The Remorseful Day Read Free

perhaps?”
    “Only the bit at the end, about the Radcliffe.”
    “Why's that?”
    “Well, as you know, I was in there myself—after I was diagnosed.”
    “Christ! You make it sound as if you're the only one who's ever been bloody diagnosed!”
    Morse held his peace, for his memory needed no jogging: Strange himself had been a patient in the selfsame Radcliffe Infirmary a year or so before his own hospitalization. No one had known much about Strange's troubles. There had been hushed rumors about “en-docrinological dysfunction”; but not everyone at Police HQ was happy about spelling or pronouncing or identifying such a polysyllabic ailment.
    “You know why I brought that cutting, Morse?”
    “No! And to be honest with you, I don't much care. I'm on furlough, you know that. The quack tells me I'm run down—blood sugar far too high—blood pressure far too high. Says I need to have a quiet little rest-cure and try to forget the great big world out there, as you call it.”
    “Some of us can't forget it though, can we?” Strange spoke the words very softly, and Morse got to his feet and turned off the CD player.
    “Not one of your greatest triumphs that case, was it?”
    “One of the few—very few, Morse—I got no-bloody-where with. And it wasn't exactly mine, either, as you know. But it was my responsibility, that's all. Still is.”
    “What's all this got to do with me?”
    Strange further expanded his gargantuan girth as he further expounded:
    “I thought, you know, with the wife … and all that… I thought it'd help to stay in the Force another year. But…”
    Morse nodded sympathetically. Strange's wife had died very suddenly a year previously, victim of a coronary thrombosis which should surely never have afflicted one so slim, so cautious, so physically fit. She'd been anunlovely woman, Mrs. Strange—outwardly timid and inwardly bullying; yet a woman to whom by all accounts Strange had been deeply attached. Friends had spoken of a “tight” marriage; and most agreed that the widower would have been wholly lost on his own, at least for some while, had he jacked things in (as he'd intended) the previous September. And in the end he'd been persuaded to reconsider his position—and to continue for a further year. But he'd been uneasy back at HQ: a sort of supernumerary Super, feeling like a retired schoolmaster returning to a Common Room. A mistake. Morse knew it. Strange knew it.
    “I still don't see what it's got to do with me, sir.”
    “I want the case reopened—not that it's ever been closed, of course. It worries me, you see. We should have got further than we did.”
    “I still—”
    “I'd like you to look at the case again. If anyone can crack it,
you
can. Know why? Because you're just plain bloody lucky, Morse, that's why!
And I want this case solved.
”

Chapter Three
    Which of you shall have a friend and shall go unto him
at midnight and say unto him, Friend, lend me three loaves.
And he from within shall answer and say, Trouble me not:
the door is now shut; I cannot rise and give thee. I
say unto you, though he will not rise and give him,
because he is his friend, yet because of his importunity
he will rise and give him as many as he needeth.
    (
St. Luke
, ch. XI, vv. 5-8
    Lucky?
    Morse had always believed that luck played a bigger part in life than was acknowledged by many people—certainlyby those distinguished personages who saw their personal merit as the only cause of their appropriate eminence. Yet as he looked back over his own life and career Morse had never considered his own lot a particularly lucky one, not at least in what folk referred to as the affairs of the heart. Strange may have had a point though, for without doubt his record with the Thames Valley CID was the envy of most of his colleagues—his success rate the result, as Morse analyzed the matter, of all sorts of factors: a curious combination of hard thinking, hard drinking (the two, for Morse, being