The Secret of Annexe 3 (27 page)

‘Course he would! He paid us, didn’t he?’

‘The group you’re in – was playing there?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you were there
all the evening
?’

‘Till about two o’clock the next morning.’

‘How many others in the group?’

‘Four.’

‘And how many people were there at the Friar that night?’

‘Sixty? – seventy? on and off.’

‘Which bar were you in?’

‘Lounge bar.’

‘And you didn’t leave the bar all night?’

‘Well, we had steak and chips in the back room at about – half-past nine, I suppose it was.’

‘With the rest of the group?’

‘
And
the landlord –
and
the landlady.’

‘This is New Year’s Eve you’re talking about?’

‘Look, Sergeant, I’ve been here a long time already tonight, haven’t I? Can you please ring up the Friar and get someone here straight away? Or ring up any of the group?
I’m getting awfully tired – and it’s been one hell of an evening for me – you can understand that, can’t you?’

There was a silence in the room – a silence that seemed to Phillips to take on an almost palpable tautness, as the import of Wilkins’s claim slowly sank into the minds of the
detectives there.

‘What does your group call itself, Mr Wilkins?’ It was Morse himself who quietly asked the final question.

‘The “Oxford Blues”,’ said Wilkins, his face hard and unamused.

Charlie Freeman (‘Fingers’ Freeman to his musical colleagues) was surprised to find a uniformed constable standing on his Kidlington doorstep that evening. Yes, the
‘Oxford Blues’ had played the Friar on New Year’s Eve; yes,
he’d
played there that night, with Ted Wilkins, for about five or six hours; yes, he’d be more
than willing to go along to Police HQ immediately and make a statement to that effect. No great hardship for him, was it? After all, it was only a couple of minutes’ walk away.

By 9.30 p.m. Mr Edward Wilkins had been driven back to his home in Diamond Close; Phillips, at long last, had been given permission to call it a day; and Lewis, tired and
dejected, sat in Morse’s office, wondering where they had all gone so sadly wrong. Perhaps he might have suspected – and he’d actually
said
so – that Morse’s
ideas had all been a bit too bizarre: a man murdered in fancy-dress outfit; and then another man spending the night of the party pretending he
was
the murdered man and dressed in a
virtually identical outfit. Surely, surely, the simple truth was that
Thomas Bowman
had been the man at the party, as well as the man who’d been murdered! There would be (as Lewis
knew) lots of difficulties in substantiating such a view; but none of them were anywhere near as insurmountable as trying to break Wilkins’s alibi – an alibi which could be vouched for
by sixty or seventy wholly disinterested witnesses. Gently, quietly, Lewis mentioned his thoughts to Morse – the latter sitting silent and morose in the old black leather armchair. ‘You
could be right, Lewis.’ Morse rubbed his left hand across his eyes. ‘Anyway, it’s no good worrying about it tonight. My judgement’s gone! I need a drink. You
coming?’

‘No. I’ll get straight home, if you don’t mind, sir. It’s been a long day, and I should think the missus’ll have something cooking for me.’

‘I should be surprised if she hasn’t.’

‘You’re looking tired, sir. Do you want me to give you a lift?’

Morse nodded wearily. ‘Just drop me at the Friar, if you will.’

As he walked up to the entrance, Morse stopped. Red, blue, green and orange lights were flashing through the lounge windows, and the place was athrob with the live music of
what sounded like some Caribbean delirium at the Oval greeting a test century from Vivian Richards. Morse checked his step and walked round to the public bar, where in comparative peace he sat and
drank two pints of Morrell’s bitter and watched a couple of incompetent pool-players pretending to be Steve Davises. On the wall beside the dartboard he saw the notice:

Morse pondered a quick third pint; but it wanted only a couple of minutes to eleven, and he decided to get home – just a few minutes’ walk away, along Carlton Road and thence just a
little way down the Banbury Road to his bachelor flat. But something thwarted this decision, and he ordered another pint, a large Bell’s Scotch and a packet of plain crisps.

At twenty minutes past eleven he was the last one in the public bar, and the young barman wiping the tabletops suggested that he should finish his drink and leave: it was not unknown (Morse
learned) for the police to check up on over-liquored loiterers after a live music evening.

