The Secret of Annexe 3

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