The Secret of Annexe 3

would leave marks. All right, Lewis? He had a stick of theatre-black in his pocket and he smeared it all over the palms of his hands in the final hour or so of the New Year party.

'And then there's the last point. The man won a prize, and we made all sorts of complex assumptions about it; he'd been the most painstaking and imaginative competitor of the lot; he'd been so successful with his make-up that no one could recognize him; he'd been anxious for some reason to carry off the first prize in the fancy-dress competition. And all a load of complex nonsense, Lewis. The fact is that the very last thing he wanted was to draw any attention to himself by winning the first prize that evening. And the almost childishly simple fact of the matter is that if you want to dress up and win first prize as, let's say, Prince Charles, well, the best way to do it is to be Prince Charles. And we all ought to have suspected, perhaps, that the man who dressed up in that Rastafarian rig- out and who put on such a convincing and successful performance that night as a Rastafarian, might perhaps have owed his success to the simple fact that he was a Rastafarian!'

'Mr. Winston Grant.'

'Yes, Mr. Winston Grant! A man, in fact, I met outside the Friar only last night! And if anyone ever tells you, Lewis, that there isn't a quite extraordinary degree of coincidence in this world of ours — then you tell him to come to see me, and I'll tell him different!'

'Should you perhaps say 'differently'?' asked Lewis.

'This man had been a builder's labourer; he'd worked on several sites in Oxford — including the Locals; he'd lost his job because of cutbacks in the building industry; he was getting short of money for himself and his family; he was made an extraordinarily generous offer — we still don't know how generous; and he agreed to accept that offer in return for playing — as he saw things — a minor role for a few hours at a New Year's party in an Oxford hotel. I doubt we shall ever know all the ins and outs of the matter but—'

Sergeant Phillips knocked and announced that the prisoner was now in the interview room.

And Morse smiled.

And Lewis smiled.

'Just finish off what you were saying, will you, sir?'

'Nothing more to say, really. Winston Grant must have been pretty carefully briefed, that's for sure. In the first place he'd be coming into the hotel directly from the street, and it was absolutely essential that he should wait his time, to the second almost, until Margaret Bowman had created the clever little distraction of taking Sarah Jonstone away from the reception desk to inspect the graffito in the Ladies'—a graffito which she, Margaret Bowman, had herself just scrawled across the wall. Then, I'm sure he must have been told to say as little as possible to anyone else all the evening and to stick close to Margaret Bowman, as if they were far more interested in each other than in the goings-on around them. But there was no chance of him opting out of the fancy-dress competition! I suspect, too, that he was told not to eat anything — if he could manage not to without drawing too much attention to himself; and remember, he was helped in this by the way Binyon had scheduled the various courses at different tables. But it may well be, Lewis, that we're overestimating the extent to which the plan was completely thought out. Above all, though, he had to carry through that final, extraordinarily clever, little deception: he was to make every effort to pretend that he was a black man — even though he was a black man. And there was one wonderfully simple way in which such a pretence could be sustained, and that was by rubbing dark-stain on to his hands—hands that were already black—so that everyone who came into physical contact with him should believe that he was not a black man — but a white man. And that, Lewis, in the later stages of that New Year's party is what he did, making sure he left a few indelible marks on the most obvious places — like the shoulders of the light-coloured winter mackintoshes worn by both Miss Palmer and Mrs. Smith—'

'—and the white blouse of Sarah Jonstone.'

'Cream-coloured actually,' said Morse.

For Sergeant Phillips it was all somewhat deja vu as he resumed his vigil at the door of the interview room, his feet still aching, his eyes scanning the bare room once again: the wooden trestle- table on which stood a white polystyrene coffee cup (full) and an ash-tray (as yet empty); and behind the table, the same fairish-haired, fresh-complexioned man who had sat there the previous evening — Mr. Edward Wilkins.

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

Wednesday, January 8th: P.M.

Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas.

(VIRGIL, Georgics)

AT 5 P.M., MR. JAMES PRIOR, Security Officer at the Locals, put on his bicycle clips and prepared to leave. Before he did so he had a final look round Reception to make sure that everything that should be locked up was locked up. It was odd though, really, to think that the only thing the police had been interested in was the one drawer that wasn't locked up — the drawer in which he kept all the out-of-date security passes, elastic-banded into their various bundles. Like the bundle for the last lot of building workers from which the police had already taken two passes away: that of Winston Grant, a Rastafarian fellow whom Prior remembered very well; and that of a man called Wilkins, who'd operated the giant yellow crane that had towered over the Delegacy building throughout the summer months. After Morse's call early that morning, Prior had looked briefly through the rest of that particular bundle, and had wondered whether there were any other criminals lurking among those very ordinary-looking faces. But the truth was that one could never tell: he, far more than most people, was fully aware of that.

That afternoon, Wilkins had been resignedly co-operative about every detail of the whole case — with the exception of the act of murder itself, which he stubbornly and categorically refused to discuss in any respect whatsoever: it was as if that single, swift dispatch (to which he now confessed) had paralysed his capacity to accept it as in any way a piece of voluntary, responsible behaviour. But for the rest, he spoke fully and freely; and there was nothing surprising, nothing new, that emerged from his statement. Naturally enough, perhaps, he expressed the hope that Winston Grant should be treated with appropriate leniency, although it seemed to others (certainly to Lewis) that such an accomplice must have been rather more aware of the nature of his assignment than either Grant or Wilkins was prepared to admit.

About Margaret Bowman, the only piece of new information Wilkins was able to give was that he had more than once picked her up from a beauty clinic in Oxford, and Lewis shook his head ruefully as he learned that this clinic was the very first one he had rung — the one refusing to divulge any confidential details. About Margaret's present fate Wilkins appeared strangely indifferent. He hadn't (he said) the faintest idea where she'd finally drifted off to; but presumably the police would be concentrating on her various relatives up around Alnwick or Berwick or Newcastle or wherever they were. For his part, he was perhaps glad to get shot of the woman. She'd brought him