You can fool too many of the people too much of the time.
(JAMES THURBER)
THROUGHOUT THE WHOLE of the last five years (admitted Helen Smith) the two of them had successfully contrived to defraud dozens of honourable institutions of their legitimate income. But neither her husband John nor herself had the means whereby to make any reparation even fractionally commensurate with such deceit. She, Helen, fully understood why society at large should expect some expiation for her sins; but (she stressed the point) if such compensation were to be index-linked to its £ s. d. equivalents, there was no prospect whatsoever of any settlement of the overdue account. She showed Lewis the note she had found on her return from London; and would be happy to show him, too, the little hidey-hole beneath the second floorboard from the left in the spare bedroom where she had duly found the £600 referred to – that is if Lewis wanted to see it. (Lewis didn’t.) Unshakably, however, she refused to hazard any information about where her husband might have made for; and indeed her refusal was genuinely founded in total ignorance, both of his present whereabouts and of his future plans.
The pattern had seldom varied: ringing round half a dozen hotels at holiday periods; taking advantage of late cancellations (an almost inevitable occurrence); there and then accepting, by phone, any vacancy which so lately had arisen; promising a.s.a.p. a confirmatory letter (with both parties appreciating the unreliability of holiday-time postal services); staying only two nights where ‘The Businessman’s Break’ was scheduled for three; or staying just the one night where it was scheduled for two. And that was about it. Easy enough. There were of course always a few little secrets about such professional deception: for example, it was advisable always to carry as little baggage as was consistent with reasonably civilized standards of hygiene; again, it was advisable never to park a car on the hotel premises, or to fill in the section on the registration form asking for car-licence numbers. Yet there was one principle above all that had to be understood, namely, that the more demands you made upon the establishment, the more enhanced would be your status vis-à-vis the management and staff of all hotels. Thus it was that the Smiths had learned always to select their meals from the higher echelons of the à la carte specialities of the chef, and wines and liqueurs from any over-valued vintage; to demand room-service facilities at the most improbable periods of day or night; and, finally, never to exchange too many friendly words with anyone in sight – from the manager down, through receptionist to waitress, porter or cleaner. Such (Helen testified) were the basic principles she and her husband had observed in their remarkably successful bid to extract courtesy and respect from some of the finest hotels across the length and breadth of the United Kingdom. The only thing then left to be staged was their disappearance, which was best effected during that period when no one normally booked out of hotels – mid-afternoon. And that had usually been the time when the Smiths had decided to take leave of their erstwhile benefactors – sans warning, sans farewell, sans payment, sans everything.
When Helen Smith came to court (inevitably so, as Lewis saw things) it seemed wholly probable that this darkly attractive, innocent-looking defendant would plead guilty to the charges brought against her, and would pretty certainly ask, too, for one-hundred-and-one other offences to be taken into consideration. But she hardly looked or sounded like a criminal, and her account of the time she had spent at the Haworth Hotel appeared honest and clear. Four (yes!) bottles of champagne had been ordered – they both liked the lovely stuff! – two on New Year’s Eve and two on New Year’s Day, with the last of the four still in the larder if Lewis wanted to see it. (Lewis did.) Yes, she remembered a few things about the Ballards, and about the Palmers; but her recollections of specific times and specific details were even hazier than Philippa Palmer’s had been the previous evening. Like Philippa, though, she thought that the evening had been well organized – and great fun; and that the food and drink had been very good indeed. The Smiths, both of them, enjoyed fancy-dress parties; and that New Year’s Eve they had appeared – an oddly uncomplementary pair! – as a seductive Cleopatra and as a swordless Samurai. Would Lewis like to see the costumes? (Lewis would.) Whether Ballard had eaten much or drunk much that evening, she couldn’t remember with any certainty. But she did remember, most clearly, Ballard walking back with her through the snow (Oh yes! it had been snowing heavily then) to the hotel annexe, and ruining the right shoulder-lapel of her mackintosh, where his right hand had left a dirty dark-brown stain – which of course Lewis could see if he so desired. (As Lewis did.)
