Colin Dexter - The Remorseful Day

Where does all this lead us? First and foremost to an early, long-overdue, full-scale interview with Frank Harrison. Not too early though. Our colleagues got nowhere with him and we, Lewis, are a pair of bloodhounds very late on the scene, with the scent gone very cold.

Fifth, there’s this business of the letter you found in the Harrison file. As I told you, I take full responsibility for the fact that some items originally discovered at the Harrison murder scene were subsequently, as they say, found to be missing. It was embarrassing for me to talk to you about this and I know that you in turn found it equally embarrassing to—

Morse laid down his pen and answered the phone:

“Lewis! What do you want?”

“You OK, sir?”

“Why shouldn’t I be?”

“It’s just that — well, you know that animal charity shop on the corner of South Parade and Middle Way...”

“I am not an animal lover, Lewis.”

“Well, people leave things there, by the door, things for the shop to sell for charity—”

“Get on with it!”

“Guess what one of the shop assistants found when she got to work this morning?”

“Pair of handcuffs?”

“Pair of something , sir. Pair of red trainers! Almost brand-new. This woman had read in the Oxford Mail about the Burford jogger and she thought...”

“You know something, Lewis? That’s very interesting. Very interesting indeed. I’ll be with you straightaway.”

“You know, come to think of it, Lewis, we could do all of this now, couldn’t we? Just the two of us.”

“No Dixon?”

“No Dixon.”

Lewis smiled outwardly and inwardly as he looked down at the action plan. It seemed to him a sensible and fair division of a good deal of labor. For example, he himself had spoken only very briefly with Sarah Harrison; Morse had not as yet spoken at all with Simon Harrison. Both matters now to be dealt with. And all leading up to the two of them, Morse and Lewis, meeting Frank Harrison a.s.a.p. after these and a few other checks and visits had been made. Harrison! — “the corner-stone, the kingpin, the pivot,” as Morse had asserted, before running out of synonyms. “We’ve got plenty of time for all this — well, no, perhaps we haven’t. So we can be pretty direct, but not sharp. Smile occasionally. No aggressiveness, no hostility, no belligerence,” Morse had asserted, before running out of synonyms again.

It all suited Lewis nicely. If Morse’s philosophy in life was to aim high even if the target was altogether missed, he personally preferred to aim low in the hope at least of hitting something.

The voluntary (mornings only) help at the Oxford Animal Sanctuary Shop (Gifts Welcome) lived only a few hundred yards away in Osberton Road: a widow, a cat lover, an intelligent witness — Mrs. Gerrard. It was just that, as every weekday morning, she’d walked down to South Parade to buy the Daily Telegraph , about 8 o’clock before opening the shop, and she’d seen this—

“Yes?” Lewis smiled.

— well, this youngish fellow — smartly dressed, suit and tie — and he put this Sainsbury’s plastic bag in the doorway there. She couldn’t describe him any better than that really; but she remembered his car, parked for a few seconds on the double-yellows alongside the shop. She wouldn’t have noticed that either — except that it was the same make as hers, a Toyota Carina, P-Reg., a different color though: hers was a turquoisy color, his was silvery-grey. The trainers she had put carefully aside, under the counter in the shop.

No one in North Oxford with a Toyota was likely to drive unnecessarily far afield for any servicing and repairs, since there was a specialist garage in Summer-town itself; and it took Lewis only a few minutes to learn that the owner of a silvery-grey P-Reg. Carina was a regular and esteemed customer of the company, a man named Simon Harrison.

Simultaneously Morse was driving himself in the Jaguar through the low range of open hills that border Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire. His old pathologist friend, Max, had once told him that two pleasures grew ever deeper with advancing age, the pleasures of the belly and the pleasures of natural beauty. And Morse found himself concurring with the latter proposition as he turned right at the roundabout and drove down into Burford.

Christine Coverley was clearly surprised to see him, and clearly not happy.

“It’s all a bit untidy—”

Morse smiled. “Can I come in?”

“I haven’t got long, I’m afraid.”

“It won’t take long, I promise.”

“How can I...?”

“What were you doing last Monday morning? Between, say, nine and eleven?”

“Not the faintest, have I? Nobody could remember exactly—”

“Did you go out — for a newspaper, shopping, seeing someone?”

“I don’t know. Like I say—”

“Can you have a look in your diary for me?”

“That wouldn’t help.”

“What wow Whelp?”

“I don’t know what you’re getting at. Look, Inspector.” She glanced down at her wristwatch with what appeared incipient panic. “Could we talk some other time, please? You see I’ve got—”

But it was too late.

There was the scratch of a key in the Yale lock and the front door was quickly opened and as quickly closed, and a youth entered from the narrow hallway to stand in the doorway of the single bedsit room.

With staring eyes he looked first at Morse and then at Christine Coverley: “What the fuck?”

“ You haven’t increased your word power much since we last—” began Morse. But Roy Holmes had disappeared even more rapidly than he’d appeared.

In the stillness that followed the crash of the front door closing, Morse sat down in one of the armchairs, and gestured the speechless schoolmistress to seat herself in the other.

“Please tell me all about it,” he said, with no hint of aggressiveness or any of its synonyms. “If you don’t, I’m sorry but I shall have to take you down to Police HQ.”

After his twinkling Irish eyes had scrutinized Lewis’s ID, Mr. Tony Marrinan, the manager of The Randolph, was wholly cooperative; and very soon the outline of Frank Harrison’s recent stay was revealed. Double-room booked with, as staff recalled her, a sultrily attractive if less than attractively mannered partner — late twenties, perhaps; meals taken together quite regularly in the Spires Restaurant — details available, if Sergeant Lewis wanted to see them.

As Sergeant Lewis did.

The pair had breakfasted together on each morning except the Monday, and Lewis was fairly soon looking at that day’s Good Morning Breakfast chit, its details having been transferred immediately to the hotel’s computer before being placed on a spike and then at the end of the day transferred to the accounts department upstairs for a limited period, as a check if any guest should query an entry on the final bill.

Interesting! Especially the bottom half of the chit:

“Covers,” as Lewis learned, signified how many had been at the table: on the other chits it had the figure “2” beside it. But on the Monday morning just the one of them, and the restaurant manager remembered which one of them: “It was the lady. I think Mr. Harrison may have been feeling a little tired.”

Before he left the hotel, Lewis had a word with the chambermaid who had looked after Room 210, discovering that for much of the time over the period in question the do not disturb notice had hung over the outside door-knob.