The Secret of Annexe 3 (21 page)

Margaret looked at her own right hand – a couple of blue biro marks across the bottom of the thumb – and thought of the tortured atonement that Cranmer had sought, and welcomed, for
his earlier weaknesses. A tear ran hurriedly down her cheek, and she took from her handbag a white paper handkerchief to dry her eyes.

The stairs – iron now, and no longer enclosed for the next two flights – led up and over the roof of the Lady Chapel, and she felt a sense of exhilaration in the cold air as she
climbed higher still to the Bell Tower, where the man with the binoculars, his hair windswept, had just descended the stone spiral staircase that led to the top.

‘Not much further!’ he volunteered. ‘Bit blowy up there, though. Bit slippery, too. Be careful!’

For several seconds as she emerged at the top of the tower, Margaret was conscious of a terrifying giddiness as her eyes glimpsed, just below her feet, the black iron ring that circled the
golden-painted Roman numerals of the great clock adorning the north wall of the church. But the panic was soon gone, and she looked out across at the Radcliffe Camera; and then to the left of the
Camera at the colleges along Broad Street; then the buildings of Balliol where Cranmer had redeemed his soul amid the burning brushwood; then she could see the leafless trees along St Giles’,
and the roads that led off from there into North Oxford; and then the giant yellow crane that stood at the Haworth Hotel in the Banbury Road. She took a few steps along the high-walk towards the
north-western corner of the tower, and she suddenly felt a sense of elation, and the tears welled up again in her eyes as the wind blew back her hair, and as she held her head up to the elements
with the same joyous carelessness she had shown as a young girl when the rain had showered down on her tip-tilted face . . .

At a point on the corner, her wholly inadequate and unsuitable shoes had slipped along the walkway, and a man standing below watched the black handbag as it plummeted to the earth and landed,
neatly erect, in a drift of snow beneath the north-west angle of the tower.

M
ORSE WAS DISSATISFIED
and restless – that much was obvious as they sat outside the Bowmans’ house in Charlbury Drive. Ten minutes they
waited, Morse just sitting there in the passenger seat, his safety-belt still on, staring out of the window. Then another ten minutes, with Morse occasionally clicking his tongue and taking sharp
audible breaths of impatient frustration.

‘Think she’s coming back?’ said Lewis.

‘I dunno.’

‘How long are we going to wait?’

‘How do
I
know!’

‘Just asked.’

‘I tell you one thing, Lewis. I’m making one bloody marvellous mess of this case!’

‘I don’t know about that, sir.’

‘Well you
should
know! We should never have let her out of our sight.’

Lewis nodded, but said nothing; and for a further ten minutes the pair of them sat in silence.

But there was no sign of Margaret Bowman.

‘What do you suggest we do, Lewis?’ asked Morse finally.

‘I think we ought to go to the post office: see if we can find some of Bowman’s handwriting – there must be something there; see if any of his mates know anything about where
he is or where he’s gone; that sort of thing.’

‘And you’d like to get somebody from there to go and look at the body, wouldn’t you? You think it
is
Bowman!’

‘I’d just like to check, that’s all. Check it
isn’t
Bowman, if you like. But we haven’t done anything at all yet, sir, about identification.’

‘And you’re telling me it’s about bloody time we did!’

‘Yessir.’

‘All right. Let’s do it your way. Waste of time but—’ His voice was almost a snarl.

‘Are you feeling all right, sir?’

‘Course I’m not feeling all right! Can’t you see I’m dying for a bloody cigarette, man?’

The visit to the post office produced little information that was not already known. Tom Bowman had worked on the Thursday, Friday and Saturday following Christmas Day, and then had taken a
week’s holiday. He should have been back at work that very day, the 6th; but as yet no one had seen or heard anything of him. It seemed he was a quiet, punctual, methodical sort of fellow,
who had been working there for six years now. No one knew his wife Margaret very well, though it was common knowledge that she had a job in Oxford and took quite a bit of trouble over her clothes
and her personal appearance. There were two handwritten letters from Bowman in the personnel file: one dating back to his first application to join the PO; the second concerning itself with his
options under the PO pension provisions. Clearly there had been little or no calligraphic variance in Bowman’s penmanship over the years, and here seemed further evidence – if any were
required – that the letter Margaret Bowman had produced from her handbag that morning was genuinely in her husband’s hand. Mr Jeacock, the co-operative and neatly competent postmaster,
could tell them little more; but, yes, he was perfectly happy for one of Bowman’s colleagues to follow the police officers down into Oxford to look at the unidentified body.

