remember? - to get in touch once I was discharged. But no invitation, no
phone call, no letter, nothing.
If you have decided diat it was all just a temporary infatuation, and if, on
your part, it was nothing more than diat - so be it. Just for a while longer
though, let me look through my mail each morning in the hope That was all.
Just one small page of a longer letter. No date, no address, no salutation,
no valediction, no name nothing. And yet everything. Because the letter was
written in that small, neatly formed upright script that was recognizable
everywhere in the Thames Valley Police HQ.
As he re-read the page, Lewis was suddenly aware of another presence in the
office; and looked up to find Chief Inspector Morse standing silently in the
doorway.
284
chapter sixty-two Don't tell me, sweet, that I'm unkind Each time I
black your eye, Or raise a weal on your behind I'm just a loving guy.
We both despise the gentle touch, So cut out the pretence; You wouldn't love
it half as much Without the violence (Roy Dean, Lovelace Bleeding) anyone
wishing to take up Morse's earlier promise of being available the following
Monday morning would have been disappointed, since he had put in no
appearance by lunchtime. Yet he was not idle during those morning hours; and
any visitor to the bachelor flat would have found him seated at his desk for
much of the time; and for a fair proportion of that time found him writing
quite busily and (as we have seen) very neatly. His old typewriter (with its
defective 'e' and 't's) sat at his elbow; but he had never mastered the
keyboard-skills with any real confidence, and he wrote now in long-hand with
a medium-blue Biro.
For Priority Consideration Several things have happened these last few days
which have prompted me to put down in writing my own thoughts on the present
state of play.
First, I've been waking up every day recently, after some nightmarish nights,
with a premonition that some disaster is imminent. Whether death comes into
such a category, I'm not sure. I can't agree with Socrates, though, that
death is a blessing devoutly to be wished, even if it is (as I hope it is, as
I believe it is) one long completely dreamless sleep. For the very fact of
being alive is surely the best thing that's happened to (almost) all of us.
Second, the last murder case entrusted to the pair of us has been (one or two
loose ends though) satisfactorily resolved. Repp and Flynn were murdered by
Ban-on, and the murderer himself is now dead.
So any further insight into the original Harrison murder from their angles is
wholly precluded.
Third, I'm certain that Frank Harrison has been the pay- master. It's high
time we brought him into HQ for intensive questioning, either directly about
the murder of his wife, or at the very least about some culpable complicity
of her murder.
Fourth, I'm also convinced that Yvonne H was murdered by one of her own
family. Nothing else makes any sense at all, not to me anyway.
That murder was not premeditated: few of them are. It was committed
spontaneously, viciously, involuntarily perhaps, by whichever of the three it
was who found Yvonne Harrison in a situation that was utterly unexpected
kinkiness, perversion, degradation, all rolled up into one.
On the face of it, the husband is the outsider of the three, so you will
appreciate, Lewis, that in my book he's the favourite. It's the 'why' that
worries me, though. He wasn't and isn't anybody's fool, and he must have
known more than
enough about his wife's tastes in bondage and possibly masochism. So I just
can't see blazing jealousy as his motive, especially since, as I strongly
suspect, he regularly experienced the (reported) joys of extra-marital sex
