He finally rose from the creased and crumpled sheets, and was shaving, just as rosy-fingered Dawn herself was rising over the Cutteslowe Council Estate.
At 6 A.M. he once more measured his blood-sugar level, now dipped dramatically from 24.4 at 1 A.M. to 2.8. Some decent breakfast was evidently required, and a lightly boiled egg with toast would fit the bill nicely. But Morse had no eggs; no slices of bread either. So, perforce, it had to be cereal. But Morse could find no milk, and there seemed no option but to resort to the solitary king-sized Mars bar which he always kept somewhere in the flat. For an emergency. In rebus extremis, like now. But he couldn’t find it. Then — bless you St. Anthony! — he discovered that the Co-op milkman had already called; and he had a great bowl of Corn Flakes, with a pleasingly cold pint of milk and several liberally heaped spoonsful of sugar. He felt wonderful.
Sometimes life was very good to him.
At 6:45 A.M. he considered (not too seriously) the possibility of walking up from his North Oxford flat to the A40 Ring Road, and thence down the gentle hill to Kidlington. About — what? — thirty-five to forty minutes to the HQ building. Not that he’d ever timed himself, for he’d never as yet attempted the walk.
Didn’t attempt the walk that morning.
After administering his first insulin dosage of the day, he drove up to Police HQ in the Jaguar.
Far quicker.
In his office, as he reread the final findings of the two postmortems (sic), Morse decided, as he usually did, that there was no point whatsoever in his trying to unjumble the physiological details of the lacerations inflicted on the visceral organs of each body. He had little interest in the stomach; had no stomach for the stomach. In fact he was more familiar with the ninefold stomach of the bovine ilk (this because of crossword puzzles) than with its mono-chambered human counterpart. Did it really matter much to know exactly how Messrs. Flynn and Repp had met their ends? But yes, of course it did! If the technicalities pointed to a particular type of weapon; if the weapon could be accurately identified and then found; and if, finally, it could be traced to someone who was known to have had such a weapon and who had the opportunity of wielding it on the day of the murders...
Hold on though, Morse! Be fair! Amid a plethora of caveats, Dr. Hobson had pointed to a fairly specific type of weapon, had she not? And he read again the paragraph headed “Tentative Conclusions.”
Morse suddenly stopped reading, sat back in his chair, and placed his hands on his head, fingers interlinked, as he’d done so often at his teacher’s bequest in his infant class. And what had been a faraway look in his eyes now gradually focused into an intense gaze as he considered the implications of the extraordinary idea which had suddenly occurred to him...
Very soon he was rereading the whole report from Forensics, where almost all the earlier findings had been confirmed, although there remained much checking to be done. Prints of Flynn, prints of Repp, prints of the car owner, and several other prints as yet to be identified. Doubtless some of these latter would turn out to be those of the car owner’s family. But (Morse read the last sentence of the report again): “One set of fingerprints, repeated and fairly firm, may well prove to be of considerable interest.”
He leaned back again in his chair, pleasingly weary and really quite pleased with himself, because he knew whose fingerprints they were.
Oh yes!
Chapter forty
Odd instances of strange coincidence are really not all that odd perhaps.
Morse jerked awake as Lewis entered the office just before 8 A.M., wondering where he was, what time it was, what day it was. Yet it had been a wonderful little sleep, the deep and dreamless sleep that Socrates anticipated after swallowing the hemlock.
“No crossword this morning, sir?”
“Shop wasn’t open.”
“Why don’t you pay a paperboy?”
“Because, Lewis, a little occasional exercise...”
Lewis sat down. “Do you mind if I ask you something?”
Morse pointed to the reports laid out on the desk. “You’ve read these?”
Lewis nodded. “But, like I say, I’ve got something to ask you.”
“And I’ve got something to tell you. Is that all right, Lewis?” The voice was suddenly harsh. “You’ll remember from all our times together how coincidence occurs in life far more frequently than anyone — except me — is prepared to accept. Coincidence isn’t unusual at all. It’s the norm. Just like those consecutive numbers cropping up in the National Lottery every week. But in this case the coincidence is even odder than usual.”
(Lewis raised his eyebrows a little.)
“Let’s go back to Yvonne Harrison’s murder. She was a woman with exceptional sex drive, but she certainly wasn’t just the deaf-and-dumb nymphomaniac with a bedroom just above the public bar that many a man has fantasized about. Oh, no. She was highly intelligent, highly desirable, like the woman in the Larkin poem with the “lash-wide stare,” who in turn was attracted by a variety of men. A lot of men. So many men that over the years she inevitably came across a few paying clients with kinky preferences. I doubt she ever went in for S and M, but it looks very likely that a bit of bondage was on her list of services, probably with a hefty surcharge. It’s well known that some men only find sexual satisfaction with women who put on a show of being utterly submissive and powerless. It gives these men the only sense of real power they’re ever likely to experience in life, because the object of their desire is lying there defenseless, unstruggling, sometimes unspeaking, too. Not uncommon, that, Lewis. And you can read all about it in Krafft-Ebing’s case studies...”
(Lewis’s eyebrows rose significantly.)
“... although, as you know, I’m no great expert in such matters. In fact, come to think of it, I can’t even remember whether he’s got one or two ‘b’s in his name. But it means there’s a pretty obvious explanation of two of the items that puzzled our previous colleagues: a pair of handcuffs, and a gag not all that tightly tied. The woman offering such a specialist service is never going to answer back, never going to scratch your eyes out — and Yvonne Harrison had just about the longest fingernails...”
(Lewis’s eyebrows rose a lot.)
“On the night of the murder she had a client in bed with her, and if ever there was a locus classicus for what they call coitus interruptus, this was it, because someone interrupted the proceedings. Or at the very least, someone saw them there in bed together.”
“Harry Repp?”
“Repp was certainly there at some point. But I think he kept his cool and kept his distance that night. I think he realized there could well be something in it for himself. He was right, too. Because what he saw that night — what he later kept from the police — was going to prove very profitable, as you discovered, Lewis. Five hundred pounds a month from someone just for exercising his professional skills as a burglar in staying well out of sight and keeping his eyes wide open. Exactly what he saw, we shan’t know, shall we? Unless he told Debbie Richardson, which I doubt.”
“What do you think he saw?”
“Pretty obvious, isn’t it?”
“You mean he saw who murdered Mrs. Harrison?”
Morse nodded.