'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.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Monday, January 6th: A.M.
By working faithfully eight hours a day, you may eventually get to be a boss and work twelve hours a day.
(ROBERT FROST)
GLADYS TAYLOR WOULD be very sorry to leave 'The University of Oxford Delegacy of Local Examinations'. It was all a bit of a mouthful when people asked her where she worked; but the Examination Board's premises, a large, beige-bricked, flat-roofed building in Summertown, had been her happy second home for nineteen and a half years now — and some neat streak within her wished it could have been the full twenty. But the 'Locals', as the Board was affectionately known, insisted that those women like herself—'supernumeraries', they were called — had their contracts terminated in the session following their sixtieth birthday. These 'sessions', four or five of them every academic year, varied in duration from three or four weeks to nine or ten weeks; and the work involved in each session was almost as varied as its duration. For example, the current short session (and Gladys's last — for she had been sixty the previous November) involved three weeks of concentrated arithmetical checking of scripts — additions, scalings, transfers of marks — from the autumn GCE retake examinations. The entry was very much smaller than the massive summer one, comprising those candidates who had failed adequately to impress the examiners on the earlier occasion. But such young men and women (the 'returned empties', as some called them) were rather nearer Gladys Taylor's heart than many of the precious summer thoroughbreds (she knew a few of them!) who seemed to romp around the academic racecourses with almost arrogant facility. For, in her own eyes,
