Read The Secret of Annexe 3 Online
Authors: Colin Dexter
The Secret of Annexe 3
For
Elizabeth, Anna, and Eve
ONTENTS
HAPTER
O
NE
The pomp of funerals has more regard to the vanity of the living than to the honour of the dead.
(LA ROCHEFOUCAULD,
Maxims
)
W
HEN THE OLD
man died, there was probably no great joy in heaven; and quite certainly little if any real grief in Charlbury Drive, the pleasantly
unpretentious cul-de-sac of semi-detached houses to which he had retired. Yet a few of the neighbours, especially the womenfolk, had struck up some sort of distanced acquaintance with him as they
pushed prams or shopping trolleys past his neatly kept front lawn; and two of these women (on learning that things were fixed for a Saturday) had decided to be present at the statutory obsequies.
Margaret Bowman was one of them.
‘Do I look all right?’ she asked.
‘Fine!’ His eyes had not left the racing page of the tabloid newspaper, but he knew well enough that his wife would always be an odds-on favourite for looking all right: a tall,
smart woman upon whom clothes invariably hung well, whether for dances, weddings, dinners – or even funerals.
‘Well? Have a
look
then! Yes?’
So he looked up at her and nodded vaguely as he surveyed the black ensemble. She
did
look fine. What else was there to say? ‘You look fine,’ he said.
With a gaiety wholly inappropriate she twirled round on the points of her newly purchased black leather court shoes, fully aware, just as he was, that she did look rather attractive. Her hips
had filled out somewhat alarmingly since that disappointing day when as a willowy lass of twenty (a year before marrying Tom Bowman) her application to become an air hostess had proved
unsuccessful; and now, sixteen years later, she would have more than a little trouble (she knew it!) in negotiating the central aisle of a Boeing 737. Yet her calves and ankles were almost as
slender as when she had slipped her nightgowned body between the stiff white sheets of their honeymoon bed in a Torquay hotel; it was only her feet, with a line of whitish nodules across the middle
joints of her slightly ugly toes, that now presaged the gradual approach of middle age. Well, no. It wasn’t
only
that – if she were being really honest with herself. There was
that hebdomadal visit to the expensive clinic in Oxford . . . But she cast that particular thought from her mind. (‘Hebdomadal’ was a word she’d become rather proud of, having
come across it so often in her job in Oxford with the University Examining Board.)
‘Yes?’ she repeated.
He looked at her again, more carefully this time. ‘You’re going to change your shoes, aren’t you?’
‘What?’ Her hazel eyes, with their markedly flecked irises, took on a puzzled, appealingly vulnerable aspect. Involuntarily her left hand went up to the back of her freshly brushed
and recently dyed blonde hair, whilst the fingers of her right hand began to pluck fecklessly at some non-existent speck that threatened to jeopardize her immaculate, expensive nigritude.
‘It’s bucketing down – hadn’t you noticed?’ he said.
Little rivulets were trickling down the outside of the lounge window, and even as he spoke a few slanted splashes of rain re-emphasized the ugly temper of the windswept sky.
She looked down at the specially purchased black leather shoes – so classy-looking, so beautifully comfortable. But before she could reply he was reinforcing his line of argument.
‘They’re going to inter the poor sod, didn’t you say?’
For a few moments the word ‘inter’ failed to register adequately in her brain, sounding like one of those strangely unfamiliar words that had to be sought out in a dictionary. But
then she remembered: it meant they wouldn’t be cremating the body; they would be digging a deep, vertically sided hole in the orange-coloured earth and lowering the body down on straps.
She’d seen the sort of thing on TV and at the cinema; and usually it had been raining then, too.
She looked out of the window, frowning and disappointed.
‘You’ll get your feet drenched – that’s all I’m trying to say.’ He turned to the centre pages of his newspaper and began reading about the extraordinary
sexual prowess of a world-famous snooker player.
For a couple of minutes or so at that point the course of events in the Bowman household could perhaps have continued to drift along in its normal, unremarkable neutral gear. But it was not to
be.
