As you know, I was wrong.
But there was someone else who had an even more compelling motive, with the other facts fitting equally convincingly: Sarah Harrison. What motive could she have had? Simply this: that she and Barron had been secret lovers for a year or so before Yvonne’s murder. I learned something about this from two most unlikely witnesses — from Alf and Bert, denizens of the Maiden’s Arms. Particularly from Bert, who had seen the two of them together, both at the Three Pigeons in Witney and at the White Hart in Wolvercote, when he was playing away in the cribbage league. I’ve little doubt that others in Lower Swinstead knew about it too, but they all kept their mouths shut. On that fateful evening, Sarah called home unexpectedly, and found her secret lover in bed with her mother — God help us! She was already known to Repp, as well as to Barron, of course. But where does that opportunistic fellow Flynn fit into the picture this time? There is now ample proof that he knew Sarah fairly well, because in the years before the murder the pair of them had performed in a pop group together in several pubs and clubs in West Oxfordshire (some details are known) although never as it happens at the Maiden’s Arms.
And that’s almost it, Lewis.
There remains just the one final matter to settle. The murder weapon was never found. But the path report, as you’ll recall, gave some indication of the type of weapon used. There were perhaps two blows only to Yvonne’s head. The first rendered the right cheekbone shattered and the bridge of the nose broken. The second, the more vicious and it seems the fatal blow, crashed across the base of the skull, doubtless as Yvonne tried to turn her head away in desperate self-defense. The suggestion made was that some sort of “tubular metal rod” was in all probability the cause of such injuries.
An arm crutch!
How do I know this? I don’t. But I shall be inordinately surprised if I am not very close indeed to the truth. And — how many times this has happened? — it was you, Lewis, who did the trick for me again! Remember? You were reining back some fanciful notions of mine about Sarah tearing down to the cinema to buy a ticket, and you said that she wasn’t going to be tearing about anywhere that night, because she’d sprained her ankle rather badly; and that if she were doing anything it would be hobbling about. Yes. Hobbling about on one of those metal arm crutches they’d probably issued her with from the Physiotherapy Department. (Will you find out, Lewis, if and when the arm crutch was returned?)
I realize that it won’t be easy to establish Sarah’s guilt, but we’ve got the long-awaited interview with her father to look forward to. He’ll be a worthy opponent, I know that, but I’m beginning to suspect that even he has almost had enough by now. If I’m overoptimistic about such an outcome, there’ll still be Sarah herself. It will be a surprise if the pair of them haven’t been in close touch in recent days and weeks, and I’ve got a feeling that like her father she’s almost ready herself to emerge from the hell she must have been going through for so long. Quite apart from judicial convictions and punishments, guilt brings its own moral retribution. We all know that.
One thing is certain. This will be — has been — my last case. I am now determined to retire and to take life a little more gently and sensibly. We’ve tackled so many cases together, old friend, and I’m very happy and very proud to have worked with you for so long.
That’s it. The time is now 12:45 A.M., and suddenly I feel so very weary.
All the manuscript notes were with Strange within the half-hour.
And Lewis had nothing further to do with the investigation.
Chapter eighty
I am retired. I am to be met with in trim gardens. I am already come to be known by my vacant face and careless gesture, perambulating at no fixed pace nor with any settled purpose. I walk about; not to and from.
It seemed there was little to cloud the bright evening at the end of August, that same year, when Strange held his retirement party. The Chief Constable (no less!) had toasted his farewell from the Force, paying a fulsome tribute to his colleague’s many years of distingished service in the Thames Valley CID, crowned, as it had been, with yet another significant triumph in the Yvonne Harrison murder case.
For his part, Strange had spoken reasonably wittily and blessedly briefly and had included a personal tribute to Chief Inspector Morse:
“I don’t think we’re going to see his like again in a hurry, and people of lesser intellect like me should be grateful for that. And it’s good to have with us here his faithful friend and, er, drinking companion” (muted amusement) “Sergeant Lewis” (Hear-Hear! all round). “Morse had no funeral service and no memorial service, just as he wished; but I make no apology for remembering him here this evening because, quite simply, he had the most brilliant mind I ever encountered in the whole of my police career... Well now. All that remains for me is to thank you for coming along to see me off; to say thank you for the lawn mower and the book” (he held aloft a copy of Sir David Attenborough’s The Life of Birds) “and to remind you there’s a splendid buffet next door, including a special plate of doughnuts for one of our number.” (Much laughter, and much subsequent applause.)
Lewis had clapped as much as the rest of them, but he had no wish to stay too long amid the backslapping and the reminiscences; and soon made his way upstairs to the deserted canteen where he sat in a corner drinking an orange juice, wishing to be alone with his thoughts for a while...
The conclusion to the Harrison case had proved pretty much, though far from exactly, as Morse had predicted. Two hours after her father had been taken to HQ for questioning, Sarah Harrison (refusing to see her father) had presented herself voluntarily and made a full confession to the murder of her mother, making absolutely no apology for anything — except for causing her father (she knew it!) all that pain and agony of spirit. What would happen to her now, she said, would not really amount to imprisonment at all; but, in a curious sort of way, to a kind of liberation.
And perhaps it had been much the same, albeit rather later, for Frank Harrison himself, who (less eloquently than his daughter) had by degrees unburdened himself of his manifold sins and wickednesses, including the subsequent murder of his wife’s lover, John Barron...
His actions, after receiving his daughter’s frantic, frenetic phone call on the night of Yvonne’s murder, had been straightforward. Train to Oxford; then taxi to Lower Swinstead, whence Barron had long since fled; and where Repp, though still around, remained unseen. Harrison had paid off Flynn, expecting him to drive away forthwith; thereafter very quickly dispatching his distraught daughter home. Coolly and ruthlessly he’d taken over. Confusion! — that was the only hope; and the only plan. Yvonne was already handcuffed, presumably for some bizarre bondage session, and what a blessing that had been! He’d tied a gag lightly around her mouth; gone on to the patio and smashed in the glass of the French window from the outside before unlocking it; he’d turned the lights on, every one of them, and yanked out the TV and the telephone leads, both upstairs and down; and finally, with illogical desperation, he’d decided to activate the burglar alarm, since even if no one heard it, it would be recorded (so he believed).