The Secret of Annexe 3 (10 page)

She sat there, her legs crossed, looking tired, every few moments pushing her spectacles up to the top of her nose with the middle finger of her ringless left hand – and
thereby irritating Morse to a quite disproportionate extent – as he himself hooked his half-lenses behind his ears and trusted that he projected an appropriate degree of investigative
acumen.

‘After the annexe lot left the party, the others finished too – is that right?’

‘I think so.’

‘You don’t
know
so?’

‘No.’

‘You say Ballard had his arms round these two women?’

‘No, he had one arm round one woman and one—’

‘Which two women?’

‘Mrs Palmer was one – I’m fairly sure of that.’

‘And the other one?’

‘I think it was . . . Mrs Smith.’

‘You’d had quite a lot to drink, hadn’t you!’

Sarah Jonstone’s pale face coloured deeply; and yet perhaps it was, that morning, more from anger than from shame. ‘Oh yes!’ she said, in a firm, quiet voice. ‘I
don’t think you’ll find a single person in the hotel who would disagree with that.’

‘But you saw the women fairly clearly?’ (Morse was beginning to appreciate Miss Jonstone more and more.)

‘I saw them clearly from the back, yes.’

‘It was snowing, wasn’t it?’

‘Yes.’

‘So they had their coats on?’

‘Yes. Both of them had light-coloured winter macs on.’

‘And you say’ – Morse referred to her statement – ‘that the other three members of the annexe sextet were just behind them?’

Sarah nodded.

‘So, if you’re right about the first three, that leaves us with Mrs Ballard, Mr Palmer and Mr . . . Smith – yes?’

Sarah hesitated – and then said ‘Yes!’ – then pushed her spectacles up once more towards her luminous eyes.

‘And behind them all came Mr Binyon?’

‘Yes – I think he was going to make sure that the side door to the annexe was locked up after them.’

‘That’s what
he
says, too.’

‘So it might be true, Inspector.’

But Morse appeared not to have heard her. ‘After Mr Binyon had locked up the annexe, no one else could have got
in
there?’

‘Not unless he had a key.’

‘Or
she
had a key!’

‘Or she had a key, yes.’

‘But anyone could have got
out
of the annexe later on?’

Again Sarah hesitated before answering. ‘Yes, I suppose so. I hadn’t really thought of it, but – yes. The lock’s an ordinary Yale one, and any of the guests could have
got out, if they’d wanted to.’

It was Lewis who, at this point, made an unexpected intervention.

‘Are you absolutely
sure
it was snowing then, Miss Jonstone?’

Sarah turned towards the sergeant, feeling relieved to look into a pair of friendly eyes and to hear a friendly voice. And she
wasn’t
quite sure, now she came to think of it. The
wind had been blowing and lifting up the settled snow in a drifting whirl around her window; and whether it
had
been snowing, at that particular moment, she wasn’t really prepared to
assert with any dogmatism.

‘No,’ she said simply. ‘I’m
not
absolutely sure.’

‘It’s just,’ continued Lewis, ‘that according to the weatherman on Radio Oxford the snow in this area had virtually stopped falling just about midnight. There may have
been the odd flurry or two; but it had pretty well finished by then – so they say.’

‘What are you trying to get at, Sergeant? I’m not . . . quite sure . . .’

‘It’s just that if it
had
stopped snowing, and if someone had left the annexe that night, there would have been some footprints, wouldn’t there? Wouldn’t such a
person have to make his way across to the main road?’

Sarah was thinking back, thinking back so very hard. There had been
no
prints the next morning leading from the annexe across to the Banbury Road. None! She could almost swear to that.
But
had
it been snowing when she looked out that fateful evening? Yes, it had!

Thus it was that she answered Lewis simply and quietly. ‘No, there were no footprints from the annexe to be seen that morning – yesterday morning. But yes, it
was
snowing
when I looked out – I’m sure of it.’

‘You mean that the weatherman at Radio Oxford has got things all wrong, miss?’

‘Yes, I do, Sergeant.’

Lewis felt a little taken aback by such strong, and such conflicting evidence, and he turned to Morse for some kind of arbitration. But as he did so, he noticed (as he had so often in the past)
that the chief inspector’s eyes were growing brighter and brighter by the second, in some sort of slow incandescence, as though a low-powered filament had been switched on somewhere at the
back of his brain. But Morse said nothing for the moment, and Lewis tried to rediscover his bearings.

