Colin Dexter - The Secret of Annexe 3

Clearly some sort of selection was required, and he would have been more than glad to have Morse at his side at that moment. It was like being faced with a difficult maths problem at school: if you weren't careful, you got more and more ensnared in some increasingly complex equations — until the master showed you a beautifully economic short-cut that reduced the problem to a few simple little sums and produced a glittering (and correct) solution at the foot of the page. But his present master, Morse, was still apparently otherwise engaged, and so he decided to begin in earnest: on the second of the two equations.

Yet an hour later he had advanced his knowledge of charity collections in Oxford not one whit: and he was becoming increasingly irritated with telephone numbers which didn't answer when called, or which (if they did answer) appeared manned by voluntary envelope-lickers, decorators, caretakers or idiots — or (worst of all!) by intimidating answering machines telling Lewis to start speaking 'now'. And after a further hour of telephoning, he hadn't found a single charitable organization which had held a flag day in Oxford — or anywhere else in the vicinity, for that matter — in the last few days of December.

He was getting, ridiculously, nowhere; and he said as much when Morse finally put in another appearance at 11 a.m. with a cup of coffee and a digestive biscuit, both of which (mistakenly) Lewis thought his superior officer had brought in for him.

'We need some of those men we've been promised, sir.'

'No, no, Lewis! We don't want to start explaining everything to a load of squaddies. Just have a go at the clinic angle if the other's no good. I'll come and give you a hand when I get the chance.'

So Lewis made another start — this time on those Oxford hair clinics which had bothered to take a few centimetres of advertising space in the Yellow Pages: only four of them, thank goodness! But once again the problem soon began to take on unexpectedly formidable dimensions — once he began to consider the sort of questions he could ask a clinic manageress— if she was on the premises. For what could he ask? He wanted to find out if a woman whose name he didn't know, whose appearance he could only very imperfectly describe, and of whose address he hadn't the faintest notion, except perhaps that it might just be in Chipping Norton — whether such a woman had been in for some unspecified treatment, but probably upper-lip depilation, at some unspecified time, though most probably on the morning of, let him say, any of the last few days of December. What a farce, thought Lewis; and what a fruitless farce it did in fact become. The first of the clinics firmly refused to answer questions, even to the police, about such 'strictly confidential' matters; the second was quite happy to inform him that it had no customers whatsoever on its books with an address in Chipping Norton; a recorded message informed him that the third would re-open after the New Year break on January 6th; and the fourth suggested, politely enough, that he must have misread the advertisement: that whilst it cut, trimmed, singed and dyed, the actual removal of hair was not included amongst its splendid services.

Lewis put down the phone — and capitulated. He went over to the canteen and found Morse — the only one there — drinking another cup of coffee and just completing The Times crossword puzzle.

'Ah, Lewis. Get yourself a coffee! Any luck yet?'

'No, I bloody haven't,' snapped Lewis — a man who swore, at the very outside, about once a fortnight. 'As I said, sir, I need some help: half a dozen DCs — that's what I need.'

'I don't think it's necessary, you know.'

'Well, I do! ' said Lewis, looking as angry as Morse had ever seen him, and about to use up a whole month's ration of blasphemies. 'We're not even sure the bloody woman does come from Chipping Norton. She might just as well come from Chiswick — like the tart you met in Paddington!'

'Lew-is! Lew-is! Take it easy! I'm sure that, neither the "Palmers" nor the Smiths had anything at all to do with the murder. And when I said just now it wasn't necessary to bring any more people in on the case, I didn't mean that you couldn't have as many as you like — if you really need them. But not for this particular job, Lewis, I don't think. I didn't want to disturb you, so I've been doing a bit of phoning from here; and I'm waiting for a call that ought to come through any minute. And if it tells me what I think it will, I reckon we know exactly who this "Mrs. Ballard" is, and exactly where we should be able to find her. Her name's Mrs. Bowman — Mrs. Margaret Bowman. And do you know where she lives?'

'Chipping Norton?' suggested Lewis, in a rather wearily defeated tone.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Sunday, January 5th

A man is in general better pleased when he has a good dinner upon his table than when his wife talks Greek.

(SAMUEL JOHNSON)

MORSE HAD BEEN glad to accept Mrs. Lewis's invitation to her traditional Sunday lunch of slightly undercooked beef, horseradish sauce, velvety-flat Yorkshire pudding, and roast potatoes; and the meal had been a success. In deference to the great man's presence, Lewis had bought a bottle of Beaujolais Nouveau; and as Morse leaned back in a deep-cushioned armchair and drank his coffee, he felt very much at his ease.

