CRITICAL ACCLAIM FOR

Colin Dexter

The Remorseful Day

'Morse's last case is a virtuoso piece of plotting . . . by quitting the game on the top of his form [Dexter] has set his fellow crime-writers an example they will find hard to emulate'

Sunday Times

Death Is Now My Neighbour

'Dexter has created a giant among fictionaldetectives and has never short-changed his readers'

The Times

The Daughters of Cain

'This is Colin Dexter at his most excitingly devious'

Daily Telegraph

The Way Through the Woods

'Morse and his faithful Watson, Sergeant Lewis,in supreme form . . . Hallelujah'

Observer

The Jewel that Was Ours

'Traditional crime writing at its best; the kindof book without which no armchair is complete'

Sunday Times

The Wench Is Dead

'Dextrously ingenious'

Guardian

The Secret of Annexe 3

'A plot of classic cunning and intricacy'

Times Literary Supplement

The Riddle of the Third Mile

'Runs the gamut of brain-racking unputdownability'

Observer

The Dead of Jericho

'The writing is highly intelligent, the atmospheremelancholy, the effect haunting'

Daily Telegraph

Service of All the Dead

'A brilliantly plotted detective story'

Evening Standard

The Silent World of Nicholas Quinn

'Morse's superman status is reinforced by anending which no ordinary mortal could havepossibly unravelled'

Financial Times

Last Seen Wearing

'Brilliant characterization in original whodunnit'

Sunday Telegraph

Last Bus to Woodstock

'Let those who lament the decline of the Englishdetective story reach for Colin Dexter'

Guardian

THE SECRET OF

ANNEXE 3

Colin Dexter graduated from Cambridge University in 1953 and has lived in Oxford since 1966. His first novel,Last Bus to Woodstock, was published in 1975. There are now thirteen novels in the series, of which The Remorseful Day is, sadly, the last.

Colin Dexter has won many awards for his novels, including the CWA Silver Dagger twice, and the CWA Gold Dagger for The Wench Is Dead and The Way Through the Woods. In 1997 he was presented with the CWA Diamond Dagger for outstanding services to crime literature, and in 2000 was awarded the OBE in the Queen's Birthday Honours List.

The Inspector Morse novels have been adapted for the small screen with huge success by Carlton/Central Television, starring John Thaw and Kevin Whately.

THE INSPECTOR MORSE NOVELS

Last Bus to Woodstock

Last Seen Wearing

The Silent World of Nicholas Quinn

Service of All the Dead

The Dead of Jericho

The Riddle of the Third Mile

The Secret of Annexe 3

The Wench Is Dead

The Jewel that Was Ours

The Way Through the Woods

The Daughters of Cain

Death Is Now My Neighbour

The Remorseful Day

Also available in Pan Books

Morse's Greatest Mystery and Other Stories

The First Inspector Morse Omnibus

The Second Inspector Morse Omnibus

The Third Inspector Morse Omnibus

The Fourth Inspector Morse Omnibus

First published 1986 by Macmillan

First published in paperback 1987 by Pan Books

This edition published 2007 by Pan Books

an imprint of Pan Macmillan Ltd

Pan Macmillan, 20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR

Basingstoke and Oxford

Associated companies throughout the world

www.panmacmillan.com

ISBN 978-0-330-46883-1 in Adobe Reader format

ISBN 978-0-330-46882-4 in Adobe Digital Editions format

ISBN 978-0-330-46885-5 in Microsoft Reader format

ISBN 978-0-330-46884-8 in Mobipocket format

Copyright © Colin Dexter 1986

The right of Colin Dexter to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Visit www. panmacmillan.com to read more about all our books and to buy them. You will also find features, author interviews and news of any author events, and you can sign up for e-newsletters so that you're always first to hear about our new releases.

For

Elizabeth, Anna, and Eve.

Acknowledgements

The author and publishers wish to thank the following who have kindly given permission for the use of copyright material:

George Allen & Unwin (Publishers) Ltd, for a quotation by Bertrand Russell.

Curtis Brown Group Ltd, London, on behalf of the Estate of Ogden Nash for a quotation by him.

Peter Champkin for an extract from his book The Waking Life of Aspern Williams.

Faber and Faber Ltd, for an extract from 'La Figlia Che Piange' in Collected Poems by T. S. Eliot.

A. M. Heath & Company Ltd, on behalf of the Estate of the late Sonia Brownell Orwell for an extract from Shooting an Elephant by George Orwell, published by Secker & Warburg Ltd.

Henry Holt & Company Inc, for a quotation by Robert Frost.

A. D. Peters & Company and Jonathan Cape Ltd, on behalf of the Executors of the Estate of C. Day Lewis, for an extract from 'Departure in the Dark' in Collected Poems, 1954, published by the Hogarth Press.

The Society of Authors on behalf of the Bernard Shaw Estate for a quotation by Bernard Shaw.

A. P. Watt Ltd, on behalf of The National Trust for Places of Historic Interest or Natural Beauty, for an extract by Rudyard Kipling from The Thousandth Man.

Every effort has been made to trace all the copyright holders but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publishers will be pleased to make the necessary arrangement at the first opportunity.

CHAPTER ONE

November

The pomp of funerals has more regard to the vanity of the living than to the honour of the dead.

(LA ROCHEFOUCAULD, Maxims)

WHEN THE OLD man died, there was probably no great joy in heaven; and quite certainly little if any real grief in Charlbury Drive, the pleasantly unpretentious cul-de-sac of semi-detached houses to which he had retired. Yet a few of the neighbours, especially the womenfolk, had struck up some sort of distanced acquaintance with him as they pushed prams or shopping trolleys past his neatly kept front lawn; and two of these women (on learning that things were fixed for a Saturday) had decided to be present at the statutory obsequies. Margaret Bowman was one of them.

'Do I look all right?' she asked.

'Fine!' His eyes had not left the racing page of the tabloid newspaper, but he knew well enough that his wife would always be an odds-on favourite for looking all right: a tall, smart woman upon whom clothes invariably hung well, whether for dances, weddings, dinners—or even funerals.

'Well? Have a look then! Yes?'

So he looked up at her and nodded vaguely as he surveyed the black ensemble. She did look fine. What else was there to say? 'You look fine,' he said.

