The Secret of Annexe 3 (6 page)

The water in the washbasin became very hot indeed after only ten or fifteen seconds, and she was taking her flannel from her washing bag when she noticed a creosote-looking stain on the palm of
her right hand; and then noticed the same sort of stain on one of the fluffy white towels she must have used before going to bed. And, of course, she knew immediately where
that
had come
from. Had that wretched Rastafarian stained her blouse as well, when his left hand had circled her waist (perhaps a fraction too intimately) above her black tight-fitting skirt? Yes! He had! Blast
it! For a few minutes as her headache became gradually worse she moistened the offending patch on her cream blouse and cleaned off the stain as best she could. No one would notice it, anyway.

It was seven forty-five when she walked into the kitchen. Seemingly, she was the only person stirring in the whole hotel. And, had Sarah Jonstone known it at that time, there was a person in the
same hotel who never would be seen to stir again. For in the room designated, on the key-hook board behind Reception, as ‘Annexe 3’, a man lay stiffly dead – the window of his
ground-floor room thrust open, the radiator switched completely off, and the temperature around the body as icily frigid as an igloo’s.

The end of the year had fallen cold; and the body that lay across the top of the coverlet on one of the twin beds in Annexe 3 was very, very cold indeed.

F
OR THE
C
HIEF
Constable of Oxfordshire, a man internationally renowned for his handling of terrorist sieges, the new year dawned
upon fewer problems than had been anticipated. With the much-publicized CND march from Carfax to Greenham Common badly hit by the weather, and with the First Division game between Oxford United and
Everton inevitably postponed, many of the extra police drafted in for special duties in both the city and the county had not been required. There had been, it was true, a whole string of minor
accidents along the A40, but no serious injuries and no serious hold-ups. Indeed, it had been a very gentle New Year’s Day; and at 6.30 p.m. the Chief Constable was just about to leave his
office on the second floor of the Kidlington Police HQ when Superintendent Bell rang from the City Police HQ in St Aldates to ask whether among extra personnel available that day there happened to
be any spare inspectors from the CID division.

The phone had been ringing for a good while before the sole occupant of the bachelor flat at the top of the Banbury Road in North Oxford turned down the mighty volume of the
finale of
Die Walküre
and answered it.

‘Morse!’ he said curtly.

‘Ah, Morse!’ (The Chief Constable expected his voice to be instantly recognized, and it almost always was.) ‘I suppose you’ve just staggered out of bed all ready for
another night of debauchery?’

‘A Happy New Year to you, too, sir!’

‘Looks like being a pretty good new year for the crime rate, Morse: we’ve got a murder down at the bottom of your road. I’m assuming you had nothing to do with it, of
course.’

‘I’m on furlough, sir.’

‘Well, never mind! You can make up the days later in January.’

‘Or February,’ mumbled Morse.

‘Or February!’ admitted the Chief Constable.

‘Not tonight, I’m afraid, sir. I’m taking part in the final of the pub quiz round at the Friar.’

‘I’m glad to hear others have got such confidence in your brains.’

‘I’m quite good, really – apart from Sport and Pop Music.’

‘Oh, I know that, Morse!’ The Chief Constable was speaking very slowly now. ‘And
I
have every confidence in your brains, as well.’

Morse sighed audibly into the phone and held his peace as the Chief Constable continued: ‘We’ve got dozens of men here if you need ’em.’

‘Is Sergeant Lewis on duty?’ asked a Morse now fully resigned.

‘Lewis? Ah yes! As a matter of fact he’s on his way to pick you up now. I thought, you know, that er . . .’

‘You’re very kind, sir.’

Morse put down the phone and walked to the window where he looked down on the strangely quiet, muffled road. The Corporation lorries had gritted for a second time late that afternoon, but only a
few carefully driven cars were intermittently crawling past along the icy surfaces. Lewis wouldn’t mind coming out, though. In fact, thought Morse, he’d probably be only too glad to
escape the first night of the new year television.