During the last part of this interview Morse had seemed only minimally interested in Lewis’s interrogation, and had been leafing through an outsize volume entitled The Landscape of Thomas Hardy. But now, suddenly, he asked a question.
‘Would you recognize Mrs Ballard if you saw her again?’
‘I – I don’t really know. She was in fancy dress and—’
‘In a yashmak, wasn’t she?’
Helen nodded, somewhat abashed by the brusqueness of his question.
‘Didn’t she eat anything?’
‘Of course, yes.’
‘But you can’t eat anything in a yashmak!’
‘No.’
‘You must have seen her face, then?’
Helen knew that he was right; and suddenly, out of the blue, she did remember something. ‘Yes,’ she began slowly. ‘Yes, I did see her face. Her top lip was a bit red, and there were red sort of pin-pricks – you know, sort of little red spots . . .’
But even as Helen spoke these words, her own upper lip was trembling uncontrollably, and it was clear that the hour of questioning had left her spirits very low indeed. The tears were suddenly springing copiously and she turned her head sharply away from the two policemen in total discomfiture.
In the car, Lewis ventured to ask whether it might not have been wiser to take Helen Smith back to Oxford there and then for further questioning. But Morse appeared unenthusiastic about any such immediate move, asserting that, compared with the likes of Marcinkus & Co. in the Vatican Bank, John and Helen Smith were sainted folk in white array.
It was just after they had turned on to the A34 that Morse mentioned the strange affair of the yashmak’d lady’s upper lip.
‘How did you guess, Lewis?’ he asked.
‘It’s being married, sir – so I don’t suppose you ought to blame yourself too much for missing it. You see, most women like to look their best when they go away, let’s say for a holiday or a trip abroad or something similar; and the missus has a bit of trouble like that – you know, a few unsightly hairs growing just under the chin or a little fringe of hairs on the top lip. A lot of women have the same trouble especially if they’ve got darkish sort of hair—’
‘But your missus has got fair hair!’
‘All right; but it happens to everybody a bit as they get older. You get rather self-conscious and embarrassed about it if you’re a woman, so you often go to one of the hair clinics like the Tao or something and they give you electrolysis and they put a needle sort of thing into the roots of the hairs and – well, sort of get rid of them. Costs a bit though, sir!’
‘But being a rich man you can just about afford to let the missus go along to one of these beauty parlours?’
‘Just about!’
Lewis suddenly put down his foot with a joyous thrust, turned on his right-hand flasher, took the police car up to 95 m.p.h., veered in a great swoop across the outside lane, and netted a dozen lorries and cars which had thoughtfully decelerated to the statutory speed limit as they’d noticed the white car looming up in their rear mirrors.
‘The treatment they give you,’ continued Lewis, ‘makes the skin go a bit pinkish all over and they say if it’s on the top lip it’s very sensitive and you often get a histamine reaction – and a sort of tingling sensation . . .’
But Morse was no longer listening. His own body was tingling too; and there crossed his face a beatific smile as Lewis accelerated the police car faster still towards the City of Oxford.
Back in Kidlington HQ, Morse decided that they had spent quite long enough in the miserably cold and badly equipped room at the back of the Haworth annexe, and that they should now transfer things back home, as it were.
‘Shall I go and get a few new box-files from the stores?’ asked Lewis. Morse picked up two files which were heavily bulging with excess paper, and looked cursorily through their contents. ‘These’ll be OK. They’re both OBE.’
‘OBE, sir?’
Morse nodded: ‘Overtaken By Events.’
The phone rang half an hour later and Morse heard Sarah Jonstone’s voice at the other end. She’d remembered a little detail about Mrs Ballard; it might be silly of her to bother Morse with it, but she could almost swear that there had been a little red circular sticker – an RSPCA badge, she thought – on Mrs Ballard’s coat when she had booked in at registration on New Year’s Eve.
‘Well,’ said Morse, ‘we’ve not done a bad job between us, Lewis. We’ve managed to find two of the three women we were after – and it’s beginning to look as if it’s not going to be very difficult to find the last one! Not tonight, though. I’m tired out – and I could do with a bath, and a good night’s sleep.’
‘And a shave, sir!’