The Secret of Annexe 3

'Are you. .?' The driver jerked his thumb towards the police car.

'Chief Inspector Morse — him! Not me!'

'Accident. They found her—'

'How old?'

The man shrugged. 'Forty?'

'You know who she is?'

The man shook his head. 'No one knows yet. No purse. No handbag.'

Lewis drew back the blanket and looked at the woman's face, his heart pounding in anticipatory dread — for such an eventuality, as he well knew, was exactly what Morse had feared.

But the ambulance driver was right in suggesting that no one knew who she was: Lewis didn't know, either. For the dead woman in the back of the ambulance was certainly not Mrs. Margaret Bowman.

That same lunch-hour, some fifty minutes before Norris had positively identified the man murdered at the Haworth Hotel as Mr. Thomas Bowman, Ronald Armitage, an idle, dirty, feckless, cold, hungry, semi-drunken sixty- three-year-old layabout — unemployed and unemployable — experienced a remarkable piece of good fortune. He had spent the previous night huddled up on a bench in the passage that leads from Radcliffe Square to the High, and had spent most of the morning on the same bench, with an empty flagon of Buhner's Cider at his numbed feet, and one dirty five-pound note and a few 10p coins in the pocket of the ankle-length greatcoat that for many years had been his most treasured possession. When he had first seen the black handbag as it plummeted to the ground, and came to rest in a cushion of deep snow at the corner of the church, his instinctive reaction was to look sharply and suspiciously around him. But for the moment the square was empty; and he quickly grabbed the handbag, putting it beneath the front of his coat, and walked hurriedly off over the snow-covered cobbles outside Brasenose into the lane on the left that led through to the Turl. Here — with none of his cronies in sight — like a wolf which grabs a great gobbet of meat from the kill and takes it away from the envious eyes of the rest of the pack, he examined his exciting discovery. Inside the handbag he found a lipstick, a powder compact, a comb, a cheap cigarette lighter, a packet of white paper handkerchiefs, a leaflet about St. Mary the Virgin, a small pair of nail scissors, a bunch of car keys, two other keys — and a brown leather purse-cum-wallet. The plastic cards — Visa, Access, Lloyds — he ignored, but he quickly pocketed the two beautifully crisp ten-pound notes and the three one- pound coins he found therein.

In mid-afternoon, he wandered slowly up the High to Carfax, and then turned left down past Christ Church and into St. Aldates Police Station where he handed the bag over to Lost Property.

'Where did you find it?' asked the sergeant on duty.

'Someone must have dropped it—'

'You better leave your name—'

'Nah! Don't fink so.'

'Might be a reward!'

'Cheers, mate!'

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

Monday, 6th January: P.M.

Wordsworth recalls in 'The Prelude' how he was soothed by the sound of the Derwent winding among grassy holms.

(Literary Landscapes of the British Isles)

IT WAS SELDOM THAT Morse ever asked for more personnel. Indeed, it was his private view that the sight (as so often witnessed on TV) of a hundred or so uniformed policemen crawling in echelon across a tract of heathland often brought the force into something approaching derision. He himself had once taken part in such a massive sweep across a field in North Staffordshire, ending up, as he had done, with one empty packet of Featherlite Durex, one empty can of alcohol-free lager — and (the next morning) a troublesome bout of lumbago.

But he did ask for more personnel on the afternoon of January 6th; and Lewis, for one, was glad that much needed help (in the shape of Sergeant Phillips and two detective constables) had been summoned to follow up all inquiries regarding Margaret Bowman.

Oddly enough (yet almost everything about him was odd, as Lewis knew) Morse had shown no great surprise on hearing the news that the murdered man was Thomas Bowman; indeed, the only emotion he showed — and that of immense relief — was after learning that the other corpse on view that lunchtime was not Margaret Bowman's. In fact, Morse suddenly seemed much more at peace with himself as he sat with Lewis in the Royal Oak, just opposite the hospital — a circumstance (as Lewis rightly guessed) not wholly unconnected with the fact that after his Herculean efforts over Christmas and the New Year he had finally surrendered and bought himself a packet of cigarettes. At two-thirty, they were once more on the A34 to Chipping Norton, this time with a much firmer mission — to investigate the property at 6 Charlbury Drive, which had now quite definitely become the focus of the murder inquiry.

'Shall we break one of the front windows or one of the back ones?' Morse asked as they stood in front of the property, faces at a good many windows in the quiet cul-de-sac now watching the activity with avid curiosity. But such forcible ingress proved unnecessary. Lewis it was who suggested that most people ('Well, the missus does') leave a key with the neighbours: and so it proved in this case, with the elderly woman in number 5 promptly producing both a back-door and a front-door key. Mrs. Bowman, it appeared, had gone out on Friday evening, saying she wouldn't be back until Monday after work; hadn't been back, either — as far as the woman knew.

Finding nothing of immediate interest in the downstairs rooms, Lewis went upstairs where he found Morse in one of the two spare bedrooms looking into a cumbrous dark mahogany wardrobe which (apart from an old- fashioned armchair) was the only item of furniture there.

'Found anything, sir?'

Morse shook his head. 'Lots of shoes he had.'