The Secret of Annexe 3

by Colin Dexter

  The next thing she knew, she was walking along the Banbury Road, a good way down from the Haworth Hotel, her heart thumping like a trip-hammer in an ironmaster’s yard. She walked without looking back for a single second; she walked and walked like some revenant zombie, oblivious to her surroundings, still panic-stricken and trembling – yet safe, blessedly safe! At the railway station, with only ten minutes to wait, she bought herself a Scotch, and felt fractionally better. But as she sat in a deserted compartment in the slow train back to Reading, she knew that each of the wearisome stops, like the stations of the cross, was bringing her nearer and nearer to a final reckoning.

  Morse had made no secret of the fact that he would be meeting Philippa Palmer at the Great Western Hotel, and had agreed that should Lewis think it necessary he might be reached there. The news could wait until the morning of course – Lewis knew that; and it probably wasn’t crucially important in any case. Yet everyone is anxious to parade a success, and for Lewis it had been a successful evening. In Annexe 2, the room in which Mr and Mrs John Smith had spent the night of December 31st, he had found, beneath the pillow of the bed nearer the window, in a brown imitation-leather case, a pair of spectacles: small, feminine, rather fussy little things. At first he had been disappointed, since the case bore no optician’s name, no address, no signification of town or county – nothing. But inside the case, squashed down at the very bottom, he had found a small oblong of yellow material for use (as Lewis knew) in the cleaning of lenses; and printed on this material were the words ‘G.W. Lloyd, Opticians, High Street, Reading’. Fortunately Mr Lloyd, a garrulous Welshman hailing from Mountain Ash, had still been on the premises when Lewis rang him, and had willingly agreed to remain so until Lewis arrived. If it had taken Lewis only forty minutes to reach Reading, it had taken Lloyd only four or five to discover the owner of the lost spectacles. In his neat records the resourceful Lloyd kept full information about all his clients: this defect, that defect; long sight, short sight; degrees of astigmatism; type of spectacle frames; private or NHS. And tracing the spectacles had been almost childishly easy. Quite an able fellow, Lewis decided, this little Welshman who had opted for ophthalmology.

  ‘I found them under the pillow, sir,’ said Lewis when he finally got through to Morse at Paddington.

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘I thought it wouldn’t perhaps do any harm just to check up on things a bit.’

  ‘Check up on me, you mean!’

  ‘Well, we can all miss things.’

  ‘You mean to say they were there when I looked over that room? Come off it, Lewis! You don’t honestly think I’d have missed something like that, do you?’

  The thought that the spectacles had been planted in Annexe 2 by some person or other after Morse had searched the room had not previously occurred to Lewis, and he was beginning to wonder about the implications of such a strange notion when Morse spoke again.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Pardon, sir?’

  ‘I said I’m sorry, that’s all. I must have missed the bloody things! And there’s something else I want to say. Well done! No wonder I sometimes find it useful having you around, my old friend.’

  Lewis was looking very happy when, after giving Morse the Smiths’ address, he put down the phone, thanked the optician, and drove straight back to Oxford. He and Morse had agreed not to try to see either of the mysterious Smith couple until the following day. And Lewis was glad of that since he was feeling very tired indeed.

  Mrs Lewis could see that her husband was happy when he finally returned home just before 9 p.m. She cooked him egg and chips and once again marvelled at the way in which Chief Inspector Morse could, on occasions, have such a beneficent effect upon the man she’d married. But she was very happy herself, too; she was always happy when he was.

  Deciding, after he had finished his telephone conversation with Lewis, that he might just as well stay on in London and then stop off at Reading the following morning on his return to Oxford, Morse approached the receptionist (the same one) for the third time, and asked her sweetly whether she could offer him a single room for the night. Which she could, for there had been a cancellation. The card which she gave him Morse completed in the name of Mr Philip Palmer, of Irish nationality, and handed it back to her. As she gave him his room key, the girl looked at him with puzzlement in her eyes, and Morse leaned over and spoke quietly to her. ‘Just one little t’ing, miss. If Chief Inspector Morse happens to call, please send him up to see me immediately, will you?’

  The receptionist, now utterly bewildered, looked at him with eyes that suggested that either he was quite mad, or she was. And when he walked off towards the main staircase, she wondered whether she should ring the duty manager and acquaint him with her growing suspicion that she might have just booked an IRA terrorist into the hotel. But she decided against it. If he had a bomb with him, it was quite certainly not in his suitcase, for he had no suitcase; had no luggage at all, in fact – not even a toothbrush by the look of things.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  January 2nd/3rd

  Love is strong as death; jealousy is cruel as the grave.

  (SONG OF SOLOMON viii, 6)

  THE WHOLE DESPERATE business had acquired a gathering momentum born of its own progress. It was, for Margaret Bowman, like driving a car whose brakes had failed down an ever more steeply inclined gradient – where the only thing to do was to try to steer the accelerating vehicle with the split-second reactions of a racing driver and to pray that it would reach the bottom without a fatal collision. To stop was utterly impossible.

