Colin Dexter - The Remorseful Day

“Harry never had nothin’ to do with that murder!”

“You obviously remember the case.”

“Course I do! Everybody does. Biggest thing ever happened round here.”

“So as far as you know Harry had nothing—”

“You reckon I’d be tellin’ you if he had?”

“But you say he hadn’t?”

“Course he hadn’t!”

“You see, all I’m saying is that Harry’s a burglar—”

“Was a burglar.”

“—and there was some evidence that there could have been a burglary that night that might have gone a bit wrong perhaps.”

“What? Her lyin’ on the bed there with her legs wide open? Funny bloody burglary!”

“How did you know that? How she was found?”

“Come off it! How the hell do any of us know any-thin’? Common knowledge, wasn’t it? Common gossip, anyway.”

“Where did you hear it?”

“Pub, I should think.”

“Maiden’s Arms?”

“Shouldn’t be surprised. Everybody talks about every-thin’ there. The landlord, ‘specially. Still, that’s what landlords—”

“Is he still there?”

“Tom? Oh, yes. Tom Biffen. Keeps about the best pint of bitter in Oxfordshire, so Harry said.” (Lewis made a mental note, for Morse would be interested.)

“You know him fairly well, the landlord?”

She lit another cigarette, her eyes widening as she leaned forward a little. “Fairly well, yes, Sergeant.”

Lewis changed tack. “You saw Harry pretty regularly while he was inside?”

“Once a week, usually.”

“How did you get there?”

“Friends, mostly.”

“Awkward place to get to.”

“Yep.”

“When did you last see him?”

“Week ago.”

“What did you take him?”

“Bit o’ cake. Few cigs. No booze, no drugs — nothin’ like that. You can’t get away with much there.”

“Can you get away with anything there?”

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.”

“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.”