Lewis put down the phone — and capitulated. He went over to the canteen and found Morse — the only one there — drinking another cup of coffee and just completing The Times crossword puzzle.
'Ah, Lewis. Get yourself a coffee! Any luck yet?'
'No, I bloody haven't,' snapped Lewis — a man who swore, at the very outside, about once a fortnight. 'As I said, sir, I need some help: half a dozen DCs — that's what I need.'
'I don't think it's necessary, you know.'
'Well, I do!' said Lewis, looking as angry as Morse had ever seen him, and about to use up a whole month's ration of blasphemies. 'We're not even sure the bloody woman does come from Chipping Norton. She might just as well come from Chiswick — like the tart you met in Paddington!'
'Lew-is! Lew-is! Take it easy! I'm sure that, neither the "Palmers" nor the Smiths had anything at all to do with the murder. And when I said just now it wasn't necessary to bring any more people in on the case, I didn't mean that you couldn't have as many as you like — if you really need them. But not for this particular job, Lewis, I don't think. I didn't want to disturb you, so I've been doing a bit of phoning from here; and I'm waiting for a call that ought to come through any minute. And if it tells me what I think it will, I reckon we know exactly who this "Mrs. Ballard" is, and exactly where we should be able to find her. Her name's Mrs. Bowman — Mrs. Margaret Bowman. And do you know where she lives?'
'Chipping Norton?' suggested Lewis, in a rather wearily defeated tone.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Sunday, January 5th
A man is in general better pleased when he has a good dinner upon his table than when his wife talks Greek.
(SAMUEL JOHNSON)
MORSE HAD BEEN glad to accept Mrs. Lewis's invitation to her traditional Sunday lunch of slightly undercooked beef, horseradish sauce, velvety-flat Yorkshire pudding, and roast potatoes; and the meal had been a success. In deference to the great man's presence, Lewis had bought a bottle of Beaujolais Nouveau; and as Morse leaned back in a deep-cushioned armchair and drank his coffee, he felt very much at his ease.
'I sometimes wish I'd taken a gentle little job in the Egyptian Civil Service, Lewis.'
'Fancy a drop of brandy, sir?'
'Why not?'
From the rattle and clatter coming from the kitchen, it was clear that Mrs. Lewis had launched herself into the washing-up, but Morse kept his voice down as he spoke again. 'I know that a dirty weekend away with some wonderful woman sounds just like the thing for some jaded fellow getting on in age a bit — like you, Lewis — but you'd be an idiot to leave that lovely cook you married—'
'I've never given it a thought, sir.'
There are one or two people in this case, though, aren't there, who seem to have been doing a bit of double-dealing one way or another?'
Lewis nodded as he, too, leaned back in his armchair sipping his coffee, and letting his mind go back to the previous day's startling new development, and to Morse's explanation of how it had occurred. .
'. . If you ever decide to kick over the traces' (Morse had said) 'you've got to have an accommodation address — that's the vital point to bear in mind. All right, there are a few people, like the Smiths, who can get away without one; but don't forget they're professional swindlers and they know all the rules of the game backwards. In the normal course of events, though, you've got to get involved in some sort of correspondence. Now, if the princess you're going away with isn't married or if she's a divorcee or if she is just living on her own anyway, then there's no problem, is there? She can be your mistress and your missus for the weekend and she can deal with all the booking — just like Philippa Palmer did. She can use — she must use — her own address and, as I say, there are no problems. Now let's just recap for a minute about where we are with the third woman in this case, the woman who wrote to the hotel as "Mrs. Ann Ballard" and who booked in as "Mrs. Ann Ballard" from an address in Chipping Norton. Obviously, if we can find her, and find out from her what went on in Annexe 3 on New Year's Eve — or New Year's morning — well, we shall-be home and dry, shan't we? And in fact we know a good deal about her. The key thing — or what I thought was the key thing — was that she'd probably gone to a hair clinic a day or so before turning up at the Haworth Hotel. I'm sorry, Lewis, that you've had such a disappointing time with that side of things. But there was this other side which I kept on thinking about — the address she wrote from and the address the hotel wrote to. Now you can't exchange correspondence with a phoney address — obviously you can't! And yet, you know, you can! You must be able to because it happened, Lewis! And when you think about it you can do it pretty easily if you've got one particular advantage in life — just the one. And you know what that advantage is? It's being a postman. Now let's just take an example. Let's take the Banbury Road. The house numbers go up a long, long way, don't they? I'm not sure, but certainly to about four hundred and eighty or so. Now if the last house is, say, number 478, what exactly happens to a letter addressed to a non-existent 480? The sorters in the main post office are not going, to be much concerned, are they? It's only just above the last house-number; and as likely as not — even if someone did spot it — he'd probably think a new house was being built