Colin Dexter - The Remorseful Day

Then, so very recently, there’d been this upsurge of interest in his mother’s murder, bringing with it a corresponding upsurge in his hatred of Barron.

Yes, he’d bought the trainers — £70! No, he’d not driven out to Stokenchurch that Monday morning. He’d driven out to Burford instead, where he knew that Barron was working.

Here Morse had interrupted. “How did you know that?”

“Pardon?”

Was it a genuine plea? Morse was most doubtful, but he repeated the question with what he trusted was legible enunciation, conscious as he had been throughout of Simon’s eyes upon his lips.

“He told me himself. You see, I wanted the outside of my flat, er... you know, the windows, doors... they were all getting a bit... Anyway, I asked him if he could do it and he said he’d come round and give me an estimate after he’d finished his next job. And I don’t know why but he just happened to mention where it was, that’s all.”

Morse nodded dubiously. Even if it wasn’t the truth, it wasn’t a bad answer. And Simon Harrison continued his unofficial statement:

He’d just felt — well, murderous. Simple as that. He’d always suspected that Barron was involved somehow in his mother’s murder, and he was conscious of an ever-increasing hatred for the man. So he’d decided to go and see if Barron was there, in Sheep Street, balanced precariously (as he hoped) on the top of an extended ladder, painting the guttering or something. And he was.

Morse made a second interruption: “So why didn’t you...?”

Simon understood the inchoate query immediately, and for Morse his answer had the ring of truth about it:

“I wanted to make sure he could be pushed off. I’d noticed when he was doing Mum’s roof that he used to anchor the top of his ladder to the troughing or chimney stack or something. And he’d done the same there, in Sheep Street — I could see it easily. So even if I’d had the guts to do it, the ladder wouldn’t have fallen. He might have done, agreed, but... Anyway, I was a nervous wreck when I got back home; and when I read in the Oxford Mail that Mrs. Somebody-or-other had mentioned seeing a jogger there wearing red trainers... I should have put them in the dustbin. Stupid, I was! But they’d cost me — well, I told you. And I’ve always loved animals, so... well, that’s it really.”

Although less than convinced by what sounded a suspiciously shaky story, Morse was adequately impressed by the manner of the pleasantly spoken young man. Had he been as vain as Morse and many other mortals, he would probably have grown his hair fairly long over his temples in order to conceal his hearing aids. But Harrison’s dark hair was closely cropped, framing a clean-shaven face that seemed honest. Or reasonably so.

Asking Harrison to remind him of his home address and telephone number, Morse got to his feet and prepared to leave.

“You’ll have to make an official statement, of course.”

“I realize that, yes.”

Morse pushed the trainers an inch or two further across the desk.

“ You might as well keep them now. I only wish I were as fit as you.”

Was there a glint of humor in Simon’s eyes as, in turn, he got to his feet?

“Fit a shoe, did you say, Inspector?”

Morse let it go. The man’s hearing was very poor, little doubt of that. Which made it surprising perhaps that a mobile phone lay on the desk beside him.

On his second impulse that day, Morse drove down to North Oxford and stopped momentarily outside Simon Harrison’s small property at 5 Grosvenor Street. The replacement windows with their aluminium frames had clearly been installed there fairly recently — frames whose glory (as advertised) was never to need any painting at all.

Courteously if somewhat cautiously received, Lewis listened carefully as one of the Bank’s important personages spelled out the situation with (as was stressed) utter confidentiality, with appropriate delicacy, and with (for Lewis) a leavening of incomprehensible technicalities. In simple terms it amounted to this: Mr. Frank Harrison, currently on furlough, was currently also, if unofficially, on suspension from his duties with the Bank on suspicion, as yet unsubstantiated, of misappropriation of monies: viz. an unexplained black hole of some £520,000 in his department’s investment portfolios.

Sloane Square... Gridlock... Siren... Gridlock... Siren...

It is not a matter for any surprise that car drivers occasionally contract one of the minor strains of the road-rage virus — even that patient man in the siren-assisted police car who finally pulled over on to the hard shoulder of the M40 and rang his chief.

“Been stuck in traffic, sir. Be with you in about an hour.”

“Lewis! Can’t you hear the wireless? It’s five-past seven — bang in the middle of The Archers. It can wait, surely!”

Lewis supposed it could; and would have said so. But the phone was dead.

Wireless! Huh! Everybody called it a “radio” these days — well, everybody except Morse and one or two of the old ’uns, like Strange. Yes, come to think of it, Morse and Strange were the oldest of the HQ lot, with Strange six months the older and due for retirement that next month.

The road was free and Lewis drove fast. It could wait — of course it could — the news about Harrison Senior. Perhaps it didn’t matter all that much; and as Morse frequently reminded him nothing really mattered very much at all in the end. But he was looking forward to a swapping of notes. There had been some interesting developments, certainly on his own side; and he doubted not that Morse’s researches that day had generated a few new ideas. Not that they needed any more high-flown ideas really, he decided, as a sudden torrential downpour called for more terrestrial concentration. He reduced his speed to 80 mph.

At 7:20 P.M. Morse was sitting back in the black-leather armchair, knowing that only a few of the pieces in the jigsaw remained to be fitted. Earlier in the case the top half of the puzzle had presented itself as a monochrome blue, like the sky earlier that evening, although of late the weather had become sultry, as though a thunderstorm were brewing. But the jigsaw’s undifferentiated blue had been duly broken by a solitary seagull or two, by a piece of soft-white cloud, and later perhaps (when Lewis arrived?) by what Housman so memorably had called “the orange band of eve.” He felt almost happy. There was something else, too: he would quite certainly wait until that arrival before having his first drink of the day. It was quite easy really (as he told himself) to refrain from alcohol for a limited period.

The storm reached North Oxford fifty minutes later, traveling from the southwest at a pace commensurate with Lewis’s speed along the M40.

It may have had something to do with Wagner, but Morse enjoyed the intensity and the electricity of a thunderstorm, and he watched with deep pleasure the plashing rain and the dazzling flashes in the lightning-riven sky. From his viewpoint by the window of his flat, a slightly sagging telephone wire cut the leaden heavens in two; and he watched as a succession of single drops of rain ran along the wire before finally falling off, reminding him of soldiers crossing a river on rope-harness, and finally dropping off on the other side. As he had once done himself.

Crossing the river...

His mother would never speak of “dying”: always of “crossing the river.” It was a pleasing conceit; a pleasing metaphor. If he’d been a poet, he might have written a sonnet about that telephone-wire just outside. But Morse wasn’t a poet. And the storm now ceased as suddenly as it had started.