The Secret of Annexe 3 (4 page)

At nine o’clock the same morning, the morning of the 31st, she was awakened by the insistent ringing of her doorbell; and drawing her dressing gown round her hips, she opened the door to
find John Binyon on the doorstep: Caroline’s mother (Sarah learned) had just rung to say that her daughter had the flu, and would certainly not be getting out of bed that day – let
alone getting out of the house; the Haworth Hotel was in one almighty fix; could Sarah? would Sarah? it would be well worth it – very much so – if Sarah could put in a couple of extra
days, please! And stay the night, of course – as Caroline had arranged to do, in the nice little spare room at the side, the one overlooking the annexe.

Yes. If she could help out, of course she would! The only thing she
couldn’t
definitely promise was to stay awake. Her eyelids threatened every second to close down permanently
over the tired eyes, and she was only half aware, amidst his profuse thanks, of the palms of his hands on her bottom as he leaned forward and kissed her gently on the cheek. He was, she knew, an
inveterate womanizer; but curiously enough she found herself unable positively to dislike him; and on the few occasions he had tested the temperature of the water with her he had accepted without
rancour or bitterness her fairly firm assurance that for the moment it was little if anything above freezing point. As she closed the door behind Binyon and went back to her bedroom, she felt a
growing sense of guilt about her early morning escapade. It had been those wretched (beautiful!) gins and Campari that had temporarily loosened the girdle round her robe of honour. But her sense of
guilt was, she knew, not occasioned just by the lapse itself, but by the anonymous, mechanical nature of that lapse. Jenny had been utterly delighted, if wholly flabbergasted, by the unprecedented
incident; but Sarah herself had felt immediately saddened and diminished in her own self-estimation. And when finally she had returned to her flat, her sleep had been fitful and unrefreshing, the
eiderdown perpetually slipping off her single bed as she had tossed and turned and tried to tell herself it didn’t matter.

Now she took two Disprin, in the hope of dispelling her persistent headache, washed and dressed, drank two cups of piping hot black coffee, packed her toilet bag and night-clothes, and left the
flat. It was only some twelve minutes’ walk down to the hotel, and she decided that the walk would do her nothing but good. The weather was perceptibly colder than the previous day: heavy
clouds (the forecasters said) were moving down over the country from the north, and some moderate falls of snow were expected to reach the Midlands by the early afternoon. During the previous week
the bookmakers had made a great deal of money after the tenth consecutive non-white Christmas; but they must surely have stopped taking any more bets on a white New Year, since such an eventuality
was now beginning to look like a gilt-edged certainty.

Not that Sarah Jonstone had ever thought of laying a bet with any bookmaker, in spite of the proximity of the Ladbrokes office in Summertown which she passed almost daily on her way to work.
Passed it, indeed, again now, and stared (surely, far too obviously!) at the man who had just emerged, eyes downcast, from one of the swing-doors folding a pink, oblong betting slip into his
wallet. How extraordinarily strange life could become on occasions! It was just like meeting a word in the English language for the very first time, and then – lo and behold! – meeting
exactly the same word for the
second
time almost immediately thereafter. She had seen this same man, for the first time, the previous evening as she had walked up to Jenny’s flat at
about 9.30 p.m.: middle-aged; greyish-headed; balding; a man who once might have been slim, but who was now apparently running to the sort of fat which strained the buttons on his shabby-looking
beige raincoat.
Why
had she looked at him so hard on that former occasion?
Why
had she recorded certain details about him so carefully in her mind? She couldn’t tell. But
she did know that this man, in his turn, had looked at
her
, however briefly, with a look of intensity which had been slightly (if pleasurably) disturbing.

Yet the man’s cursory glance had been little more than a gesture of approbation for the high cheekbones that had thrown the rest of her face into a slightly mysterious shadow under the
orange glare of the street lamp which illuminated the stretch of road immediately outside his bachelor flat. And after only a few yards, he had virtually forgotten the woman as he stepped out with
a purpose in his stride towards his nightly assignation at the Friar.

