view that in the early years of the new millennium the streets of the UK’s major cities would be lined with past-sell-by-date typewriters and VDUs and computers and the rest. And how was he to find an obviously ancient typewriter for God’s sake, one with a tired and overworked ribbon of red and black? He might as well try to trace the animal inventory from the Ark.

Forget it?

Forget it!

What Strange needed now was new ideas.

What Strange needed now was Morse to be around.

Detective Sergeant Lewis of the Thames Valley CID kept himself pretty fit — very fit, really — in spite of a diet clogged daily with cholesterol. Quite simply, he had long held the view that some things went with other things. He had often heard, for example, that caviar was best washed down with iced champagne, although in truth his personal experience had occurred somewhat lower down the culinary ladder — with fried eggs necessarily complemented with chips and HP sauce; and (at breakfast time) with bacon, buttered mushrooms, well-grilled tomatoes, and soft fried bread. And, indeed, such was the breakfast that Mrs. Lewis had prepared at 7:15 A.M. on Monday, July 20, 1998.

It will be of no surprise, therefore, for the reader to learn that Sergeant Lewis felt pleasingly replete when, just before 8 A.M., he drove from Headington down the Ring Road to the Cutteslowe roundabout, where he turned north up to Police HQ at Kidlington. No problems. All the traffic was going the other way, down to Oxford City.

He was looking forward to the day.

He’d known that working with Morse was never going to be easy, but he couldn’t disguise the fact that his own service in the CID had been enriched immeasurably because of his close association, over so many years now, with his curmudgeonly, miserly, oddly vulnerable chief.

And now? There was the prospect of another case: a big, fat, juicy puzzle — like the first page of an Agatha Christie novel.

Most conscientiously, therefore (after Strange had spoken to him), Lewis had read through as much of the archive material as he could profitably assimilate; and as he drove along that bright summer’s morning he had a reasonably clear picture of the facts of the case, and of the hitherto ineffectual glosses put upon those facts by the CID’s former investigating officers.

From the very start (as Lewis learned) several theories, including of course burglary, had been entertained, although none of such theories had made anywhere near complete sense. There had been no observable signs of any struggle, for example. And although Yvonne Harrison was found naked, handcuffed, and gagged, she had apparently not been raped or tortured. In addition, it appeared most unlikely that she had been forcibly stripped of the clothes she’d been wearing, since the skimpy lace bra, the equally skimpy lace knickers, the black blouse, and the minimal white skirt were found neatly folded beside her bed.

Had she been lying there completely unclothed when some intruder had disturbed her? Surely it was an unusually early hour for her to be abed; and if she had been abed then, and if she had heard the front doorbell, or heard something, it seemed quite improbable that she would have confronted any burglar or (unknown?) caller without first putting something on to cover a body fully acknowledged to be beautiful. Such considerations had led the police to speculate on the likelihood of the murderer being well known to Mrs. Harrison; and indeed to speculate on the possibility of the murderer living in the immediate and very circumscribed vicinity, and of being rather too well known to Mrs. Harrison. Her husband was away from home a good deal, and few of the (strangely uncooperative?) villagers would have been too surprised, it seemed, if his wife conveniently forgot her marriage vows occasionally. In fact it had not been difficult to guess that most of the villagers, though loath to be signatories to any specific allegations, were fairly strongly in favor of some sort of “lover theory.” Yet although the Harrisons often appeared more than merely geographically distanced, no evidence was found of likely divorce proceedings.

Once Mr. Frank Harrison, with a very solid (if very unusual) alibi, had been eliminated from the inquiries, painstakingly strenuous investigations had produced (as one of the final reports admitted) no sustainable line of positive inquiry...

As he pulled off right, into Thames Valley Police HQ, Lewis was smiling quietly to himself. Morse would very soon have established some “sustainable line of positive inquiry.” Even if it was a wrong line.

So what?

Morse was very often wrong — at the start.

So what?

Morse was almost always right — at the finish.

The following is an extract from The Times , Monday, July 20, 1998:

Two psychics and a hypnotist have already been involved in the case. It has caught the attention of the Still a Mystery series on ITV, although it has yet to be promoted to the Premier Division of such classical unsolved cases as the disappearance of Lord Lucan, the fate of the racehorse Shergar. or the quest for the Holy Grail itself.

Although the murder of Yvonne Harrison has long been out of the immediate headlines, we are led to believe that the box-files concerning the ease, stacked on the shelves at Thames Valley Police HQ, are definitely not accumulating layer upon layer of undisturbed dust. After all it is only just over a year since the body of Mrs. Harrison was discovered in the living room of her Grade-II-listed Georgian house, set in four acres of wooded ground in the Cotswold village of Lower Swinstead. The home. “The Windhovers.” was sold for £350.000 fairly soon after the murder, and the family have long since left the quiet leafy village all except Yvonne, of course, who is buried in the small, neatly mown churchyard of St. Mary’s, where, in the form of a Christian cross, a low. wooden stake is the only memorial to the body reposing beneath it: