That was the plan. Something like it. So I believe.
But the countdown had been aborted because (Simon himself a witness) a bicycle, the front wheel jerked up repeatedly from the ground, was lurching its way along the path, and under the ladder, and into the ladder. Surplus to requirements therefore was the plan the Harrisons had plotted. Or so we are led to believe. Why such a proviso? Because I shall be surprised if any plan devised by the opportunistic Frank Harrison has ever come to a sorry nothing. Is it possible therefore that the accident of Barron’s death was not quite so “accidental” after all? Already Frank Harrison had accomplished something far more complex — his manipulation of the evidence surrounding his wife’s murder, when it was imperative for him to establish one crucial fact: that no other living soul was present when he went into his house that night. But three other people knew this fact was untrue; and all three of them — whichever way intercommunication was effected — were subsequently rewarded for their roles in the conspiracy of complicity and silence.
Back to my proviso.
Can it be that Frank Harrison trawled his net even wider and dragged in the cyclist who sent Barron down to his death, the boy Holmes — the brother of Harrison’s son Allen?
We turn now to the Harrison clan itself.
Our researchers have given us several pointers to the relationships within that family. The marriage itself had long been loveless: he with a string of mistresses in his Pavilion Road flat in London; she with a succession of straight or kinky but always besotted bedmates, with whom she fairly regularly dallied with mutual delight. And, doubtless, profit. Of the two children, Simon was clearly the mother’s favorite — a boy who had battled bravely with his disability; a boy for whom his mother had found an affection considerably deeper than that for her daughter Sarah — a young lady who was very attractive physically, very bright academically, very talented musically, who from her early years had almost everything going for her, and who (unlike her brother) needed far less of her mother’s tender loving care. Both children, as well as their parents, were probably fully aware of the imbalance here; and tacitly and tactfully accepted it.
At the time of their mother’s murder, both the children had left home several years earlier. Sarah had already qualified as a doctor specializing with considerable distinction in the treatment of diabetes. And Simon had landed a surprisingly good job in publishing, and was now financially independent — if not emotionally independent, because he still yearned for that unique love his mother had always shown him; a love that had meant everything to him in those long years of an ever-struggling school life in which he knew with joyous assurance that it was he — Simon! — who’d acquired the monopoly of a mother’s love, more of it even than his father had ever had. He called to see her regularly, of course he did. But she probably always insisted that he ring her beforehand. No reason to ask why, surely? Simon was completely unaware of his mother’s vesper-tinal divertissements.
But Frank certainly knew all about them, and they served as some sort of excuse and justification for his own adulterous liaisons. He didn’t much care anyway. Perhaps he could shrug things off fairly easily. But Simon couldn’t. Simon turned up unexpectedly one evening and found his mother lying on that very same bed where as a young boy (perhaps as an older boy?) he’d snuggled in beside her when his dad was away; and where he’d seen a man straddled across her on his elbows and his knees.
I doubt it had been exactly like that, though. More likely he’d seen a man bouncing down the stairs toward him, jerking up his trousers and fastening up his flies. A man he knew: Barron! Then he’d found his mother lying in the bedroom there: naked, gagged, handcuffed, with a pornographic video probably still running on the TV. Shell-shocked with disbelief and disillusionment, in the white heat of a furious jealousy — yes! — he murdered his mother.
Chapter sixty-six
We might now be stepping through a dark door with no bottom on the other side, and fall flat on our faces.
Conscious that he was writing with increasing fluency, Morse poured himself another tumbler of single malt and resumed his narrative:
With regard to events immediately thereafter, we can only guess. But at some point Simon rang his father in predictable panic. He had very few people he could call on. But he could call on his father — and there was a special loop-system on the telephone there. And Frank H. got to the house as quickly as any man could have done that night. His BMW was in for servicing, that was checked; and I now believe (a bit late in the day) that the sequence of events was precisely as he claimed: taxi» Paddington; train» Oxford; Oxford (enter Flynn!)» Lower Swinstead.
Then? Probably we’ll never really know. But five people, three of them now dead, they knew: Barron, who’d been disturbed in medio coitu; Flynn, the petty crook who just happened to be on hand; Repp, the burglar who’d been watching the property all evening; Frank H.; and Simon H. himself. Simon doesn’t seem to me the caliber of fellow who could stay long at such a ghastly scene on his own; and I think it’s more than likely that his father rang Sarah and told her to get along there posthaste, on the way buying a cinema ticket as an alibi for Simon. Certainly when I met Sarah I felt strongly that she probably knew who had murdered her mother. The trouble was that the three outsiders also knew: Repp and Barron, who were both local men — and Flynn, who’d met Simon in the lipreading classes at Oxpens, and who must have seen him there that night.
What then was the family plan of campaign?
The two (or three) of them were determined to create the maximum amount of confusion — their only hope. The murder couldn’t be concealed; but the waters around it could be made so muddied that any investigation was likely to shoot off into several blind alleys. We may postulate that a gag was tied around Yvonne’s mouth (as I recall the report: “no longer tight as if she had worked it looser in her desperation”); that a pair of handcuffs was snapped around her wrists; that one of the panes of the French window was smashed in from the outside. Why Yvonne’s carefully folded clothes were not scattered all over the floor, I just don’t know, because “attempted rape” would have seemed a wholly probable explanation of the murder.
When and how the circling vultures closed in for their shares of the kill — your guess, Lewis, is (almost) as good as mine. Some early liaison there must have been with Barron in order to establish the telephone alibi. Flynn probably just stayed around that night — a petty crook going through a bad patch, and naming his price immediately. I suspect that Repp, a real pro, held his hand for a couple of days or so before threatening to spill at least half the can of beans... unless he could be persuaded otherwise.