mean?'
'We were always near the end.'
'So what do you think happened?'
'Shan't ever know for certain, shall we? With all three of them dead, all
three of them murdered ' ' Only two, surely? '
'If you say so, Lewis. If you say so.'
'You're not suggesting ?'
But Morse was not to be deflected: 'There were three people who had a vested
interest in Yvonne Harrison's murder: Repp, Barren, and Flynn. Repp because
he'd been casing the property for a burglary; because he happened to be there
on the night of the murder; and because he knew who the murderer was.
Barren a man with an SAS background, who'd found a woman who could gratify
his sexual fantasies, and who also knew who the murderer was because he was
the fellow in bed with Yvonne that night. Flynn the fellow who lied about
the events that night and who, like the other two, knew who the murderer was.
The three of them had got their clutches into the only person who could pay
their price, the person who did pay their price: Frank Harrison. He was
becoming a fatter and fatter cat in his banking business, so they thought
and, rightly it seems. So they were ready to up the stakes. And on the day
Repp was released, they'd agreed to meet and co-ordinate some plan of action.
But things went wrong. Pretty certainly they somehow discovered that they'd
each been treated differently dangerously differently and bitterness,
jealousy, rivalry, all surfaced, and there was one almighty row. I've said
all this before! They'd stopped, perhaps in a lay-by along the A34 - take
your pick! - and Barren got his Stanley knife out and threatened Flynn, the
man who'd just happened to be at the taxi-rank that night, and who was now
overplaying his hand. And soon it must have occurred to the other two that
half a cake is considerably better than a third of one; and Flynn was
murdered and
dumped at Redbridge in those black bags, the ones the owner of the car was
originally going to cart off to the rubbish dump. '
'Waste Disposal Centre.'
'After that? Who knows? But suddenly the situation was becoming more
dangerous sdll. If half a cake is better than a third, what about a whole
cake? So the two of them must have wrangled about the best way to capitalize
on Flynn's beneficial departure . . . But how and why and when and where
things went on from there, I've no more idea than you have and that's not
saying much, is it?'
'No,' said Lewis flatly.
Morse looked at his sergeant, and smiled wearily: 'You're annoyed, aren't
you?'
'Annoyed? What about?'
'Dixon.'
'Why didn't you tell me?'
'You'd've accused me of wasting police resources. Do you know what I got him
to do today?'
'Vaguely.'
'Well, let me tell you, specifically. First, I asked him to do a bit of
fourth-grade clerical stuff at Oxpens, and get copies of those attending
lip-reading classes these last five years. And he did it.
Very efficiently. He found Simon Harrison's name there, for three years; and
Paddy Flynn's there, for two years overlapping. Very interesting that,
because they must have known each other!
'Second, I asked Dixon to find out more about Flynn. Flynn was known as an
amateur entertainer round the local pubs and clubs in Oxfordshire, playing
the clarinet and compering his little pop group.
Till about three years ago, when things started to go wrong: he began to
experience trouble with his hearing something that later compromised his job
with Radio Taxis; and at about the same time, according to the
post-mortem
details, he had a lot of dental trouble which meant he had to have all his
top-front teeth extracted. And that's not a good thing for a
clarinet-player. '
'It's not?'
'Well-known fact. Louis Armstrong had the same sort of trouble.'
'He was a trumpet-plsyerV ' Same sort of thing! Then I asked Dixon to look
