The Secret of Annexe 3 (14 page)

If Helen Smith had ever been likely to despair, she would have done so at this point. And yet somehow she knew that she would
not
despair. It may have been the cold, the hopelessness,
the futility of it all; it may have been her awareness that there could be nothing more for her to lose. She didn’t know. She didn’t want to know. But she sensed within herself a
feeling of wild determination that she had never known before. Her whole being seemed polarized between the black-and-white hat across the road and the key still clutched so tightly and warmly in
her right hand. There had to be
some
way of diverting the man’s attention, so that she would have the chance to slip swiftly and silently through the side door. But it had been so
much easier than that! He had just walked across to the main hotel, where he now stood drinking a cup of something from a white plastic beaker, and happily engrossed in conversation with a young
woman from the hotel.

Helen was in the corridor almost before her courage had been called upon.

No problem! With shaking hand she inserted the key in the lock of Annexe 2, closed the door behind her, and stood stock-still for a moment or two in the dark. Then she felt her way across to the
bed nearer the window, and ran her hands along the smooth sheets, and beneath and around the pillow, and along the headboard, and finally over the floor. They
had
been there: they
had
been underneath her pillow – she
knew
it. And an embryo sob escaped her lips as again her hands frantically, but fruitlessly, searched around. There were two switches on
the headboard, and she turned on the one above the bed she had slept in: she
had
to make sure! For half a minute she searched again desperately in the lighted room; but to no avail. And
now, for the first time, it was fear that clutched her heart as she switched off the light, left the room and edged her way noiselessly through the side door. Then she froze where she stood against
the wall. Immediately opposite, at one of the windows on the first floor of the main hotel, a woman stood watching her – and then was gone. Helen felt quite certain that the woman had seen
her, and an icy panic seized her. She could remember little of how she left the hotel; but fear had given its own winged sandals to her feet.

The next thing she knew, she was walking along the Banbury Road, a good way down from the Haworth Hotel, her heart thumping like a trip-hammer in an ironmaster’s yard. She walked without
looking back for a single second; she walked and walked like some revenant zombie, oblivious to her surroundings, still panic-stricken and trembling – yet safe, blessedly safe! At the railway
station, with only ten minutes to wait, she bought herself a Scotch, and felt fractionally better. But as she sat in a deserted compartment in the slow train back to Reading, she knew that each of
the wearisome stops, like the stations of the cross, was bringing her nearer and nearer to a final reckoning.

Morse had made no secret of the fact that he would be meeting Philippa Palmer at the Great Western Hotel, and had agreed that should Lewis think it necessary he might be
reached there. The news
could
wait until the morning of course – Lewis knew that; and it probably wasn’t crucially important in any case. Yet everyone is anxious to parade a
success, and for Lewis it had been a successful evening. In Annexe 2, the room in which Mr and Mrs John Smith had spent the night of December 31st, he had found, beneath the pillow of the bed
nearer the window, in a brown imitation-leather case, a pair of spectacles: small, feminine, rather fussy little things. At first he had been disappointed, since the case bore no optician’s
name, no address, no signification of town or county – nothing. But inside the case, squashed down at the very bottom, he had found a small oblong of yellow material for use (as Lewis knew)
in the cleaning of lenses; and printed on this material were the words ‘G.W. Lloyd, Opticians, High Street, Reading’. Fortunately Mr Lloyd, a garrulous Welshman hailing from Mountain
Ash, had still been on the premises when Lewis rang him, and had willingly agreed to remain so until Lewis arrived. If it had taken Lewis only forty minutes to reach Reading, it had taken Lloyd
only four or five to discover the owner of the lost spectacles. In his neat records the resourceful Lloyd kept full information about all his clients: this defect, that defect; long sight, short
sight; degrees of astigmatism; type of spectacle frames; private or NHS. And tracing the spectacles had been almost childishly easy. Quite an able fellow, Lewis decided, this little Welshman who
had opted for ophthalmology.

