The Remorseful Day (13 page)

“No, I don't,” he said quietly.

As he drove back along the A34 into Oxford, Morse doubted he'd expressed adequate thanks to Greenways Waste Management. He was (he acknowledged the fact) never a man renowned for voicing much gratitude. He'd even dismissed, and that cursorily, Rice's thoughtful offer of issuing a memo to everyone working either permanently or temporarily on the site, acquainting them with the situation.

But Morse felt unable to feel too self-critical, because he knew there
was
no “situation.” And he repeated to himself this recently corroborated conviction as he turned on the car radio, and listened again to the slow movement of Bruckner's Seventh.

When later that same afternoon Lewis arrived back at Kidlington HQ, he felt more pleased, more excited, and (yes!) more confident in himself than he'd been for a long, long while. In almost all previous cases he'd usually reached first base only to find that Morse was already sprinting off to second base; and so on, and so on, all round the baseball pitch. So now he decided to do a little sprinting for himself.

First, he rang Redbridge—only to discover that Morse had already visited the site.

Second, he rang Sutton Courtenay—only to discover that Morse had already visited the site, and where he'd pronounced that any search of said site was quite certainly foredoomed to failure.

So Lewis had coolly countermanded these instructions.

It was as if he—Lewis—was taking charge of the case.

Well, he was, wasn't he?

During “Jammie” Jarnold's twenty-two years’ service on the Sutton Courtenay site, he'd seen most things. Not everything. For example, he'd never caught a glimpse of that sack of notes the Metropolitan Police were certain had been deposited in one of the trucks on that long train which arrived in the early hours of each morning from Brentford, via a branchline from Didcot, with its thousands of tons of the capital's refuse. Four hundred and fifty thousand pounds, they'd said, in fivers and tenners. Yes, Jammie had kept his eyes wide open on that occasion; had occasionally climbed down from his cab to prod anything that seemed even minimally promising.

If, on balance, it was a steady old job, it was also a job that was unmemorable and predictably monotonous. For this reason, neither Jammie nor his colleagues in the team of BOMAC tractor operators had dismissed as so much negligible bumf the single Xeroxed sheet which had been handed out that Saturday morning, both to permanent on-site personnel and to every dump truck driver entering the site from the far quarters of Oxfordshire.

(Morse himself would have been pleased to write such a succinct note—though inserting, of course, an apostrophe in the humorous parenthesis.)

Just after the start of the shift, a colleague shouted across at Jammie, waving a copy of the memo.

“Better keep your eyes open!”

“What's the reward?”

“Night with Sophia Loren in the Savoy.”

“Bit young for me.”

“I still reckon you'll keep your eyes open.”

“Yeah! I reckon.”

“Like looking for a needle in an ‘aystack though.”

“Like finding a shadow in the blackout, as me ol’ mum used to say.”

“I like that, Jammie. Sort o’ poetic, like.”

Jarnold braked his tractor at 10:05
A.M.
and jumped down from his cab on to the semileveled, semicom-pacted mound of recently deposited rubbish. It was not that the specific item he'd spotted was unusual in any way. In fact, any pair of shoes was a very common sight: thousands of pairs were ever to be observed on every part of the site, worn down, worn out, worn beyond any possible repair. But there were unusual aspects about this particular pair of shoes. For a start, they looked comparatively new and were clearly of good quality; then, they were the only objects sticking out of a large black bag; what's more, they seemed strangely reluctant to drop
out
of that large black bag, as if (perhaps?)
they might be attached, permanently, to something
inside
that large black bag.

Jarnold shouted over to a colleague.

“Come over ‘ere a sec!”

But already he had half-torn one side of the plastic.

“Christ!”

He turned away to vomit full-throatedly over a piece of conveniently positioned carpeting.

Had he been dining with Miss Loren at the Savoy, this would have caused considerable consternation. Not here, though. Not at the landfill site at Sutton Courte-nay in Oxfordshire.

Morse (for some reason) was in that Saturday morning when Lewis knocked on his office door just after ten.

“Spare a few minutes, sir?”

“C'm in! I've finished the crossword.”

“How long?”

“Let's just say the brain is deteriorating.”

“Thirty thousand brain cells a day we lose after thirty, so you told me once.”

Morse nodded morosely. “I just thought I was the exception, that's all. Si’ down!”

Lewis did so, and took a deep breath. “I've been following you, sir.”

Morse looked across at his sergeant uncomprehendingly.

“You were at Debbie Richardson's house—before me;
you were at the Maiden's Arms—before me; you were at Bullingdon—before me; you were at Redbridge—before me; you were out at Sutton Courtenay—before me. You've been one move ahead of me all the time.”

“Only
one
?”

“Why couldn't you just
tell
me?”

“Tell you what?” asked Morse. “And don't forget that time when it was
me
following
you:
from Bullingdon. At exactly the distance recommended in the Highway Code.”

“Which is?”

“Next question?”

“You will be taking on the case, won't you?”

“Next question?”

