The Secret of Annexe 3

erotic dream (about a woman with a large Elastoplast over one ankle) thrown in for good measure. He told himself, on waking at 6.30 a.m., that if only there had been a double room available the night before. . But he had never been a man to be unduly perturbed by the 'if onlys' of life, and he possessed a wholly enviable capacity for discounting most disappointments. Remembering a programme he had heard the previous week on cholesterol (a programme which the Lewis family had obviously missed), Morse decided to forgo the huge and rare treat of a fried breakfast in the restaurant, and caught the 9.10 train to Reading from platform 2. In the second-class compartment in which he made the journey were two other persons: in one corner, an (equally unshaven) Irishman who said nothing whatsoever after a polite 'Good morning, sorr!' but who thereafter smiled perpetually as though the day had dawned exceedingly bright; and in the other corner, a pretty young girl wearing (as Morse recognized it) a Lady Margaret Hall scarf, who scowled unceasingly as she studied a thick volume of anthropological essays, as though the world had soured and worsened overnight.

It seemed, to Morse, a metaphor.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Friday, January 3rd: A.M.

There's a kind of release

And a kind of torment in every goodbye for every man.

(C. DAY LEWIS)

FOR MANY HOURS before Morse had woken, Helen Smith had been lying wide awake in bed, anticipating the worries that would doubtless beset her during the coming day. After her dreadful ordeal of the previous day, it had been wonderfully supportive of John to show such understanding and forgiveness; indeed, he had almost persuaded her that, even if she had left anything potentially incriminating behind, police resources were so overstretched in coping with major felonies that it was very doubtful whether anyone would find the time to pursue their own comparatively minor misdemeanours. And at that point, she had felt all the old love for him which she had known five years previously when they had met in Yugoslavia, her native country; and when after only two weeks' courtship she had agreed to marry him and go to live in England. He had given her the impression then — very much so! — of being a reasonably affluent businessman; and in any case she was more than glad to get away from a country in which her family lived under the shadow of a curiously equivocal incident from the past, in which her paternal grandfather, for some mysterious reason, had been shot by the Titoists outside Trieste. But from the earliest days in England she had become aware of her husband's strange lifestyle, of his dubious background, of his shady present, and of his far from glittering prospects for the future. Yet in her own quiet, gentle way, she had learned to love him, and to perform (without overmuch reluctance) the role that she was called upon to play.

At 7.30 a.m. they sat opposite each other over the pine-wood table in the small kitchen of their rented property, having a breakfast of grapefruit juice, toast and marmalade, and coffee. When they had finished, John Smith looked across at his wife and put his hand over hers. In his eyes she was still a most attractive woman — that at least was a point on which he had no need to lie. Her legs, for the purist, were perhaps a little too slim; and likewise her bust was considerably less bulging than the amply bosomed models who unfailingly featured on one of the earlier pages of their daily newspaper; her face had a pale, Slavonic cast, with a slightly pitted, rather muddy- looking skin; but the same face, albeit somewhat sullen in repose, was ever irradiated when she smiled, the intense, greenish eyes flashing into life, and the lips curling back over her regular teeth. She was smiling, though a little sadly, even now.

'Thank you!' she said.

At 8 a.m. John Smith told his wife that he wanted her to go up to the January sales in Oxford Street and buy herself a new winter coat. He gave her five ?20 notes, and would countenance no refusal. He took her down to the station in the car, and waited on the platform with her until the 8.40 '125' pulled in to carry her off to the West End.

As her train drew into Paddington's platform 5 at 9.10 a.m., another '125' was just pulling out of platform 2 and soon gliding along the rails at a high, smooth speed towards Reading. In a second-class compartment (as we have already seen), rather towards the rear of this train, and with only two wholly uncommunicative fellow- passengers for company, sat Morse, reading the Sun. At home he invariably took The Times, though not because he much enjoyed it, or even read it (apart from the letters page and the crossword); much more because the lady local councillor who ran the newsagent's shop down in Summertown was fully aware of Morse's status, and had (to Morse's knowledge) more than once referred to him as 'a really civilized gentleman'; and he had no wish prematurely to destroy such a flattering illusion.

If the serious-minded undergraduette from Lady Margaret Hall had bothered to lift her eyes from her reading, she would have seen a man of medium height who had filled out into a somewhat barrel-shaped figure, with his waist and stomach measurements little altered from his earlier days and yet with his shirt now stretching tight around his chest. His unshaven jowls (the young student might have thought) suggested an age of nearer sixty than fifty (in fact, the man was fifty-four), and his face seemed cast in a slightly melancholy mould, not at all brightened that morning by the insistence, of the young ticket-collector that he was obliged to pay a surcharge on the day- return ticket he had paid for the previous evening.

The taxi carrying its fare from Reading railway station to the Smiths' newly discovered address was told to pull up fifty yards into Eddleston Road, where Morse told the driver to wait as he walked across the road and rang the bell on the door of number 45,

When John Smith turned into the street, he immediately saw the taxi opposite his house, and stopped dead in his tracks at the corner shop where he appeared to take an inordinate interest in the hundred-and-one rectangular white notices which announced a multitude of wonderful bargains, from a pair of training shoes (hardly ever worn) to a collection of Elvis Presley records (hardly ever played). The taxi's exhaust was still running, sending a horizontal stream of vapour across the lean, cold air; and reflected in the corner-shop window Smith could see a man in an expensive-looking dark grey overcoat seemingly reluctant to believe that neither of the occupants of the house could be at home. Finally, slowly, the importunate caller walked away from the house, stood back to take a last look at the property, and then got back into the taxi, which was off immediately in a spurt of dirty slush.

John Smith entered the shop, purchased a packet of twenty Silk Cut, and stood for three or four minutes at the magazine rack leafing through Wireless Weekly, Amateur Photographer, and the Angling Times. But apparently he had decided that none of these periodicals was exactly indispensable, and he walked out empty-handed into the street. He had always prided himself on being able to sniff out danger a mile away. But he sensed there was none now; and he strolled down the street with exaggerated unconcern, and let himself into number 45.

He had a fastidiously tidy mind, and even now was tempted to wash up the few breakfast things that stood in the kitchen sink, particularly the two knives that looked almost obscenely sticky from the polyunsaturated Flora and Cooper's Thick Cut Oxford Marmalade. But the walls were closing in, he knew it. The BMW would have been the riskiest thing; and half an hour ago he had sold the three-year-old beauty at Reading Motors for a ridiculously low- pitched ?6,000 in cash. Then he had gone along to the town-centre branch of Lloyds Bank, where he had withdrawn (again in cash) the ?1,200 which stood in the joint account of John and Helen Smith.