The Secret of Annexe 3

by Colin Dexter

  ‘That is 114 Worcester Road?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you haven’t got a Miss or a Mrs Arkwright there?’

  ‘We’ve got a butcher’s shop ’ere, mate.’

  ‘Oh, I see. Sorry to have troubled you.’

  ‘You’re welcome.’

  ‘I just don’t believe it!’ said Morse quietly.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Thursday, January 2nd: p.m.

  Even in civilized mankind, faint traces of a monogamic instinct can sometimes be perceived.

  (BERTRAND RUSSELL)

  HELEN SMITH’S HUSBAND, John, had told her he would be back at about one o’clock, and Helen had the ingredients for a mushroom omelette all ready. Nothing for herself, though. She would have found it very difficult to swallow anything that lunchtime, for she was sick with worry.

  The headlines on ‘The World at One’ had just finished when she heard the crunch of the BMW’s wheels on the gravel outside – the same BMW which had spent the New Year anonymously enough in the large multi-storey car park in the Westgate shopping centre at Oxford. She didn’t turn as she felt his light kiss on the back of her hair, busying herself with excessive fussiness over the bowl as she whisked the eggs, and looking down at the nails of her broad, rather stumpy fingers, now so beautifully manicured . . . and so very different from the time, five years ago, when she had first met John, and when he had mildly criticized her irritating habit of biting them down to the quicks . . . Yes, he had smartened her up in more than one way in their years of marriage together. That was certain.

  ‘Helen! I’ve got to go up to London this afternoon. I may be back later tonight; but if I’m not, don’t worry. I’ve got a key.’

  ‘Um!’ For the moment, she hardly dared risk a more fully articulated utterance.

  ‘Is the water hot?’

  ‘Mm!’

  ‘Will you leave the omelette till I’ve had a quick bath?’

  She waited until he had gone into the bathroom; waited until she heard the splash of water; even then gave things a couple of minutes more, just in case . . . before stepping out lightly and quietly across the drive and trying the front passenger door of the dark-blue BMW – almost whimpering with anticipation.

  It was open.

  Two hours after Mr John Smith had stretched himself out in his bath at Reading, Philippa Palmer lay looking up at the ceiling of her own bedroom in her tastefully furnished, recently redecorated, first-floor flat in Chiswick. The man who lay beside her she had spotted at 12.30 p.m. in the Cocktail Lounge of the Executive Hotel just off Park Lane – a tall, dark-suited, prematurely balding man, perhaps in his early forties. To Philippa, he looked like a man not short of a few pounds, although it was always difficult to be certain. The exorbitant tariffs at the Executive (her favourite hunting-ground) were almost invariably settled on business expense accounts, and bore no necessary correlation with the apparent affluence of the hotel’s (largely male) cliente`le. She’d been sitting at the bar, nylon-stockinged, legs crossed, split skirt falling above the knee; he’d said ‘Hullo’, pleasantly; she’d accepted his offer of a drink – gin and tonic; she’d asked him, wasting no time at all, whether he wanted to be ‘naughty’ – an epithet which, in her wide experience, was wonderfully efficacious in beguiling the vast majority of men; he had demurred, slightly; she had moved a little closer and shot a sensual thrill throughout his body as momentarily she splayed a carmine-fingered hand along his thigh. The ‘How much?’ and the ‘When?’ and the ‘Where?’ had been settled with a speed unknown in any other professional negotiating body; and now here she lay – a familiar occurrence! – in her own room, in her own bed, waiting with ineffable boredom for the two-hour contract (at £60 per hour) to run its seemingly interminable course. She’d gauged him pretty well correctly from the start: a man of rather passive, voyeuristic tendencies rather than one of the more thrusting operatives in the fornication field. Indeed, the aggregate time of his two (hitherto) perfunctory penetrations could hardly have exceeded a couple of minutes; and of that Philippa had been duly glad. He might, of course, ‘after a few minutes’ rest’ as the man had put it, rise to more sustained feats of copulatory stamina; but blessedly (from Philippa’s point of view) the few minutes’ rest had extended itself to a prolonged period of stertorous slumber.