‘I found them under the pillow, sir,’ said Lewis when he finally got through to Morse at Paddington.

‘Did you?’

‘I thought it wouldn’t perhaps do any harm just to check up on things a bit.’

‘Check up on me, you mean!’

‘Well, we can all miss things.’

‘You mean to say they were there when I looked over that room? Come off it, Lewis! You don’t honestly think I’d have missed something like that, do you?’

The thought that the spectacles had been planted in Annexe 2 by some person or other
after
Morse had searched the room had not previously occurred to Lewis, and he was beginning to
wonder about the implications of such a strange notion when Morse spoke again.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Pardon, sir?’

‘I said I’m sorry, that’s all. I must have missed the bloody things! And there’s something else I want to say. Well done! No wonder I sometimes find it useful having you
around, my old friend.’

Lewis was looking very happy when, after giving Morse the Smiths’ address, he put down the phone, thanked the optician, and drove straight back to Oxford. He and Morse
had agreed not to try to see either of the mysterious Smith couple until the following day. And Lewis was glad of that since he was feeling very tired indeed.

Mrs Lewis could see that her husband was happy when he finally returned home just before 9 p.m. She cooked him egg and chips and once again marvelled at the way in which Chief
Inspector Morse could, on occasions, have such a beneficent effect upon the man she’d married. But she was very happy herself, too; she was always happy when he was.

Deciding, after he had finished his telephone conversation with Lewis, that he might just as well stay on in London and then stop off at Reading the following morning on his
return to Oxford, Morse approached the receptionist (the same one) for the third time, and asked her sweetly whether she could offer him a single room for the night. Which she could, for there had
been a cancellation. The card which she gave him Morse completed in the name of Mr Philip Palmer, of Irish nationality, and handed it back to her. As she gave him his room key, the girl looked at
him with puzzlement in her eyes, and Morse leaned over and spoke quietly to her. ‘Just one little t’ing, miss. If Chief Inspector Morse happens to call, please send him up to see me
immediately, will you?’

The receptionist, now utterly bewildered, looked at him with eyes that suggested that either he was quite mad, or she was. And when he walked off towards the main staircase, she wondered whether
she should ring the duty manager and acquaint him with her growing suspicion that she might have just booked an IRA terrorist into the hotel. But she decided against it. If he had a bomb with him,
it was quite certainly not in his suitcase, for he had no suitcase; had no luggage at all, in fact – not even a toothbrush by the look of things.

T
HE WHOLE DESPERATE
business had acquired a gathering momentum born of its own progress. It was, for Margaret Bowman, like driving a car whose brakes
had failed down an ever more steeply inclined gradient – where the only thing to do was to try to steer the accelerating vehicle with the split-second reactions of a racing driver and to pray
that it would reach the bottom without a fatal collision. To stop was utterly impossible.

