exchanges wholly mundane and perfunctory, the bottle of Claret rapidly going
and going and soon wholly gone.
'Another bottle. Dad?' suggested Simon.
'No!'
'I came on the bus- I'm going back on the bus.'
'But Dad's got to drive back to London, remember? Anyway I thought we were
all supposed to keep sober tonight. Isn't that why we're here?'
'It was, yes. Just keep your voice down, will you? And read this.
Simon's already seen it. Pretty quick off the mark, some of these local
reporters. '
Sarah looked down at the copy of the Oxford Mail passed across to her, the
lower half of the back page folded over to show the latest news column:
Thousands of families evacuated as Hurricane Georges lashes Florida Keys with
torrential downpours and winds of over 120 m. p. h.
Huge tailback on A40 as lorry carrying thousands of gallons of cows' blood
overturns near Eynsham Local builder John Ban-on of Lower Swinstead
pronounced dead on arrival at JR2 after falling from ladder in Sheep Street,
Burford 220
chapter forty-seven Different things can add up in different
ways whilst reaching an identical solution, just as 'eleven plus two forms an
anagram of 'twelve plus one' (Margot Gleave, A Classical Education) A wealth
of police personnel and well-targeted enquiries had borne swift if, here and
there, unexpected evidence evidence which Sergeant Lewis (alone in his office
late that Monday evening) was able to shift and to categorize at his own
pace. Thus far, the facts, and the glosses on the facts, formulated
themselves as follows in Lewis's mind: First. The shiny orange-red Stanley
knife had been purchased, together with other items, from a hardware shop in
Burford on the Saturday of the previous week (receipt unearthed in Barren's
Expenses File). Barren could still have been a murderer of course, he could!
- but quite certainly not with the knife he'd used that same morning as he
stood almost atop the topmost section of the ladder and twisted the blade
into the rotting, unresisting sill of the dormer window in Sheep Street.
Second. The stains on the overalls Ban-on had been wearing that morning had
quite certainly not been human blood; but almost certainly smears of paint
patented under the brand- name Cremosin, two-pint tins of which were found in
Barren's garage, a space now used exclusively for building and decorating
materials.
Third. On the morning of the Friday when Flynn and Repp had been murdered,
Barron had left home around his usual time to spend some of the morning in
Thame, where two properties were inviting tenders for renovation, for which
Barron had been keen to submit his own estimates. Necessarily of course,
this evidence had been taken from Barren's wife, Linda; and yet (already) a
dated parking ticket for four hours that morning (South Oxon DC, Cattle
Market) had been found in Barren's van evidence, if anything, to substantiate
the claim that the builder had paid for a fairly extensive stay in the centre
of Thame on July the 24th.
Fourth. There appeared, as yet, no evidence whatever that Barron had
received any monies from anywhere to match the payments so regularly stashed
into the balances of both Flynn and Repp. In short, i/Barron had been the
third man ifhe had duly received his own share of the spoils for the
conspiracy of silence there was no sign of it, so far.
They were not in any way decisive, these findings and non- findings.
The trouble was they all seemed to be pointing in the same direction.
Or were they?
For example (thought Lewis), it was surely to be expected that Barron would
have got rid of the murder weapon and bought himself a new knife if in fact
he had used the former for the murders.
For example (thought Lewis), it was most unlikely that Barron had only one
pair of overalls And if someone with an extravagantly fanciful mind (Morse! )
could entertain the idea that a pair of white overalls covered with red paint
was a good disguise for a soaking of blood . . . well, it could be,
