Morris

Morris is one of Ted Conkaffey’s police colleagues, initially part of the ordinary fellowship of shared work and social life. When Ted is questioned about the girl at Mount Annan, Morris becomes one of the people conducting the interrogation. The shift is decisive: someone who had shared beers and police work with Ted now sits across the table from him, helping to make him an object of suspicion among his own colleagues.

Identity and Prior Relationship

Before the investigation, Morris belonged to Ted’s circle of work friends. The men had drunk beers together around Ted’s backyard barbecue, kicked down doors, gone to pubs, and stood guard at protests back when they were patrol officers. Their history is presented through shared routine rather than a single intimate confidence: Morris was part of a group with a common workplace and a life that extended beyond it.

That prior closeness gives Morris’s role in the questioning its particular force. Ted describes the group’s shared lives as slowly draining away as the investigation proceeds. Morris is not a stranger imposing authority from outside; he is a colleague whose presence makes the change in Ted’s standing visible. The familiar relationship remains in the room as a history, but it no longer protects Ted from being questioned.

The Interrogation

Morris enters the interrogation room with Davo while Frankie remains in the doorway, avoiding Ted’s eyes. The scene places the officers around Ted rather than beside him: Morris and Davo circle him, while Ted sits on the other side of the table. The room’s arrangement reverses their former working relationship. Ted is now the person being questioned, and the colleagues who once acted alongside him control the questions.

The questioning follows Ted’s movements on the Sunday afternoon in question. Morris asks whether Ted had been driving near Mount Annan, and the officers return repeatedly to the details of the day: what happened that morning, what Ted and Kelly had said to each other, and which way he had driven after leaving home. Ted experiences the questions as circling the same ground. At one point he has already spent hours in the room, with no clock to mark the passage of time; the uncertainty about how long the interview has lasted adds to his sense that he cannot understand what is happening or when it will end.

Morris also controls the pace of the exchange. When he rises to retrieve an envelope, Ted tries to speak, but Morris redirects the interview with a question about fishing and insists on an answer. Ted’s anger grows as he is repeatedly interrupted. He recognizes the tactic as the way Morris speaks to criminal suspects: cutting off answers and preventing a person from finishing a sentence. The method that Ted knows as police practice now bears directly on him, and his recognition of it sharpens the shock of being treated as a suspect by a colleague.

From Colleague to Interrogator

The conflict is personal as well as procedural. Ted recalls that Morris, Davo, and Frankie were upset by the situation, yet they began questioning him directly despite the conflict of interest. No one stopped them from taking part at the outset. Their distress does not prevent their participation; instead, it exists alongside it. Ted remembers them as restless, guilty, and horrified by the words they were saying, while still continuing to question him.

The interrogation lasted fourteen hours. Morris, Davo, and Frankie began it, and after a couple of hours, when the answers they wanted had not emerged, Ted was handed over to homicide detectives because the eventual charges would include attempted murder. The handover marks a change in who conducts the questioning, but it does not undo Morris’s part in the opening stage. Ted spent the night in the cells at his own police station, trying to get the attention of officers he knew as they passed. They had been ordered not to speak to him. In a single day, his place among colleagues had become, in Ted’s account, that of an enemy.

Narrative Role and Significance

Morris’s importance lies less in a separately described personal history than in the contrast between his former relationship with Ted and his conduct in the interrogation room. The narrative offers no account of his private motives or of what he later thought about the case. Instead, it shows him through concrete actions: entering with Davo, asking about Ted’s movements, retrieving the envelope, and interrupting Ted as he tries to answer. That limited view keeps attention on what Ted can observe and on the uncertainty surrounding the accusation.

The scene also makes police procedure familiar to Ted and newly threatening at once. He knows the interruption tactic because he has seen Morris use it with suspects; now he is on the receiving end of the same approach. Morris’s presence therefore embodies the sudden change in Ted’s position without requiring the former colleagues to become strangers. Their shared history is precisely what makes the reversal legible: the work friends who had once acted together now help conduct the questioning that separates Ted from the station and its people.