Sixty-two
Anyone wishing to take up Morse's earlier promise of being available the following Monday morning would have been disappointed, since he had put in no appearance by lunchtime. Yet he was not idle during those morning hours; and any visitor to the bachelor flat would have found him seated at his desk for much of the time; and for a fair proportion of that time found him writing quite busily and (as we have seen) very neatly. His old typewriter (with its defective “e” and “t”) sat at his elbow; but he had never mastered the keyboard skills with any real confidence, and he wrote now in longhand with a medium-blue Biro.
For Priority Consideration
Several things have happened these last few days which have prompted me to put down in writing my own thoughts on the present state of play.
First, I've been waking up every day recently, after some nightmarish nights, with a premonition that some disaster is imminent. Whether death comes into such a category, I'm not sure. I can't agree with Socrates, though, that death is a blessing devoutly to be wished, even if it is (as I hope it is, as I believe it is) one long completely dreamless sleep. For the very fact of being alive is surely the best thing that's happened to (almost) all of us.
Second, the last murder case entrusted to the pair of us has been (one or two loose ends though) satisfactorily resolved. Repp and Flynn were murdered by Barron, and the murderer himself is now dead. So any further insight into the original Harrison murder from their angles is wholly precluded.
Third, I'm certain that Frank Harrison has been the paymaster. It's high time we brought him into HQ for intensive questioning, either directly about the murder of his wife, or at the very least about some culpable complicity of her murder.
Fourth, I'm also convinced that Yvonne H. was murdered by one of her own family. Nothing else makes any sense at all, not to me anyway. That murder was not premeditated: few of them are. It was committed spontaneously, viciously, involuntarily perhaps, by whichever of the three it was who found Yvonne Harrison in a situation that was utterly unexpected—kinkiness, perversion, degradation, all rolled up into one.
On the face of it, the husband is the outsider of the three, so you will appreciate, Lewis, that in my book he's the favorite. It's the “why” that worries me, though. He wasn't and isn't anybody's fool, and he must have known more than enough about his wife's tastes in bondage and possibly masochism. So I just can't see blazing jealousy as his motive, especially since, as I strongly suspect, he regularly experienced the (reported) joys of extramarital sex himself.
A confession here.
Quite a few times I've found myself looking at the faces of people concerned with this case and thinking I'd seen them somewhere before. I thought it might be the result of interbreeding in a small community—no wonder some of the villagers are pretty tight-lipped! And I was right. That fruit-machine addict, for example: Allen Thomas. That's how you spell his name by the way, Lewis. I found it in the village-school records: Allen Alfred Thomas. Unusual these days, that spelling of “Allen.” And “Alfred” belongs more to the first half of the century, doesn't it? I also found out (well, Dixon found out) that the Christian names of Elizabeth Jane Thomas's father were “Harold Alfred”; and that someone else in the village had a father with the Christian names “Joseph Allen.” That someone else was Frank Harrison. And (believe me!) he was the father of the lad, and Elizabeth decided to give him a couple of Christian names that, at least for herself, could confer some little pretense of legitimacy of her illegitimate son. (I wonder if his father gives him a fruit-machine allowance?)
Let's turn to the Harrison children.
Either of them could have murdered their mother. What would be the motive, though? I just can't see Sarah suddenly turning to murder because she finds her mother abed with one of her many lovers. What does it really matter to her that her mother enjoys a bit of biting and bondage occasionally? Shocked and disgusted? Yes, she'd certainly have been both. But driven to murder? No. There's something about her, though—something that tells me that she's up to her very smooth neck in things.
What about Simon Harrison? As we know he's always been a bit of a mummy's darling: a boy disad-vantaged because of early deafness; a boy always needing extra understanding and extra love, and who found it (hardly surprisingly) from his mother. I'd guess myself that for Simon this relationship had always been very precious. Sacrosanct almost. I'd also guess that he had no notion whatsoever of his mother's idiosyncratic tastes in sexual gratification. Then one night, the night of the murder, he'd driven out to see her. And why not? Just to say hello, perhaps? Like his sister, he had a key to the front door, and he entered the house and disturbed the copulating couple—copulating in the most extraordinary circumstances; and he would have been shocked and disgusted (like his sister) but heartbroken, too, and disillusioned and betrayed. His mother performing those things with some plebeian local builder!
Where does all this lead us? First and foremost to an early, long-overdue, full-scale interview with Frank Harrison. Not too early though. Our colleagues got nowhere with him and we, Lewis, are a pair of bloodhounds very late on the scene, with the scent gone very cold.
Fifth, there's this business of the letter you found in the Harrison file. As I told you, I take full responsibility for the fact that some items originally discovered at the Harrison murder scene were subsequently, as they say, found to be missing. It was embarrassing for me to talk to you about this and I know that you in turn found it equally embarrassing to—
Morse laid down his pen and answered the phone:
“Lewis! What do you want?”
“You OK, sir?”
“Why shouldn't I be?”
“It's just that—well, you know that animal charity shop on the corner of South Parade and Middle Way…”
“I am not an animal lover, Lewis.”
“Well, people leave things there, by the door, things for the shop to sell for charity—”
“Get on with it!”
“Guess what one of the shop assistants found when she got to work this morning?”
“Pair of handcuffs?”
“Pair of something, sir. Pair of red trainers! Almost brand-new. This woman had read in the Oxford Mail about the Burford jogger and she thought…”
“You know something, Lewis? That's very interesting. Very interesting indeed. I'll be with you straightaway.”