“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:
7 A.M.-1 P.M. Yvonne on early shift at JR2 Ward 7C
1:15-2 P.M. Lunches in staff canteen
2:15-4 P.M. (?)Drives down to Oxford shopping at M&S and Austin Reed
4:00(?)-4:30 P.M. Drives home avoiding main traffic exodus
6-7 P.M. Evening meal of mushroom omelette
9:00 P.M. Local builder rings — number engaged or phone off hook
9:10 P.M. Frank H gets phone call and catches 21.48 Paddington to Oxford train
9:30 P.M. Builder rings again — ringing-tone but no reply
11:00 P.M. F H gets taxi to Lower Swinstead
11:20 P.M. Discovers wife naked, gagged, handcuffed and dead
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.”
“But all the proper procedures were gone through. Left on her wrists till the PM, and the path people did all the usual checks — blood, fibers, hairs. Couldn’t come up with anything though, could they? And they checked them for prints — job they’d normally leave to the SOCOs. Bit of a muddle, by the sound of it. Probably that’s how they came to be lost.”
“Temporarily misplaced, Lewis.”
“Not the only things that went missing, were they? There was a file of personal letters...”