He’d been thirty-two when, seven years earlier, he’d married Josie Newton, and duly fathered two daughters upon that lady — although (this the testimony of a brother in Belfast) the offspring had appeared so dissimilar in temperament, coloration, and mental ability, that there had been many doubts about their common paternity.
Josie Flynn had been unable or unwilling to offer much in the way of “character profiling” of her late husband (they’d never divorced); had scant interest in the manner of his murder; and, quite certainly, no interest in attending his “last rites,” whatever form these latter might take. Although he had treated her with ever-increasing indifference and contempt, he had never (she acknowledged it) abused her physically or sexually. In fact sex, even in the early months of their relationship, had never been a dominant factor in his life; nor, for that matter, had power or success or social acceptability or drink or even happiness. Just plain money. She’d not seen him for over two years; nor had her daughters — she’d seen to that. It was (again) all rather sad, according to Sergeant Dixon’s report. Mr. Paddy Flynn may not have been the ideal husband, but perhaps Ms. Josephine Newton (now her preferred appellation) was hardly a paragon of rectitude in the marital relationship. “Not exacly a saint herself?” as Dixon’s handwritten addendum had suggested. And Lewis smiled to himself again, feeling a little superior.
It had been Lewis himself (no Morse beside him) who had visited Flynn’s upstairs flat: smell of cigarette smoke everywhere; sheets on the single bed rather grubby; dirty cutlery and plates in the kitchen sink, but not too many of them; the top surface of the cooker in sore need of Mrs. Lewis; soiled shirts, underpants, socks, handkerchiefs, in a neat pile behind the bathroom door; a minimal assemblage of trousers, jackets, shirts, underclothes, in a heavy wardrobe; a Corby trouser-press; eleven cans of Guinness in the otherwise sparsely stocked refrigerator; not a single book anywhere; two copies of the Mirror opened at the Racing pages; a TV set, but not even the statutory hard-core video; one CD, Great Arias from Puccini, but no CD player for Flynn to have gauged their magnitude; no pictures on the walls; no personal correspondence; and very little in the way of official communications, apart from Social Security forms; no sign of any bank account or credit facility.
Nothing much to go on.
And yet Lewis had sensed from the start that there was something missing. Sensed that he knew where that “something missing” might well be.
And it was.
Most petty crooks had little in the way of imagination, having two or three favoured niches wherein to conceal their ill-gotten gains. And Paddy Flynn proved no exception. The small, brown-leather case was on the top shelf of the old mahogany wardrobe, tucked away on the far left, beneath a pair of faded-green blankets.
It took one DC just under twenty minutes to itemize the contents; a second DC just over thirty minutes to check the original itemization — a cache of legitimate banknotes, in fifties, twenties, tens, and fives. The confirmed tally was £17,465 and Lewis knew that Morse would be interested.
And Morse, on being told, most decidedly had been interested.
A similarly painstaking review of Repp and Richardson had taken up the whole of the Wednesday. Little new had come to light except for the unexpected (?) discovery that an account with the Burford and Cheltenham Building Society showed a robust balance of £14,350 held in the name of Deborah Richardson, with regular monthly deposits (as was confidentially ascertained) always made in cash. Debbie Richardson had smilingly refused to answer Lewis’s questions concerning the provenance of such comparatively substantial income, stating her belief that everybody — bishops, barmaids, presidents, prostitutes — all deserved some measure of privacy. Yes, Lewis had agreed; but he knew that Morse would be interested.
And Morse, on being told, most decidedly had been interested.
The Thursday and Friday had been taken up largely with a preliminary scrutiny and analysis of the scores of reports and statements taken from prison officers, bus drivers, rubbish-dump employees, car-park attendants, forensic boffins, and so on and so on — as well as from those members of the public who had responded to appeals for information. But so far there’d been little to show for the methodical police routine that Lewis had supervised. Vital, though! Criminal investigation was all about motives and relationships, about times and dates and alibis. It was all about building up a pattern from the pieces of a jigsaw. So many pieces, though. Some of them blue for the sky and the sea; some of them green and brown for the trees and the land; and sometimes, somewhere, one or two pieces of quirky coloration that seemed to fit in nowhere. And that, as Lewis knew, was where Morse would come in — as he invariably did. It was almost as if the Chief Inspector had the ability to cheat: to have sneaked some quick glimpse of the finished picture even before picking up the individual pieces.
Frequently when Lewis had seen him that week, Morse had been sitting in HQ, immobile and apparently immovable (apart from an hour or so over lunchtimes), occasionally and almost casually abstracting a page or two of a report, of a statement, of a letter, from one of the bulging box-files on his desk, YVONNE HARRISON written large in black felt-tipped pen down each of the spines. Clearly (whatever else) Morse had come round to Strange’s conviction that some causal connection between the cases had become overwhelmingly probable.
But that was no surprise to Lewis.
What had occasioned him puzzlement was the number of green box-files there, since he had himself earlier studied the same material when (he could swear it!) there had only been three.
Chapter thirty-nine
Q: Doctor, how many autopsies have you performed on dead people?
A: All of my autopsies are performed on dead people.
After (for him) an unprecedented early hour of retirement that same Sunday evening, at 9:30 P.M., Morse had awoken with a troublous headache. Assuming that the dawn was already breaking, he had confidently consulted his watch, to discover that it was still only 11:30 P.M. Thereafter he had woken up at regular ninety-minute intervals, in spite of equally regular doses of Alka-Seltzer and Paracetamol — his mind, even in the periods of intermittent slumber, riding the merry-go-round of disturbing dreams; his blood sugar ridiculously high; his feet suddenly hot and just as suddenly icy cold; an indigestion pain that was occasionally excruciating.
Ovid (now almost becoming Morse’s favorite Latin poet) had once begged the horses of the night to gallop slowly whenever some delightfully compliant mistress was lying beside him. But Morse had no such mistress beside him; and even if he had, he would still have wished those horses of the night to complete their course as quickly as they could possibly manage it.