It had been about a year ago when she had first become aware that her husband was showing unmistakable signs of becoming a semi-drunkard. There would be days when he would not touch a drop of
alcohol; but there were other periods when two or three times a week she would return from work to find him in a sort of slow-thinking half-daze after what must clearly have been fairly prolonged
bouts of drinking, about which her own occasional criticism had served merely to trigger off an underlying crude and cruel streak in his nature which had greatly frightened her. Had it been because
of his drinking that (for the first time in their marriage) she had been unfaithful to him? She wasn’t sure. Possibly – probably, even – she might in any case have drifted into
some sort of illicit liaison with one or two of the men she had recently got to know at work. Everyone changed as the years went by, she knew that. But Tom, her husband, seemed to have undergone a
fundamental change of character, and she had become increasingly terrified of him finding out about her affair, and deeply worried about what dreadful things he would do to her; and to
him
, and perhaps to himself, if he ever did find out. Her infidelity had spanned the late summer and most of the autumn before she began to realize that any affair was just as fraught with
risk as marriage was. For the first few weeks, a single afternoon a week had sufficed: he, by regulating his varied weekend workings, was able to take a day off every week, and this was easily
synchronized with her own afternoon off (on Thursdays) when the pair of them made love in the bedroom of an erstwhile council house in North Oxford which he now owned himself. That had been the
early pattern; and for the first two or three months he had been interesting to be with, considerate, anxious to please. But as time went on, he too (just like her husband) had appeared to change:
he became somewhat crude in one or two respects, more demanding, less talkative, with (quite clearly to Margaret Bowman) his own craving for sexual gratification dominating their postmeridian
copulations. Progressively he’d wished to see her more often, ever badgering her to fabricate for her employers a series of visits to dentists, doctors, and terminally ill relatives; or to
take home to her husband tales of overtime workings necessitated by imaginary backlogs. And while she despised the man to some degree for so obviously allowing all his professed love for her to
degenerate into an undisguised lust, yet there was a physical side to her own nature, at once as crude and selfish and demanding as his, which welded them into an almost perfect partnership between
the sheets. The simple truth was that the more he used and abused her, the more sexual satisfaction he managed to wring from her, and the more she was conscious of her pride in being the physical
object of his apparently insatiable appetite for her body. Indeed, as the year moved into its last quarter, she began to suspect that she needed him almost as much as he needed her, although for a
long time she refused to countenance, even to herself, the full implications of such a suspicion. But then she was forced to face them. He was soon making
too
many demands upon her,
begging her to be with him even for an odd half-hour at lunchtimes when (truth to tell) she would more often than not have preferred a glass of red wine and a ham sandwich with her friend and
colleague Gladys Taylor in the Dew Drop. And then had come the show-down, as perhaps she’d known would be inevitable. He’d asked her to leave her husband and come to live with him: it
was about time, surely, that she left the man she didn’t love and moved in with the one she did. And although coming within an ace of saying ‘yes’, she’d finally said
‘no’.

Why Margaret Bowman had thus refused, she would herself have found difficult to explain. Perhaps it was because (for the present at least) it was all far too much
bother
. The rather
dull, the slightly overweight, the only semi-successful man who was her husband, was the man with whom she had shared so much for so many years now. And there were far too many other shared things
to think of packing everything up just like that: payments on the car, life insurances, the house mortgage, family friends and relations, neighbours – even the disappointments and the
quarrels and the boredoms, which all seemed to form a strangely binding sort of tie between them. Yet there was perhaps, too, one quite specific reason why she had refused. Gladys (Margaret had
come to work in the same section as Gladys in the spring) had become a genuine friend; and one day in the Dew Drop she had told Margaret how she had been temporarily jilted by her husband, and how
for many months after that she had felt so hurt and so belittled that she’d wondered whether she would ever be able to lift up her head in life again. ‘Having had it done to me’
(she’d confided) ‘I couldn’t ever think of doing it to anyone else.’ It had been a simple little thing to say, and it had not been said with any great moral fervour; yet it
had made its point with memorable effect . . .

That particular Thursday afternoon when she had finally said ‘no’ they’d had their first blazing row, and she had been alarmed by the look of potential violence in his eyes.
Although he had finally calmed down, she found herself making excuses for the whole of the next week, including the hitherto sacrosanct p.m. period on Thursday. It had been a sad mistake, though,
since the following fortnight had been a nightmare. He had rung her at work, where she had taken the message in front of all the other women in the section, their eyes glued on her as
(nonchalantly, she hoped) she promised to get in touch. Which she
had
done, asking him sensibly, soberly, just to let things ride for a few weeks and see if they would sort themselves out.
Then there had been the first letter, addressed to her at work – pleasantly, lovingly, imploring her to go back to the old pattern of their former meetings. And then, when she did not reply
to the first letter, a second one, which was addressed to her home and which she’d picked up from the front-hall mat at eight o’clock on a wet and miserable November morning
when
she was going to a funeral
. Tom was still in bed, and she’d hurriedly torn the envelope open and looked through the letter – the cruel, vindictive, frightening letter which
she’d quickly stuck into the bottom of her handbag as she heard the creak at the top of the stairs.