Colin Dexter - The Remorseful Day

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

The Thursday and Friday had been taken up largely with a preliminary scrutiny and analysis of the scores of reports and statements taken from prison officers, bus drivers, rubbish-dump employees, car-park attendants, forensic boffins, and so on and so on — as well as from those members of the public who had responded to appeals for information. But so far there’d been little to show for the methodical police routine that Lewis had supervised. Vital, though! Criminal investigation was all about motives and relationships, about times and dates and alibis. It was all about building up a pattern from the pieces of a jigsaw. So many pieces, though. Some of them blue for the sky and the sea; some of them green and brown for the trees and the land; and sometimes, somewhere, one or two pieces of quirky coloration that seemed to fit in nowhere. And that, as Lewis knew, was where Morse would come in — as he invariably did. It was almost as if the Chief Inspector had the ability to cheat: to have sneaked some quick glimpse of the finished picture even before picking up the individual pieces.

Frequently when Lewis had seen him that week, Morse had been sitting in HQ, immobile and apparently immovable (apart from an hour or so over lunchtimes), occasionally and almost casually abstracting a page or two of a report, of a statement, of a letter, from one of the bulging box-files on his desk, YVONNE HARRISON written large in black felt-tipped pen down each of the spines. Clearly (whatever else) Morse had come round to Strange’s conviction that some causal connection between the cases had become overwhelmingly probable.

But that was no surprise to Lewis.

What had occasioned him puzzlement was the number of green box-files there, since he had himself earlier studied the same material when (he could swear it!) there had only been three.

After (for him) an unprecedented early hour of retirement that same Sunday evening, at 9:30 P.M., Morse had awoken with a troublous headache. Assuming that the dawn was already breaking, he had confidently consulted his watch, to discover that it was still only 11:30 P.M. Thereafter he had woken up at regular ninety-minute intervals, in spite of equally regular doses of Alka-Seltzer and Paracetamol — his mind, even in the periods of intermittent slumber, riding the merry-go-round of disturbing dreams; his blood sugar ridiculously high; his feet suddenly hot and just as suddenly icy cold; an indigestion pain that was occasionally excruciating.

Ovid (now almost becoming Morse’s favorite Latin poet) had once begged the horses of the night to gallop slowly whenever some delightfully compliant mistress was lying beside him. But Morse had no such mistress beside him; and even if he had, he would still have wished those horses of the night to complete their course as quickly as they could possibly manage it.

He finally rose from the creased and crumpled sheets, and was shaving, just as rosy-fingered Dawn herself was rising over the Cutteslowe Council Estate.

At 6 A.M. he once more measured his blood-sugar level, now dipped dramatically from 24.4 at 1 A.M. to 2.8. Some decent breakfast was evidently required, and a lightly boiled egg with toast would fit the bill nicely. But Morse had no eggs; no slices of bread either. So, perforce, it had to be cereal. But Morse could find no milk, and there seemed no option but to resort to the solitary king-sized Mars bar which he always kept somewhere in the flat. For an emergency. In rebus extremis , like now. But he couldn’t find it. Then — bless you St. Anthony! — he discovered that the Co-op milkman had already called; and he had a great bowl of Corn Flakes, with a pleasingly cold pint of milk and several liberally heaped spoonsful of sugar. He felt wonderful.

Sometimes life was very good to him.

At 6:45 A.M. he considered (not too seriously) the possibility of walking up from his North Oxford flat to the A40 Ring Road, and thence down the gentle hill to Kidlington. About — what? — thirty-five to forty minutes to the HQ building. Not that he’d ever timed himself, for he’d never as yet attempted the walk.

Didn’t attempt the walk that morning.

After administering his first insulin dosage of the day, he drove up to Police HQ in the Jaguar.

Far quicker.

In his office, as he reread the final findings of the two postmortems (sic) , Morse decided, as he usually did, that there was no point whatsoever in his trying to unjumble the physiological details of the lacerations inflicted on the visceral organs of each body. He had little interest in the stomach; had no stomach for the stomach. In fact he was more familiar with the ninefold stomach of the bovine ilk (this because of crossword puzzles) than with its mono-chambered human counterpart. Did it really matter much to know exactly how Messrs. Flynn and Repp had met their ends? But yes, of course it did! If the technicalities pointed to a particular type of weapon; if the weapon could be accurately identified and then found; and if, finally, it could be traced to someone who was known to have had such a weapon and who had the opportunity of wielding it on the day of the murders...

Hold on though, Morse! Be fair! Amid a plethora of caveats, Dr. Hobson had pointed to a fairly specific type of weapon, had she not? And he read again the paragraph headed “Tentative Conclusions.”

Morse suddenly stopped reading, sat back in his chair, and placed his hands on his head, fingers interlinked, as he’d done so often at his teacher’s bequest in his infant class. And what had been a faraway look in his eyes now gradually focused into an intense gaze as he considered the implications of the extraordinary idea which had suddenly occurred to him...

Very soon he was rereading the whole report from Forensics, where almost all the earlier findings had been confirmed, although there remained much checking to be done. Prints of Flynn, prints of Repp, prints of the car owner, and several other prints as yet to be identified. Doubtless some of these latter would turn out to be those of the car owner’s family. But (Morse read the last sentence of the report again): “One set of fingerprints, repeated and fairly firm, may well prove to be of considerable interest.”

He leaned back again in his chair, pleasingly weary and really quite pleased with himself, because he knew whose fingerprints they were.

Oh yes!

Morse jerked awake as Lewis entered the office just before 8 A.M., wondering where he was, what time it was, what day it was. Yet it had been a wonderful little sleep, the deep and dreamless sleep that Socrates anticipated after swallowing the hemlock.

“No crossword this morning, sir?”

“Shop wasn’t open.”

“Why don’t you pay a paperboy?”

“Because, Lewis, a little occasional exercise...”

Lewis sat down. “Do you mind if I ask you something?”

Morse pointed to the reports laid out on the desk. “You’ve read these?”

Lewis nodded. “But, like I say, I’ve got something to ask you.”

“And I’ve got something to tell you. Is that all right, Lewis?” The voice was suddenly harsh. “You’ll remember from all our times together how coincidence occurs in life far more frequently than anyone — except me — is prepared to accept. Coincidence isn’t unusual at all. It’s the norm. Just like those consecutive numbers cropping up in the National Lottery every week. But in this case the coincidence is even odder than usual.”