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.