The Secret of Annexe 3 (24 page)

‘I see,’ said Morse.

A letter was awaiting Morse at Kidlington: a white envelope, with a London postmark, addressed to Chief Inspector Morse (in as neat a piece of typewriting as one could wish to
find) and marked ‘Strictly Private and Personal’. Even before he opened the envelope, Morse was convinced that he was about to be apprised of some vital intelligence concerning the
Bowman case. But he was wrong. The letter read as follows:

The letter lacked both salutation and signature, and Morse’s expression, as he read it, seemed to combine a dash of distaste with a curiously pleasurable fascination. But as the girl
herself (whoever she was!) had said – it didn’t really matter. Yet it would have been quite extraordinary for any man not to have pondered on the identity of such a correspondent. And,
for several minutes, Morse did so ponder as he sat silently at his desk that winter’s afternoon. She sounded a nice girl – and she’d only made the one spelling error . . .

The call from Lewis – a jubilant Lewis! – came in at 5.10 p.m. that day.

I
T HAD BEEN
in the inside breast pocket of a rather ancient sports jacket that Lewis had finally found the copied letter. And such a discovery was so
obviously what Morse had been hoping for that he was unable to conceal the high note of triumph in his voice as he reported his find. Equally, for his part, Morse had been unable to conceal his own
delight; and when (only some half an hour later) Lewis delivered the four closely handwritten sheets, Morse handled them with the loving care of a biblical scholar privileged to view the
Codex
Vaticanus
.

Morse read the letter through twice – each time slowly, and (much to Lewis’s delight) appeared to be highly satisfied.

‘What do you make of it, sir?’

Morse put the letter down and leaned back in the old black leather chair, his elbows resting on the arms, the tips of his middle fingers tapping each other lightly in front of a well-pleased
mouth. ‘What would
you
say about that letter, Lewis, eh? What do
you
learn from it?’

Lewis usually hated moments such as this. But he had been asking himself exactly the same question since he’d first read the letter through, and he launched into what he hoped Morse would
accept as an intelligent analysis.

‘It’s quite clear, sir, that Margaret Bowman was unfaithful to her husband over quite a while. He talks in the letter about night classes and I think they were probably held in the
autumn term – say, for about three or four months – after he first saw her, like he says, in the summer. I’d say from about July onwards. That’s the first thing.’
(Lewis was feeling not displeased with himself.) ‘Second thing, sir, is this man’s age. He says he’s not been around quite as long as she has, and he’s underlined the word
“quite”. He probably teased her a bit – like most people would – if she was a little bit older than he was: let’s say, six months or a year, perhaps. Now, Margaret
Bowman – I’ve found out, sir – was thirty-six last September. So let’s put our prime suspect in the thirty-five age-bracket then, all right?’ (Lewis could recall few
occasions on which he had seemed to be speaking with such fluent authority.) ‘Then there’s a third point, sir. He asks her to meet him outside the library at ten minutes to one –
so he must know it takes about five minutes for her to get there
from
the Locals – and five minutes to get back. That leaves us with fifty minutes from the hour they’re given
at the Locals for a lunch-break. But he mentions “
forty
minutes”: so, as I see things’ (how happy Lewis felt!) ‘he must live only about five minutes’ drive
away from South Parade. I don’t think they just went to a pub and held hands, sir. I think, too, that this fellow probably lives on the
west
side of Oxford – let’s say
off the Woodstock Road somewhere – because Summertown Library would be a bit of a roundabout place to pick her up if he lived on the
east
side, especially with such a little time
they’ve got together.’

Morse had nodded agreement at several points during this exposition; and had been on the point of congratulating his sergeant when Lewis resumed – still in full spate.

‘Now if we add these new facts to what we’ve already discovered, sir, I reckon we’re not all that far off from knowing exactly who he is. We can be far more precise about where
he lives – within five minutes’ drive, at the outside, from Summertown; and we can be far more precise about his age – pretty certainly thirty-four or thirty-five. So if we had a
computerized file on everybody, I think we could spot our man straight away. But there’s something else – something perhaps much more helpful than a computer, sir: that night-school
class! It won’t be difficult to trace the people in Mrs Bowman’s class; and I’d like to bet we shall find somebody who had a vague sort of inkling about what Margaret Bowman was
up to. Seems to me a good line of inquiry; and I can get on with it straight away if you agree.’

