Inspector Morse 13 The Remorseful Day

that car drivers occasionally contract one of the minor strains of the

road-rage virus even that patient man in the siren-assisted police car who

finally pulled over on to the hard shoulder of the M40 and rang his chief.

"Been stuck in traffic, sir.  Be with you in about an hour."

"Lewis!  Can't you hear the wireless?  It's five-past seven bang in the

middle of The Archers.  It can wait, surely!"

Lewis supposed it could; and would have said so.  But the phone was dead.

Wireless!  Huh!  Everybody called it a 'radio' these days well, everybody

except Morse and one or two of the old 'uns, like Strange.

Yes, come to think of it.  Morse and Strange were the oldest of the HQ lot,

with Strange six months the older, and due for retirement that next month.

The road was free and Lewis drove fast.  It could wait of course it could the

news about Harrison Senior.  Perhaps it didn't matter all that much; and as

Morse frequently reminded

him nothing really mattered very much at all in the end.  But he was looking

forward to a swopping of notes.  There had been some interesting

developments, certainly on his own side; and he doubted not that Morse's

researches that day had generated a few new ideas.

Not that they needed any more high-flown ideas really, he decided, as a

sudden torrential downpour called for more terrestrial concentration.  He

reduced his speed to 80 m.  p.  h.

At 7.  20 p.  m.  Morse was sitting back in the black-leather arm- chair,

knowing that only a few of the pieces in the jigsaw remained to be fitted.

Earlier in the case the top half of the puzzle had presented itself as a

monochrome blue, like the sky earlier that evening, although of late the

weather had become sultry, as though a thunderstorm were brewing.  But the

jigsaw's undifferentiated blue had been duly broken by a solitary seagull or

two, by a piece of soft-white cloud, and later perhaps (when Lewis arrived?

) by what Housman so memorably had called 'the orange band of eve'.  He felt

almost happy.  There was something else, too: he Would quite certainly wait

until that arrival before having his first drink of the day.  It was quite

easy really (as he told himself) to refrain from alcohol for a limited period.

The storm reached North Oxford fifty minutes later, travel- ling from the

south-west at a pace commensurate with Lewis's speed along the

M40.

It may have had something to do with Wagner, but Morse enjoyed the intensity

and the electricity of a thunderstorm, and he watched with deep pleasure the

plashing rain and the dazzling flashes in the lightning-riven sky.  From his

viewpoint by the window of his flat, a slightly sagging telephone-wire cut

the leaden heavens in two; and he watched as a succession of single drops of

rain ran along the wire before finally falling off, reminding him of soldiers

crossing a river on rope-harness, 303

 and finally dropping off on the other

side.  As he had once done himself.

Crossing the river .  His mother would never speak of 'dying': always of

'crossing the river'.  It was a pleasing conceit; a pleasing metaphor.  If

he'd been a poet, he might have written a sonnet about that telephone-wire

just outside.  But Morse wasn't a poet.  And the storm now ceased as suddenly

as it had started.

And the front-door bell was ringing.

It was after 10 p.  m.  when, with Lewis now gone, Morse took stock of the

situation with renewed interest, though (truth to tell) with little great

surprise.  Lewis had declined the offer of alcohol, and Morse had decided to

prolong his own virtually unprecedented abstinence.  He felt tired, and at

10.  30 p.  m.  decided that he would be early abed.  So many times had he

been counselled that beer made a lumpy mattress, that spirits made a hard

pillow, and that in general alcohol was the stuff that nightmares were made

of.  So, if that were true, he could perhaps expect to be sleeping the sleep

of the just that night.  It would be a new experience.

He put on the RSPB video, and once again watched the wonderful albatross

gliding effordessly across the Antarctic wastes.  So relaxing .  .

At 11.  15 he switched off the bedroom light and turned as ever on to his

right-hand side, conscious of a clear head, a freshness of mind, and a gently

slumbrous lassitude.

Wonderful.

In spite of his occasional disillusionment about being cast up on to the

shores of light in the first place, it would be wholly untrue to say that

Morse was over-eager to embark upon diat final journey to that further land.

Indeed, like the majority of

mortals, he was something of a hypochondriac; and that night he found himself

becoming increasingly fearful about his own physical well-being.  Or

ill-being.

The illuminated green figures on the alarm clock showed 2.  42 a.  m.  when

he finally abandoned the unequal struggle.  His mind was an uncontrollable

whirligig at St Giles' Fair, and the indigestion-pains in his chest and in

his arms were hard and unrelenting.  He got up, poured himself a glass of

Alka-Seltzer, poured himself a glass of the single malt, took up his medium-