Colin Dexter - The Secret of Annexe 3

Back at Kidlington HQ, Morse sat back in the old black leather armchair, looking (for the while) imperturbably expansive. The man arrested at Gatwick, almost two hours earlier, was well on his way to Oxfordshire, expected (Morse learned) within the next fifteen minutes. It was a time to savour.

Lewis himself now knew exactly what had happened on New Year's Eve in Annexe 3; knew, too, that the murderer of Thomas Bowman had neither set foot inside the main hotel building, nor bedecked himself in a single item of fancy dress. And yet, as to how Morse had arrived at the truth, he felt as puzzled as a small boy witnessing his first conjuring performance. 'What really put you on to it, sir?'

'The key point was, as I told you, that the murderer tried desperately hard to persuade us that the crime was committed as late as possible : after midnight. But as you yourself rightly observed, Lewis, there would seem to be little point in such a deception if the murderer stayed on the scene the whole time from about eight that night to one o'clock the next morning. But there was every point if he wasn't on the scene in the latter part of the evening — a time for which he had an alibi .'

'But, sir—'

'There were three clues in this case which should have put us on to the truth much earlier than they did. Each of these three clues, in itself, looks like a pedestrian little piece of information; but taken together — well. . The first vital clue came largely from Sarah Jonstone — the only really valuable and coherent witness in the whole case — and it was this: that the man posing as "Mr. Ballard" ate virtually nothing that evening! The second vital clue — also brought to our notice, among others, by Miss Jonstone — was the fact that the man posing as "Mr. Ballard" was still staining whatever he touched late that evening! Then there was the third vital clue — the simplest clue of the lot, and one which was staring all of us in the face from the very beginning. So obvious a clue that none of us — none of us! — paid the slightest attention to it: the fact that the man posing as "Mr. Ballard" won the fancy-dress competition!

'You see, Lewis, there are two ways of looking at each of these clues — the complex way, and the simple way. And we'd been looking at them the wrong way — we've been looking at them the complex way.'

'I see,' said Lewis, unseeing.

Take the food business,' continued Morse. 'We almost got in some hopelessly complex muddle about it, didn't we? I read carefully what dear old Max said in his report about what had been floating up and down in the ascending and descending colons. You, Lewis, were bemused enough to listen to what Miss Jonstone said about someone ringing up to ask what the menu was. Why the hell shouldn't someone ring up and ask if they're in for another few slices of the virtually inevitable turkey? And do you know what we didn't do amid all this cerebration, Lewis? We didn't ask ourselves a very simple question: if our man had eaten nothing of the first two courses, shouldn't we assume he might be getting a little hungry? And even if he's been told he'd better go through the evening secretly sticking all the goodies into a doggie-bag, you might have thought he'd be tempted when he came to the next two courses on the menu — especially a couple of succulent pork chops. So why. Lewis-just think simply! — why didn't he have a mouthful or two?'

'Like you say, sir, he was told not to, because it was vital—'

'No! You're still getting too complicated , Lewis. There's a very simple answer, you see! Rastafarians aren't allowed to eat pork!

'Now let's come to this business of the stains this man was leaving behind on whatever he touched — even after midnight! We took down all the evidence, didn't we — we got statements from Miss Palmer, and Mrs. Smith, and Sarah Jonstone — about how the wretched fellow went round ruining their coats and their blouses. And we almost came to the point — well, I did, Lewis — of getting them all analysed and seeing if the stains were the same, and trying to find out where the original theatre-black came from and — well, we were getting too complex again! The simple truth is that any make-up dries after a few hours; it comes off at first, of course, on anything that's touched — but after a while it's no problem at all. Yet in this case it remained a problem. And the simple answer to this particular mystery is that our man wanted to leave his marks late that evening; he deliberately put more stain on his hands; and he deliberately put his hands where they would leave marks. All right, Lewis? He had a stick of theatre-black in his pocket and he smeared it all over the palms of his hands in the final hour or so of the New Year party.

'And then there's the last point. The man won a prize, and we made all sorts of complex assumptions about it; he'd been the most painstaking and imaginative competitor of the lot; he'd been so successful with his make-up that no one could recognize him; he'd been anxious for some reason to carry off the first prize in the fancy-dress competition. And all a load of complex nonsense, Lewis. The fact is that the very last thing he wanted was to draw any attention to himself by winning the first prize that evening. And the almost childishly simple fact of the matter is that if you want to dress up and win first prize as , let's say, Prince Charles, well, the best way to do it is to be Prince Charles. And we all ought to have suspected, perhaps, that the man who dressed up in that Rastafarian rig-out and who put on such a convincing and successful performance that night as a Rastafarian, might perhaps have owed his success to the simple fact that he was a Rastafarian!'

'Mr. Winston Grant.'

'Yes, Mr. Winston Grant! A man, in fact, I met outside the Friar only last night! And if anyone ever tells you, Lewis, that there isn't a quite extraordinary degree of coincidence in this world of ours — then you tell him to come to see me, and I'll tell him different!'

'Should you perhaps say "differently"?' asked Lewis.

'This man had been a builder's labourer; he'd worked on several sites in Oxford — including the Locals; he'd lost his job because of cutbacks in the building industry; he was getting short of money for himself and his family; he was made an extraordinarily generous offer — we still don't know how generous; and he agreed to accept that offer in return for playing — as he saw things — a minor role for a few hours at a New Year's party in an Oxford hotel. I doubt we shall ever know all the ins and outs of the matter but—'

Sergeant Phillips knocked and announced that the prisoner was now in the interview room.

And Morse smiled.

And Lewis smiled.

'Just finish off what you were saying, will you, sir?'

'Nothing more to say, really. Winston Grant must have been pretty carefully briefed, that's for sure. In the first place he'd be coming into the hotel directly from the street, and it was absolutely essential that he should wait his time, to the second almost, until Margaret Bowman had created the clever little distraction of taking Sarah Jonstone away from the reception desk to inspect the graffito in the Ladies'—a graffito which she, Margaret Bowman, had herself just scrawled across the wall. Then, I'm sure he must have been told to say as little as possible to anyone else all the evening and to stick close to Margaret Bowman, as if they were far more interested in each other than in the goings-on around them. But there was no chance of him opting out of the fancy-dress competition! I suspect, too, that he was told not to eat anything — if he could manage not to without drawing too much attention to himself; and remember, he was helped in this by the way Binyon had scheduled the various courses at different tables. But it may well be, Lewis, that we're overestimating the extent to which the plan was completely thought out. Above all, though, he had to carry through that final, extraordinarily clever, little deception: he was to make every effort to pretend that he was a black man — even though he was a black man. And there was one wonderfully simple way in which such a pretence could be sustained, and that was by rubbing dark-stain on to his hands— hands that were already black —so that everyone who came into physical contact with him should believe that he was not a black man — but a white man. And that, Lewis, in the later stages of that New Year's party is what he did, making sure he left a few indelible marks on the most obvious places — like the shoulders of the light-coloured winter mackintoshes worn by both Miss Palmer and Mrs. Smith—'