Stokenchurch that Harrison spoke: 'Red kite country this is now. Did you
know that, Sergeant?'
'As a matter of fact I did, yes. I'm not into birds myself though.
The wife puts some nuts out occasionally but. '
It may hardly be seen as a significant passage of conversation.
Harrison spoke again just after Dixon had turned off the M40 on to the A40
for Oxford.
'You know, I'm looking forward to seeing Morse again. I met him at Barren's
funeral, but I don't think we got on very well . . . My daughter, Sarah,
knows him though. He's one of her patients at the Radcliffe. She tells me
he's a strange sort of fellow in some ways interesting though, and very
bright, but perhaps not taking all that good care of himself.'
Lewis remained silent.
'Why didn't he come up to Heathrow himself? Wasn't that the original idea?'
'Yes, I think it was.'
'Are we meeting at St Aldate's or Kidlington?'
'He won't be meeting you anywhere, sir. Chief Inspector Morse is dead.'
chapter seventy-seven Dear Sir/ Madam Please note that an entry on the
Register of Electors in your name has been deleted for the following reason:
DEATH
If you have any objections, please notify me, in writing, before the 25th
November, 1998, and state the grounds for your objection.
Yours faithfully (Communication from Carlow County Council to an erstwhile
elector) after returning to HQ Lewis gave Strange an account of the quite
extraordinary evidence so innocently (as it seemed) supplied by Maxine
Ridgway.
But he could do no more.
For he had nothing more to give.
Unlike Morse, who had always professed enormous faith in pills pills of all
colours, shapes, and sizes Lewis could hardly remember the last time he'd
taken anything apart from the Vitamin C tablet he was bullied to swallow each
breakfast-time. It had therefore been something of a surprise to learn that
Mrs L kept such a copious supply of assorted medicaments;
and retiring to bed unprecedentedly early that evening he had swallowed two
Nurofen Plus tablets, and slept like the legendary log.
At 10 a. m. the following morning he drove up to the mortuary attheJR2.
The eyes were closed, but the expression on the waxen face was hardly one of
great serenity, for some hint of pain still lingered there.
Like so many others contemplating a dead person, Lewis found himself
pondering so many things as he thought of Morse's mind within the skull.
Thought of that wonderful memory, of that sensitivity to music and
literature, above all of that capacity for thinking laterally, vertically,
diagonally whateverwhichway that extraordinary brain should decide to go.
But all gone now, for death had scattered that union of component atoms into
the air, and Morse would never move or think or speak again.
Feeling slightly guilty, Lewis looked around him. But at least for the
moment his only company was the dead. And bending down he put his lips to
Morse's forehead and whispered just two final words: 'Goodbye, sir.'
chapter seventy-eight . & that I be not bury'd in consecrated ground Ss~
that no sexton be asked to toll the bell &' that no murners walk behind me at
my funeral & that no flours he planted on my grave. (Thomas Hardy, The Mayor
of Casterbridge) morse had always been more closely attuned to life's adagios
than its allegros; and his home reflected such a melancholic temperament.
The pastel-coloured walls, haunted by the music of Wagner, Bruckner, and
Mahler, were deco- rated with sombre-toned reproductions of Rembrandt, Ver-
meer, and Atkinson Grimshaw; and lined, in most rooms both upstairs and down,
with long shelves of the poets and the novelists.
The whole place now seemed so very still as Lewis picked up two pints of
semi-skimmed Coop milk from the porch, picked up four letters from the
doormat, and entered.
In the study upstairs there were several signs (as Lewis already knew) of a
sunnier temperament: the room was deco- rated in a sun-bed tan, terra cotta
and white, with a bright Matisse hanging on the only wall free of the
ubiquitous books, CDs, and cassettes. A red angle-lamp stood on the desk
