‘Has Andrew Milner got anything to hide?’
O J O
‘You must be joking,’ said Harry. ‘Our Margaret knows every hole in his socks. The poor bugger couldn’t hide a pimple on his arse.’
‘The police are useless, anyway,’ said Sam. “They never know who to talk to, what questions to ask. If they solve anything, it’s by luck round here.’
Wilford laughed. ‘Not like on the telly, Sam.’
‘Well, on the telly they always sort it out. That stands to reason. They’re just stories. There wouldn’t be much point putting them on the telly otherwise, would there?’
‘I suppose it’s a sort of warning to people, like,’ said Wilford. ‘It’s telling them not to commit murders and crimes, because
O ‘
they’ll get caught, like they always do on the telly.’
‘But they don’t really get caught,’ said Sam. ‘Not in real life they don’t. Half of ‘em never get found out. And those that do
66
get caught are let off by the judges. They get probation or one of them other things.”
‘Community service,’ said Harry. He pronounced the words carefully, as if he had never actually heard them spoken but had only seen them as an unfamiliar combination of syllables printed in the court reports of the Bu. on Advertiser.
Sam curled his lip. ‘Aye. Community service. When was that ror a punishment for a crime? Making ‘em do a bit of honest work. It’s just like letting them off. It’s true, you can get away with owt these days. Murder, even.’
‘But the people who watch the telly don’t know that,’ said Wilford. ‘Mostly they have no idea. They think it is real life on the box. The kids today. And the women, of course. They don’t know the difference. They think when there’s a crime Inspector Morse comes out and works it all out in the pub with a pencil and a bit of paper and the murderer gets banged up.’
‘Banged up, aye. For life.’
They lapsed into silence again, staring at each other’s drinks, trying to imagine the reality of spending the rest of their lives in prison. A life sentence might mean ten, twenty or thirty years — it was all the same for a man in his late seventies or eighties.
o
He would never be likely to see the outside again.
‘You’d miss the open air something terrible in prison,’ said Sam.
The other two nodded, their heads turning automatically to the window, where, even in the dusk, the outline of the Witches could be made out against the southern sky, jagged and black on the horizon of Win Low. A ripple of unease ran round the table. Sam shivered and clutched at his stick, rubbing the ivory as if seeking comfort from its smooth shape. Wilford ran his hands nervously through his untidy hair and reached for his glass.
J O J O
Even Harry seemed to become more tight-lipped, a shade more cautious.
‘No. You couldn’t be doing with that,’ he said. ‘Not at all.’
The three old men looked sideways at each other, unspoken
messages passing between them in the tentative movements of
their hands and the tilting of their heads. It was a level of
communication they had learned in their working lives, when
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they had been isolated from the rest of the world in their own enclosed space, where conversation was unnecessary and at times impossible. At such moments, they could still cut themselves off from the world around them, pushing the noise and bustle of the pub into the distance as effectively as if they had been sitting in oik’ of those dark tunnels a mile undcroround, far from tho ‘
surface light.
Sam fumbled a pac kct of ten Fmbassv and a box of matches from somewhere among his clothing and lit a cigarette, squinting his pale eyes against the cloud of smoke that hung in the still air, obscuring his face. Wilford ran his dirt-stained fingers through his hair, momentarilv revealing an unnaturally white patch of naked
‘ J O J 1
scalp at the side of his head, where the skin was stretched thin and tight like paper. Harry fiddled with his unlit pipe, poking a few dominoes about the table with the stem, separating the tiles that were face down. He stared at them fixedly, as though f
hoping to read their numbers through their patterned backs. I
‘There are some that would have a troubled conscience, though,’ suggested Wilford. ‘They say that can be as bad as anything anybody else can do to you.’
‘It can drive folks mad,’ agreed Sam.
‘Like being in your own hell, I reckon. That would be punishment, all right.’
‘Worse than community service, any road.’
‘Worse than prison?’ asked Harry.
They looked unsure about that. They were picturing a narrow, confined cell and bars, the knowledge of hundreds of other men crowded together like ants, allowed out into a yard for an hour each day. Shut away from the light and the air for ever.