‘So from what you say, you think that Mr Ballard must have been murdered by one of those five other people there?’

‘Well, yes! Don’t you? I think he was murdered by Mr or Mrs Palmer, or by Mr or Mrs Smith, or by Mrs Ballard – whoever
she
is!’

‘I see.’

During these exchanges, Morse himself had been watching the unshadowed, unrouged, unlipsticked blonde with considerable interest; but no longer. He stood up and thanked her, and then seemed
relieved that she had left them.

‘Some shrewd questioning there, Lewis!’

‘You really think so, sir?’

But Morse made no direct answer. ‘It’s time we had some refreshment,’ he said.

Lewis, who was well aware that Morse invariably took his lunchtime calories in liquid form, was himself perfectly ready for a pint and a sandwich; but he was a little displeased about
Morse’s apparently total lack of interest in the weather conditions at the time of the murder.

‘About the snow, sir—’ he began.

‘The snow? The snow, my old friend, is a complete white herring,’ said Morse, already pulling on his greatcoat.

In the back bar of the Eagle and Child in St Giles’, the two men sat and drank their beer, and Lewis found himself reading and reading again the writing on the wooden
plaque fixed to the wall behind Morse’s head:

And strangely enough it was Sergeant Lewis’s mind, after (for him) a rather liberal intake of alcohol, which was waxing the more imaginative as he pictured a series of
fundamental emendations to this received text; ‘CHIEF INSPECTOR MORSE, with his friend and colleague Sergeant Lewis, sat in this back room one Thursday, in order to solve . . .’

I
F
,
AS NOW
seemed most probable, the Haworth Hotel murderer was to be sought amongst the fellow guests who had been housed in
the annexe on New Year’s Eve, it was high time to look more carefully into the details of the Palmers and the Smiths, the guests (now vanished) who had been staying in Annexe 1 and Annexe 2
respectively; and Lewis looked at the registration forms he had in front of him, each of them fully filled in; each of them, on the face of it, innocent enough.

The Palmers’ address, the same on the registration form as on the earlier correspondence, was given as 29A Chiswick Reach; and the telephone operator confirmed that there was indeed such a
property, and that it did indeed have a subscriber by the name of Palmer, P. (sex not stated) listed in the London Telephone Directory. Lewis saw Morse’s eyebrows lift a little, as if he were
more than a fraction surprised at this intelligence; but for his own part he refused to assume that everyone who had congregated quite fortuitously in the Haworth annexe was therefore an automatic
criminal. He dialled the number and waited, letting the phone at the other end ring for about a minute before putting down the receiver.

‘We could get someone round there, perhaps?’

‘Not yet, Lewis. Give it a go every half-hour or so.’

Lewis nodded, and looked down at the Smiths’ card.

‘What’s their address?’ asked Morse.

‘Posh sort of place, by the look of it, “
Aldbrickham
, 22 Spring Street, Gloucester”.’

This time Lewis saw Morse’s eyebrows lift a lot. ‘Here! Let me look at that!’ said Morse.

And as he did so, Lewis saw him shake his head slowly, a smile forming at the corners of his mouth.

‘I’m prepared to bet you my bank-balance that there’s no such address as that!’

‘I’m not betting anything!’

‘I know the place, Lewis. And so should you! It’s the street where Jude and Sue Fawley lived!’

‘Should I know them?’

‘In
Jude the Obscure
, Lewis! And “Aldbrickham” is Hardy’s name for Reading, as you’ll remember.’

‘Yes, I’d forgotten for the moment,’ said Lewis.

‘Clever!’ Morse nodded again as though in approbation of the literary tastes of Mr and Mrs John Smith. ‘There’s no real point in trying but . . .’ Lewis heard an
audible sigh from the girl on 192 as she heard that Lewis wanted Smith, J.; and it took her a little while to discover there was no subscriber of that name with a Spring Street address in
Gloucester. A further call to the Gloucester Police established, too, that there was not a Spring Street in the city.

Lewis tried Chiswick again: no reply.