With a gaiety wholly inappropriate she twirled round on the points of her newly purchased black leather court shoes, fully aware, just as he was, that she did look rather attractive. Her hips had filled out somewhat alarmingly since that disappointing day when as a willowy lass of twenty (a year before marrying Tom Bowman) her application to become an air hostess had proved unsuccessful; and now, sixteen years later, she would have more than a little trouble (she knew it!) in negotiating the central aisle of a Boeing 737. Yet her calves and ankles were almost as slender as when she had slipped her nightgowned body between the stiff white sheets of their honeymoon bed in a Torquay hotel; it was only her feet, with a line of whitish nodules across the middle joints of her slightly ugly toes, that now presaged the gradual approach of middle age. Well, no. It wasn't only that—if she were being really honest with herself. There was that hebdomadal visit to the expensive clinic in Oxford . . . But she cast that particular thought from her mind. ('Hebdomadal' was a word she'd become rather proud of, having come across it so often in her job in Oxford with the University Examining Board.)

'Yes?' she repeated.

He looked at her again, more carefully this time. 'You're going to change your shoes, aren't you?'

'What?' Her hazel eyes, with their markedly flecked irises, took on a puzzled, appealingly vulnerable aspect. Involuntarily her left hand went up to the back of her freshly brushed and recently dyed blonde hair, whilst the fingers of her right hand began to pluck fecklessly at some non-existent speck that threatened to jeopardize her immaculate, expensive nigritude.

'It's bucketing down—hadn't you noticed?' he said.

Little rivulets were trickling down the outside of the lounge window, and even as he spoke a few slanted splashes of rain re-emphasized the ugly temper of the windswept sky.

She looked down at the specially purchased black leather shoes—so classy-looking, so beautifully comfortable. But before she could reply he was reinforcing his line of argument.

'They're going to inter the poor sod, didn't you say?'

For a few moments the word 'inter' failed to register adequately in her brain, sounding like one of those strangely unfamiliar words that had to be sought out in a dictionary. But then she remembered: it meant they wouldn't be cremating the body; they would be digging a deep, vertically sided hole in the orange-coloured earth and lowering the body down on straps. She'd seen the sort of thing on TV and at the cinema; and usually it had been raining then, too.

She looked out of the window, frowning and disappointed.

'You'll get your feet drenched—that's all I'm trying to say.' He turned to the centre pages of his newspaper and began reading about the extraordinary sexual prowess of a world-famous snooker player.

For a couple of minutes or so at that point the course of events in the Bowman household could perhaps have continued to drift along in its normal, unremarkable neutral gear. But it was not to be.

The last thing Margaret wanted to do was ruin the lovely shoes she'd bought. All right. She'd bought them for the funeral; but it was ridiculous to go and waste more than £50. It wasn't necessary to go and trample all over the muddy churchyard of course; but even going out in them in this weather was pretty foolish. She looked down again at her expensively sheathed feet, and then at the clock on the mantelpiece. Not much time. But she would change them, she decided. Most things went reasonably well with black, and that pair of grey shoes with the cushioned soles would be a sensible choice. But if she was going to be all in black apart from just her shoes, wouldn't it be nicely fashionable to change her handbag as well? Yes! There was that grey leather handbag that would match the shoes almost perfectly.

She tripped up the stairs hurriedly.

And fatefully.

It was no more than a minute or so after this decision—not a decision that would strike anyone as being particularly momentous—that Thomas Bowman put down his newspaper and answered the confidently repeated stridencies at the front door, where in friendly fashion he nodded to a drably clad young woman standing at the porch in the pouring rain under a garishly multicoloured golf umbrella, and wearing knee-length boots of bright yellow plastic that took his thoughts back to the Technicolor broadcasts of the first manned landing on the moon. Some of the women on the estate, quite clearly, were considerably less fashion-conscious than his wife.

'She's nearly ready' he said. 'Just putting on her ballet shoes for your conducted tour across the ploughed fields'

'Sorry I'm a bit late.'

'You coming in?'

'Better not. We're a bit pushed for time. Hello Margaret!'

The chicly clad feet which moments ago had flitted lightly up the stairs were now descending more sombrely in a pair of grey, thickish-soled walking shoes. A grey-gloved hand hurriedly pushed a white handkerchief into the grey handbag—and Margaret Bowman was ready, at last, for a funeral.

CHAPTER TWO

November

'Nobody ever notices postmen, somehow,' said he thoughtfully; 'yet they have passions like other men.'

(G.K. CHESTERTON, The Invisible Man)

IT WAS A LITTLE while after the front door had closed behind the two women that he allowed himself an oblique glance across the soggy lawn that stretched between the wide lounge window and the road. He had told Margaret that she could have the car if she wanted it, since he had no plans for going anywhere himself. But clearly they had gone off in the other woman's since the maroon Metro still stood there on the steepish slope that led down to the garage. Charlbury Drive might just as well have been uninhabited, and the rain poured steadily down.

He walked upstairs and went into the spare bedroom, where he opened the right-hand leaf of the cumbrous, dark mahogany wardrobe that served to store the overflow of his wife's and his own clothing. Behind this leaf, stacked up against the right-hand side of the wardrobe, stood eight white shoe boxes, one atop the other; and from this stack he carefully withdrew the third box from the bottom. Inside lay a bottle of malt whisky about two-thirds empty—or about one-third full, as a man who is thirsting for a drink would probably have described it. The box was an old one, and had been the secret little hiding place for two things since his marriage to Margaret. For a week, in the days when he was still playing football, it had hidden a set of crudely pornographic photographs which had circulated from the veteran goalkeeper to the fourteen-year-old outside-left. And now (and with increasing frequency) it had become the storage space for the whisky of which he was getting, as he knew, rather dangerously over-fond. Guilty secrets both, assuredly; yet hardly sins of cosmic proportions. In fact, he had slowly grown towards the view that the lovely if somewhat overweight Margaret would perhaps have forgiven him readily for the photographs; though not for the whisky, perhaps. Or would she have forgiven him for the whisky? He had sensed fairly early on in their married life together that she would probably always have preferred unfaithful sobriety to intoxicated fidelity. But had she changed? Changed recently? She must have smelled the stuff on his breath more than once, although their intimacy over the past few months had been unromantic, intermittent, and wholly unremarkable. Not that any such considerations were bothering his mind very much, if at all, at this particular juncture. He took out the bottle, put the box back, and was just pushing two of his old suits back into place along the rail when he caught sight of it—standing on the floor immediately behind the left-hand leaf of the wardrobe, a leaf which in his own experience was virtually never opened: it was the black handbag which his wife had at the very last minute decided to leave behind.

At first this purely chance discovery failed to register in his mind as an incident that should occasion any interest or surprise; but after a few moments he frowned a little—and then he frowned a lot. Why had she put the handbag behind the door of the wardrobe? He had never noticed any of her accessories there before. Normally she would keep her handbag on the table beside the twin bed that stood nearer the window—her bed. So why . . .? Still frowning, he walked across the landing into their bedroom and looked down at the two black leather shoes, one toppled on to its side, which had been so hurriedly taken off and carelessly left at the foot of her bed.

