It was ten minutes later that the Muzak was switched off and a pleasantly clear female voice made the announcement to everyone in the Great Western Hotel, in the lounge, in the restaurant, and in the bar: 'Would Chief Inspector Morse please come to Reception immediately. Chief Inspector Morse, to Reception, please.'
He helped her on with her mackintosh, an off-white expensive creation that would have made almost any woman look adequately glamorous; and he watched her as she pulled the belt tight and evened out the folds around her slim waist.
'Been nice meeting you, Inspector.'
Morse nodded. 'We shall probably need some sort of statement.'
'I'd rather not — if you can arrange it.'
'I'll see.'
As she turned to leave, Morse noticed the grubby brown stain on the left shoulder of her otherwise immaculate raincoat: 'Were you wearing that when you left the party?' he asked.
'Yes.' She squinted down at the offending mark. 'You can't walk around semi-nude in the snow, can you?'
'I suppose not.'
'Pity, though. Cost a fiver at least to get it cleaned, that will.' You'd 'a'thought, wouldn't you, if you dress up as a wog you might keep your 'ands off. .'
The voice had slipped, and the mask had slipped; and Morse felt a saddened man. She could have been a lovely girl, but somehow, somewhere, she was flawed. A man had been savagely murdered — a man (who knows? with maybe just a little gentleness in his heart) who after a party one night had put his left hand, sweatily stained with dark-brown stage make-up, on to a woman's shoulder; and she was angry because it would possibly cost a few pounds to get rid of a stain that might detract from her appearance. They said farewell, and Morse sought to hide his two-fold disappointment behind the mask that he, too, invariably wore for most occasions before his fellow men. Perhaps — the thought suddenly struck him — it was the masks that were the reality, and the faces beneath them that were the pretence. So many of the people in the Haworth that fatal evening had been wearing some sort of disguise — a change of dress, a change of make-up, a change of attitude, a change of partner, a change of life almost; and the man who had died had been the most consummate artist of them all.
After she had left, Morse walked back through the lounge to Reception (it must be Lewis who had rung for him — Lewis was the only person who had any idea where he was) and prayed that it would be a different young girl on duty. But it wasn't. Furthermore she was a girl who obviously possessed a fairly retentive memory.
'I'm afraid we haven't had any cancellations yet, Mr. Palmer.'
'Oh, Christ!' muttered Morse under his breath.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Thursday, January 2nd: P.M.
Men seldom make passes
At girls who wear glasses.
(DOROTHY PARKER)
MR. JOHN SMITH returned home that evening, unexpectedly early, to find his wife Helen in a state of tear-stained distraction; and once he had persuaded her to start talking, it was impossible to stop her. .
Helen had caught the 3.45 train from Reading that afternoon, and arrived in Oxford at 4.20. Apart from the key to Annexe 2 which she clasped tight in the pocket of her duffel coat, she carried little else: no handbag, no wallet, no umbrella — only the return ticket to Reading, two pound coins, and a few shillings in smaller change. A taxi from Oxford station might have been sensible, but it certainly wasn't necessary; and in any case she knew that the twenty-minute walk would do her no harm. As she began to make her way to the Haworth Hotel her heart was beating as nervously as when she had opened the front passenger door of the BMW, and had frantically felt all over the floor of the car, splayed her hands across and under and down and round the sides of seats and everywhere—everywhere! And found nothing: nothing except a two-pence piece, a white indigestion tablet, and a button from a lady's coat (not one of her own)
She walked quickly past the vast glass-fronted Blackwells' building in Hythe Bridge Street, through Gloucester Green, and then along Beaumont Street into St. Giles', where at the Martyrs' Memorial she crossed over to the right-hand side of the thoroughfare and, now more slowly, made her way northwards along the Banbury Road.
Opposite the Haworth Hotel she could see the two front windows of the annexe clearly — and so very near! There seemed to be some sort of light on at the back of the building somewhere; but each of the two rooms facing the street — and especially one of them, the one on the left as she watched and waited — was dark and almost certainly empty. A glass-sided bus shelter almost directly opposite the annexe protected her from the drizzle, if not from the wind, and gave her an ideal vantage point from which to keep watch without arousing suspicion. A bus came and picked up the two people waiting there, a very fat West Indian woman and a wiry little English woman, both about sixty, both (as Helen gathered) cleaners in a nearby hospice, who chatted together on such easy and intimate terms that it was tempting to be optimistic about future prospects for racial harmony. Helen stood aside — and continued to watch. Soon another bus was coming towards her, its headlights illuminating the silvery sleet; but she stood back inside the shelter, and the bus passed on without stopping. Then she saw something — something which seemed to make her heart lurch towards her mouth. A light had been turned on in the room on the right, Annexe 1: the window, its curtains undrawn, glared brightly in the darkness, and a figure was moving around inside. Then the light was switched off, and the light in the next room—her room — was switched on. A bus had stopped, the doors, folding inwards, inviting her to climb aboard; and she found herself apologizing and seeing the look on the driver's face as he tossed his head in contempt before leaning forward over the great steering-wheel and driving away. The light was still on in Annexe 2, and she saw a figure silhouetted against the window for a few seconds; and then that light too was switched off. A man came out of the side door, walked round to the front of the annexe, immediately opposite to her, and disappeared inside; and the two rooms facing the street were dark and empty once more. But the policeman was still there at the side entrance. He had been there all along, his black-and-white checkered cap conspicuous under the light that illuminated the path between the Haworth Hotel and the cordoned area of the annexe — the red, yellow, and white tabs on the ropes tilting back and forth in the keen wind.
If Helen Smith had ever been likely to despair, she would have done so at this point. And yet somehow she knew that she would not despair. It may have been the cold, the hopelessness, the futility of it all; it may have been her awareness that there could be nothing more for her to lose. She didn't know. She didn't want to know. But she sensed within herself a feeling of wild determination that she had never known before. Her whole being seemed polarized between the black-and-white hat across the road and the key still clutched so tightly and warmly in her right hand. There had to be some way of diverting the man's attention, so that she would have the chance to slip swiftly and silently through the side door. But it had been so much easier than that! He had just walked across to the main hotel, where he now stood drinking a cup of something from a white plastic beaker, and happily engrossed in conversation with a young woman from the hotel.
Helen was in the corridor almost before her courage had been called upon.
No problem! With shaking hand she inserted the key in the lock of Annexe 2, closed the door behind her, and stood stock-still for a moment or two in the dark. Then she felt her way across to the bed nearer the window, and ran her hands along the smooth sheets, and beneath and around the pillow, and along the headboard, and finally over the floor. They had been there: they had been underneath her pillow — she knew it. And an embryo sob escaped her lips as again her hands frantically, but fruitlessly, searched around. There were two switches on the headboard, and she turned on the one above the bed she had slept in: she had to make sure! For half a minute she searched again desperately in the lighted room; but to no avail. And now, for the first time, it was fear that clutched her heart as she switched off the light, left the room and edged her way noiselessly through the side door. Then she froze where she stood against the wall. Immediately opposite, at one of the windows on the first floor of the main hotel, a woman stood watching her — and then was gone. Helen felt quite certain that the woman had seen her, and an icy panic seized her. She could remember little of how she left the hotel; but fear had given its own winged sandals to her feet.
The next thing she knew, she was walking along the Banbury Road, a good way down from the Haworth Hotel, her heart thumping like a trip-hammer in an ironmaster's yard. She walked without looking back for a single second; she walked and walked like some revenant zombie, oblivious to her surroundings, still panic-stricken and trembling — yet safe, blessedly safe! At the railway station, with only ten minutes to wait, she bought herself a Scotch, and felt fractionally better. But as she sat in a deserted compartment in the slow train back to Reading, she knew that each of the wearisome stops, like the stations of the cross, was bringing her nearer and nearer to a final reckoning.
