sentence: 'It was embarrassing for me to talk to you about this and I know
that you in turn found it equally embarrassing to There would be ample time
to put that part of the record straight in the days ahead.
Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow . .
chapter sixty-five Jealousy is that pain which a man feels from the
apprehension that he is not equally beloved by the person whom he entirely
loves (Addison, The Spectator) Simon H is not a good liar, and I dragged some
of the truth out of him. He is genuinely very deaf, and the telephone must
always be a nightmare for him. So what's he got a mobile for? Even people
with good hearing often have trouble with one. But, remember, even someone
who's stone- deaf can communicate to some degree with someone on the other
end, because he's always able to speak if not to hear.
Many people must have wanted Barren dead. And no one more so than Frank
Harrison, who'd learned that Barren would soon be working up at some giddy
height in a quietish street in Burford. The job had been mentioned, among
other places no doubt, in the Maiden's Arms. And one person in that pub was
in regular communication with Frank H: Alien Thomas, that soon-to-be-married
youth who regularly wastes his substance on the fruit machine. How come?
Like so many others in this case, he's dependent on Frank H - his father,
remember! - who (rumour! ) has just bought him a small flat in Bicester,
and who has pretty certainly been making him a regular allowance for many
years.
The plan had been a reasonably simple one with one
snag. Both the Harrisons, Senior and Junior, had some knowledge of Ban-on's
ladder-technique from the several times he had worked at the family home:
specifically his habit of tying the top of his ladders to something firm up
there in the heights. It would seem likely that he'd do the same again, and
there'd be little point in giving the ladder one great hefty push if it
wouldn't topple to the ground. Some recce was therefore required; and Simon
picked up his father that Monday morning in Oxford and drove him the twenty
miles to Burford, leaving the car at the western end of Sheep Street, and
then jogging up and down the opposite side of the street in tracksuit and
trainers, noting that Barren was moving the ladder along every twelve minutes
or so, and predictably re- roping the top each time. The only possibility
then was to catch Barren after he'd re-climbed the ladder and was refix- ing
the rope. A minute or so? Not much more. But enough. Simon's job was to
phone his father, mobile to mobile, and just say
'Now!' Nothing else. He hadn't the spunk he says (I believe him) to perform
the deed himself; and it was his father, also in jogging kit, who would run
along the pathway there and topple Barron to a death that in Simon's view was
fully deserved and long overdue.
That was the plan. Something like it. So I believe. But the countdown had
been aborted because (Simon himself a witness) a bicycle, the front wheel
jerked up repeatedly from the ground, was lurching its way along the path,
and under the ladder, and into the ladder.
Surplus to requirements therefore was the plan the Harrisons had plotted. Or
so we are led to believe. Why such a proviso? Because I shall be surprised
if any plan devised by the opportunistic Frank Harrison has ever come to a
sorry nothing. Is it possible therefore that the accident of Barren's death
was not quite so 'accidental' after all? Already Frank Harrison had
accomplished something far more complex his manipulation of the evidence
surrounding his wife's murder, when it was
imperative for him to establish
one crucial fact: that no other living soul was present when he went into his
