“Except she doesn’t drive a car.”
“All right. She arranged for somebody else to pick him up.”
“Why did he ask for a travel warrant, then?”
Morse looked less than happy. “He got on the bus at Bicester and while he was sitting there somebody saw him and tapped on the window and offered him a lift to Oxford or wherever he was going — and we know where that is, don’t we? Home. Which is exactly where he is now, you can put your bank balance on that! It’s a racing certainty. And if you don’t believe me, go and see for yourself!”
Lewis considered what he had just heard. “It must have been somebody unexpected, sir. Like I say, he’d asked for a warrant.”
“You’re right, yes. Well, partly right. Either unexpected — or not really expected... Perhaps not really welcome, either,” added Morse slowly, a weak smile playing on his lips as though for the first time that morning his brain was possibly engaged in some serious thinking.
“You reckon that’s what happened?”
“Lewis! Something happened, didn’t it? If you think your man decided to dematerialize, you’ve been watching too many space videos.”
“I don’t watch—”
“Look! Remember what I’ve always told you when we’ve been on a case together — unlike this one! There’s always, without exception, some wholly explicable, wholly logical causation for any chain of events, in any situation. In this case, you’ve just got to ask yourself where the link broke, then how it broke, then why it broke — and nothing in that sequence of events is going to be anything but simple and commonplace.”
Lewis looked the troubled man he was. “I just can’t see how...”
Morse’s question was quietly spoken. “You remember that car, the one you said somehow squeezed in between you and the bus from Bullingdon?”
Lewis looked across the desk in pained surprise. “You don’t think...”
“What do you remember about it?”
“Dark color — black, I think — pretty recent Reg — one person in it — man, I think — pretty sure it was a man.”
“Not very observant—”
“I was looking at the bus all the time, for God’s sake!”
“—and not much help, if you want the truth.”
No, it wasn’t, Lewis knew that. “What do I tell the Super, though?”
“If I were you? I certainly wouldn’t tell him the truth. Not a very wise thing, you know, going through life telling nothing but the truth. So in this case, I’d tell him I’d followed the bus to Bicester, then followed the bus to Oxford, then seen Repp get off outside The Randolph, get picked up there in a car, and get driven off in the general direction of Chaucer Lane, Burford. Easy!”
Uneasy, however, was Lewis’s minimal nod.
“But I’m not you, Lewis, am I? I’m a very accomplished liar myself, but I’ve never rated you too highly in that department.”
A puzzled look suddenly came over Lewis’s brow. “How come you know where Repp lives?”
“Great man, Chaucer, born in 1343, it’s thought—”
“You’re not answering my question!”
“I know a lot of things, Lewis — far more than you think.”
“You’ve still not told me what I’m supposed to say to the Super.”
“Cut your losses and tell him the truth.”
“He’ll tear me apart.”
“You may well be surprised.”
But, as he rose to his feet, Lewis appeared far from convinced.
“Well, I suppose I’d better—”
“Hold your horses!” (Morse looked at his wrist-watch.) “It may just be that I can help you.”
Lewis’s eyebrows lifted a little as Morse continued:
“ You promise to buy me a couple of drinks, and I’ll promise to give you a big, fat juicy clue.”
“If you say so, sir.”
“Off we go then.”
“What’s this big, fat—?”
“I’ll give you the Registration Number of the car that you followed from Bullingdon to Bicester! Bargain, is it?”
Lewis’s eyebrows lifted a lot. “No kidding?”
Morse rechecked his wristwatch. “First things first, though. They’ve already been open five minutes.”
Chapter nineteen
It’s good to hope; it’s the waiting that spoils it.
With increasing impatience and with incipient disquiet, lighting one cigarette from another, drinking cup after cup of instant coffee, Deborah Richardson had been watching from the front-room window, on and off from 10:30 A.M., on and off from 11:30 A.M., and virtually on and on from midday and thereafter — at first with that curiously pleasing expectation of happy events which Jane Austen would have swapped for happiness itself. Not that Debbie had ever read Jane Austen. Heard of her, though, most recently from that elderly Oxford don (well, wasn’t fifty-eight elderly?) with whom she’d spent the night at the Cotswold Hotel in Burford...
It wasn’t that she was keenly anticipating any renewal of sexual congress with her newly liberated partner. Although she felt gratified that physically he’d always been so demanding of her, it had often occurred to her that he was probably enjoying the sex more for its own sake than because he was having it with her. And perhaps that was why only occasionally did she experience that “intercrural effusion” of which she’d read in one of the women’s magazines...
Nor was she looking forward to the regular resumption of cooking and washing and ironing that had monopolized her time in the years prior to his arrest...
Nor — she ought to be honest with herself! — was she at all anxious to witness his eating habits again, especially at breakfast, when he would regularly offer some trite and ill-informed commentary on whatever article he was reading in the Sun, and openly displaying thereby a semimasticated mouthful of whatever...
And — oh, most definitely! — she would never never ever tolerate again the demands his erstwhile criminal dealings had made upon the space, her space, in the quite unpleasantly appointed little semi he’d bought three years earlier at rock-bottom price during the slump in the housing market. After which, at almost any given time, every conceivable square foot of space had been jam-packed with crates of gin and whiskey, cartons of cigarettes, car radios, video recorders, cameras, computers, and hi-fi equipment. No! There’d have to be an end to all that stolen-property lark; and surely (now!) there’d be little further risk of Harry himself taking part in any of the actual burglaries. For he had taken part occasionally, Debbie knew that, although the police hadn’t seemed to know, or perhaps just couldn’t find sufficient evidence to prosecute. Certainly Harry had never asked for any further offenses to be taken into consideration. He’d made only the one plea in mitigation of his sentence: he might have known the possible provenance of the miscellaneous merchandise he’d acquired; might have known, if only he’d asked — but he’d just never asked. He was in business, that was all. He knew a few clients who wanted to buy things at less than market price. Who didn’t? “Just like yer duty-frees, innit? Everybody’s always looking round for a bargain, officer”...
So?
So why was she still standing there at the window, staring up and down the quiet road? The answer was simple: she just wanted a man around the place. Without Harry she felt isolated, lonely, unshared. She’d lost her man; and there was no man there to talk to, to talk to others about, to grumble at, to argue with, even to walk out on — because you couldn’t walk out on a man who wasn’t there to start with, now could you?