Back in the spare bedroom he picked up the handbag. An incurious man who had seldom felt any fascination for prying into others' affairs, he would never have thought of opening one of his wife's letters—or opening one of her handbags. Not in normal circumstances. But why had she tried to conceal her handbag? And the answer to that question now seemed very obvious indeed. There was something, perhaps more than one thing, inside the handbag that she didn't want him to see; and in her rush she hadn't had the time to transfer all its contents to the other one. The catch opened easily and he found the letter, four pages of it, almost immediately.

You are a selfish thankless bitch and if you think you can just back out of things when you like you'd better realize that you've got another big thick headaching think coming because it could be that I've got some ideas about what I like. You'd better understand what I'm saying. If you can act like a bitch you'd better know I can be a bit of a sod too. You were glad enough to get what you wanted from me and just because I wanted to give it to you you think that we can just drop everything and go back to square one. Well this letter is to tell you we can't and like I say you'd better understand what I'm telling you. You can be sure I'll get my own back on you . . .

His throat was dry as he rapidly skimmed the rest of the letter: it had no salutation on page one, no subscription on page four. But there was no doubt about the message of the letter—a message that screamed so loudly at him that even some under-achieving idiot would require no prompting about its import: his wife was being unfaithful to him—probably had been for a period of several months.

A sharp pain throbbed in the centre of his forehead, the blood was pounding in his ears, and for several minutes his thought processes were utterly incapable of any sharp tuning. Yet curiously enough he appeared to be adequately in control of the rest of his body, for his hands trembled not the merest millimetre as he filled the shabby little cylindrical glass he always used for the whisky. Sometimes he added a little cold tap water; sometimes not. Now he sipped the whisky neat: first just a small sip; then a larger sip; then two large gulps of the burning liquor, and the glass was empty. He refilled his glass and soon had drained that, too. The last drops from the bottle just filled the third glass to the brim and this he sipped more slowly, feeling as he did so the familiar surge of warmth that slowly suffused his brain. And now it happened, paradoxically and totally unexpectedly, that instead of the vicious jealousy which a few minutes ago had threatened to swamp his foundering senses he was gradually becoming ever more conscious of the love he felt for his wife. This renewed consciousness reminded him vividly of the day when, under-prepared and over-confident, she had failed her first driving test; and when, as she sadly and quietly explained to him where she thought she had gone wrong, he had felt an overwhelming surge of sympathy for her. Indeed such had been his awareness of her vulnerability that day, so fierce his determination to protect her whenever possible from future disappointment, that he would willingly have shot the examiner who had been allotted the unavoidable task of reporting adversely on his wife's incompetence.

The glass was empty—the bottle was empty; and Thomas Bowman walked slowly but steadily down the stairs, the empty bottle in his left hand, the letter in his right. The car keys were on the kitchen table, and he picked them up and put on his mackintosh. Before getting into the Metro, he inserted the bottle beneath the four or five bundles of kitchen refuse which almost filled the larger of the two dustbins standing beside the garden shed. Then he drove off: there was one very simple little job he would do immediately.

It was only a mile or so to his place of work in Chipping Norton, and as he drove he was conscious of the surprisingly clear-cut logicality of what he was proposing to do. It was only when he'd returned some fifteen minutes later to Charlbury Drive and replaced the letter in the handbag that he became fully aware of the blazing hatred he was feeling against the man, whoever he was, who had robbed him of his wife's affection and fidelity; a man who hadn't even got the guts to sign his name.

The woman with the grey handbag stood at the graveside, the purplish-yellow clay sucking and clinging to her sensible shoes. The rain had now almost stopped, and the fresh-faced young vicar intoned the interment rites with unrushed and edifying dignity. From the snatches of conversation she had heard, Margaret Bowman learned that the old fellow had been with the Allied spearhead on the Normandy beaches and that he had fought right through to VE Day. And when one of his old colleagues from the British Legion had thrown a Remembrance Day poppy down on to the top of the coffin lid, she had felt the tears welling up at the back of her eyes; and before she could turn her head away (though no one noticed it) a great blobby tear had splashed down on her gloves.

'That's it, then!' said the woman in the yellow boots. 'No port and ham sandwiches today, I'm afraid.'

'Do they usually have that after funerals?'

'Well, you need something to cheer you up. Specially on a day like this.'

Margaret was silent, and remained so until she got into the car.

'Would you like to nip along to the pub?' asked her companion.

'No. I'd better not. I'd better get home I think'

'You're not going to cook him a meal, are you?'

'I said I'd get us a snack when I got in,' she said, rather weakly.

The yellow-booted driver made no further attempt to influence the course of events: it would be sensible, she knew, to get her nervous-looking passenger home as quickly as possible and then go and join some of the others at the local.

Margaret Bowman wiped her shoes on the front door mat and slid her latchkey into the Yale lock.

'I'm ho-ome,' she called.

But she received no reply. She looked quickly into the kitchen, the lounge, the bedroom—and then the spare room: but he wasn't there, and she was glad. The Metro hadn't been in the drive when she had come in; but he might of course have driven it into the garage out of the rain. More likely though he'd driven down to the local for a drink—and if he had, she was glad about that, too. In the spare room she opened the door of the wardrobe, picked up her handbag, and looked inside it: obviously she needn't have worried at all, and she began to wish she'd agreed to join her fellow mourners for a consolatory gin at the Black Horse. But that didn't really matter. The pile of shoe boxes on the right looked rather precariously askew and she squared them into a neater stack. In all, it was a great relief, and she promised herself that she would be far more careful in the future.

She reheated the leftovers from the chicken risotto she'd cooked the previous evening, but the few mouthfuls she managed to swallow tasted like the Dead Sea apples. What a mess she was in! What an unholy, desperate mess she'd landed herself in! She sat in the lounge and listened to the one o'clock news, and learned that the pound had perked up a little overnight on the Tokyo Stock Exchange. Unlike her heart. She turned on the television and watched the first two races from Newbury without having any recollection whatsoever of which horses had been first past the post. It was only after the third race had similarly bypassed her consciousness that she heard the squeak of the Metro's brakes on the drive. He kissed her lightly on the cheek, and his voice sounded surprisingly sober as he asked a few perfunctory questions about the funeral. But he had been drinking heavily, she could tell that; and she was not one whit surprised when he declared that he would have a lie-down for the remainder of the afternoon.