As he left, Morse saw the Calypso Quartet packing away its collection of steel drums and sundry other Caribbean instruments into the back of an old, oft-dented Dormobile. And suddenly Morse
stopped. He stopped dead. He stopped as if petrified, staring at the man who had just closed the back door of the vehicle and who was languidly lolling round to the driving seat. Even in the bitter
late-night air this man wore only a blood-red, open-necked shirt on the upper part of his loose-limbed body; whilst on his head he had a baggy black-and-white checked cap that covered all his hair
apart from the beaded dreadlocks which dangled on either side of his face like the snakes that once wreathed the head of the stone-eyed Gorgon.

‘You all right, man?’ enquired the coloured musician, holding both hands up in a mock gesture of concern about a fellow mortal who seemed to have imbibed too freely perhaps and too
well. And Morse noticed the hands – hands that were almost like the hands of a white man, as though the Almighty had just about run out of pigment when he came to the palms.

‘You all right, man?’ repeated the musician.

Morse nodded, and there appeared on his face a stupidly beatific smile such as was seldom seen there – save when he listened to the love duet from Act One of
Die Walküre
.

Morse should (he knew it!) not have left things where they were that night. But his eyelids drooped heavily over his prickly-tired eyes as he walked back to his flat and in
spite of his elation, he had little enough strength left, little appetite for anything more that day. But before throwing himself on the longed-for bed, he did ring Lewis; and prevailed upon Mrs
Lewis (still up) to rouse her husband (an hour abed) for a few quick words before January 7th drew to its seemingly interminable close. And when, after only a brief monologue from Morse, a
weary-brained Lewis put his receiver down, he, too, knew the identity of the man who on New Year’s Eve had walked back to the annexe of the Haworth Hotel with Helen Smith on the one side and
Philippa Palmer on the other.

A
T THE DESK
of the Haworth Hotel the following morning, Sarah Jonstone greeted Sergeant Lewis as if she were glad to see him; which indeed she was,
since she had at last remembered the little thing that had been troubling her. So early in the day (it was only eight thirty), her excessively circumferenced spectacles were still riding high upon
her pretty little nose, and it could hardly be claimed, at least for the present, that she was being hectically overworked; in fact Lewis had already observed her none-too-convincing attempt to
conceal beneath a pile of correspondence the book she had been reading when he had so unexpectedly walked in – on Morse’s instruction – to interview her once again.

It was just a little corroboration (Lewis had pointed out) that was needed; and Sarah found herself once again seeking to stress the few unequivocally certain points she had made in her earlier
statement. Yes, she
did
remember, and very clearly, the man coming out of the Gentlemen’s lavatory just before the New Year’s Eve party was due to begin; yes (now that Lewis
mentioned it) perhaps his hands
hadn’t
been blackened-over as convincingly as the rest of him; yes, the two of them, ‘Mr and Mrs Ballard’,
had
kept themselves
very much to themselves for the greater part of the evening – certainly until that hour or so before midnight when a series of eightsome reels, general excuse-mes and old-time barn-dances had
severed the last ties of self-consciousness and timidity; and when ‘Mr Ballard’ had danced with her, his sweaty fingers leaving some of their dark stain on her own hands,
and
on her blouse; yes, without a shadow of doubt that last fact
was
true, because she remembered with a sweet clarity how she had washed her hands in the bedroom washbasin before going to bed
that night, and how she had tried to sponge the stain off her blouse the following morning.

A middle-aged couple stood waiting to pay their bill; and while Sarah fetched the account from the small room at the back of Reception, Lewis turned his head to one side and was thus able to
make out the title on the white spine of the book she had been reading: MILLGATE:
Thomas Hardy
–
A Biography
. O.U.P.

The bill settled, Sarah resumed her seat and told Lewis what she had remembered. It had been odd, though it didn’t really seem all that important now. What had happened was that someone
– a woman – had rung up and asked what the New Year’s Eve menu was: that was all. As far as she could recall, the little incident had taken place on the Monday before – that
would be December 30th.

