“Well-known fact. Louis Armstrong had the same sort of trouble.”
“He was a trumpet player!”
“Same sort of thing! Then I asked Dixon to look into Mrs. Holmes’s background. I had the impression when we spoke to her that she might have been a most attractive woman when she was younger; and I just wondered... I got Dixon to check up on her, that’s all. Seems she used to live in Lower Swinstead before she moved to Burford and, well, look at things for yourself.”
Elizabeth Jane Thomas (b. 7.11.53) 1976 (Feb.) Son b. (Alan) illeg.
1983 (March) Son b. (Roy) illeg.
1983 (Dec.) m. Kenneth Holmes (Registry Office)
1991 (Sept.) Husband killed in pile-up on A40 — same accident that caused all her trouble
Lewis read Dixon’s notes:
“They don’t call them ‘illegitimate’ these days, and it should be ‘Register’ Office.”
Morse nodded. “You’re missing the main point, though.”
“I am?”
“Remember when we were in the village pub? Remember Biffen greeting his customers?”
Yes. Lewis remembered that “Evening, Mr. Thomas”: the young fellow forever playing the fruit machine, the young fellow who had spoken to him in the car park.
“You mean they’re half-brothers? Roy Holmes and Alan Thomas?”
“Why not full brothers — with the same father? I knew there was something familiar about young Holmes... Anyway, there it is. Elizabeth Thomas was an unmarried mum in the village; Alan was already seven when his younger brother was born; and everybody knew him as Alan Thomas. So he kept the name when his mother married a few months later, and kept it when he went along with the family to live in Burford.”
“Interesting enough — but is it important?”
“I don’t know,” said Morse slowly. “I just don’t know. But it throws up one or two new ideas.”
“If you say so, sir. Aren’t you going to offer me another Scotch, by the way?”
What a strange day it had been! Even stranger, perhaps, in that Morse now left his own glass unreplenished.
“Shall I tell you something else, Lewis? You’d never believe it, but I’ve been watching the telly this afternoon. I picked up one of those RSPB videos.”
“You mean you know how to work the machine?”
“It’s Strange’s fault. Genuine bird-watcher, Strange! He told me the sparrow population in North Oxford’s down by fifty percent these last few years; and he told me the sparrow hawks along Squitchey Lane are getting fatter. So I bought this video on birds of prey — you know, eagles, falcons, hobbies, merlins, red kites... did you hear me, Lewis? Red kites.”
Lewis looked puzzled. “I’m not with you.”
“Your interview with Simon Harrison. He’s a phoney bird-watcher, that fellow. Said he’d been off to Llandudno to try to spot a red kite. Llandudno! He meant Llandovery, Lewis — that was the only home of the red kite in the UK until they introduced a few near Stokenchurch.”
“I didn’t know you were an expert—”
“I’m not. And nor is Simon Harrison. His alibi for Monday morning’s worthless. He wouldn’t know a red kite from a red cabbage.”
Unaccustomedly relaxed, Lewis sipped his Glenfiddich and involuntarily repeated an earlier comment: “Interesting enough — but is it important?”
“I just don’t know,” said Morse slowly, himself now involuntarily repeating an earlier comment: “But it throws up one or two new ideas...”
“Perhaps they’ve all been telling us a few lies, sir... except Mrs. Barron, perhaps.”
Morse smiled. “Don’t you mean especially Mrs. Barron?”
Chapter fifty-nine
Wherever God erects a house of prayer,
The Devil always builds a chapel there;
And ‘twill be found, upon examination,
The latter has the largest congregation.
Mrs. Linda Barron walked steadily up the aisle between the small assembly of mourners, her arm linked through that of her mother, both women dutifully dressed in bible-black suits...
On the whole, it hadn’t been quite the ordeal she’d expected: in practical terms, the shock of it all continued to cocoon a good half of her conscious thoughts; whilst emotionally she had long since accepted that her love for her husband was as dead as the man who had been lying there in the coffin — until mercifully the curtains had closed, and the show was over. He would have enjoyed the hymn though, “He Who Would Valiant Be,” for he had been valiant enough (she’d learned that from his army friends) — as well as vain and domineering and unfaithful. Yes, she’d found herself moved by the hymn; and the tears ought to have come.
But they hadn’t.
Outside, in the clear sunshine, she whispered quickly into her mother’s ear. “Remember what I said. The kids are fine, if anybody asks. OK?”
But the grandmother made no reply. She was the very last person in the world to let the little ones down, especially the one of them. As for Linda, she girded up her loins in readiness for the chorus of commiseration she would have to cope with.
And indeed several of the family and friends of her late husband, J. Barron, Builder, had already emerged through the chapel doors, including Thomas Biffen, Landlord, whose creased white shirt was so tight around the neck that he had been forced to unfasten the top button beneath the black tie; including the perennial opponents, Alf and Bert, who had exchanged no words in the chapel, but whose thoughts were perhaps in tune during the service as each of them must have mused on their imminent mortality, and the prospects of encountering that great cribbage player in the sky.
Including Frank Harrison.
Chief Superintendent Strange, who had been seated in the back row next to Morse, was the last but one to leave. His thoughts had roamed irreverently throughout the short service, and the superannuated minister’s apparent confidence in the resurrection of the dead had filled him more with horror than with hope. He thought of his wife and of her death and experienced that familiar sense of the guilt that still remained to be expiated. The hymn was all right, although he’d gone himself for “Praise My Soul, the King of Heaven” in the Instructions for My Funeral stapled to his last will and testament. But on the whole he dreaded church services almost as much as did the man seated beside him; and he could think of nothing more detestable than a funeral.
Morse himself had been sickened by the latest version (Series Something) of the Funeral Service. Gone were those resonant cadences of the AV and the Prayer Book: those passages about corruption putting on incorruptibility and the rest of it, which as a youth he’d found so poignant and powerful. They’d even had a cheerful hymn, for heaven’s sake! Where was that wonderfully sad and sentimental hymn he’d chosen for his own farewelclass="underline" “O Love That Wilt Not Let Me Go”? Chosen, that is, before he’d recently decided to leave his body for medical science, although that decision itself was now in considerable doubt. In particular that little clause in sub-section 6 of Form D1 still stuck in his craw: “Should your bequest be accepted...”
He pointedly avoided the priest who’d presided — a man (in Morse’s view) excessively accoutred in ecclesiastical vestments, and wholly lacking in any sensitivity to the English language. But he did have a quick word of sympathy with the widow, shaking her black-gloved hand firmly before turning to her mother.