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,
held his hand for a couple of days or so before threatening to spill at least
half the can of beans . . . unless he could be persuaded otherwise.
Whatever the case, financial arrangements were made, and as far as we know
faithfully met. After the murder of his wife, much money was diverted from
the assets of Frank H into other channels, although I'm still surprised to
learn that 311
there may well have been some serious misappropriation of
funds at the Swiss Helvetia Bank.
All of which leaves one or two (or three! ) points unresolved.
First, the burglar alarm. Now on his train-trip from London Frank H must
have had thoughts galore. Several times he would have phoned home from the
train, and Sarah must surely have been there to take the calls. And it was
probably from the back of the taxi that Frank had the clever idea of ringing
Sarah and telling her he would be ringing again, when the taxi was only half
a minute or so from home, and asking her (Flynn wouldn't have heard, would
he? ) to turn on the burglar alarm. It was a clever idea, let's agree on
that. It certainly and understandably caused huge confusion in the original
police enquiry. The only person not wholly confused was Strange. It was he,
from the word go, who suggested that the alarm might well have been set off
deliberately by the murderer himself. (Never under-rate that man, Lewis! )
The time, as Morse saw, was 3. 40 a. m. ' almost exactly one hour after
