The Secret of Annexe 3

'Well done, anyway!' said Bell. 'The Chief Constable'll be pleased.'

'Perhaps he'll let me have a day or two's holiday before the end of the decade.'

'We're very grateful, though — you know that, don't you?'

'Yes,' said Morse, honestly enough.

It was a highly euphoric Lewis who came in at a quarter past one, thrusting a statement — four pages of it — on the desk in front of Morse. 'Maybe a few little errors in English usage here and there, sir; but on the whole a splendid piece of prose, I think you'll find.'

Morse took the statement and scanned the last page:

in the normal way, but we were hard up and I lost my job in November and there was only playing in the group left with a wife and my four little children to feed and look after. We'd got the Social Security but the HP was getting bad, and then this came along. All I had to do was what he told me and that wasn't very difficult. I didn't really have any choice because I needed the money bad and it wasn't because I wanted to do anything that was wrong. I know what happened because I saw it in the Oxford Mail but when I agreed I just did what I was told and I never knew what things were all about at the time. I'm very sorry about it. Please remember I said that, because I love my wife and my little children.

As dictated to Sergeant Lewis, Kidlington CID, by Mr. Winston Grant, labourer (unemployed), of 29 Rose Hill Gardens, Rose Hill, Oxford. 8 Jan.

'The adverb from 'bad' is 'badly',' mumbled Morse.

'Shall we keep him here?' asked Bell.

'He's your man,' said Morse.

'And the charge — officially?'

' 'Accessory to murder', I suppose — but I'm not a legal man.'

' 'Party to murder', perhaps?' suggested Lewis, who had seldom looked so happy since his elder daughter announced her first pregnancy.

Back at Kidlington HQ, Morse sat back in the old black leather armchair, looking (for the while) imperturbably expansive. The man arrested at Gatwick, almost two hours earlier, was well on his way to Oxfordshire, expected (Morse learned) within the next fifteen minutes. It was a time to savour.

Lewis himself now knew exactly what had happened on New Year's Eve in Annexe 3; knew, too, that the murderer of Thomas Bowman had neither set foot inside the main hotel building, nor bedecked himself in a single item of fancy dress. And yet, as to how Morse had arrived at the truth, he felt as puzzled as a small boy witnessing his first conjuring performance. 'What really put you on to it, sir?'

'The key point was, as I told you, that the murderer tried desperately hard to persuade us that the crime was committed as late as possible: after midnight. But as you yourself rightly observed, Lewis, there would seem to be little point in such a deception if the murderer stayed on the scene the whole time from about eight that night to one o'clock the next morning. But there was every point if he wasn't on the scene in the latter part of the evening — a time for which he had an alibi.'

'But, sir—'

'There were three clues in this case which should have put us on to the truth much earlier than they did. Each of these three clues, in itself, looks like a pedestrian little piece of information; but taken together — well. . The first vital clue came largely from Sarah Jonstone — the only really valuable and coherent witness in the whole case — and it was this: that the man posing as 'Mr. Ballard' ate virtually nothing that evening! The second vital clue — also brought to our notice, among others, by Miss Jonstone — was the fact that the man posing as 'Mr. Ballard' was still staining whatever he touched late that evening! Then there was the third vital clue — the simplest clue of the lot, and one which was staring all of us in the face from the very beginning. So obvious a clue that none of us — none of us! — paid the slightest attention to it: the fact that the man posing as 'Mr. Ballard' won the fancy-dress competition!

'You see, Lewis, there are two ways of looking at each of these clues — the complex way, and the simple way. And we'd been looking at them the wrong way — we've been looking at them the complex way.'

'I see,' said Lewis, unseeing.

Take the food business,' continued Morse. 'We almost got in some hopelessly complex muddle about it, didn't we? I read carefully what dear old Max said in his report about what had been floating up and down in the ascending and descending colons. You, Lewis, were bemused enough to listen to what Miss Jonstone said about someone ringing up to ask what the menu was. Why the hell shouldn't someone ring up and ask if they're in for another few slices of the virtually inevitable turkey? And do you know what we didn't do amid all this cerebration, Lewis? We didn't ask ourselves a very simple question: if our man had eaten nothing of the first two courses, shouldn't we assume he might be getting a little hungry? And even if he's been told he'd better go through the evening secretly sticking all the goodies into a doggie-bag, you might have thought he'd be tempted when he came to the next two courses on the menu — especially a couple of succulent pork chops. So why. Lewis-just think simply! — why didn't he have a mouthful or two?'

'Like you say, sir, he was told not to, because it was vital—'

'No! You're still getting too complicated, Lewis. There's a very simple answer, you see! Rastafarians aren't allowed to eat pork!

'Now let's come to this business of the stains this man was leaving behind on whatever he touched — even after midnight! We took down all the evidence, didn't we — we got statements from Miss Palmer, and Mrs. Smith, and Sarah Jonstone — about how the wretched fellow went round ruining their coats and their blouses. And we almost came to the point — well, I did, Lewis — of getting them all analysed and seeing if the stains were the same, and trying to find out where the original theatre-black came from and — well, we were getting too complex again! The simple truth is that any make-up dries after a few hours; it comes off at first, of course, on anything that's touched — but after a while it's no problem at all. Yet in this case it remained a problem. And the simple answer to this particular mystery is that our man wanted to leave his marks late that evening; he deliberately put more stain on his hands; and he deliberately put his hands where they