Colin Dexter: The Remorseful Day

“You know why I brought that cutting, Morse?”

“No! And to be honest with you, I don’t much care. I’m on furlough, you know that. The quack tells me I’m run down — blood sugar far too high — blood pressure far too high. Says I need to have a quiet little rest-cure and try to forget the great big world out there, as you call it.”

“Some of us can’t forget it though, can we?” Strange spoke the words very softly, and Morse got to his feet and turned off the CD player.

“Not one of your greatest triumphs that case, was it?”

“One of the few — very few, Morse — I got no-bloody-where with. And it wasn’t exactly mine, either, as you know. But it was my responsibility, that’s all. Still is.”

“What’s all this got to do with me?”

Strange further expanded his gargantuan girth as he further expounded:

“I thought, you know, with the wife... and all that... I thought it’d help to stay in the Force another year. But...”

Morse nodded sympathetically. Strange’s wife had died very suddenly a year previously, victim of a coronary thrombosis which should surely never have afflicted one so slim, so cautious, so physically fit. She’d been an unlovely woman, Mrs. Strange — outwardly timid and inwardly bullying; yet a woman to whom by all accounts Strange had been deeply attached. Friends had spoken of a “tight” marriage; and most agreed that the widower would have been wholly lost on his own, at least for some while, had he jacked things in (as he’d intended) the previous September. And in the end he’d been persuaded to reconsider his position — and to continue for a further year. But he’d been uneasy back at HQ: a sort of supernumerary Super, feeling like a retired schoolmaster returning to a Common Room. A mistake. Morse knew it. Strange knew it.

“I still don’t see what it’s got to do with me, sir.”

“I want the case reopened — not that it’s ever been closed, of course. It worries me, you see. We should have got further than we did.”

“I still—”

“I’d like you to look at the case again. If anyone can crack it, you can. Know why? Because you’re just plain bloody lucky, Morse, that’s why! And I want this case solved. ”

Lucky?

Morse had always believed that luck played a bigger part in life than was acknowledged by many people — certainly by those distinguished personages who saw their personal merit as the only cause of their appropriate eminence. Yet as he looked back over his own life and career Morse had never considered his own lot a particularly lucky one, not at least in what folk referred to as the affairs of the heart. Strange may have had a point though, for without doubt his record with the Thames Valley CID was the envy of most of his colleagues — his success rate the result, as Morse analyzed the matter, of all sorts of factors: a curious combination of hard thinking, hard drinking (the two, for Morse, being synonymous), hard work (usually undertaken by Sergeant Lewis), and, yes, a sprinkling here and there of good fortune. The Romans had poured their libations not only to Jupiter and Venus and their associate deities in the Pantheon, but also to Fortuna, the goddess of good luck.

Lucky, then?

Well, a bit.

It was high time Morse said something:

“Why the Lower Swinstead murder? What’s wrong with the Hampton Poyle murder, the Cowley murder...?”

“Nothing to do with me, either of ‘em.”

“That’s the only reason then? Just to leave a clean slate behind you?”

For a few moments Strange appeared uncomfortable: “It’s partly that, yes, but...”

“The Chief Constable wouldn’t look at any new investigation — not a serious investigation.”

“Not unless we had some new evidence.”

“Which in our case, as the poet said, we have not got.”

“This fellow that rang—”

“No end of people ring. We both know that, sir.”

“—rang twice. He knows something. I’m sure of it.”

“Did you speak to him yourself?”

“No. He spoke to the girl on the switchboard. Didn’t want to be put through to anybody, he said. Just wanted to leave a message.”

“For you?”

“Yes.”

“A ‘he,’ you say?”

“Not much doubt about that.”

“Surely from the recordings...?”

“We can’t record every crazy sod who rings up and asks what the bloody time is, you know that!”

“Not much to go on.”

“Twice , Morse? The first time on the anniversary of the murder? Come off it! We’ve got a moral duty to reopen the case. Can’t you understand that?”

Morse shook his head. “Two anonymous phone calls? Just isn’t worth the candle.”

And suddenly — why was this? — Strange seemed at ease again as he sank back even further in his chair:

“You’re right, of course you are. The case wouldn’t be worth re-opening — unless” (Strange paused for effect, his voice now affable and bland) “unless our caller — identity cloaked in anonymity, Morse — had presented us with some... some new evidence. And , after my appeal, my nationally reported appeal, we’re going to get some more! I’m not just thinking of another telephone call from our friend either, though I’m hopeful about that. I’m thinking of information from members of the public, people who thought the case was forgotten, people whose memories have had a jog, people who were a bit reluctant, a bit afraid, to come forward earlier on.”

“It happens,” conceded Morse.

The armchair creaked as Strange leaned forward once more, smiling semibenignly, and holding out his empty tumbler: “Lovely!”

After refilling the glasses, Morse asked the obvious question:

“Tell me this, sir. You had two DIs on the case originally—”

“Three.”

“—several DSs, God knows how many DCs and PCs and WPCs—”

“No such thing now. All the women are PCs — no sex discrimination these days. By the way, you were never guilty of sexual harassment, were you?”

“Seldom. The other way round, if anything.”

Strange grinned as he sipped his Scotch. “Go on!”

“As I say, you had all those people on the case. They studied it. They lived with it. They—”

“Got nowhere with it.”

“Perhaps it wasn’t altogether their fault. We’re never going to solve everything. It’s taken these mathematicians over three hundred years to solve Fermat’s Last Theorem.”

“Mm.” Strange waggled his tumbler in front of him, holding it up toward the light, like a judge at the Beer Festival at Olympia.

“Just like the color of my urine specimens at the Radcliffe.”

“Tastes better, though.”

“Listen. I’m not a crossword wizard like you. Sometimes I can’t even finish the Mirror coffee-break thing. But I know one thing for sure. If you get stuck over a clue—”

“As occasionally even the best of us do.”

“—there’s only one way to solve it. You go away, you leave it, you forget it, you think of the teenage Brigitte Bardot, and then you go back to it and — Eureka! It’s like trying to remember a name: the more you think about it the more the bloody thing sinks below the horizon. But once you forget about it, once you come to it a second time, fresh—”