The Secret of Annexe 3 (2 page)

At first this purely chance discovery failed to register in his mind as an incident that should occasion any interest or surprise; but after a few moments he frowned a little – and then he
frowned a lot. Why had she put the handbag behind the door of the wardrobe? He had never noticed any of her accessories there before. Normally she would keep her handbag on the table beside the
twin bed that stood nearer the window – her bed. So why . . .? Still frowning, he walked across the landing into their bedroom and looked down at the two black leather shoes, one toppled on
to its side, which had been so hurriedly taken off and carelessly left at the foot of her bed.

Back in the spare bedroom he picked up the handbag. An incurious man who had seldom felt any fascination for prying into others’ affairs, he would never have thought of opening one of his
wife’s letters – or opening one of her handbags. Not in normal circumstances. But why had she tried to conceal her handbag? And the answer to that question now seemed very obvious
indeed. There was something, perhaps more than one thing,
inside
the handbag that she didn’t want him to see; and in her rush she hadn’t had the time to transfer all its
contents to the other one. The catch opened easily and he found the letter, four pages of it, almost immediately.

His throat was dry as he rapidly skimmed the rest of the letter: it had no salutation on page one, no subscription on page four. But there was no doubt about the message of the letter – a
message that screamed so loudly at him that even some under-achieving idiot would require no prompting about its import:
his wife was being unfaithful to him
– probably had been for
a period of several months.

A sharp pain throbbed in the centre of his forehead, the blood was pounding in his ears, and for several minutes his thought processes were utterly incapable of any sharp tuning. Yet curiously
enough he appeared to be adequately in control of the rest of his body, for his hands trembled not the merest millimetre as he filled the shabby little cylindrical glass he always used for the
whisky. Sometimes he added a little cold tap water; sometimes not. Now he sipped the whisky neat: first just a small sip; then a large sip; then two large gulps of the burning liquor, and the glass
was empty. He refilled his glass and soon had drained that, too. The last drops from the bottle just filled the third glass to the brim and this he sipped more slowly, feeling as he did so the
familiar surge of warmth that slowly suffused his brain. And now it happened, paradoxically and totally unexpectedly, that instead of the vicious jealousy which a few minutes ago had threatened to
swamp his foundering senses he was gradually becoming ever more conscious of the love he felt for his wife. This renewed consciousness reminded him vividly of the day when, under-prepared and
over-confident, she had failed her first driving test; and when, as she sadly and quietly explained to him where she thought she had gone wrong, he had felt an overwhelming surge of sympathy for
her. Indeed such had been his awareness of her vulnerability that day, so fierce his determination to protect her whenever possible from future disappointment, that he would willingly have shot the
examiner who had been allotted the unavoidable task of reporting adversely on his wife’s incompetence.

The glass was empty – the bottle was empty; and Thomas Bowman walked slowly but steadily down the stairs, the empty bottle in his left hand, the letter in his right. The car keys were on
the kitchen table, and he picked them up and put on his mackintosh. Before getting into the Metro, he inserted the bottle beneath the four or five bundles of kitchen refuse which almost filled the
larger of the two dustbins standing beside the garden shed. Then he drove off: there was one very simple little job he would do immediately.

It was only a mile or so to his place of work in Chipping Norton, and as he drove he was conscious of the surprisingly clear-cut logicality of what he was proposing to do. It was only when
he’d returned some fifteen minutes later to Charlbury Drive and replaced the letter in the handbag that he became fully aware of the blazing hatred he was feeling against the man, whoever he
was, who had robbed him of his wife’s affection and fidelity; a man who hadn’t even got the guts to sign his name.

The woman with the grey handbag stood at the graveside, the purplish-yellow clay sucking and clinging to her sensible shoes. The rain had now almost stopped, and the
fresh-faced young vicar intoned the interment rites with unrushed and edifying dignity. From the snatches of conversation she had heard, Margaret Bowman learned that the old fellow had been with
the Allied spearhead on the Normandy beaches and that he had fought right through to VE Day. And when one of his old colleagues from the British Legion had thrown a Remembrance Day poppy down on to
the top of the coffin lid, she had felt the tears welling up at the back of her eyes; and before she could turn her head away (though no one noticed it) a great blobby tear had splashed down on her
gloves.

‘That’s it, then!’ said the woman in the yellow boots. ‘No port and ham sandwiches today, I’m afraid.’

‘Do they usually have that after funerals?’

‘Well, you need something to cheer you up. Specially on a day like this.’

Margaret was silent, and remained so until she got into the car.

‘Would you like to nip along to the pub?’ asked her companion.

‘No. I’d better not. I’d better get home I think.’

‘You’re not going to cook him a meal, are you?’

‘I said I’d get us a snack when I got in,’ she said, rather weakly.

The yellow-booted driver made no further attempt to influence the course of events: it would be sensible, she knew, to get her nervous-looking passenger home as quickly as possible and then go
and join some of the others at the local.

Margaret Bowman wiped her shoes on the front door mat and slid her latchkey into the Yale lock.

‘I’m ho-ome,’ she called.

But she received no reply. She looked quickly into the kitchen, the lounge, the bedroom – and then the spare room: but he wasn’t there, and she was glad. The Metro hadn’t been
in the drive when she had come in; but he might of course have driven it into the garage out of the rain. More likely though he’d driven down to the local for a drink – and if he had,
she was glad about that, too. In the spare room she opened the door of the wardrobe, picked up her handbag, and looked inside it: obviously she needn’t have worried at all, and she began to
wish she’d agreed to join her fellow mourners for a consolatory gin at the Black Horse. But that didn’t really matter. The pile of shoe boxes on the right looked rather precariously
askew and she squared them into a neater stack. In all, it was a great relief, and she promised herself that she would be far more careful in the future.

