Colin Dexter - The Remorseful Day

And the front-door bell was ringing.

It was after 10 P.M. when, with Lewis now gone, Morse took stock of the situation — with renewed interest, though (truth to tell) with little great surprise. Lewis had declined the offer of alcohol, and Morse had decided to prolong his own virtually unprecedented abstinence. He felt tired, and at 10:30 P.M. decided that he would be early abed. So many times had he been counseled that beer made a lumpy mattress, that spirits made a hard pillow, and that in general alcohol was the stuff that nightmares were made of. So, if that were true, he could perhaps expect to be sleeping the sleep of the just that night. It would be a new experience.

He put on the RSPB video, and once again watched the wonderful albatross gliding effortlessly across the Antarctic wastes. So relaxing...

At 11:15 he switched off the bedroom light and turned as ever on to his right-hand side, conscious of a clear head, a freshness of mind, and a gently slumbrous lassitude.

Wonderful.

In spite of his occasional disillusionment about being cast up on to the shores of light in the first place, it would be wholly untrue to say that Morse was over-eager to embark on that final journey to that further land. Indeed, like the majority of mortals, he was something of a hypochondriac; and that night he found himself becoming increasingly fearful about his own physical well-being. Or ill-being.

The illuminated green figures on the alarm clock showed 2:42 A.M. when he finally abandoned the unequal struggle. His mind was an uncontrollable whirligig at St. Giles Fair, and the indigestion pains in his chest and in his arms were hard and unrelenting. He got up, poured himself a glass of Alka-Seltzer, poured himself a glass of the single malt, took up his medium-blue Parker pen, and resumed the exegesis he’d been writing when Lewis had interrupted him, deciding however to cross out the last (and uncompleted) sentence:

It was embarrassing for me to talk to you about this and I know that you in turn found it equally embarrassing to—

There would be ample time to put that part of the record straight in the days ahead.

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow...

Simon H. is not a good liar, and I dragged some of the truth out of him. He is genuinely very deaf, and the telephone must always be a nightmare for him. So what’s he got a mobile for? Even people with good hearing often have trouble with one. But, remember, even someone who’s stone deaf can communicate to some degree with someone on the other end, because he’s always able to speak if not to hear.

Many people must have wanted Barron dead. And no one more so than Frank Harrison, who’d learned that Barron would soon be working up at some giddy height in a quietish street in Burford. The job had been mentioned, among other places no doubt, in the Maiden’s Arms. And one person in that pub was in regular communication with Frank H.: Allen Thomas, that soon-to-be-married youth who regularly wastes his substance on the fruit machine. How come? Like so many others in this case, he’s dependent on Frank H. — his father, remember! — who (rumor!) has just bought him a small flat in Bicester, and who has pretty certainly been making him a regular allowance for many years.

The plan had been a reasonably simple one — with one snag. Both the Harrisons, Senior and Junior, had some knowledge of Barron’s ladder technique from the several times he had worked at the family home: specifically his habit of tying the top of his ladders to something firm up there in the heights. It would seem likely that he’d do the same again, and there’d be little point in giving the ladder one great hefty push if it wouldn’t topple to the ground. Some recce was therefore required; and Simon picked up his father that Monday morning in Oxford and drove him the twenty miles to Burford, leaving the car at the western end of Sheep Street, and then jogging up and down the opposite side of the street in tracksuit and trainers, noting that Barron was moving the ladder along every twelve minutes or so, and predictably re-roping the top each time. The only possibility then was to catch Barron after he’d re-climbed the ladder and was re-fixing the rope. A minute or so? Not much more. But enough. Simon’s job was to phone his father, mobile to mobile, and just say “Now!” Nothing else. He hadn’t the spunk he says (I believe him) to perform the deed himself; and it was his father, also in jogging kit, who would run along the pathway there and topple Barron to a death that in Simon’s view was fully deserved and long overdue.

That was the plan. Something like it. So I believe.

But the countdown had been aborted because (Simon himself a witness) a bicycle, the front wheel jerked up repeatedly from the ground, was lurching its way along the path, and under the ladder, and into the ladder. Surplus to requirements therefore was the plan the Harrisons had plotted. Or so we are led to believe. Why such a proviso? Because I shall be surprised if any plan devised by the opportunistic Frank Harrison has ever come to a sorry nothing. Is it possible therefore that the accident of Barron’s death was not quite so “accidental” after all? Already Frank Harrison had accomplished something far more complex — his manipulation of the evidence surrounding his wife’s murder, when it was imperative for him to establish one crucial fact: that no other living soul was present when he went into his house that night. But three other people knew this fact was untrue; and all three of them — whichever way intercommunication was effected — were subsequently rewarded for their roles in the conspiracy of complicity and silence.

Back to my proviso.

Can it be that Frank Harrison trawled his net even wider and dragged in the cyclist who sent Barron down to his death, the boy Holmes — the brother of Harrison’s son Allen?

We turn now to the Harrison clan itself.

Our researchers have given us several pointers to the relationships within that family. The marriage itself had long been loveless: he with a string of mistresses in his Pavilion Road flat in London; she with a succession of straight or kinky but always besotted bedmates, with whom she fairly regularly dallied with mutual delight. And, doubtless, profit. Of the two children, Simon was clearly the mother’s favorite — a boy who had battled bravely with his disability; a boy for whom his mother had found an affection considerably deeper than that for her daughter Sarah — a young lady who was very attractive physically, very bright academically, very talented musically, who from her early years had almost everything going for her, and who (unlike her brother) needed far less of her mother’s tender loving care. Both children, as well as their parents, were probably fully aware of the imbalance here; and tacitly and tactfully accepted it.

At the time of their mother’s murder, both the children had left home several years earlier. Sarah had already qualified as a doctor specializing with considerable distinction in the treatment of diabetes. And Simon had landed a surprisingly good job in publishing, and was now financially independent — if not emotionally independent, because he still yearned for that unique love his mother had always shown him; a love that had meant everything to him in those long years of an ever-struggling school life in which he knew with joyous assurance that it was he — Simon! — who’d acquired the monopoly of a mother’s love, more of it even than his father had ever had. He called to see her regularly, of course he did. But she probably always insisted that he ring her beforehand. No reason to ask why, surely? Simon was completely unaware of his mother’s vesper-tinal divertissements.