The Remorseful Day by Colin Dexter

computers, and hi-fi equipment. No! There'd have to be an end to all that stolen-property lark; and surely (now!) there'd be little further risk of Harry himself taking part in any of the actual burglaries. For he
had
taken part occasionally, Debbie knew that, although the police hadn't seemed to know, or perhaps just couldn't find sufficient evidence to prosecute. Certainly Harry had never asked for any further offenses to be taken into consideration. He'd made only the one plea in mitigation of his sentence: he might have known the possible provenance of the miscellaneous merchandise he'd acquired;
might
have known, if only he'd asked—but he'd just never asked. He was in business, that wasall. He knew a few clients who wanted to buy things at less than market price. Who didn't? “Just like yer duty-frees, innit? Everybody's always looking round for a bargain, officer” …
    So?
    So why was she still standing there at the window, staring up and down the quiet road? The answer was simple: she just wanted a man
around
the place. Without Harry she felt isolated, lonely, unshared. She'd lost her man; and there was no man there to talk to, to talk to others about, to grumble at, to argue with, even to walk out on—because you couldn't walk out on a man who wasn't there to start with, now could you?
    Where was he? What had happened? …
    Not that her grass-widowhood had been entirely minus men. There'd been that nice little affair with the young plasterer who'd come in to patch up a crack in the kitchen wall. And that civilized little liaison with the Oxford don (so undemanding, so appreciative) she'd met in a Burford pub. But in each case, and on every occasion, she'd been so very, very careful…
    Only once had she had
that
dreadful worry, after buying a Home Pregnancy Kit from Boots, when she'd just had to tell Harry, and when he'd been surprisingly sympathetic. If they did have a kid, it'd be good for him (him!) to have a mum
and
a dad. Yeah! He'd hated both his mum and his dad—but he'd hated his mum
less
, and it was proper to have a choice. Something else too: you know, when the poor little bugger went to school and one of the other kids said what's your name or what's your dad do—well, it was probably old-fashioned to think like that but, yeah!, better to have two of them, two parents. So she ought to change her name to his, but no need for any of all that nuptial stuff! Just for the kid's sake, mind—nothing to do with any social worker!
    But she'd be “Debbie Repp,” then; and that would be too close to “demirep” (a word she'd met in the “inter-crural” article), which she'd looked up in the biggest dictionary she could find in the Burford Public Library: “a person, esp. a woman, of dubious and libidinous disposition.”Her name, she'd decided, would henceforth remain “Richardson.” And in any case the subsequent messy miscarriage had settled
that
domestic crisis.
    At 12:50 P.M. she left her vigil for the kitchen, where she felt the neck of the champagne bottle, standing beside two glasses on the table there. Inappropriately
chambré
she decided (another recent addition to her vocabulary), and she put it back in the fridge. Not Premier Division stuff: £8.99 from the supermarket, although in truth she'd begrudged even that. Money! God, how important that was in life! They had enough money—what's more, money temporarily held in her own name. But that was Harry's money, and she would never dare to touch more of it than the reasonably generous allowance he'd authorized.
    She'd taken some occasional office-cleaning jobs in Burford, usually from 6 P.M. to 8 P.M. But £4.75 per hour was hardly the rate of remuneration to support any reasonable lifestyle; certainly not the style she'd begun to get accustomed to with Harry. So did she find herself
almost
hoping that he might pick up again on some of those very shady but very profitable activities?
    No! No! No!
    At 1:15 P.M. she rang Bullingdon Prison,