In the living room, he selected Bruno Walter’s early recording of Die Walküre, with Lauritz Melchior and Lotte Lehmann singing the roles of Siegmund and Sieglinde. Wonderful! So Morse turned the volume control to maximum as he listened to the anagnorisis at the end of Act I, and heard neither of the telephone calls made to his ex-directory number that afternoon, conscious only that he was falling deliciously asleep as the benighted brother and sister rushed off into the forest to beget Siegfried...
It was coming up to 2:45 P.M. when Morse jerked abruptly awake, disappointed that his semi-erotic dream was prematurely terminated: a dream of a woman seated intimately close to him — a dream of Debbie Richardson, with legs provocatively crossed, the texture of the cheap black stockings tautly stretched along her upper thighs.
Wonderful!
But even as she’d leaned toward him, he’d voiced his deep anxiety: “Aren’t you frightened someone will come in?”
“No one’ll come in. Harry won’t be comin’ back. Ever. I’ll get you another drink. Just — stay — where — you — are.”
So Morse had stayed where he was, awaiting her return with impatience, and with an empty glass beside him. And when he awoke, he was still sitting there alone, awaiting her return with impatience, and with an empty glass beside him.
Wagner had long since run his course, and finally Morse got to his feet and turned off the CD player. He felt tired, hot, thirsty — and a sharp pain in his chest betokened another bout of indigestion. In the bathroom, he cleaned his teeth and dropped three Alka-Seltzer tablets into a glass of water; then he filled up the washbasin and thrice dipped his head into the cold water. The tablets had fizzed and dissolved and he downed the dosage at a single draught. Thence to his bedroom, where he took his blood-sugar leveclass="underline" 24.8 — almost off the scale. His own fault, since he’d forgotten to inject himself at lunchtime — making up for it now, though, with an extra four units of Actrapid insulin. Just to be on the safe side. Back in the bathroom, he drank two further glasses of cold water, acknowledging how surprisingly pleasing was its taste, since water had seldom figured prominently in his drinking habits. Finally he decided that a couple of Paracetamol would be appropriate. So he shook out the tablets on to his palm; shook out three in fact — and decided to take the three. Just to be on the safe side.
Suddenly he was feeling much better, his faith in this curious combination of assorted medicaments seemingly justified once more. Suddenly, too, he decided to follow his consultant’s somewhat despairing exhortation to take a bit of exercise occasionally. Why not? It was a warm and gentle summer’s day.
In the small entrance hall, he noticed the figure “2” on the window of his Ansafone. Pressing “Play” he listened to the first message:
Morse? Janet! Ten-past one Saturday afternoon. Good news! I hope to be back in Oxford on the 14th. So you’ll be able to take me somewhere? To bed perhaps? Give me a ring — soon. Bye!
Any semiremembrance of Debbie Richardson was lingering no longer, and Morse smiled happily to himself. He would ring immediately. But the second message had followed without a pause, and he was destined not to ring Sister McQueen that afternoon.
Instead he dialed HQ and finally got through to the young PC who had driven him out to Bullingdon the previous morning in an unmarked police car.
“Get the same car, Kershaw — nice, comfy seats — and pick me up from home quam celerrime.”
“Pardon?”
“Smartish!”
“Sir, I was just going off duty when you rang and I’ve—”
“Make it five minutes!”
Deeply puzzled, Morse walked back into the sitting room where he sat in the black-leather armchair; and where his right hand reached for whiskey once more as mentally he rehearsed that second, quite extraordinary message on the Ansafone:
Sir? Lewis here — half-past one, nearly — I’m out at Sutton Courtenay. Please come along as soon as you can — for my sake if nobody else’s. I think you should get here before we move the body. You see, sir, it isn’t the body of Harry Repp.
Chapter twenty-eight
Alas, poor Yorick! — I knew him, Horatio.
It was just after 4 P.M. that same Saturday afternoon when Morse and Lewis finally sat down together in the requisitioned office of the site manager.
“Straightaway I knew it wasn’t him, sir, when I saw his arms. Harry Repp had this tattoo: all twisted chains and anchors, you know — a sort of...” Lewis undulated his hands vertically, as if tracing a woman’s willowy figure.
“Convoluted involvement,” suggested Morse gently.
“Well, this fellow’s not got any, has he? Anyway he’s much smaller, only — what? — five-four, five-five. Doesn’t weigh much either — eight, nine stone? No more.”
Morse nodded. “And he’s got different colored hair, and he’s got a port-wine stain on his neck, and he’s not wearing Repp’s clothes, and his shoes are three sizes smaller—”
“All right. I wasn’t expecting the Queen’s Medal!”
At which Eddie Andrews, the 2i/c senior SOCO, knocked on the door and entered the office, at once uncertain whether to address himself to Morse or to Lewis. He decided on the former:
“Safe, I reckon, to move him now? Dr. Hobson says there’s not much else she can do here.”
Morse shrugged. “You’d better ask Sergeant Lewis. He’s in charge.”
And Lewis rose to the occasion. “Yes, move him. Thank you.”
As he was about to leave, Andrews noticed the TV set.
“Mind if I just see how Northants are getting on in the cricket?”
“Important to you, is it?” queried Morse mildly.
Andrews was digitally discovering Sport (Cricket) on Ceefax when the office door burst open to admit a florid-faced Chief Superintendent Strange, an officer resolutely determined to retain the appellation “Chief,” whatever most of his collateral colleagues in the Force were doing.
“You’ve ruined my afternoon’s golf, Lewis! You know that?”
Surprisingly, the words were spoken with little sign of animus. But before Lewis could respond in any way, Strange was addressing Morse in considerably sharper tones:
“And how exactly do you come to be here?”
“Same as you really, sir. Ruined my day, too. I was just indulging in a little Egyptian PT—”
“After indulging in a lot of Scottish whiskey by the smell of it!”
“—when Lewis here rang and asked me to come along. Well, he’s been a faithful soul most of the time, so...”
“So you just came along as a sort of personal favor?”
“That’s about it.” (Andrews sidled silently from the room.)
“Well let me tell you one thing, matey. You won’t be staying on as a personal favor — is that clear? You’ll be staying on because you’re in charge of this case — because that’s an order. You may have had some excuse as far as the Harrison case was concerned: I could just about understand that.” (Strange’s voice had momentarily dropped to a semisympathetic register.) “But you’ve no bloody excuse now. And if you decide to get on your high horse again and start arguing the toss with me, you’ll be up before the Chief Constable first thing Monday morning!”