The Secret of Annexe 3 (17 page)

But Lewis had got off to a bad start. His first call elicited the disappointing information that the last street-collection in Oxford for the RSPCA had been the previous July; and he had no
option but to start making another list, and a very long list at that. First came the well-known medical charities, those dealing with multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, heart diseases,
cancer research, blindness, deafness, et cetera; then the major social charities, ranging from Christian Aid and Oxfam to War on Want and the Save the Children Fund, et cetera; next came specific
societies that looked after ambulancemen, lifeboatmen and ex-servicemen, et cetera; finally were listed the local charities which funded hospices for the terminally ill, hostels for the criminally
sick or the mentally unbalanced, et cetera. Lewis could have added scores of others – and he knew he was getting into an awful mess. He could even have added the National Association for the
Care and Resettlement of Criminal Offenders. But he didn’t.

Clearly some sort of selection was required, and he would have been more than glad to have Morse at his side at that moment. It was like being faced with a difficult maths problem at school: if
you weren’t careful, you got more and more ensnared in some increasingly complex equations – until the master showed you a beautifully economic short-cut that reduced the problem to a
few simple little sums and produced a glittering (and correct) solution at the foot of the page. But his present master, Morse, was still apparently otherwise engaged, and so he decided to begin in
earnest: on the second of the two equations.

Yet an hour later he had advanced his knowledge of charity collections in Oxford not one whit; and he was becoming increasingly irritated with telephone numbers which didn’t answer when
called, or which (if they did answer) appeared manned by voluntary envelope-lickers, decorators, caretakers or idiots – or (worst of all!) by intimidating answering machines telling Lewis to
start speaking ‘now’. And after a further hour of telephoning, he hadn’t found a single charitable organization which had held a flag day in Oxford – or anywhere else in the
vicinity, for that matter – in the last few days of December.

He was getting, ridiculously, nowhere; and he said as much when Morse finally put in another appearance at 11 a.m. with a cup of coffee and a digestive biscuit, both of which (mistakenly) Lewis
thought his superior officer had brought in for him.

‘We need some of those men we’ve been promised, sir.’

‘No, no, Lewis! We don’t want to start explaining everything to a load of squaddies. Just have a go at the clinic angle if the other’s no good. I’ll come and give you a
hand when I get the chance.’

So Lewis made another start – this time on those Oxford hair clinics which had bothered to take a few centimetres of advertising space in the Yellow Pages: only four of them, thank
goodness! But once again the problem soon began to take on unexpectedly formidable dimensions – once he began to consider the sort of questions he could ask a clinic manageress –
if
she was on the premises. For what
could
he ask? He wanted to find out if a woman whose name he didn’t know, whose appearance he could only very imperfectly describe, and
of whose address he hadn’t the faintest notion, except perhaps that it might just be in Chipping Norton – whether such a woman had been in for some unspecified treatment, but probably
upper-lip depilation, at some unspecified time, though most probably on the morning of, let him say, any of the last few days of December. What a farce, thought Lewis; and what a fruitless farce it
did in fact become. The first of the clinics firmly refused to answer questions, even to the police, about such ‘strictly confidential’ matters; the second was quite happy to inform him
that it had no customers whatsoever on its books with an address in Chipping Norton; a recorded message informed him that the third would re-open after the New Year break on January 6th; and the
fourth suggested, politely enough, that he must have misread the advertisement: that whilst it cut, trimmed, singed and dyed, the actual
removal
of hair was not included amongst its
splendid services.

Lewis put down the phone – and capitulated. He went over to the canteen and found Morse – the only one there – drinking another cup of coffee and just completing
The
Times
crossword puzzle.

‘Ah, Lewis. Get yourself a coffee! Any luck yet?’

‘No, I bloody haven’t,’ snapped Lewis – a man who swore, at the very outside, about once a fortnight. ‘As I said, sir, I need some help: half a dozen DCs –
that’s what I need.’

‘I don’t think it’s necessary, you know.’

‘Well, I
do
!’ said Lewis, looking as angry as Morse had ever seen him, and about to use up a whole month’s ration of blasphemies. ‘We’re not even sure the
bloody woman
does
come from Chipping Norton. She might just as well come from Chiswick – like the tart you met in Paddington!’

‘Lew-is! Lew-is! Take it
easy
! I’m sure that neither the “Palmers” nor the Smiths had anything at all to do with the murder. And when I said just now it
wasn’t necessary to bring any more people in on the case, I didn’t mean that you couldn’t have as many as you like – if you really need them. But not for this particular
job, Lewis, I don’t think. I didn’t want to disturb you, so I’ve been doing a bit of phoning from here; and I’m waiting for a call that ought to come through any minute. And
if it tells me what I think it will, I reckon we know exactly who this “Mrs Ballard” is, and exactly where we should be able to find her. Her name’s Mrs Bowman – Mrs
Margaret Bowman. And do you know where she lives?’

