Colin Dexter - The Secret of Annexe 3

'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.

CHAPTER THIRTY

Monday, January 6th: noon

Then the devil taketh him up into the holy city, and setteth him on a pinnacle of the temple.

(MATTHEW iv, 5)

MARGARET BOWMAN 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. Half-way 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 custodial 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:

when Mary became Queen and England reverted to Roman Catholicism, Archbishop Cranmer and two of his fellow bishops, Latimer and Ridley, were tried in St. Mary's for heresy. Latimer and Ridley were burned at the stake. Cranmer himself, after officially recanting, was brought back to St. Mary's and condemned to death. He was burned at the stake in the town ditch, outside Balliol College, holding his right hand (which had written his recantation) steadily in the flames. .

Margaret looked at her own right hand — a couple of blue biro marks across the bottom of the thumb — and thought of the tortured atonement that Cranmer had sought, and welcomed, for his earlier weaknesses. A tear ran hurriedly down her cheek, and she took from her handbag a white paper handkerchief to dry her eyes.

The stairs — iron now, and no longer enclosed for the next two flights — led up and over the roof of the Lady Chapel, and she felt a sense of exhilaration in the cold air as she climbed higher still to the Bell Tower, where the man with the binoculars, his hair windswept, had just descended the stone spiral staircase that led to the top.

'Not much further!' he volunteered. 'Bit blowy up there, though. Bit slippery, too. Be careful!'

For several seconds as she emerged at the top of the tower, Margaret was conscious of a terrifying giddiness as her eyes glimpsed, just below her feet, the black iron ring that circled the golden-painted Roman numerals of the great clock adorning the north wall of the church. But the panic was soon gone, and she looked out across at the Radcliffe Camera; and then to the left of the Camera at the colleges along Broad Street; then the buildings of Balliol where Cranmer had redeemed his soul amid the burning brushwood; then she could see the leafless trees along St. Giles', and the roads that led off from there into North Oxford; and then the giant yellow crane that stood at the Haworth Hotel in the Banbury Road. She took a few steps along the high-walk towards the north-western corner of the tower, and she suddenly felt a sense of elation, and the tears welled up again in her eyes as the wind blew back her hair, and as she held her head up to the elements with the same joyous carelessness she had shown as a young girl when the rain had showered down on her tip-tilted face. .