‘Do you reckon we ought to try old Doris – Doris Arkwright?’ asked Morse. ‘Perhaps she’s another crook.’

But before any such attempt could be made, a messenger from the pathology lab came in with the police surgeon’s preliminary findings. The amateurishly typewritten report
added little to what had already been known, or assumed, from the previous evening’s examination: age thirty-five to forty-five; height five foot eight and a half (‘He’s grown an
inch overnight!’ said Morse); no fragments of wood or glass or steel in the considerable facial injury, caused likely enough by a single powerful blow; teeth – in exceptionally good
condition for a male in the age group, with only three minor fillings in the left-hand side of the jaw, one of them very recent; stomach – a few mixed vegetables, but little recent intake by
the look of things.

That, in essence, was all the report said. No further information about such key issues as the time of death; an array of medical terms, though, such as ‘supra-orbital foramen’ and
‘infra-orbital fissure’, which Morse was perfectly happy to ignore. But there was a personal note from the surgeon written in a spidery scrawl at the foot of this report. ‘Morse:
A major drawback to any immediate identification is going to be the very extensive laceration and contusion across the inferior nasal concha – this doesn’t give us any easily
recognizable lineaments for a photograph – and it makes the look of the face harrowing for relatives. In any case, people always look different when they’re dead. As for the time of
death, I’ve nothing to add to my definitive statement of yesterday. In short, your guess is as good as mine, although it would come as a profound shock to me if it was any better.
Max.’

Morse glanced through the report as rapidly as he could, which was, to be truthful, not very rapidly at all. He had always been a slow reader, ever envying those of his colleagues whose eyes
appeared to have the facility to descend swiftly through the centre of a page of writing, taking in as they went the landscape both to the left and to the right. But two points – two simple,
major points – were firmly and disappointingly apparent: and Morse put them into words.

‘They don’t know who he is, Lewis; and they don’t know when he died. Bloody typical!’

Lewis grinned: ‘He’s not a bad old boy, though.’

‘He should be pensioned off! He’s too old! He drinks too much! No – he’s not a bad old boy, as you say; but he’s on the downward slope, I’m afraid.’

‘You once told me
you
were on the downward slope, sir!’

‘We’re
all
on the downward slope!’

‘Shall we go and have a look at the other bedrooms?’ Lewis spoke briskly, and stood up as if anxious to prod a lethargic-looking Morse into some more purposive line of inquiry.

‘You mean they may have left their Barclaycards behind?’

‘You never know, sir.’ Lewis fingered the great bunch of keys that Binyon had given him, but Morse appeared reluctant to get moving.

‘Shall I do it myself, sir?’

Morse got up at last. ‘No! Let’s go and have a look round the rooms – you’re quite right. You take the Palmers’ room.’

In the Smiths’ room, Annexe 2, Morse looked around him with little enthusiasm (wouldn’t the maid have tidied Annexe 1 and Annexe 2 during the day?), finally turning back the sheets
on each of the twin beds, then opening the drawers of the dressing table, then looking inside the wardrobe. Nothing. In the bathroom, it was clear that one or both of the Smiths had taken a shower
or a bath fairly recently, for the two large white towels were still slightly damp and the soap in the wall-niche had been used – as had the two squat tumblers that stood on the surface
behind the washbasin. But there was nothing to learn here, Morse felt sure of that. No items left behind; no torn letters thrown into the waste-paper basket; only a few marks over the carpet,
mostly just inside the door, left by shoes and boots that had tramped across the slush and snow. In any case, Morse felt fairly sure that the Smiths, whoever they were, had nothing at all to do
with the crime, because he thought he knew just how and why the pair of them had come to the Haworth Hotel, booking
in
at the last possible moment, and getting
out
at the earliest
possible moment after the murder of Ballard had been discovered. ‘Smith, J.’ (there was little doubt in Morse’s mind) was an ageing rogue in middle management, drooling with lust
over a new young secretary, who’d told his long-suffering spouse that he had to go to a business conference in the Midlands over the New Year. Such conduct was commonplace, Morse knew that;
and perhaps there was little point in pursuing the matter further. Yet he would like to meet her, for she was, according to the other guests, a pleasingly attractive woman. He sat on one of the
beds, and picked up the phone.