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Morse sits on a bench in the churchyard—the same one he sat on after he and Thursday said their goodbyes, those years ago. The same church the Stranges got married in.
Around him late spring is at its most unbearable—the day drenched in sunlight and the interminable chatter of the birds, when all it should have is a raging storm. Bitter winds; a cold that seeps into your bones.
The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood,
For nothing now can ever come to any good,
His mind supplies idly. Pedestrian drivel but casework does that to you; finds the most banal of verses and songs and art and lets them under your skin.
*
Thursday calls him late one evening, out of the blue and barely on this side of acceptable.
Morse picks up the receiver, fully expecting news of another body that requires his attention at once.
Instead, what he hears on the other end of the line is his past, a voice that is somehow, still, familiar to him as the beating of his own heart.
“Morse.”
*
Morse .
The voice pulls him from the depths of a drug-induced nightmare—familiar, steadfast; a harbour in the storm.
*
“Sir.” He sits down without thinking, his mind already conjuring myriad catastrophes that may warrant such a call. “Is everything alright?”
“Yes, yes, nothing like that,” Thursday replies quickly.
So why are you calling then?
Unvoiced as it may be, the question rings across the line; settles in the air like thick smoke. Morse switches the receiver to his other hand, asks, if belatedly-
“How are you doing?”
“Fine. Still retired.”
For two years now—Morse heard, sent a card even.
*
Morse sits on his sofa, staring intently at the phone on his lap. I just wanted to offer my congratulations sir , he says in his own head, again, on your retirement . I hope all is well on your end.
*
“You?”
“Fine, yes. Same as always—you know how it is.”
He doesn’t know what else to say.
When silence sours between them like old milk, Thursday snaps- “it’s what people do, isn’t it—keep in touch?” voice thick with resentment.
Does anyone?
Morse exhales, massaging one eye with the base of his free hand.
“Yes, of course, I’m glad you called,” he says out loud, amiably.
*
With no interest in getting up from his bench just yet, he touches his breast pocket where he can feel the weight of Thursday’s revolver.
He was leaving the house this morning when he looked down and found, clutched in his hands like a lifeline, the thermos.
He stared at it uncomprehending for a moment—he had no memory of picking it up—before he realised what a terribly odd and inappropriate thing it would be to bring a thermos to where he was going and set it on the kitchen counter.
Except, when he turned to walk away, he felt suddenly, inexplicably, bereft without it, as if it was a piece of his soul he was leaving behind in his kitchen instead.
So he climbed the stairs with a sigh, clenching his jaw, and pulled the locked box he keeps under his bed. The revolver was where he left it, the metal cool against his skin, its curves and planes familiar in his hand.
Too familiar, perhaps—although today he has no intention to spin a bullet in its chamber, the way he did the last time he sat on this bench.
*
“It’s good of you to visit,” Thursday says, the unhappy line of his mouth betraying the hypocrisy of his words.
Perhaps, Morse thinks bitterly, he should be grateful that Thursday hasn’t said ‘there was no need for you to come, not on my account,’ the way his own father had. Perhaps this was a mistake from the start.
Perhaps Morse wouldn’t have fared any better himself if their places were switched; after all he has only come because he forced from Mrs Strange the news that her father had a small heart attack, and Thursday is too clever by half not to know it.
*
Thursday plops a sandwich onto his lap without ceremony.
“You need to eat.”
The sandwich only bears a passing resemblance to those made by Mrs Thursday, an entirely Continental, unattractive affair purchased from the buffet car of the train.
*
It’s hard to look at him without feeling betrayed.
*
“I have little appetite—funnily enough,” Morse offers with a half smile.
Even appealing to what easy camaraderie may still exist between them, he knows he should not push back, that Thursday could ask him to stand on his head and sing nursery rhymes right now and he should do it without question, and yet here he is, pushing back.
They are on the long journey back from Venice and Morse has no interest—not in food, not much in anything—and he still has little in the way of manners too.
*
How dare Thursday age 20 years in the five Morse has not seen him?
How dare he leave Morse with a stain he must carry on his soul for the rest of his life; how dare he leave him and then fall sick, when he is meant to be a thorn in the periphery of Morse’s mind, seldom felt and never dislodged?
Struggle to walk ten metres from the parked car to the nearest bench?
*
“Even so.” Thursday gestures at the sandwich with his head on the train. “You need to keep your strength up.”
Morse doesn’t remember the last time he ate; he takes a bite; the sandwich tastes like sawdust in his mouth.
When he is done with his lunch—or is it dinner?—he folds the cheap wrapping paper that will go home to no one, out of habit more than anything else, and tries to put his thoughts, the things he needs to tell Thursday, into coherent order.
*
The Channel stretches in front of them as far as the eye can see, steely under a fractured mass of clouds.
The clouds drift slowly, aimlessly, in a breeze that carries from the water, such that if you weren’t paying attention you couldn’t tell they were moving at all—only to look up again five minutes later and find a completely different sky looking down at you.