  It had been about a year ago when she had first become aware that her husband was showing unmistakable signs of becoming a semi-drunkard. There would be days when he would not touch a drop of alcohol; but there were other periods when two or three times a week she would return from work to find him in a sort of slow-thinking half-daze after what must clearly have been fairly prolonged bouts of drinking, about which her own occasional criticism had served merely to trigger off an underlying crude and cruel streak in his nature which had greatly frightened her. Had it been because of his drinking that (for the first time in their marriage) she had been unfaithful to him? She wasn’t sure. Possibly – probably, even – she might in any case have drifted into some sort of illicit liaison with one or two of the men she had recently got to know at work. Everyone changed as the years went by, she knew that. But Tom, her husband, seemed to have undergone a fundamental change of character, and she had become increasingly terrified of him finding out about her affair, and deeply worried about what dreadful things he would do to her; and to him, and perhaps to himself, if he ever did find out. Her infidelity had spanned the late summer and most of the autumn before she began to realize that any affair was just as fraught with risk as marriage was. For the first few weeks, a single afternoon a week had sufficed: he, by regulating his varied weekend workings, was able to take a day off every week, and this was easily synchronized with her own afternoon off (on Thursdays) when the pair of them made love in the bedroom of an erstwhile council house in North Oxford which he now owned himself. That had been the early pattern; and for the first two or three months he had been interesting to be with, considerate, anxious to please. But as time went on, he too (just like her husband) had appeared to change: he became somewhat crude in one or two respects, more demanding, less talkative, with (quite clearly to Margaret Bowman) his own craving for sexual gratification dominating their postmeridian copulations. Progressively he’d wished to see her more often, ever badgering her to fabricate for her employers a series of visits to dentists, doctors, and terminally ill relatives; or to take home to her husband tales of overtime workings necessitated by imaginary backlogs. And while she despised the man to some degree for so obviously allowing all his professed love for her to degenerate into an undisguised lust, yet there was a physical side to her own nature, at once as crude and selfish and demanding as his, which welded them into an almost perfect partnershi
p between the sheets. The simple truth was that the more he used and abused her, the more sexual satisfaction he managed to wring from her, and the more she was conscious of her pride in being the physical object of his apparently insatiable appetite for her body. Indeed, as the year moved into its last quarter, she began to suspect that she needed him almost as much as he needed her, although for a long time she refused to countenance, even to herself, the full implications of such a suspicion. But then she was forced to face them. He was soon making too many demands upon her, begging her to be with him even for an odd half-hour at lunchtimes when (truth to tell) she would more often than not have preferred a glass of red wine and a ham sandwich with her friend and colleague Gladys Taylor in the Dew Drop. And then had come the show-down, as perhaps she’d known would be inevitable. He’d asked her to leave her husband and come to live with him: it was about time, surely, that she left the man she didn’t love and moved in with the one she did. And although coming within an ace of saying ‘yes’, she’d finally said ‘no’.

  Why Margaret Bowman had thus refused, she would herself have found difficult to explain. Perhaps it was because (for the present at least) it was all far too much bother. The rather dull, the slightly overweight, the only semi-successful man who was her husband, was the man with whom she had shared so much for so many years now. And there were far too many other shared things to think of packing everything up just like that: payments on the car, life insurances, the house mortgage, family friends and relations, neighbours – even the disappointments and the quarrels and the boredoms, which all seemed to form a strangely binding sort of tie between them. Yet there was perhaps, too, one quite specific reason why she had refused. Gladys (Margaret had come to work in the same section as Gladys in the spring) had become a genuine friend; and one day in the Dew Drop she had told Margaret how she had been temporarily jilted by her husband, and how for many months after that she had felt so hurt and so belittled that she’d wondered whether she would ever be able to lift up her head in life again. ‘Having had it done to me’ (she’d confided) ‘I couldn’t ever think of doing it to anyone else.’ It had been a simple little thing to say, and it had not been said with any great moral fervour; yet it had made its point with memorable effect . . .

  That particular Thursday afternoon when she had finally said ‘no’ they’d had their first blazing row, and she had been alarmed by the look of potential violence in his eyes. Although he had finally calmed down, she found herself making excuses for the whole of the next week, including the hitherto sacrosanct p.m. period on Thursday. It had been a sad mistake, though, since the following fortnight had been a nightmare. He had rung her at work, where she had taken the message in front of all the other women in the section, their eyes glued on her as (nonchalantly, she hoped) she promised to get in touch. Which she had done, asking him sensibly, soberly, just to let things ride for a few weeks and see if they would sort themselves out. Then there had been the first letter, addressed to her at work – pleasantly, lovingly, imploring her to go back to the old pattern of their former meetings. And then, when she did not reply to the first letter, a second one, which was addressed to her home and which she’d picked up from the front-hall mat at eight o’clock on a wet and miserable November morning when she was going to a funeral. Tom was still in bed, and she’d hurriedly torn the envelope open and looked through the letter – the cruel, vindictive, frightening letter which she’d quickly stuck into the bottom of her handbag as she heard the creak at the top of the stairs.