‘Let’s hope to God it’s
not
Tom! he said as Morse and Lewis got up and left his small office.

‘I honestly don’t think you need to worry about that, sir,’ said Morse.

As always, the cars coming up in the immediate rear had all decelerated to the statutory speed limit; and by the time the police car reached the dual carriageway just after
Blenheim Palace, with Mr Frederick Norris, sorter of Her Majesty’s mail in Chipping Norton, immediately behind, there was an enormous tailback of vehicles. Morse, who had told Lewis to take
things quietly, sat silent throughout the return journey, and Lewis too held his peace. At the bottom of the Woodstock Road he turned right into a narrow road at the Radcliffe Infirmary and stopped
on an ‘Ambulances Only’ parking lot outside the mortuary to which the body found in the Haworth annexe had now been transferred. Norris got out of the car that pulled up behind
them.

‘You coming, sir?’ asked Lewis.

But Morse shook his head.

Fred Norris stood stock-still for a few seconds, and then – somewhat to Lewis’s bewilderment – nodded slowly, his own pallor only a degree less ghastly than
the skin that backed the livid bruising of the murdered man’s features. No words were spoken; but as the mortuary attendant replaced the white sheet, Lewis put a kindly, understanding hand on
Norris’s shoulder, and then gently urged him out of the grim building into the bright January air.

An ambulance had pulled in just ahead of the police car, and Lewis, as he stood fixing a time with Norris for an official statement, saw the ambulance driver unhurriedly get out and speak to one
of the porters at the Accident entrance. From the general lack of urgency, Lewis gathered that the man was probably delivering some fussy octogenarian for her weekly dose of physiotherapy. But the
back doors were suddenly opened to reveal the body of a woman covered in a red blanket, with only the shoeless stockinged feet protruding. Lewis’s throat was dry as he walked past the police
car, and saw Morse (the latter still unaware of the dramatic news that Lewis was about to impart) point to the back of the ambulance.

‘Who is she?’ asked Lewis as the two ambulancemen prepared to fix the runners for the stretcher.

‘Are you . . .?’ The driver jerked his thumb towards the police car.

‘Chief Inspector Morse – him! Not me!’

‘Accident. They found her—’

‘How old?’

The man shrugged. ‘Forty?’

‘You know who she is?’

The man shook his head. ‘No one knows yet. No purse. No handbag.’

Lewis drew back the blanket and looked at the woman’s face, his heart pounding in anticipatory dread – for such an eventuality, as he well knew, was exactly what Morse had
feared.

But the ambulance driver was right in suggesting that no one knew who she was: Lewis didn’t know, either. For the dead woman in the back of the ambulance was certainly not Mrs Margaret
Bowman.

That same lunch-hour, some fifty minutes before Norris had positively identified the man murdered at the Haworth Hotel as Mr Thomas Bowman, Ronald Armitage, an idle, dirty,
feckless, cold, hungry, semi-drunken sixty-three-year-old layabout – unemployed and unemployable – experienced a remarkable piece of good fortune. He had spent the previous night
huddled up on a bench in the passage that leads from Radcliffe Square to the High, and had spent most of the morning on the same bench, with an empty flagon of Bulmer’s Cider at his numbed
feet, and one dirty five-pound note and a few 10p coins in the pocket of the ankle-length greatcoat that for many years had been his most treasured possession. When he had first seen the black
handbag as it plummeted to the ground, and came to rest in a cushion of deep snow at the corner of the church, his instinctive reaction was to look sharply and suspiciously around him. But for the
moment the square was empty; and he quickly grabbed the handbag, putting it beneath the front of his coat, and walked hurriedly off over the snow-covered cobbles outside Brasenose into the lane on
the left that led through to the Turl. Here – with none of his cronies in sight – like a wolf which grabs a great gobbet of meat from the kill and takes it away from the envious eyes of
the rest of the pack, he examined his exciting discovery. Inside the handbag he found a lipstick, a powder compact, a comb, a cheap cigarette lighter, a packet of white paper handkerchiefs, a
leaflet about St Mary the Virgin, a small pair of nail scissors, a bunch of car keys, two other keys – and a brown leather purse-cum-wallet. The plastic cards – Visa, Access, Lloyds
– he ignored, but he quickly pocketed the two beautifully crisp ten-pound notes and the three one-pound coins he found therein.

