Inspector Morse 13 The Remorseful Day

He was about to pick up the phone when the door-bell rang.

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chapter fifty-eight It remains quite a problem to play the clarinet with

false teeth, because there is great difficulty with the grip (this may even

result in the plate being pulled out!  ).  In addition there are problems

with the breathing, because it is difficult to project a successful airstream

(Paul Harris, Clarinet Basics) 'been trying to get you all day, sir.  "

"I've had other things to do, you know."

"You just said you'd wanted a rest day."

"Come in!  Fancy a quick noggin?"

Lewis hesitated.

"Why not?"

"Ye gods!  You must have had a bad day or was it a good day?"

"I've had a good day, and so have you."

Morse now listened quietly to the extraordinary news from Andrews, though

without any sign of triumphalism.

Equally quietly he slowly read through Lewis's typed reports.  Then read them

a second time.

"Your orthography has come on enormously since they put that spell-check

system into the word-processor."

"Don't you have any problems with spellings sometimes?"

"Only with " proceed"."

"Where does this all leave us, sir?"

"Things are moving fast."

"We're getting near the end, you mean?"

 "We were always near the end."

"So what do you think happened?"

"Shan't ever know for certain, shall we?  With all three of them dead, all

three of them murdered ' " Only two, surely?  "

"If you say so, Lewis.  If you say so."

"You're not suggesting ?"

But Morse was not to be deflected: "There were three people who had a vested

interest in Yvonne Harrison's murder: Repp, Barren, and Flynn.  Repp because

he'd been casing the property for a burglary; because he happened to be there

on the night of the murder; and because he knew who the murderer was.

Barren a man with an SAS background, who'd found a woman who could gratify

his sexual fantasies, and who also knew who the murderer was because he was

the fellow in bed with Yvonne that night.  Flynn the fellow who lied about

the events that night and who, like the other two, knew who the murderer was.

The three of them had got their clutches into the only person who could pay

their price, the person who did pay their price: Frank Harrison.  He was

becoming a fatter and fatter cat in his banking business, so they thought

and, rightly it seems.  So they were ready to up the stakes.  And on the day

Repp was released, they'd agreed to meet and co-ordinate some plan of action.

But things went wrong.  Pretty certainly they somehow discovered that they'd

each been treated differently dangerously differently and bitterness,

jealousy, rivalry, all surfaced, and there was one almighty row.  I've said

all this before!  They'd stopped, perhaps in a lay-by along the A34 - take

your pick!  - and Barren got his Stanley knife out and threatened Flynn, the

man who'd just happened to be at the taxi-rank that night, and who was now

overplaying his hand.  And soon it must have occurred to the other two that

half a cake is considerably better than a third of one; and Flynn was

murdered and

dumped at Redbridge in those black bags, the ones the owner of the car was

originally going to cart off to the rubbish dump.  "

"Waste Disposal Centre."

"After that?  Who knows?  But suddenly the situation was becoming more

dangerous sdll.  If half a cake is better than a third, what about a whole

cake?  So the two of them must have wrangled about the best way to capitalize

on Flynn's beneficial departure .  .  .  But how and why and when and where

things went on from there, I've no more idea than you have and that's not

saying much, is it?"

"No," said Lewis flatly.

Morse looked at his sergeant, and smiled wearily: "You're annoyed, aren't

you?"

"Annoyed?  What about?"

"Dixon."

"Why didn't you tell me?"

"You'd've accused me of wasting police resources.  Do you know what I got him

to do today?"

"Vaguely."

"Well, let me tell you, specifically.  First, I asked him to do a bit of

fourth-grade clerical stuff at Oxpens, and get copies of those attending

lip-reading classes these last five years.  And he did it.

Very efficiently.  He found Simon Harrison's name there, for three years; and

Paddy Flynn's there, for two years overlapping.  Very interesting that,

because they must have known each other!

"Second, I asked Dixon to find out more about Flynn.  Flynn was known as an

amateur entertainer round the local pubs and clubs in Oxfordshire, playing

the clarinet and compering his little pop group.

Till about three years ago, when things started to go wrong: he began to

experience trouble with his hearing something that later compromised his job

with Radio Taxis; and at about the same time, according to the

 post-mortem

details, he had a lot of dental trouble which meant he had to have all his

top-front teeth extracted.  And that's not a good thing for a

clarinet-player.  "

"It's not?"

"Well-known fact.  Louis Armstrong had the same sort of trouble."

"He was a trumpet-plsyerV " Same sort of thing!  Then I asked Dixon to look

into Mrs Holmes's background.  I had the impression when we spoke to her that