by Colin Dexter
In fact, the fuckin’ bus was well on its way; and a few minutes later the two men boarded a virtually empty bus and uncommunicatively took their separate seats.
Lewis moved smoothly into gear and followed discreetly, not at all unhappy when another (rather posh) car interposed itself between him and the bus. (Another posh car behind him, for that matter.) Any minor worry that Repp might unexpectedly get off at some stage between Bullingdon and Bicester was taking care of itself very nicely, since the bus made no stop whatsoever until reaching the Bure Place bus station in Bicester, where the ferret straightaway alighted (and straightaway disappeared); and where Repp, the immediate quarry, walked up the line of bus shelters to the 27 oxford (Direct) bay, promptly boarding the bus already standing there.
Repp was not the only one who had done his homework on the Bicester-Oxford timetable. For Lewis, knowing there would be a full ten-minute wait before departure, and leaving his car in the capacious car park opposite, walked quickly through the short passageway to Sheep Street, passing the public toilets on his left, where at Forbuoys Newsagent's he bought the Mirror. Even if there was a bit of a queue, so what? He would rather enjoy not following but chasing the 27 to Oxford. But the bus was still there, filling up quite quickly, as he got back into his car.
After the implementation of the Beeching Report of the mid-sixties, passengers between Oxford and Bicester had perforce to use their own cars. But the former railway line had now been re-opened; and the deregulated bus companies were trying their best, and sometimes succeeding, in tempting passengers back to public transport. There were no traffic jams on the rail, and a newly designated bus lane from Kidlington gave a comparatively fast-track entry into Oxford. So perhaps (Lewis pondered the matter) it was hardly surprising that Repp had not been picked up at Bullingdon by a friend, or by a relative, or by his common-law wife. Yet it would surely have been so much easier, quicker, more convenient that way?
At 10:10 A.M. the 27 pulled out of the bus station and headed toward Oxford, in due course crossing over the M40 junction and making appropriately good speed along the A34, before turning off through Kidlington and then over the A40 down toward Oxford City Centre.
And again Lewis was fortunate, for no one had got off the bus along the route until the upper reaches of the Banbury Road.
Easy!
Driving at a safe and courteous distance behind the bus, Lewis had ample opportunity for reflecting once more on the slightly disturbing developments of the previous few days…
Morse had been as good as his word that Monday morning, when the latter part of their audience with Strange had turned almost inexplicably bitter. No, Morse could not agree to any involvement in the reopening of the Harrison inquiries. Yes, Morse realized (“Fully, sir!”) the possible implications of his non-compliance with the decision of a superior officer. Yet oddly enough, it had been Strange who had seemed the more unsure of himself during those final exchanges; and Lewis had found himself puzzled, and suspecting that there were certain aspects of the case of which he himself was wholly unaware.
Could it be… ?
Could it be perhaps… ?
Could it be perhaps that Morse had some reason for keeping his head above the turbid waters still swirling around the unsolved murder of Yvonne Harrison? Some personal reason, say? Some connection with the major participants in the case? Some connection (Lewis was thinking the unthinkable) with the major participant: with the murdered woman herself? For there must be some reason …
Some reason, too, for Morse's (virtually unprecedented) absence from HQ on those two following days, the Tuesday and the Wednesday? To be fair, he had rung Lewis (at home) early on the Tuesday morning, saying that he was feeling unwell, and in truth sounding unwell. He'd be grateful, he'd said, if Lewis could apologize to all concerned; perhaps for the following day as well. Lewis had rung Morse that Tuesday evening, but there was no answer; had rung again on the Wednesday evening—again with no answer.
Was Morse ill?
Not all that ill, anyway, because he'd appeared on the Thursday morning at his usual, comparatively early hour. And said nothing about his absence. Or about his row with Strange. Or about his health, for that matter. But Morse seldom mentioned his health …
Just below the Cutteslowe roundabout, the bus stopped and four passengers alighted—but not Repp.