Morse had made no secret of the fact that he would be meeting Philippa Palmer at the Great Western Hotel, and had agreed that should Lewis think it necessary he might be reached there. The news could wait until the morning of course — Lewis knew that; and it probably wasn't crucially important in any case. Yet everyone is anxious to parade a success, and for Lewis it had been a successful evening. In Annexe 2, the room in which Mr. and Mrs. John Smith had spent the night of December 31st, he had found, beneath the pillow of the bed nearer the window, in a brown imitation-leather case, a pair of spectacles: small, feminine, rather fussy little things. At first he had been disappointed, since the case bore no optician's name, no address, no signification of town or county — nothing. But inside the case, squashed down at the very bottom, he had found a small oblong of yellow material for use (as Lewis knew) in the cleaning of lenses; and printed on this material were the words 'G.W. Lloyd, Opticians, High Street, Reading'. Fortunately Mr. Lloyd, a garrulous Welshman hailing from Mountain Ash, had still been on the premises when Lewis rang him, and had willingly agreed to remain so until Lewis arrived. If it had taken Lewis only forty minutes to reach Reading, it had taken Lloyd only four or five to discover the owner of the lost spectacles. In his neat records the resourceful Lloyd kept full information about all his clients: this defect, that defect; long sight, short sight; degrees of astigmatism; type of spectacle frames; private or NHS. And tracing the spectacles had been almost childishly easy. Quite an able fellow, Lewis decided, this little Welshman who had opted for ophthalmology.
'I found them under the pillow, sir,' said Lewis when he finally got through to Morse at Paddington.
'Did you?'
'I thought it wouldn't perhaps do any harm just to check up on things a bit.'
'Check upon me, you mean!'
'Well, we can all miss things.'
'You mean to say they were there when I looked over that room? Come off it, Lewis! You don't honestly think I'd have missed something like that, do you?'
The thought that the spectacles had been planted in Annexe 2 by some person or other after Morse had searched the room had not previously occurred to Lewis, and he was beginning to wonder about the implications of such a strange notion when Morse spoke again.
'I'm sorry.'
'Pardon, sir?'
'I said I'm sorry, that's all. I must have missed the bloody things! And there's something else I want to say. Well done! No wonder I sometimes find it useful having you around, my old friend.'
Lewis was looking very happy when, after giving Morse the Smiths' address, he put down the phone, thanked the optician, and drove straight back to Oxford. He and Morse had agreed not to try to see either of the mysterious Smith couple until the following day. And Lewis was glad of that since he was feeling very tired indeed.
Mrs. Lewis could see that her husband was happy when he finally returned home just before 9 p.m. She cooked him egg and chips and once again marvelled at the way in which Chief Inspector Morse could, on occasions, have such a beneficent effect upon the man she'd married. But she was very happy herself, too; she was always happy when he was.
Deciding, after he had finished his telephone conversation with Lewis, that he might just as well stay on in London and then stop off at Reading the following morning on his return to Oxford, Morse approached the receptionist (the same one) for the third time, and asked her sweetly whether she could offer him a single room for the night. Which she could, for there had been a cancellation. The card which she gave him Morse completed in the name of Mr. Philip Palmer, of Irish nationality, and handed it back to her. As she gave him his room key, the girl looked at him with puzzlement in her eyes, and Morse leaned over and spoke quietly to her. 'Just one little t'ing, miss. If Chief Inspector Morse happens to call, please send him up to see me immediately, will you?'
The receptionist, now utterly bewildered, looked at him with eyes that suggested that either he was quite mad, or she was. And when he walked off towards the main staircase, she wondered whether she should ring the duty manager and acquaint him with her growing suspicion that she might have just booked an IRA terrorist into the hotel. But she decided against it. If he had a bomb with him, it was quite certainly not in his suitcase, for he had no suitcase; had no luggage at all, in fact — not even a toothbrush by the look of things.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
January 2nd/3rd
Love is strong as death; jealousy is cruel as the grave.
(SONG OF SOLOMON viii, 6)
THE WHOLE DESPERATE business had acquired a gathering momentum born of its own progress. It was, for Margaret Bowman, like driving a car whose brakes had failed down an ever more steeply inclined gradient — where the only thing to do was to try to steer the accelerating vehicle with the split-second reactions of a racing driver and to pray that it would reach the bottom without a fatal collision. To stop was utterly impossible.
