Inspector Morse 13 The Remorseful Day

their respective clinics, we know our fellow out-patients as those affected

by impaired vision; as victims of chronic erectile dysfunction; as citizens

with a serious hearing-impediment.  The individual members of such groups,

however, know perfectly well what their troubles are.  And in the latter

category, they tend to prefer the monosyllabic 'deaf', although they realize

that there are varying degrees of deafness; realize that some are very deaf

indeed.

Like Simon Harrison.

He had been a six-year-old (it was 1978) attending a village school in

Gloucestershire when an inexplicably localized out- break of meningitis had

given cause for most serious concern in the immediate vicinity.  And in

particular to two families there: to the Palmer family in High Street, whose

only daughter had tragically died; and to the Harrison family in Church Lane,

whose son had slowly recovered in hospital after three

weeks of intensive care, but with irreversible long-term deafness:

twenty-five per cent residual hearing in the left ear; and almost nothing in

the right.

Thereafter, for Simon, social and academic progress had been seriously

curtailed and compromised: like an athlete being dined for the hundred-me tres

sprint over sand-dunes wearing army boots; like a pupil, with thick wadges of

cotton- wool in each ear, seeking to follow instructions vouchsafed by a

tutor from behind a thickly panelled door.

Oh God!  Being deaf was such a dispiriting business.

But Simon was a fighter, and he'd tried hard to make the best of things.

Tried so hard to master the skills of lip-reading; to learn the complementary

language of 'signing' with movements of fingers and hands; to present a

wholly bogus facial expression of comprehension in the company of others;

above all, to come to terms with the fact that silence, for those who are

deaf, is not merely an absence of noise, but is a wholly passive silence, in

which the potential vibrancy of active silence can never again be appreciated.

Deafness is not the brief pregnant silence on the radio when the listener

awaits the Greenwich time-signal; deafness is a radio-set that is defunct,

its batteries dead and non-renewable.

Few people in Simon's life had understood such things; and in his early

teens, when the audio graphical readings had begun to dip even more

alarmingly, fewer and fewer people had been overly sympathetic.

Except his mother, perhaps.

And the reason for such lack of interest in the boy had not been difficult to

fathom.  He was an unattractive, skinny-limbed lad, with rather protuberant

ears, and a whiny, nasal manner of enunciating his words, as though his

disability were not so much one of hearing as one of speaking.

Yet it would be an exaggeration to portray the young Harrison as a hapless

adolescent, so often mishearing, so often misunderstood.  His school fellows

were not a gang of 35

 unmitigated bullies; nor were his teachers an

uncaring crew.  No.  It was just that no one seemed to like him much;

certainly no one seemed to love him.

Except his mother, perhaps.

But Simon did have some residual hearing, as we have seen; and the powerful

hearing-aids he wore were themselves far more valuable than any sympathy the

world could ever offer.  And when, after many a struggle, he left school with

two A- level certificates (a C in English and a D in History) he very soon

had a job.

Still had a job.

In the early 1990s, Oxfordshire's potential facilities for business and

industry had attracted many leading national and international companies.

During those years, for example, the county could boast the largest

concentration of printing and publishing companies outside the metropolis;

and it was to one of these, the Daedalus Press in North Oxford, that on

leaving school Simon had applied for the post of apprentice proof-reader.

And had been successful, principally (let it be admitted) because of the

employers' legal obligation to appoint a small percentage of semi-disabled

applicants.

Yet the 'apprentice' appellation was very soon to be deleted from Simon's job

description, for he was proving to be surprisingly and encouragingly

competent: accurate, careful, neat - a fair combination of qualities required

in a proof-reader.  And with any luck (so it was thought) experience would

gradually bring with it that needful extra dimension of tedious pedanticism.

On the morning of Friday, 17 July, he found on his desk a photocopied extract

from some unspecified tabloid which some unspecified colleague had left, and

which he read through with keen attention; then read through a second time,

with less interest in its content, it appeared, than in its form, since his

proof-reading pen applied itself at five points in the article.

NEW CLUE TO OLD MURDER

Information received by son in.  Nobody knows who he Thames Valley Police

seems was.  Or she was.  " 5 likely to prompt renewed en- ij^ difficult to

disagree.  Would '% Qi^/ quir^jb into the bizzarre murder we still be reading

about the Ripof Mrs Yvonne Harrison just per if we knew who it was who over a