“Poor sod! Bet he was looking forward... you know. Attractive woman, our Debbie!”
“Yeah.” The builder took a deep draught of his bitter. “Did you go — to the crem?”
“No. Like you said...”
“Have you seen her at all since...?”
“No. Like you said...”
“The police’ve been round, they tell me.”
“Yeah. Came in — when was it? — Tuesday.”
“What’d they want?”
Doubtless the builder would have been enlightened immediately had not two further customers entered at that point: an elderly, backpacking, stoutly booted couple.
“Two glasses of orange juice, please!”
“Coming up, sir.”
“Beautiful little village you’ve got here. So quiet. So peaceful. ‘Far from the madding crowd’ — you’ll know the quotation?”
The landlord nodded unconvincingly as he passed over the drinks.
“And you serve meals as well!”
The couple walked over to the corner farthest from the fruit machine: she consulting the hostelry’s menu; he plotting a possible P.M. itinerary from Family Walks in the Cotswolds.
“Quiet and peaceful!” mumbled the landlord, as one of the elders stepped forward with two empty straight glasses. Words were clearly superfluous.
“You were saying?” resumed the builder.
“Saying what?”
“About the police?”
“Ah, yes. That sergeant came in and asked some of us about Harry and Debbie.”
“But you hadn’t seen either of them?”
“Right! But, I would’ve done, see — would’ve seen her, anyway, if it hadn’t been for them — for the police. That Sat’day night I thought I’d just nip over and take ‘em a bottle o’ Shampers, like — give ‘em both a bit of a celebration. Well, I’d just parked the car and I was just walking along when I saw this police car driving slowly round and the fellow inside making notes of Reg numbers by the look of it.”
“What’d you say?”
“Didn’t say nothing, did I? Just waited till the coast was clear, then buggered off back here smartish. They’d seen the number, though. So not much point in...”
“Good story!”
“Bloody true story, mate!”
The builder finished his pint. “Beer’s in good nick, Biff.”
“Always in good nick!”
(“Is it fuck!” came sotto voce from the region of the cribbage board.)
“Summat else too,” continued the landlord as he pulled the builder a second pint. “The police tell me there was a phone call for Debbie that Sat’day night — from the pay phone here.”
“Could have been anybody.”
“Yeah.”
“Any ideas?”
“Sat’day nights? Come off it! Full up to the rafters, ain’t we?”
The elderly lady now came to the bar and ordered gammon-and-pineapple with chips for two; and during this transaction the builder turned round and, with a fascination that is universal, watched the unequal struggle at the fruit machine.
From outside came the jingle of an ice-cream van — as happy a noise as any to the youngsters of Lower Swinstead that sunny lunchtime; almost as happy a noise as that clunk-clunk-clunk of coins falling into the winnings tray of a fruit machine.
Conversation at the bar was temporarily suspended, since several noisy customers were now arriving, including three members of the highly unsuccessful Lower Swinstead Cricket Club. There was therefore a comparatively large audience for the seemingly endless music of the machine: clunk-clunk-clunk-clunk-clunk-clunk-clunk-clunk-clunk-clunk-clunk-clunk-clunk-clunk-clunk-clunk-clunk-clunk-clunk; and an even larger audience as the impassively faced youth pressed the “Repeat” button — successfully — with a further twenty £1 coins duly clanking into the winnings tray.
“Nearly enough for that honeymoon,” said the builder.
“Nonsense! He’ll be putting it all back,” said one of the cricketers.
But he wasn’t.
With a temporary lull in business, the landlord resumed the conversation. “Business still pretty good, John?”
“Plenty o’ work, yeah. Having to turn some things down.”
“What you got on at the minute?”
“Job in Burford in Sheep Street: bit o’ roofing, bit o’ pointing, bit o’ painting.”
“High up, is it?”
“High enough. I’ll need a coupla extensions on the ladder.”
Biffen screwed up his face and closed his eyes. “You’d never get me up there.”
“You’re OK, so long as things are firm.”
“Not if you get vertigo as bad as me.”
The coins bulged proudly in his trouser pocket as the bridegroom designate walked out of the bar. Once in the passage that led to the toilets, he lifted the receiver from the pay phone there, inserted 20p, and dialed a number.
But what he said, or to whom he spoke, not even the keen-eared elders could have known.
Chapter thirty-eight
All persons are puzzles until at last we find in some word or act the key to the man, to the woman; straightway all their past words and actions lie in light before us.
For much of the week Lewis had been working three-quarters of the way round the clock; but on Sunday, the day following the events described in the previous chapter, he felt refreshed after a good sleep and arrived at Kidlington Police HQ at 8:45 A.M. No sign of Morse. But that mattered little. It had been facts that were required. Not fancies. Not yet, anyway. And as he sat taking stock of the past week’s activities, Lewis felt solidly satisfied — both with himself and with the performance of the personnel readily allocated to the case. There had been so much to cover...
Lewis had personally supervised the Monday and Tuesday inquiries into the activities of Paddy Flynn in the years, months, days — and morning — before his murder; and if the net result was perhaps somewhat disappointing, at least it had been thorough. Flynn had been living in an upstairs flat (converted a few years previously) on Morrell Avenue. He had been there for just over five months, paying £375 per calendar month for the privilege, and having virtually nothing to do with the tenant of the downstairs flat — a middle-aged accountant who, rain or shine, would walk each day down to St. Clements, across Magdalen Bridge, and up the High to his firm’s offices in King Alfred Street. He knew Flynn by sight, of course, but only exchanged words when occasionally they encountered each other in the narrow entrance hall. Of Flynn’s lifestyle, he had no knowledge at alclass="underline" no ideas about the activities in which his fellow tenant might have been engaged. Well, just one little observation, perhaps, since not infrequently there was a car parked outside the semi — always a different car, and almost always gone the following morning. Lewis’s notes had read: “Has no knowledge of F’s professional or leizure time activities.” But he’d consulted his dictionary, ever kept beside him, in case Morse decided to look at his notes, and quickly corrected the antepenultimate word.
By all accounts Flynn had led a pretty private, almost secretive life. He was quite frequently spotted in the local hostelries, quite frequently spotted in the local bookmakers, though never, apparently, the worse for excessive liquor or for excessive losses. His name figured nowhere in police records as even the pettiest of crooks, although he was mentioned in dispatches several times as the taxi driver who had picked up Frank Harrison from Oxford Railway Station on the night of Yvonne’s murder. Radio Taxis had been his employer at the time, but he had been suspected of (possibly) fabricating fares for his own aggrandisement and duly dismissed — without rancor, it appeared, and certainly without recourse to any industrial tribunal. Dismissed too, subsequently, by the proprietors of Maxim Removals, a firm of middle-distance haulers, “for attempted trickery with the tachometer.” (Lewis had spelled the last word correctly, having checked it earlier.) Since that time, five months previously, Flynn had reported regularly to the DSS office at the bottom of George Street. But lacking any testimonials to his competence and integrity, his attempts to secure further employment in any field of motor transport had been unsuccessful, his completed application forms seldom reaching even the slush pile. It was all rather sad, as the woman regularly dealing with the Flynn file had testified.