‘You feeling generous tonight, Robin?’ Gwenda said. ‘Or just too tired to know what you’re saying?’
She was up on her high stool, low-cut, long-sleeved black top, black leggings. You could eat her.
Robin deliberately didn’t answer, accepting his shandy from one of the two women behind the bar. Extra staff on tonight. Good business with all the cops around, chilling out after a heavy day. Only one here now, though.
‘We do the right thing coming here, Gary?’ Robin fumbled out a ten pound note to pay for his and Gareth Nunne’s drinks. ‘I dunno. But it was all your fault.’
‘Not still bothered about Jerry Brace?’ Nunne accepted his beer. ‘Cheers, boy.’
‘Guy’s cast a pall,’ Robin admitted.
‘Junkie and a loony. Forget about him. You’ll come through. You’re young, you bastard.’
Robin carried his tankard to the end of the pitted farmhouse table under the bar. In some pain now as he sat down, his stick between his knees, opposite Connie Wilby, edge of the inglenook. He brushed at his jeans.
‘Guess this is unlikely, but would anybody here still have an old VCR?’
‘What’s that?’ Connie said.
‘Videotape player?’
‘Never had one, dear, not even when they were in vogue. I’m what they used to call… damn, can’t even remember the terminology.’
Gareth Nunne looked thoughtful.
‘A reader?’
‘Yes!’ Connie raised a finger. ‘Of course. That’s the word. Thank you, Gary.’
Robin smiled, brought the videotape out of his jacket.
‘That better not be a bloody Kindle,’ some guy said.
‘See?’ Robin said. ‘How soon everyone forgets.’
Gore Turrell was leaning elegantly over the bar on folded arms. He didn’t look happy. Or was that a mood you just projected on him? He nodded at the tape, making a soundless question.
‘I’m guessing The Best of Adolf Hitler,’ Robin said. ‘But who knows?’
Robin felt like a wrench was tightening his balls. He looked around at the shiny faces under the teardrop globes. He knew Gwyn Arthur Jones was in here somewhere and also the screwed-up cop in the baseball sweater, Bliss.
Bliss didn’t talk like any cop Robin had known. Telling him to stir the shit, flush it all out into the street.
Be loud. They make allowances. You’re coping with disability. It’s a bastard, isn’t it, being disabled? Makes you angry all the time. Makes you wanna deck people, just because you know you can’t. You know they’re gonna see the first punch coming before you’ve even made a fist.
But take your time, boy, Jones had said. Don’t make it look like you have a story to tell. Let it get teased out of you.
They had to be halfway out of their minds to trust a dysfunctional foreigner whose dream was exploding in his face.
It’s insane, Bliss had said, but it keeps screaming at me. We have two murders of young women, thirty years apart, in similar ritualistic circumstances. And one we know was committed by Gore’s father with the help of his mother. And we know that Tamsin was asking questions in their bar.
And then he’d looked at Gwyn Arthur Jones.
We’ve not gorra shred of evidence. And me and Brent… you don’t know the worst of it. And you’re retired, and I’m off duty.
And that was when Jones had said,
Let’s go and have a drink. Robin looks like he could use one.
‘What you looking for, Robin?’ Gwenda said.
Gwenda who’d watched a woman getting murdered and hacked up into joints. Fucked her son. And still you could eat her.
‘Just making sure Mr Oliver isn’t here,’ Robin said.
‘Oliver came in here once,’ Gwenda said with a luscious pout. ‘Unfortunately nobody knew how to make whichever sophisticated London cocktail he prefers.’
See, that was crap. Unless Jones had all this wrong, couldn’t be anything Gwenda didn’t know about sophisticated London cocktails.
‘And what, exactly, do you not want Mr Oliver to know?’ Gore said.
Thank you, Gore.
You kill a cop? A young girl? Did you do that?
‘Uh… we had to wreck his chimney,’ Robin said. ‘The swastika stone… Betty hated it. We decided we were gonna rip it out and put it in the trash. Then we found a hole behind it. A cavity?’
He took a pull on his shandy, not reacting to all the eyes on him.
Gareth Nunne said, ‘And?’
‘Huh?’
‘What was in it? The hole. In the bloody wall?’
‘Oh. A box. A wooden box.’
‘Coffin?’
‘A small wooden box, Gary. Just big enough for…’ he waved the cassette in the air ‘… a medieval videotape. Only, like most people, we don’t have a VCR any more.’