The Secret of Annexe 3 (8 page)

‘Did she ring up?’ asked Morse.

‘Yes, she must have rung Mr Binyon, I think.’

‘You don’t ask for a deposit?’

She shook her head. ‘Mr Binyon doesn’t think it’s good business practice.’

‘You don’t get many cancellations?’

‘Very few.’

‘Really? But you’ve had two out of the four rooms in the annexe!’

Yes, he was right. And he looked like the wretched sort of man who would
always
be right.

‘Have you ever had this old biddy staying with you before?’ continued Morse.

‘What makes you think she’s an “old biddy”, Inspector?’

‘With a name like Doris Arkwright? Straight out of the Lancashire mills, isn’t it? Pushing a sprightly ninety, I shouldn’t wonder, and drives an ancient Austin.’

Sarah opened her mouth, but closed it again. Morse (as she watched him) had perched a pair of NHS half-lenses on his Jewish-looking nose and looked again at the short letter from Doris
Arkwright.

‘Do you think she’s got anything to do with the case?’ asked Sarah.

‘Do I think so?’ He waited for a few pregnant seconds before taking off his spectacles and looking at her quizzically. ‘No, I don’t think she’s got anything at all
to do with the murder. Do
you
, Miss Jonstone?’

F
OR LEWIS
,
THE
next two hours of the evening of New Year’s Day were hardly memorable. A good deal of the earlier
excitement had dissipated, with even the novelty of murder worn thin; and the Haworth Hotel now looked an uninviting place, its high-ceilinged rooms harshly lit by neon strips, its guests standing
or sitting in small groups, quiet and unsmiling – and waiting. Morse had asked him to check (factually) with Phillips all the names and addresses of those staying in the hotel, and briefly
himself to interview as many vital witnesses as he could find – with Phillips to take on the rest; to try to form a picture (synoptically) of the scene at the hotel on the previous evening;
and to keep his antennae attuned (almost metaphysically, it appeared) for any signals from an unsuspected psychopath or any posthumous transmissions from the newly dead. Festivities – all of
them, including the pantomine – had been cancelled, and the hotel was now grimly still, with not even the quiet click of snooker balls from the games room to suggest that murder was anything
but a deadly serious matter.

Lewis himself had never spent a Christmas or a New Year away from home since his marriage; and although he knew that family life was hardly prize-winning roses all along the way, he had never
felt the urge to get away from his own modest semi-detached house up in Headington over such holiday periods. Yet now – most oddly, considering the circumstances – he began to see for
the first time, some of the potential attractions: no frenetic last-minute purchases from supermarkets; no pre-feastday preparations of stuffings and sauces; no sticky saucepans to scour; no
washing-up of plates and cutlery. Yes! Perhaps Lewis would mention the idea to the missus, for it seemed perfectly clear to him as he spoke to guest after guest that a wondrously good time was
being had by all – until a man had been found murdered.

Exactly where Morse had been during the whole of this period, Lewis had little idea, although (Lewis had heard part of it) the chief inspector had interviewed the woman on Reception at some
considerable length – a woman (as Lewis saw her) most pleasingly attractive, with a quiet, rather upper-class manner of speaking that contrasted favourably with the somewhat abrasive
questioning she was being subjected to – with Morse obviously still in a tetchy frame of mind after his altercations with the luckless Phillips, and apparently quite unconcerned about venting
his temporary ill-humour on anyone and everyone, including Sarah Jonstone.

It was just after 10 p.m. that the police surgeon came back into the main building again, the inevitable long-ashed cigarette dropping from his lips, his black bag in one hand, two sheets of A4
in the other.

‘My God, you do pick ’em, Morse!’ began the surgeon as the three of them, Max, Morse and Lewis, sat down together in the deserted games room.

‘Get on with it, Max!’ said Morse.

The surgeon looked quickly at his notes – then began.

‘One – he’s a wasp, Morse.’

‘He’s a
what
?’

‘He’s a WASP – a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant – though he could well be a Catholic, of course.’

