She leaned forward again and smiled as she drew deeply on her cigarette. “Perhaps I could have done if I’d tried.”
“Could he give you anything? To take out?”
“Well, nothin’ he shouldn’t. Just as strict about that as the other way round. We all sat at tables, you know, and they were watchin’ us all the time — all the screws. You’d be lucky to get away with anythin’.”
But Lewis knew that it was all a little too pat, this easy interchange. Things got in, and things got out — every prison was the same; and everybody knew it. Including this woman. And for the first time Lewis sensed that Strange was probably right: that the letter received by Thames Valley Police had been written by Harry Repp at Bullingdon Prison, handed to one of his visitors, and posted somewhere outside — at Lower Swinstead, say.
For whatever reason.
But as yet Lewis couldn’t identify such a reason.
“Did Harry ever ask you to take anything out of prison?”
“Come off it! What’d he got in there to take out?”
“Letters perhaps?” suggested Lewis quietly.
“If he’d forgotten some address. Not often, though.”
“To some of his old cronies?”
“Crooks, you mean?”
“That’s what I’m asking you, I suppose.”
“Few letters, yes. He didn’t want them people in there lookin’ through everythin’ he wrote. Nobody would.”
“So you occasionally took one away?”
“Not difficult, was it? Just slip it in your handbag.”
“What was the last one you took out?”
“Can’t remember.”
“I think you can.” Lewis was surprised with the firm tone of his own voice.
“No, I can’t. Just told you, didn’t I?” (Yet another cigarette.)
“Please don’t lie to me. You see, I know you posted a letter at Lower Swinstead. Harry’d asked you to post it there because he thought — he was wrong as it turned out — that it would be postmarked from there.”
For the first time in the interview, Debbie Richardson seemed unsure of herself, and Lewis pressed home his perceptible advantages.
“How did you get to Lower Swinstead, by the way?”
“Only three or four miles—”
“You walked?”
“No, I drove—” She stopped herself. But the words, in Homeric phrase, had escaped the barrier of her teeth.
“Didn’t you say you couldn’t drive?”
“Lied to you, didn’t I?”
“Why? Why lie to me?”
“I get used to it, that’s why.” She leaned forward across the table. And Lewis saw for certain what he had already suspected for semicertain — that she wore no bra beneath her dress; probably no knickers, either.
“How often do you go to the pub there, the Maiden’s Arms?”
“Often as I can.”
“Not in the car, I hope?”
“Sometimes get a lift there — you know, if somebody rings.”
“When were you there last?”
“When I posted the letter.”
“Open all day, is it?”
“What’s all this quizzin’ about?”
“Just that my boss’ll be interested, that’s all.”
“You’re all alike, you bloody coppers!”
It seemed a strange reply, and Lewis looked puzzled.
“Pardon?”
“What you just asked me — about the pub bein’ open all day. Exactly what the other fellow asked.”
“What other fellow?”
“Can’t remember his name. So what? Can’t remember yours, come to that.”
“When was this?”
“Last night. Asked me out for a drink, didn’t he? I reckon he fancied me a little bit. But I was already—”
“ From the police, you say?”
“That’s what he said.”
“You didn’t check?”
Debbie Richardson shrugged her shoulders. “Nice he was — sort o’ well educated. Know what I mean?”
“You can’t recall his name?”
“No, sorry. Tell you one thing though, Sergeant, er...”
“Lewis.”
“Had a lovely car, he did. Been nice it would — ridin’ round in that. A Jag — maroon-colored Jag.”
Chapter twenty-two
... a mountain range of Rubbish, like an old volcano, and its geological foundation was Dust. Coal-dust, vegetable-dust, bone-dust, crockery-dust, rough dust, and sifted dust — all manner of Dust in the accumulated Rubbish.
“Not for scrap, is she?” Stan Cox nodded toward the Jag parked in the no-parking area outside his office window in the Redbridge Waste Disposal Centre.
“Getting on a bit,” conceded Morse, “like all of us. You know, windscreen wipers packing up, gearbox starting to jam, no heat...”
“Sounds a bit like the missus!”
“Pardon?”
“Joke, sir.”
“Ah, yes.” Morse’s smile was even weaker than the witticism as he looked round the cramped office, his eyes catching a girlie calendar in the corner, from which a provocatively bare-breasted bimbo, with short blonde hair, stared back at him.
“Nice, ain’t she!”
Morse nodded. “Past her sell-by date, though. She’s the May girl.”
“Remember the ol’ song, sir — ‘From May to September’?”
“You just like having her around.”
It was Cox’s turn to nod: “Drives me mad, she does. Keeps me sane at the same time though, if you follows me meaning.”
Morse wasn’t at all sure that he did, but he was conscious that he’d drunk too much beer that lunchtime; that he should never have driven himself out to Red-bridge; that what he’d earlier seen as a clear-cut outline had now grown blurred around the periphery. In the pub, with Lewis, he’d felt convinced he could see a cause, a sequence, a structure, to the crime.
Perhaps two crimes now.
It was the same old tantalizing challenge to puzzles that had faced him ever since he was a boy. It was the certain knowledge that something had happened in the past — happened in an ordered, logical, very specific way. And the challenge had been, and still was, to gather the disparate elements of the puzzle together and to try to reconstruct that “very specific way.”
Not too successfully now, though. For here, at Red-bridge, there seemed a great gulf fixed between the fanciful hypothesis he’d so recently formulated, and the humdrum reality of a rubbish dump.
Is that what Cox was trying to say?
“How d’you mean? Keeps you sane?”
“Well, it’s not exactly your Botanical Gardens here, is it? Just all the filth and useless stuff people want shut of. So there’s not much good to look at, ‘cept her, bless her heart! Pearl in a pigsty — that’s what she is.”
“Why don’t you write her a fan letter?”
“Think she’d read it?”
“No.”
“So what can we do for you, Chief?”
Morse told him, making most of it up as he went along.
And when he’d finished, Cox nodded. “No problem. We’d better just let the County Authorities know.”
“Already done,” lied Morse. And refusing a cup of coffee, he left the office and walked unaccompanied around the site, only a few hundred yards from the southern stretch of Oxford’s Ring Road, thinking about the things he’d learned from Cox...
“Do you reckon,” he’d asked, “you could dispose of a body here, in one of your, er...?”
“Only in one of the compactor bins — that’d be the best bet. You’ll be able to see for yourself, though. The others are a bit too open, really.”
“Black bag, say? Put a body in it? Just chuck it in?”