At the Martyrs’ Memorial, the majority of the passengers alighted—but not Repp.
At the Gloucester Green terminus, the last few passengers alighted—but not Repp.
The 27 bus was now empty.
Eighteen
Any fool can tell the truth; but it requires a man of some sense to know how to lie well.
(Samuel Butler)
Lewis knew what he must do as soon as he saw Morse's maroon Jaguar parked in its wonted place.
“Still feeling better, sir?”
“Better than what?”
“Can you spare a minute?”
“Si’ down!”
Seated opposite, in his own wonted place, Lewis said his piece.
“You're in a bit of a mess,” said Morse, at the end of the sorry story.
“That's not much help, is it?”
“Remember the Sherlock Holmes story, Case of Identity? A fellow gets in one side of a hansom cab and gets out through the opposite side.”
“Doors on buses are always on the same side.”
“Really?”
“You never go on a bus.”
“But you weren't watching either side. You were queuing for coffee.”
“Buying a paper.”
“Listen!” Morse looked and sounded strained and weary. “I thought you were asking for my advice. Do you want to hear it?”
There was a brief silence before Morse continued: “It's not really a question of your own competence or incompetence—probably the latter, I'm afraid. The main concern is what's happened to your man, Repp. Agreed?”
Lewis nodded joylessly.
“Well, the situation's fairly simple. You just lost contact with him in the middle of things, that's all. No great shakes, is it? He's fine, believe me! Absolutely fine. At this very second he's probably got his bottom on the top sheet with that common-law missus of his. She picked him up somewhere—that's for certain. Most of these people released from the nick have somebody to pick ‘em up.”
“Except she doesn't drive a car.”
“All right. She arranged for somebody else to pick him up.”
“Why did he ask for a travel warrant, then?”
Morse looked less than happy. “He got on the bus at Bicester and while he was sitting there somebody saw him and tapped on the window and offered him a lift to Oxford or wherever he was going—and we know where that is, don't we? Home. Which is exactly where he is now, you can put your bank balance on that! It's a racing certainty. And if you don't believe me, go and see for yourself!”
Lewis considered what he had just heard. “It must have been somebody unexpected, sir. Like I say, he'd asked for a warrant.”
“You're right, yes. Well, partly right. Either unexpected—or not really expected … Perhaps not really welcome, either,” added Morse slowly, a weak smile playing on his lips as though for the first time that morning his brain was possibly engaged in some serious thinking.
“You reckon that's what happened?”
“Lewis! Something happened, didn't it? If you think your man decided to dematerialize, you've been watching too many space videos.”
“I don't watch—”
“Look! Remember what I've always told you when we've been on a case together—unlike this one! There's always, without exception, some wholly explicable, wholly logical causation for any chain of events, in any situation. In this case, you've just got to ask yourself where the link broke, then how it broke, then why it broke—and nothing in that sequence of events is going to be anything but simple and commonplace.”
Lewis looked the troubled man he was. “I just can't see how…”
Morse's question was quietly spoken. “You remember that car, the one you said somehow squeezed in between you and the bus from Bullingdon?”
Lewis looked across the desk in pained surprise. “You don't think …”
“What do you remember about it?”
“Dark color—black, I think—pretty recent Reg—one person in it—man, I think—pretty sure it was a man.”
“Not very observant—”
“I was looking at the bus all the time, for God's sake!”
“—and not much help, if you want the truth.”
No, it wasn't, Lewis knew that. “What do I tell the Super, though?”
“If I were you? I certainly wouldn't tell him the truth. Not a very wise thing, you know, going through life telling nothing but the truth. So in this case, I'd tell him I'd followed the bus to Bicester, then followed the bus to Oxford, then seen Repp get off outside The Randolph, get picked up there in a car, and get driven off in the general direction of Chaucer Lane, Burford. Easy!”
Uneasy, however, was Lewis's minimal nod.
