The Secret of Annexe 3

by Colin Dexter

  Immediately to the left in the spacious room (about twenty feet by fourteen feet) stood a built-in wardrobe of white wood, in which nine plastic coat-hangers hung from the cross-rail; beyond it stood a dressing table, its drawers (as we have seen) quite empty, with a brochure of the hotel lying on its top, next to a card with the handwritten message: ‘Welcome – your room has been personally prepared by Mandy’; a colour TV set stood in the corner; and, between it and the dressing table, a ledge some four feet from the floor held a kettle, a small teapot, two cups and two saucers, and a rectangular plastic tray, on which, in separate compartments, were small cellophaned packets of biscuits, sachets of Nescafe´, sachets of sugar, teabags, and little squat tubs of Eden Vale milk.

  Along the far wall was a long low radiator, and just above its top the sill of an equally long window, the latter a triptych of panes, the centre one fixed, but the left and right panes still opened outwards to the elements at an angle of forty-five degrees, and the darkish-green curtains drawn only half across. Liberally sprinkled fingerprint powder was observable all round the window, where a few daubs of unpromising-looking blotches had been circled with a black felt pen.

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Morse, a shiver running down his vertebrae, ‘we should take our first positive moves in this case, Lewis, eh? Let’s close those bloody windows! And turn on the radiator!’

  ‘You’re not worried about the prints, sir?’

  ‘It’s not going to help us to arrest anybody if we land up in some intensive-care unit with bronchial pneumonia.’

  (Lewis, at that moment, felt quite unconscionably happy.)

  The twin beds occupied most of the area in the rest of the room, their tops close against the wall to the right, beneath a long headboard panel of beige plastic, set into which were the controls for TV and radio, loudspeakers, various light switches, and an early-morning-alarm unit with what seemed to Lewis instructions that were completely incomprehensible. On a small table between the beds was a white digital telephone; and on a shelf beneath that, the Holy Bible, as placed by the ever-persevering Gideons. The walls and ceiling were painted in a very pale shade of apple green, and the floor was carpeted wall to wall in a grey-green chequered pattern.

  All very neat, very clean, and very tidy – apart from the obscene blotch of dried blood across the further bed.

  Completing the circuit of this accommodation, the two men came to the tiny bathroom, only some seven feet by five feet, whose door stood a few feet inside and to the right of the main entrance to Annexe 3. Immediately facing was the WC, a unit of the usual white enamel, the bowl a sparkling tribute to the ministrations of the conscientious Mandy; on the left was a washbasin by which stood two tumblers and a diminutive bar of soap (unopened) in a pink paper wrapping bearing the name ‘Haworth’; to the right was a bath, fairly small, with shower attachment, and a ledge let into the wall containing a second bar of soap (also unopened); finally, on the wall opposite, to the left of the WC, were racks for a whole assortment of fluffy white towels (all seemingly unused), and fixtures for toilet paper and Kleenex tissues. The walls were tiled in a light olive-green, with the vinyl flooring of a slightly darker, matching green.

  ‘They don’t look, whoever they were, as if they made much use of the facilities, sir.’

  ‘No-o.’ Morse walked back into the main part of the room and stood there nodding to himself. ‘Good point! I wonder if . . .’ He fiddled with some of the buttons and switches which appeared to determine the reception of a TV programme; but with no effect.

  ‘Shall I plug it in, sir?’

  ‘You mean . . .?’ Again Morse appeared deep in thought as an indeterminate blur dramatically developed into a clearly delineated picture, and a late-night newsreader announced that in Beirut the Shi’ite and the Christian Militias had begun the new year with exactly the same implacable hatred as they had finished the old one.

  ‘Funny, you know, Lewis – turn that thing off! – you’d have thought they would have made some use of the facilities, wouldn’t you?’ Morse carefully drew back the coverings on the bed nearer the window; but the sheets appeared quite virgin, apart from the indentations caused by the superimposition of a corpse. With the other bed, too, the evidence seemed very much the same: someone might well have sat on the side, perhaps, but it seemed reasonably clear that neither bed had been the scene of any frolicsome coition.

