Investigation
A second teenager, Jacko Lever, is reported missing. As Morse is on holiday, his Detective Sergeant Lewis (Kevin Whately) is placed with another Inspector, the more methodical and soon to retire DCI Holroyd (John Junkin). Lewis (who is studying for inspector) is in charge of the search for Jacko with Holroyd observing him. The teen is eventually found dead in a railway tunnel; another suicide.
Both Marilyn and Jacko are found to have ingested the same pill before their death, although it is not immediately recognizable to the pathologist. A friend of Marilyn's, Vicky Wilson (Liza Walker), goes missing, which adds a degree of urgency to the investigation. Morse and Lewis learn more about rave culture from a younger drugs squad officer and they manage to discover a periodical unofficial 'rave' event called CHERUB which Marilyn, Vicky and Jacko have been attending.
During the investigation, Lewis is shown having difficulty connecting with his teenage daughter, who plays her choice of pop music very loudly (Lewis remarks that it is nearly as bad as Morse's operas), and seems to be displaying teenage angst. Lewis is also struggling to memorise the turgid details of Traffic Policing as part of his preparation for an examination that could result in him being promoted to Inspector. (Of course, following the end of the "Morse" series, Lewis reappears in a similar TV series of his own, titled "Lewis". He has become an Inspector, but not with the intellectual brilliance or background of Morse, although Lewis does follow some of Morse's empathetic and irregular approaches to detective work. In this later series Lewis is assisted by Detective Sergeant Hathaway, who is young, but intellectually similar to Morse.)
Lewis also quickly grasps the teenage rave-party characters' interest in paisley-like fractal art. He understands, intuitively, that fractals are an aspect of Chaos Theory and is clearly interested. Morse struggles to understand this. But one of the concepts of Chaos Theory is echoed in the plot: a tiny event in a distant place can have unpredictable, and huge consequences, elsewhere. Seemingly separate things in the world are in fact connected, and there are unexpected patterns in randomness.
In the same way that Lewis sees connections between the teenage rave-party characters and his own daughter, Morse is stimulated by the suicide of his niece to reflect on his own troubled teenage years. He explains to Lewis that his parents divorced when he was young, and he initially lived with his mother. But after she died, he went to live with his father, who had remarried. Morse's step-mother disliked him at that time, and, in this story, as an old woman with dementia, she dislikes him still. Morse has a good relationship with his step-sister. Tellingly, Morse reveals that, as a rebellious teenager he deliberately read poetry because he knew his step-mother did not understand or like it. He traces much of his intellectual approach to life to his rebellion against his step-mother. For example he says that he spent school holidays visiting parish churches and investigating their architecture and art.
Crucially, Morse confesses to Lewis that, when he was 15 years old he was so distressed by home-life that he decided he would commit suicide. To prepare for this he created a list of as many different ways of killing himself as he could imagine. For each one he considered to what extent it would hurt his father, or his step-mother, or his step-sister. When he had completed the list he realised how clever he must be to have worked so much out. (He agrees, with a half-smile, as he tells this to Lewis, that he was vain then, about his intellect, and is still vain.) He concluded, having made this list, that he must be too clever to waste his cleverness by killing himself.
This single episode reveals almost all that is known about the young Morse, and his path to the much older person who is the centre of the stories.
Read more about this topic: Cherubim And Seraphim