‘Chipping Norton?’ suggested Lewis, in a rather wearily defeated tone.

M
ORSE HAD BEEN
glad to accept Mrs Lewis’s invitation to her traditional Sunday lunch of slightly undercooked beef, horseradish sauce, velvety-flat
Yorkshire pudding, and roast potatoes; and the meal had been a success. In deference to the great man’s presence, Lewis had bought a bottle of Beaujolais Nouveau; and as Morse leaned back in
a deep-cushioned armchair and drank his coffee, he felt very much at his ease.

‘I sometimes wish I’d taken a gentle little job in the Egyptian Civil Service, Lewis.’

‘Fancy a drop of brandy, sir?’

‘Why not?’

From the rattle and clatter coming from the kitchen, it was clear that Mrs Lewis had launched herself into the washing-up, but Morse kept his voice down as he spoke again. ‘I know that a
dirty weekend away with some wonderful woman sounds just like the thing for some jaded fellow getting on in age a bit – like you, Lewis – but you’d be an idiot to leave that
lovely cook you married—’

‘I’ve never given it a thought, sir.’

‘There are one or two people in this case, though, aren’t there, who seem to have been doing a bit of double-dealing one way or another?’

Lewis nodded as he, too, leaned back in his armchair sipping his coffee, and letting his mind go back to the previous day’s startling new development, and to Morse’s explanation of
how it had occurred . . .

‘. . . If you ever decide to kick over the traces’ (Morse had said) ‘you’ve
got
to have an accommodation address – that’s the vital
point to bear in mind. All right, there are a few people, like the Smiths, who can get away without one; but don’t forget they’re professional swindlers and they know all the rules of
the game backwards. In the normal course of events, though, you’ve got to get involved in some sort of correspondence. Now, if the princess you’re going away with isn’t married or
if she’s a divorcee or if she is just living on her own anyway, then there’s no problem, is there? She can be your mistress
and
your missus for the weekend and
she
can
deal with all the booking – just like Philippa Palmer did. She can use – she
must
use – her own address and, as I say, there are no problems. Now let’s just recap
for a minute about where we are with the third woman in this case, the woman who wrote to the hotel as “Mrs Ann Ballard” and who booked in as “Mrs Ann Ballard” from an
address in Chipping Norton. Obviously, if we can find her, and find out from her what went on in Annexe 3 on New Year’s Eve – or New Year’s morning – well, we shall be home
and dry, shan’t we? And in fact we know a good deal about her. The key thing – or what I
thought
was the key thing – was that she’d probably gone to a hair clinic a
day or so before turning up at the Haworth Hotel. I’m sorry, Lewis, that you’ve had such a disappointing time with that side of things. But there was this
other
side which I
kept on thinking about – the address she wrote
from
and the address the hotel wrote
to
. Now you can’t exchange correspondence with a phoney address – obviously
you can’t! And yet, you know, you
can
! You
must
be able to – because it
happened
, Lewis! And when you think about it you can do it pretty easily if
you’ve got one particular advantage in life – just the one. And you know what that advantage is?
It’s being a postman
. Now let’s just take an example. Let’s
take the Banbury Road. The house numbers go up a long, long way, don’t they? I’m not sure, but certainly to about four hundred and eighty or so. Now if the last house is, say, number
478, what exactly happens to a letter addressed to a non-existent 480? The sorters in the main post office are not going to be much concerned, are they? It’s only
just
above the last
house-number; and as likely as not – even if someone did spot it – he’d probably think a new house was being built there. But if it were addressed, say, to 580, then obviously a
sorter is going to think that something’s gone askew, and he probably won’t put that letter into the appropriate pigeon-hole. In cases like that, Lewis, there’s a tray for problem
letters, and one of the higher-echelon post-office staff will try to sort them all out later. But whichever way things go, whether the letter would get into the postman’s bag, or whether it
would get put into the problem tray – it wouldn’t matter! You see, the postman himself would be there on the premises while all this sorting was taking place! I know! I’ve had a
long talk on the phone with the Chief Postmaster from Chipping Norton – splendid fellow! – and he said that the letter we saw from the Haworth Hotel, the one addressed to 84 West
Street, would pretty certainly have gone straight into the West Street pigeon-hole, because it’s only a couple over the last street-number; and even if it had been put in the problem tray,
the postman waiting to get his sack over his shoulder would have every opportunity of seeing it, and taking it. And there were only two postmen who delivered to West Street in December: one was a
youngish fellow who’s spending the New Year with his girlfriend in the Canary Islands; and the other is this fellow called Tom Bowman, who lives at Charlbury Drive in Chipping Norton. But
there’s nobody there – neither him nor his wife – and none of the neighbours knows where they’ve gone, although Margaret Bowman was at her work in Summertown on Thursday and
Friday last week: I’ve checked that. Anyway there’s not much more we can do this weekend. Max says he’ll have the body all sewn up and presentable again by Monday, and so we ought
to know who he is pretty soon.’

