Colin Dexter - The Remorseful Day

The London offices of the Swiss Helvetia Bank are tucked away discreetly just behind Sloane Square. The brass plaque pinpointing visitors to these premises, albeit highly polished, is perhaps disproportionately small. Yet in truth the Bank has little need to impress its potential clients. On the contrary. Such clients have every need to impress the Bank.

Just after 4 P.M. on Friday, July 17, a smartly suited man in his late forties waved farewell to the uniformed guard at the security desk and walked out into the sunshine of a glorious summer’s day. Traffic was already heavy; but that was of no concern to Frank Harrison, one of six portfolio and investment managers of SHB (London). His company flat was only a few minutes’ walk away in Pavilion Road.

Earlier in the day he’d been very much what they paid him so handsomely for being — shrewd, superior, trustworthy — when his secretary had poured coffee for a small, grey-haired man and for his larger, much younger, cosmetically exquisite wife.

“You realize that SHB deals principally with portfolio investments of, well, let’s say, over a million dollars? Is that, er...?”

The self-made citizen from South Carolina nodded. “I think you can feel assured, sir, that we shall be able to meet that figure — ah! — fairly easily, shan’t we, honey?”

He’d taken his wife’s heavily diamonded left hand in his own and smiled, smiled rather sweetly, as Harrison thought.

And he himself had smiled, too — rather sweetly, as he hoped — as mentally he calculated the likely commission from his latest client.

Almost managed a smile again now, as he stopped outside Sloane Square Underground Station and bought a copy of the Evening Standard , flicking through the sheets, almost immediately finding the only item that appeared to interest him, then swiftly scanning the brief article before depositing the paper in the nearest litter bin. Had he been at all interested in horse-racing, he might have noticed that Carolina Cutie was running in the 4:30 at Kempton Park. But it had been many years since he had placed a bet with any bookie — instead now spending many hours of each working day studying on his office’s computer screens the odds displayed from the London, New York, and Tokyo stock exchanges.

Considerably safer.

And recently he’d been rather lucky in the management of his clients’ investments.

And the bonuses were good.

He let himself into his flat, tapped in the numbers on the burglar alarm, and walked into the kitchen, where he poured himself a large gin with a good deal of ice and very little tonic. But he’d never had any drinking problem himself. Unlike his wife. His murdered wife.

Lauren had promised to be along about 6 P.M., and she’d never been late. He would call a taxi... well, perhaps they’d spend an hour or so between the sheets first, although (if truth were told) he was not quite so keenly aware of her sexual magnetism as he had been a few months earlier. Passion was coming off the boil. It usually happened. On both sides, too. It had happened with Yvonne, with whom he’d scaled the heights of sexual ecstasy, especially in the first few months of their marriage. Yet even during those kingfisher days he had been intermittently unfaithful to her; had woken with heart-aching guilt in the small hours of so many worryful nights — until, that is, he had discovered what he had discovered about her; and until he had fallen in love with a woman who was living so invitingly close to him in Lower Swinstead.

The front doorbell rang at 5:50 P.M. Ten minutes early. Good sign! He felt sexually ready for her now; tossed back the last mouthful of his second gin; and went to greet her.

“You’re in the paper again!” she blurted, almost accusingly, brandishing the relevant page of the Evening Standard in front of his face after the door was closed behind them.

“Really?”

For the second time Harrison looked down at the headline, new clue to old murder; and pretended to read the article through.

“Well?” she asked.

“Well, what?”

“What have you got to tell me?”

“I’m going to take you out for a meal and then I’m going to take you upstairs to bed — or maybe the other way round.”

“I didn’t mean that. You know I didn’t.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I want you to tell me what happened. You’ve never spoken about it, have you? Not to me. And I want to know!” Her upper lip was suddenly tremulous. “So before we do anything else, you’d better—”

“Better what?” He snapped the words and his voice seemed that of a different man. “Listen, my sweetheart! The day you tell me what to do, that’s the day we finish, OK? And if you don’t get that message loud and clear” (paradoxically the voice had dropped to a whisper) “you’d better bugger off and forget we ever met.”

There were no tears in her eyes as she replied: “I can’t do that, Frank. But there’s one thing I can do: I’m going, as you so delicately put it, to bugger off!”

In full control of herself she turned the catch on the Yale lock, and the door closed quietly behind her.

It had been the previous day, Thursday, when after collecting her boss’s mail Barbara Dean had walked along the corridor, white blouse as ever perfectly pressed, flicking through the eleven envelopes held in her left hand. And looking with particular attention (again!) at the one addressed with a scarlet felt-pen, in outsize capital letters, to:

The execution of this lettering gave her the impression of its being neither the work of a particularly educated nor of a particularly uneducated correspondent. Yet the lowercase legend along the top-left of the envelope — “Private and Confidencial” (sic) — would perhaps suggest the latter. Whatever the case though, the envelope was always going to be noticed — by whomsoever. It was like someone entering a lucky-dip postal competition with multicolored sketches adorning the periphery of the envelope; or like a lover mailing off a vastly outsize Valentine.

What would her boss make of it?

Barbara had been working at Police HQ for almost six years now and had enjoyed her time there — especially these past three years working as the personal secretary of Chief Superintendent Strange; and she was very sad that he would be leaving at the end of the summer. “Strange by name and strange by nature” — that’s what she often said when friends had asked about him: an oddly contradictory man, that was for sure. He was a heavyweight, in every sense of the word; yet there were times when he handled things with a lightness of touch which was as pleasing as it was unexpected. His was the reputation of a blunt, no-nonsense copper who had not been born with quite the IQ of an Aristotle or an Isaac Newton; yet (in Barbara’s experience) he could on occasion exhibit a remarkably compassionate insight into personal problems, including her own. All right (yes!) he was a big, blundering, awkward teddy bear of a man: a bit (a lot?) henpecked at home — until recently of course; a man much respected, if not particularly liked, by his fellow officers; and (from Barbara’s point of view) a man who had never, hardly ever, sought to take the slightest advantage of her... well, of her womanhood. Just that once, perhaps?