The Secret of Annexe 3 (7 page)

As he stood there, still looking back up to the side entrance, he noted the simple geography of the annexe. Four doors led off the corridor: to his right were those numbered 2 and 1; immediately
opposite 1 was 4; and then, set back behind a narrow, uncarpeted flight of stairs (temporarily blocked off but doubtless leading to the hitherto undeveloped first floor) a door numbered 3. From
what he had already learned, Morse could see little hope of lifting any incriminatory fingerprints from the doorknob of this last room which had been twisted quite certainly by Binyon and probably
by others. Yet he looked at the knob with some care, and at the trilingual notice that was still hooked over it.

‘There should be an umlaut over the “o” in “Storen”,’ said Morse.

‘
Ja! Das sagen mir alle
,’ replied Binyon.

Morse, whose only knowledge of German stemmed from his addiction to the works of Richard Wagner and Richard Strauss, and who was therefore supremely unfitted to converse in the language, decided
that it would be sensible to say no more on the point; decided, too, that Binyon was not perhaps quite the nonentity that his weak-chinned appearance might seem to signify.

Inside Annexe 3, a door immediately to the right gave access to a small, rather cramped toilet area, with a washbasin, a WC, and a small bath with shower attachment. In the bedroom itself, the
main items of furniture were twin beds, pulled close together, with matching white coverlets; a dressing table opposite them, a TV set in the corner; and just to the left of the main door a
built-in wardrobe. Yet it was not the furniture which riveted the attention of Morse and Lewis as they stood momentarily in the doorway. Across the further of the two beds, the one that stood only
some three or four feet from the opened window, lay the body of a dead man. Morse, as he invariably did, recoiled from an immediate inspection of the corpse; yet he knew that he had to look. And an
extraordinary oddity it was upon which he looked: a man dressed in Rastafarian clothes lay on his side, his face towards them, his head lying in a great, coldly clotted pool of blood, like red wine
poured across the snow. The dead man’s left hand was trapped beneath the body; but the right hand was clearly visible below the long sleeve of a light blue shirt; and it was – without
any doubt – the hand of a white man.

Morse, now averting his eyes from this scene of gory mutilation, looked long and hard at the window, then at the TV set, and finally put his head inside the small washroom.

‘You’ve got a good fingerprint man coming?’ he asked Phillips.

‘He’s on his way, sir.’

‘Tell him to have a go at the radiator, the TV, and the lever on the WC.’

‘Anything else, sir?’

Morse shrugged. ‘Leave it to him. I’ve never had much faith in fingerprints myself.’

‘Oh, I don’t know, sir—’ began Phillips.

But Morse lifted his hand like a priest about to pronounce a benediction, and cut off whatever Phillips had intended to say. ‘I’m not here to argue, lad!’ He looked around
again, and seemed just on the point of leaving Annexe 3 when he stepped back inside the room and opened the one drawer, and then the other, of the chest below the TV set, peering carefully into the
corners of each.

‘Were you expecting to find something?’ asked Lewis quietly as he and Morse walked back across to the Haworth Hotel.

Morse shook his head. ‘Just habit, Lewis. I once found a ten-pound note in a hotel in Tenby, that’s all.’

O
N THEIR RETURN
to the main building, Morse himself addressed the assembled guests in the ballroom area (not, as Lewis saw things, particularly
impressively), telling everyone what had happened (they knew anyway), and asking everyone to be sure to tell the police if they had any information which might be of use (as if they
wouldn’t!).

None of those still remaining in the hotel appeared at all anxious to return home prematurely. Indeed, it soon became apparent to Lewis that the ‘Annexe Murder’ was, by several
kilometres, the most exciting event of most lives hitherto; and that far from wishing to distance themselves physically from the scene of the crime, the majority of the folk left in the hotel were
more than happy to stay where they were, flattered as they had been to be told that their own recollections of the previous evening’s events might possibly furnish a key clue in solving the
murder which had been committed. None of these guests appeared worried about the possibility of an indiscriminate killer being abroad in Oxford’s semi-civilized acres – a worry which
would, in fact, have been totally unfounded.

Whilst Lewis began the documentation of the hotel guests, Morse was to be seen sitting at the receipt of custom, with Sarah Jonstone to his right, looking through the correspondence concerned
with those annexe guests whom (the duly chastened) Sergeant Phillips had earlier blessed or semi-blessed upon their homeward ways.

A pale Sarah Jonstone, a nerve visibly twitching at her left nostril, lit a cigarette, drew upon it deeply, and then exhaled the rarefied smoke. Morse, who the previous day (for the thousandth
time) had rid himself of the odious habit, turned to her with distaste.

‘Your breath must smell like an old ashtray,’ he said.

‘Yes?’

‘Yes!’

‘Who to?’

‘“To whom?”, do you mean?’

‘Do you want me to help you or not?’ said Sarah Jonstone, the skin around her cheekbones burning.

‘Room 1?’ asked Morse.