  The phone had first rung at about 2.30 p.m., the importunate burring making the man quite disproportionately nervous as he’d undressed. But she had told him that it would only be her sister; and he had appeared to believe her, and to relax. And as she herself had begun unzipping her skirt, he had asked if she would wear a pair of pyjamas while they were in bed together – a request with which she was not unfamiliar, knowing as she did that more than a few of her clients were less obsessed with nudity than with semi-nudity, and that the slow unbuttoning of a blouse-type top, with its tantalizing lateral revelations, was a far more erotic experience for almost all men than the vertically functional hitch of a nightdress up and over the thighs.

  It was 3.15 p.m. when the phone rang again, and Philippa felt the man’s eyes feasting on her body as she leaned forward and picked up the receiver.

  ‘Mrs Palmer? Mrs Philippa Palmer?’ The voice was loud and clear, and she knew that the man at her side would be able to hear every word.

  ‘Ye-es?’

  ‘This is Sergeant Lewis here, Thames Valley Police. I’d like to have a word with you about—’

  ‘Look, Sergeant. Can you ring me back in ten minutes? I’m just having a shower and—’

  ‘All right. You’ll make sure you’re there, Mrs Palmer?’

  ‘Of course! Why shouldn’t I be?’

  The man had been sitting on the edge of the bed pulling on his socks with precipitate haste from the words ‘Sergeant Lewis’ onwards, and Philippa was relieved that (as always) pecuniary matters had been fully settled before the start of the performance. Seldom had Philippa seen a man dress himself so quickly; and his hurried goodbye and immediate departure were a relief to her, although she knew he was probably quite a nice sort of man, really. She admitted to herself that his underclothes had been the cleanest she had seen in weeks; and he hadn’t mentioned his wife, if he had one, once.

  It was a different voice at the end of the line when the telephone rang again ten minutes later: an interesting, educated sort of voice that she told herself she rather liked the sound of, announcing itself as Chief Inspector Morse.

  Morse insisted that it would be far more sensible for himself (not Lewis) to go to interview the woman finally found at the other end of a telephone line in Chiswick. He fully appreciated Lewis’s offer to go, but he also emphasized the importance of someone (Lewis) staying at the hotel and continuing to ‘sniff around’. Lewis, who had heard this sort of stuff many times, was smiling to himself as he drove Morse down to Oxford station to catch the 4.34 train to Paddington that afternoon.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Thursday, January 2nd: p.m.

  And he that seeketh findeth.

  (MATTHEW vii, 8)

  ON HIS RETURN from Oxford railway station, Lewis was tempted to call it a day and get off home. He had been up since 5 a.m., and it was now just after 5 p.m. A long enough stretch for anybody. But he didn’t call it a day; and in retrospect his decision was to prove a crucial one in solving the mystery surrounding Annexe 3.

  He decided to have a last look round the rooms in the annexe before he went home, and for this purpose he left the Operations Room by the front door (the partition between the main annexe entrance and the four rooms in use had not been dismantled) and walked round the front of the building to the familiar side-entrance, where a uniformed constable still stood on duty.

  ‘It’s open, Sarge,’ Lewis heard as he fumbled with his embarrassment of keys.

  ‘Give it till seven, I reckon. Then you can get off,’ said Lewis. ‘I’ll just have a last look round.’

  First, Lewis had a quick look round the one room that no one had as yet bothered about,
Annexe 4; and here he made one small find – alas, completely insignificant. On the top shelf of the built-in wardrobe he found a glossy magazine illustrated with lewdly pornographic photographs, and filled out with a minimum of text which (judging from a prevalence of ø-looking letters) Lewis took to be written in some Scandinavian tongue. If Morse had been there (Lewis knew it so well) he would have sat down on the bed forthwith and given the magazine his undivided attention; and it often puzzled Lewis a little to understand how an otherwise reasonably sensitive person such as Morse could simultaneously behave in so unworthily crude a fashion. Yet he knew that nothing was ever likely to change the melancholy, uncommitted Morse; and he put the magazine back on the shelf, deciding that his superior should know nothing of it.

  In Annexe 3 itself, there were so many chalked marks, so many biro’d circles, so many dusted surfaces, so much shifted furniture, that it was impossible to believe any clue would now be found there that had not been found already; and Lewis turned off the light and closed the door, making sure it was locked behind him.