But Thomas Bowman rested little that Saturday afternoon, for a plan of action had already begun to form in his mind. The room at the post office housing the Xerox machine had been empty; and after copying the letter he had stood there looking out at the fleet of postal vans in the rear park. A small post office van (he had never quite seen things this way before) was as anonymous as any vehicle could be: no passer-by was interested in the identity of its driver, hemmed in as the latter was (from all but a directly frontal encounter) by the closed side of the secretive little red van that could creep along unobtrusively from one parking point to the next, immune from the tickets of the predatory traffic wardens who prowled the busier streets of Oxford. In the letter, the man who was making such a misery of Margaret's life had begged her to meet him at ten minutes to one on Monday outside the Summertown Library in South Parade—and yes! he, Tom Bowman, would be there too. There would be no real problem about borrowing one of the vans; he could fix that. Furthermore, he had often picked up Margaret, before she had passed her test, along exactly that same road, and he remembered perfectly clearly that there was a little post office right on the corner of South Parade and Middle Way, with a post-box just outside. There could hardly have been a more suitable spot . . .

Suddenly the thought struck him: how long had the letter been in her bag? There was no date on the letter—no way at all of telling which particular Monday was meant. Had it been last Monday? There was no way he could be certain about things; and yet he had the strong conviction that the letter, presumably addressed to her at work, had been received only a day or so previously. Equally, he felt almost certain that Margaret was going to do exactly what the man had asked her. On both counts, Thomas Bowman was correct.

In the wing-mirror at ten minutes to one the following Monday he could see Margaret walking towards him and he leaned backwards as she passed, no more than two or three yards away. A minute later a Maestro stopped very briefly just ahead of him, outside the Summertown Library, the driver leaning over to open the passenger door, and then to accelerate away with Margaret Bowman seated beside him.

The post office van was three cars behind when the Maestro came to the T-junction at the Woodstock Road, and at that moment a train of events was set in motion which would result in murder—a murder planned with slow subtlety and executed with swift ferocity.

CHAPTER THREE

December

'I have finished another year,' said God,

'In grey, green, white, and brown;

I have strewn the leaf upon the sod,

Sealed up the worm within the clod,

And let the last sun down.'

(THOMAS HARDY, New Year's Eve)

THE TREE-LINED boulevard of St. Giles' is marked at three or four points by heavy cast-iron street-plaques (the latter painted white on a black background) that were wrought at Lucy's foundry in nearby Jericho. And Oxford being reckoned a scholarly city, the proper apostrophe appears after the final 's': indeed, if a majority vote were to be taken in the English Faculty, future signwriters wouldbe exhorted to go for an extra 's', and print 'St. Giles's'. But few of the leading characters who figure in the following chronicle were familiar with Fowler's advice over the difficulties surrounding the possessive case, for they were people who, in the crude distinction so often drawn in the city, would be immediately—and correctly—designated as 'Town' rather than 'Gown'.

At the northern end of St. Giles', where in a triangle of grass a stone memorial pays tribute to the dead of two world wars, the way divides into the Woodstock Road, to the left, and the Banbury Road, to the right. Taking the second of these two roads (the road, incidentally, in which Chief Inspector Morse has lived these many years) the present-day visitor will find, after he has walked a few hundred yards, that he is viewing a fairly homogeneous stretch of buildings—buildings which may properly be called 'Venetian Gothic' in style: the houses have pointed arches over their doorways, and pointed arches over their clustered windows which are themselves vertically bisected or trisected by small columns of marble. It is as though Ruskin had been looking over the shoulders of the architects as they ruled and compassed their designs in the 1870s. Most of these houses (with their yellowish-beige bricks and the purple-blue slates of their roofs) may perhaps appear to the modern eye as rather severe and humourless. But such an assessment would be misleading: attractive bands of orange brick serve to soften the ecclesiastical discipline of many of these great houses, and over the arches the pointed contours are re-emphasized by patterns of orange and purple, as though the old harlot of the Mediterranean had painted on her eye-shadow a little too thickly.

This whole scene changes as the visitor walks further northwards past Park Town, for soon he finds houses built of a cheerful orange-red brick that gives an immediate impression of warmth and good fellowship after the slightly forbidding facades of the Venetian wedge. Now the roofs are of red tile, and the paintwork around the stone-plinthed windows of an almost uniform white. The architects, some fifteen years older now, and no longer haunted by the ghost of Ruskin, drew the tops of their windows, sensibly and simply, in a straight horizontal. And thus it is that the housing for about half a mile or so north of St. Giles' exhibits the influences of its times—times in which the first batches of College Fellows left the cloisters and the quads to marry and multiply, and to employ cohorts of maids and under-maids and tweeny maids in the spacious suburban properties that slowly spread northward along the Banbury and Woodstock Roads in the last decades of the nineteenth century—their annual progress leaving its record no less surely than the annular tracings of a sawn-through tree of mighty girth.

Betwixt the two rings sketched briefly above, and partaking something of each, stands the Haworth Hotel. It will not be necessary to describe this building—or, rather, these buildings—in any great detail at this point, but a few things should be mentioned immediately. When (ten years since) the house had been put on the market, the successful purchaser had been one John Binyon, an erstwhile factory-hand from Leeds who had one day invested a £1 Treble Chance stake on the Pools, and who (to the incredulity of the rest of the nation) had thought fit to presume, in an early round of the FA Cup, that the current leaders of the First Division would be unable to defeat a lowly bunch t)f non-league part-time no-hopers from the Potteries—Binyon's reward for such effrontery being a jackpot prize of £450,000 from Littlewoods. The large detached residence (first named the Three Swans Guest House and then the Haworth Hotel) had been his initial purchase—a building that paid tribute both to the staid Venetian planner of the 1880s and to his gayer rosy-fingered colleague of the 1890s. Yellow-bricked, red-roofed, the tops of doors and windows now compromised to gentle curves, the house openly proclaimed its divided loyalties in a quietly genteel manner, standing back from the road some ten yards or so with a slightly apologetic air, as if awaiting with only partial confidence the advent of social acceptability. After a few disappointing months, trade began to pick up for Binyon, and then to prosper most satisfactorily; after two years of a glorified B & B provision, the establishment was promoted to the hotel league, boasting now a fully licensed restaurant, colour-TV'd and showered or bathroomed accommodation, and a small exercise room for fitness fanatics; and four years after this, the proprietor had been able to stand under his own front porch and to look up with pride at the yellow sign which proclaimed that the AA had deemed it appropriate to award the Haworth Hotel one of its stars. Thereafter such was mine host's continued success that he was soon deciding to expand his operations—in two separate directions. First, he was able to purchase the premises immediately adjacent on the south side, in order to provide (in due course and after considerable renovation) a readily accessible annexe for the increasingly large number of tourists during the spring and summer seasons. Second, he began to implement his growing conviction that much of the comparatively slack period (especially weekends and holidays) from October to March could be revitalized by a series of tastefully organized special-rate functions. And it was for this reason that a half-page advertisement for the Haworth Hotel appeared (now for the third year running) in the 'Winter Breaks with Christmas and New Year Bonanzas' brochures which were to be seen on the racks of many a travel agent in the autumn of the year in which our story begins. And in order that the reader may get the flavour of the special features which attracted those men and women we are to meet in the following pages we reproduce below the prospectus in which the hotel was willing to offer 'at prices decidedly too difficult to resist' for a three-day break over the New Year.

TUESDAY

NEW YEAR'S EVE

12.30 a.m. Sherry reception! John and Catherine Binyon extend a happy welcome to as many of their guests as can make this early get-together.

1.00 p.m. Buffet lunch: a good time for more introductions—or reunions.

The afternoon will give you the opportunity for strolling down—only ten minutes' walk to Carfax!—into the centre of our beautiful University City. For those who prefer a little lively competition to keep them busy and amused, tournaments are arranged for anyone fancying his (her!) skills at darts, snooker, table-tennis, Scrabble, and video games. Prizes!

5.00 p.m. Tea and biscuits: nothing—but nothing!—else will be available. Please keep a keen edge on your appetite for . . .

7.30 p.m. OUR GRAND FANCY DRESS DINNER PARTY.

It will be huge fun if everyone—yes, everyone!—comes to the dinner in fancy dress. But please don't think that we shall be any less liberal with the pre-prandial cocktails if you can't. This year's theme is 'The Mystery of the East', and for those who prefer to improvise their costumes our own Rag Bag will be available in the games room throughout the afternoon.

10.00 a.m. Fancy Dress Judging: Prizes!!—continuing with live Cabaret and Dancing to keep you in wonderful spirits until . . .

Midnight to 1.00 a.m. Champagne! Auld Lang Syne! Bed!!!

WEDNESDAY

NEW YEAR'S DAY

8.30-10.30 a.m. Continental Breakfast (quietly please, for the 10.30 a.m. benefit of any of us—all of us!—with a mild hangover).

10.45 a.m. CAR TREASURE-HUNT, with clues scattered round a care-free, car-free (as we hope) Oxford. There are plenty of simple instructions, so you'll never get lost. Be adventurous! And get out for a breath of fresh air! (Approximately one and a half hours to complete.) Prizes!!

1.00 p.m. English Roast Beef Luncheon.

2.00 p.m. TOURNAMENTS once more for those who have the stamina; and the chance of an afternoon nap for those who haven't.

4.30 p.m. Devonshire Cream Tea.

6.30 p.m. Your pantomime coach awaits to take you to Aladdin at the Apollo Theatre.

There will be a full buffet awaiting you on your return, and you can dance away the rest of the evening at the DISCO (live music from Paper Lemon) until the energy (though not the bar!) runs out.

THURSDAY

9.00 a.m. Full English Breakfast—available until 10.30 a.m. The last chance to say your farewells to your old friends and your new ones, and to promise to repeat the whole enjoyable process again next year!

Of course (it is agreed) such a prospectus would not automatically appeal to every sort and condition of humankind. Indeed, the idea of spending New Year's Eve being semi-forcibly cajoled into participating in a darts match, or dressing up as one of the Samurai, or even of being expected de rigueur to wallow in the company of their fellow men, would drive some solid citizens into a state of semi-panic. And yet, for the past two years, many a couple had been pleasingly surprised to discover how much, after the gentlest nudge of persuasion, they had enjoyed the group activities that the Binyons so brashly presented. Several couples were now repeating the visit for a second time; and one couple for a third—although it is only fair to add that neither member of this unattractive duo would ever have dreamed of donning a single item of fancy dress, delighting themselves only, as they had done, in witnessing what they saw as the rather juvenile imbecilities of their fellow guests. For the simple truth was that almost all the guests required surprisingly little, if any, persuasion to dress up for the New Year's Eve party—not a few of them with brilliant, if bizarre effect. And such (as we shall see) was to be the case this year, with several of the guests so subtly disguised, so cleverly bedecked in alien clothing, that even long-standing acquaintances would have recognized them only with the greatest difficulty.

Especially the man who was to win the first prize that evening.

Yes, especially him.

CHAPTER FOUR

December 30th/31st

The feeling of sleepiness when you are not in bed, and can't get there, is the meanest feeling in the world.

(E.W. HOWE, Country Town Sayings)

WHENEVER SHE FELT tired—and that was usually in the early hours of the evening—the almost comically large spherical spectacles which framed the roundly luminous eyes of Miss Sarah Jonstone would slowly slip further and further down her small and neatly geometrical nose. At such times her voice would (in truth) sound only perfunctorily polite as she spoke into whichever of the two ultramodern phones happened to be purring for her expert attention; at such times, too, some of the belated travellers who stood waiting to sign the register at the Haworth Hotel would perhaps find her expression of welcome a thing of somewhat mechanical formality. But in the eyes of John Binyon, this same slightly fading woman of some forty summers could do little, if anything, wrong. He had appointed her five years previously: first purely as a glorified receptionist; subsequently (knowing a real treasure when he spotted one) as his unofficial 'manageress'—although his wife Catherine (an awkward, .graceless woman) had still insisted upon her own name appearing in that senior-sounding capacity on the hotel's general literature, as well as in the brochures announcing bargain breaks for special occasions.

Like Easter, for example.

Or Whitsun.

Or Christmas.

Or, as we have seen, like New Year.

With Christmas now over, Sarah Jonstone was looking forward to her official week's holiday—a whole week off from everything, and especially from the New Year festivities—the latter, for some reason, never having enthused her with rapture unconfined.

The Christmas venture was again likely to be oversubscribed, and this fact had been the main reason—though not quite the only reason—why John Binyon had strained every nerve to bring part of the recently purchased, if only partially developed, annexe into premature use. He had originally applied for planning permission for a single-storey linking corridor between the Haworth Hotel and this adjoining freehold property. But although the physical distance in question was only some twenty yards, so bewilderingly complex had proved the concomitant problems of potential subsidence, ground levels, drains, fire exits, goods access and gas mains, that he had abandoned his earlier notions of a formal merger and had settled for a self-standing addendum physically separated from the parent hotel. Yet even such a limited ambition was proving (as Binyon saw it) grotesquely expensive; and a long-term token of such expenditure was the towering yellow crane which stood like some enormous capital Greek Gamma in what had earlier been the chrysanthemumed and foxgloved garden at the rear of the newly acquired property. From late August, the dust ever filtering down from the planked scaffolding had vied, in degrees of irritation, with the daytime continuum of a revolving cement mixer and the clanks and hammerings which punctuated all the waking and working hours. But as winter had drawn on—and especially during the record rainfall of November—such inconveniences had begun to appear, in retrospect, as little more than the mildest irritancies. For now the area in which the builders worked day by day was becoming a morass of thick-clinging, darkish-orange mud, reminiscent of pictures of Passchendaele. The mud was getting everywhere: it caked the tyres of the workmen's wheelbarrows; it plastered the surfaces of the planks and the duckboards which lined the site and linked its drier spots; and (perhaps most annoying of all) it left the main entrance to the hotel, as well as the subsidiary entrance to the embryo annexe, resembling the approaches to a milking parlour in the Vale of the Great Dairies. A compromise was clearly called for over the hotel tariffs, and Binyon promptly amended the Christmas and New Year brochures to advertise the never-to-be-repeated bargain of 15 per cent off rates for the rooms in the main hotel, and 25 per cent (no less!) off the rates for the three double rooms and the one single room now available on the ground floor of the semi-completed annexe. And indeed it was a bargain: no workmen; no noise; no real inconvenience whatsoever over these holiday periods—except for that omnipresent mud . . .

