The Remorseful Day by Colin Dexter Read Free Book Online Page A

can be traced to a particular post-box?”
    “No, none.”
    “Traced to a particular village?”
    “No.”
    Dixon was not an officer of any great intellectual capacity; indeed Morse had once cruelly described him as “the lowest-watt bulb in the Thames Valley Force.” He had only five years to go before retirement, and he knew that his recent elevation to the rank of sergeant was as high as he could ever hope to climb. Not too bad, though, for a man who had been given little encouragement either from home or from school: if he'd made something of himself he'd made something of himself
himself
, as he'd once put things. Not the most elegant of sentences. But “elegance” had never been a word associated with Sergeant Dixon.
    And yet, as he looked down at his outsize black boots, buffed and bulled, he was thinking as hard as he'd thought for many a moon. He was fully aware of the importance of his present inquiries, and he felt gratified to have been given the job. How good it would be if he could impress his superiors—something (he knew) he'd seldom done in his heretofore somewhat nondescript career.
    So he took his time as he sat in that small postal office; took his time as he wrote down a few words inhis black notebook; then another few words; then asked another question; then another …
    When finally he drove back to Oxford, Sergeant Dixon was feeling rather pleased with himself.
    That letter-cum-envelope was still exercising Strange's mind to its limits; but there seemed no cause for excitement. In late morning he had driven down to the Fingerprint Department at St. Aldate's in Oxford—only to learn that there was little prospect of further enlightenment. The faint, oversmeared prints offered no hope: the envelope itself must have been handled by the original correspondent, by the collecting postman, by the sorter, by the delivering postman, by a member of the HQ post department, by Strange's secretary, by Strange himself—and probably by a few extra intermediary persons to boot. How many fingers there, pray?
    Forget it?
    Forget it!
    Handwriting? Only those red-felt capitals on the cover. Was it worth getting in some underemployed graphologist to estimate the correspondent's potential criminality? To seek possible signs of his (?) childhood neglect, parental abuse, sexual perversion, drugs… ?
    Forget it?
    Forget it!
    The typewriter? God! How many typewriters were there to be found in Oxfordshire? In any case, Strange held the view that in the early years of the new millennium the streets of the UK's major cities would be lined with past-sell-by-date typewriters and VDUs and computers and the rest. And how was he to find an obviously
ancient
typewriter for God's sake, one with a tired and overworked ribbon of red and black? He might as well try to trace the animal inventory from the Ark.
    Forget it?
    Forget it!
    What Strange needed now was new ideas.
    What Strange needed now was Morse to be around.

Chapter Eleven
    Take notice, lords, he has a loyal breast,
For you have seen him open ‘t. Read o ‘er this;
And after, this: and then to breakfast with
What appetite you have.
    (Shakespeare,
Henry VIII
)
    Detective Sergeant Lewis of the Thames Valley CID kept himself pretty fit—very fit, really—in spite of a diet clogged daily with cholesterol. Quite simply, he had long held the view that some things went with other things. He had often heard, for example, that caviar was best washed down with iced champagne, although in truth his personal experience had occurred somewhat lower down the culinary ladder—with fried eggs necessarily complemented with chips and HP sauce; and (at breakfast time) with bacon, buttered mushrooms, well-grilled tomatoes, and soft fried bread. And, indeed, such was the breakfast that Mrs. Lewis had prepared at 7:15 A.M. on Monday, July 20, 1998.
    It will be of no surprise, therefore, for the reader to learn that Sergeant Lewis felt pleasingly replete when, just before 8 A.M. , he