“Did she ever come in here with any men?”
Biff shook his head indeterminately: “Simon, the boy? Only occasionally though. Deaf, see! I ‘spect it was a bit dull for him — not being able to hear the sparkling repartee of my regulars, like Alf and Bert here.”
(“Used to drink Coca-Cola—” from Alf, or was it Bert?)
“What about the daughter?”
“Sarah? Nice pair o’ legs, Sarah.”
(“Not the only nice pair o’ things!” — sotto voce from behind.)
“With a boyfriend in tow, was it?”
“Sometimes.”
“With her mum?”
“Nah! Wouldn’t have wanted her around, would she?”
“Why not?”
“Well... attractive, wasn’t she, Sarah? It was her mum had the real sex appeal, though. Could have had most fellahs round here, if they’d had a jar or two.”
(“Even if they hadn’t!” — from Bert, or was it Alf?)
“Did you ever come up with any names?”
“Names? Nah! Like I said...”
“Must have been rumors though?”
“Never heard any meself.” Biff looked over Lewis’s shoulder: “You ever hear any rumors, lads?”
“Not me,” said Bert.
“Nor me,” said Alf.
Lewis felt certain that all three of them were lying. And, according to the report, the police on the original inquiry had felt very much the same: that the villagers were quite willing to hint that Yvonne Harrison had not exactly been the high priestess of marital fidelity; but that when it came to naming names, they’d decided to clamp up. En bloc.
“Drink on the house, sir?”
Lewis declined, and bade his farewell, nodding to the cardplayers as he walked to the door, where he stopped and turned back toward the landlord, pointing to the T-shirt:
“Shouldn’t there be an apostrophe before the ‘s’?”
Biff grinned. “Funny you should say that. Fellow in here last night asked me exactly the same thing!”
Lewis walked slowly round to the car park, noting the plaque on the sidewalclass="underline"
Need more than that, thought Lewis, to unclamp a small community which was so clearly still maintaining its conspiracy of silence.
But Lewis was wrong.
As he took out his car keys, he saw the youth who had just been feeding the fruits of his labors into the fruit machine. Waiting for him. Beside the car.
“Police, aincha?”
“Yes?”
“You was asking about things in there.”
“I’m always asking about things.”
“Just that somebody else was asking them same sort o’ questions, see? Couldn’t help hearing, could I? And this fellah — he was asking me a few things. About Mrs. Harrison. About if I’d ever seen her with any fellah in the pub. But I couldn’t quite remember. Not at the time.”
“You remember now, though?”
“Right on the nail, copper. Told me to give ‘im a buzz if I suddenly remembered something. Said, you know, it might be worthwhile like.”
“Why didn’t you ring him?”
“That’s just it, though. I’d seen her with the fellah that asked me, see? Same bleedin fellah!”
“You mean... it was him you’d seen with Mrs. Harrison?”
“Right on the nail, copper.”
“What did he look like, this fellow?”
“Well, sort of... I can’t really...”
“He gave you his name?”
“No. Gave me ‘is phone number though, like I said.”
The youth produced a circular beer-mat from his pocket.
Lewis looked down at a telephone number written above the red Bass triangle, written in the small, neat hand he knew so welclass="underline" the personal ex-directory telephone number of Chief Inspector Morse.
Chapter twenty-four
In many an Oxfordshire Ale-house the horseshoe is hung upside-down, in the form that is of an Arch or an Omega. This age-old custom (I have been convincingly informed) is not to allow the Luck to run out but to prevent the Devil building up a nest therein.
As he stood amid the wilderness of waste, a High Viz jacket over his summer shirt and a red safety helmet on his head, Chief Inspector Morse realized that he had miscalculated rather badly. But he’d had to check it up.
It had always been the same with him. Whenever as a young boy reading under his bedside lamp he’d come across an unfamiliar word, he’d known with certainty that he could never look forward to sleep until he’d traced the newcomer’s credentials and etymology in Chambers’ Dictionary, the book that stood alongside The Family Doctor (1910), A Pictorial History of the First World War, and The Life of Captain Cook, on the single short shelf that comprised his parents’ library.
His father (sadly, almost tragically) had been a clandestine gambler. And Morse was fully aware that this time he himself had put his money on a rank outsider: the possibility that someone had murdered Harry Repp; had disposed of his body in the Redbridge Waste Disposal Centre; had disposed of this hypothetical body in a particular part of that Centre — specifically in one of the compactor bins perhaps: further, that the said and equally hypothetical bin had been, was being, or was about to be, driven out in a hypothetical black bag to Sutton Courtenay. And, above all, that somebody might have observed such a hypothetical deposit. Ridiculous! William Hill or Ladbrokes would probably have offered odds of 1,000,000-1 against any such eventuality.
On impulse Morse had driven down the A34, thence along the A4130, to the landfill site on the outskirts of Sutton Courtenay. Where, after a series of telephone calls from the temporary (permanent) Portakabins, the management had finally acknowledged the bona fides of their dubious visitor.
It was in a Landrover that (finally) Morse had been driven out to the tipping area, where virtually continuous convoys of lorries from the whole of Oxfordshire were raising the telescopic legs of container-cargoes to some 45 degrees as they began to tip their loads, moving forward in disjunctive jerks as they ensured the contents were fully discharged, and leaving behind a distinctive trail of their own particular type of rubbish. As a rather dispirited Morse watched these operations, he imagined that perhaps when viewed from some hovering helicopter each truck would seem like an artist’s brush, with the trail of the gradually extending rubbish like a stroke of variegated paint being smeared across the canvas of the landscape. But Morse accepted the more prosaic truth of the situation immediately: the truck drivers themselves would very seldom, if ever, have occasion to notice, let alone to examine, the contents of the loads they were emptying.
He voiced his thoughts. “If a driver dumped a body... well, he wouldn’t really know much about it, would he?”
Colin Rice, the site manager, hesitated awhile before replying — not because he had the slightest doubt about the answer to this question, but because he felt reluctant immediately to disappoint his somewhat melancholic inquisitor.
“No.”
“How many of those compactor bins do you get from Redbridge every day?”
“Depends.”
“Today?”
“Four or five? I could check.”
“No. No need.”
Morse watched as the yellow-painted BOMAG tractors were once again setting about their dismal business, the metal teeth of their giant wheels compacting the recently deposited mounds; and then, with a fair-weather frontage reminiscent of a snowplow, pushing forward the leveled rubbish toward its burial ground.