Sarah handed over the two sheets of paper, stapled together, the lower sheet reading as follows:

On top of this originating handwritten letter was the typewritten reply (ref JB-SJ) to which Morse now briefly turned his attention:

There was no further correspondence; but across the top letter was a large tick in blue biro, with ‘Accepted 23rd Dec’ written beneath it.

‘You remember them?’ asked Morse.

‘Not very well, I’m afraid.’ She recalled (she thought) a darkly attractive woman of about thirty or so, and a smartly dressed, prosperous-looking man about ten years her
senior, perhaps. But little else. And soon she found herself wondering whether the people she was thinking of were, in fact, the Palmer pair at all.

‘Room 2?’

Here the documentary evidence Sarah produced was at an irreducible minimum: one sheet of hotel paper recorded the bare facts that a Mr Smith – a ‘Mr J. Smith’ – had rung
on December 23rd and been told that there had been a late cancellation in the annexe, that a double room would now be available, and that written confirmation should be put in the post
immediately.

‘There’s no confirmation here,’ complained Morse.

‘No. It was probably held up in the Christmas post.’

‘But they came?’

‘Yes.’ Again, Sarah thought she remembered them – certainly
him
, a rather distinguished-looking man, hair prematurely grey, perhaps, with a good-humoured, twinkling
sort of look about him.

‘You get quite a few “John Smiths”?’

‘Quite a few.’

‘The management’s not worried?’

‘No! Nor me. Or would you prefer “Nor I”?’

“That’d be a little bit pedantic, wouldn’t it, miss?’

Sarah felt the keen glance of his eyes upon her face, and again (maddeningly) she knew that her cheeks were a burning red.

‘Room 3?’

Sarah, fully aware that Morse already knew far more about the situation in Room 3 than she did, handed over the correspondence without comment – this time a typewritten originating letter,
stapled below a typewritten reply.

The prompt reply (dated 2nd December) was as follows:

In biro across this letter, too, the word ‘Accepted’ was written, with the date ‘3rd Dec’.

Morse looked down again at the letter from Mrs Ballard, and seemed (at least to Sarah Jonstone) to spend an inexplicably long time re-reading its meagre content. Finally he nodded very slowly to
himself, put the two sheets of paper down, and looked up at her.

‘What do you remember about that pair?’

It was the question Sarah had been afraid of, for her recollections were not so much vague as confused. She thought it had been
Mrs
Ballard who had collected the key from Reception; Mrs
Ballard who had been nodded in the direction of the annexe at about 4 p.m. that New Year’s afternoon; Mrs Ballard who had appeared in her Iranian outfit just before the evening festivities
were due to begin and pointed out the distasteful graffito in the Ladies’ loo. And it had been
Mr
Ballard, dressed in his distinctively Rastafarian outfit of light blue shirt, white
trousers, baggy checked cap, and maroon knee-boots, who had emerged from the Gents’ loo just before everyone was due to eat; Mr Ballard who in fact had eaten very little at all that evening
(indeed Sarah herself had cleared away his first two courses virtually untouched); Mr Ballard who had kept very close to his wife throughout the evening, as if they were still in some lovey-dovey
idyll of a recent infatuation; Mr Ballard who had asked her – Sarah! – to dance in the latter part of an evening which was becoming less and less of a distinct sequence of events the
more she tried to call it back to mind . . .

All these things Sarah told a Morse intensely interested (it seemed) in the vaguest facts she was able to dredge up from the chaotic jumble of her memory.

‘Was he drunk?’

‘No. I don’t think he drank much at all.’

‘Did he try to kiss you?’

‘No!’ Sarah’s face, she knew, was blushing again, and she cursed herself for such sensitivity, aware that Morse appeared amused by her discomfiture.

‘No need to blush! Nobody’d blame a fellow for wanting to kiss someone like you after one of your boozy midnight parties, my love!’

‘I’m not your “love”!’ Her upper lip was trembling and she felt the tears beginning to brim behind her eyes.

But Morse was looking at her no more: he picked up the phone and dialled Directory Enquiries on 192.

‘There’s no Ballard at 84 West Street,’ interrupted Sarah. ‘Sergeant Phillips—’

‘No, I know that,’ said Morse quietly, ‘but you don’t mind if I just check up, do you?’

Sarah was silent as Morse spent a few minutes speaking to some supervisor somewhere, asking several questions about street names and street numbers. And whatever he’d learned, he
registered no surprise, certainly no disappointment, as he put down the phone and grinned boyishly at her. ‘Sergeant Phillips was right, Miss Jonstone. There isn’t a Mr Ballard of 84
West Street, Chipping Norton. There isn’t even a number 84! Which makes you think, doesn’t it?’ he asked, tapping the letter that Sarah herself had written to precisely that
non-existent address.

‘I’m past thinking!’ said Sarah quietly.

‘What about Room 4?’

Here, the initiating letter, addressed from 114 Worcester Road, Kidderminster, and dated 4th December, was a model of supremely economical, no-nonsense English, and written in a small, neat
hand:

Such confirmation had been duly forthcoming in the form of an almost equally brief reply, this time signed by the proprietor himself, and dated 6th December. But across this
letter was now pencilled ‘Cancelled 31st Dec – snow.’