Knowing how pleased Morse would be to have one of his hunches confirmed, Lewis was on the point of taking down some firm statement from Sarah Jonstone when he became aware of an extraordinarily
attractive brunette standing beside him, shifting the weight of her beautifully moulded figure from one black-stockinged leg to the other.

‘Can I have my bill, please?’ she asked. Although the marked Birmingham accent was not, as he heard it, exactly the music of the spheres, Lewis found himself staring at the woman
with an almost riveted fascination.

The whispered voice in his ear was totally unexpected: ‘Take your lecherous eyes off her, Lewis!’

‘Thank you very much, Miss Arkwright!’ said Sarah Jonstone, as the woman turned and left, flashing a brief, but almost interested, glance at the man who had just come in.

‘Good morning, Miss Jonstone!’ said Morse.

‘Oh, hello!’ There was nothing about her greeting that could be construed as even wanly welcoming.

‘Is she the same one?’ asked Morse, gesturing after the departed beauty. ‘The one who was due for the New Year?’

‘Yes!’

‘Well, well!’ said Morse, looking quite extraordinarily pleased with himself and with life in general; and quite clearly pleased with the sight of Miss Doris Arkwright in particular.
‘Could you please ask
Mrs
Binyon to come along to Reception, Miss Jonstone? There’s something rather important—’

‘She’s not here, I’m afraid. She’s gone up to Leeds. She
was
going there for the New Year, but—’

‘Really? How
very
interesting! Well thank you very much, Miss Jonstone. Come on, Lewis! We’ve a busy morning ahead.’

‘Miss Jonstone remembered something—’ started Lewis.

‘Forget it for the minute! Bigger things to worry about just now! Goodbye, Miss Jonstone!’

Morse was still smirking to himself with infinite self-satisfaction as, for the last time, the two men walked from the Haworth Hotel.

An hour later, a man was arrested at his home in southeast Oxford. This time, there were no revolvers on view; and the man in question, promptly cautioned by Sergeant Lewis of
the Oxfordshire CID, made no show of resistance whatsoever.

T
HE
B
OEING
737 scheduled to take off from Gatwick at 12.05 hours was almost fully booked, with only four or five empty seats
visible as the air hostesses went through their dumb-shows with the oxygen masks and the inflatable life-jackets. It was noticeable that almost all the passengers were paying the most careful
attention to the advice being offered: several tragic air crashes during the previous months had engendered a sort of collective pterophobia, and airport lounges throughout the world were reporting
a dramatic rise in the sales of tranquillizing pills and alcoholic spirits. But quite certainly there were two persons on the aircraft (and there may have been others) who listened only
perfunctorily to the safety instructions being rehearsed that lunchtime. For one of these two persons, the transit through the terminal had been a nightmare: and yet, as it now seemed, there had
been no real cause for anxiety. Documentation, baggage, passport – none had brought any problem at all. For the second of these two persons, worries had sprung from a slightly different
source; yet he, too, was now beginning to feel more relaxed. As he looked down from his window-seat on to the wet tarmac, his left hand quietly slid the half-bottle of brandy from his anorak
pocket, allowing his right hand to unscrew the cap. The attention of those passengers sitting immediately around him was still focused on the slim-waisted stewardesses, and he was able to pour for
himself a couple of tots without his imbibings being too obvious. And already he felt slightly better! It had been a damnably close-run thing – but he’d made it! A sign came on just
above him, bidding all passengers to fasten their seatbelts and to refrain from smoking until further notice; the engines vibrated anew along the fuselage; and the stewardesses took their seats,
facing the passengers, and smiling perhaps with slightly spurious confidence upon their latest charges. Gradually the giant plane moved forward in a quarter-turn, took up its proper station, and
stood there for a minute or two preparing, like a long-jump finalist in the Olympic Games, to accelerate along the runway. The man seated by the window knew that any second now he would be able to
relax – almost completely. Like so many fellow criminals, he was under the happy delusion that there was no extradition treaty between Spain and the United Kingdom, and he had read of so many
criminals – bank robbers, embezzlers, drug-peddlers and pederasts – who were even now lounging lazily at various resorts along the Costa del Sol. Suddenly the aircraft’s throttles
were opened completely and the mighty power seemed almost a tangible entity.