Inspector Morse 13 The Remorseful Day

blue Parker pen, and resumed the exegesis he'd been writing when Lewis had

interrupted him, deciding however to cross out the last (and uncompleted)

sentence: "It was embarrassing for me to talk to you about this and I know

that you in turn found it equally embarrassing to There would be ample time

to put that part of the record straight in the days ahead.

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow .  .

chapter sixty-five Jealousy is that pain which a man feels from the

apprehension that he is not equally beloved by the person whom he entirely

loves (Addison, The Spectator) Simon H is not a good liar, and I dragged some

of the truth out of him.  He is genuinely very deaf, and the telephone must

always be a nightmare for him.  So what's he got a mobile for?  Even people

with good hearing often have trouble with one.  But, remember, even someone

who's stone- deaf can communicate to some degree with someone on the other

end, because he's always able to speak if not to hear.

Many people must have wanted Barren dead.  And no one more so than Frank

Harrison, who'd learned that Barren would soon be working up at some giddy

height in a quietish street in Burford.  The job had been mentioned, among

other places no doubt, in the Maiden's Arms.  And one person in that pub was

in regular communication with Frank H: Alien Thomas, that soon-to-be-married

youth who regularly wastes his substance on the fruit machine.  How come?

Like so many others in this case, he's dependent on Frank H - his father,

remember!  - who (rumour!  ) has just bought him a small flat in Bicester,

and who has pretty certainly been making him a regular allowance for many

years.

The plan had been a reasonably simple one with one

snag.  Both the Harrisons, Senior and Junior, had some knowledge of Ban-on's

ladder-technique from the several times he had worked at the family home:

specifically his habit of tying the top of his ladders to something firm up

there in the heights.  It would seem likely that he'd do the same again, and

there'd be little point in giving the ladder one great hefty push if it

wouldn't topple to the ground.  Some recce was therefore required; and Simon

picked up his father that Monday morning in Oxford and drove him the twenty

miles to Burford, leaving the car at the western end of Sheep Street, and

then jogging up and down the opposite side of the street in tracksuit and

trainers, noting that Barren was moving the ladder along every twelve minutes

or so, and predictably re- roping the top each time.  The only possibility

then was to catch Barren after he'd re-climbed the ladder and was refix- ing

the rope.  A minute or so?  Not much more.  But enough.  Simon's job was to

phone his father, mobile to mobile, and just say

"Now!"  Nothing else.  He hadn't the spunk he says (I believe him) to perform

the deed himself; and it was his father, also in jogging kit, who would run

along the pathway there and topple Barron to a death that in Simon's view was

fully deserved and long overdue.

That was the plan.  Something like it.  So I believe.  But the countdown had

been aborted because (Simon himself a witness) a bicycle, the front wheel

jerked up repeatedly from the ground, was lurching its way along the path,

and under the ladder, and into the ladder.

Surplus to requirements therefore was the plan the Harrisons had plotted.  Or

so we are led to believe.  Why such a proviso?  Because I shall be surprised

if any plan devised by the opportunistic Frank Harrison has ever come to a

sorry nothing.  Is it possible therefore that the accident of Barren's death

was not quite so 'accidental' after all?  Already Frank Harrison had

accomplished something far more complex his manipulation of the evidence

surrounding his wife's murder, when it was

 imperative for him to establish

one crucial fact: that no other living soul was present when he went into his

house that night.  But three other people knew this fact was untrue; and all

three of them whichever way intercommunication was effected were subsequently

rewarded for their roles in the conspiracy of complicity and silence.

Back to my proviso.

Can it be that Frank Harrison trawled his net even wider and dragged in the

cyclist who sent Barren down to his death, the boy Holmes the brother of

Harrison's son Alien?

We turn now to the Harrison clan itself.

Our researchers have given us several pointers to the relationships within

that family.  The marriage itself had long been loveless: he with a string of

mistresses in his Pavilion Road flat in London; she with a succession of

straight or kinky but always besotted bed mates with whom she fairly

regularly dallied with mutual delight.  And, doubtless, profit.  Of the two

children, Simon was clearly the mother's favourite - a boy who had battled

bravely with his disability; a boy for whom his mother had found an affection

considerably deeper than that for her daughter Sarah a young lady who was

very attractive physically, very bright academically, very talented