“But I'm not you, Lewis, am I? I'm a very accomplished liar myself, but I've never rated you too highly in that department.”
A puzzled look suddenly came over Lewis's brow. “How come you know where Repp lives?”
“Great man, Chaucer, born in 1343, it's thought—”
“You're not answering my question!”
“I know a lot of things, Lewis—far more than you think.”
“You've still not told me what I'm supposed to say to the Super.”
“Cut your losses and tell him the truth.”
“He'll tear me apart.”
“You may well be surprised.”
But, as he rose to his feet, Lewis appeared far from convinced.
“Well, I suppose I'd better—”
“Hold your horses!” (Morse looked at his wrist-watch.) “It may just be that I can help you.”
Lewis's eyebrows lifted a little as Morse continued:
“ You promise to buy me a couple of drinks, and I'll promise to give you a big, fat juicy clue.”
“If you say so, sir.”
“Off we go then.”
“What's this big, fat—?”
“I'll give you the Registration Number of the car that you followed from Bullingdon to Bicester! Bargain, is it?”
Lewis's eyebrows lifted a lot. “No kidding?”
Morse rechecked his wristwatch. “First things first, though. They've already been open five minutes.”
Nineteen
It's good to hope; it's the waiting that spoils it.
(Yiddish proverb)
With increasing impatience and with incipient disquiet, lighting one cigarette from another, drinking cup after cup of instant coffee, Deborah Richardson had been watching from the front-room window, on and off from 10:30 A.M., on and off from 11:30 A.M., and virtually on and on from midday and thereafter—at first with that curiously pleasing expectation of happy events which Jane Austen would have swapped for happiness itself. Not that Debbie had ever read Jane Austen. Heard of her, though, most recently from that elderly Oxford don (well, wasn't fifty-eight elderly?) with whom she'd spent the night at the Cotswold Hotel in Burford …
It wasn't that she was keenly anticipating any renewal of sexual congress with her newly liberated partner. Although she felt gratified that physically he'd always been so demanding of her, it had often occurred to her that he was probably enjoying the sex more for its own sake than because he was having it with her. And perhaps that was why only occasionally did she experience that “intercrural effusion” of which she'd read in one of the women's magazines…
Nor was she looking forward to the regular resumption of cooking and washing and ironing that had monopolized her time in the years prior to his arrest…
Nor—she ought to be honest with herself!—was she at all anxious to witness his eating habits again, especially at breakfast, when he would regularly offer some trite and ill-informed commentary on whatever article he was reading in the Sun, and openly displaying thereby a semimasticated mouthful of whatever …
And—oh, most definitely!—she would never never ever tolerate again the demands his erstwhile criminal dealings had made upon the space, her space, in the quite unpleasantly appointed little semi he'd bought three years earlier at rock-bottom price during the slump in the housing market. After which, at almost any given time, every conceivable square foot of space had been jam-packed with crates of gin and whiskey, cartons of cigarettes, car radios, video recorders, cameras, computers, and hi-fi equipment. No! There'd have to be an end to all that stolen-property lark; and surely (now!) there'd be little further risk of Harry himself taking part in any of the actual burglaries. For he had taken part occasionally, Debbie knew that, although the police hadn't seemed to know, or perhaps just couldn't find sufficient evidence to prosecute. Certainly Harry had never asked for any further offenses to be taken into consideration. He'd made only the one plea in mitigation of his sentence: he might have known the possible provenance of the miscellaneous merchandise he'd acquired; might have known, if only he'd asked—but he'd just never asked. He was in business, that was all. He knew a few clients who wanted to buy things at less than market price. Who didn't? “Just like yer duty-frees, innit? Everybody's always looking round for a bargain, officer” …
So?
So why was she still standing there at the window, staring up and down the quiet road? The answer was simple: she just wanted a man around the place. Without Harry she felt isolated, lonely, unshared. She'd lost her man; and there was no man there to talk to, to talk to others about, to grumble at, to argue with, even to walk out on—because you couldn't walk out on a man who wasn't there to start with, now could you?
