Colin Dexter: The Remorseful Day

Vienna...

The city Schubert had so rarely left; the city in which he’d gained so little recognition; where he’d died of typhoid fever — only thirty-one.

Not much of an innings, was it — thirty-one?

Morse leaned back, listened, and looked semicontentedly through the French window. In The Ballad of Reading Gaol , Oscar Wilde had spoken of that little patch of blue that prisoners call the sky; and Morse now contemplated that little patch of green that owners of North Oxford flats are wont to call the garden. Flowers had always meant something to Morse, even from his schooldays. Yet in truth it was more the nomenclature of the several species, and their context in the works of the great poets, that had compelled his imagination: fast-fading violets, the globèd peonies, the fields of asphodel... Indeed Morse was fully aware of the etymology and the mythological associations of the asphodel, although quite certainly he would never have recognized one of its kind had it flashed across a Technicolor screen.

It was still true though: as men grew older (so Morse told himself) the delights of the natural world grew ever more important. Not just the flowers, either. What about the birds?

Morse had reached the conclusion that if he were to be reincarnated (a prospect which seemed to him most blessedly remote), he would register as a part-time Quaker and devote a sizeable quota of his leisure hours to ornithology. This latter decision was consequent upon his realization, however late in the day, that life would be significantly impoverished should the birds no longer sing. And it was for this reason that, the previous week, he had taken out a year’s subscription to Bird-watching; taken out a copy of the RSPB’s Birdwatchers’ Guide from the Summertown Library; and purchased a secondhand pair of 152/1000m binoculars (£9.90) that he’d spotted in the window of the Oxfam Shop just down the Banbury Road. And to complete his program he had called in at the Summertown Pet Store and taken home a small wired cylinder packed with peanuts — a cylinder now suspended from a branch overhanging his garden. From the branch overhanging his garden.

He reached for the binoculars now and focused on an interesting specimen pecking away at the grass below the peanuts: a small bird, with a greyish crown, dark-brown bars across the dingy russet of its back, and paler underparts. As he watched, he sought earnestly to memorize this remarkable bird’s characteristics, so as to be able to match its variegated plumage against the appropriate illustration in the Guide.

Plenty of time for that though.

He leaned back once more and rejoiced in the radiant warmth of Schwarzkopf’s voice, following the English text that lay open on his lap: “You holy Art, when all my hope is shaken...”

When, too, a few moments later, his mood of pleasurable melancholy was shaken by three confident bursts on a front-door bell that to several of his neighbors sounded considerably over-decibeled, even for the hard-of-hearing.

“Not disturbing you?”

Morse made no direct reply, but his resigned look would have been sufficiently eloquent for most people.

Most people.

He opened the door widely — perforce needed so to do — in order to accommodate his unexpected visitor within the comparatively narrow entrance.

“I am disturbing you.”

“No, no! It’s just that...”

“Look, matey!” (Chief Superintendent Strange cocked an ear toward the lounge.) “I don’t give a dam if I’m disturbing you; pity about disturbing old Schubert, though.”

For the dozenth time in their acquaintance, Morse found himself quietly re-appraising the man who first beached and then readjusted his vast bulk in an armchair, with a series of expiratory grunts.

Morse had long known better than to ask Strange whether he wanted a drink, alcoholic or nonalcoholic. If Strange wanted a drink, of either variety, he would ask for it, immediately and unambiguously. But Morse did allow himself one question:

“You know you just said you didn’t give a dam. Do you know how you spell ‘dam’?”

“You spell it ‘d — a — m.’ Tiny Indian coin — that’s what a dam is. Surely you knew that?”

For the thirteenth time in their acquaintance...

“Is that a single malt you’re drinking there, Morse?”

It was only after Morse had filled, then refilled, his visitor’s glass that Strange came to the point of his evening call.

“The papers — even the tabloids — have been doing me proud. You read The Times yesterday?”

“I never read The Times.”

“What? The bloody paper’s there — there! — on the coffee table.”

“Just for the crossword — and the Letters page.”

“You don’t read the obituaries?”

“Well, perhaps just a glance sometimes.”

“To see if you’re there?”

“To see if some of them are younger than me.”

“I don’t follow you.”

“If they are younger, so a statistician once told me, I’ve got a slightly better chance of living on beyond the norm.”

“Mm.” Strange nodded vaguely. “You frightened of death?”

“A bit.”

Strange suddenly picked up his second half-full tumbler of Scotch and tossed it back at a draught like a visitor downing an initiatory vodka at the Russian Embassy.

“What about the telly, Morse? Did you watch Newsroom South-East last night?”

“I’ve got a TV — video as well. But I don’t seem to get round to watching anything and I can’t work the video very well.”

“Really? And how do you expect to understand what’s going on in the great big world out there? You’re supposed to know what’s going on. You’re a police officer, Morse!”

“I listen to the wireless—”

“Wireless? Where’ve you got to in life, matey? ‘Radio’ — that’s what they’ve been calling it these last thirty years.”

It was Morse’s turn to nod vaguely as Strange continued:

“Good job I got this done for you, then.”

Sorry, sir. Perhaps I am a bit behind the times — as well as The Times.

But Morse gave no voice to these latter thoughts as he slowly read the photocopied article that Strange had handed to him. Morse always read slowly.

Had Morse’s eyes narrowed slightly as he read the last few lines? If they had, he made no reference to whatever might have puzzled or interested him there.

“I trust it wasn’t you who split the infinitive, sir?”

“You never suspected that, surely? We’re all used to sloppy reporting, aren’t we?”

Morse nodded as he handed back the photocopied article.

“No! Keep it, Morse — I’ve got the original.”

“Very kind of you, sir, but...”

“But it interested you, perhaps?”

“Only the bit at the end, about the Radcliffe.”

“Why’s that?”

“Well, as you know, I was in there myself — after I was diagnosed.”

“Christ! You make it sound as if you’re the only one who’s ever been bloody diagnosed!”

Morse held his peace, for his memory needed no jogging: Strange himself had been a patient in the selfsame Radcliffe Infirmary a year or so before his own hospitalization. No one had known much about Strange’s troubles. There had been hushed rumors about “en-docrinological dysfunction”; but not everyone at Police HQ was happy about spelling or pronouncing or identifying such a polysyllabic ailment.