And what of Morse himself? There was perhaps just a hint of grim delight to be observed on his features as he saw the police car pull into the gutter in a spurt of deep slush, and waved to the
man who got out of it – a thick-set, slightly awkward-looking man, for whom the only blemishes on a life of unexciting virtuousness were a gluttonous partiality for egg and chips, and a
passion for fast driving.

Sergeant Lewis looked up to the window of the flat, and acknowledged Morse’s gesture of recognition. And had Lewis been able to observe more closely at that moment he might have seen that
in the deep shadows of Morse’s rather cold blue eyes there floated some reminiscences of an almost joyful satisfaction.

L
EWIS PULLED IN
behind the two other police cars outside the Haworth Hotel, where a uniformed constable in a black-and-white chequered hat stood outside
the main entrance, with one of his colleagues, similarly attired, guarding the front door of the adjacent property further down the Banbury Road.

‘Who’s in charge?’ asked Morse, of the first constable, as he passed through into the foyer, stamping the snow from his shoes on the doormat.

‘Inspector Morse, sir.’

‘Know where he is?’ asked Morse.

‘Not sure, sir. I’ve only just got here.’

‘Know him by sight, do you?’

‘I don’t know him at all.’

Morse went on in, but Lewis tapped the constable on the shoulder and whispered in his ear: ‘When you meet this Morse fellow, he’s a
chief
inspector – all right?
– and a nasty one at that! So watch your step, lad!’

‘Famous pair, we are!’ murmured Morse as the two of them stood at Reception, where in a small room at the back of the desk Sergeant Phillips of the City CID (Morse recognized him)
stood talking to a pale-faced, worried-looking man who was introduced as Mr John Binyon, the hotel proprietor. And very soon Morse and Lewis knew as much – or as little – as anyone
about the tragedy so recently discovered in his own hotel by the proprietor himself.

The two Anderson children had been putting the finishing touches to their snowman just as it was getting dark that afternoon when they were joined by their father, Mr Gerald Anderson. And it had
been he who had observed that one of the rear windows on the ground floor of the annexe was open; and who had been vaguely uneasy about this observation, since the weather was raw, with a cutting
wind sweeping down from the north. He had finally walked closer and seen the half-drawn curtains flapping in the icy draught – although he had not gone all the way up to the window, under
which (as he’d noticed) the snow was still completely undisturbed. He had mentioned this fact to his wife once he was back in the hotel, and it was at her instigation that he reported his
disquiet to the proprietor himself – at about 5 p.m., that was; with the result that the pair of them, Anderson and Binyon, had walked across to the annexe and along the newly carpeted
corridor to the second bedroom on the right, where over the doorknob was hooked a notice, written in English, French, and German, instructing potential intruders that the incumbent was not to be
disturbed. After repeated knockings, Binyon had opened the door with his master-key, and had immediately discovered why the man they found there had been incapable (for some considerable time, it
seemed) of responding to any knocking from within or to any icy blast from without.

For the man on the bed was dead and the room was cold as the grave.

The news of the murder was known almost immediately to everyone in the hotel; and despite Binyon’s frenetic protestations, some few of the guests (including, it appeared,
everyone
from the annexe) had taken the law into their own hands, packed their belongings, strapped up their cases (and in one case not paid any part of the bill), and disappeared from the Haworth Hotel
before Sergeant Phillips from St Aldates had arrived at about 5.40 p.m.

‘You
what
?’ bellowed Morse as Phillips explained how he’d allowed four more of the guests to leave the hotel when full names and addresses had been checked.

‘Well, it was a very difficult situation, sir, and I thought—’

‘Christ man! Didn’t someone ever tell you that if you’ve got a few suspicious circumstances you’re expected to hold on to a few of the
suspects
? And what do
you
do, Sergeant? You tell ’em all to bugger off!’

‘I got all the details—’

‘Bloody marvellous!’ snapped Morse.

Binyon, who had been standing by in some embarrassment as Morse (not, it must be admitted, without just cause) lashed the luckless Phillips, decided to come to the rescue.