It had been after Morse had finished that Lewis ventured the most important question of all: ‘Do you think the murdered man is Tom Bowman, sir?’ And Morse had hesitated before
replying. ‘Do you know, Lewis, I’ve got a strange sort of feeling that
it isn’t
. . .’

Morse had nodded off in his chair, and Lewis quietly left the room to help with the drying-up.

That same Sunday afternoon Sarah Jonstone at last got back to her flat. She knew that she would almost certainly never have such an amazing experience again in her life, and
she had been reluctant to leave the hotel whilst police activity was continuously centred upon it. But even the ropes that had cordoned off the area were gone, and no policeman now stood by the
side door of the annexe block. Mrs Binyon (who had not originally intended to stay at the Haworth for the New Year anyway, but who had been pressed into reluctant service because of the illnesses
of so many staff) had at last, that morning, set off on her trip north to visit her parents in Leeds. Only half a dozen people were booked into the hotel that Sunday evening, although (perversely!)
the staff who had been so ill were now almost fully recovered. Sarah was putting on her coat at 3.30 p.m. when the phone went in Reception and a young woman’s voice, a quietly attractive one,
asked if she could please speak to Mr Binyon if he was there. But when Sarah asked for the woman’s name, the line went suddenly dead.

Sarah found herself recalling this little incident later in the evening as she sat watching TV. But it wasn’t important, she told herself; probably just a line cut off by
some technical trouble or other.
Could
it be important though? Chief Inspector Morse had begged her to dredge her memory to salvage
anything
that she could recall; and there
had
been that business about the sticker on Mrs Ballard’s coat . . . But there was something else, she knew, if only her mind could get hold of it.

But, for the moment, it couldn’t.

G
LADYS
T
AYLOR WOULD
be very sorry to leave ‘The University of Oxford Delegacy of Local Examinations’. It was all a
bit of a mouthful when people asked her where she worked; but the Examination Board’s premises, a large, beige-bricked, flat-roofed building in Summertown, had been her happy second home for
nineteen and a half years now – and some neat streak within her wished it could have been the full twenty. But the ‘Locals’, as the Board was affectionately known, insisted that
those women like herself – ‘supernumeraries’, they were called – had their contracts terminated in the session following their sixtieth birthday. These
‘sessions’, four or five of them every academic year, varied in duration from three or four weeks to nine or ten weeks; and the work involved in each session was almost as varied as its
duration. For example, the current short session (and Gladys’s last – for she had been sixty the previous November) involved three weeks of concentrated arithmetical checking of scripts
– additions, scalings, transfers of marks – from the autumn GCE retake examinations. The entry was very much smaller than the massive summer one, comprising those candidates who had
failed adequately to impress the examiners on the earlier occasion. But such young men and women (the ‘returned empties’, as some called them) were rather nearer Gladys Taylor’s
heart than many of the precious summer thoroughbreds (she knew a few of them!) who seemed to romp around the academic racecourses with almost arrogant facility. For, in her own eyes, Gladys had
been a bit of a failure herself, leaving her secondary-modern school at the beginning of the war, at the age of fifteen, with nothing to show any prospective employer except a lukewarm testimonial
to her perseverance and punctuality. Then, at the age of forty-one, following the premature death of a lorry-driver husband who, besides faltering in fidelity, had failed to father any offspring,
she had applied to work at the Locals – and she had been accepted. During those first few months she had brought to her duties a care over detail that was almost pathological in its
intensity, and she had often found herself waking up in the early hours and wondering if she had perpetrated some unforgivable error. But she had settled down; and thoroughly enjoyed the work. Her
conscientiousness had been recognized by her supervisors and acknowledged by her fellow ‘Supers’; and finally, over the last few years, she had been rewarded by a belated promotion to a
post of some small responsibility, part of which involved working with inexperienced women who came to join the various teams; and for the past six months Gladys had been training a very much
younger woman in the mysteries of the whole complex apparatus. This younger woman’s name was Margaret Bowman.