Inspector Morse 13 The Remorseful Day

It was two minutes later before he spoke again: "I'll be over straightaway."

chapter forty-eight We trust we are not guilty of sacrilege in suggesting

that the teaching of Religious Knowledge in some schools would pose an

almighty challenge even for the Almighty Himself (From the Introduction to

Religious Education in Secondary Schools:

1967-87, HMSO)

roy holmes, aged fifteen, was a crudely disruptive pupil at school, a

truculently unco-operative son in the Witney Street house he shared with his

invalid mother, and a menace wherever he walked in the wider community.  He

took drugs; he was an inveterate and skilful shoplifter; he regularly snapped

the stems of newly planted trees striving to establish themselves; he spat

disgusting gobbets of phlegm on most of the pavements in Burfbrd.  In short,

Roy Holmes was an appalling specimen of humankind.

He deserved to have no real friends at all in life; and he had none.

Except one.

Ms Christine Coveriey, aged twenty-seven, in her second year at Burfbrd

Secondary School, was not an impressive personage.  A small, skinny,

flat-chested, spotty-chinned, mousy-haired woman, she could scarcely have

expected admirers anywhere - either among her fellow male members of staff,

or among the motley collection of pupils, especially the boys, she was time

tabled to teach.  And, indeed, she had no such admirers.

Except one.

To complicate her incompetence as a teacher, she had been appointed faute de

mieux to teach Religious Knowledge, a task wholly beyond her ability.  Her

classes taunted her mercilessly; and on more than one occasion such was the

uproar in her classroom that teachers in adjacent rooms had barged in only to

find, with deep embarrassment, that a nominal teacher was already present

there; and with even deeper embarrassment for Ms Coverley herself, resulting

in fevered nightmares and anguish of soul that was often unbearable.  One

class, 4 Remove (Holmes's class), was even worse than the others a group of

pagan half wits of both sexes, whose interest in the pronouncements of major

and minor prophets alike was nil.

Over the year her hebdomadal clash with these monsters had been a terrifying

ordeal; and the situation was quite hopeless.  But no not quite hopeless.

Each night of term she would kneel in her bed sit and beseech the Almighty to

grant her some deliverance from such despair.

And one day her prayer had been answered.

In the middle of the summer term, at the end of one of her spectacularly

disastrous lessons with 4 Remove, her eyes smarting with tears of

humiliation, she had stopped the cocky, surly Holmes as he was about to leave

the room: "Roy!  I know I'm useless.  I wouldn't be though if I got a bit of

help, but I don't get any help from anyone.  I just want some help.

And there's someone who could help me so easily if he wanted to.  You, Roy!  "

She turned away, wiped her moist cheeks, picked up her books, and left the

empty classroom.

But Roy Holmes stood where he was, immobile.  For the first time in his life

someone had asked him for help him the despair of mother, vicar, social

workers, headmaster, police; and suddenly he'd felt oddly, unprecedentedly

moved, conscious somewhere deep inside himself of a compassion he'd never

known and could scarcely recognize.

 If, as Ms Coverley believed, her God sometimes moved in a mysterious way,

it was not quite so dramatic as the way in which Roy Holmes was soon to move.

In the next RK lesson one of the boys in the back row had been particularly

foul- mouthed and disruptive, whilst Holmes had remained completely silent.

After school that day, the youth in question returned home with a bleeding

mouth, two broken teeth, and one bruised and hugely swollen eye.  No one knew

who was responsible.

But then no one needed to know; since everyone knew who was responsible.

The nightmares were over, and Ms Coverley's last few weeks of the summer term

were almost happy ones.  Yet she knew that she was not the stuff that

teachers are made of, and her resignation was received with relief by the

headmaster.  For the time being she decided to stay on in Burfbrd, renewing

the let on her ground-floor bed sit for a further two months.

The bell rang at 11.  15 p.  m.  and Roy Holmes, somewhat the worse for drink

or drugs or both, stood at the door when she opened it.  His words were the

words she had used to him, almost exactly so: "I just want some help.  And

there's someone who can help me, if she wants to.  You!"

It wasn't a lot he had to say; not a lot she had to say to the duty-sergeant,

half an hour later, when she rang Burfbrd Police Station; and not a lot when

he, in turn, rang Thames Valley HQ, almost immediately put through to the

home number of the man in charge of the enquiry into the death ofJ.  Barren,

Builder.

Roy Holmes, a pupil of Burfbrd Secondary School, aged fifteen, living at 29A

Witney Street, had been riding his mountain bike along the footway on the

southern side of Sheep Street at approximately 10 a.  m.  that Monday, 3