by Colin Dexter
‘But being a rich man you can just about afford to let the missus go along to one of these beauty parlours?’
‘Just about!’
Lewis suddenly put down his foot with a joyous thrust, turned on his right-hand flasher, took the police car up to 95 m.p.h., veered in a great swoop across the outside lane, and netted a dozen lorries and cars which had thoughtfully decelerated to the statutory speed limit as they’d noticed the white car looming up in their rear mirrors.
‘The treatment they give you,’ continued Lewis, ‘makes the skin go a bit pinkish all over and they say if it’s on the top lip it’s very sensitive and you often get a histamine reaction – and a sort of tingling sensation . . .’
But Morse was no longer listening. His own body was tingling too; and there crossed his face a beatific smile as Lewis accelerated the police car faster still towards the City of Oxford.
Back in Kidlington HQ, Morse decided that they had spent quite long enough in the miserably cold and badly equipped room at the back of the Haworth annexe, and that they should now transfer things back home, as it were.
‘Shall I go and get a few new box-files from the stores?’ asked Lewis. Morse picked up two files which were heavily bulging with excess paper, and looked cursorily through their contents. ‘These’ll be OK. They’re both OBE.’
‘OBE, sir?’
Morse nodded: ‘Overtaken By Events.’
The phone rang half an hour later and Morse heard Sarah Jonstone’s voice at the other end. She’d remembered a little detail about Mrs Ballard; it might be silly of her to bother Morse with it, but she could almost swear that there had been a little red circular sticker – an RSPCA badge, she thought – on Mrs Ballard’s coat when she had booked in at registration on New Year’s Eve.
‘Well,’ said Morse, ‘we’ve not done a bad job between us, Lewis. We’ve managed to find two of the three women we were after – and it’s beginning to look as if it’s not going to be very difficult to find the last one! Not tonight, though. I’m tired out – and I could do with a bath, and a good night’s sleep.’
‘And a shave, sir!’
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Saturday, January 4th
Arithmetic is where the answer is right and everything is nice and you can look out of the window and see the blue sky – or the answer is wrong and you have to start all over and try again and see how it comes out this time.
(CARL SANDBURG, Complete Poems)
THE THAW CONTINUED overnight, and lawns that had been totally subniveal the day before were now resurfacing in patches of irregular green under a blue sky. The bad weather was breaking; the case, it seemed, was breaking too.
At Kidlington HQ Morse was going to be occupied (he’d said) with other matters for most of the morning; and Lewis, left to his own devices, was getting progressively more and more bogged down in a problem which at the outset had looked comparatively simple. The Yellow Pages had been his starting point, and under ‘Beauty Salons and Consultants’ he found seven or eight addresses in Oxford which advertised specialist treatment in what was variously called Waxing, Facials, or Electrolysis; with another five in Banbury; three more (a gloomier Lewis noticed) in Bicester; and a good many other establishments in individual places that could be reached without too much travelling by a woman living in Chipping Norton – if (and in Lewis’s mind it was a biggish ‘if’) ‘Mrs Ballard’ was in fact a citizen of Chipping Norton.
But there were two quadratic equations, as it were, from which to work out the unknown ‘x’: and it was the second of these – the cross-check with the charity flag days – to which Lewis now directed his thinking. In recent years, the most usual sort of badge received from shakers of collection tins had come in the form of a little circular sticker that was pressed on to the lapel of the contributor’s coat; and Lewis’s experience was that such a sticker often fell off after a few minutes rather than stuck on for several days. And so Morse’s view, Lewis agreed, was probably right: if Mrs Ballard was still wearing a sticker on New Year’s Eve, she’d probably bought it the same day, or the day before at the very outside. But Lewis had considerable doubts about Morse’s further confidently stated conviction that there must have been an RSPCA flag day in Oxford on the 30th or 31st, and that Mrs Ballard had bought a flag as she went into a beauty salon in the city centre. ‘Beautifully simple!’ Morse had said. ‘We’ve got the time, we’ve got the place – and we’ve almost got the woman, agreed? Just a little phoning around and . . .’