The net result of these difficulties, and of further foul weather in early December, had been that, in spite of daily Hooverings and daily scrapings, many rugs and carpets and stretches of linoleum were so sadly in need of a more general shampoo after the departure of the Christmas guests that it was decided to put into operation a full-scale clean-up on the 30th in readiness for the arrival of the New Year contingent—or the majority of it—at lunchtime on the 31st. But there were problems. It was difficult enough at the best of times to hire waitresses and bedders and charladies. But when, as now, extra help was most urgently required; and when, as now, two of the regular cleaning women were stricken with influenza, there was only one thing for it: Binyon himself, his reluctant spouse Catherine, Sarah Jonstone, and Sarah's young assistant-receptionist, Caroline, had been called to the colours early on the 30th; and (armed with their dusters, brushes, squeegees, and Hoovers) had mounted their attack upon the blighted premises to such good effect that by the mid-evening of the same day all the rooms and the corridors in both the main body of the hotel and in the annexe were completely cleansed of the quaggy, mire-caked traces left behind by the Christmas revellers, and indeed by their predecessors. When all was done, Sarah herself had seldom felt so tired, although such unwonted physical labour had not—far from it!—been wholly unpleasant for her. True, she ached in a great many areas of her body which she had forgotten were still potentially operative, especially the spaces below her ribs and the muscles just behind her knees. But such physical activity served to enhance the delightful prospect of her imminent holiday; and to show the world that she could live it up with the rest and the best of them, she had wallowed in a long 'Fab-Foam' bath before ringing her only genuine friend, Jenny, to say that she had changed her mind, was feeling fine and raring to go, and would after all be delighted to come to the party that same evening at Jenny's North Oxford flat (only a stone's throw, as it happened, from Morse's own small bachelor property). Jenny's acquaintances, dubiously moral though they were, were also (almost invariably) quite undoubtedly interesting; and it was at 1.20 A.M. precisely the following morning that a paunchy, middle-aged German with a tediously repeated passion for the works of Thomas Mann had suddenly asked a semi-intoxicated Sarah (yes, just like that!) if she would like to go to bed with him. And in spite of her very brief acquaintance with the man, it had been only semi-unwillingly that she had been dragged off to Jenny's spare room where she had made equally brief love with the hirsute lawyer from Bergisch Gladbach. She could not remember too clearly how she had finally reached her own flat in Middle Way—a road (as the careful reader will remember) which stretches down into South Parade, and at the bottom of which stands a post office.

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.

CHAPTER FIVE

Tuesday, December 31st

Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, and disregard of all the rules.

(GEORGE ORWELL, Shooting an Elephant)

IN 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 dog-eared 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.

It was funny about names, thought Sarah. You could often tell what a person was like from a name. Take the Arkwright woman, for instance, who had cancelled her room, Annexe 4—the drifting snow south of Solihull making motoring a perilous folly, it appeared. Doris Arkwright! With a name like that, she just had to be a suspicious, carefully calculating old crab-crumpet! And she wasn't coming—Binyon had just brought the message to her.

Minus one: and the number of guests was down to thirty-eight.

Oddly enough, one of the things very much on Sarah Jonstone's mind early that evening was the decision she had made (so authoritatively!) to allow 'Caribbean' in the Scrabble final. And she could hardly forget the matter, in view of a most strange coincidence. Later on in the evening, the judge for the fancy-dress competition would be asking whether another 'Caribbean' should be allowed, since one of the male entrants had gaily bedecked, himself in a finely authentic Rastafarian outfit. 'The Mystery of the East' (the judge suggested) could hardly accommodate such an obviously West Indian interpretation? Yet (as one of the guests quietly pointed out) it wasn't really 'West Indian' at all—it was 'Ethiopian'; and Ethiopia had to be East in anyone's atlas—well, Middle East, anyway. Didn't it all depend, too (as another of the guests argued with some force), on exactly what this 'East' business meant, anyway: didn't it depend on exactly whereabouts on the globe one happened to be standing at any particular time? The upshot of this difference of opinion was that 'Caribbean' was accepted for a second time in the Haworth Hotel that New Year's Eve.

It would be a good many hours into New Year's Day itself before anyone discovered that the number of guests was down to thirty-seven.

CHAPTER SIX

December 31st/January 1st

Beware of all enterprises that require fancy clothes.

(THOREAU)

DURING THE TIMES in which these events are set, there occurred a quite spectacular renaissance in fancy-dress occasions of all types. In pubs, in clubs, in ballrooms, at discos, at dinner parties—it was as if a collective mania would settle upon men and women wherever they congregated, demanding that at fairly regular intervals each of them should be given an opportunity to bedeck the body in borrowed plumes and for a few hours to assume an entirely alien personality. Two years previously (the Haworth's first such venture) the New Year's party had taken 'What we were wearing when the ship went down as its theme, with the emphasis very much upon the degree of imagination, humour and improvisation that could be achieved with a very minimum of props. The theme for the following New Year's Eve had been 'This Sporting Life'; and since this theme had been announced in the brochure, some of the guests had taken the challenge most seriously, had turned their backs on improvisation, and had brought appropriate costumes with them. This year, in accord with the temper of the times, participants had been given even wider scope than before, with ample time and opportunity to hire their chosen outfits and to acquire suitable make-up and accessories—in short, to take the whole thing far too seriously. The hotel's 'Rag Bag' still stood in the games room, but only one or two had rummaged through its contents that afternoon. After all, the current theme had been likewise pre-announced, and all the guests knew exactly what was coming; and, to be fair, in many cases the fancy-dress evening was one of the chief reasons for them choosing the Haworth Hotel in the first place. On such occasions, the greatest triumph would be registered when a person went through the first part of the evening—sometimes a good deal longer—totally unrecognized even by close acquaintances: a feat which Binyon himself had accomplished the previous year when only by a process of elimination had even his hotel colleagues finally recognized the face of their proprietor behind the bushy beard and beneath the Gloucestershire cricket-cap of Dr W.G. Grace.

