“I doubt they’d ever have been much help.”
“We still didn’t do a very good job.”
“Bloody awful job.”
“If only we knew who rang Frank Harrison in London that night!”
“One of his children, the builder, the burglar, the lover, the candlestick-maker? I’m like you: I don’t know. But unlike you I’m not concerned with the case.”
Lewis looked shrewdly into Morse’s face. “You’re interested though, I think.”
Morse got to his feet. “Just give me a lift down to Oddbins. I’m out of Glenfiddich.”
The phone rang as they were leaving.
“Morse?” (Strange’s unmistakable voice.)
“Sir?”
“Listen to this!”
“Not me, sir. It just so happens that Sergeant Lewis—”
“MORSE!” But the receiver had already been transferred; and although aware of the explosions at the other end of the line, Morse walked out into the corridor and along to the Gentlemen’s loo.
On his return, the telephone conversation had concluded.
“They’ve found a body. Out at Sutton Courtenay.”
“Just like I said.”
“No, sir. Not just like you said. You told the people there not to worry any more. It was me who told them to keep looking.”
“Well done! You were right and I was wrong. I thought Repp was due for his comeuppance, and probably he thought so too. But I just didn’t follow it through. That letter he wrote from prison was a cry for help in a way, asking us to keep a protective eye on him. Which we did, of course. Or rather which we didn’t.”
Suddenly he gave his chest a vigorous massage with his right hand.
“OK, sir?”
“Bit of indigestion.”
“You sure?”
“They’ve found the body, you say?”
“Half an hour ago.”
“You’d better get off then.”
“Will you come along?”
“Certainly not. I’m not worried about him any longer. He was a cheap crook, a part-time burglar, a nasty piece of work — should have been rumbled years ago. Good riddance, Harry Repp!”
Chapter twenty-seven
In the afternoon they came unto a land
In which it seemèd always afternoon,
All round the coast the languid air did swoon,
Breathing like one that hath a weary dream.
After an excited, if somewhat dispirited, Lewis had dropped him off at Oddbins, Morse picked up two bottles of single-malt Glenfiddich (“£4 Off When Two Are Purchased”); then walked further down the Summertown shops to Boots, where he bought two large boxes of Alka-Seltzer (sixty tablets in all) and two packets of extra-strength BiSoDoL (sixty tablets in all), reckoning that such additional medicaments might keep him comparatively fit for a further fortnight. But in truth his acid indigestion and heartburn were getting even worse. All right, it was a family affliction; but it gave little comfort to know that father and paternal grandfather had both endured agonies from hiatal hernia — a condition not desperately serious perhaps, but certainly far more painful than it sounded. The cure — so simple! — had been repeatedly advocated by his GP: “Just pack up the booze!” And indeed Morse had occasionally followed such advice for a couple of days or so; only to assume, upon the temporary disappearance of the symptoms, that a permanent cure had been effected; and that a resumption of his erstwhile modus vivendi was thenceforth justified.
He would try again soon.
Not today, though.
He walked down South Parade to the Woodstock Road, turned right, and soon found himself at the Woodstock Arms, where the landlord rightly prided himself on a particularly fine pint of Morrell’s Bitter — of which Morse took liberal advantage that early Saturday lunchtime. The printed menu and the chalked-up specials on the board were strong temptations to many a man. But not to Morse. These past two decades he had almost invariably taken his lunchtime calories in liquid form; and he did so now. Most of the habitués he knew by sight, if not by name; but after a few perfunctory nods he settled himself in a corner of the wall-seating, and thought of many things...
Instinctively (or so he told himself) he’d known that Harry Repp was doomed to die from the moment he’d left Bullingdon. Harry had known too much. Harry had been a bit player — a bit more than a bit player in the drama that had been enacted on the evening Yvonne Harrison was murdered. But Harry had decided to remain silent. And the reason for such silence was probably the reason for many a silence — money. Someone had ensured that Harry’s discreet silence had been profitably rewarded. On his release Harry had probably decided that the goose could soon be persuaded to change the golden eggs from medium to large. But he’d miscalculated: something had happened — probably there’d been some communication during the last few weeks of his imprisonment — that had cast a cloud of fear over his impending release; justifiable fear, since he now lay stiff and cold amidst the trash and the filth of Sutton Courtenay.
It seemed a predictable outcome though far from an inevitable one, and Morse felt no real cause for any self-recrimination. Lewis would go along there — was probably there already; would join the SOCOs and supervise the necessary procedures; would draw a few tentative, temporary conclusions; would report to Strange; and all in all would probably do as good a job as any other member of the Thames Valley CID in seeking the motive for Repp’s murder.
He ordered himself a third pint, conscious that the world seemed a considerably kindlier place than heretofore. He even found himself listening to the topics of conversation around him: darts, bar-billiards, Aunt Sally, push-penny... and perhaps (he thought) his own life might have been marginally enriched by such innocent divertissements.
Perhaps not, though.
Leaving the Woodstock Arms, he slowly walked the few hundred yards north to Squitchey Lane, where he turned right toward his bachelor flat.
No messages on the Ansafone; no letters or notes pushed through the letter-box. A free afternoon! — for which, in his believing days, he would have given thanks to the Almighty. His dark-blue Oxford University diary was beside the phone, and he looked through the following week’s engagements. Not much there either, really: just that diabetes review at the Radcliffe Infirmary at 9 A.M. on Monday morning. Only an hour or so that; but the imminent appointment disturbed him slightly. He had promised his consultant, and promised himself, that he would present a faithful record of his blood-sugar measurements over the previous fortnight. But he had failed to do so, and there was little he could now do to remedy the situation except to take half a dozen such measurements in the remaining interval of thirty-six hours and to extrapolate backward therefrom, in order to present a neatly tabulated series of satisfactory readings. He’d done it before and he would do it again.
Kein Problem.
He half-filled a tumbler with Glenfiddich, then topped it up with commensurate tap water. Such dilution (a recent innovation) would, as Morse knew, mark him out in the eyes of many a Scot as a sacrilegious Sassenach. But according to his GP, the liver preferred things that way; and Morse’s liver (according to the same source) was in need of a bit of tender loving care, along with his heart, kidneys, stomach, pancreas, lungs.
Lungs...
Well, at least he’d finally managed to pack up smoking, a filthy habit, as he now recognized; but one which had given him almost as much pleasure as any other vice in life. And he knew that were he privy to the date and time of an early Judgment Day (the following Monday, say) he would set off immediately to the nearest newsagent’s to buy in a store of cigarettes. And he almost did so now, as if he could already hear the trumpets sounding on the other side.