I
N VIEW OF
the events described in the previous chapter, it is not surprising that from the start of subsequent police investigations Sarah
Jonstone’s memories should have resembled a disorderly card index, with times and people and sequences sometimes hopelessly confused. Interview with one interrogator had been followed by
interview with another, and the truth was that her recollection of some periods of December 31st had grown as unreliable as a false and faithless lover.

Until about 11.30 a.m. she spent some time in the games room: brushing down the green baize on the snooker table; putting up the ping-pong net; repolishing the push-penny board; checking up on
the Monopoly, Scrabble and Cluedo sets; and putting into their appropriate niches such items as cues, dice, bats, balls, chalk, darts, cards, and scoring pads. She spent some time, too, in the
restaurant; and was in fact helping to set up the trestles and spread the tablecloths for the buffet lunch when the first two guests arrived – guests signed in, as it happened, by a rather
poorly and high-temperatured Mrs Binyon herself in order to allow Sarah to nip upstairs to her temporary bedroom and change into regulation long-sleeved cream-coloured blouse, close-buttoned to the
chin, and regulation mid-calf, tightly fitting black skirt which (Sarah would have been the first to admit) considerably flattered waist, hips, thighs and calves alike.

From about noon onwards, guests began to arrive regularly, and there was little time, and little inclination, for needless pleasantries. The short-handed staff may have been a little
short-tempered here and there – particularly with each other; but the frenetic to-ings and fro-ings were strangely satisfying to Sarah Jonstone that day. Mrs Binyon kept out of the way for
the most part, confining her questionable skills to restaurant and kitchen before finally retiring to bed; whilst Mr Binyon, in between lugging suitcases along corridors and up stairs, had already
repaired one squirting radiator, one flickering TV and one noisily dripping bath tap, before discovering in early afternoon that some of the disco equipment was malfunctioning, and spending the
next hour seeking to beg, cajole and bribe anyone with the slightest knowledge of circuits and switches to save his hotel from imminent disaster. Such (not uncommon) crises meant that Sarah was
called upon to divide her attention mainly between Reception – a few guests had rung to say that the bad weather might delay their arrival – and the games room.

Oh dear – the games room!

The darts (Sarah soon saw) was not going to be one of the afternoon’s greater successes. An ex-publican from East Croydon, a large man with the facility of lobbing his darts into the
treble-twenty with a sort of languid regularity, had only two potential challengers for the championship title; and one of these could hardly be said to pose a major threat – a small, ageing
charlady from somewhere in the Chilterns who shrieked with juvenile delight whenever one of her darts actually managed to stick in the board instead of the wooden surround. On the other hand, the
Cluedo players appeared to be settling down quite nicely – until one of the four children booked in for the festivities reported a ‘Colonel Mustard’ so badly dogeared and a
‘Conservatory’ so sadly creased that each of the two cards was just as easily recognizable from the back as from the front. Fortunately the knock-out Scrabble competition, which was
being keenly and cleanly played by a good many of the guests, had reached the final before any real dissension arose, and that over both the spelling and the admissibility of
‘Caribbean’. (What an unpropitious omen
that
had been!) But these minor worries could hardly compare with the consternation caused on the Monopoly front by a swift-fingered
checker-out from a Bedford supermarket whose palm was so extraordinarily speedy in the recovery of the two dice thrown from the cylindrical cup that her opponents had little option but to accept,
without ever seeing the slightest evidence, her instantaneously enunciated score, and then to watch helplessly as this sharp-faced woman moved her little counter along the board to whichever square
seemed of the greatest potential profit to her entrepreneurial designs. No complaint was openly voiced at the time; but the speed with which she bankrupted her real-estate rivals was later a matter
of some general dissatisfaction – if also of considerable amusement. Her prize, though, was to be only a bottle of cheap, medium-sweet sherry; and since she did not look the sort of woman who
would ever own a real-life hotel in Park Lane or Mayfair, Sarah had said nothing, and done nothing, about it. The snooker and the table-tennis tournaments were happily free from any major
controversy; and a friendly cheer in mid-afternoon proclaimed that the ageing charlady from the Chilterns (who appeared to be getting on very nicely thank-you with the ex-publican from East
Croydon) had at last managed to hit the dartboard with three consecutive throws.

