Free The Remorseful Day by Colin Dexter Page B

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,