Colin Dexter - The Remorseful Day

And on this occasion he was right.

Instead, he decided to continue the Socratic dialogue, though this time installing himself as Chief Inquisitor and making the far bolder hypothesis that if only the blurred outlines of the anonymous murderer could be adjusted more sharply, it was Harry Repp who would come into focus.

Don’t you think it would be easier, sir, for Debbie Richardson to take a change of clothes to him? Wouldn’t it be dangerous for him to go out to Lower Swinstead?

I don’t know, Lewis.

I asked you two questions.

I don’t know. I don’t know.

What do you think Harry Repp did?

I just don’t know.

What about the car? Where’s that? Come on! Back your hunch!

The car? Oh, I know where the car is, Lewis. It’s parked at the back of Oxford Railway Station.

Lucky Lewis!

He was walking up the steps to the station when the automatic doors opened in front of him, and Sergeant Dick Evans of the British Transport Police came toward him. Old friends, they greeted each other with appropriate cordiality.

“Know anything about a stolen car — R456 LJB?”

“Parked here?”

“Dunno,” Lewis admitted.

“Well, not as far as I know. I’ve been in Reading all day, though. Just got back. Bob Mitchell’d know, perhaps. He’s on duty here.”

“I’d better go and wake him up then.”

“He’s not in the office. I looked in a couple of minutes ago — door’s locked. Probably called out on some trouble somewhere. Saturday! Football yobos and all that.”

“But it’s not the football season,” protested Lewis.

“What’s that got to do with it?”

“You straight off home?”

“Well, yes. It’s getting late. If I can do anything to help an old mucker though... What’s the trouble?”

Lewis told him, and the two men walked down the steps and across to the station car park.

It had been more than a year since Lewis had visited the station complex, and he was immediately surprised to find that the previously fairly extensive car-parking space had been drastically reduced: the northern section had been taken over by “Another Prestigious Development — ”a series of Victorian-style town houses, built in attractive terra-cotta bricks, with white stuccoed lower stories; “spacious and luxurious” as the site board guaranteed.

“Year or two back,” volunteered Evans, “I’d’ve parked up there if I’d wanted to keep out of sight for a while. Used to be a bit dark and creepy late at night, if you got back late from Paddington on the milk float.”

Lewis nodded, but without comment. Late-night returns from concerts and operas in the capital had never figured large in the lifestyle of the Lewises. But now, in sunny daylight, the area seemed wholly benign, and still almost packed with cars marshaled there in semilegitimate rows.

“What if you come,” asked Lewis, “and you just can’t find a space?”

“Not easy, is it? You can always try Gloucester Green” (Evans pointed vaguely across toward Hythe Bridge Street) “or one of the side roads.”

The two sergeants walked together to the northern area of the park, away from the main road where, with any choice in the matter, any murderous villain (as well as Sergeant Evans) would surely have headed with an incriminating car. But things had changed. Parading the site, tall stanchions now stood there, topped with video cameras and floodlights. No guarantee of complete security perhaps, but a sufficient deterrent for casual car thieves.

“You could still squeeze one or two more cars in?” suggested Lewis (himself a wizard at vehicular maneuvering), pointing to a few square meters amid heaps of sand and piles of jagged half-bricks and broken tiles.

“Not if you’re worried about your suspension.”

“Which he wasn’t, Dick.”

“No sign of it though, is there?”

They walked systematically through the lines of cars down to the southern end of the car park, bounded by the Botley Road.

Again, nothing.

And the questions that had already worried Morse were worrying his sergeant now. Was there any sign of criminal activity here? Were they on some profitless pursuit of a questionable quarry?

Morse!

Top-of-the-head Morse!

Things just didn’t happen like that.

At bottom, any police investigation was a matter of pretty firm facts; of accumulating such facts; and of aggregating them into a hard core of evidence, on which suspicion could be progressively corroborated, until an arrest could be made, a charge brought, a prosecution formulated, and finally a case heard in a court of law. That’s how things happened.

A dispirited Lewis stood with Evans for only a few seconds longer before walking up to the exit booth, where a red-and-white-striped barrier was being intermittently raised as a few patrons returning early to Oxford inserted their parking tokens, and where a uniformed Transport Policeman, clearly not at the peak of physical condition, came running toward them:

“What the ‘ell are you doing here, Dick?”

“Just back from Reading, Bob. And what the ‘ell’s up with you? You know Sergeant Lewis here from HQ?”

Mitchell had regained some of his breath. “HQ? Huh! That’s exactly what’s up. Chap who said he was from HQ. Rang about a car — said it was parked here at the station...”

Evans finished the sentence for him. “But it wasn’t.”

“No. But I thought I’d look around a bit. This chap’d sounded pretty positive, like. So I went over to Gloucester Green — and Bingo! Just behind the Irish pub there.”

“You’ve got this chap’s number?” asked Lewis.

“In the office, yes. He said he couldn’t get here himself. Said he was tired. Huh!”

“He must have given his name?”

“‘Moss,’ I think it was. Look, I’ll just...”

A temporarily rejuvenated Mitchell was bounding up the station steps three at a time as Evans turned to Lewis:

“Reckon he misheard a bit.”

“Just a bit,” said Lewis, with quiet resignation.

Barry Edwards was another of the SOCO personnel called out that busy Saturday. In fact, simply because he lived only a short distance away along the Botley Road, he was the first of the team to arrive at the scene of the crime. A well-set, dark-haired man in his late twenties, he had a pair of diffident brown eyes that seemed to some of his colleagues strangely naive, as if he would ever be surprised by the scenes that would inevitably confront him in his new career.

His SOCO training had been completed only a few months previously, and now he was a full-fledged (civilian) officer, employed by the Thames Valley Police. Furthermore, thus far, he was enjoying his job. After leaving school, with a comparatively successful performance in the comparatively undemanding field of GCSE, he had worked as a supermarket shelf-filler, hospital porter, barman, and ironmonger’s shop assistant, before finally completing a police recruitment questionnaire and duly learning of the opportunities in his present profession. He had taken his chance; and he was enjoying his choice. He felt quite important sometimes, especially when he dealt off his own bat with some fairly minor affair, when (as he knew) he was important. And he’d looked forward to the time when he would be called out to a big job, to some major incident. Like murder. Like now — as he sensed immediately when he drove his van into the Gloucester Green Car Park. The full complement of the team would have been called in, and almost certainly he would witness, for the first time, the operation of those basic principles — preservation of the scene, continuity and noncontamination of evidence — which had guided his training in photography, fingerprinting, forensic labeling, and the meticulous procedure vital to all in situ investigations.