Colin Dexter - The Secret of Annexe 3

Yes. If she could help out, of course she would! The only thing she couldn't definitely promise was to stay awake. Her eyelids threatened every second to close down permanently over the tired eyes, and she was only half aware, amidst his profuse thanks, of the palms of his hands on her bottom as he leaned forward and kissed her gently on the cheek. He was, she knew, an inveterate womanizer; but curiously enough she found herself unable positively to dislike him; and on the few occasions he had tested the temperature of the water with her he had accepted without rancour or bitterness her fairly firm assurance that for the moment it was little if anything above freezing point. As she closed the door behind Binyon and went back to her bedroom, she felt a growing sense of guilt about her early morning escapade. It had been those wretched (beautiful!) gins and Campari that had temporarily loosened the girdle round her robe of honour. But her sense of guilt was, she knew, not occasioned just by the lapse itself, but by the anonymous, mechanical nature of that lapse. Jenny had been utterly delighted, if wholly flabbergasted, by the unprecedented incident; but Sarah herself had felt immediately saddened and diminished in her own self-estimation. And when finally she had returned to her flat, her sleep had been fitful and unrefreshing, the eiderdown perpetually slipping off her single bed as she had tossed and turned and tried to tell herself it didn't matter.

Now she took two Disprin, in the hope of dispelling her persistent headache, washed and dressed, drank two cups of piping hot black coffee, packed her toilet bag and night-clothes, and left the flat. It was only some twelve minutes' walk down to the hotel, and she decided that the walk would do her nothing but good. The weather was perceptibly colder than the previous day: heavy clouds (the forecasters said) were moving down over the country from the north, and some moderate falls of snow were expected to reach the Midlands by the early afternoon. During the previous week the bookmakers had made a great deal of money after the tenth consecutive non-white Christmas; but they must surely have stopped taking any more bets on a white New Year, since such an eventuality was now beginning to look like a gilt-edged certainty.

Not that Sarah Jonstone had ever thought of laying a bet with any bookmaker, in spite of the proximity of the Ladbrokes office in Summertown which she passed almost daily on her way to work. Passed it, indeed, again now, and stared (surely, far too obviously!) at the man who had just emerged, eyes downcast, from one of the swing-doors folding a pink, oblong betting slip into his wallet. How extraordinarily strange life could become on occasions! It was just like meeting a word in the English language for the very first time, and then — lo and behold! — meeting exactly the same word for the second time almost immediately thereafter. She had seen this same man, for the first time, the previous evening as she had walked up to Jenny's flat at about 9.30 p.m.: middle-aged; greyish-headed; balding; a man who once might have been slim, but who was now apparently running to the sort of fat which strained the buttons on his shabby-looking beige raincoat. Why had she looked at him so hard on that former occasion? Why had she recorded certain details about him so carefully in her mind? She couldn't tell. But she did know that this man, in his turn, had looked at her , however briefly, with a look of intensity which had been slightly (if pleasurably) disturbing.

Yet the man's cursory glance had been little more than a gesture of approbation for the high cheekbones that had thrown the rest of her face into a slightly mysterious shadow under the orange glare of the street lamp which illuminated the stretch of road immediately outside his bachelor flat. And after only a few yards, he had virtually forgotten the woman as he stepped out with a purpose in his stride towards his nightly assignation at the Friar.

CHAPTER FIVE

Tuesday, December 31st

Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, and disregard of all the rules.

(GEORGE ORWELL, Shooting an Elephant )

IN VIEW OF THE events described in the previous chapter, it is not surprising that from the start of subsequent police investigations Sarah Jonstone's memories should have resembled a disorderly card index, with times and people and sequences sometimes hopelessly confused. Interview with one interrogator had been followed by interview with another, and the truth was that her recollection of some periods of December 31st had grown as unreliable as a false and faithless lover.

Until about 11.30 a.m. she spent some time in the games room: brushing down the green baize on the snooker table; putting up the ping-pong net; repolishing the push-penny board; checking up on the Monopoly, Scrabble and Cluedo sets; and putting into their appropriate niches such items as cues, dice, bats, balls, chalk, darts, cards, and scoring pads. She spent some time, too, in the restaurant; and was in fact helping to set up the trestles and spread the tablecloths for the buffet lunch when the first two guests arrived — guests signed in, as it happened, by a rather poorly and high-temperatured Mrs. Binyon herself in order to allow Sarah to nip upstairs to her temporary bedroom and change into regulation long-sleeved cream-coloured blouse, close-buttoned to the chin, and regulation mid-calf, tightly fitting black skirt which (Sarah would have been the first to admit) considerably flattered waist, hips, thighs and calves alike.

From about noon onwards, guests began to arrive regularly, and there was little time, and little inclination, for needless pleasantries. The short-handed staff may have been a little short-tempered here and there — particularly with each other; but the frenetic to-ings and fro-ings were strangely satisfying to Sarah Jonstone that day. Mrs. Binyon kept out of the way for the most part, confining her questionable skills to restaurant and kitchen before finally retiring to bed; whilst Mr. Binyon, in between lugging suitcases along corridors and up stairs, had already repaired one squirting radiator, one flickering TV and one noisily dripping bath tap, before discovering in early afternoon that some of the disco equipment was malfunctioning, and spending the next hour seeking to beg, cajole and bribe anyone with the slightest knowledge of circuits and switches to save his hotel from imminent disaster. Such (not uncommon) crises meant that Sarah was called upon to divide her attention mainly between Reception — a few guests had rung to say that the bad weather might delay their arrival — and the games room.

Oh dear — the games room!

The darts (Sarah soon saw) was not going to be one of the afternoon's greater successes. An ex-publican from East Croydon, a large man with the facility of lobbing his darts into the treble-twenty with a sort of languid regularity, had only two potential challengers for the championship title; and one of these could hardly be said to pose a major threat — a small, ageing charlady from somewhere in the Chilterns who shrieked with juvenile delight whenever one of her darts actually managed to stick in the board instead of the wooden surround. On the other hand, the Cluedo players appeared to be settling down quite nicely — until one of the four children booked in for the festivities reported a 'Colonel Mustard' so badly dog-eared and a 'Conservatory' so sadly creased that each of the two cards was just as easily recognizable from the back as from the front. Fortunately the knock-out Scrabble competition, which was being keenly and cleanly played by a good many of the guests, had reached the final before any real dissension arose, and that over both the spelling and the admissibility of 'Caribbean'. (What an unpropitious omen that had been!) But these minor worries could hardly compare with the consternation caused on the Monopoly front by a swift-fingered checker-out from a Bedford supermarket whose palm was so extraordinarily speedy in the recovery of the two dice thrown from the cylindrical cup that her opponents had little option but to accept, without ever seeing the slightest evidence, her instantaneously enunciated score, and then to watch helplessly as this sharp-faced woman moved her little counter along the board to whichever square seemed of the greatest potential profit to her entrepreneurial designs. No complaint was openly voiced at the time; but the speed with which she bankrupted her real-estate rivals was later a matter of some general dissatisfaction — if also of considerable amusement. Her prize, though, was to be only a bottle of cheap, medium-sweet sherry; and since she did not look the sort of woman who would ever own a real-life hotel in Park Lane or Mayfair, Sarah had said nothing, and done nothing, about it. The snooker and the table-tennis tournaments were happily free from any major controversy; and a friendly cheer in mid-afternoon proclaimed that the ageing charlady from the Chilterns (who appeared to be getting on very nicely thank-you with the ex-publican from East Croydon) had at last managed to hit the dartboard with three consecutive throws.