‘And how are the family bearing up?’ said Sam. ‘Bit of a shock for the womenfolk, no doubt.’
Harry shrugged. ‘That son-in-law of mine is the worst by a long chalk,’ he said. ‘He can’t stand it at all. Worried about his precious job with Vernon.’
‘He’d crack like a nut, that one. Sorry to say it, Harry. But if he had anything to hide, if he ever found himself under suspicion. He’d cough, all right.’
The slang expression brought a small smile to Harry’s face. Like Sam, he had heard it used last night in the latest television police series, set in some drug-ridden area of inner London, where the detectives were more like criminals than the criminals themselves.
‘Has he?’ asked Wilford suddenly.
‘Has who what?’
‘Has Andrew Milner got anything to hide?’
‘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 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 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 Buxton Advertiser.
Sam curled his lip. ‘Aye. Community service. When was that ever 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. 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. 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 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 one of those dark tunnels a mile underground, far from the surface light.
Sam fumbled a packet of ten Embassy 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, momentarily revealing an unnaturally white patch of naked 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 hoping to read their numbers through their patterned backs.
‘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.
‘You’d have to have a conscience to start with, of course,’ said Wilford.
‘There aren’t many that have one these days,’ agreed Sam.
They both looked at Harry, waiting for his response. But Harry didn’t seem to want to think about it. He got up stiffly, collected their glasses and walked across the room to the bar. He looked to neither right nor left as he moved through the crowd of youngsters, his back upright, like a man entirely apart from those around him. Drinkers parted automatically to let him through, and the landlord served him without having to be told the order.
Harry’s jacket and tie looked incongruously formal and sober among the T-shirts and shorts of the other customers. He could have been an elderly undertaker who had wandered into a wedding reception. When he turned his head, the peak of his cap swung like a knife across a background of pink limbs and sunburnt faces.
‘So the bloke who killed this lass,’ said Harry when he returned to the corner table. ‘Do you reckon he’ll get away with it?’
‘Depends,’ said Wilford. ‘Depends whether the coppers have a bit of luck. Perhaps somebody saw something and decides to tell them about it. Or some bobby asks the right question by accident. That’s the only way it happens.’
‘They have their suspicions, no doubt.’
‘It doesn’t matter what they suspect. They can’t do anything without evidence,’ said Wilford confidently.
‘Evidence. Aye, that’s what they’ll want.’
‘They’ll be desperate for it. Desperate for a bit of evidence.’
‘They reckon that Sherratt lad has gone missing,’ said Sam.
‘Daft bugger.’
‘It’ll keep the coppers busy, I suppose, looking for him. He’ll be the number one suspect.’
‘Unless they fancy blaming it on one of the family,’ said Wilford. ‘That’s where they always look first.’
‘Aye,’ said Sam, brightening suddenly. ‘Or the boyfriend.’
‘Ah! Which boyfriend?’ asked Harry.
‘That’s the question. With that