“Why not?”

“Pass.”

“You're getting people's backs up here, you know that?”

“Nothing new about that.”

“But surely—?”

“Listen!” Unblinking blue eyes glared across the desk. “I am not taking on the Harrison case.”

“I was just hoping you'd help me, that's all.”

“Yes?”

“Well, do you mind me asking you if … if you've got any personal interest in all of this?”

“Nil.” If there had been a quick flicker of unease in Morse's eyes, it was as quickly gone.

“But you know a lot about it, don't you? So you must have some idea about what happened on the night she was murdered?”

“Ideas—plural.”

“There was a logical sequence of events, as you would say.”

“There was a concatenation of events, yes, with each link of the chain causally connected to its predecessor.”

“What do you think happened that night?”

“Not much argument about that, is there?”

“You'd agree with this, then?” Lewis produced a sheet of A4 on which he had typed a timetable for the day of the murder:

Morse glanced at the sheet in perfunctory fashion.

“You ought to use the Oxford comma more.”

“Pardon?”

“The presumption was—is—that somewhere between nine and half-past…”

“Pathologist's report seemed to confirm that.”

“Would I had your faith in pathologists!”

“Not just that though, is it? The whole thing hangs together. Pretty well everything there's confirmed: statements from the hospital; receipts from the two shops; postmortem details on the meal; phone calls checked out—”

“Nonsense! The builder? First time the number's engaged? Second time nobody answers? How the hell do you check that?”

“You can't check absolutely everything—”

“What about the husband? Odd sort of call, wasn't it? Drop whatever you're doing and get here double-quick! So who was it who rang him?”

“That's what I'm asking you, sir.”

“His number couldn't have been too well known. He was renting a flat, wasn't he?”

“Still is.”

“But somebody knew it—and rang him. Did we check the phone records of the suspects?”

“What suspects?”

“The two children?”

“They
weren't
suspects. And if they were, why shouldn't they ring their dad occasionally?”

“How did he pay for his train journey?”

“No credit card record—must have paid cash.
And
for the taxi ride. Anyway, he'd got the best alibi of anybody: taxi driver remembers the time exactly. He was just listening to the 11 o'clock news headlines.”

“Was the train a bit late that night? If it's the one I sometimes catch, it's due in at 22:53.”

“Too late to find out, sir.”

“Rubbish! Too difficult, possibly. But they keep all these times of arrivals: they make statistical tables out of ‘em, for heaven's sake.”

“Must've been on time, surely?”

“What? Seven minutes for somebody in one helluva rush? From Platform 2 to the taxi-rank? It'd only take a geriatric like me a couple of minutes.”

“Perhaps there was a queue.”

“Was
there a queue?”

“Dunno. Perhaps he nipped into the snack bar.”

“Closed.”

“I don't quite see what you're getting at.”

“What is essential, Lewis, is usually invisible to the outward eye.”

“Which doesn't help
me
much, does it?”

“All right. Get back to your facts.”

“She was burgled. At some point that evening the back patio window was smashed in from the outside and somebody was after something. The TV was unplugged—”

“But not taken.”

“—so he was probably disturbed. He must have thought the place was empty. Probably none of the lights would have been on—not then anyway. Midsummer, wasn't it? Sunset was about a quarter-past nine—I looked it up.” (Morse nodded approvingly.) “I know some people always leave one or two lights on anyway when they go out—”

“But she
didn't
go out.”

“No. So as I say the burglar must have thought the coast was clear, and must have been prepared for the alarm to ring—it's quite a way to the next house—while he grabbed a few of the valuables, smartish like.”

“The alarm was ringing when Harrison got there, wasn't it? Twenty-past eleven.”

Lewis nodded. “Two hours or so after she was murdered.”

“And the alarm would cut out automatically after twenty minutes’ ringing?”

“Yes.”

“So?”

“I dunno, sir. But it seems we didn't discount the theory that the murderer might have set it off himself.”

“You mean two hours
later?
”

“I don't know what I mean.”

“Pretty little puzzle.”

“You're not trying to help me, are you? You've usually got some theory or other of your own.”

Morse smiled amiably. “The obvious one. Mrs. H. surprised a burglar and the burglar panicked and murdered her. Or perhaps…” (the smile had faded) “… perhaps she was entertaining one of her lovers that night and things went wrong—things went sadly wrong. That's all I've got to offer: the burglar theory and the lover theory. What else is there?”

“Maybe a bit of both, sir? Say she was in bed with some fellow when she heard the window being smashed in and …”

“Could well be.”

“You see, she'd
not
had sex that night, sir—certainly not been raped or tortured or physically assaulted. Clothes all neatly folded by the side of the bed.”

“Couldn't the murderer have folded them? Doesn't take me long to fold a pair of pajamas.”

Lewis shook his head slowly. “Naked, gagged, handcuffed …”

“Yes,” agreed Morse. “Don't forget the handcuffs.”

“Not much good remembering them, either.”

“No. I recall they were, er, not to be found later on.”