The Remorseful Day (6 page)

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.

So he took his time as he sat in that small postal office; took his time as he wrote down a few words in
his black notebook; then another few words; then asked another question; then another …

When finally he drove back to Oxford, Sergeant Dixon was feeling rather pleased with himself.

That letter-cum-envelope was still exercising Strange's mind to its limits; but there seemed no cause for excitement. In late morning he had driven down to the Fingerprint Department at St. Aldate's in Oxford—only to learn that there was little prospect of further enlightenment. The faint, oversmeared prints offered no hope: the envelope itself must have been handled by the original correspondent, by the collecting postman, by the sorter, by the delivering postman, by a member of the HQ post department, by Strange's secretary, by Strange himself—and probably by a few extra intermediary persons to boot. How many fingers there, pray?

Forget it?

Forget it!

Handwriting? Only those red-felt capitals on the cover. Was it worth getting in some underemployed graphologist to estimate the correspondent's potential criminality? To seek possible signs of his (?) childhood neglect, parental abuse, sexual perversion, drugs… ?

Forget it?

Forget it!

The typewriter? God! How many typewriters were there to be found in Oxfordshire? In any case, Strange held the view that in the early years of the new millennium the streets of the UK's major cities would be lined with past-sell-by-date typewriters and VDUs and computers and the rest. And how was he to find an obviously
ancient
typewriter for God's sake, one with a tired and overworked ribbon of red and black? He might as well try to trace the animal inventory from the Ark.

Forget it?

Forget it!

What Strange needed now was new ideas.

What Strange needed now was Morse to be around.

Detective Sergeant Lewis of the Thames Valley CID kept himself pretty fit—very fit, really—in spite of a diet clogged daily with cholesterol. Quite simply, he had long held the view that some things went with other things. He had often heard, for example, that caviar was best washed down with iced champagne, although in truth his personal experience had occurred somewhat lower down the culinary ladder—with fried eggs necessarily complemented with chips and HP sauce; and (at breakfast time) with bacon, buttered mushrooms, well-grilled tomatoes, and soft fried bread. And, indeed, such was the breakfast that Mrs. Lewis had prepared at 7:15
A.M.
on Monday, July 20, 1998.

It will be of no surprise, therefore, for the reader to learn that Sergeant Lewis felt pleasingly replete when, just before 8
A.M.
, he drove from Headington down the Ring Road to the Cutteslowe roundabout, where he turned north up to Police HQ at Kidlington. No problems. All the traffic was going the other way, down to Oxford City.

He was looking forward to the day.

He'd known that working with Morse was never going to be easy, but he couldn't disguise the fact that his own service in the CID had been enriched immeasurably because of his close association, over so many years now, with his curmudgeonly, miserly, oddly vulnerable chief.

And now? There was the prospect of another case: a
big, fat, juicy puzzle—like the first page of an Agatha Christie novel.

Most conscientiously, therefore (after Strange had spoken to him), Lewis had read through as much of the archive material as he could profitably assimilate; and as he drove along that bright summer's morning he had a reasonably clear picture of the facts of the case, and of the hitherto ineffectual glosses put upon those facts by the CID's former investigating officers.

From the very start (as Lewis learned) several theories, including of course burglary, had been entertained, although none of such theories had made anywhere near complete sense. There had been no observable signs of any struggle, for example. And although Yvonne Harrison was found naked, handcuffed, and gagged, she had apparently not been raped or tortured. In addition, it appeared most unlikely that she had been forcibly stripped of the clothes she'd been wearing, since the skimpy lace bra, the equally skimpy lace knickers, the black blouse, and the minimal white skirt were found neatly folded beside her bed.

Had she been lying there completely unclothed when some intruder had disturbed her? Surely it was an unusually early hour for her to be abed; and if she
had
been abed then, and if she had heard the front doorbell, or heard something, it seemed quite improbable that she would have confronted any burglar or (unknown?) caller without first putting something on to cover a body fully acknowledged to be beautiful. Such considerations had led the police to speculate on the likelihood of the murderer being well known to Mrs. Harrison; and indeed to speculate on the possibility of the murderer living in the immediate and very circumscribed vicinity, and of being rather
too
well known to Mrs. Harrison. Her husband was away from home a good deal, and few of the (strangely uncooperative?) villagers would have been too surprised, it seemed, if his wife conveniently forgot her marriage vows occasionally. In fact it had not been difficult to guess that most of the villagers, though loath to be signatories to any specific
allegations, were fairly strongly in favor of some sort of “lover theory.” Yet although the Harrisons often appeared more than merely geographically distanced, no evidence was found of likely divorce proceedings.