Perhaps it was a bleak joke.
“No, of course not.”
It had been a joyless experience for Morse, who now walked slowly down St. Giles toward The Randolph. He’d thought at the very least they’d have shown a little gratitude. Instead, he felt as though they were doing him a favor by agreeing (provisionally!) to accept a corpse that would surely be presenting apprentice anatomists and pathologists with some appreciably interesting items: liver, kidneys, lungs, pancreas, heart...
In the Chapters’ Bar, Ailish Hurley, his favorite barmaid, greeted him in her delightful Irish brogue; and two pints of bitter later, as he walked round into Magdalen Street and almost immediately caught a bus back up to the top of the Banbury Road, he felt that the world was a happier place than it had been half an hour earlier.
Once home, he treated himself to a small(ish) Glenfiddich, deciding that his liquid intake of calories that lunchtime would nicely balance his dosage of insulin. Yes, things were looking up, and particularly so since the phone hadn’t rung all day. What a wonderful thing it would be to go back to the days pre telephone (mobile and immobile alike), pre FAX, pre e-mail!
And, to cap it all, he’d bought himself a video — in front of which, in midafternoon, he’d fallen fairly soundly asleep, though at some point half-hearing, as he thought, a slippery flop through the letter-box.
It was an hour later when he opened the envelope and read Dixon’s notes on Simon Harrison; on Paddy Flynn; on Mrs. Holmes.
Interesting!
Interesting!
Interesting!
And very much as he’d thought...
Only one thing was worrying him slightly. Why hadn’t Lewis been in touch? He didn’t want Lewis to get in touch but... perhaps he did want Lewis to get in touch. So he rang Lewis himself only to discover that the phone was out of order. Or was it? He banged the palm of his right hand against his forehead. He’d rung Dixon early that morning from the bedroom; then he’d had to go downstairs to check an address in the phone book, finishing the call there, and forgetting to replace the receiver in the bedroom. He’d done it before. And he’d do it again. It was not a matter of any great moment. He’d ring Lewis himself — not that he had anything much to say to him; not for the minute anyway.
He was about to pick up the phone when the doorbell rang.
Chapter fifty-eight
It remains quite a problem to play the clarinet with false teeth, because there is great difficulty with the grip (this may even result in the plate being pulled out!). In addition there are problems with the breathing, because it is difficult to project a successful airstream.
“Been trying to get you all day, sir.”
“I’ve had other things to do, you know.”
“You just said you’d wanted a rest day.”
“Come in! Fancy a quick noggin?”
Lewis hesitated. “Why not?”
“Ye gods! You must have had a bad day — or was it a good day?”
“I’ve had a good day, and so have you.”
Morse now listened quietly to the extraordinary news from Andrews, though without any sign of triumphalism.
Equally quietly he slowly read through Lewis’s typed reports. Then read them a second time.
“Your orthography has come on enormously since they put that spell-check system into the word processor.”
“Don’t you have any problems with spellings — sometimes?”
“Only with ‘proceed’.”
“Where does this all leave us, sir?”
“Things are moving fast.”
“We’re getting near the end, you mean?”
“We were always near the end.”
“So what do you think happened?”
“Shan’t ever know for certain, shall we? With all three of them dead, all three of them murdered—”
“Only two, surely?”
“If you say so, Lewis. If you say so.”
“You’re not suggesting—?”
But Morse was not to be deflected:
“There were three people who had a vested interest in Yvonne Harrison’s murder: Repp, Barron, and Flynn. Repp — because he’d been casing the property for a burglary; because he happened to be there on the night of the murder; and because he knew who the murderer was. Barron — a man with an SAS background, who’d found a woman who could gratify his sexual fantasies, and who also knew who the murderer was — because he was the fellow in bed with Yvonne that night. Flynn — the fellow who lied about the events that night and who, like the other two, knew who the murderer was. The three of them had got their clutches into the only person who could pay their price, the person who did pay their price: Frank Harrison. He was becoming a fatter and fatter cat in his banking business, so they thought — and, rightly it seems. So they were ready to up the stakes. And on the day Repp was released, they’d agreed to meet and coordinate some plan of action. But things went wrong. Pretty certainly they somehow discovered that they’d each been treated differently — dangerously differently; and bitterness, jealousy, rivalry, all surfaced, and there was one almighty row. I’ve said all this before! They’d stopped, perhaps in a lay-by along the A34 — take your pick! — and Barron got his Stanley knife out and threatened Flynn, the man who’d just happened to be at the taxi-rank that night, and who was now overplaying his hand. And soon it must have occurred to the other two that half a cake is considerably better than a third of one; and Flynn was murdered and dumped at Redbridge in those black bags, the ones the owner of the car was originally going to cart off to the rubbish dump.”
“Waste Disposal Centre.”
“After that? Who knows? But suddenly the situation was becoming more dangerous still. If half a cake is better than a third, what about a whole cake? So the two of them must have wrangled about the best way to capitalize on Flynn’s beneficial departure... But how and why and when and where things went on from there, I’ve no more idea than you have — and that’s not saying much, is it?”
“No,” said Lewis flatly.
Morse looked at his sergeant, and smiled wearily:
“You’re annoyed, aren’t you?”
“Annoyed? What about?”
“Dixon.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“You’d’ve accused me of wasting police resources. Do you know what I got him to do today?”
“Vaguely.”
“Well, let me tell you, specifically. First, I asked him to do a bit of fourth-grade clerical stuff at Oxpens, and get copies of those attending lipreading classes these last five years. And he did it. Very efficiently. He found Simon Harrison’s name there, for three years; and Paddy Flynn’s there, for two years — overlapping. Very interesting that, because they must have known each other!
“Second, I asked Dixon to find out more about Flynn. Flynn was known as an amateur entertainer round the local pubs and clubs in Oxfordshire, playing the clarinet and compering his little pop group. Till about three years ago, when things started to go wrong: he began to experience trouble with his hearing — something that later compromised his job with Radio Taxis; and at about the same time, according to the postmortem details, he had a lot of dental trouble which meant he had to have all his top-front teeth extracted. And that’s not a good thing for a clarinet player.”
“It’s not?”