The Remorseful Day (22 page)

No! She'd stay.

She'd consulted the Yellow Pages and found
Barron
, J.,
Builder and Decorator;
not so far away, either—at Lower Swinstead. She'd rung him and he'd called round to survey the job. He'd seemed a personable sort of fellow; and when he'd quoted a reasonable (if slightly steep) estimate for both the restructuring and the repainting, she'd accepted.

He'd promised to be with her at 7:30
A.M.
on Monday, August 3. And it was precisely at that time that he knocked in civilized manner on the front door of “Collingwood,” again admiring as he did so the dripstone molding above it.

Born in North Oxford, Mrs. Bayley spoke her mind unapologetically: “You look as if you've just come straight from the abattoir, Mr. Barron!”

The builder (rather a handsome man, she thought) grinned wryly as he looked down at overalls bespattered with scarlet paint. “Not my choice, Mrs. B. I'm with
you
, all the way. If there's a better combination of color than black and white and yellow, I don't know it.”

Mrs. B. felt gratified. “Well, I'll let you get on then. I won't bother you—no one will bother you. It's all very quiet round here. Would you like some coffee later?”

“Tea, if you don't mind, Mrs. B. Milk and two teaspoons of sugar, please. About ten? Smashing!”

From the ground-floor window she watched him as he removed the aluminum ladders from the top of the van, stood there for a few seconds looking up at the dormer window, then shaking out the first extension and, by means of a rope and pulley at the bottom, elongating the ladder to its fullest extent with a second, smaller extension. For a few seconds he stood there, holding the loftily assembled structure at right angles to the ground; then easing the pointed top of the third stage—most carefully, lovingly almost—into place
against the casement of the dormer window some thirty feet above, before finally firming the bottom of the ladder on the compacted gravel of the pathway which divided the front of the houses there from the wide stretch of grass leading to the edge of Sheep Street, some four or five feet below.

For several minutes Mrs. B. stood by her front window on the ground floor, looking out a little anxiously to observe her builder's varied skills. Across the road, a solitary jogger in red trainers was running reasonably briskly past the Bay Tree Hotel, his tracksuit hood over his head, as if he were trying to work up a sweat; or just perhaps to keep his ears warm, since there was an unseasonal nip in the air that morning. Mrs. B thought jogging a silly and dangerous way of keeping fit, though. She'd known the young North Oxford don who had written the hugely popular
Joys of Jogging
, and who had died aged twenty-seven, whilst on an early-morning not-so-joyful jog.

Jogging was a dangerous business.

Like climbing ladders.

And Mrs. B.'s nerves could stand things no longer.

She would repair to the second-floor back bedroom to continue with her quilting—as well as to quell the acute fear she felt for a man who (as she saw it) was risking his life at every second of his working day. But before doing so, she knew she had the moral duty to impart a few cautionary words of advice. And she opened the front door just as the builder was beginning his ascent, his left hand on a shoulder-high rung, his right hand grasping a narrowly serrated saw, a long chisel, and a red, short-handled Stanley knife.

“You
will
be careful, won't you? Please!”

The builder nodded, successively grasping each rung (each “round” as the firemen say) at a point just above his shoulders as he climbed with measured step, professionally, confidently, to the top of the triple-length ladder. He'd always enjoyed being up high, ever since the vicar of St. John the Baptist's in Burford had taken him and his fellow choirboys up to the top of the church. It
was the first time in his young life he'd felt superior, felt powerful, as he traversed his way along the high places there with a strangely happy confidence, whilst the others inched their cautious way along the narrow ledges.

It was just the same now.

Once he had reached the top rung but three, he looked up and immediately decided he would be able to work at the top of the dormer without any trouble. Then he looked down, and saw that the ladder(s) beneath him, though sagging slightly in the middle (that was good), seemed perfectly straight and secure. Funny, really! Most people thought you were all right on heights just so long as you didn't look up or down. Rubbish! The only thing to avoid was looking laterally to left or right, when there really
was
the risk (at least for him) of losing all sense of the vertical and the horizontal. He dug his red Stanley knife into the upper lintel, then the lower sill; in each case, as he twisted the blade, finding the wooden texture crumble with ominous ease. Not surprising though, really, for he'd noticed the date above the door. He secured the top of the ladder to the gutterings—his normal practice—and began work.

At the appointed hour Mrs. B. boiled the kettle in the second-floor front (as her husband had called it); squeezed a Typhoo bag with the kitchen tongs; and stirred in two heaped spoonsful of sugar. Then, with the steaming cup and two digestive biscuits on a circular tray, she was about to make her way downstairs when something quite extraordinary flashed across her vision: she saw a pair of oblique parallel lines passing almost in slow motion across the oblong frame of the second-floor window. So sharply was that momentary configuration imprinted upon her retina that she was able to describe it so very precisely later that same afternoon; was able to recall that earsplitting, skin-tingling shriek of terror as the man whose skull was about to be smashed to pieces fell headfirst on to the compacted pathway below, so very few yards from her own front door.