‘Of course.’

‘Two – his age is about thirty to forty, though he could be twenty-nine or forty-one, for that matter.’

‘Or forty-two,’ said Morse.

The surgeon nodded. ‘Or twenty-eight.’

‘Get on with it!’

‘Three – his height’s five foot seven and a half inches. You want that in metres, Morse?’

‘Not so long as it’s accurate in inches.’

‘Can’t promise that.’

‘Christ!’

‘Four – he’s dressed up as a Rastafarian.’

‘Very perceptive!’

‘Five – he’s got a wig on: black, curlyish.’

‘Something several of us could do with!’

‘Six – he’s got dreadlocks.’

‘Which are?’

‘Long, thin bits of hair, plaited into strands, with cylindrical beads at the end.’

‘I saw them! It’s just that I didn’t know—’

‘Seven – these strands of hair are stapled to the inside of the hat he’s wearing.’

Morse nodded.

‘Eight – this hat is a sort of baggy, felt “cap”, with a big peak, a black-grey-white check pattern, filled out with folded toilet-paper. You want to know which
brand?’

‘No!’

‘Nine – his face is darkened all over with what’s known in theatrical circles as “stage-black”.’

Again Morse nodded.

‘Ten – this stage-black stretches down to the top of the shirt-level, just round his neck; the backs of the hands are similarly bedaubed, Morse, but not the palms.’

‘Is that important?’

‘Eleven’ – the surgeon ignored the question – ‘his light blue shirt has got six buttons down the front, all but the top one done up, long-sleeved, obviously very
new and probably being worn for the first time.’

No comment from Morse.

‘Twelve – his white trousers are made of some cheap summer-wear material, a bit worn here and there.’

‘And nothing in the pockets,’ said Morse; but it wasn’t a question.

‘Thirteen – he’s got three longish chains round his neck: junk stuff that you’d find in a cheap second-hand shop.’

Morse was beginning to show the first signs of restlessness.

‘Fourteen – there was a pair of sunglasses on the floor just between the two beds, the ear-hooks quite shallowly slanted.’

‘As if they’d fall off his ears, you mean?’

‘They
did
fall off his ears.’

‘I see.’

‘Fifteen – a false moustache, affixed with strong adhesive, still exactly in position across the upper lip.’

‘Why do you say “affixed”, instead of just plain “fixed”?’

‘Sixteen – a pair of high-heeled, knee-level boots: highly polished, light maroon plastic.’

‘You sure it’s not a
woman
we’ve got there on the bed, Max?’

‘Seventeen – time of death: difficult to judge.’

‘As well we might have known!’

‘About sixteen to twenty-four hours before the body was found – at a guess. But the room temperature is only just above freezing point – which could upset calculations either
way.’

‘So?’

For the first time, the surgeon seemed slightly less than happy with himself: ‘As I say, Morse, it’s very difficult.’

‘But you
never
come up with a plain statement of when—’

‘They pay me to report facts.’

‘And they pay me to find out who killed the poor sod, Max.’ But Morse, it seemed, was making little impression upon the mournful man who lit another cigarette before continuing.

‘Eighteen – cause of death? A mighty whack, probably only one, across the front of the skull, with the bone smashed in from the top of the right eye across the nasal bridge to the
left cheekbone.’

Morse was silent.

‘Nineteen – he wasn’t a navvie, judging from his fingernails.’

‘Now you’re getting down to things.’

‘No I’m not, Morse. I’ve nearly finished.’

‘You’re going to tell me who he is, you mean?’

‘Twenty – he had flat feet.’

‘You mean he
has
flat feet?’

The surgeon permitted himself a bleak smile. ‘Yes, Morse. When he was alive he had flat feet, and in death those feet were not unflattened.’

‘What does that suggest, Max?’

‘Perhaps he’s a policeman, Morse.’ The surgeon stood up, the cigarette ash dropping on to his black waistcoat. ‘I’ll let you have the written report as soon as I
can. Not tonight though.’ He looked at his watch. ‘We’ve got half an hour if you want to nip up to the Gardeners’? I’ve got a car.’