In mid-afternoon, he wandered slowly up the High to Carfax, and then turned left down past Christ Church and into St Aldates Police Station where he handed the bag over to Lost Property.

‘Where did you find it?’asked the sergeant on duty.

‘Someone must have dropped it—’

‘You better leave your name—’

‘Nah! Don’t fink so.’

‘Might be a reward!’

‘Cheers, mate!’

I
T WAS SELDOM
that Morse ever asked for more personnel. Indeed, it was his private view that the sight (as so often witnessed on TV) of a hundred or so
uniformed policemen crawling in echelon across a tract of heathland often brought the force into something approaching derision. He himself had once taken part in such a massive sweep across a
field in North Staffordshire, ending up, as he had done, with one empty packet of Featherlite Durex, one empty can of alcohol-free lager – and (the next morning) a troublesome bout of
lumbago.

But he
did
ask for more personnel on the afternoon of January 6th; and Lewis, for one, was glad that much needed help (in the shape of Sergeant Phillips and two detective constables)
had been summoned to follow up all inquiries regarding Margaret Bowman.

Oddly enough (yet almost everything about him was odd, as Lewis knew) Morse had shown no great surprise on hearing the news that the murdered man was Thomas Bowman; indeed, the only emotion he
showed – and that of immense relief – was after learning that the other corpse on view that lunchtime was
not
Margaret Bowman’s. In fact, Morse suddenly seemed much more
at peace with himself as he sat with Lewis in the Royal Oak, just opposite the hospital – a circumstance (as Lewis rightly guessed) not wholly unconnected with the fact that after his
Herculean efforts over Christmas and the New Year he had finally surrendered and bought himself a packet of cigarettes. At two-thirty, they were once more on the A34 to Chipping Norton, this time
with a much firmer mission – to investigate the property at 6 Charlbury Drive, which had now quite definitely become the focus of the murder inquiry.

‘Shall we break one of the front windows or one of the back ones?’ Morse asked as they stood in front of the property, faces at a good many windows in the quiet
cul-de-sac now watching the activity with avid curiosity. But such forcible ingress proved unnecessary. Lewis it was who suggested that most people (‘Well, the missus does’) leave a key
with the neighbours: and so it proved in this case, with the elderly woman in number 5 promptly producing both a back-door and a front-door key. Mrs Bowman, it appeared, had gone out on Friday
evening, saying she wouldn’t be back until Monday after work; hadn’t been back, either – as far as the woman knew.

Finding nothing of immediate interest in the downstairs rooms, Lewis went upstairs where he found Morse in one of the two spare bedrooms looking into a cumbrous dark mahogany wardrobe which
(apart from an old-fashioned armchair) was the only item of furniture there.

‘Found anything, sir?’

Morse shook his head. ‘Lots of shoes he had.’

‘Not much help.’

‘No help at all.’

‘Can you smell anything, sir?’

‘Such as?’

‘Whisky?’ suggested Lewis.

Morse’s eyes lit up as he sniffed, and sniffed again.

‘I reckon you’re right, you know.’

There was a stack of white shoe boxes, and they found the half-full bottle of Bell’s in the third box from the bottom.

‘You think he was a secret drinker, sir?’

‘What if he was?
I’m
a secret drinker – aren’t you?’

‘No, sir. And I wouldn’t have got away with this. The missus cleans all my shoes.’