“Dead,” the senior paramedic had told her quietly,
six minutes only after her panic-stricken call on
999.
Incontrovertibly dead.

For the next hour or so Mrs. Bayley wept almost uncontrollably. Partly from shock. Partly, too, from guilt, because (as she repeatedly reminded herself) it was
her
fault that he'd appeared upon the scene in the first place. She'd found his name among the local builders and house renovators listed alphabetically in the telephone directory. In the Yellow Pages, in fact. Exactly where Sergeant Lewis, also, had discovered the address of J. Barron, Builder, together with a telephone number in Lower Swinstead.

Had he been left to himself, had he been without any knowledge of the context in which the apparent “accident” had occurred, Lewis would not have suspected that it all amounted to murder. But it
had
been murder, he felt sure of that; and four hours earlier he had taken personal responsibility for initiating the whole apparatus of yet another murder inquiry. Same SOCOs as in the Sutton Courtenay murder, same pathologist, same everything; but with almost every sign of immediate activity over when, just before 3
P.M.
, Morse finally put in an appearance, very soon to be seating himself in Mrs. Bayley's north-facing sitting room on the ground floor.

“Northamptonshire faring any better?” he asked the senior SOCO.

“Next year, perhaps,” said Eddie Andrews pessimistically.

“You'd be out of a job without me,” continued Morse. “Just like Dr. Hobson here.”

But the unsmiling pathologist could find little place in her heart for any banter and ignored the comment. As did Edwards.

The gloomy room was suddenly empty, apart from Sergeant Lewis. “You said there wasn't any danger of
him
being murdered, sir.”

Morse could find no satisfactory answer and stared silently out of the window until Mrs. Bayley came in with (for Morse) wholly unwelcome cups of coffee and the same two digestive biscuits that Barron would have eaten with his oversugared tea.

“You mentioned to Sergeant Lewis what you saw from the window? The one above this, wasn't it?”

She nodded. “It made such a vivid imprint on the, er …”

“Retina?” suggested Lewis.

“Thank you, Sergeant. I
did
myself once work in the Oxford Eye Hospital.” She turned to Morse. “You'll think me a silly old woman, but it reminded me of something I saw quite a few years ago now in one of the Sundays. There were these outline drawings sent in by readers and you had to guess what they were; and one of them always stuck in my, er …” (This time Lewis desisted.) She took a pencil and without permission made a quick little drawing in Lewis's notebook:

“Can't you guess, Inspector?” Her eyes twinkled.

Morse frowned, about to suggest something wildly inappropriate when the undeterred Lewis intervened:

“Giraffe walking past a window?”

“You clever man.”

“No!” Lewis smiled deprecatingly. “I'd seen it before.”

He took a pencil and made an equally quick little drawing underneath:

“Aristocratic sardine in a tin!” she cried triumphantly.

“You clever woman!”

She shook her head. “I'd seen it before.”

Morse sounded wearily impatient. “I'm very sorry to interrupt the fun, Mrs. Bayley, but…”

“Of course. Forgive me!”

“Which way was your, er, giraffe walking? Left to right? Right to left?”

“Left to right—exactly like I've drawn it, Inspector.”

“So if the ladder fell across the window from left to right, the bottom of the ladder must have slipped from right to left—that is, from your point of view here in the house, Mrs. Bayley?”

“I'm not quite sure I follow you.”

“I mean, if someone had come along and given the ladder a hefty kick at the bottom, he'd probably have been coming from” (Morse pointed to the right) “the center of Burford, say, to” (Morse pointed vaguely to the left) “wherever this road leads to?”

“Bourton on the Water.”

“Thank you, Lewis!”

“But we know that, sir—about the ladder, I mean. They found him six or seven yards to the right of the front door. That's from Mrs. Bayley's point of view of course,” he added mischievously.

“Yes!” whispered the lady of the household, as so vividly she recalled that terrible sight, with the red Stanley knife lying there beside the shattered skull.

Morse was looking far from pleased. Even less so when a further cup of coffee was suggested. The room had become chillier, and he shivered slightly as he got to his feet. It was time for the clichés:

“If you
do
remember anything else—anything odd—anything unusual—anything at all…”

And suddenly she
had
remembered something. It was Morse's involuntarily shivering shoulders that had jogged—yes,
jogged
—her memory.

The jogger.

“There
was
something a bit unusual. We don't get many people jogging here—we're all a bit too old. But there was one this morning, about a quarter-to-eight. He'd pulled the hood of his tracksuit over his head as if he was feeling the cold a bit.”

“Or wasn't anxious to be recognized,” added Morse quietly.

“Perhaps
you
could recognize him though, Inspector. You see, he was wearing a very distinctive pair of training shoes.
Red
, they were.”

The two policemen left with appropriate expressions of gratitude; and with the two digestive biscuits still untouched on the circular tray, beside two cups, one of them full, of stone-cold coffee.

After Lewis had turned right at the junction of Sheep Street and High Street and slipped the marked police car into the queue up to the A40 roundabout, Morse pointed peremptorily to the right, to the Cotswold Gateway Hotel.