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all there. Well, not Barrett, he’s away on his holidays.”
    Burden went down to Station Road, accompanied by an enthusiastic Lynn Fancourt. Tanya Paine was back on her phones, apparently none the worse for wear. She sent them through to the kitchen area, where Trotter was sitting in front of the black and white television set, eating a hamburger and with a plate of chips on his knees.
    “Maybe you’d like to tell me where you were between ten and midday,” Burden said.
    Trotter took a bite out of his hamburger. “The station trade,” he said with his mouth full. “And when that come to an end after the ten-nineteen’d come and gone, I got a call from here to fetch a fare from Pomfret. Masters Street, Pomfret, number fifteen, to be precise, which I took to the station, picked up a fare as was waiting, and drove them to Stowerton, and by then it’d have been half-eleven, so I had my tea break. I was back in the cab by ten of twelve and I hung about down by the station, but when I never got no more calls from here, I thought, Funny, that’s very funny, that’s never happened before.”
    “What then?”
    “I come back here, didn’t I?”
    “I’d like the name of the fare you picked up in Pomfret.”
    “I don’t know his name. Why would I? Tanya said to go to fifteen Masters Street, Pomfret, and that’s what I done.”
    Burden asked Tanya Paine for the fare’s name. Presumably she kept a record. She looked at him blankly.
    “I’d have to write them down.” She spoke as if writing by hand was comparable to mastering some difficult language, Russian, for instance. “Pete’s thinking of getting a computer,” she said, “if he can pick one up secondhand.”
    “So you’ve no idea how many calls come in or who from?”
    “I never said that. I know how many. I sort of jot it down.”
    She showed him a sheet of paper on which perhaps thirty or forty dashes had been made in pencil.
    “What about the fare you picked up at the station after that?” Burden asked.
    “I took him to Oval Road, Stowerton. Number five or it might have been seven. He’ll remember me and so will the Pomfret chap.”
    Trotter fixed Burden with a stony glare. He didn’t look guilty, though. He looked as if he had nothing to hide. Burden was unable to imagine how the incidents of the morning at Contemporary Cars could have any connection with the murder of Ulrike Ranke, but that was what police work was about, discovering connections where none seemed to exist. He went back to the office where Tanya Paine had retreated. Squinting into a small hand mirror, she was applying violet-colored mascara, her lips pursed and her nostrils narrowed.
    “Is it possible,” he said, “that one of the two men who tied you up could have been one of the drivers here?”
    “Pardon?” She turned around and passed her tongue wetly across her lips.
    “The two men,” he rephrased it, “could one or both of them have been known to you? Did you have any sort of feeling of familiarity?”
    She shook her head, stunned by this new turn the inquiry was taking.
    “Did they speak?”
    “One of them did. He said to keep quiet and I would be okay. That’s all.”
    “So you didn’t hear the other one’s voice?”
    Again that amazed shake of the head.
    “The other one, then, he was masked and you didn’t hear his voice. You can’t really say he couldn’t have beenknown to you, can you? If you couldn’t see his face and didn’t hear his voice, it could have been someone you knew very well.”
    “I don’t know what you mean,” said Tanya Paine. “I’m confused now. They tied me up and gagged me and it was
horrible
and I want counseling, I’m a victim.”
    “We can arrange that, Ms. Paine,” said Lynn sympathetically.
    Burden took Lynn Fancourt down to Stowerton with him where they established that no one from number five Oval Road had been brought by taxi from the station that morning. Nobody was at home at number seven, so they had either