This year the enthusiasm of the guests was such—all but six had presented themselves in various guises—that even Sarah, not by nature one of the world's obvious have-a-go extroverts, found herself wishing that she were one of the happy band drinking red or blue cocktails in the restaurant-cum-ballroom on the ground floor at the back of the hotel, where everything was now almost ready. The whole of the area was surprisingly warm, the radiators round the walls turned up to their maximum readings, and a log fire burning brightly in a large old grate that was simultaneously the delight of guests and the despair of management. But tonight the fire was dancing smokelessly and merrily, and the older folk there spoke of the times when their shadows had passed gigantic round the walls of their childhood, and when in the late hours of the night the logs had collapsed of a sudden in a firework of sparks. Abetting this fire, in a double illumination, were tall red candles, two on each of the tables, and all already lit, with the haloes that formed around them creating little pools of warm light amid the darkling, twinkling dining room, and reflecting their elongated yellow flames in the gleaming cutlery.

It would have been easiest to divide the original guest-list into three tables of thirteen; but in deference to inevitable superstition Binyon had settled for two tables of fourteen and one of eleven, with each place set only for two courses. At each place, a small white card denoted the seating arrangements for these first two courses, spouse duly positioned next to spouse; but each of these cards also had two numbers printed on it, denoting a different table for the third and fourth courses, and a different table again for the fifth and sixth. This system had been tried out the previous year; and although on that occasion one or two of the couples had failed to follow instructions too carefully, the social mix effected thereby had proved a huge success. The only real problem attendant upon such a system was the awkwardness of transferring side plates from one seat to another, but this had been solved by the supremely simple expedient of dispensing with rolls and butter altogether.

It was at about a quarter to eight (eating would begin at eight o'clock) when the nasty little episode occurred: Sarah could vouch for the time with reasonable confidence. One of the women guests from the annexe, one dressed in the black garb of a female adherent of the Ayatollah, informed Sarah in a voice muffled by the double veil of her yashmak that there was something rather unpleasant written on the wall of the Ladies' lavatory, and Sarah had accompanied this women to inspect the offending graffito. And, yes, she agreed with the voice behind the veils that it was not really very nice at all: 'I'm nuts' had been daubed on the wall over one of the washbasins in a black felt pen; and underneath had been added 'So are Binyon's B—'. Oh dear! But it had taken only a few minutes with sponge and detergent to expunge these most distressing words—certainly to the point of illegibility.

The cocktails turned out to be a huge success, for even the most weirdly bedizened strangers were already beginning to mix together happily. Binyon himself, gaudily garbed as the Lord High Executioner, was making no attempt this year to cloak his identity, and in a kindly way (so Sarah thought, as she looked in briefly) was making a successful fuss of one of the children, a small-boned nervous little girl dressed up prettily in Japanese costume. The mystical lure of the Orient had clearly provoked a colourful response, and there were one or two immediate hits—the most stunning being a woman with a lissomely sinuous figure, whose Turkish belly-dancer's outfit (what little there was of it) was causing several pairs of eyes (besides Binyon's) to sparkle widely with fornicatory intent. There was, as far as Sarah could see, only one real embarrassment amongst the whole lot, and that in the form of the gaunt-faced snooker king from Swindon, who had turned up as a rather too convincing version of Gandhi—a Gandhi, moreover, clearly in the latter stages of one of his emaciating fasts. But even he appeared happy enough, holding a cocktail in one hand, and ever hitching up his loin-cloth with the other.

It would not be long now before the guests began to drift to their places, to start on the Fresh Grapefruit Cerisette—already laid out (to be followed by the Consommé au Riz); and Sarah picked up a Tequila Sunrise and walked back through to Reception, where she locked the front door of the hotel. Her head was aching slightly, and the last thing she wanted was a six-course meal. An early night was all she really craved for; and that (she told herself) was what she would have, after giving a hand (as she'd promised) with the Grilled Trout with Almonds and then with the Pork Chop Normandy. (The Strawberry Gateau, the cheese and biscuits and the coffee, Binyon had assured her, would be no problem.) She had never herself been a big eater, and for this reason she was always a little vexed that she could put on weight so easily; and unlike the Mahatma, perhaps, she most certainly did not wish to face the new year with a little extra poundage.

The cocktail tasted good; and with ten or fifteen minutes to spare before the grapefruit plates would need to be cleared Sarah lit one of the half-dozen cigarettes she allowed herself each day, enjoying the sensation as she sat back in her chair and inhaled deeply.

Ten minutes to eight.

It could have been only some two or three minutes later that she heard the noise, fairly near her. And suddenly, illogically—with the stillness of the half-lit, empty entrance hall somehow emphasized by the happy voices heard from the dining room she experienced a sense of fear that prickled the roots of her honey-coloured hair. And then, equally suddenly, everything was normal once again. From the door of the Gents' lavatory there emerged a gaily accoutred personage who on any normal evening might justifiably have been the cause of some misgiving on her part; but upon whom she now bestowed a knowingly appreciative smile. It must have taken the man some considerable time to effect such a convincing transformation into a coffee-coloured, dreadlocked Rastafarian; and perhaps he hadn't quite finished yet, for even as he walked across to the dining room he was still dabbing his brown-stained hands with a white handkerchief that was now more chocolate than vanilla.

Sarah drank some more of the liberally poured cocktail—and began to feel good. She looked down at the only letter that had found its way into her tray that morning: it was from a Cheltenham lady thanking the hotel for the fact that her booking of a room had been answered with 'laudable expedition' ('very quickly', translated Sarah), but at the same time deploring the etiquette of these degenerate days that could allow the 'Dear Madam' of the salutation to be complemented by the 'Yours sincerely' of the valediction. Again, Sarah smiled to herself—the lady would probably turn out to be a wonderful old girl—and looked up to find the Lord High Executioner smiling down, in turn, at her.

'Another?' he suggested, nodding to the cocktail.

'Mm—that would be nice,' she heard herself say.

