Colin Dexter - The Remorseful Day

“Plenty o’ work, yeah. Having to turn some things down.”

“What you got on at the minute?”

“Job in Burford in Sheep Street: bit o’ roofing, bit o’ pointing, bit o’ painting.”

“High up, is it?”

“High enough. I’ll need a coupla extensions on the ladder.”

Biffen screwed up his face and closed his eyes. “You’d never get me up there.”

“You’re OK, so long as things are firm.”

“Not if you get vertigo as bad as me.”

The coins bulged proudly in his trouser pocket as the bridegroom designate walked out of the bar. Once in the passage that led to the toilets, he lifted the receiver from the pay phone there, inserted 20p, and dialed a number.

But what he said, or to whom he spoke, not even the keen-eared elders could have known.

For much of the week Lewis had been working three-quarters of the way round the clock; but on Sunday, the day following the events described in the previous chapter, he felt refreshed after a good sleep and arrived at Kidlington Police HQ at 8:45 A.M. No sign of Morse. But that mattered little. It had been facts that were required. Not fancies. Not yet, anyway. And as he sat taking stock of the past week’s activities, Lewis felt solidly satisfied — both with himself and with the performance of the personnel readily allocated to the case. There had been so much to cover...

Lewis had personally supervised the Monday and Tuesday inquiries into the activities of Paddy Flynn in the years, months, days — and morning — before his murder; and if the net result was perhaps somewhat disappointing, at least it had been thorough. Flynn had been living in an upstairs flat (converted a few years previously) on Morrell Avenue. He had been there for just over five months, paying £375 per calendar month for the privilege, and having virtually nothing to do with the tenant of the downstairs flat — a middle-aged accountant who, rain or shine, would walk each day down to St. Clements, across Magdalen Bridge, and up the High to his firm’s offices in King Alfred Street. He knew Flynn by sight, of course, but only exchanged words when occasionally they encountered each other in the narrow entrance hall. Of Flynn’s lifestyle, he had no knowledge at all: no ideas about the activities in which his fellow tenant might have been engaged. Well, just one little observation, perhaps, since not infrequently there was a car parked outside the semi — always a different car, and almost always gone the following morning. Lewis’s notes had read: “Has no knowledge of F’s professional or leizure time activities.” But he’d consulted his dictionary, ever kept beside him, in case Morse decided to look at his notes, and quickly corrected the antepenultimate word.

By all accounts Flynn had led a pretty private, almost secretive life. He was quite frequently spotted in the local hostelries, quite frequently spotted in the local bookmakers, though never, apparently, the worse for excessive liquor or for excessive losses. His name figured nowhere in police records as even the pettiest of crooks, although he was mentioned in dispatches several times as the taxi driver who had picked up Frank Harrison from Oxford Railway Station on the night of Yvonne’s murder. Radio Taxis had been his employer at the time, but he had been suspected of (possibly) fabricating fares for his own aggrandisement and duly dismissed — without rancor, it appeared, and certainly without recourse to any industrial tribunal. Dismissed too, subsequently, by the proprietors of Maxim Removals, a firm of middle-distance haulers, “for attempted trickery with the tachometer.” (Lewis had spelled the last word correctly, having checked it earlier.) Since that time, five months previously, Flynn had reported regularly to the DSS office at the bottom of George Street. But lacking any testimonials to his competence and integrity, his attempts to secure further employment in any field of motor transport had been unsuccessful, his completed application forms seldom reaching even the slush pile. It was all rather sad, as the woman regularly dealing with the Flynn file had testified.

He’d been thirty-two when, seven years earlier, he’d married Josie Newton, and duly fathered two daughters upon that lady — although (this the testimony of a brother in Belfast) the offspring had appeared so dissimilar in temperament, coloration, and mental ability, that there had been many doubts about their common paternity.

Josie Flynn had been unable or unwilling to offer much in the way of “character profiling” of her late husband (they’d never divorced); had scant interest in the manner of his murder; and, quite certainly, no interest in attending his “last rites,” whatever form these latter might take. Although he had treated her with ever-increasing indifference and contempt, he had never (she acknowledged it) abused her physically or sexually. In fact sex, even in the early months of their relationship, had never been a dominant factor in his life; nor, for that matter, had power or success or social acceptability or drink or even happiness. Just plain money. She’d not seen him for over two years; nor had her daughters — she’d seen to that. It was (again) all rather sad, according to Sergeant Dixon’s report. Mr. Paddy Flynn may not have been the ideal husband, but perhaps Ms. Josephine Newton (now her preferred appellation) was hardly a paragon of rectitude in the marital relationship. “Not exacly a saint herself?” as Dixon’s handwritten addendum had suggested. And Lewis smiled to himself again, feeling a little superior.

It had been Lewis himself (no Morse beside him) who had visited Flynn’s upstairs flat: smell of cigarette smoke everywhere; sheets on the single bed rather grubby; dirty cutlery and plates in the kitchen sink, but not too many of them; the top surface of the cooker in sore need of Mrs. Lewis; soiled shirts, underpants, socks, handkerchiefs, in a neat pile behind the bathroom door; a minimal assemblage of trousers, jackets, shirts, underclothes, in a heavy wardrobe; a Corby trouser-press; eleven cans of Guinness in the otherwise sparsely stocked refrigerator; not a single book anywhere; two copies of the Mirror opened at the Racing pages; a TV set, but not even the statutory hard-core video; one CD, Great Arias from Puccini , but no CD player for Flynn to have gauged their magnitude; no pictures on the walls; no personal correspondence; and very little in the way of official communications, apart from Social Security forms; no sign of any bank account or credit facility.

Nothing much to go on.

And yet Lewis had sensed from the start that there was something missing. Sensed that he knew where that “something missing” might well be.

And it was.

Most petty crooks had little in the way of imagination, having two or three favoured niches wherein to conceal their ill-gotten gains. And Paddy Flynn proved no exception. The small, brown-leather case was on the top shelf of the old mahogany wardrobe, tucked away on the far left, beneath a pair of faded-green blankets.

It took one DC just under twenty minutes to itemize the contents; a second DC just over thirty minutes to check the original itemization — a cache of legitimate banknotes, in fifties, twenties, tens, and fives. The confirmed tally was £17,465 and Lewis knew that Morse would be interested.

And Morse, on being told, most decidedly had been interested.

A similarly painstaking review of Repp and Richardson had taken up the whole of the Wednesday. Little new had come to light except for the unexpected (?) discovery that an account with the Burford and Cheltenham Building Society showed a robust balance of £14,350 held in the name of Deborah Richardson, with regular monthly deposits (as was confidentially ascertained) always made in cash. Debbie Richardson had smilingly refused to answer Lewis’s questions concerning the provenance of such comparatively substantial income, stating her belief that everybody — bishops, barmaids, presidents, prostitutes — all deserved some measure of privacy. Yes, Lewis had agreed; but he knew that Morse would be interested.