But Lewis had got off to a bad start. His first call elicited the disappointing information that the last street-collection in Oxford for the RSPCA had been the previous July; and he had no option but to start making another list, and a very long list at that. First came the well-known medical charities, those dealing with multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, heart diseases, cancer research, blindness, deafness, et cetera; then the major social charities, ranging from Christian Aid and Oxfam to War on Want and the Save the Children Fund, et cetera; next came specific societies that looked after ambulancemen, lifeboatmen and ex-servicemen, et cetera; finally were listed the local charities which funded hospices for the terminally ill, hostels for the criminally sick or the mentally unbalanced, et cetera. Lewis could have added scores of others – and he knew he was getting into an awful mess. He could even have added the National Association for the Care and Resettlement of Criminal Offenders. But he didn’t.
Clearly some sort of selection was required, and he would have been more than glad to have Morse at his side at that moment. It was like being faced with a difficult maths problem at school: if you weren’t careful, you got more and more ensnared in some increasingly complex equations – until the master showed you a beautifully economic short-cut that reduced the problem to a few simple little sums and produced a glittering (and correct) solution at the foot of the page. But his present master, Morse, was still apparently otherwise engaged, and so he decided to begin in earnest: on the second of the two equations.
Yet an hour later he had advanced his knowledge of charity collections in Oxford not one whit; and he was becoming increasingly irritated with telephone numbers which didn’t answer when called, or which (if they did answer) appeared manned by voluntary envelope-lickers, decorators, caretakers or idiots – or (worst of all!) by intimidating answering machines telling Lewis to start speaking ‘now’. And after a further hour of telephoning, he hadn’t found a single charitable organization which had held a flag day in Oxford – or anywhere else in the vicinity, for that matter – in the last few days of December.
He was getting, ridiculously, nowhere; and he said as much when Morse finally put in another appearance at 11 a.m. with a cup of coffee and a digestive biscuit, both of which (mistakenly) Lewis thought his superior officer had brought in for him.
‘We need some of those men we’ve been promised, sir.’
‘No, no, Lewis! We don’t want to start explaining everything to a load of squaddies. Just have a go at the clinic angle if the other’s no good. I’ll come and give you a hand when I get the chance.’
So Lewis made another start – this time on those Oxford hair clinics which had bothered to take a few centimetres of advertising space in the Yellow Pages: only four of them, thank goodness! But once again the problem soon began to take on unexpectedly formidable dimensions – once he began to consider the sort of questions he could ask a clinic manageress – if she was on the premises. For what could he ask? He wanted to find out if a woman whose name he didn’t know, whose appearance he could only very imperfectly describe, and of whose address he hadn’t the faintest notion, except perhaps that it might just be in Chipping Norton – whether such a woman had been in for some unspecified treatment, but probably upper-lip depilation, at some unspecified time, though most probably on the morning of, let him say, any of the last few days of December. What a farce, thought Lewis; and what a fruitless farce it did in fact become. The first of the clinics firmly refused to answer que
stions, even to the police, about such ‘strictly confidential’ matters; the second was quite happy to inform him that it had no customers whatsoever on its books with an address in Chipping Norton; a recorded message informed him that the third would re-open after the New Year break on January 6th; and the fourth suggested, politely enough, that he must have misread the advertisement: that whilst it cut, trimmed, singed and dyed, the actual removal of hair was not included amongst its splendid services.
Lewis put down the phone – and capitulated. He went over to the canteen and found Morse – the only one there – drinking another cup of coffee and just completing The Times crossword puzzle.
‘Ah, Lewis. Get yourself a coffee! Any luck yet?’
‘No, I bloody haven’t,’ snapped Lewis – a man who swore, at the very outside, about once a fortnight. ‘As I said, sir, I need some help: half a dozen DCs – that’s what I need.’
