The Remorseful Day by Colin Dexter Read Free Book Online

envelope and unfolded the single, thin sheet of paper contained therein. And for a while frowned mightily; then smiled.
    “Have a look at that, Babs!” he said proudly, making as if to hand the sheet across the desk. “May well be what we've been waiting for—from my appeal, you know.”
    “Won't there be some fingerprints on it?” she asked tentatively.
    “Ah!”
    “You can
get
fingerprints from paper?”
    “Get almost anything from anything these days,” mumbled Strange. “And what with DNA, forensics, psychological profiling—soon be no need for us detectives any more!”
    But in truth he appeared a little abashed as he held the top of the sheet between his thumb and forefinger and leaned forward over the desk; and Barbara Dean leaned forward herself and read the undated letter, typed on a patently antiquated machine through a red/black ribbon long past its operative sell-by date, with each keyed character unpredictably produced in either color.
    “Bit illiterate?” suggested Strange.
    “I wonder if he really is,” said Barbara, replacing her spectacles in their case.
    “You should wear ‘em more often. You've got just theface for specs, you know. Hasn't anyone ever told you that?”

    No one ever had, and Barbara hoped she wasn't blushing.
    “Thank you.”
    “Well?”
    “I'm not in the Crime Squad, sir.”
    “But you don't think he'd last long in the typing pool?”
    “You fairly sure it's a ‘he’?”
    “Sounds like it to me.”
    Barbara nodded.
    “Not much of a typist, like I say.”
    “Spelling's OK—'recognize,’ and so on.”
    “Can't spell ‘was.’”
    “That's not really spelling though, is it? You sometimes get typists who are sort of dyslexic with some words. They try to type ‘was,’ say, and they hit the ‘s’ before the ‘a.’ Do things like that regularly but they don't seem to notice.”
    “Ah!”
    “Grammar's not so hot, I agree. Probably good enough to pass GCSE, I suppose, sir.”
    “Does anyone ever
fail
GCSE?”
    “Could do with a bit more punctuation too, couldn't it?”
    “Dunno. Not as much as Morse'd put in.”
    “Who do you think ‘The Ringer’ is?”
    “Ringer? One who rings, isn't it? Chap who's been ringing us up, like as not.”
    “Does the postmark help?”
    “Oxford. Not that that means anything. It could have been posted anywhere in our patch of the Cotswolds… Carterton! Yes. That's where they take the collections and do the sorting before bringing everything to Oxford.”
    “Scores of villages though, sir.”
    “Go and fetch Sergeant Dixon!”
    “Know where he is?”
    “Give you three guesses.”
    “In the canteen?”
    “In the canteen.”
    “Eating a doughnut?”
    “Doughnuts, plural.”
    It was like some of the responses she'd learned so well from the Litany.
    “I'll go and find him.”
    “And send him straight to me.”
    “The Lord be with you.”
    “And with thy spirit.”
    “You
do
go to church, sir!”
    “Only for funerals.”
    Sergeant Dixon was not so corpulent as Chief Superintendent Strange. But there was not all that much in it; and the pair of them would have made uncomfortable copassengers in economy-class seating on an airline. Plenty of room, though, as Dixon drove out alone to Carterton in a marked police car. He'd arranged a meeting with the manager of the sorting office there. A manageress, as it happened, who quickly and competentlyanswered his questions about the system operating in West Oxfordshire.
    Yes, since the Burford office had been closed, Carter-ton had assumed postal responsibility for a pretty wide area. Dixon was handed a printed list of the Oxon districts now covered; was informed how many postmen were involved; where the collection points were, and how frequently the boxes were emptied; how and when the accumulated bags of mail were brought back to Carterton, and how they were there duly sorted and categorized—but not franked—before being sent on to Oxford.
    “Any way a particular letter