For a moment or two, Lewis almost thought that Morse was going to resist the temptation.

‘G
IN AND
C
AMPARI
for me, Morse, and buy yourself one as well. My GP keeps on telling me it’s sensible to keep off
the spirits.’

Soon the two old friends were seated facing each other in the lounge bar, the surgeon resting his heavy-looking dolichocephalic skull upon his left hand.

‘Time of death!’ said Morse. ‘Come on!’

‘Nice drink this, Morse.’

‘The science of thanatology hasn’t advanced a millimetre in your time, has it?’

‘Ah! Now you’re taking advantage of my classical education.’

‘But nowadays, Max, you can look down from one of those space-satellite things and see a house fly rubbing its hands over a slice of black pudding in a Harlem delicatessen – you know
that? And yet
you
can’t—’

‘The room was as cold as a church, Morse. How do you expect—’

‘You don’t know anything about churches!’

‘True enough.’

They sat silently for a while, Morse looking at the open fire where a log suddenly shifted on its foundations and sent a shower of red-glowing sparks against the back of the old grate, beside
which was a stack of wood, chopped into quartered segments.

‘Did you notice they’d chopped down a couple of trees at the back of the annexe, Max?’

‘No.’

Morse sipped his gin. ‘I could develop quite a taste for this.’

‘You think it might have been the branch of a tree or something . . .? Could have been, I suppose. About two feet long, nice easy grip, couple of inches in diameter.’

‘You didn’t see any wood splinters?’

‘No.’

‘What about a bottle?’

‘No broken glass on his face, either, as far as I could see.’

‘Tough things, though. Some of these people who launch battleships have a hell of a job breaking champagne bottles.’

‘We may find something, Morse.’

‘When can you let me have a report?’

‘Not tonight.’

‘Much blood, would there have been?’

‘Enough. No spurting though.’

‘No good asking the guests if they saw a fellow walking around with blood all over his best shirt?’

‘What about a
woman
, Morse? With blood all over her liberty bodice?’

‘Perhaps, I suppose.’

The surgeon nodded non-committally and looked into the fire: ‘Poor sod . . . Do
you
ever think of death?
Mors
,
mortis
, feminine – remember that?’

‘Not likely to forget a word like that, am I? Just add on “e” to the end and . . .’

The surgeon smiled a sour acknowledgement of the point and drained his glass. ‘We’ll just have the other half. Then we’ll get back, and show you round the scene of the crime
again.’

‘When the body’s out of the way?’

‘You don’t like the sight of blood much, do you?’

‘No. I should never have been a policeman.’

‘Always turned me on, blood did – even as a boy.’

‘Unnatural!’

‘Same again?’

‘Why not?’

‘What turns
you
on?’ asked the surgeon as he picked up the two glasses.

‘Somebody from the
Oxford Times
asked me that last week, Max. Difficult, you know – just being asked out of the blue like that.’

‘What did you say?’

‘I said I was always turned on by the word “unbuttoning”.’

‘Clever!’

‘Not really. It comes in one of Larkin’s poems somewhere. It’s just that you know nothing about the finer things in life . . .’

But the surgeon, apparently unhearing, was already standing at the bar and rattling an empty glass imperiously on the counter.

U
NDER THE SURGEON
’
S
supervision, the frozen-footed ambulancemen had finally stretchered away the white-sheeted corpse to
the morgue at the Old Radcliffe at 11.30 p.m., and Lewis was glad that the preliminaries of the case were now almost over. The two fingerprint men had departed just after eleven, followed ten
minutes later by the spiky-haired young photographer, clutching the neck of his flash-bulb camera as if it were some poisonous serpent. The surgeon himself had driven off in his old black Ford at a
quarter to midnight, and the hotel seemed strangely still as Lewis followed Morse across the slush and blackened snow to the room called Annexe 3, where the two men stood for the second time that
evening, and where, each in his own way, they now took a more detailed mental inventory of what they saw.