The Secret of Annexe 3 (3 page)

Betwixt the two rings sketched briefly above, and partaking something of each, stands the Haworth Hotel. It will not be necessary to describe this building – or, rather, these buildings
– in any great detail at this point, but a few things should be mentioned immediately. When (ten years since) the house had been put on the market, the successful purchaser had been one John
Binyon, an erstwhile factory-hand from Leeds who had one day invested a £1 Treble Chance stake on the Pools, and who (to the incredulity of the rest of the nation) had thought fit to presume,
in an early round of the FA Cup, that the current leaders of the First Division would be unable to defeat a lowly bunch of non-league part-time no-hopers from the Potteries – Binyon’s
reward for such effrontery being a jackpot prize of £450,000 from Littlewoods. The large detached residence (first named the Three Swans Guest House and then the Haworth Hotel) had been his
initial purchase – a building that paid tribute both to the staid Venetian planner of the 1880s and to his gayer rosy-fingered colleague of the 1890s. Yellow-bricked, red-roofed, the tops of
doors and windows now compromised to gentle curves, the house openly proclaimed its divided loyalties in a quietly genteel manner, standing back from the road some ten yards or so with a slightly
apologetic air, as if awaiting with only partial confidence the advent of social acceptability. After a few disappointing months, trade began to pick up for Binyon, and then to prosper most
satisfactorily; after two years of a glorified B & B provision, the establishment was promoted to the hotel league, boasting now a fully licensed restaurant, colour-TV’d and showered or
bathroomed accommodation, and a small exercise room for fitness fanatics; and four years after this, the proprietor had been able to stand under his own front porch and to look up with pride at the
yellow sign which proclaimed that the AA had deemed it appropriate to award the Haworth Hotel one of its stars. Thereafter such was mine host’s continued success that he was soon deciding to
expand his operations – in two separate directions. First, he was able to purchase the premises immediately adjacent on the south side, in order to provide (in due course and after
considerable renovation) a readily accessible annexe for the increasingly large number of tourists during the spring and summer seasons. Second, he began to implement his growing conviction that
much of the comparatively slack period (especially weekends and holidays) from October to March could be revitalized by a series of tastefully organized special-rate functions. And it was for this
reason that a half-page advertisement for the Haworth Hotel appeared (now for the third year running) in the ‘Winter Breaks with Christmas and New Year Bonanzas’ brochures which were to
be seen on the racks of many a travel agent in the autumn of the year in which our story begins. And in order that the reader may get the flavour of the special features which attracted those men
and women we are to meet in the following pages we reproduce below the prospectus in which the hotel was willing to offer ‘at prices decidedly too difficult to resist’ for a three-day
break over the New Year.

TUESDAY

NEW YEAR’S EVE

WEDNESDAY

NEW YEAR’S DAY

THURSDAY

Of course (it is agreed) such a prospectus would not automatically appeal to every sort and condition of humankind. Indeed, the idea of spending New Year’s Eve being
semi-forcibly cajoled into participating in a darts match, or dressing up as one of the Samurai, or even of being expected
de rigueur
to wallow in the company of their fellow men, would
drive some solid citizens into a state of semi-panic. And yet, for the past two years, many a couple had been pleasingly surprised to discover how much, after the gentlest nudge of persuasion, they
had enjoyed the group activities that the Binyons so brashly presented. Several couples were now repeating the visit for a second time; and one couple for a third – although it is only fair
to add that neither member of this unattractive duo would ever have dreamed of donning a single item of fancy dress, delighting themselves only, as they had done, in witnessing what they saw as the
rather juvenile imbecilities of their fellow guests. For the simple truth was that almost all the guests required surprisingly little, if any, persuasion to dress up for the New Year’s Eve
party – not a few of them with brilliant, if bizarre effect. And such (as we shall see) was to be the case this year, with several of the guests so subtly disguised, so cleverly bedecked in
alien clothing, that even long-standing acquaintances would have recognized them only with the greatest difficulty.

Especially the man who was to win the first prize that evening.

Yes, especially him.

W
HENEVER SHE FELT
tired – and that was usually in the early hours of the evening – the almost comically large spherical spectacles which
framed the roundly luminous eyes of Miss Sarah Jonstone would slowly slip further and further down her small and neatly geometrical nose. At such times her voice would (in truth) sound only
perfunctorily polite as she spoke into whichever of the two ultramodern phones happened to be purring for her expert attention; at such times, too, some of the belated travellers who stood waiting
to sign the register at the Haworth Hotel would perhaps find her expression of welcome a thing of somewhat mechanical formality. But in the eyes of John Binyon, this same slightly fading woman of
some forty summers could do little, if anything, wrong. He had appointed her five years previously: first purely as a glorified receptionist; subsequently (knowing a real treasure when he spotted
one) as his unofficial ‘manageress’ – although his wife Catherine (an awkward, graceless woman) had still insisted upon her own name appearing in that senior-sounding capacity on
the hotel’s general literature, as well as in the brochures announcing bargain breaks for special occasions.