‘It really was a very difficult situation, Inspector, and we thought—’

‘
Thought
?’ Morse’s instantaneous repetition of the monosyllable sounded like a whiplashed retaliation for such impertinence, and it was becoming abundantly clear that
he had taken an instant dislike to the hotel proprietor. ‘Mr Binyon! They don’t pay you, do they, for having any thoughts about this case? No? But they
do
pay
me
! They
even pay Sergeant Phillips here; and if I was angry with him just now it was only because I basically respect what
he
thought and what he tried to do. But I shall be obliged if
you
will kindly keep your thoughts out of things until I ask for them – all right?’

In the latter part of this little homily, Morse’s voice was as cool and as level as the snow upon which Sarah Jonstone had looked out early that same morning; and she herself as she sat
silently at Reception was more than a little alarmed by this new arrival; more than a little upset by his harsh words. But gossip had it that the corpse found in the room called Annexe 3 had been
horridly mutilated about the face; and she was relieved that the police seemed at least to have matched the gravity of the crime by sending a man from the higher echelons of its detective branch.
But he was disturbingly strange, this man with the hard-staring, startling eyes – eyes that had at first reminded her of the more fanatical politicians, like Benn or Joseph or Powell, as
she’d watched them on TV; eyes that seemed uncommunicative and unseeing, eyes fixed, it seemed, upon some distanced, spiritual shore. And yet that wasn’t true, and she knew it; for
after his initial ill-temper he had looked so directly and so daringly into her eyes that for a second or two she could have sworn that he was about to wink at her.

A man she’d seen three times now in three days!

Another man had come in – the humpbacked man she’d seen earlier – and he, too, was in Sarah’s eyes one of the more unusual specimens of humankind. With a cigarette
hanging down at forty-five degrees from a thin-lipped, mournful mouth, and with the few remaining strands of his lank, black hair plastered in parallels across a yellowish dome of a skull, anyone
could perhaps be forgiven for supposing his profession to be that of a moderately unsuccessful undertaker. (Oddly enough, over the fifteen years they had known – and respected – each
other, Morse had invariably addressed this police surgeon by his Christian name, whilst the surgeon had never addressed Morse by anything other than his surname.)

‘I was here an hour ago,’ began the surgeon.

‘You want me to give you a medal or something?’ said Morse.

‘You in charge?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, go and have a look at things. I’ll be ready when you want me.’

Following closely behind Binyon and Phillips and Lewis, Morse was walking over to the annexe when he stopped halfway and gazed up at the giant crane, its arm outstretched some hundred and twenty
feet above the ground as if in benediction, or perhaps in bane, upon one or other of the two blocks of buildings between which it was positioned.

‘Not a job they’d get me on, Lewis,’ he said, as his eyes went up towards the precarious-looking box at the top of the structure, in which, presumably, some operator would
normally sit.

‘No need, sir. You can operate those things from the bottom.’ Lewis pointed to a platform, only some six feet above the ground, on which a series of knobbed levers stuck up at
various angles through the iron floor. Morse nodded; and averted his eyes from the crane’s nest atop the criss-crossed iron girders that stood out black against the heavy, darkened sky.

Through the side door of the annexe they proceeded, where Morse looked along the newly carpeted passage that stretched some ten to twelve yards in front of him, its terminus marked by pieces of
boarding, nailed (not too professionally) across an aperture which would, in due course, lead through to the front entrance hall of the annexe. Morse strode to the far end of the corridor and
looked through the temporary slats to the foyer beyond, where rickety-looking planks, resting on pairs of red bricks, were set across the recently cemented floor. Dust from such activities had
filtered through, and was now lying, albeit lightly, on the surfaces just a few feet inside the completed section of the ground-floor annexe, and it seemed clear that there had been no recent
entrance, and no recent exit, from that particular point. Morse turned, and for a few seconds looked back up the short corridor down which they had walked; looked at the marks of many muddy shoes
(including their own) on the purple carpeting – the latter seeming to Morse almost as distasteful as the reproduction of the late Renoir, ‘Les nues dans l’herbe’, which hung
on the wall to his right.