Colin Dexter - The Remorseful Day

But Frank certainly knew all about them, and they served as some sort of excuse and justification for his own adulterous liaisons. He didn’t much care anyway. Perhaps he could shrug things off fairly easily. But Simon couldn’t. Simon turned up unexpectedly one evening and found his mother lying on that very same bed where as a young boy (perhaps as an older boy?) he’d snuggled in beside her when his dad was away; and where he’d seen a man straddled across her on his elbows and his knees.

I doubt it had been exactly like that, though. More likely he’d seen a man bouncing down the stairs toward him, jerking up his trousers and fastening up his flies. A man he knew: Barron! Then he’d found his mother lying in the bedroom there: naked, gagged, handcuffed, with a pornographic video probably still running on the TV. Shell-shocked with disbelief and disillusionment, in the white heat of a furious jealousy — yes! — he murdered his mother.

Conscious that he was writing with increasing fluency, Morse poured himself another tumbler of single malt and resumed his narrative:

With regard to events immediately thereafter, we can only guess. But at some point Simon rang his father in predictable panic. He had very few people he could call on. But he could call on his father — and there was a special loop-system on the telephone there. And Frank H. got to the house as quickly as any man could have done that night. His BMW was in for servicing, that was checked; and I now believe (a bit late in the day) that the sequence of events was precisely as he claimed: taxi» Paddington; train» Oxford; Oxford (enter Flynn!)» Lower Swinstead.

Then? Probably we’ll never really know. But five people, three of them now dead, they knew: Barron, who’d been disturbed in medio coitu; Flynn, the petty crook who just happened to be on hand; Repp, the burglar who’d been watching the property all evening; Frank H.; and Simon H. himself. Simon doesn’t seem to me the caliber of fellow who could stay long at such a ghastly scene on his own; and I think it’s more than likely that his father rang Sarah and told her to get along there posthaste, on the way buying a cinema ticket as an alibi for Simon. Certainly when I met Sarah I felt strongly that she probably knew who had murdered her mother. The trouble was that the three outsiders also knew: Repp and Barron, who were both local men — and Flynn, who’d met Simon in the lipreading classes at Oxpens, and who must have seen him there that night.

What then was the family plan of campaign?

The two (or three) of them were determined to create the maximum amount of confusion — their only hope. The murder couldn’t be concealed; but the waters around it could be made so muddied that any investigation was likely to shoot off into several blind alleys. We may postulate that a gag was tied around Yvonne’s mouth (as I recall the report: “no longer tight as if she had worked it looser in her desperation”); that a pair of handcuffs was snapped around her wrists; that one of the panes of the French window was smashed in from the outside. Why Yvonne’s carefully folded clothes were not scattered all over the floor, I just don’t know, because “attempted rape” would have seemed a wholly probable explanation of the murder.

When and how the circling vultures closed in for their shares of the kill — your guess, Lewis, is (almost) as good as mine. Some early liaison there must have been with Barron in order to establish the telephone alibi. Flynn probably just stayed around that night — a petty crook going through a bad patch, and naming his price immediately. I suspect that Repp, a real pro, held his hand for a couple of days or so before threatening to spill at least half the can of beans... unless he could be persuaded otherwise.

Whatever the case, financial arrangements were made, and as far as we know faithfully met. After the murder of his wife, much money was diverted from the assets of Frank H. into other channels, although I’m still surprised to learn that there may well have been some serious misappropriation of funds at the Swiss Helvetia Bank.

All of which leaves one or two (or three!) points unresolved.

First, the burglar alarm. Now on his train trip from London Frank H. must have had thoughts galore. Several times he would have phoned home from the train, and Sarah must surely have been there to take the calls. And it was probably from the back of the taxi that Frank had the clever idea of ringing Sarah and telling her he would be ringing again, when the taxi was only half a minute or so from home, and asking her (Flynn wouldn’t have heard, would he?) to turn on the burglar alarm. It was a clever idea, let’s agree on that. It certainly and understandably caused huge confusion in the original police inquiry. The only person not wholly confused was Strange. It was he, from the word go, who suggested that the alarm might well have been set off deliberately by the murderer himself. (Never underrate that man, Lewis!)

The time, as Morse saw, was 3:40 A.M., almost exactly one hour after he’d started writing. He was feeling pleasantly tired, and he knew he would slip into sleep so easily now. Yet he wanted to go (as Flecker had said) “always that little further”; and perhaps more immediately to the point he wanted to pour himself a further Scotch — which he did before resuming.

There is one more thing to consider, and it is of vital importance, as well as being (almost!) the only thing about which I was less than honest with you. That is, the extraordinary relationship between a drink-doped, drug-doped juvenile lout and an insignificant-looking little schoolma’am: between Roy Holmes and Christine Coverley. Something must have happened, probably at school, which had forged a wholly improbable but strangely strong bond between them — including a sexual relationship (she confessed as much). That’s the reason she stayed on in Burford after the end of the summer term. Why is this important? Because we have been making one fundamental assumption in our inquiries which thus far has been completely unverified by any single independent witness. But truth will out! And first, and forthwith, we shall call in on Ms. Coverley for further questioning. How wise it was to hold our horses before facing Frank Harrison with a whole

(Here the narrative breaks off.)

Morse, who had been deeply asleep at his study desk, his head pillowed on folded arms, jerked awake just before 7:30 A.M., feeling wonderfully refreshed.

Life was a funny old business.

The following morning Lewis was pleased with himself. Before Morse arrived, he’d turned to the Police Gazette’s “Puzzle Corner” and easily solved the challenge there:

“Initially—” that was the clue; and once you twigged it, the answer stared you in the face vertically.

Morse made an appearance at 9:10 A.M., looking (in Lewis’s view) a little fitter than of late.

“Want to test your brain, sir?”

“Certainly not!”

Lewis pushed the puzzle across the desk, and Morse considered it, though for no more than a few seconds: