The Secret of Annexe 3 (12 page)

O
N HIS RETURN
from Oxford railway station, Lewis was tempted to call it a day and get off home. He had been up since 5 a.m., and it was now just after 5
p.m. A long enough stretch for anybody. But he didn’t call it a day; and in retrospect his decision was to prove a crucial one in solving the mystery surrounding Annexe 3.

He decided to have a last look round the rooms in the annexe before he went home, and for this purpose he left the Operations Room by the front door (the partition between the main annexe
entrance and the four rooms in use had not been dismantled) and walked round the front of the building to the familiar side-entrance, where a uniformed constable still stood on duty.

‘It’s open, Sarge,’ Lewis heard as he fumbled with his embarrassment of keys.

‘Give it till seven, I reckon. Then you can get off,’ said Lewis. ‘I’ll just have a last look round.’

First, Lewis had a quick look round the one room that no one had as yet bothered about, Annexe 4; and here he made one small find – alas, completely insignificant. On the top shelf of the
built-in wardrobe he found a glossy magazine illustrated with lewdly pornographic photographs, and filled out with a minimum of text which (judging from a prevalence of ø-looking letters)
Lewis took to be written in some Scandinavian tongue. If Morse had been there (Lewis knew it so well) he would have sat down on the bed forthwith and given the magazine his undivided attention; and
it often puzzled Lewis a little to understand how an otherwise reasonably sensitive person such as Morse could simultaneously behave in so unworthily crude a fashion. Yet he knew that nothing was
ever likely to change the melancholy, uncommitted Morse; and he put the magazine back on the shelf, deciding that his superior should know nothing of it.

In Annexe 3 itself, there were so many chalked marks, so many biro’d circles, so many dusted surfaces, so much shifted furniture, that it was impossible to believe any clue would now be
found there that had not been found already; and Lewis turned off the light and closed the door, making sure it was locked behind him.

In Annexe 1, the Palmers’ room, Lewis could find nothing that he had missed in his earlier examination, and he paused only for a moment before the window, seeing his own shadow in the
oblong of yellow light that was thrown across the snow, before turning the light off there too, and closing the door behind him. He would have a quick look at the last room, the Smiths’ room,
and then he really would call an end to his long, long day.

In this room, Annexe 2, he could find nothing of any import; and Morse (Lewis knew) would have looked over it with adequate, if less than exhaustive, care. In any case, Morse had a creative
imagination that he himself could never hope to match, and often in the past there had been things – those oddly intangible things – which the careful Lewis himself had missed and which
Morse had almost carelessly discovered. Yet it would do no harm to have one final eleventh-hour check before permission was given to Binyon (as soon it must be) for the rooms to be freed for hotel
use once more.

It was five minutes later that Lewis made his exciting discovery.

Sarah Jonstone saw Lewis leave just before 6 p.m., his car headlights, as he turned in front of the annexe, sending revolving patches of yellow light across the walls and
ceiling of her unlit room. Then the winter darkness was complete once more. She had never minded the dark, even as a little girl, when she’d always preferred the door of her bedroom shut and
the light on the landing switched off; and now as she looked out she was again content to leave the light turned off. She was developing a slight headache and she had dropped two soluble Disprin
into a glass of water and was slowly swishing the disintegrating tablets round. Mr Binyon had asked her to stay on another night, and in the circumstances it would have been unkind for her to
refuse. But it was an oddly unsatisfactory, anticlimactic sort of time: the night was now still after so many comings and goings; the lights in the annexe all switched off, including the light in
the large back room which Morse and Lewis had been using; the press, the police, the public – almost everyone seemed to have gone; gone, too, were all the New Year revellers, all of them gone
back home again – all except one, of course, the one who would never see his home again. The only signs left of all the excitement were the beribboned ropes that still cordoned off the annexe
area, and the single policeman in the flat, black-and-white checked hat who still stood at the side entrance of the annexe, his breath steaming in the cold air, stamping his feet occasionally, and
pulling his greatcoat ever more closely around him. She was wondering if she ought to offer him something – when she heard Mandy, from just below her window, call across and ask him if he
wanted a cup of tea.

She herself drank the cloudy, bitter-tasting mixture from the glass, switched on the light, washed the glass, smoothed the wrinkled coverlet on which she had earlier been lying, turned on the
TV, and listened to the main items of the six o’clock news. The world that day, that second day of the brand-new year, was familiarly full of crashes, hijackings, riots and terrorism; yet
somehow such cataclysmic, collective disasters seemed far less disturbing to her than the murder of that one man, only some twenty-odd yards from where she stood. She turned off the TV, and went
over to the window to pull the curtains across; she would smarten herself up a bit before going down to have her evening meal with the Binyons.

Odd!

A light was on again in the annexe, and she wondered who it could be. Probably the constable, for he was no longer standing by the side door. It was almost certainly in Annexe 2 that the light
was on, she thought, judging from the yellow square of snow in front of the building. Then the light was switched off; and standing there at her window, arms outspread, Sarah was just about to pull
the curtains across when she saw a figure, just inside the annexe doorway, pressed against the left-hand wall. Her heart seemed to miss a beat, and she felt a constriction somewhere at the back of
her throat as she stood there for a few seconds completely motionless, mesmerized by what she had seen. Then she acted. She threw open the door, scampered down the stairs, rushed through to the
main entrance and then along to the side door of the main building, where the constable stood talking with Mandy over a cup of steaming tea.

‘There’s someone across there!’ Sarah whispered hoarsely as she pointed over to the annexe block.

‘Pardon, miss?’

‘I just saw someone in the doorway!’

The man hurried across to the annexe, with Sarah and Mandy walking nervously a few steps behind. They saw him open the side door (it hadn’t been locked, that much was clear) and then
watched as the light flicked on in the corridor, and then flicked off.

‘There’s no one there now,’ said the worried-looking constable, clearly conscious of some potentially disastrous dereliction of duty.

‘There
was
someone,’ persisted Sarah quietly. ‘It was in Annexe 2 – I’m sure of it. I saw the light on the snow.’

‘But the rooms are all locked up, miss.’

Sarah said nothing. There were only two sets of master-keys, and Binyon (Sarah knew) had given one of those sets to Sergeant Lewis. But Sergeant Lewis had gone. Had Binyon used the other set
himself
? Had the slim figure she had seen in the doorway been Binyon’s? And if so, what on earth—?

It was Binyon himself, wearing a raincoat but no hat, who had startlingly materialized from somewhere, and who now stood behind them, insisting (once he had asked about the nature of the
incident) that they should check up on the situation forthwith.

Sarah followed him and the constable into the annexe corridor, and it was immediately apparent that someone
had
stood – and that within the last few minutes or so – in front
of the door to Annexe 2. The carpet just below the handle was muddied with the marks of slushy footwear, and little slivers of yet unmelted snow winked under the neon lighting of the corridor.

Back in her room, Sarah thought hard about what had just happened. The constable had refused to let the door of Annexe 2 be touched or opened, and had immediately tried to contact Lewis at the
number he had been instructed to ring should anything untoward occur. But Lewis had not yet arrived home; and this fact tended to bolster the belief, expressed by both Binyon and the constable,
that it had probably been Lewis who had called back for some unexpected though probably quite simple reason. But Sarah had kept her counsel. She knew quite certainly that the figure she had
glimpsed in the annexe doorway could never have been the heavily built Sergeant Lewis.
Could
it have been Mr Binyon, though? Whilst not impossible, that too, thought Sarah, was wildly
improbable. And, as it happened, her view of the matter was of considerably greater value than anyone else’s. Not only was she the sole witness to the furtive figure seen in the doorway; she
was also the only person, at least for the present, who knew a most significant fact: the fact that although there were only two sets of master-keys to the annexe rooms, it was perfectly possible
for
someone else
to have entered the room that evening without forcing a door or breaking a window.
Two other people
, in fact. On the key-board behind Reception, the hook was
still empty on which should have been hanging the black-plastic oblong tab, with ‘Haworth’ printed over it in white, and the room key to Annexe 2 attached to it. For Mr and Mrs John
Smith had left behind their unsettled account, but their room key they had taken with them.

M
ORSE WALKED THROUGH
the carpeted lounge of the Great Western Hotel where several couples, seemingly with little any longer to say to each other, were
desultorily engaged in reading paperbacks, consulting timetables or turning over the pages of the London
Standard
. Time, apparently, was the chief item of importance here, where a
video-screen gave travellers up-to-the-minute information about arrivals and departures, and where frequent glances were thrown towards the large clock above the Porters’ Desk, at which stood
two slightly supercilious-looking men in gold-braided green uniforms. It was 5.45 p.m.

Immediately in front of him, through the revolving door that gave access to Praed Street, Morse could see the white lettering of PADDINGTON on the blue Underground sign as he turned right and
made his way towards the Brunel Bar. At its entrance, a board announced that 5.30 p.m. to 6.30 p.m. encompassed ‘The Happy Hour’, with any drink available at half-price – a
prospect doubtless accounting for the throng of dark-suited black-briefcased businessmen who stood around the bar, anxious to get in as many drinks as possible before departing homewards to Slough
or Reading or Didcot or Swindon or Oxford. Wall-seats, all in a deep maroon shade of velveteen nylon, lined the rectangular bar; and after finally managing to purchase his half-priced pint of beer,
Morse sat down near the main entrance behind one of the freestanding, mahogany-veneered tables. The tripartite glass dish in front of him offered nuts, crisps, and cheese biscuits, into which he
found himself dipping more and more nervously as the hands of the clock crept towards 6 p.m. Almost (he knew it!) he felt as excited as if he were a callow youth once more. It was exactly 6 p.m.
when Philippa Palmer walked into the bar. For purposes of recognition, it had been agreed that she should carry her handbag in her left hand and a copy of the London
Standard
in her right.
But the fact that she had got things the wrong way round was of little consequence to Morse; he himself was quite incapable of any instant and instinctive knowledge of east and west, and he would
have spotted her immediately. Or so he told himself.

He stood up, and she walked over to him.

‘Chief Inspector Morse?’ Her face betrayed no emotion whatsoever: no signs of nervousness, embarrassment, co-operation, affability, humour – nothing.

‘Let me get you a drink,’ said Morse.

She took off her raincoat, and as Morse waited his turn again at the crowded bar he watched her from the corner of his eye: five foot five or six, or thereabouts, wearing a roll-necked
turquoise-blue woollen dress which gently emphasized the rounded contours of her bottom but hardly did the rest of her figure much justice, perhaps. When he set the glass of red wine in front of
her, she had crossed her nyloned legs, her slim-style high-heeled shoes accentuating the slightly excessive muscularity of her calves; and across the back of her right ankle Morse noticed a piece
of Elastoplast, as though her expensive shoes probably combined the ultimate in elegance with a sorry degree of discomfiture.

‘I tried to run a half-marathon – for charity,’ she said, following his eyes, and his thoughts.

‘For the Police Welfare Fund, I trust!’ said Morse lightly.

Her eyes were on the brink of the faintest smile, and Morse looked closely at her face. It was undeniably an attractive face, framed by a head of luxuriant dark-brown hair glinting overall with
hints of auburn; but it was the eyes above the high cheekbones – eyes of a deep brown – that were undoubtedly the woman’s most striking feature. When she had spoken (with a slight
Cockney accent) she had shown rather small regular teeth behind a mouth coated with only the thinnest smear of dark-red lipstick, and a great many men (Morse knew it) would find her a very
attractive woman; and more than a few would find her necessary, too.