The last thing Margaret wanted to do was ruin the lovely shoes she’d bought. All right. She’d bought them
for
the funeral; but it was ridiculous to go and waste more than
£50. It wasn’t necessary to go and trample all over the muddy churchyard of course; but even going out in them in this weather was pretty foolish. She looked down again at her
expensively sheathed feet, and then at the clock on the mantelpiece. Not much time. But she
would
change them, she decided. Most things went reasonably well with black, and that pair of
grey shoes with the cushioned soles would be a sensible choice. But if she was going to be all in black apart from just her shoes, wouldn’t it be nicely fashionable to change her handbag as
well? Yes! There was that grey leather handbag that would match the shoes almost perfectly.
She tripped up the stairs hurriedly.
And fatefully.
It was no more than a minute or so after this decision – not a decision that would strike anyone as being particularly momentous – that Thomas Bowman put down his newspaper and
answered the confidently repeated stridencies at the front door, where in friendly fashion he nodded to a drably clad young woman standing at the porch in the pouring rain under a garishly
multicoloured golf umbrella, and wearing knee-length boots of bright yellow plastic that took his thoughts back to the Technicolor broadcasts of the first manned landing on the moon. Some of the
women on the estate, quite clearly, were considerably less fashion-conscious than his wife.
‘She’s nearly ready,’ he said. ‘Just putting on her ballet shoes for your conducted tour across the ploughed fields.’
‘Sorry I’m a bit late.’
‘You coming in?’
‘Better not. We’re a bit pushed for time. Hello Margaret!’
The chicly clad feet which moments ago had flitted lightly up the stairs were now descending more sombrely in a pair of grey, thickish-soled walking shoes. A grey-gloved hand hurriedly pushed a
white handkerchief into the grey handbag – and Margaret Bowman was ready, at last, for a funeral.
HAPTER
T
WO
‘Nobody ever notices postmen, somehow,’ said he thoughtfully; ‘yet they have passions like other men.’
(G.K. CHESTERTON,
The Invisible Man
)
I
T WAS A
little while after the front door had closed behind the two women that he allowed himself an oblique glance across the soggy lawn that
stretched between the wide lounge window and the road. He had told Margaret that she could have the car if she wanted it, since he had no plans for going anywhere himself. But clearly they had gone
off in the other woman’s since the maroon Metro still stood there on the steepish slope that led down to the garage. Charlbury Drive might just as well have been uninhabited, and the rain
poured steadily down.
He walked upstairs and went into the spare bedroom, where he opened the right-hand leaf of the cumbrous, dark mahogany wardrobe that served to store the overflow of his wife’s and his own
clothing. Behind this leaf, stacked up against the right-hand side of the wardrobe, stood eight white shoe boxes, one atop the other; and from this stack he carefully withdrew the third box from
the bottom. Inside lay a bottle of malt whisky about two-thirds empty – or about one-third full, as a man who is thirsting for a drink would probably have described it. The box was an old
one, and had been the secret little hiding place for two things since his marriage to Margaret. For a week, in the days when he was still playing football, it had hidden a set of crudely
pornographic photographs which had circulated from the veteran goalkeeper to the fourteen-year-old outside-left. And now (and with increasing frequency) it had become the storage space for the
whisky of which he was getting, as he knew, rather dangerously over-fond. Guilty secrets both, assuredly; yet hardly sins of cosmic proportions. In fact, he had slowly grown towards the view that
the lovely if somewhat overweight Margaret would perhaps have forgiven him readily for the photographs; though not for the whisky, perhaps. Or
would
she have forgiven him for the whisky?
He had sensed fairly early on in their married life together that she would probably always have preferred unfaithful sobriety to intoxicated fidelity. But had she changed? Changed recently? She
must have smelled the stuff on his breath more than once, although their intimacy over the past few months had been unromantic, intermittent, and wholly unremarkable. Not that any such
considerations were bothering his mind very much, if at all, at this particular juncture. He took out the bottle, put the box back, and was just pushing two of his old suits back into place along
the rail when he caught sight of it – standing on the floor immediately behind the left-hand leaf of the wardrobe, a leaf which in his own experience was virtually never opened: it was the
black handbag which his wife had at the very last minute decided to leave behind.