he asked finally.
‘I borrowed it.’
‘Borrowed it? Who from?’
‘Schei.’
‘Scheimacher?’
‘That’s right. He said we could have it whenever we wanted it so we’ve got it.’
‘Does he know we’ve got it?’
Sally sighed. ‘Look, he’s in India isn’t he, currying sperm? So what does it matter what he knows? By the time he gets back we’ll be in the Land of the Free.’
‘Shit.’ said Gaskell wearily, ‘one of these days you’re going to land us in it up to the eyeballs.’
‘Gaskell honey, sometimes you bore me with your worrying so.’
‘Let me tell you something. You worry me with your goddam attitude to other people’s property.’
‘Property is theft.’
‘Oh sure. You just get the cops to see it that way when they catch up with you. The fuzz don’t go a ball on stealing in this country.’
The fuzz weren’t going much of a ball on the well-nourished body of a woman apparently murdered and buried under thirty feet and twenty tons of rapidly setting concrete. Barney had supplied the well-nourished bit. ‘She had big breasts too,’ he explained, in the seventh version of what he had seen. ‘And this hand reaching up–’
‘Yes, well we know all about the hand,’ said Inspector Flint. ‘We’ve been into all that before but this is the first time you’ve mentioned breasts.’
‘It was the hand that got me,’ said Barney. ‘I mean you don’t think of breasts in a situation like that.’
The Inspector turned to the foreman. ‘Did you notice the deceased’s breasts?’ he enquired. But the foreman just shook his head. He was past speech.’
‘So we’ve got a well-nourished woman…What age would you say?’
Barney scratched his chin reflectively. ‘Not old,’ he said finally. ‘Definitely not old.’
‘In her twenties?’
‘Could have been.’
‘In her thirties?’
Barney shrugged. There was something be was trying to recall. Something that had seemed odd at the time.
‘But definitely not in her forties?’
‘No.’ said Barney. ‘Younger than that.’ He said it rather hesitantly.
‘You’re not being very specific,’ said Inspector Flint.
‘I can’t help it,’ said Barney plaintively. ‘You see a woman down a dirty great hole with concrete sloshing down on top of her you don’t ask her her age.’
‘Quite. I realise that but if you could just think. Was there anything peculiar about her…’
‘Peculiar? Well, there was this hand see…’
Inspector Flint sighed. ‘I mean anything out of the ordinary about her appearance. Her hair for instance. What colour was it?’
Barney got it. ‘I knew there was something,’ he said, triumphantly. ‘Her hair. It was crooked.’
‘Well, it would be, wouldn’t it. You don’t dump a woman down a thirty-foot pile shaft without mussing up her hair in the process.’
