The Secret of Annexe 3 (28 page)

Then the engines seemed to die a little.

And then they seemed to die completely.

And two members of Gatwick Security Police boarded the aircraft.

For the man in the window-seat, beside whom these men stopped, there appeared little point in even thinking of escape. Where was there to escape to?

The Boeing was only very slightly delayed; and five minutes behind schedule it was shooting off the earth at an angle of forty-five degrees and heading for its appointed
destination. Very soon, passengers were told that they could unfasten their seatbelts: everything was fine. And six rows behind the now-empty window-seat, a woman lit a cigarette and inhaled very
deeply.

M
ORSE SAT IN
Superintendent Bell’s office in St Aldates awaiting Lewis – the latter having been deputed the task of taking down in his
rather laborious longhand the statement from the man arrested earlier that day at his home in south-east Oxford.

‘Damned clever, you know!’ reiterated Bell.

Morse nodded: he liked Bell well enough perhaps – though not overmuch – and he found himself wishing that Lewis would get a move on.

‘Well done, anyway!’ said Bell. ‘The Chief Constable’ll be pleased.’

‘Perhaps he’ll let me have a day or two’s holiday before the end of the decade.’

‘We’re
very
grateful, though – you know that, don’t you?’

‘Yes,’ said Morse, honestly enough.

It was a highly euphoric Lewis who came in at a quarter past one, thrusting a statement – four pages of it – on the desk in front of Morse. ‘Maybe a few
little errors in English usage here and there, sir; but on the whole a splendid piece of prose, I think you’ll find.’

Morse took the statement and scanned the last page:

‘The adverb from “bad” is “badly”,’ mumbled Morse.

‘Shall we keep him here?’ asked Bell.

‘He’s your man,’ said Morse.

‘And the charge – officially?’

‘“Accessory to murder”, I suppose – but I’m not a legal man.’

‘“Party to murder”, perhaps?’ suggested Lewis, who had seldom looked so happy since his elder daughter announced her first pregnancy.

Back at Kidlington HQ, Morse sat back in the old black leather armchair, looking (for the while) imperturbably expansive. The man arrested at Gatwick, almost two hours earlier,
was well on his way to Oxfordshire, expected (Morse learned) within the next fifteen minutes. It was a time to savour.

Lewis himself now knew exactly what had happened on New Year’s Eve in Annexe 3; knew, too, that the murderer of Thomas Bowman had neither set foot inside the main hotel building, nor
bedecked himself in a single item of fancy dress. And yet, as to how Morse had arrived at the truth, he felt as puzzled as a small boy witnessing his first conjuring performance. ‘What really
put you on to it, sir?’

‘The
key
point was, as I told you, that the murderer tried desperately hard to persuade us that the crime was committed
as late as possible
: after midnight. But as you
yourself rightly observed, Lewis, there would seem to be little point in such a deception if the murderer stayed on the scene the whole time from about eight that night to one o’clock the
next morning. But there was every point if he
wasn’t
on the scene in the latter part of the evening – a time for which he had an
alibi
!’

‘But, sir—’

‘There were three clues in this case which should have put us on to the truth much earlier than they did. Each of these three clues, in itself, looks like a pedestrian little piece of
information; but taken together – well . . . The
first
vital clue came largely from Sarah Jonstone – the only really valuable and coherent witness in the whole case – and
it was this: that the man posing as “Mr Ballard” ate virtually nothing that evening! The
second
vital clue – also brought to our notice, among others, by Miss Jonstone
– was the fact that the man posing as “Mr Ballard” was still staining whatever he touched late that evening! Then there was the
third
vital clue – the simplest clue
of the lot, and one which was staring all of us in the face from the very beginning. So obvious a clue that none of us – none of us! – paid the slightest attention to it: the fact that
the man posing as “Mr Ballard” won the fancy-dress competition!

‘You see, Lewis, there are two ways of looking at each of these clues – the complex way, and the simple way. And we’d been looking at them the wrong way – we’ve
been looking at them the
complex
way.’

‘I see,’ said Lewis, unseeing.

‘Take the food business,’ continued Morse. ‘We almost got in some hopelessly complex muddle about it, didn’t we? I read carefully what dear old Max said in his report
about what had been floating up and down in the ascending and descending colons. You, Lewis, were bemused enough to listen to what Miss Jonstone said about someone ringing up to ask what the menu
was. Why the hell
shouldn’t
someone ring up and ask if they’re in for another few slices of the virtually inevitable turkey? And do you know what we didn’t do amid all
this cerebration, Lewis? We didn’t ask ourselves a very simple question: if our man had eaten nothing of the first two courses, shouldn’t we assume he might be getting a little
hungry
? And even if he’s been told he’d better go through the evening secretly sticking all the goodies into a doggie-bag, you might have thought he’d be tempted when he
came to the next two courses on the menu – especially a couple of succulent pork chops. So why, Lewis – just think simply! – why didn’t he have a mouthful or two?’

‘Like you say, sir, he was told not to, because it was vital—’

‘No! You’re still getting too
complicated
, Lewis. There’s a very
simple
answer, you see! Rastafarians aren’t allowed to eat pork!

