On one of the settees, under a poster recommending the Costa del Sol and displaying a photograph of a girl in a wet-look bikini leering at a bull in its death throes, sat Monkey Matthews with an old man. He looked, Wexford thought, very much by time’s fell hand defaced and in nearly as bad case as the bull. It wasn’t that he was thin or pale - in fact his squarish toad’s face was purple - but there was an air about him of one who has been physically ruined by years of bad feeding, damp dwellings and nasty indulgences whose nature Wexford preferred not to dwell on.
Each man had an almost empty half-pint glass of the cheapest obtainable bitter and Monkey was smoking a minuscule cigarette.
“Evening,” said Wexford.
Monkey didn’t get up but indicated this companion with an airy wave. “This is Mr. Casaubon.”
Wexford gave a tiny sigh, the outward and audible sign of an inward and outrageous scream. “I don’t believe it,” he said thinly. “Just enlighten me to which one of you two intellectuals is acquainted with George Eliot.”
Far from living up to Monkey’s image of a man intimidated by the police, Mr. Casaubon had brightened as soon as Wexford spoke and now rejoined in thick hideous cockney, “I see him once. Strangeways it was, 1929. They done him for a big bullion job.”
“I fear,” Wexford said distantly, “that we cannot be thinking of the same person. Now what are you gentlemen drinking?”
"Port and brandy,” said Mr. Casaubon almost before the words were out, but Monkey, to whom what could be inhaled always took priority over what could merely be imbibed, pushed forward his empty bitter glass and remarked that he would appreciate twenty Dunhill International.
Wexford bought the drinks and tossed the crimson and gold package into Monkey’s lap. “I may as well open the proceedings,” he said; “by telling you two jokers you can forget about. five hundred pounds or anything like it. Is that clear?”
Mr. Casaubon received this in the manner of one used to frequent disappointment. The liveliness which had briefly appeared in his watery eyes died away and, making a low humming sound that might have been a long-drawn murmur of assent or just an attempt at a tune, he reached for his port and brandy. Monkey, said, “When all’s said and done, me and my friend would settle for the reward.”
“That’s very handsome of you,” said Wexford sarcastically. “I suppose you realise that money will be paid only for information leading directly to the arrest of the murderer of Stella Rivers?”
“We wasn’t born yesterday,” said Monkey. This remark was so obviously true, particularly in the case of Mr. Casaubon, who looked as if he had been born in 1890, that the old man broke off from his humming to emit a cackle of laughter, showing Wexford the most hideous, dilapidated and rotting set of teeth he had ever seen in a human mouth, “We can read what’s in the papers as well as you,” Monkey went on. “Now then, cards on the table. If my friend tells you what he knows and what he’s got papers to prove, are you going to do fair by us and see we get what’s our right when Swan’s under lock and key?”
“I can get a witness, if that’s what you want. Mr. Burden perhaps?”
Monkey puffed smoke out through his nostrils. “I can’t stomach that sarcastic devil,” he said. “No, your word’s good enough for me. When folks run down the fuzz I always say, Mr. Wexford’s hounded me, God knows, but he . . .”
“Monkey,” Wexford interrupted, “are you going to tell me or aren’t you?”
“Not here,” said Monkey, shocked. ‘What, give you a load of info that’ll put a man away for life here in what you might call the market place?”
“I’ll drive you back to the station, then.”
“Mr. Casaubon wouldn’t like that.” Monkey stared at the old man, perhaps willing him to show some sign of terror, but Mr. Casaubon, his eyelids drooping, simply continued to hum monotonously. “We’ll go to Rube’s place. She’s out babysitting.”
Wexford shrugged his agreement. Pleased, Monkey gave Mr. Casaubon a poke. “Come on, mate, wakey wakey.”
It took Mr. Casaubon quite a long time to get on to his legs. Wexford walked impatiently to the door, but Monkey, not usually renowned for his considerate manners, hovered with some solicitude at his friend’s side, and then, giving him an arm, helped him tenderly out into the street.
Burden had never phoned her before, His heart palpitated lightly and fast as he listened to the ringing tone and imagined her running to answer, her heart beating quickly too because she would guess who it was.
The steadiness of her voice took the edge off his excitement. He spoke her name softly, on a note of enquiry.
“Yes, speaking,” she said. “Who is it?”
“Mike.” She hadn’t recognised his voice and his disappointment was profound.
But immediately he had identified himself she gasped and said quickly, “You’ve got some news for me? Something’s happened at last?”
He closed his eyes momentarily. She could only think of that child. Even his voice, her lover’s voice, was to her just the voice of someone who might have found her child. “No, Gemma, no, there’s nothing.”
“It was the first time you ever phoned me, you see,” she said quietly.
“Last night was a first time too.”
She said nothing. Burden felt that he had never known so long a silence, aeons of silence, time for twenty cars to drone past the phone box, time for the lights to change to green and back again to red, time for a dozen people to enter the Olive and leave the door swinging, swinging, behind them until it lapsed into stillness. Then at last she said, “Come to me now, Mike. I need you so.”
There was another woman he had to have speech with first.
“I’m just going out on a job, Grace,” said Burden, too straitlaced, too innocent perhaps, to see a double entendre which would have had Wexford in stitches. “I may be hours.”
They were given to pregnant, throbbing silences, his women. Grace broke the one she had created with a sharp ward sister’s snap. “Don’t lie to me, Mike. I just phoned the station and they said you had a free evening.”
“You had no business to do that,” Burden flared. “Even Jean never did that and she had the right, she was my wife.”
“I’m sorry, but the children asked and I thought . . . As a matter of fact, there’s something special I want to discuss with you.”
“Can’t it wait till tomorrow?” Burden thought he knew these discussions of Grace’s. They were always about the children more precisely about the children’s psychological problems or what Grace imagined those problems to be: Pat’s supposedly butterfly mind and John’s mental block over his mathematics. As if all children didn’t have their difficulties which were a part of growing up and which he in his day, and surely Grace in hers, had faced satisfactorily without daily analysis. “I’ll try to be in tomorrow night,” he said weakly.
“That,” said Grace, “is what you always say.”
His conscience troubled him for about five minutes. It had long ceased to do so before he reached the outskirts of Stowerton. Burden had yet to learn that the anticipation of sexual pleasure is the most powerful of all the crushers of conscience. He wondered why he felt so little guilt, why Grace’s reproach had only momentarily stung him. Her words - or what he could recall of them - had become like the meaningless and automatic admonition of some schoolteacher spoken years ago. Grace was no longer anything to him but an impediment, an irritating force which conspired with work, and other useless time-wasters to keep him from Gemma.