She reheated the leftovers from the chicken risotto she’d cooked the previous evening, but the few mouthfuls she managed to swallow tasted like the Dead Sea apples. What a mess she was in!
What an unholy, desperate mess she’d landed herself in! She sat in the lounge and listened to the one o’clock news, and learned that the pound had perked up a little overnight on the
Tokyo Stock Exchange. Unlike her heart. She turned on the television and watched the first two races from Newbury without having any recollection whatsoever of which horses had been first past the
post. It was only after the third race had similarly bypassed her consciousness that she heard the squeak of the Metro’s brakes on the drive. He kissed her lightly on the cheek, and his voice
sounded surprisingly sober as he asked a few perfunctory questions about the funeral. But he had been drinking heavily, she could tell that; and she was not one whit surprised when he declared that
he would have a lie-down for the remainder of the afternoon.

But Thomas Bowman rested little that Saturday afternoon, for a plan of action had already begun to form in his mind. The room at the post office housing the Xerox machine had been empty; and
after copying the letter he had stood there looking out at the fleet of postal vans in the rear park. A small post office van (he had never quite seen things this way before) was as anonymous as
any vehicle could be: no passer-by was interested in the identity of its driver, hemmed in as the latter was (from all but a directly frontal encounter) by the closed side of the secretive little
red van that could creep along unobtrusively from one parking point to the next, immune from the tickets of the predatory traffic wardens who prowled the busier streets of Oxford. In the letter,
the man who was making such a misery of Margaret’s life had begged her to meet him at ten minutes to one on Monday outside the Summertown Library in South Parade – and yes! he, Tom
Bowman, would be there too. There would be no real problem about borrowing one of the vans; he could fix that. Furthermore, he had often picked up Margaret, before she had passed her test, along
exactly that same road, and he remembered perfectly clearly that there was a little post office right on the corner of South Parade and Middle Way, with a post-box just outside. There could hardly
have been a more suitable spot . . .

Suddenly the thought struck him: how long had the letter been in her bag? There was no date on the letter – no way at all of telling which particular Monday was meant. Had it been
last
Monday? There was no way he could be certain about things; and yet he had the strong conviction that the letter, presumably addressed to her at work, had been received only a day or
so previously. Equally, he felt almost certain that Margaret was going to do exactly what the man had asked her. On both counts, Thomas Bowman was correct.

In the wing-mirror at ten minutes to one the following Monday he could see Margaret walking towards him and he leaned backwards as she passed, no more than two or three yards
away. A minute later a Maestro stopped very briefly just ahead of him, outside the Summertown Library, the driver leaning over to open the passenger door, and then to accelerate away with Margaret
Bowman seated beside him.

The post office van was three cars behind when the Maestro came to the T-junction at the Woodstock Road, and at that moment a train of events was set in motion which would result in murder
– a murder planned with slow subtlety and executed with swift ferocity.

T
HE TREE-LINED BOULEVARD
of St Giles’ is marked at three or four points by heavy cast-iron street-plaques (the latter painted white on a black
background) that were wrought at Lucy’s foundry in nearby Jericho. And Oxford being reckoned a scholarly city, the proper apostrophe appears after the final ‘s’: indeed, if a
majority vote were to be taken in the English Faculty, future signwriters would be exhorted to go for an extra ‘s’, and print ‘St Giles’s’. But few of the leading
characters who figure in the following chronicle were familiar with Fowler’s advice over the difficulties surrounding the possessive case, for they were people who, in the crude distinction
so often drawn in the city, would be immediately – and correctly – designated as ‘Town’ rather than ‘Gown’.

At the northern end of St Giles’, where in a triangle of grass a stone memorial pays tribute to the dead of two world wars, the way divides into the Woodstock Road, to the left, and the
Banbury Road, to the right. Taking the second of these two roads (the road, incidentally, in which Chief Inspector Morse has lived these many years) the present-day visitor will find, after he has
walked a few hundred yards, that he is viewing a fairly homogeneous stretch of buildings – buildings which may properly be called ‘Venetian Gothic’ in style: the houses have
pointed arches over their doorways, and pointed arches over their clustered windows which are themselves vertically bisected or trisected by small columns of marble. It is as though Ruskin had been
looking over the shoulders of the architects as they ruled and compassed their designs in the 1870s. Most of these houses (with their yellowish-beige bricks and the purple-blue slates of their
roofs) may perhaps appear to the modern eye as rather severe and humourless. But such an assessment would be misleading: attractive bands of orange brick serve to soften the ecclesiastical
discipline of many of these great houses, and over the arches the pointed contours are re-emphasized by patterns of orange and purple, as though the old harlot of the Mediterranean had painted on
her eye-shadow a little too thickly.

This whole scene changes as the visitor walks further northwards past Park Town, for soon he finds houses built of a cheerful orange-red brick that gives an immediate impression of warmth and
good fellowship after the slightly forbidding façades of the Venetian wedge. Now the roofs are of red tile, and the paintwork around the stone-plinthed windows of an almost uniform white.
The architects, some fifteen years older now, and no longer haunted by the ghost of Ruskin, drew the tops of their windows, sensibly and simply, in a straight horizontal. And thus it is that the
housing for about half a mile or so north of St Giles’ exhibits the influences of its times – times in which the first batches of College Fellows left the cloisters and the quads to
marry and multiply, and to employ cohorts of maids and under-maids and tweeny maids in the spacious suburban properties that slowly spread northward along the Banbury and Woodstock Roads in the
last decades of the nineteenth century – their annual progress leaving its record no less surely than the annular tracings of a sawn-through tree of mighty girth.