It had been about a year ago when she had first become aware that her husband was showing unmistakable signs of becoming a semi-drunkard. There would be days when he would not touch a drop of alcohol; but there were other periods when two or three times a week she would return from work to find him in a sort of slow-thinking half-daze after what must clearly have been fairly prolonged bouts of drinking, about which her own occasional criticism had served merely to trigger off an underlying crude and cruel streak in his nature which had greatly frightened her. Had it been because of his drinking that (for the first time in their marriage) she had been unfaithful to him? She wasn't sure. Possibly — probably, even — she might in any case have drifted into some sort of illicit liaison with one or two of the men she had recently got to know at work. Everyone changed as the years went by, she knew that. But Tom, her husband, seemed to have undergone a fundamental change of character, and she had become increasingly terrified of him finding out about her affair, and deeply worried about what dreadful things he would do to her; and to him, and perhaps to himself, if he ever did find out. Her infidelity had spanned the late summer and most of the autumn before she began to realize that any affair was just as fraught with risk as marriage was. For the first few weeks, a single afternoon a week had sufficed: he, by regulating his varied weekend workings, was able to take a day off every week, and this was easily synchronized with her own afternoon off (on Thursdays) when the pair of them made love in the bedroom of an erstwhile council house in North Oxford which he now owned himself. That had been the early pattern; and for the first two or three months he had been interesting to be with, considerate, anxious to please. But as time went on, he too (just like her husband) had appeared to change: he became somewhat crude in one or two respects, more demanding, less talkative, with (quite clearly to Margaret Bowman) his own craving for sexual gratification dominating their post-meridian copulations. Progressively he'd wished to see her more often, ever badgering her to fabricate for her employers a series of visits to dentists, doctors, and terminally ill relatives; or to take home to her husband tales of overtime workings necessitated by imaginary backlogs. And while she despised the man to some degree for so obviously allowing all his professed love for her to degenerate into an undisguised lust, yet there was a physical side to her own nature, at once as crude and selfish and demanding as his, which welded them into an almost perfect partnership between the sheets. The simple truth was that the more he used and abused her, the more sexual satisfaction he managed to wring from her, and the more she was conscious of her pride in being the physical object of his apparently insatiable appetite for her body. Indeed, as the year moved into its last quarter, she began to suspect that she needed him almost as much as he needed her, although for a long time she refused to countenance, even to herself, the full implications of such a suspicion. But then she was forced to face them. He was soon making too many demands upon her, begging her to be with him even for an odd half-hour at lunchtimes when (truth to tell) she would more often than not have preferred a glass of red wine and a ham sandwich with her friend and colleague Gladys Taylor in the Dew Drop. And then had come the show-down, as perhaps she'd known would be inevitable. He'd asked her to leave her husband and come to live with him: it was about time, surely, that she left the man she didn't love and moved in with the one she did. And although coming within an ace of saying 'yes', she'd finally said 'no'.
Why Margaret Bowman had thus refused, she would herself have found difficult to explain. Perhaps it was because (for the present at least) it was all far too much bother. The rather dull, the slightly overweight, the only semi-successful man who was her husband, was the man with whom she had shared so much for so many years now. And there were far too many other shared things to think of packing everything up just like that: payments on the car, life insurances, the house mortgage, family friends and relations, neighbours — even the disappointments and the quarrels and the boredoms, which all seemed to form a strangely binding sort of tie between them. Yet there was perhaps, too, one quite specific reason why she had refused. Gladys (Margaret had come to work in the same section as Gladys in the spring) had become a genuine friend; and one day in the Dew Drop she had told Margaret how she had been temporarily jilted by her husband, and how for many months after that she had felt so hurt and so belittled that she'd wondered whether she would ever be able to lift up her head in life again. 'Having had it done to me' (she'd confided) 'I couldn't ever think of doing it to anyone else.' It had been a simple little thing to say, and it had not been said with any great moral fervour; yet it had made its point with memorable effect.