Chapter sixty-four
Refrain to-night
And that shall lead a kind of easiness
To the next abstinence: the next more easy;
For use almost can change the stamp of nature.
Sloane Square... Gridlock... Siren... Gridlock... Siren...
It is not a matter for any surprise that car drivers occasionally contract one of the minor strains of the road-rage virus — even that patient man in the siren-assisted police car who finally pulled over on to the hard shoulder of the M40 and rang his chief.
“Been stuck in traffic, sir. Be with you in about an hour.”
“Lewis! Can’t you hear the wireless? It’s five-past seven — bang in the middle of The Archers. It can wait, surely!”
Lewis supposed it could; and would have said so. But the phone was dead.
Wireless! Huh! Everybody called it a “radio” these days — well, everybody except Morse and one or two of the old ’uns, like Strange. Yes, come to think of it, Morse and Strange were the oldest of the HQ lot, with Strange six months the older and due for retirement that next month.
The road was free and Lewis drove fast. It could wait — of course it could — the news about Harrison Senior. Perhaps it didn’t matter all that much; and as Morse frequently reminded him nothing really mattered very much at all in the end. But he was looking forward to a swapping of notes. There had been some interesting developments, certainly on his own side; and he doubted not that Morse’s researches that day had generated a few new ideas. Not that they needed any more high-flown ideas really, he decided, as a sudden torrential downpour called for more terrestrial concentration. He reduced his speed to 80 mph.
At 7:20 P.M. Morse was sitting back in the black-leather armchair, knowing that only a few of the pieces in the jigsaw remained to be fitted. Earlier in the case the top half of the puzzle had presented itself as a monochrome blue, like the sky earlier that evening, although of late the weather had become sultry, as though a thunderstorm were brewing. But the jigsaw’s undifferentiated blue had been duly broken by a solitary seagull or two, by a piece of soft-white cloud, and later perhaps (when Lewis arrived?) by what Housman so memorably had called “the orange band of eve.” He felt almost happy. There was something else, too: he would quite certainly wait until that arrival before having his first drink of the day. It was quite easy really (as he told himself) to refrain from alcohol for a limited period.
The storm reached North Oxford fifty minutes later, traveling from the southwest at a pace commensurate with Lewis’s speed along the M40.
It may have had something to do with Wagner, but Morse enjoyed the intensity and the electricity of a thunderstorm, and he watched with deep pleasure the plashing rain and the dazzling flashes in the lightning-riven sky. From his viewpoint by the window of his flat, a slightly sagging telephone wire cut the leaden heavens in two; and he watched as a succession of single drops of rain ran along the wire before finally falling off, reminding him of soldiers crossing a river on rope-harness, and finally dropping off on the other side. As he had once done himself.
Crossing the river...
His mother would never speak of “dying”: always of “crossing the river.” It was a pleasing conceit; a pleasing metaphor. If he’d been a poet, he might have written a sonnet about that telephone-wire just outside. But Morse wasn’t a poet. And the storm now ceased as suddenly as it had started.
And the front-door bell was ringing.
It was after 10 P.M. when, with Lewis now gone, Morse took stock of the situation — with renewed interest, though (truth to tell) with little great surprise. Lewis had declined the offer of alcohol, and Morse had decided to prolong his own virtually unprecedented abstinence. He felt tired, and at 10:30 P.M. decided that he would be early abed. So many times had he been counseled that beer made a lumpy mattress, that spirits made a hard pillow, and that in general alcohol was the stuff that nightmares were made of. So, if that were true, he could perhaps expect to be sleeping the sleep of the just that night. It would be a new experience.
He put on the RSPB video, and once again watched the wonderful albatross gliding effortlessly across the Antarctic wastes. So relaxing...
At 11:15 he switched off the bedroom light and turned as ever on to his right-hand side, conscious of a clear head, a freshness of mind, and a gently slumbrous lassitude.
Wonderful.
In spite of his occasional disillusionment about being cast up on to the shores of light in the first place, it would be wholly untrue to say that Morse was over-eager to embark on that final journey to that further land. Indeed, like the majority of mortals, he was something of a hypochondriac; and that night he found himself becoming increasingly fearful about his own physical well-being. Or ill-being.
The illuminated green figures on the alarm clock showed 2:42 A.M. when he finally abandoned the unequal struggle. His mind was an uncontrollable whirligig at St. Giles Fair, and the indigestion pains in his chest and in his arms were hard and unrelenting. He got up, poured himself a glass of Alka-Seltzer, poured himself a glass of the single malt, took up his medium-blue Parker pen, and resumed the exegesis he’d been writing when Lewis had interrupted him, deciding however to cross out the last (and uncompleted) sentence:
It was embarrassing for me to talk to you about this and I know that you in turn found it equally embarrassing to—
There would be ample time to put that part of the record straight in the days ahead.
Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow...
Chapter sixty-five
Jealousy is that pain which a man feels from the apprehension that he is not equally beloved by the person whom he entirely loves.
Simon H. is not a good liar, and I dragged some of the truth out of him. He is genuinely very deaf, and the telephone must always be a nightmare for him. So what’s he got a mobile for? Even people with good hearing often have trouble with one. But, remember, even someone who’s stone deaf can communicate to some degree with someone on the other end, because he’s always able to speak if not to hear.
Many people must have wanted Barron dead. And no one more so than Frank Harrison, who’d learned that Barron would soon be working up at some giddy height in a quietish street in Burford. The job had been mentioned, among other places no doubt, in the Maiden’s Arms. And one person in that pub was in regular communication with Frank H.: Allen Thomas, that soon-to-be-married youth who regularly wastes his substance on the fruit machine. How come? Like so many others in this case, he’s dependent on Frank H. — his father, remember! — who (rumor!) has just bought him a small flat in Bicester, and who has pretty certainly been making him a regular allowance for many years.
The plan had been a reasonably simple one — with one snag. Both the Harrisons, Senior and Junior, had some knowledge of Barron’s ladder technique from the several times he had worked at the family home: specifically his habit of tying the top of his ladders to something firm up there in the heights. It would seem likely that he’d do the same again, and there’d be little point in giving the ladder one great hefty push if it wouldn’t topple to the ground. Some recce was therefore required; and Simon picked up his father that Monday morning in Oxford and drove him the twenty miles to Burford, leaving the car at the western end of Sheep Street, and then jogging up and down the opposite side of the street in tracksuit and trainers, noting that Barron was moving the ladder along every twelve minutes or so, and predictably re-roping the top each time. The only possibility then was to catch Barron after he’d re-climbed the ladder and was re-fixing the rope. A minute or so? Not much more. But enough. Simon’s job was to phone his father, mobile to mobile, and just say “Now!” Nothing else. He hadn’t the spunk he says (I believe him) to perform the deed himself; and it was his father, also in jogging kit, who would run along the pathway there and topple Barron to a death that in Simon’s view was fully deserved and long overdue.