“How is Oxford?” Thursday asks, looking at him, “how have you been?”
Oxford is Oxford.
Ancient, indifferent to the plight of those who walk its streets. Sometimes it feels to Morse as if the world could end in nuclear disaster and the same spires would still keep watch over the sprawling wasteland, reproachful and unyielding, for millennia to come.
It’s not the kind of thought one voices.
*
He wonders whether this same barbed wire that snakes around his chest, his throat, cuts everyone else when they speak, too.
“Thank you, sir. I-” He lets out a laugh, a small, humourless thing, and shakes his head, his plan already in shambles four words in. “I don’t know how to thank you, how to apologise.” He doesn’t. He doesn’t even know where to begin. “The things I said-”
But Thursday cuts him off, matter of fact as ever.
“You already have. I got your letter.”
It’s hardly the same thing, is it? Hardly enough.
Still he nods, unsure of his voice and unwilling to risk another argument.
*
“I’ve put in for my Inspector’s,” he says, fiddling with the edge of his jacket.
Had he not torn his eyes from the sea to look at Thursday he would have missed the way his old governor’s face lights up with pride at the words—perhaps too subtly for someone who doesn’t know him to notice.
“Good. It was damn time.”
It shouldn’t matter—not after all this time—and yet.
Morse lets his gaze drift back onto the water, to come to rest on the speck of a ship on the horizon. They have exhausted the easy topics, how Sam is doing now in France, the news of Mrs Strange’s baby and of Morse’s current governor, back at the house when they were having tea with Mrs Thursday, and silence is no longer theirs to command in easy companionship—perhaps it never was.
Morse is fine. What else is there to say, now, after everything?
*
Thursday is the one who pierces the white noise of their train car, some indeterminable amount of time later.
“Siddle is a fine man.”
Morse tears his eyes from the barren landscape he was watching unseeing, the mention of Thursday’s new sergeant a bitter reminder of what he has lost. What he has destroyed by his own hand.
“I’m sure.”
He hopes his expression, his voice, does not give him away. That Thursday finds in it neutral agreement and not bitter sarcasm.
“But I’m too old to break in a new sergeant,” Thursday continues, fixing him with a knowing look. “If you could be persuaded to stay?”
*
“There was a panther that escaped from the Oxford zoo, a couple of months ago,” Morse starts, apropos of nothing, “perhaps you have heard about it? They needed someone from CID to supervise the search and you should have seen the expression on the new Super’s face when I replied, quite without thinking, ‘oh not again.’”
He turns to Thursday; Thursday is already halfway to a smile.
“‘Is it a common occurrence in Oxford then,’” he says, doing his best imitation of the Super, “‘for big cats to roam the streets?” and Thursday laughs then, a rare, infectious sound, another piece of him Morse will take to his grave.
It’s the sort of March day where spring, which has been making steady inroads to dispel the gloom of the winter, has grown weary in its toils and teeters now on the brink, unsure whether to go on or to call time. But a stubborn ray of sunshine breaks through the cloud cover nonetheless, races down the sky and hugs the water in its golden splendour.
He asks Thursday how the football is going, whether anyone has been sent off lately; Thursday asks him about the opera, and if they can no longer find what they once had and if Morse can no longer remember what Monday’s sandwiches were and if he has never once cared about football before in his life, none of it seems to matter. Hours still turn into minutes before they know it, the day into early evening.
“You must stay for tea,” Mrs Thursday insists when they finally make it back to the house, friends once again. Governor and bagman once again, as if no time has passed at all and Morse will pick him up on his way to CID tomorrow morning, and tell him of a robbery or a sudden death that has come in that Uniform just want them to take a quick look over. A stillborn illusion, of course, nothing more.
Morse offers his best apologetic smile.
He’d love to but he needs to get back; it’s a long drive and he is on call tomorrow.
“On a Sunday?” Mrs Thursday asks, though her disappointment is a resigned one; she has been married to a police officer for more than three decades after all.
Morse doesn’t tell them that he volunteered—that he feared they would ask him to stay for tea and by the time that was done, conversation would shift to setting up the spare room for the night, given the hour. That he feared that he might accept.
He wishes he had not but there is nothing to be done about it now.
Thursday walks him to the car after Morse takes his leave, and they stand by it, idling, neither of them quite ready to let go, futile and foolish as the sentiment might be.
Then Thursday gestures to the thermos Morse is holding in his hand—a physical marker of his defeat against the Thursdays’ insistence that if he was going on such a long drive at this hour the least he could use was some tea and a sandwich to take with him.
“You will have to return that. It’s Win’s favourite.”
Morse hears it for what it is.
Come back.
Don’t leave—not for good .
He smiles, openly, if only for a moment so that Thursday can see just how much he means it when he says “you have my word”.
*
Thursday’s jacket is draped over him like a blanket when he startles awake with a sudden jolt of the carriage, and Thursday asleep across from him only in his shirt and tie, hugging himself against the cold.