The Secret of Annexe 3 (20 page)

‘Chipping Norton,’ said Morse suddenly – ‘quick as you can!’

Blue rooflight flashing, siren wailing, the white Ford raced up to the Banbury Road roundabout then across to the Woodstock Road roundabout, and was soon out on the A34, a happy-looking Lewis
behind the wheel.

‘Think she’ll go back home straight away?’

‘My God, I hope so!’ said Morse with unwonted vehemence.

It was when the car had passed the Black Prince and was climbing the hill out of Woodstock that Morse spoke again. ‘Going back to what you were saying about Annexe 3, Lewis, you
did
have a look at the bed-linen, didn’t you?’

‘Yes, sir. In both beds.’

‘You don’t think you missed anything?’

‘Don’t think so. Wouldn’t matter much if I did, though. We’ve still got all the bedclothes – I sent everything along to the path lab.’

‘You did?’

Lewis nodded. ‘But if you want my opinion, nobody’d been sleeping in either of those two beds, sir.’

‘Well, you couldn’t tell with the one, could you? It was all soaked in blood.’

‘No, it wasn’t, sir. The blood had seeped through the counterpane or whatever you call it, and a bit through the blankets; but the sheets weren’t marked at all.’

‘And you don’t think that they’d been having sex that afternoon or evening – in either of the beds.’

Lewis was an old hand in murder investigations, and some of the things he’d found in rooms, in cupboards, in wardrobes, in beds, under beds – he’d have been more than happy to
be able to forget. But he knew what Morse was referring to, and he was more than confident of his answer. ‘No. There were no marks of sexual emissions or anything like that.’

‘You have an admirably delicate turn of phrase,’ said Morse, as Lewis sped past an obligingly docile convoy of Long Vehicles. ‘But it’s a good point you made earlier, you
know. If the old charpoy
wasn’t
creaking all that afternoon . . .’

‘As you said, though, sir – they might have made love on the carpet.’

‘Have you ever made love on the carpet in midwinter?’

‘Well, no. But—’

‘Central heating’s one thing. But you get things like draughts under doors, don’t you?’

‘I haven’t got much experience of that sort of thing myself.’

The car turned off left at the Chipping Norton/Moreton-in-Marsh/Evesham sign; and a few minutes later Lewis brought it to a gentle stop outside 6 Charlbury Drive. He noticed the twitch of a lace
curtain in the front window of number 5; but no one seemed to be about at all, and the little road lay quiet and still. No maroon Metro stood outside number 6, or in the steep drive that led down
to the white-painted doors of the single garage.

‘Go and have a look!’ said Morse.

But there was no car in the garage, either; and the front-door bell seemed to Lewis to re-echo through a house that sounded ominously empty.

W
HERE
M
ORSE DECIDED
to turn right past Allied Carpets, Margaret Bowman, some five minutes earlier, had decided to turn left past
the Straw Hat, and had thence proceeded south towards the centre of the city. In St Giles’, the stiff penalty recently introduced for any motorists outstaying their two-hour maximum (even by
a minute or so) had resulted in the unprecedented sight of a few free rectangles of parking space almost invariably being available at any one time; and Margaret pulled into the one she spotted
just in front of the Eagle and Child, and walked slowly across to the ticket machine, some twenty-odd yards away. For the whole of the time from when she had sat down in the Secretary’s
office until now, her mind had been numbed to the reality of her underlying situation, and far-distanced, in some strange way, from what (she knew) would be the disastrous inevitability of her
fate. Her voice and her manner, as she had answered the policemen, had been much more controlled than she could have dared to hope. Not
quite
all the time; but anyone, even someone who was
wholly innocent, would always be nervous in those circumstances. Had they believed her? But she knew now that the answer even to such a crucial question was perhaps no longer of any great
importance. (She prodded her fingers into the corner of her handbag for the necessary change.) But to say that at that very moment Margaret Bowman had finally come to any conclusion about ending
her life would be untrue. Such a possibility had certainly occurred to her – oh, so many times! – over the past few days of despair and the past few nights of hell. Academically, she
had not been a successful pupil at the Chipping Norton Comprehensive School, and in O-level
Greek Literature in Translation
(Margaret had not been considered for the high fliers’
Latin course) she had been ‘Unclassified’. Yet she remembered something (in one of the books they were supposed to read) about Socrates, just before he took the hemlock: when he’d
said that he would positively welcome death if it turned out to be just one long and dreamless sleep. And that’s what Margaret longed for now – a long, a wakeless and a dreamless sleep.
(She could not find the exact number of coins which the notice on the ticket machine so inexorably demanded.) And then she remembered her mother, dying of cancer in her early forties, when Margaret
was only fourteen: and before dying saying how desperately tired she was and how she just wanted to be free from pain and never wake again . . .

Margaret had found five 10p coins – still one short – and she looked around her with a childlike pleading in her eyes, as though she almost expected her very helplessness to work its
own deliverance. A hundred or so yards away, just passing the Taylorian, and coming towards her, she saw a yellow-banded traffic warden, and suddenly a completely new and quite extraordinary
thought came to her mind. Would it matter if she
were
caught? Didn’t she
want
to be caught? Wasn’t there, after all hope had been cruelly cancelled, a point when even
total despair could hold no further terrors? A notice (‘No Change Given’) outside the Eagle and Child informed Margaret that she could expect little help from that establishment; but
she walked in and ordered a glass of orange juice.

‘Ice?’

‘Pardon?’

‘You want ice in it?’

‘Oh – yes. Er – no. I’m sorry, I didn’t quite hear . . .’

