“Routine check, that’s all,” asserted Frank Harrison. “Just like the man said.”
Chapter seventy
I cried for madder music and for stronger wine,
But when the feast is finished and the lamps expire,
Then falls thy shadow, Cynara! the night is thine;
And I am desolate and sick of an old passion,
Yea hungry for the lips of my desire:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.
“Let him go, Kershaw. Let him catch his flight.”
“You think that’s wise, sir?”
“What?”
“I just wondered—”
“Look, lad! If I ever have to look to you as a fount of wisdom, it’ll be the day you’re dry behind the ears. Is that clear?”
“Sir!”
Morse put down the phone. It was 6:10 P.M.
“Do you think that was fair, sir?” asked Lewis.
“Probably not,” conceded Morse.
It had been Lewis, an hour earlier, who had received the call from the Bank: profound apology; embarrassing recantation; chagrin unspeakable! Over £500,000 indeed was still unaccountably missing; but not, not from Harrison’s department. Inquiries subsequent to Lewis’s visit had now established that any embezzlement or misappropriation of funds was most definitely not to be laid at the door of one of the Bank’s most experienced, most trusted, most valued blah blah blah. It was a call in which Morse was most interested, now repeating (with some self-congratulation) what he had earlier maintained: that Frank Harrison might well be, most likely was, capable of murder; but that it was quite out of character, definitely infra dignitatem, for him to stoop to cooking the books and fiddling the balance-and-loss ledgers.
“Do you think you may be wrong, sir?”
“Certainly not. He’ll be back from Paris, believe me! There’s no hiding place for him. Not from me, there isn’t.”
“You think he murdered his wife?”
“No. But he knows who did. You know who did. But we’ve got to get some evidence. We’ve been checking alibis — recent ones. But we’ve got to check those earlier alibis again.”
“Who are you thinking of?”
“Of whom am I thinking?” (Morse recalled the suspicion he’d voiced in his earlier notes.) “I’m thinking of the only other person apart from Frank Harrison who had a sufficient motive to kill Yvonne.”
“You mean—?”
“Do you ever go to the pictures?”
“They don’t call it the ‘pictures’ any more.”
“I went to the pictures a year and a bit ago to see The Full Monty.”
“Surely not your sort of—?”
“Exactly my sort of thing. I laughed and I cried.”
“Oh yes.” (The penny had dropped.) “Simon Harrison said he’d gone—”
“ ‘Said,’ yes.”
“Said he’d gone with someone else, didn’t he? A girlfriend.”
“Wasn’t checked though, as far as I can see.”
“Understandable, isn’t it? Nobody ever really thought of someone inside the family—”
“Oh yes they did. Frank Harrison was one of their first suspects.”
“But with those signs of burglary, the broken window, the burglar alarm...”
Morse nodded. “At first almost everything pointed to an outside job. But then it slowly began to look like something else: a lover, a tryst, a sex session, a quarrel, a murder...”
“And now we’re coming back to the family, you say.”
“No one seems to have bothered to get a statement from the young lady Simon Harrison took to the pictures that evening.”
“Perhaps we could still trace her, sir?”
“Yes.”
“It’s a long time ago though. She’d never remember—”
“Of course she would! It was all over the papers: ‘Woman Murdered’ — and she’d been with that same woman’s son the evening when it happened. She could never forget it!”
“It’s still a long time—”
“Lewis! I don’t eat all that much as you know. But when I’m cooking for myself—”
(Lewis’s eyebrows rose.)
“—I always make sure the plate’s hot. I can’t abide eating off a cold plate.”
“You mean we could heat the plate up again?”
“The plate’s already hot again. She’s still around. She’s a proud, married mum now living in Witney.”
“How do you know all that?”
“You can’t do everything yourself, Lewis.”
“Dixon, you mean?”
“Good man, Dixon! So we’re going to see her tonight. Just you and I.”
“You think Simon murdered his mum.”
“No doubt about that. Not any longer, Lewis,” said Morse quietly.
“Just because he found her in bed with someone...”
“With Barron. I know that, Lewis.”
Never before had Lewis been so hesitant in asking Morse a question:
“Did... did Mrs. Harrison ever tell you that she was... seeing Barron?”
Morse hesitated — hesitated for far too long.
“No. No, she never told me that.”
Lewis waited a while, choosing his words carefully and speaking them slowly: “If she had told you, would you have been as jealous as Simon Harrison?”
Again Morse hesitated. “Jealousy is a dreadfully corrosive thing. The most powerful motive of all, in my view, for murder — more powerful than—”
The phone rang once more and Morse answered.
Kershaw.
“They’ll soon be winging their way across the channel, sir. Anything more you want me to do?”
“Yes. Have a pint of beer, just the one, then bugger off home.”
Morse put down the phone.
“Good man, Kershaw! Bit of an old woman though. Reminds me of my Aunt Gladys in Alnwick, my last remaining relative. Well, she was. Dead now.”
“I think he’ll do well, yes.”
“Kershaw? Should do. He got a First in History from Keble.”
“Bit more than me, sir.”
“Bit more than me, Lewis.”
The phone was ringing again.
Strange.
“Morse? You’ve let him out of the country, I hear?”
“Yes. We need a bit more time and a bit more evidence before we bring him in.”
“I agree,” said Strange, unexpectedly. “No good just...”
“He’ll be back for the day of reckoning.”
“You think so?”
“I know so.”
“And in the interim?”
“He’ll be having a beano — kisses, wine, roses. ‘But when the feast is finished and the lamps expire...’ You know the Dowson poem, sir?”
“Course I bloody do!”
“Well, I don’t think he’ll ever be really happy with any of these other women of his.”
“This one sounds like a bit of all right though.”
“I’d still like to bet he wakes up in the small hours sometimes and thinks back on the woman he loved more than any of them, feeling a bit desolate—”
“—and sick of an old passion.”
“Exactly.”
“Yvonne, you mean?”
“No, not Yvonne, sir. Elizabeth — Elizabeth Jane Thomas.”
Chapter seventy-one
What more pleasant setting than the cinema for sweetly deodorized bodies to meet, unzip, and commune?