by Colin Dexter
I therefore come before you armed with the delusions of adequacy with which so many of us equip ourselves.
(AIR VICE-MARSHAL A. D. BUTTON)
LEWIS PULLED IN behind the two other police cars outside the Haworth Hotel, where a uniformed constable in a black-and-white chequered hat stood outside the main entrance, with one of his colleagues, similarly attired, guarding the front door of the adjacent property further down the Banbury Road.
‘Who’s in charge?’ asked Morse, of the first constable, as he passed through into the foyer, stamping the snow from his shoes on the doormat.
‘Inspector Morse, sir.’
‘Know where he is?’ asked Morse.
‘Not sure, sir. I’ve only just got here.’
‘Know him by sight, do you?’
‘I don’t know him at all.’
Morse went on in, but Lewis tapped the constable on the shoulder and whispered in his ear: ‘When you meet this Morse fellow, he’s a chief inspector – all right? – and a nasty one at that! So watch your step, lad!’
‘Famous pair, we are!’ murmured Morse as the two of them stood at Reception, where in a small room at the back of the desk Sergeant Phillips of the City CID (Morse recognized him) stood talking to a pale-faced, worried-looking man who was introduced as Mr John Binyon, the hotel proprietor. And very soon Morse and Lewis knew as much – or as little – as anyone about the tragedy so recently discovered in his own hotel by the proprietor himself.
The two Anderson children had been putting the finishing touches to their snowman just as it was getting dark that afternoon when they were joined by their father, Mr Gerald Anderson. And it had been he who had observed that one of the rear windows on the ground floor of the annexe was open; and who had been vaguely uneasy about this observation, since the weather was raw, with a cutting wind sweeping down from the north. He had finally walked closer and seen the half-drawn curtains flapping in the icy draught – although he had not gone all the way up to the window, under which (as he’d noticed) the snow was still completely undisturbed. He had mentioned this fact to his wife once he was back in the hotel, and it was at her instigation that he reported his disquiet to the proprietor himself – at about 5 p.m., that was; with the result that the pair of them, Anderson and Binyon, had walked across to the annexe and along the newly carpeted corridor to the second bedroom on the right, where over the doorknob was hooked a notice, written in English, French, and German, instructing potential intruders that the incumbent was not to be disturbed. After repeated knockings, Binyon had opened the door with his master-key, and had immediately discovered why the man they found there had been incapable (for some considerable time, it seemed) of responding to any knocking from within or to any icy blast from without.
For the man on the bed was dead and the room was cold as the grave.
The news of the murder was known almost immediately to everyone in the hotel; and despite Binyon’s frenetic protestations, some few of the guests (including, it appeared, everyone from the annexe) had taken the law into their own hands, packed their belongings, strapped up their cases (and in one case not paid any part of the bill), and disappeared from the Haworth Hotel before Sergeant Phillips from St Aldates had arrived at about 5.40 p.m.
‘You what?’ bellowed Morse as Phillips explained how he’d allowed four more of the guests to leave the hotel when full names and addresses had been checked.
‘Well, it was a very difficult situation, sir, and I thought—’
‘Christ man! Didn’t someone ever tell you that if you’ve got a few suspicious circumstances you’re expected to hold on to a few of the suspects? And what do you do, Sergeant? You tell ’em all to bugger off!’
‘I got all the details—’
‘Bloody marvellous!’ snapped Morse.
Binyon, who had been standing by in some embarrassment as Morse (not, it must be admitted, without just cause) lashed the luckless Phillips, decided to come to the rescue.
‘It really was a very difficult situation, Inspector, and we thought—’
‘Thought?’ Morse’s instantaneous repetition of the monosyllable sounded like a whiplashed retaliation for such impertinence, and it was becoming abundantly clear that he had taken an instant dislike to the hotel proprietor. ‘Mr Binyon! They don’t pay you, do they, for having any thoughts about this case? No? But they do pay me! They even pay Sergeant Phillips here; and if I was angry with him just now it was only because I basically respect what he thought and what he tried to do. But I shall be obliged if you will kindly keep your thoughts out of things until I ask for them – all right?’
In the latter part of this little homily, Morse’s voice was as cool and as level as the snow upon which Sarah Jonstone had looked out early that same morning; and she herself as she sat silently at Reception was more than a little alarmed by this new arrival; more than a little upset by his harsh words. But gossip had it that the corpse found in the room called Annexe 3 had been horridly mutilated about the face; and she was relieved that the police seemed at least to have matched the gravity of the crime by sending a man from the higher echelons of its detective branch. But he was disturbingly strange, this man with the hard-staring, startling eyes – eyes that had at first reminded her of the more fanatical politicians, like Benn or Joseph or Powell, as she’d watched them on TV; eyes that seemed uncommunicative and unseeing, eyes fixed, it seemed, upon some distanced, spiritual shore. And yet that wasn’t true, and she knew it; for after his initial ill-temper he had looked so directly and so daringly into her eyes that for a second or two she could have sworn that he was about to wink at her.