  In Annexe 1, the Palmers’ room, Lewis could find nothing that he had missed in his earlier examination, and he paused only for a moment before the window, seeing his own shadow in the oblong of yellow light that was thrown across the snow, before turning the light off there too, and closing the door behind him. He would have a quick look at the last room, the Smiths’ room, and then he really would call an end to his long, long day.

  In this room, Annexe 2, he could find nothing of any import; and Morse (Lewis knew) would have looked over it with adequate, if less than exhaustive, care. In any case, Morse had a creative imagination that he himself could never hope to match, and often in the past there had been things – those oddly intangible things – which the careful Lewis himself had missed and which Morse had almost carelessly discovered. Yet it would do no harm to have one final eleventh-hour check before permission was given to Binyon (as soon it must be) for the rooms to be freed for hotel use once more.

  It was five minutes later that Lewis made his exciting discovery.

  Sarah Jonstone saw Lewis leave just before 6 p.m., his car headlights, as he turned in front of the annexe, sending revolving patches of yellow light across the walls and ceiling of her unlit room. Then the winter darkness was complete once more. She had never minded the dark, even as a little girl, when she’d always preferred the door of her bedroom shut and the light on the landing switched off; and now as she looked out she was again content to leave the light turned off. She was developing a slight headache and she had dropped two soluble Disprin into a glass of water and was slowly swishing the disintegrating tablets round. Mr Binyon had asked her to stay on another night, and in the circumstances it would have been unkind for her to refuse. But it was an oddly unsatisfactory, anticlimactic sort of time: the night was now still after so many comings and goings; the lights in the annexe all switched off, including the light in the large back room which Morse and Lewis had been using; the press, the police, the public – almost everyone seemed to have gone; gone, too, were all the New Year revellers, all of them gone back home again – all except one, of course, the one who would never see his home again. The only signs left of all the excitement were the beribboned ropes that still cordoned off the annexe area, and the single policeman in the flat, black-and-white checked hat who still stood at the side entrance of the annexe, his breath steaming in the cold air, stamping his feet occasionally, and pulling his greatcoat ever more closely around him. She was wondering if she ought to offer him something – when she heard Mandy, from just below her window, call across and ask him if he wanted a cup of tea.

  She herself drank the cloudy, bitter-tasting mixture from the glass, switched on the light, washed the glass, smoothed the wrinkled coverlet on which she had earlier been lying, turned on the TV, and listened to the main items of the six o’clock news. The world that day, that second day of the brand-new year, was familiarly full of crashes, hijackings, riots and terrorism; yet somehow such cataclysmic, collective disasters seemed far less disturbing to her than the murder of that one man, only some twenty-odd yards from where she stood. She turned off the TV, and went over to the window to pull the curtains across; she would smarten herself up a bit before going down to have her evening meal with the Binyons.

  Odd!

  A light was on again in the annexe, and she wondered who it could be. Probably the constable, for he was no longer standing by the side door. It was almost certainly in Annexe 2 that the light was on, she thought, judging from the yellow square of snow in front of the building. Then the light was switched off; and standing there at her window, arms outspread, Sarah was just about to pull the curtains across when she saw a figure, just inside the annexe doorway, pressed against the left-hand wall. Her heart seemed to miss a beat, and she felt a constriction somewhere at the back of her throat as she stood there for a few seconds completely motionless, mesmerized by what she had seen. Then she acted. She threw open the door, scampered down the stairs, rushed through to the main entrance and then along to the side door of the main building, where the constable stood talking with Mandy over a cup of steaming tea.

  ‘There’s someone across there!’ Sarah whispered hoarsely as she pointed over to the annexe block.

  ‘Pardon, miss?’

  ‘I just saw someone in the doorway!’

  The man hurried across to the annexe, with Sarah and Mandy walking nervously a few steps behind. They saw him open the side door (it hadn’t been locked, that much was clear) and then watched as the light flicked on in the corridor, and then flicked off.

  ‘There’s no one there now,’ said the worried-looking constable, clearly conscious of some potentially disastrous dereliction of duty.

  ‘There was someone,’ persisted Sarah quietly. ‘It was in Annexe 2 – I’m sure of it. I saw the light on the snow.’