She felt the hard eyes of the well-coiffeured bar-lady on her as she handed over a £1 coin and received 60p in exchange: one 50p piece, and one 10p. Somehow she felt almost childishly
pleased as she put her six 10p pieces together and held the little stack of coins in her left hand. She had no idea how long she stayed there, seated at a table just in front of the window. But
when she noticed that the glass in front of her was empty, and when she felt the coins so warmly snug inside her palm, she walked out slowly into St Giles’. It occurred to her – so
suddenly! – that there she was, in St Giles’; that she had just come down the Banbury Road; that she must have passed directly in front of the Haworth Hotel; and that
she
hadn’t even noticed it
. Was she beginning to lose control of her mind? Or had she got
two
minds now? The one which had pushed itself into auto-pilot in the driving seat of the
Metro; and the other, logical and sober, which even now, as she walked towards the ticket machine, was seeking to keep her shoes (the ones she had bought for the funeral) out of the worst of
crunching slush. She saw the celluloid-covered document under the near-side windscreen-wiper; and caught sight of the traffic warden, two cars further up, leaning back slightly to read a number
plate before completing another incriminating ticket.

Margaret walked up to her, pointing to the maroon Metro.

‘Have I committed an offence?’

‘Is that your car?’

‘Yes.’

‘You were parked without a ticket.’

‘Yes, I know. I’ve just been to get the right change.’ Almost pathetically she opened her left palm and held the six warm coins to view as if they might just serve as some
propitiatory offering.

‘I’m sorry, madam. It tells you on the sign, doesn’t it? If you haven’t got the right change, you shouldn’t park.’

For a moment or two the two women, so little different in age, eyed each other in potential hostility. But when Margaret Bowman spoke, her voice sounded flat, indifferent almost.

‘Do you enjoy your work?’

‘Not the point, is it?’ replied the other. ‘There’s nothing
personal
in it. It’s a job that’s got to be done.’

Margaret Bowman turned and the traffic warden looked after her with a marked expression of puzzlement on her face. It was her experience that on finding a parking ticket virtually all of them
got into their cars and drove angrily away. But not this tall, good-looking woman who was now walking away from her car, down past the Martyrs’ Memorial; and then, almost out of sight now,
but with the warden’s last words still echoing in her mind, across into Cornmarket and up towards Carfax.

M
ARGARET
B
OWMAN STOOD
beneath Carfax Tower, a great, solid pile of pale-yellowish stone that stands on the corner of Queen
Street and Cornmarket, and which looks down, at its east side, on to the High. White lettering on a background of Oxford blue told her that a splendid view of the city and the surrounding district
was available from the top of the tower: admission 50p, Mondays to Saturdays, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.; and her heart pounded as she stood there, her eyes ascending to the crenellated balustrade built
four-square around the top. Not a high balustrade either; and often in the past she’d noticed people standing there, almost half their bodies visible as they gazed out over Oxford or waved to
friends who stood a hundred feet below. She was not one of those acrophobes (as, for example, Morse was) who burst into a clammy sweat of vertiginous panic when forced to stand on the third or the
fourth rung of a household ladder. But she was always terrified of being
pushed
– had been ever since one of the boys on a school party to Snowdon had
pretended
to push her,
and when for a split second she had experienced a sense of imminent terror of falling over the precipitous drop that yawned almost immediately below her feet. People said you always thought of your
childhood before you died, and she was conscious that twice already – no, three times – her mind had reverted to early memories. And now she was conscious of a fourth – of the
words her father had so often used when she tried to put off writing a letter, or starting her homework: ‘The longer you put things off, the harder they become, my girl!’ Should she put
things off now? Defer any fateful decision? No! She pushed the door to the tower. But it was clear that the tower was shut; and it was with a sense of despairing disappointment that she noticed the
bottom line of the notice: ‘20th March – 31st October’.

The spire of St Mary the Virgin pointed promisingly skywards in front of her as she walked down the High, and into the Mitre.

‘Large Scotch – Bell’s, please – if you have it.’ (How often had she heard her husband use those selfsame words!)

A young barmaid pushed a tumbler up against the bottom of an inverted bottle, and then pushed again.

‘Ice?’

‘Pardon?’

‘Do you want ice?’

‘Er – no. Er – yes – yes please! I’m sorry. I didn’t quite hear . . .’

As she sipped the whisky, a hitherto dormant nerve throbbing insistently along her left temple, the world seemed to her perhaps fractionally more bearable than it had done when she’d left
the Delegacy. Like some half-remembered medicine – foul-tasting yet efficacious – the whisky seemed to do her good; and she bought another.

A few minutes later she was standing in Radcliffe Square; and as she looked up at the north side of St Mary’s Church, a strange and fatal fascination seemed to grip her soul. Halfway up
the soaring edifice, his head and shoulders visible over the tricuspid ornamentation that marked the intersection of tower and spire, Margaret could see a duffel-coated young man, binoculars to his
eyes, gazing out across the northern parts of Oxford. The tower must be open, surely! She walked down the steps towards the main porch of the church and then, for a moment, turned round and gazed
up at the dome of the Radcliffe Camera behind her; and noticed the inscription on the top step:
Dominus custodiat introitum tuum et exitum tuum
. But since she had no Latin, the potential
irony of the words escaped her. TOWER OPEN was printed in large capitals on a noticeboard beside the entrance; and just inside, seated behind a table covered with postcards, guidebooks and assorted
Christian literature, was a middle-aged woman who had already assumed that Margaret Bowman wished to ascend, for she held out a maroon-coloured ticket and asked for 60p. A few flights of wide
wooden stairs led up to the first main landing, where a notice on a locked door to the left advised visitors that here was the Old Library – the very first one belonging to the University
– where the few books amassed by the earliest scholars were so precious that they were chained to the walls. Margaret had seldom been interested in old churches, or old anythings for that
matter; but she now found herself looking down at the leaflet the woman below had given her: