Colin Dexter - The Secret of Annexe 3

It had been after Morse had finished that Lewis ventured the most important question of all: 'Do you think the murdered man is Tom Bowman, sir?' And Morse had hesitated before replying. 'Do you know, Lewis, I've got a strange sort of feeling that it isn't . .'

Morse had nodded off in his chair, and Lewis quietly left the room to help with the drying-up.

That same Sunday afternoon Sarah Jonstone at last got back to her flat. She knew that she would almost certainly never have such an amazing experience again in her life, and she had been reluctant to leave the hotel whilst police activity was continuously centred upon it. But even the ropes that had cordoned off the area were gone, and no policeman now stood by the side door of the annexe block. Mrs. Binyon (who had not originally intended to stay at the Haworth for the New Year anyway, but who had been pressed into reluctant service because of the illnesses of so many staff) had at last, that morning, set off on her trip north to visit her parents in Leeds. Only half a dozen people were booked into the hotel that Sunday evening, although (perversely!) the staff who had been so ill were now almost fully recovered. Sarah was putting on her coat at 3.30 p.m. when the phone went in Reception and a young woman's voice, a quietly attractive one, asked if she could please speak to Mr. Binyon if he was there. But when Sarah asked for the woman's name, the line went suddenly dead.

Sarah found herself recalling this little incident later in the evening as she sat watching TV. But it wasn't important, she told herself; probably just a line cut off by some technical trouble or other. Could it be important though? Chief Inspector Morse had begged her to dredge her memory to salvage anything that she could recall; and there had been that business about the sticker on Mrs. Ballard's coat. . But there was something else, she knew, if only her mind could get hold of it.

But, for the moment, it couldn't.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Monday, January 6th: A.M.

By working faithfully eight hours a day, you may eventually get to be a boss and work twelve hours a day.

(ROBERT FROST)

GLADYS TAYLOR WOULD be very sorry to leave 'The University of Oxford Delegacy of Local Examinations'. It was all a bit of a mouthful when people asked her where she worked; but the Examination Board's premises, a large, beige-bricked, flat-roofed building in Summertown, had been her happy second home for nineteen and a half years now — and some neat streak within her wished it could have been the full twenty. But the 'Locals', as the Board was affectionately known, insisted that those women like herself—'supernumeraries', they were called — had their contracts terminated in the session following their sixtieth birthday. These 'sessions', four or five of them every academic year, varied in duration from three or four weeks to nine or ten weeks; and the work involved in each session was almost as varied as its duration. For example, the current short session (and Gladys's last — for she had been sixty the previous November) involved three weeks of concentrated arithmetical checking of scripts — additions, scalings, transfers of marks — from the autumn GCE retake examinations. The entry was very much smaller than the massive summer one, comprising those candidates who had failed adequately to impress the examiners on the earlier occasion. But such young men and women (the 'returned empties', as some called them) were rather nearer Gladys Taylor's heart than many of the precious summer thoroughbreds (she knew a few of them!) who seemed to romp around the academic racecourses with almost arrogant facility. For, in her own eyes, Gladys had been a bit of a failure herself, leaving her secondary-modern school at the beginning of the war, at the age of fifteen, with nothing to show any prospective employer except a lukewarm testimonial to her perseverance and punctuality. Then, at the age of forty-one, following the premature death of a lorry-driver husband who, besides faltering in fidelity, had failed to father any offspring, she had applied to work at the Locals — and she had been accepted. During those first few months she had brought to her duties a care over detail that was almost pathological in its intensity, and she had often found herself waking up in the early hours and wondering if she had perpetrated some unforgivable error. But she had settled down; and thoroughly enjoyed the work. Her conscientiousness had been recognized by her supervisors and acknowledged by her fellow 'Supers'; and finally, over the last few years, she had been rewarded by a belated promotion to a post of some small responsibility, part of which involved working with inexperienced women who came to join the various teams; and for the past six months Gladys had been training a very much younger woman in the mysteries of the whole complex apparatus. This younger woman's name was Margaret Bowman.

For the past three sessions, the two of them had worked together, becoming firm friends in the process, and learning (as women sometimes do) a good many things about each other. At the start, Margaret had seemed almost as diffident and insecure as she herself, Gladys, had been; and it was — what was the word? — yes, such vulnerability that had endeared the younger woman to Gladys, and very soon made the older woman come to look upon Margaret more as a daughter than a colleague. Not that Margaret was ever too forthcoming about the more intimate details of her life with Tom, her husband; or (during the autumn) about the clandestine affair she was so obviously having with someone else (Gladys had never learned his name). How could anyone not have guessed? For the affair was engendering the sort of bloom on the cheek which (unbeknown to Gladys) Aristotle himself had once used in seeking to define his notion of pure happiness. Then, in the weeks of late autumn, there had occurred a change in Margaret: there were now moments of (hitherto) unsuspected irritability, of (hitherto) uncharacteristic carelessness, and (perhaps most disturbing of all) a sort of coarseness and selfishness. Yet the strangely close relationship between them had survived, and on two occasions Gladys had tried to ask, tried to help, tried to offer more than just a natural friendliness; but nothing had resulted from these overtures. And when on a Friday in mid-December the last session of the calendar year had finally come to its close, that was the last Gladys had seen of her colleague until the new-year resumption — on January 2nd, a day on which it hardly required the talents of a clairvoyant to see that there was something quite desperately wrong.

Smoking was banned from the room in which the Supers worked; but several of the women were moderately addicted to the weed, and each day they greatly looked forward to the morning coffee-breaks and afternoon tea-breaks, both taken in the Delegacy canteen, in which smoking was allowed. Hitherto — and invariably — during the time Gladys had known her, Margaret would sit patiently puffing her way through a single cigarette a.m; a single cigarette p.m. But on that January 2nd, and again on the 3rd, Margaret had been getting through three cigarettes in each of the twenty-minute breaks, inhaling deeply and dramatically on each one.

Margaret's work, too, during the whole of her first day back, had been quite unprecedentedly slack: ten marks missed at one point in a simple addition; a wrong scaling, and a very obvious one at that, not spotted; and then (an error which would have made Gladys herself blanch with shame and mortification) an addition of 104 and 111 entered as 115—a total which, but for Glady's own rechecking, would probably have given some luckless candidate an 'E' grade instead of an 'A' grade.