Colin Dexter - The Secret of Annexe 3

'Perhaps, I suppose.'

The surgeon nodded non-committally and looked into the fire: 'Poor sod. . Do you ever think of death? Mors, mortis , feminine — remember that?'

'Not likely to forget a word like that, am I? Just add on "e" to the end and. .'

The surgeon smiled a sour acknowledgement of the point and drained his glass. 'We'll just have the other half. Then we'll get back, and show you round the scene of the crime again.'

'When the body's out of the way?'

'You don't like the sight of blood much, do you?'

'No. I should never have been a policeman.'

'Always turned me on, blood did — even as a boy.'

'Unnatural!'

'Same again?'

'Why not?'

'What turns you on?' asked the surgeon as he picked up the two glasses.

'Somebody from the Oxford Times asked me that last week, Max. Difficult, you know — just being asked out of the blue like that.'

'What did you say?'

'I said I was always turned on by the word "unbuttoning".'

'Clever!'

'Not really. It comes in one of Larkin's poems somewhere. It's just that you know nothing about the finer things in life. .'

But the surgeon, apparently unhearing, was already standing at the bar and rattling an empty glass imperiously on the counter.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Wednesday, January 1st: P.M.

Close up the casement, draw the blind,

Shut out that stealing moon.

(THOMAS HARDY)

UNDER THE SURGEON'S supervision, the frozen-footed ambulancemen had finally stretchered away the white-sheeted corpse to the morgue at the Old Radcliffe at 11.30 p.m., and Lewis was glad that the preliminaries of the case were now almost over. The two fingerprint men had departed just after eleven, followed ten minutes later by the spiky-haired young photographer, clutching the neck of his flash-bulb camera as if it were some poisonous serpent. The surgeon himself had driven off in his old black Ford at a quarter to midnight, and the hotel seemed strangely still as Lewis followed Morse across the slush and blackened snow to the room called Annexe 3, where the two men stood for the second time that evening, and where, each in his own way, they now took a more detailed mental inventory of what they saw.

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.