Colin Dexter - The Remorseful Day

It had been at the height of the summer heat wave of 1995. One day when she had been wearing the skimpiest outfit the Force could ever officially tolerate, she had seen in Strange’s eyes what she thought (and almost hoped?) were the signs of some mild, erotic fantasy.

“You look very desirable, my girl!”

That’s all he’d said.

Was that what people meant by “sexual harassment”?

Not that she’d mentioned it to anyone; but the phrase was much in the headlines that long, hot summer, and she’d heard some of the girls talking in the canteen about it.

“ I could do with a bi’ o’ that sexual harássment!” confessed Sharon, the latest and youngest tyro in the typing pool.

That was the occasion when one of the senior CID officers seated at the far end of the table had got to his feet, drained his coffee, and come across to lay a gentle hand on Sharon’s suntanned shoulder.

“You mean sexual hárassment, I think. As you know, we usually exercise the recessive accent in English; and much as I admire our American friends, we shouldn’t let them prostitute our pronunciation, young lady!”

He had spoken quietly but a little cruelly; and the uncomprehending Sharon was visibly hurt.

“Pompous prick! Who the hell does he think he is?” she’d asked when he was gone.

So Barbara told her.

Not that she knew him personally, although his blue eyes invariably smiled into hers, a little wearily sometimes but ever interestedly, whenever the two of them passed each other in the corridors; and when she sometimes fancied that he looked at her as though he knew what she was thinking.

God forbid!

It was not of Morse, though, but of Strange that she was thinking that morning when she tapped the customary twice on his office door and entered. Sometimes, when he sat there behind his desk — tie slightly askew, a light shower of dandruff over the shoulders of his jacket, hairs growing a little too prominently from his ears and from his nostrils, white shirt rather less than white and less than smoothly ironed — it was then, yes, that she wished to mother him. She — Barbara! — less than half his age.

That he’d never had such a complicated effect on other women, she felt completely convinced.

Well, no; not completely convinced...

“Probably some nutter!” growled Strange as he slipped a paper knife inside the top of the envelope and unfolded the single, thin sheet of paper contained therein. And for a while frowned mightily; then smiled.

“Have a look at that, Babs!” he said proudly, making as if to hand the sheet across the desk. “May well be what we’ve been waiting for — from my appeal, you know.”

“Won’t there be some fingerprints on it?” she asked tentatively.

“Ah!”

“You can get fingerprints from paper?”

“Get almost anything from anything these days,” mumbled Strange. “And what with DNA, forensics, psychological profiling — soon be no need for us detectives any more!”

But in truth he appeared a little abashed as he held the top of the sheet between his thumb and forefinger and leaned forward over the desk; and Barbara Dean leaned forward herself and read the undated letter, typed on a patently antiquated machine through a red/black ribbon long past its operative sell-by date, with each keyed character unpredictably produced in either color.

“Bit illiterate?” suggested Strange.

“I wonder if he really is,” said Barbara, replacing her spectacles in their case.

“You should wear ‘em more often. You’ve got just the face for specs, you know. Hasn’t anyone ever told you that?”

No one ever had, and Barbara hoped she wasn’t blushing.

“Thank you.”

“Well?”

“I’m not in the Crime Squad, sir.”

“But you don’t think he’d last long in the typing pool?”

“You fairly sure it’s a ‘he’?”

“Sounds like it to me.”

Barbara nodded.

“Not much of a typist, like I say.”

“Spelling’s OK — ‘recognize,’ and so on.”

“Can’t spell ‘was.’”

“That’s not really spelling though, is it? You sometimes get typists who are sort of dyslexic with some words. They try to type ‘was,’ say, and they hit the ‘s’ before the ‘a.’ Do things like that regularly but they don’t seem to notice.”

“Ah!”

“Grammar’s not so hot, I agree. Probably good enough to pass GCSE, I suppose, sir.”

“Does anyone ever fail GCSE?”

“Could do with a bit more punctuation too, couldn’t it?”

“Dunno. Not as much as Morse’d put in.”

“Who do you think ‘The Ringer’ is?”

“Ringer? One who rings, isn’t it? Chap who’s been ringing us up, like as not.”

“Does the postmark help?”

“Oxford. Not that that means anything. It could have been posted anywhere in our patch of the Cotswolds... Carterton! Yes. That’s where they take the collections and do the sorting before bringing everything to Oxford.”

“Scores of villages though, sir.”

“Go and fetch Sergeant Dixon!”

“Know where he is?”

“Give you three guesses.”

“In the canteen?”

“In the canteen.”

“Eating a doughnut?”

“Doughnuts, plural.”

It was like some of the responses she’d learned so well from the Litany.

“I’ll go and find him.”

“And send him straight to me.”

“The Lord be with you.”

“And with thy spirit.”

“You do go to church, sir!”

“Only for funerals.”

Sergeant Dixon was not so corpulent as Chief Superintendent Strange. But there was not all that much in it; and the pair of them would have made uncomfortable copassengers in economy-class seating on an airline. Plenty of room, though, as Dixon drove out alone to Carterton in a marked police car. He’d arranged a meeting with the manager of the sorting office there. A manageress, as it happened, who quickly and competently answered his questions about the system operating in West Oxfordshire.

Yes, since the Burford office had been closed, Carter-ton had assumed postal responsibility for a pretty wide area. Dixon was handed a printed list of the Oxon districts now covered; was informed how many postmen were involved; where the collection points were, and how frequently the boxes were emptied; how and when the accumulated bags of mail were brought back to Carterton, and how they were there duly sorted and categorized — but not franked — before being sent on to Oxford.

“Any way a particular letter can be traced to a particular post-box?”

“No, none.”

“Traced to a particular village?”

“No.”

Dixon was not an officer of any great intellectual capacity; indeed Morse had once cruelly described him as “the lowest-watt bulb in the Thames Valley Force.” He had only five years to go before retirement, and he knew that his recent elevation to the rank of sergeant was as high as he could ever hope to climb. Not too bad, though, for a man who had been given little encouragement either from home or from school: if he’d made something of himself he’d made something of himself himself , as he’d once put things. Not the most elegant of sentences. But “elegance” had never been a word associated with Sergeant Dixon.

And yet, as he looked down at his outsize black boots, buffed and bulled, he was thinking as hard as he’d thought for many a moon. He was fully aware of the importance of his present inquiries, and he felt gratified to have been given the job. How good it would be if he could impress his superiors — something (he knew) he’d seldom done in his heretofore somewhat nondescript career.