Inspector Morse 13 The Remorseful Day

musically, who from her early years had almost everything going for her, and

who (unlike her brother) needed far less of her mother's tender loving care.

Both children, as well as their parents, were probably fully aware of the

imbalance here; and tacitly and tactfully accepted it.

At the time of their mother's murder, both the children had left home several

years earlier.  Sarah had already qualified as a doctor specializing with

considerable distinction in the treatment of diabetes.  And Simon had landed

a surprisingly good job in publishing, and was now financially inde- pendent

if not emotionally independent, because he still yearned for that unique love

his mother had always shown him; a love that had meant everything to him in

those long

years of an ever-struggling school-life in which he knew with joyous

assurance that it was he Simon!  - who'd acquired the monopoly of a mother's

love, more of it even than his father had ever had.  He called to see her

regularly, of course he did.  But she probably always insisted that he rang

her beforehand.  No reason to ask why, surely?  Simon was completely unaware

of his mother's vespertinal divertissements.

But Frank certainly knew all about them, and they served as some sort of

excuse and justification for his own adulterous liaisons.  He didn't much

care anyway.  Perhaps he could shrug things off fairly easily.  But Simon

couldn't.  Simon turned up unexpectedly one evening and found his mother

lying on that very same bed where as a young boy (perhaps as an older boy?  )

he'd snuggled in beside her when his dad was away; and where he'd seen a man

straddled across her on his elbows and his knees.

I doubt it had been exactly like diat, though.  More likely he'd seen a man

bouncing down the stairs towards him, jerking up his trousers and fastening

up his flies.  A man he knew: Barron!  Then he'd found his mother lying in

the bedroom there: naked, gagged, handcuffed, with a porno- graphic video

probably still running on the TV.

Shellshocked with disbelief and disillusionment, in the white heat of a

furious jealousy yes!  - he murdered his mother.

309

chapter SiXTY-SiX We might now be stepping through a dark door with no

bottom on the other side, and fall flat on our faces (A member of the

Honolulu City Council, quoted by the Press Corps) conscious that he was

writing with increasing fluency, Morse poured himself another tumbler of

single malt, and resumed his narrative: With regard to events immediately

thereafter, we can only guess.  But at some point Simon rang his father in

predictable panic.  He had very few people he could call on.  But he could

call on his father and there was a special loop-system on the telephone

there.  And Frank H got to the house as quickly as any man could have done

that night.

His BMW was in for servicing, that was checked; and I now believe (a bit late

in the day) that the sequence of events was precisely as he claimed: taxi >

Paddington; train > Oxford; Oxford (enter Flynn!  ) > Lower Swinstead.

Then?  Probably we'll never really know.  But five people, three of them now

dead, they knew: Barren, who'd been disturbed in media coitu; Flynn, the

petty crook who just happened to be on hand; Repp, the burglar who'd been

watching the property all evening; Frank H; and Simon H himself.  Simon

doesn't seem to me the calibre of fellow who could stay long at such a

ghastly scene on his own; and I

think it's more than likely that his father rang Sarah and told her to get

along there post-haste, on the way buying a cinema ticket as an alibi for

Simon.  Certainly when I met Sarah I felt strongly that she probably knew who

had murdered her mother.  The trouble was that the three outsiders also knew:

Repp and Ban-on, who were both local men and Flynn, who'd met Simon in the

lip-reading classes at Oxpens, and who must have seen him there that night.

What then was the family plan of campaign?

The two (or three) of them were determined to create the maximum amount of

confusion their only hope.  The murder couldn't be concealed; but the waters

around it could be made so muddied that any investigation was likely to shoot

off into several blind alleys.  We may postulate that a gag was tied around

Yvonne's mouth (as I recall the report: 'no longer tight as if she had worked

it looser in her desperation'); that a pair of handcuffs was snapped around

her wrists; that one of the panes of the french window was smashed in from

the outside.  Why Yvonne's carefully folded clothes were not scattered all

over the floor, I just don't know, because 'attempted rape' would have seemed

a wholly probable explanation of the murder.

When and how the circling vultures closed in for their shares of the kill

your guess, Lewis, is (almost) as good as mine.  Some early liaison there

must have been with Ban-on in order to establish the telephone alibi.  Flynn

probably just stayed around that night a petty crook going through a bad

patch, and naming his price immediately.  I suspect that Repp, a real pro,