  It was Lewis, emerging from the bathroom, who had found the only tangible trace of the room’s most recent tenants: a screwed-up brown-stained Kleenex tissue, which had been the only item in the waste-bin.

  ‘Looks like this is the only thing they left behind, sir.’

  ‘Not blood is it?’

  ‘It’s the stage-black for the make-up, I think.’

  ‘Well, at least we’ve got one clue, Lewis!’

  Before leaving, Morse once more slid open the door of the wardrobe along its smooth runners and took another look inside.

  ‘Doesn’t look as if your fingerprint lads did much dusting here.’

  Lewis looked at the powder marks that covered several points on the white outer-door: ‘I wouldn’t say that, sir. It looks as if—’

  ‘I meant inside,’ said Morse quietly.

  It was midnight before Sarah Jonstone got to bed that night, and way into the early hours before she finally dropped off into a restless slumber. Her mind was reverting continually to the strangely disturbing chief inspector – a man she was growing to dislike intensely – and to what he had asked, and asked, and asked her. Occasionally, as he had listened to her answers, he had seemed to promote a simple, honest confession of ignorance or forgetfulness on her part to the status of an almost unforgivable sin. And above all her mind reverted to his repeated insistence that she must try to recall anything unusual: anything unusual; anything unusual . . . The words had re-echoed round the walls of her brain – being all the more disturbing precisely because there had, she thought, been something unusual . . . Yet this ‘something’ continued to elude her: almost, on several occasions, she had it in her grasp – and then it had slithered away like a slippery bar of soap along the bottom of the bath.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Thursday, January 2nd: a.m.

  Snow is all right while it is snowing: it is like inebriation, because it is very pleasing when it is coming, but very unpleasing when it is going.

  (OGDEN NASH)

  MORSE HAD DECIDED that it was needful, at least for a couple of days, to set up a temporary Murder HQ in situ; and from the comparatively early hours of the next morning, the room at the rear of the annexe building, a broad-windowed area that looked as if it would make an excellent classroom, was taken over by Lewis and Morse as an official ‘Operations Room’.

  An innocently deep night’s sleep, an early-morning shower and a fried breakfast of high cholesterol risk had launched a zestful Lewis on his way to the Haworth Hotel at 6.30 a.m., where an ill-rested, unshowered, unbreakfasted Morse had joined him twenty minutes later.

  At half-past seven it was John Binyon, the hotel proprietor, who was the first of many that day to sit opposite the two detectives at a rickety trestle table.

  ‘It’s a terrible thing,’ said Binyon. ‘Terrible! Just when we’d started getting things going nicely, too.’

  ‘Never mind, sir,’ said Morse, calling upon all his powers of self-control to force the last of these three words through the barrier of his teeth. ‘Perhaps you’ll have a long queue of people waiting to sleep in the famous room.’

  ‘Would you queue for it, Inspector?’

  ‘Certainly not!’ said Morse.

  The talk turned to the subject of guests in general, and Binyon admitted that things had changed a good deal, even during his own limited experience. ‘They don’t even pretend these days, some of them – don’t even put a ring on, some of the women. Mind you, we turn one or two away – well, you know, make out we’re full up.’

  ‘Do you think you could always spot them – if they weren’t marri
ed?’

  Binyon gave the question serious thought. ‘No! No – I wouldn’t say that. But I think I’d know if they were staying together for the first time.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘Lots of things. The way they act, I suppose – and they always pay by cash – and they often get addresses wrong. For example, we had a fellow last month who came with his girlfriend, and he put down his address as Slough, Berks!’

  ‘What did you do?’ asked Morse, frowning.

  ‘Nothing. I wasn’t on the desk when he signed in; but I was when he booked out, and I told him straight that the next hotel he went to it might be valuable to know that Slough was in Bucks.’

  ‘What did he say?’ asked Morse, frowning more than ever.