‘I don’t think it’s necessary, you know.’
‘Well, I do!’ said Lewis, looking as angry as Morse had ever seen him, and about to use up a whole month’s ration of blasphemies. ‘We’re not even sure the bloody woman does come from Chipping Norton. She might just as well come from Chiswick – like the tart you met in Paddington!’
‘Lew-is! Lew-is! Take it easy! I’m sure that neither the “Palmers” nor the Smiths had anything at all to do with the murder. And when I said just now it wasn’t necessary to bring any more people in on the case, I didn’t mean that you couldn’t have as many as you like – if you really need them. But not for this particular job, Lewis, I don’t think. I didn’t want to disturb you, so I’ve been doing a bit of phoning from here; and I’m waiting for a call that ought to come through any minute. And if it tells me what I think it will, I reckon we know exactly who this “Mrs Ballard” is, and exactly where we should be able to find her. Her name’s Mrs Bowman – Mrs Margaret Bowman. And do you know where she lives?’
‘Chipping Norton?’ suggested Lewis, in a rather wearily defeated tone.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Sunday, January 5th
A man is in general better pleased when he has a good dinner upon his table than when his wife talks Greek.
(SAMUEL JOHNSON)
MORSE HAD BEEN glad to accept Mrs Lewis’s invitation to her traditional Sunday lunch of slightly undercooked beef, horseradish sauce, velvety-flat Yorkshire pudding, and roast potatoes; and the meal had been a success. In deference to the great man’s presence, Lewis had bought a bottle of Beaujolais Nouveau; and as Morse leaned back in a deep-cushioned armchair and drank his coffee, he felt very much at his ease.
‘I sometimes wish I’d taken a gentle little job in the Egyptian Civil Service, Lewis.’
‘Fancy a drop of brandy, sir?’
‘Why not?’
From the rattle and clatter coming from the kitchen, it was clear that Mrs Lewis had launched herself into the washing-up, but Morse kept his voice down as he spoke again. ‘I know that a dirty weekend away with some wonderful woman sounds just like the thing for some jaded fellow getting on in age a bit – like you, Lewis – but you’d be an idiot to leave that lovely cook you married—’
‘I’ve never given it a thought, sir.’
‘There are one or two people in this case, though, aren’t there, who seem to have been doing a bit of double-dealing one way or another?’
Lewis nodded as he, too, leaned back in his armchair sipping his coffee, and letting his mind go back to the previous day’s startling new development, and to Morse’s explanation of how it had occurred . . .
‘. . . If you ever decide to kick over the traces’ (Morse had said) ‘you’ve got to have an accommodation address – that’s the vital point to bear in mind. All right, there are a few people, like the Smiths, who can get away without one; but don’t forget they’re professional swindlers and they know all the rules of the game backwards. In the normal course of events, though, you’ve got to get involved in some sort of correspondence. Now, if the princess you’re going away with isn’t married or if she’s a divorcee or if she is just living on her own anyway, then there’s no problem, is there? She can be your mistress and your missus for the weekend and she can deal with all the booking – just like Philippa Palmer did. She can use – she must use – her own address and, as I say, there are no problems. Now let’s just recap for a minute about where we are with the third woman in this case, the woman who wrote to the hotel as “Mrs Ann Ballard” and who booked in as “Mrs Ann Ballard” from an address in Chipping Norton. Obviously, if we can find her, and find out from her what went on in Annexe 3 on New Year’s Eve – or New Year’s morning – well, we shall be home and dry, shan’t we? And in fact we know a good deal about her. The key thing – or what I thought was the key thing – was that she’d probably gone to a hair clinic a day or so before turning up at the Haworth Hotel. I’m sorry, Lewis, that you’ve had such a disappointing time with that side of things. But there was this other side which I kept on thinking about – the address she wrote from and the address the hotel wrote to. Now you can’t exchange correspondence with a phoney address – obviously you can’t! And yet, you know, you can! You must be able to – because it happened, Lewis! And when you think about it you can do it pretty easily if you’ve got one particular advantage in life – just the