The Secret of Annexe 3

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!'

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Saturday, January 4th

Arithmetic is where the answer is right and everything is nice and you can look out of the window and see the blue sky — or the answer is wrong and you have to start all over and try again and see how it comes out this time.

(CARL SANDBURG, Complete Poems)

THE THAW CONTINUED overnight, and lawns that had been totally subniveal the day before were now resurfacing in patches of irregular green under a blue sky. The bad weather was breaking; the case, it seemed, was breaking too.

At Kidlington HQ Morse was going to be occupied (he'd said) with other matters for most of the morning; and Lewis, left to his own devices, was getting progressively more and more bogged down in a problem which at the outset had looked comparatively simple. The Yellow Pages had been his starting point, and under 'Beauty Salons and Consultants' he found seven or eight addresses in Oxford which advertised specialist treatment in what was variously called Waxing, Facials, or Electrolysis; with another five in Banbury; three more (a gloomier Lewis noticed) in Bicester; and a good many other establishments in individual places that could be reached without too much travelling by a woman living in Chipping Norton — if (and in Lewis's mind it was a biggish 'if) 'Mrs. Ballard' was in fact a citizen of Chipping Norton.

But there were two quadratic equations, as it were, from which to work out the unknown 'x': and it was the second of these — the cross-check with the charity flag days — to which Lewis now directed his thinking. In recent years, the most usual sort of badge received from shakers of collection tins had come in the form of a little circular sticker that was pressed on to the lapel of the contributor's coat; and Lewis's experience was that such a sticker often fell off after a few minutes rather than stuck on for several days. And so Morse's view, Lewis agreed, was probably right: if Mrs. Ballard was still wearing a sticker on New Year's Eve, she'd probably bought it the same day, or the day before at the very outside. But Lewis had considerable doubts about Morse's further confidently stated conviction that there must have been an RSPCA flag day in Oxford on the 30th or 31st, and that Mrs. Ballard had bought a flag as she went into a beauty salon in the city centre. 'Beautifully simple!' Morse had said. 'We've got the time, we've got the place — and we've almost got the woman, agreed? Just a little phoning around and. .'

But Lewis had got off to a bad start. His first call elicited the disappointing information that the last street- collection in Oxford for the RSPCA had been the previous July; and he had no option but to start making another list,