A man she’d seen three times now in three days!
Another man had come in – the humpbacked man she’d seen earlier – and he, too, was in Sarah’s eyes one of the more unusual specimens of humankind. With a cigarette hanging down at forty-five degrees from a thin-lipped, mournful mouth, and with the few remaining strands of his lank, black hair plastered in parallels across a yellowish dome of a skull, anyone could perhaps be forgiven for supposing his profession to be that of a moderately unsuccessful undertaker. (Oddly enough, over the fifteen years they had known – and respected – each other, Morse had invariably addressed this police surgeon by his Christian name, whilst the surgeon had never addressed Morse by anything other than his surname.)
‘I was here an hour ago,’ began the surgeon.
‘You want me to give you a medal or something?’ said Morse.
‘You in charge?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, go and have a look at things. I’ll be ready when you want me.’
Following closely behind Binyon and Phillips and Lewis, Morse was walking over to the annexe when he stopped halfway and gazed up at the giant crane, its arm outstretched some hundred and twenty feet above the ground as if in benediction, or perhaps in bane, upon one or other of the two blocks of buildings between which it was positioned.
‘Not a job they’d get me on, Lewis,’ he said, as his eyes went up towards the precarious-looking box at the top of the structure, in which, presumably, some operator would normally sit.
‘No need, sir. You can operate those things from the bottom.’ Lewis pointed to a platform, only some six feet above the ground, on which a series of knobbed levers stuck up at various angles through the iron floor. Morse nodded; and averted his eyes from the crane’s nest atop the criss-crossed iron girders that stood out black against the heavy, darkened sky.
Through the side door of the annexe they proceeded, where Morse looked along the newly carpeted passage that stretched some ten to twelve yards in front of him, its terminus marked by pieces of boarding, nailed (not too professionally) across an aperture which would, in due course, lead through to the front entrance hall of the annexe. Morse strode to the far end of the corridor and looked through the temporary slats to the foyer beyond, where rickety-looking planks, resting on pairs of red bricks, were set across the recently cemented floor. Dust from such activities had filtered th
rough, and was now lying, albeit lightly, on the surfaces just a few feet inside the completed section of the ground-floor annexe, and it seemed clear that there had been no recent entrance, and no recent exit, from that particular point. Morse turned, and for a few seconds looked back up the short corridor down which they had walked; looked at the marks of many muddy shoes (including their own) on the purple carpeting – the latter seeming to Morse almost as distasteful as the reproduction of the late Renoir, ‘Les nues dans l’herbe’, which hung on the wall to his right.
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.’
CHAPTER NINE
Wednesday, January 1st: p.m.
The great advantage of a hotel is that it’s a refuge from home life.
(G. B. SHAW)
ON 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:
29A Chiswick Reach
London, W4
20 Dec
Dear Sir(s)
My wife and I would like to book a double room – preferably with double bed – for the New Year Offer your hotel is advertising. If a suitable room is available, we look forward to hearing from you.
Yours faithfully,
F. Palmer
On top of this originating handwritten letter was the typewritten reply (ref JB-SJ) to which Morse now briefly turned his attention:
Dear Mr Palmer,
Thank you for your letter of 20 Dec. Our New Year programme has been extremely popular, and we are now fully booked as far as the main hotel is concerned. But you may be interested in the Special Offer (please see last page of current brochure) of accommodation in one of the rooms of our newly equipped annexe at three-quarters of the normal tariff. In spite of a few minor inconveniences, these rooms are, we believe, wonderfully good value, and we very much hope that you and your wife will be able to take advantage of this offer.
Please be sure to let us know immediately – preferably by phone. The Christmas post is not likely to be 100 per cent reliable.
Yours sincerely,
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.
84 West Street
Chipping Norton
Oxon
30th Nov
Dear Proprietor,
Please book in my husband and myself for the Haworth Hotel’s New Year Package as advertised. We would particularly wish to take advantage of the rates offered for the ‘annexe rooms’. As I read your brochure, it seems that each of these rooms is on the ground floor and this is essential for our booking since my husband suffers from vertigo and is unable to climb stairs. We would prefer twin beds if possible but this is not essential. Please answer as a matter of urgency by return (s.a.e. enclosed) since we are most anxious to fix things up immediately and shall not be at our present address (see above) after the 7th December, since we shall be moving to Cheltenham.