‘Now let’s come to this business of the stains this man was leaving behind on whatever he touched – even after midnight! We took down all the evidence, didn’t we –
we got statements from Miss Palmer, and Mrs Smith, and Sarah Jonstone – about how the wretched fellow went round ruining their coats and their blouses. And we almost came to the point –
well,
I
did, Lewis – of getting them all analysed and seeing if the stains were the same, and trying to find out where the original theatre-black came from and – well, we were
getting too
complex
again! The simple truth is that any make-up
dries
after a few hours; it comes off at first, of course, on anything that’s touched – but after a
while it’s no problem at all. Yet in this case it
remained
a problem. And the
simple
answer to this particular mystery is that our man
wanted
to leave his marks
late that evening; he deliberately put
more
stain on his hands; and he deliberately put his hands where they
would
leave marks. All right, Lewis? He had a stick of theatre-black
in his pocket and he smeared it all over the palms of his hands in the final hour or so of the New Year party.

‘And then there’s the last point. The man won a prize, and we made all sorts of complex assumptions about it; he’d been the most painstaking and imaginative competitor of the
lot; he’d been so successful with his make-up that no one could recognize him; he’d been anxious for some reason to carry off the first prize in the fancy-dress competition. And all a
load of
complex
nonsense, Lewis. The fact is that the very last thing he wanted was to draw any attention to himself by winning the first prize that evening. And the almost childishly
simple
fact of the matter is that if you want to dress up and win first prize
as
, let’s say, Prince Charles, well, the best way to do it is to
be
Prince Charles.
And we all ought to have suspected, perhaps, that the man who dressed up in that Rastafarian rigout and who put on such a convincing and successful performance that night
as
a Rastafarian,
might perhaps have owed his success to the simple fact that he
was
a Rastafarian!’

‘Mr Winston Grant.’

‘Yes, Mr Winston Grant! A man, in fact, I met outside the Friar only last night! And if anyone ever tells you, Lewis, that there isn’t a quite extraordinary degree of coincidence in
this world of ours – then you tell him to come to see me, and I’ll tell him different!’

‘Should you perhaps say “differently”?’ asked Lewis.

‘This man had been a builder’s labourer; he’d worked on several sites in Oxford – including the Locals; he’d lost his job because of cutbacks in the building
industry; he was getting short of money for himself and his family; he was made an extraordinarily generous offer – we still don’t know
how
generous; and he agreed to accept
that offer in return for playing – as he saw things – a minor role for a few hours at a New Year’s party in an Oxford hotel. I doubt we shall ever know all the ins and outs of the
matter but—’

Sergeant Phillips knocked and announced that the prisoner was now in the interview room.

And Morse smiled.

And Lewis smiled.

‘Just finish off what you were saying, will you, sir?’

‘Nothing more to say, really. Winston Grant must have been pretty carefully briefed, that’s for sure. In the first place he’d be coming into the hotel directly from the street,
and it was absolutely essential that he should wait his time, to the second almost, until Margaret Bowman had created the clever little distraction of taking Sarah Jonstone away from the reception
desk to inspect the graffito in the Ladies’ – a graffito which she, Margaret Bowman, had herself just scrawled across the wall. Then, I’m sure he must have been told to say as
little as possible to anyone else all the evening and to stick close to Margaret Bowman, as if they were far more interested in each other than in the goings-on around them.
But there was no
chance of him opting out of the fancy-dress competition!
I suspect, too, that he was told not to eat anything – if he could manage not to without drawing too much attention to himself;
and remember, he was helped in this by the way Binyon had scheduled the various courses at different tables. But it may well be, Lewis, that we’re overestimating the extent to which the plan
was completely thought out. Above all, though, he had to carry through that final, extraordinarily clever, little deception: he was to make every effort to
pretend
that he was a black man
– even though he
was
a black man. And there was one wonderfully simple way in which such a pretence could be sustained, and that was by rubbing dark-stain on to his hands –
hands that were already black
– so that everyone who came into physical contact with him should believe that he was
not
a black man – but a white man. And that, Lewis,
in the later stages of that New Year’s party is what he did, making sure he left a few indelible marks on the most obvious places – like the shoulders of the light-coloured winter
mackintoshes worn by both Miss Palmer and Mrs Smith—’

‘—and the white blouse of Sarah Jonstone.’

‘Cream-coloured actually,’ said Morse.

For Sergeant Phillips it was all somewhat
déjà vu
as he resumed his vigil at the door of the interview room, his feet still aching, his eyes scanning the
bare room once again: the wooden trestle-table on which stood a white polystyrene coffee cup (full) and an ash-tray (as yet empty); and behind the table, the same fairish-haired, fresh-complexioned
man who had sat there the previous evening – Mr Edward Wilkins.

A
T
5
P.M.
, Mr James Prior, Security Officer at the Locals, put on his bicycle clips and prepared to leave. Before he did so he
had a final look round Reception to make sure that everything that should be locked up
was
locked up. It was odd though, really, to think that the only thing the police had been interested
in was the one drawer that
wasn’t
locked up – the drawer in which he kept all the out-of-date security passes, elastic-banded into their various bundles. Like the bundle for
the last lot of building workers from which the police had already taken two passes away: that of Winston Grant, a Rastafarian fellow whom Prior remembered very well; and that of a man called
Wilkins, who’d operated the giant yellow crane that had towered over the Delegacy building throughout the summer months. After Morse’s call early that morning, Prior had looked briefly
through the rest of that particular bundle, and had wondered whether there were any other criminals lurking among those very ordinary-looking faces. But the truth was that one could never tell: he,
far more than most people, was fully aware of that.