  When, that same morning, her husband sat opposite her at the kitchen table, she seemed engrossed in the half-dozen brochures she had picked up the previous lunchtime in Summertown Travel, giving details of trips ranging from gentle strolls round the hill-forts of Western England to lung-racking rambles in the Himalayan foothills. Yet how fervently at that moment did she wish her lover dead!

  Tom Bowman had not told his wife about his discovery of the letter until the following Wednesday evening. It had been a harrowing occasion for her, but Tom had not flown into a rage or threatened her with physical violence. In retrospect, she almost wished he had done so; for far more frightening, and something that sent the four guardians scurrying from the portals of her sanity, was the change that seemed to have come over him: there was a hardness in his voice and in his eyes; an unsuspected deviousness about his thinking; a firmness of purpose about his frightening suggestions; and, underlying all (she suspected), a terrifyingly vicious and unforgiving jealousy against the man who had tried to rob him of his wife. What he said that evening was so fatuous really, so fanciful, so silly, that his words had not registered with her as forming any plausible or practicable plan of revenge. Yet slowly and inexorably the ideas which he had outlined to her that evening had set in motion a self-accelerating series of events which had culminated in murder.

  Even now, right at the end of things, she was aware of the ambivalence of all her thoughts, her motives, her hopes – and her mind would give her no rest. After watching the late-night news on BBC2 she took four aspirin tablets and went to bed, where (wonderfully!) she fell easily enough into sleep. But by a quarter past one she was awake once more, and for the next four hours her darting eyes could not remain still for a second in their burning sockets as the whirligig of her brain sped round and round without any hint of slowing down, as if the fairground operator had pushed the lever forward on to ‘Fast’ and then fallen into an insensate stupor over the controls.

  That same night, the night of January 2nd, Morse himself had a pleasantly refreshing sleep, with a mildly erotic dream (about a woman with a large Elastoplast over one ankle) thrown in for good measure. He told himself, on waking at 6.30 a.m., that if only there had been a double room available the night before . . . But he had never been a man to be unduly perturbed by the ‘if onlys’ of life, and he possessed a wholly enviable capacity for discounting most disappointments. Remembering a programme he had heard the previous week on cholesterol (a programme which the Lewis family had obviously missed), Morse decided to forgo the huge and rare treat of a fried breakfast in the restaurant, and caught the 9.10 train to Reading from platform 2. In the second-class compartment in which he made the journey were two other persons: in one corner, an (equally unshaven) Irishman who said nothing whatsoever after a polite ‘Good morning, sorr!’ but who thereafter smiled perpetually as though the day had dawned exceedingly bright; and in the other corner, a pretty young girl wearing (as Morse recognized it) a Lady Margaret Hall scarf, who scowled unceasingly as she studied a thick volume of anthropological essays, as though the world had soured and worsened overnight.

  It seemed, to Morse, a metaphor.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Friday, January 3rd: a.m.

  There’s a kind of release

  And a kind of torment in every goodbye for every man.

  (C. DAY LEWIS)

  FOR MANY HOURS before Morse had woken, Helen Smith had been lying wide awake in bed, anticipating the worries that would doubtless beset her during the coming day. After her dreadful ordeal of the previous day, it had been wonderfully supportive of John to show such understanding and forgiveness; indeed, he had almost persuaded her that, even if she had left anything potentially incriminating behind, police resources were so overstretched in coping with major felonies that it was very doubtful whether anyone would find the time to pursue their own comparatively minor misdemeanours. And at that point, she had felt all the old love for him which she had known five years previously when they had met in Yugoslavia, her native country; and when after only two weeks’ courtship she had agreed to marry him and go to live in England. He had given her the impression then – very much so! – of being a reasonably affluent businessman; and in any case she was more than glad to get away from a country in which her family lived under the shadow of a curiously equivocal incident from the past, in which her paternal grandfather, for some mysterious reason, had been shot by the Titoists outside Trieste. But from the earliest days in
England she had become aware of her husband’s strange lifestyle, of his dubious background, of his shady present, and of his far from glittering prospects for the future. Yet in her own quiet, gentle way, she had learned to love him, and to perform (without overmuch reluctance) the roˆle that she was called upon to play.

  At 7.30 a.m. they sat opposite each other over the pine-wood table in the small kitchen of their rented property, having a breakfast of grapefruit juice, toast and marmalade, and coffee. When they had finished, John Smith looked across at his wife and put his hand over hers. In his eyes she was still a most attractive woman – that at least was a point on which he had no need to lie. Her legs, for the purist, were perhaps a little too slim; and likewise her bust was considerably less bulging than the amply bosomed models who unfailingly featured on one of the earlier pages of their daily newspaper; her face had a pale, Slavonic cast, with a slightly pitted, rather muddy-looking skin; but the same face, albeit somewhat sullen in repose, was ever irradiated when she smiled, the intense, greenish eyes flashing into life, and the lips curling back over her regular teeth. She was smiling, though a little sadly, even now.