Where was he? What had happened? …
Not that her grass-widowhood had been entirely minus men. There'd been that nice little affair with the young plasterer who'd come in to patch up a crack in the kitchen wall. And that civilized little liaison with the Oxford don (so undemanding, so appreciative) she'd met in a Burford pub. But in each case, and on every occasion, she'd been so very, very careful…
Only once had she had that dreadful worry, after buying a Home Pregnancy Kit from Boots, when she'd just had to tell Harry, and when he'd been surprisingly sympathetic. If they did have a kid, it'd be good for him (him!) to have a mum and a dad. Yeah! He'd hated both his mum and his dad—but he'd hated his mum less, and it was proper to have a choice. Something else too: you know, when the poor little bugger went to school and one of the other kids said what's your name or what's your dad do—well, it was probably old-fashioned to think like that but, yeah!, better to have two of them, two parents. So she ought to change her name to his, but no need for any of all that nuptial stuff! Just for the kid's sake, mind—nothing to do with any social worker!
But she'd be “Debbie Repp,” then; and that would be too close to “demirep” (a word she'd met in the “inter-crural” article), which she'd looked up in the biggest dictionary she could find in the Burford Public Library: “a person, esp. a woman, of dubious and libidinous disposition.” Her name, she'd decided, would henceforth remain “Richardson.” And in any case the subsequent messy miscarriage had settled that domestic crisis.
At 12:50 P.M. she left her vigil for the kitchen, where she felt the neck of the champagne bottle, standing beside two glasses on the table there. Inappropriately chambré she decided (another recent addition to her vocabulary), and she put it back in the fridge. Not Premier Division stuff: £8.99 from the supermarket, although in truth she'd begrudged even that. Money! God, how important that was in life! They had enough money—what's more, money temporarily held in her own name. But that was Harry's money, and she would never dare to touch more of it than the reasonably generous allowance he'd authorized.
She'd taken some occasional office-cleaning jobs in Burford, usually from 6 P.M. to 8 P.M. But £4.75 per hour was hardly the rate of remunerat
ion to support any reasonable lifestyle; certainly not the style she'd begun to get accustomed to with Harry. So did she find herself almost hoping that he might pick up again on some of those very shady but very profitable activities?
No! No! No!
At 1:15 P.M. she rang Bullingdon Prison, learning that Harry Repp had left on schedule that morning with a bus warrant for Oxford. Nothing further they could tell her: no longer their responsibility, was he? She could ring the Probation Office in Oxford—that might have been his first port-of-call. Which number she was about to dial when she noticed a car pulling up outside—an R-Reg., dark blue, expensive-looking model; and a man she'd never seen before getting out of it, and walking toward her up the narrow, amateurishly cemented front path.
Twenty
Then said the Jews unto him, Thou art not yet fifty years old, and hast thou seen Abraham? Jesus said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Before Abraham was, I am.
(The Gospel according to St. John, ch. VIII, vv. 57, 58)
Already, an hour or so before driving out to see Debbie Richardson, it had been an unusual morning for Sergeant Lewis.
Morse had insisted on buying the second round in the Woodstock Arms, albeit one consisting only of one pint of Morrell's Best Bitter for himself, since as yet Lewis was only halfway down his obligatory orange juice.
Unusual? Yes. And quite certainly surprising.
“Do you really mean it—about the car number, sir?”
“Just be patient!”
“What do you think I am being?”
“You say the car was darkish, newish, toppish range?”
“Like I said, I was really concentrating on the bus.”
“Be more specific, man! Go for it. Back your hunches!”
“All right: black; R-Reg.; twenty thou.”
“That's better.”
Lewis smiled dubiously. “Thank you.”
“And how many people in that car of yours? One? Two? Three?”