there. But if it were addressed, say, to 580, then obviously a sorter is going to think that something's gone askew, and he probably won't put that letter into the appropriate pigeon-hole. In cases like that, Lewis, there's a tray for problem letters, and one of the higher-echelon post-office staff will try to sort them all out later. But whichever way things go, whether the letter would get into the postman's bag, or whether it would get put into the problem tray — it wouldn't matter! You see, the postman himself would be there on the premises while all this sorting was taking place! I know! I've had a long talk on the phone with the Chief Postmaster from Chipping Norton — splendid fellow! — and he said that the letter we saw from the Haworth Hotel, the one addressed to 84 West Street, would pretty certainly have gone straight into the West Street pigeon hole, because it's only a couple over the last street-number; and even if it had been put in the problem tray, the postman waiting to get his sack over his shoulder would have every opportunity of seeing it, and taking it. And there were only two postmen who delivered to West Street in December: one was a youngish fellow who's spending the New Year with his girlfriend in the Canary Islands; and the other is this fellow called Tom Bowman, who lives at Charlbury Drive in Chipping Norton. But there's nobody there — neither him nor his wife — and none of the neighbours knows where they've gone, although Margaret Bowman was at her work in Summertown on Thursday and Friday last week: I've checked that. Anyway there's not much more we can do this weekend. Max says he'll have the body all sewn up and presentable again by Monday, and so we ought to know who he is pretty soon.'
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.
At lunchtime on Friday, January 3rd, Gladys had invited Margaret for a meal at the Chinese restaurant just across the Banbury Road from the Delegacy; and over the sweet-and-sour pork and the Lotus House Special chop suey, Margaret had confided to Gladys that her husband was away on a course over the New Year and that she herself had been feeling a bit low. And how enormously it had pleased Gladys when Margaret had accepted the invitation to spend the weekend with her — in Glady's home on the Cutteslowe housing estate in North Oxford.
Mrs. Mary Webster, the senior administrative assistant who kept a very firm (if not unfriendly) eye upon the forty or so women who sat each day in the large first-storey room overlooking the playing fields of Summerfields Preparatory School, had not returned to her accustomed chair after the coffee-break on the morning of January 6th. Most unusual! But it was the intelligence gleaned by Mrs. Bannister (a woman somewhat handicapped in life by a bladder of minimal capacity, but whose regular trips to the downstairs toilet afforded, by way of compensation, a fascinating window on the world) that set the whole room a-buzzing.
'A police car!' she whispered (audibly) to half the assembled ladies.
'Two men! They're in the Secretary's room!'
'You mean the police are down there talking to Mrs. Webster?' asked one of Mrs. Bannister's incredulous colleagues.
But further commentary and interpretation was immediately forestalled by Mrs. Webster herself, who now suddenly entered the door at the top of the long room, and who began to walk down the central gangway between the desks and tables. The whole room was immediately still, and silent as a Trappist's cell. It was not until she reached Gladys's table, almost at the very bottom of the room, that she stopped.
'Mrs. Bowman, can you come with me for a few minutes, please?'
Margaret Bowman said nothing as she walked down the wooden stairs, one step behind Mrs. Webster, and then into the main corridor downstairs and directly to the room whose door of Swedish oak bore the formidable nameplate of 'The Secretary'.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Monday, January 6th: A.M.
The cruellest lies are often told in silence.
(ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON)
'THE SECRETARY' WAS one of those endearingly archaic titles, in which the University of Oxford abounded. On the face of it, such a title seemed to point to a personage with Supreme (upper-case, as it were) Stenographic Skills. In fact, however, the Secretary of the Locals, Miss Gibson, was a poor typist, her distinction arising from her outstanding academic and administrative abilities which had led, ten years previously, to her appointment as the boss of the whole outfit. Grey-haired, tight-lipped, pale-faced, Miss Gibson sat behind her desk, in an upright red leather chair, awaiting the arrival of Mrs. Margaret Bowman. Arranged in front of her desk were three further red leather chairs, of the same design: in the one to the Secretary's left sat a man of somewhat melancholy mien, the well-manicured fingers of his left hand occasionally stroking his thinning hair and who was at that moment (although Miss Gibson would never have guessed the fact) thinking what a very attractive woman the Secretary must have been in her earlier years; in the middle sat a slightly younger man — another policeman, and one also in plain clothes — but a man both thicker set, and kindlier faced. Miss Gibson introduced the two police officers after Margaret Bowman had knocked and entered and been bidden to the empty chair.
'You live in Chipping Norton?' asked Lewis.
'Yes.'
'At 6 Charlbury Drive, I think?'