'I sometimes wish I'd taken a gentle little job in the Egyptian Civil Service, Lewis.'

'Fancy a drop of brandy, sir?'

'Why not?'

From the rattle and clatter coming from the kitchen, it was clear that Mrs. Lewis had launched herself into the washing-up, but Morse kept his voice down as he spoke again. 'I know that a dirty weekend away with some wonderful woman sounds just like the thing for some jaded fellow getting on in age a bit — like you, Lewis — but you'd be an idiot to leave that lovely cook you married—'

'I've never given it a thought, sir.'

There are one or two people in this case, though, aren't there, who seem to have been doing a bit of double-dealing one way or another?'

Lewis nodded as he, too, leaned back in his armchair sipping his coffee, and letting his mind go back to the previous day's startling new development, and to Morse's explanation of how it had occurred. .

'. . If you ever decide to kick over the traces' (Morse had said) 'you've got to have an accommodation address — that's the vital point to bear in mind. All right, there are a few people, like the Smiths, who can get away without one; but don't forget they're professional swindlers and they know all the rules of the game backwards. In the normal course of events, though, you've got to get involved in some sort of correspondence. Now, if the princess you're going away with isn't married or if she's a divorcee or if she is just living on her own anyway, then there's no problem, is there? She can be your mistress and your missus for the weekend and she can deal with all the booking — just like Philippa Palmer did. She can use — she must use — her own address and, as I say, there are no problems. Now let's just recap for a minute about where we are with the third woman in this case, the woman who wrote to the hotel as "Mrs. Ann Ballard" and who booked in as "Mrs. Ann Ballard" from an address in Chipping Norton. Obviously, if we can find her, and find out from her what went on in Annexe 3 on New Year's Eve — or New Year's morning — well, we shall-be home and dry, shan't we? And in fact we know a good deal about her. The key thing — or what I thought was the key thing — was that she'd probably gone to a hair clinic a day or so before turning up at the Haworth Hotel. I'm sorry, Lewis, that you've had such a disappointing time with that side of things. But there was this other side which I kept on thinking about — the address she wrote from and the address the hotel wrote to . Now you can't exchange correspondence with a phoney address — obviously you can't! And yet, you know, you can! You must be able to because it happened , Lewis! And when you think about it you can do it pretty easily if you've got one particular advantage in life — just the one. And you know what that advantage is? It's being a postman . Now let's just take an example. Let's take the Banbury Road. The house numbers go up a long, long way, don't they? I'm not sure, but certainly to about four hundred and eighty or so. Now if the last house is, say, number 478, what exactly happens to a letter addressed to a non-existent 480? The sorters in the main post office are not going, to be much concerned, are they? It's only just above the last house-number; and as likely as not — even if someone did spot it — he'd probably think a new house was being built there. But if it were addressed, say, to 580, then obviously a sorter is going to think that something's gone askew, and he probably won't put that letter into the appropriate pigeon-hole. In cases like that, Lewis, there's a tray for problem letters, and one of the higher-echelon post-office staff will try to sort them all out later. But whichever way things go, whether the letter would get into the postman's bag, or whether it would get put into the problem tray — it wouldn't matter! You see, the postman himself would be there on the premises while all this sorting was taking place! I know! I've had a long talk on the phone with the Chief Postmaster from Chipping Norton — splendid fellow! — and he said that the letter we saw from the Haworth Hotel, the one addressed to 84 West Street, would pretty certainly have gone straight into the West Street pigeon hole, because it's only a couple over the last street-number; and even if it had been put in the problem tray, the postman waiting to get his sack over his shoulder would have every opportunity of seeing it, and taking it. And there were only two postmen who delivered to West Street in December: one was a youngish fellow who's spending the New Year with his girlfriend in the Canary Islands; and the other is this fellow called Tom Bowman, who lives at Charlbury Drive in Chipping Norton. But there's nobody there — neither him nor his wife — and none of the neighbours knows where they've gone, although Margaret Bowman was at her work in Summertown on Thursday and Friday last week: I've checked that. Anyway there's not much more we can do this weekend. Max says he'll have the body all sewn up and presentable again by Monday, and so we ought to know who he is pretty soon.'