For example (thought Lewis), it was most unlikely that Barron had only one pair of overalls. And if someone with an extravagantly fanciful mind (Morse!) could entertain the idea that a pair of white overalls covered with red paint was a good disguise for a soaking of blood... well, it could be, perhaps.
For example (thought Lewis), why buy a four-hour parking ticket in Thame on the day of the murders unless to create an alibi? Builders would usually have little difficulty in parking outside the properties in question. All right, parking was getting a nightmare everywhere, even for police cars, but...
For example (thought Lewis), why shouldn’t Barron, like Flynn perhaps, have received his payoffs in banknotes, and kept them? No need to pay them into a bank or a building society. Why not put them in the loft? In the wardrobe? In a milk jug in the fridge? Like a few other self-employed builders, Barron might well be playing a canny little game with casual receipts, with ready-cash payments, with VAT evasions. And, if so, he would certainly not be overanxious to account for any largish sums of money regularly entrusted to some official depository.
Lewis himself had felt pretty certain that Barron was their man; Morse was absolutely convinced. And yet the evidence thus far gathered seemed to be stacking up a little bit the wrong way. Lewis knew it. He had ever been a champion of the cumulative-evidence approach to crime: a piece-by-piece aggregation against a suspect that gradually mounted into an impressively documented pile that could be forwarded to the DPP. All right! Morse’s method was occasionally very different. Yet many of the murders that the pair of them had solved together had been relatively uncomplicated: no real mystery, no real cunning, no real deviousness, no carefully woven web of deceit. Domestic stuff, next-door-neighbor stuff, most of it, with the husband returning home unexpectedly from work and finding his spouse abed with postman, milkman, gasman... builder?
But whichever way one looked at things, any direct evidence against the builder was proving surprisingly difficult to come by.
At 8:45 P.M., tired and hungry, Lewis decided that whatever further developments there were to be — and they were coming in all the time — he would have to take a break; and he drove home to Headington. But only after trying Morse’s number once more. Ringing tone. No answer.
Morse came into HQ three-quarters of an hour later and rang Lewis’s home number immediately. Ringing tone. Answer.
Resignedly, about to start his eggs and chips, Lewis brought Morse up to date with the information received, suggesting that it was, at this point, all a bit ambivalent and equivocal, although in truth Lewis made use of neither of these epithets himself.
Morse sounded mildly interested, giving his own verdict in somewhat pompous terms. He asserted that the character of the human condition was indeed “ambiguity,” the virtually inseparable mixture of the true and the false. But in the present case such apparent contradictions could be explained so very easily — in fact in exactly the way Lewis himself had just explained them. “And,” continued Morse, “you can be quite sure of one thing — no, two things: Barron murdered the pair of ‘em; then somebody murdered Barron. Get that clear in your head, and we might make a bit of progress. OK? I’ll see you in the morning.”
“Sir! Before you ring off. We tried to get you several times earlier but there was the engaged tone all the time.”
“That’s funny. I only remember making the one call.”
“I thought perhaps — you know, you seemed a bit whacked...”
“You’d be wrong, Lewis. I nearly spent some time in bed. Not quite, though. Goodnight.”
The dramatic news came in at twenty minutes to midnight, as Morse sat at home making out a rough draft of his will. He’d no immediate relatives remaining, none at all; and therefore instructions for the postmortem dissemination of all his worldly goods should not present too much of a complication. Nor did they. And he was writing out a fairish copy of a simple second draft — when the phone rang.
“What?”
...
“What?”
...
It was two minutes later before he spoke again:
“I’ll be over straightaway.”
Chapter forty-eight
We trust we are not guilty of sacrilege in suggesting that the teaching of Religious Knowledge in some schools would pose an almighty challenge even for the Almighty Himself.
Roy Holmes, aged fifteen, was a crudely disruptive pupil at school, a truculently uncooperative son in the Witney Street house he shared with his invalid mother, and a menace wherever he walked in the wider community. He took drugs; he was an inveterate and skillful shoplifter; he regularly snapped the stems of newly planted trees striving to establish themselves; he spat disgusting gobbets of phlegm on most of the pavements in Burford. In short, Roy Holmes was an appalling specimen of humankind. He deserved to have no real friends at all in life; and he had none.
Except one.
Ms. Christine Coverley, aged twenty-seven, in her second year at Burford Secondary School, was not an impressive personage. A small, skinny, flat-chested, spotty-chinned, mousy-haired woman, she could scarcely have expected admirers anywhere — either among her fellow male members of staff, or among the motley collection of pupils, especially the boys, she was timetabled to teach. And, indeed, she had no such admirers.
Except one.
To complicate her incompetence as a teacher, she had been appointed faute de mieux to teach Religious Knowledge, a task wholly beyond her ability. Her classes taunted her mercilessly; and on more than one occasion such was the uproar in her classroom that teachers in adjacent rooms had barged in — only to find, with deep embarrassment, that a nominal teacher was already present there; and with even deeper embarrassment for Ms. Coverley herself, resulting in fevered nightmares and anguish of soul that was often unbearable. One class, 4 Remove (Holmes’s class), was even worse than the others — a group of pagan half-wits, of both sexes, whose interest in the pronouncements of major and minor prophets alike was nil. Over the year her hebdomadal clash with these monsters had been a terrifying ordeal; and the situation was quite hopeless. But no — not quite hopeless. Each night of term she would kneel in her bedsit and beseech the Almighty to grant her some deliverance from such despair. And one day her prayer had been answered.
In the middle of the summer term, at the end of one of her spectacularly disastrous lessons with 4 Remove, her eyes smarting with tears of humiliation, she had stopped the cocky, surly Holmes as he was about to leave the room:
“Roy! I know I’m useless. I wouldn’t be though — if I got a bit of help, but I don’t get any help from anyone. I just want some help. And there’s someone who could help me so easily if he wanted to. You, Roy!”
She turned away, wiped her moist cheeks, picked up her books, and left the empty classroom.
But Roy Holmes stood where he was, immobile. For the first time in his life someone had asked him for help — him — the despair of mother, vicar, social workers, headmaster, police; and suddenly he’d felt oddly, unprecedentedly moved, conscious somewhere deep inside himself of a compassion he’d never known and could scarcely recognize.