Arbiter, consultant, referee, umpire – Sarah Jonstone was acquitting herself well, she thought, as she emulated the impartiality of Solomon that raw but not unhappy afternoon. Especially
so since she had been performing, indeed was still performing, a contemporaneous role at the reception desk.

In its main building, the Haworth Hotel boasted sixteen bedrooms for guests – two family rooms, ten double rooms and four single rooms – with the now partially opened annexe offering
a further three double rooms and one single room. The guest-list for the New Year festivities amounted to thirty-nine, including four children; and by latish afternoon all but two couples and one
single person had registered at the desk, just to the right of the main entrance, where Sarah’s large spectacles had been slowly slipping further and further down her nose. She’d had
one glass of dry sherry, she remembered that; and one sausage roll and one glass of red wine – between half-past one and two o’clock, that had been. But thereafter she’d begun to
lose track of time almost completely (or so it appeared to those who questioned her so closely afterwards). Snow had been falling in soft, fat flakes since just before midday, and by dusk the
ground was thickly covered, with the white crystalline symbols of the TV weatherman portending further heavy falls over the whole of central and southern England. And this was probably the reason
why very few of the guests – none, so far as Sarah was aware – had ventured out into Oxford that afternoon, although (as she later told her interrogators) it would have been perfectly
possible for any of the guests to have gone out (or for others to have come in) without her noticing the fact, engaged as she would have been for a fair proportion of the time with form-filling,
hotel documentation, directions to bedrooms, general queries, and the rest. Two new plumbing faults had further exercised the DIY skills of the proprietor himself that afternoon; yet when he came
to stand beside her for a while after the penultimate couple had signed in, he looked reasonably satisfied.

‘Not a bad start, eh, Sarah?’

‘Not bad, Mr Binyon,’ she replied quietly.

She had never taken kindly to
too
much familiarity over Christian names, and ‘John’ would never have fallen easily from those lips of hers – lips which were slightly
fuller than any strict physiognomical proportion would allow; but lips which to John Binyon always looked softly warm and eminently kissable.

The phone rang as he stood there, and she was a little surprised to note how quickly he pounced upon the receiver.

‘Mr Binyon?’ It was a distanced female voice, but Sarah could hear no more: the proprietor clamped the receiver tight against his ear, turning away from Sarah as he did so.

‘But you’re not as sorry as I am!’ he’d said . . .

‘No – no chance,’ he’d said . . .

‘Look, can I ring you back?’ he’d said. ‘We’re a bit busy here at the minute and I could, er, I could look it up and let you know . . .’

Sarah thought little about the incident.

It was mostly the
names
of the people, and the association of those names with the
faces
, that she couldn’t really get fixed in her mind with any certitude. Some had been
easy to remember: Miss Fisher, for example – the embryo property tycoon from Bedford; Mr Dods, too (‘Ornly t’one “d” in t’middle, lass!’) – she
remembered
his
face very clearly; Fred Andrews – the mournful-visaged snooker king from Swindon; Mr and Mrs J. Smith from Gloucester – a marital appellation not unfamiliar to
anyone who has sat at a hotel reception desk for more than a few hours. But the others? It really was very difficult for her to match the names with the faces. The Ballards from Chipping Norton?
Could
she remember the Ballards from Chipping Norton? They must, judging from the register, have been the very last couple to sign in, and Sarah
thought
she could remember Mrs
Ballard, shivering and stamping her snow-caked boots in front of Reception, looking not unlike an Eskimo determined to ward off frostbite. Names and faces . . . faces and names . . . names which
were to echo again and again in her ears as first Sergeant Phillips, then Sergeant Lewis, and finally a distinctly brusque and hostile Chief Inspector Morse, had sought to reactivate a memory
torpid with shock and far-spent with weariness. Arkwright, Ballard, Palmer, Smith . . . Smith, Palmer, Ballard, Arkwright.