  ‘He just grinned – as if he hadn’t heard me.’

  ‘But Slough is in Berks!’ said Morse.

  The proprietor’s general grasp of hotel procedures was clearly considerably in advance of his knowledge of geography, and Morse found himself not unfavourably impressed by his succinct account of current practice at the Haworth Hotel. Normally, between 80 per cent and 90 per cent of the guests contacted the hotel, in the first instance, by phone. Often, there would be insufficient time to seek or to obtain confirmation by letter. Most usually, a credit-card number was sufficient warranty from the hotel’s point of view to establish a bona fides; but for something so specifically pre-planned and widely advertised as a Christmas or a New Year function, obviously the great majority of guests had some correspondence with the hotel. As far as actual registration was concerned, the pattern was (the two detectives learned) exactly what any seasoned traveller would expect at any established hostelry: ‘Name?’ would be the first question; and, when this was checked against the booking list, a card would be handed over which asked for surname, forename(s), company, company address, home address, method of settling account, nationality, car registration, passport number, and finally signature. Such a fairly straightforward task completed, the guest (or guests) would be given a card showing details of room number, tariff, type of breakfast, type of room, and the like. With a room key handed over from one of the hooks behind Reception, ‘registration’ was now appropriately effected, with only a final negotiation remaining about the choice of a morning newspaper. And that was that. In such a comparatively small hotel, no porter was employed to carry cases, although the management was of course always on the lookout to ensure suitable assistance for any ageing couples who appeared at risk from cardiac arrest at the prospect of lugging their belongings to the first-floor landing.

  At eight fifteen, confirmation was received from Chipping Norton that none of the five Ballard couples on the local Electoral Register had a wifely component answering to the name Ann; and that the town’s official archivist, after delving as far back towards Domesday as local records allowed, was prepared to state quite categorically that there was not, nor ever had been, a number 84 along the thoroughfare now known, and always known, as West Street, Chipping Norton.

  At eight forty-five, Superintendent Bell rang through from St Aldates to ask if Morse required any further men to help him. But Morse declined the offer; for the moment he could think of nothing he could profitably effect with a posse of policemen, except perhaps to conduct some inevitably futile house-to-house inquiries in and around Chipping Norton to ascertain whether anyone had knowledge of a man of indeterminate age, partner to a pseudonymous Ann Ballard, with neither a club-foot, nor a withered arm, nor a swastika tattooed on his forehead to assist any possible identification. Further, it became quite clear from the guests interviewed later that morning that none of them would with any certitude be able to recognize Mr Ballard again. Such diffidence (as Morse saw things) was hardly surprising: the only time the other guests had met Ballard was during that one evening; up until then he had been a complete stranger to them; and he had spent most of the evening closely shielded and chaperoned by what others had taken to be a jealously possessive wife. Indeed the only reason that many could recall him at all was the extremely obvious one: he had won first prize in the men’s fancy-dress competition, dressed in the consummately skilful disguise of a West Indian reggae musician. The only new fact of any substance to emerge was that he had, certainly in the later part of the evening, drunk more than one glass of whisky – Bell’s, according to Mandy, the stand-in barmaid. But there was also general agreement, fully corroborating Sarah Jonstone’s earlier evidence, that Ballard had eaten very little indeed. Several witnesses had a clear recollection of him dancing with his yashmak’d companion (lover? mistress? wife?), and only with her, for most of the evening; but Mr Dods (‘With t’one “d”’) was almost prepared to swear on Geoffrey Boycott’s batting average that Ballard had also danced, towards midnight, with an animated youngish woman named Mrs Palmer – ‘Philippa’ or ‘Pippa’ Palmer, as he recalled – as well as with the hotel receptionist (‘A little tipsy, Inspector, if ah mair sair sor!’). And that was about that. And towards the end of the morning it was becoming increasingly obvious to both Morse and Lewis that the only firm and valuable testimony they were going to get was that given the previous evening by Sarah (tipsy or not!) Jonstone, who had claimed in her statement to Lewis that she had peeped out of her window at about 1 a.m. and seen at that late, flake-falling, whitely covered hour, the prize-winning Rastafarian walking back across to the annexe with an arm around each of the women on either side of him. It seemed good to Morse, therefore, to summon the fair Miss Jonstone once again.

