The Remorseful Day (11 page)

“Yes.”

“Sergeant Lewis, Thames Valley CID.”

“He's not here, yet. It
was
Harry you wanted?”

“Can I come in?”

“Be my guest!”

As she sat opposite him at the Formica-topped table, Lewis saw a woman in her midthirties, of medium build, with short blonde hair, and wearing a white dress, polka-dotted in a gaudy green, that reached halfway down (or was it halfway up?) a pair of thighs now comfortably crossed in that uncomfortable kitchen. She was not by any standards a beautiful woman; certainly not a pretty one. Yet Lewis had little doubt that many men, including Morse perhaps, would have called her quietly (or loudly) attractive.

She lit a cigarette and smiled rather nervously, the pleasingly regular teeth unpleasingly coated with nicotine.

“He's OK, isn't he?”

“I'm sure he is, yes.”

“It's just—well, I was expectin’ him a bit before now.”

“You didn't arrange to meet him at the prison?”

“No. We've got a car, in the garage, but I never got on too well with drivin'.”

“Perhaps one of his mates… ?”

“Dunno, really. Expect so. He just said he'd be here as soon as he could.”

“He might have rung you.”

“Havin’ a few beers, I should think. Only natural, innit? The champagne's back in the fridge anyway.”

Lewis looked at his watch, surprised how quickly the latter part of the morning had sped by. “Only half-past one.”

“So? So why have you called then, Sergeant?”

Lewis played his less than promising hand with some care. “It's just that we've received some … information, unconfirmed information, that Harry might have … well, there might be some slight connection between him and the murder of Mrs. Harrison.”

“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.”

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?”

“You'd need a big bag.”

“Well, let's say we've got a big bag.”

“Heavy things, bodies. Ten, twelve stone, say? You couldn't just… well, unless you had two people, I suppose.”

“Or cut the body in half, perhaps.”

“Mm. Still a bit awkward, wouldn't you think? Unless it were stiff, of course.”

“Yes…”

“
Was
it stiff, this body of yours?”

“Er, no. No, I don't think it was.”

“Or unless it was a pretty small body.
Was
it small, this body of yours?”

“Er, no. No. I don't think it was.”

“Well, as I say …”

“How would
you
get rid of a body here?”

“Well, if it were a littl'un, like I said, I'd go for a compactor bin. They got ramps that go back and forrard reg'lar like, and everything soon gets pushed through into the back o’ the bin. Doubt anybody'd notice it really—not
this
end, anyway.”

“There's
another
end?”

“Sutton Courtenay, yes, out near Didcot. The bins get driven out there, to the landfill site. Somebody might notice summat there, I suppose.”

“Funny, isn't it? Dustmen always seem to notice some things, don't they?”

“You mean our Waste Disposal Operatives.”

“They refused to take my little bag of grass cuttings last week.”

“Ah, now you're talking business, sir.”

“Put a human head in the bottom of the bag though—”

“—and you'd probably get away with it? Right! But I shouldn't try your grass cuttings again, Inspector.”

As he walked around, Morse was impressed by the layout and the management of the large area designated there to the various categories of Oxford's disposable debris: car batteries; can bank; engine-oil cans; paper bank; clothing bank; tools; bottles (green, brown,
white); bulky items; scrap metal; fridges and freezers; garden waste (green); garden waste (other)…

Only the vast “Bulky Items” bins seemed to offer any scope so far; and even there a body would have lain uncomfortably and conspicuously amid the jagged edges of broken tables, awkwardly angled cupboards, tilted mattresses.

Then Morse stood still for many minutes inspecting what he'd been waiting to see: the compactor bins—twelve of them in a row. Each bin (Morse attempted a non-too-scientific analysis) was a 12-ton, 6 feet × 20 feet, white-bodied metal container, a broad green stripe painted horizontally along its middle, with a grilled covering at the receiving end which customers could easily lift before depositing their car-booted detritus there; and where a ramp was ever moving forward and back, forward and back, and pushing the divers deposits from the bin's mouth through into some unseen, unsavory interior. On the side of each bin were “start/stop” and “red/green” buttons and switches which appeared to control the complex operation; and even as Morse watched, a site workman came alongside, somehow interpreting the evidence and (presumably?) deciding whether any particular bin was sufficiently stuffed to get lifted on to one of the great lorries lumbering around, and to get carted off to—where was it?—Sutton Courtenay.

Morse tackled the young ponytailed operative as he was tapping one of the bins, rather like a man tapping the upturned hull of some stricken submarine to see if there were any signs of life.