Morse was silent for a little while before replying. ‘Yes, I think I
do
agree.’

Yet Lewis was conscious of a deeper undercurrent in Morse’s tone: something was worrying the chief, pretty surely so.

‘What’s the matter, sir?’

‘Matter? Nothing’s the matter. It’s just that – well, tell me what you make of that letter
as a whole
, Lewis. What
sort
of man is he, do you
think?’

‘Bit of mixture, I’d say. Sounds as if he’s genuinely fond of the woman, doesn’t it? At the same time it sounds as if he’s got quite a cruel streak in him –
bit of a coarse streak, too. As if he loved her – but always in a selfish sort of way: as if perhaps he might be prepared to do anything just to keep her.’

Morse nodded. ‘I’m sure you’re right. I think he
was
prepared to do almost anything to keep her.’

‘Have you got any idea of what really happened?’ asked Lewis quietly.

‘Yes! – for what it’s worth, I have. Clearly Bowman found this letter somewhere, and he realized that his wife was going with another fellow. I suspect he told her what he knew
and gave her an ultimatum. Most men perhaps would have accepted the facts and called it a day – however much it hurt. But Bowman didn’t! He loved his wife more than she could ever have
known, and his first instinctive reactions mustered themselves – not against his wife –
but against her lover
. He probably told her all this, in his own vague way; and I think
he decided that the best way to help Margaret and, at the same time, to save his own deeply injured pride, was
to get rid of her lover
! We’ve been on a lot of cases together, Lewis
– with lots of people involved; but I don’t reckon the motives are ever all
that
different – love, hate, jealousy, revenge . . . Anyway, I think that Bowman got his wife
to agree to collaborate with him in a plot to get rid of the man who – at least for the moment – was a threat to both of them. What
exactly
that plan involved, we may never
know – unless Margaret Bowman decides to tell us. The only firm thing we know about it so far is that Bowman himself wrote a wholly genuine letter which would rather cleverly serve two
purposes when lover-boy was found murdered – that is, if any suspicion were ever likely to fall on either of the Bowmans: first, it would put Margaret Bowman in a wholly sympathetic light;
second, it would appear to put Tom Bowman some few hundreds of miles away from the scene of the immediate crime.’

‘Didn’t we know most of that already—’

‘Let me finish, Lewis! At some particular point – I don’t know when –
the plan was switched
, and it was switched by the only person who could switch it –
by Margaret Bowman, who decided that if she had to take a profoundly important decision about life (as she did!) she would rather throw in her lot with her illicit lover than with her licit
husband. Is that clear? Forget the details for the minute, Lewis! The key thing to bear in mind is this: instead of having a plot involving the death of a troublesome lover, we have a plot
involving the death of an interfering husband!’

‘You don’t think the letter helps much at all, then?’ Lewis’s initial euphoria slipped a notch or two towards his wonted diffidence.

‘My goodness, yes! And your own reading of that letter was a model of logic and lucidity! But . . .’

Lewis’s heart sank. He knew what Morse was going to say, and he said it for him. ‘But you mean I missed some vital clue in it – is that right?’

Morse waited awhile, and then smiled with what he trusted was sympathetic understanding: ‘No, Lewis. You didn’t miss one vital clue, at all. You missed two.’

‘A
PART FROM YOUR
own admirable deductions, Lewis, there are, as I say, a couple of other things you could have noticed, perhaps. First’
(Morse turned to the letter and found the appropriate reference) ‘he says, “You remember how careful I always was and how none of your colleagues ever knew”. Now that
statement’s very revealing. It suggests that this fellow
could
have been very careless about meeting Margaret Bowman; careless in the sense that, if he’d wanted to, he could
easily have made Margaret’s colleagues aware of what was going on between them – pretty certainly by others actually
seeing
the evidence. It means, I think, that the pair of
them were very often
near
each other, and that he very sensibly agreed to avoid all contact with her
in the place where they found themselves
. And you don’t need me to tell
you where that might have been –
must
have been – do you? It was on the Locals site itself, where twenty-odd workmen were employed on various jobs – but mostly on the
roof – between May and September last year.’