  She sat there, her legs crossed, looking tired, every few moments pushing her spectacles up to the top of her nose with the middle finger of her ringless left hand – and thereby irritating Morse to a quite disproportionate extent – as he himself hooked his half-lenses behind his ears and trusted that he projected an appropriate degree of investigative acumen.

  ‘After the annexe lot left the party, the others finished too – is that right?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘You don’t know so?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You say Ballard had his arms round these two women?’

  ‘No, he had one arm round one woman and one—’

  ‘Which two women?’

  ‘Mrs Palmer was one – I’m fairly sure of that.’

  ‘And the other one?’

  ‘I think it was . . . Mrs Smith.’

  ‘You’d had quite a lot to drink, hadn’t you!’

  Sarah Jonstone’s pale face coloured deeply; and yet perhaps it was, that morning, more from anger than from shame. ‘Oh yes!’ she said, in a firm, quiet voice. ‘I don’t think you’ll find a single person in the hotel who would disagree with that.’

  ‘But you saw the women fairly clearly?’ (Morse was beginning to appreciate Miss Jonstone more and more.)

  ‘I saw them clearly from the back, yes.’

  ‘It was snowing, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So they had their coats on?’

  ‘Yes. Both of them had light-coloured winter macs on.’

  ‘And you say’ – Morse referred to her statement – ‘that the other three members of the annexe sextet were just behind them?’

  Sarah nodded.

  ‘So, if you’re right about the first three, that leaves us with Mrs Ballard, Mr Palmer and Mr . . . Smith – yes?’

  Sarah hesitated – and then said ‘Yes!’ – then pushed her spectacles up once more towards her luminous eyes.

  ‘And behind them all came Mr Binyon?’

  ‘Yes – I think he was going to make sure that the side door to the annexe was locked up after them.’

  ‘That’s what he says, too.’

  ‘So it might be true, Inspector.’

  But Morse appeared not to have heard her. ‘After Mr Binyon had locked up the annexe, no one else could have got in there?’

  ‘Not unless he had a key.’

  ‘Or she had a key!’

  ‘Or she had a key, yes.’

  ‘But anyone could have
got out of the annexe later on?’

  Again Sarah hesitated before answering. ‘Yes, I suppose so. I hadn’t really thought of it, but – yes. The lock’s an ordinary Yale one, and any of the guests could have got out, if they’d wanted to.’

  It was Lewis who, at this point, made an unexpected intervention.

  ‘Are you absolutely sure it was snowing then, Miss Jonstone?’

  Sarah turned towards the sergeant, feeling relieved to look into a pair of friendly eyes and to hear a friendly voice. And she wasn’t quite sure, now she came to think of it. The wind had been blowing and lifting up the settled snow in a drifting whirl around her window; and whether it had been snowing, at that particular moment, she wasn’t really prepared to assert with any dogmatism.

  ‘No,’ she said simply. ‘I’m not absolutely sure.’

  ‘It’s just,’ continued Lewis, ‘that according to the weatherman on Radio Oxford the snow in this area had virtually stopped falling just about midnight. There may have been the odd flurry or two; but it had pretty well finished by then – so they say.’

  ‘What are you trying to get at, Sergeant? I’m not . . . quite sure . . .’

  ‘It’s just that if it had stopped snowing, and if someone had left the annexe that night, there would have been some footprints, wouldn’t there? Wouldn’t such a person have to make his way across to the main road?’

  Sarah was thinking back, thinking back so very hard. There had been no prints the next morning leading from the annexe across to the Banbury Road. None! She could almost swear to that. But had it been snowing when she looked out that fateful evening? Yes, it had!