one. And you know what that advantage is? It’s being a postman. Now let’s just take an example. Let’s take the Banbury Road. The house numbers go up a long, long way, don’t they? I’m not sure, but certainly to about four hundred and eighty or so. Now if the last house is, say, number 478, what exactly happens to a letter addressed to a non-existent 480? The sorters in the main post office are not going to be much concerned, are they? It’s only just above the last house-number; and as likely as not – even if someone did spot it – he’d probably think a new house was being built there. But if it were addressed, say, to 580, then obviously a sorter is going to think that something’s gone askew, and he probably won’t put that letter into the appropriate pigeon-hole. In cases like that, Lewis, there’s a tray for problem letters, and one of the higher-echelon post-office staff will try to sort them all out later. But whichever way things go, whether the letter would get into the postman’s bag, or whether it would get put into the problem tray – it wouldn’t matter! You see, the postman himself would be there on the premises while all this sorting was taking place! I know! I’ve had a long talk on the phone with the Chief Postmaster from Chipping Norton – splendid fellow! – and he said that the letter we saw from the Haworth Hotel, the one addressed to 84 West Street, would pretty certainly have gone straight into the West Street pigeon-hole, because it’s only a couple over the last street-number; and even if it had been put in the problem tray, the postman waiting to get his sack over his shoulder would have every opportunity of seeing it, and taking it. And there were only two postmen who delivered to West Street in December: one was a youngish fellow who’s spending the New Year with his girlfriend in the Canary Islands; and the other is this fellow called Tom Bowman, who lives at Charlbury Drive in Chipping Norton. But there’s nobody there – neither him nor his wife – and none of the neighbours knows where they’ve gone, although Margaret Bowman was at her work in Summertown on Thursday and Friday last week: I’ve checked that. Anyway there’s not much more we can do this weekend. Max says he’ll have the body all sewn up and presentable again by Monday, and so we ought to know who he is pretty soon.’
It had been after Morse had finished that Lewis ventured the most important question of all: ‘Do you think the murdered man is Tom Bowman, sir?’ And Morse had hesitated before replying. ‘Do you know, Lewis, I’ve got a strange sort of feeling that it isn’t . . .’
Morse had nodded off in his chair, and Lewis quietly left the room to help with the drying-up.
That same Sunday afternoon Sarah Jonstone at last got back to her flat. She knew that she would almost certainly never have such an amazing experience again in her life, and she had been reluctant to leave t
he hotel whilst police activity was continuously centred upon it. But even the ropes that had cordoned off the area were gone, and no policeman now stood by the side door of the annexe block. Mrs Binyon (who had not originally intended to stay at the Haworth for the New Year anyway, but who had been pressed into reluctant service because of the illnesses of so many staff) had at last, that morning, set off on her trip north to visit her parents in Leeds. Only half a dozen people were booked into the hotel that Sunday evening, although (perversely!) the staff who had been so ill were now almost fully recovered. Sarah was putting on her coat at 3.30 p.m. when the phone went in Reception and a young woman’s voice, a quietly attractive one, asked if she could please speak to Mr Binyon if he was there. But when Sarah asked for the woman’s name, the line went suddenly dead.
Sarah found herself recalling this little incident later in the evening as she sat watching TV. But it wasn’t important, she told herself; probably just a line cut off by some technical trouble or other. Could it be important though? Chief Inspector Morse had begged her to dredge her memory to salvage anything that she could recall; and there had been that business about the sticker on Mrs Ballard’s coat . . . But there was something else, she knew, if only her mind could get hold of it.
But, for the moment, it couldn’t.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Monday, January 6th: a.m.
By working faithfully eight hours a day, you may eventually get to be a boss and work twelve hours a day.