  ‘But the rooms are all locked up, miss.’

  Sarah said nothing. There were only two sets of master-keys, and Binyon (Sarah knew) had given one of those sets to Sergeant Lewis. But Sergeant Lewis had gone. Had Binyon used the other set himself? Had the slim figure she had seen in the doorway been Binyon’s? And if so, what on earth—?

  It was Binyon himself, wearing a raincoat but no hat, who had startlingly materialized from somewhere, and who now stood behind them, insisting (once he had asked about the nature of the incident) that they should check up on the situation forthwith.

  Sarah followed him and the constable into the annexe corridor, and it was immediately apparent that someone had stood – and that within the last few minutes or so – in front of the door to Annexe 2. The carpet just below the handle was muddied with the marks of slushy footwear, and little slivers of yet unmelted snow winked under the neon lighting of the corridor.

  Back in her room, Sarah thought hard about what had just happened. The constable had refused to let the door of Annexe 2 be touched or opened, and had immediately tried to contact Lewis at the number he had been instructed to ring should anything untoward occur. But Lewis had not yet arrived home; and this fact tended to bolster the belief, expressed by both Binyon and the constable, that it had probably been Lewis who had called back for some unexpected though probably quite simple reason. But Sarah had kept her counsel. She knew quite certainly that the figure she had glimpsed in the annexe doorway could never have been the heavily built Sergeant Lewis. Could it have been Mr Binyon, though? Whilst not impossible, that too, thought Sarah, was wildly improbable. And, as it happened, her view of the matter was of considerably greater value than anyone else’s. Not only was she the sole witness to the furtive figure seen in the doorway; she was also the only person, at least for the present, who knew a most significant fact: the fact that although there were only two sets of master-keys to the annexe rooms, it was perfectly possible for someone else to have entered the room that evening without forcing a door or breaking a window. Two other people, in fact. On the key-board behind Reception, the hook was still empty on
which should have been hanging the black-plastic oblong tab, with ‘Haworth’ printed over it in white, and the room key to Annexe 2 attached to it. For Mr and Mrs John Smith had left behind their unsettled account, but their room key they had taken with them.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Thursday, January 2nd: p.m.

  Aspern Williams wanted to touch the skin of the daughter, thinking her beautiful, by which I mean separate and to be joined.

  (PETER CHAMPKIN, The Waking Life of Aspern Williams)

  MORSE WALKED THROUGH the carpeted lounge of the Great Western Hotel where several couples, seemingly with little any longer to say to each other, were desultorily engaged in reading paperbacks, consulting timetables or turning over the pages of the London Standard. Time, apparently, was the chief item of importance here, where a video-screen gave travellers up-to-the-minute information about arrivals and departures, and where frequent glances were thrown towards the large clock above the Porters’ Desk, at which stood two slightly supercilious-looking men in gold-braided green uniforms. It was 5.45 p.m.

  Immediately in front of him, through the revolving door that gave access to Praed Street, Morse could see the white lettering of PADDINGTON on the blue Underground sign as he turned right and made his way towards the Brunel Bar. At its entrance, a board announced that 5.30 p.m. to 6.30 p.m. encompassed ‘The Happy Hour’, with any drink available at half-price – a prospect doubtless accounting for the throng of dark-suited black-briefcased businessmen who stood around the bar, anxious to get in as many drinks as possible before departing homewards to Slough or Reading or Didcot or Swindon or Oxford. Wall-seats, all in a deep maroon shade of velveteen nylon, lined the rectangular bar; and after finally managing to purchase his half-priced pint of beer, Morse sat down near the main entrance behind one of the freestanding, mahogany-veneered tables. The tripartite glass dish in front of him offered nuts, crisps, and cheese biscuits, into which he found himself dipping more and more nervously as the hands of the clock crept towards 6 p.m. Almost (he knew it!) he felt as excited as if he were a callow youth once more. It was exactly 6 p.m. when Philippa Palmer walked into the bar. For purposes of recognition, it had been agreed that she should carry her handbag in her left hand and a copy of the London Standard in her right. But the fact that she had got things the wrong way round was of little consequence to Morse; he himself was quite incapable of any instant and instinctive knowledge of east and west, and he would have spotted her immediately. Or so he told himself.