Like Easter, for example.

Or Whitsun.

Or Christmas.

Or, as we have seen, like New Year.

With Christmas now over, Sarah Jonstone was looking forward to her official week’s holiday – a whole week off from everything, and especially from the New Year festivities –
the latter, for some reason, never having enthused her with rapture unconfined.

The Christmas venture was again likely to be oversubscribed, and this fact had been the main reason – though not quite the only reason – why John Binyon had strained every nerve to
bring part of the recently purchased, if only partially developed, annexe into premature use. He had originally applied for planning permission for a single-storey linking corridor between the
Haworth Hotel and this adjoining freehold property. But although the physical distance in question was only some twenty yards, so bewilderingly complex had proved the concomitant problems of
potential subsidence, ground levels, drains, fire exits, goods access and gas mains, that he had abandoned his earlier notions of a formal merger and had settled for a self-standing addendum
physically separated from the parent hotel. Yet even such a limited ambition was proving (as Binyon saw it) grotesquely expensive; and a long-term token of such expenditure was the towering yellow
crane which stood like some enormous capital Greek Gamma in what had earlier been the chrysanthemumed and foxgloved garden at the rear of the newly acquired property. From late August, the dust
ever filtering down from the planked scaffolding had vied, in degrees of irritation, with the daytime continuum of a revolving cement mixer and the clanks and hammerings which punctuated all the
waking and working hours. But as winter had drawn on – and especially during the record rainfall of November – such inconveniences had begun to appear, in retrospect, as little more
than the mildest irritancies. For now the area in which the builders worked day by day was becoming a morass of thick-clinging, darkish-orange mud, reminiscent of pictures of Passchendaele. The mud
was getting everywhere: it caked the tyres of the workmen’s wheelbarrows; it plastered the surfaces of the planks and the duckboards which lined the site and linked its drier spots; and
(perhaps most annoying of all) it left the main entrance to the hotel, as well as the subsidiary entrance to the embryo annexe, resembling the approaches to a milking parlour in the Vale of the
Great Dairies. A compromise was clearly called for over the hotel tariffs, and Binyon promptly amended the Christmas and New Year brochures to advertise the never-to-be-repeated bargain of 15 per
cent off rates for the rooms in the main hotel, and 25 per cent (no less!) off the rates for the three double rooms and the one single room now available on the ground floor of the semi-completed
annexe. And indeed it
was
a bargain: no workmen; no noise; no real inconvenience whatsoever over these holiday periods – except for that omnipresent mud . . .

The net result of these difficulties, and of further foul weather in early December, had been that, in spite of daily Hooverings and daily scrapings, many rugs and carpets and stretches of
linoleum were so sadly in need of a more general shampoo after the departure of the Christmas guests that it was decided to put into operation a full-scale clean-up on the 30th in readiness for the
arrival of the New Year contingent – or the majority of it – at lunchtime on the 31st. But there were problems. It was difficult enough at the best of times to hire waitresses and
bedders and charladies. But when, as now, extra help was most urgently required; and when, as now, two of the regular cleaning women were stricken with influenza, there was only one thing for it:
Binyon himself, his reluctant spouse Catherine, Sarah Jonstone, and Sarah’s young assistant-receptionist, Caroline, had been called to the colours early on the 30th; and (armed with their
dusters, brushes, squeegees, and Hoovers) had mounted their attack upon the blighted premises to such good effect that by the mid-evening of the same day all the rooms and the corridors in both the
main body of the hotel and in the annexe were completely cleansed of the quaggy, mire-caked traces left behind by the Christmas revellers, and indeed by their predecessors. When all was done, Sarah
herself had seldom felt so tired, although such unwonted physical labour had not – far from it! – been wholly unpleasant for her. True, she ached in a great many areas of her body which
she had forgotten were still potentially operative, especially the spaces below her ribs and the muscles just behind her knees. But such physical activity served to enhance the delightful prospect
of her imminent holiday; and to show the world that she could live it up with the rest and the best of them, she had wallowed in a long ‘Fab-Foam’ bath before ringing her only genuine
friend, Jenny, to say that she had changed her mind, was feeling fine and raring to go, and would after all be delighted to come to the party that same evening at Jenny’s North Oxford flat
(only a stone’s throw, as it happened, from Morse’s own small bachelor property). Jenny’s acquaintances, dubiously moral though they were, were also (almost invariably) quite
undoubtedly interesting; and it was at 1.20 a.m. precisely the following morning that a paunchy, middle-aged German with a tediously repeated passion for the works of Thomas Mann had suddenly asked
a semi-intoxicated Sarah (yes, just like that!) if she would like to go to bed with him. And in spite of her very brief acquaintance with the man, it had been only semi-unwillingly that she had
been dragged off to Jenny’s spare room where she had made equally brief love with the hirsute lawyer from Bergisch Gladbach. She could not remember too clearly how she had finally reached her
own flat in Middle Way – a road (as the careful reader will remember) which stretches down into South Parade, and at the bottom of which stands a post office.