Colin Dexter - The Remorseful Day

“Do you know the answer?”

“Easy! ‘Initially,’ sir — that’s what you’ve got to think about. Just look at the first letters. Cyclist? Get it?”

“I thought the question was what would an intelligent cyclist’s thought be.”

“I don’t quite follow.”

“Not difficult surely, Lewis? You’ve just got the answer wrong, that’s all. Any intelligent cyclist, any bright bus driver — anyone! — would think exactly the same thing immediately.”

“They would?”

“The question’s phony. Based on a false premise, isn’t it? Based on the assumption that the facts you’ve been given are true.”

“You mean they’re not?”

“Tosca? Written by Verdi?”

Oh dear! “You were quick to spot that.”

Morse grinned. “Not really. They often ask me to submit a little brainteaser to the Gazette.”

“You mean—?”

Morse nodded. “And talking of false premises, that’s been a big part of our trouble. We’ve both been trying to check up on such a lot of things, haven’t we? But there’s one thing we’ve been prepared to accept without one ha’poth of evidence. So we’ll get on to that without delay. Couple of cars we’ll need. I’ll just give Dixon a ring—”

Lewis got to his feet. “I can deal with all that, sir.”

“Si’ down, Lewis! I want to talk to you.”

Through the glass-paneled door Dixon finally saw the silhouette moving toward him: a woman in a wheelchair who brusquely informed him that she knew nothing of the whereabouts of her son. He had not been home the previous evening. He had a key. He was sometimes out all night, yes. No, she didn’t know where. And if it was of any interest to the police, she didn’t care — didn’t bloody well care.

There was no reply to PC Kershaw’s importunate ringing and knocking. But at last he was able to locate the mildly disgruntled middle-aged woman who looked after the two “lets”; and who accompanied him back to the ground-floor flat. She appeared to have little affection for either of the two lessees, although when she opened the door she must have felt a horrified shock of sympathy for one of them.

Christine Coverley lay supine on a sheepskin rug in front of an unlit electric fire. She was wearing a summery, sleeveless, salmon-pink dress, her arms very white, hands palm-upward, with each of her wrists slashed deeply and neatly across. A black-handled kitchen knife lay beside her left shoulder.

Young Kershaw was unused to such horrors; and over the next few days the visual image was to refigure repeatedly in his nightmares. Two patches on the rug were deeply steeped in blood; and Kershaw was reminded of the Welsh hill farm where he’d once stayed and where the backs of each of the owner’s sheep had been daubed with a dye of the deepest crimson.

No note was found by Kershaw; indeed no note was found by anyone afterward. It was as if Christine had left this world with a despair she’d found incommunicable to anyone: even to her parents; even to the uncouth lout who penetrated her so pleasurably now, though at first against her will; even to the rather nice police inspector who’d seemed to her to understand so much about her. Far too much... including (she’d known it!) the fact that she had lied. Roy could never have been cycling along Sheep Street when Barron fell to his death because at that very moment he had been in bed with her...

Lewis had not been surprised — no, certainly not that. But disappointed? Yes. Oh yes! And Morse had been aware of his reaction, clearly anticipating it, yet saying nothing to lessen the impact of the revelation. The relationship between them would never be quite the same again, Lewis realized that. It wasn’t at all the fact that Morse had driven out one evening (two evenings? ten evenings?) to meet a seductively attractive woman. Lewis had seen the sharply focused photographs of her body stretched out on the bed that night; and it could be no great wonder that many a man, young and old alike, had lusted after a woman such as that. No, it was something else. It was the out-of-character, underhand way that Morse had allowed the dishonest subterfuge to linger on and on from the beginning of the case.

Indeed Morse had been less than wholly forthcoming in his confession even now, Lewis was fairly sure of it. Yes, Morse agreed, he had gained access to the file containing the intimate correspondence addressed to Y H. Yes, he had “appropriated” the handcuffs, police handcuffs, with a number stamped on them that could easily be traced back to the officer issued with them, in this case to Morse himself. And yes (he readily admitted it) he had “withdrawn” the relevant sheet of the issue-numbers kept at HQ. As far as the partial letter was concerned (Morse accepted immediately that it was in his own hand) Lewis had hoped, in an old-fashioned sort of way, that Morse had in fact never been invited to Lower Swinstead, in spite of his own plea for some communication from her; in spite of that almost school-boyish business about looking through his mail every morning in the hope of finding something from her. And that was about it. Morse had wanted to cover up something of which he was rather ashamed and very embarrassed; just wanted his own name, previously his own good name, never to be associated with the life — and the death — of Yvonne Harrison. He’d been careless about leaving that single page of a longer letter but (as he asked Lewis to agree) it was hardly an incriminating piece of evidence. What Morse stoutly refused to accept was that what he had done, however cowardly and dishonest and foolish, had in any way jeopardized the course of the original inquiry, which he now had the nerve to assert had been conducted with almost unprecedented incompetence. Such arrogance was of course not all that unusual; yet in the present circumstances it seemed to Lewis quite gratuitously cheap.

Leaving all such considerations aside though, what stuck in Lewis’s throat was that initial, duplicitous refusal on Morse’s part to have anything to do with the original case. Agreed, once he had been drafted on to what seemed to both Lewis and Strange the second half of the same case, Morse had risen to his accustomed heights of logical analysis and depths of human understanding. Agreed, he had (as usual) been several furlongs ahead of the field — and, for once, on the right racecourse from the “off.”

Who else but Morse could have put forward the quite extraordinary hypotheses made earlier that morning about the murder of J. Barron, Builder? The hypothesis (seemingly confirmed) that Roy Holmes — who’d do almost anything to get drugs and who’d do absolutely anything when he was on drugs — was having a sexual relationship with Christine Coverley; the hypothesis (seemingly confirmed) that the weirdly incongruous partnership had resulted from some incident or series of incidents at school; that the youth had agreed, for money, to make a statement to the police about a supposedly accidental collision with a high ladder — a statement that was wholly untrue, because Roy Holmes had been nowhere near Sheep Street that morning; the hypothesis (to be confirmed!) that it was Frank Harrison who had murdered Barron, and who had engineered an ingenious scheme whereby all suspicion would be diverted both from himself and from Simon — the scheme itself probably prompted by another son, by Allen Thomas, who regularly gathered a good deal of information from his vantage point in the Maiden’s Arms and who regularly passed it on to his father, the man at the center of everything.