What had she remembered then? She could recall, quite certainly, clearing away after the soup course; picking up the supernumerary spoons and forks that marked the place of that pusillanimous spirit from Solihull, Doris Arkwright; standing by in the kitchen as a Pork Chop Normandy had slithered off its plate to the floor, to be replaced thither after a perfunctory wipe; drinking a third cocktail; dancing with the Lord High Executioner; eating two helpings of the gateau in the kitchen; dancing, in the dim light of the ballroom, a sort of chiaroscuro cha-cha-cha with the mysterious 'Rastafarian'—the latter having been adjudged the winner of the men's fancy-dress prize; telling Binyon not to be so silly when he'd broached the proposition of a brief dive beneath the duvet in her temporary quarters; drinking a fourth cocktail, the colour of which she could no longer recall; feeling slightly sick; walking up the stairs to her bedroom before the singing of 'Auld Lang Syne'; feeling very sick; and finally finding herself in bed. Those were the pretty definite events of a crowded evening. ('But there must have been so many other little things, Miss Jonstone?') And there were other things, yes. She remembered, for example, the banging of so many doors once the music and the singing had finally ended—half-past midnight, it must have been—when standing by her window (alone!) she had seen the guests from the annexe walking back to their rooms: two of the women, their light-coloured raincoats wrapped around them, with the prize-winning Rastafarian between them, a hand on either shoulder; and behind that trio, another trio—the yashmak'd, graffiti-conscious woman, with a Samurai on one side and Lawrence of Arabia on the other; and bringing up the rear the Lord High Executioner, with a heavy, dark coat over his eastern robes. Yes! And she remembered quite clearly seeing all of them, including Binyon, go into the annexe, and then Binyon, fairly shortly afterwards, coming out, and fiddling for a moment or two with the Yale lock on the side door of the annexe—presumably to secure the inmates against any potential intruders.

It was just before 7 a.m. when Sarah woke, for a few seconds finding some difficulty in recalling exactly where she was. Then, it had been with a wholly childlike delight that on opening her curtains she saw the canopy of snow that enveloped everything—four or five inches of it on the ledge outside her window, and lodging heavily along the branches of the trees. The world outside looked so bitterly chill. But she was happily conscious of the square little radiator, now boiling hot, that made her room under the eaves so snugly warm; and through the frost-whorled window-panes she looked out once more at the deep carpet of snow: it was as if the Almighty had taken his brush, after the last few hours of the death-struck year, and painted the earth in a dazzling Dulux Super-White. Sarah wondered about slipping back into bed for a brief while, but decided against it. Her head was beginning to ache a little, and she knew there were some aspirin in the kitchen. In any case she'd promised to help with the breakfasts. Much better to get up—even to go out and walk profanely across the virgin snow. As far as could be seen, there were no footprints, no indentations whatsoever, in the smooth surface of snow that surrounded the strangely still hotel, and a line from a poem she'd always loved came suddenly to mind: 'All bloodless lay the untrodden snow . . .'

The water in the washbasin became very hot indeed after only ten or fifteen seconds, and she was taking her flannel from her washing bag when she noticed a creosote-looking stain on the palm of her right hand; and then noticed the same sort of stain on one of the fluffy white towels she must have used before going to bed. And, of course, she knew immediately where that had come from. Had that wretched Rastafarian stained her blouse as well, when his left hand had circled her waist (perhaps a fraction too intimately) above her black tight-fitting skirt? Yes! He had! Blast it! For a few minutes as her headache became gradually worse she moistened the offending patch on her cream blouse and cleaned off the stain as best she could. No one would notice it, anyway.

It was seven forty-five when she walked into the kitchen. Seemingly, she was the only person stirring in the whole hotel. And, had Sarah Jonstone known it at that time, there was a person in the same hotel who never would be seen to stir again. For in the room designated, on the key-hook board behind Reception, as 'Annexe 3', a man lay stiffly dead—the window of his ground-floor room thrust open, the radiator switched completely off, and the temperature around the body as icily frigid as an igloo's.

The end of the year had fallen cold; and the body that lay across the top of the coverlet on one of the twin beds in Annexe 3 was very, very cold indeed.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Wednesday, January 1st: P.M.

But if he finds you and you find him,

The rest of the world don't matter;

For the Thousandth Man will sink or swim

"With you in any water.

(RUDYARD KIPLING, The Thousandth Man)

FOR THE CHIEF CONSTABLE of Oxfordshire, a man internationally renowned for his handling of terrorist sieges, the new year dawned upon fewer problems than had been anticipated. With the much-publicized CND march from Carfax to Greenham Common badly hit by the weather, and with the First Division game between Oxford United and Everton inevitably postponed, many of the extra police drafted in for special duties in both the city and the county had not been required. There had been, it was true, a whole string of minor accidents along the A40, but no serious injuries and no serious hold-ups. Indeed, it had been a very gentle New Year's Day; and at 6.30 p.m. the Chief Constable was just about to leave his office on the second floor of the Kidlington Police HQ when Superintendent Bell rang from the City Police HQ in St. Aldates to ask whether among extra personnel available that day there happened to be any spare inspectors from the CID division.

The phone had been ringing for a good while before the sole occupant of the bachelor flat at the top of the Banbury Road in North Oxford turned down the mighty volume of the finale of Die Walküre and answered it.

'Morse!' he said curtly.

'Ah, Morse!' (The Chief Constable expected his voice to be instantly recognized, and it almost always was.) 'I suppose you've just staggered out of bed all ready for another night of debauchery?'

'A Happy New Year to you, too, sir!'

'Looks like being a pretty good new year for the crime rate, Morse: we've got a murder down at the bottom of your road. I'm assuming you had nothing to do with it, of course.'

'I'm on furlough, sir.'

'Well, never mind! You can make up the days later in January.'

'Or February,' mumbled Morse.

'Or February!' admitted the Chief Constable.

'Not tonight, I'm afraid, sir. I'm taking part in the final of the pub quiz round at the Friar.'

'I'm glad to hear others have got such confidence in your brains.'

'I'm quite good, really—apart from Sport and Pop Music'

'Oh, I know that, Morse!' The Chief Constable was speaking very slowly now. 'And I have every confidence in your brains, as well.'

Morse sighed audibly into the phone and held his peace as the Chief Constable continued: 'We've got dozens of men here if you need 'em.'

'Is Sergeant Lewis on duty?' asked a Morse now fully resigned.

'Lewis? Ah yes! As a matter of fact he's on his way to pick you up now. I thought, you know, that er . . .'

'You're very kind, sir.'

Morse put down the phone and walked to the window where he looked down on the strangely quiet, muffled road. The Corporation lorries had gritted for a second time late that afternoon, but only a few carefully driven cars were intermittently crawling past along the icy surfaces. Lewis wouldn't mind coming out, though. In fact, thought Morse, he'd probably be only too glad to escape the first night of the new year television.

And what of Morse himself? There was perhaps just a hint of grim delight to be observed on his features as he saw the police car pull into the gutter in a spurt of deep slush, and waved to the man who got out of it—a thick-set, slightly awkward-looking man, for whom the only blemishes on a life of unexciting virtuousness were a gluttonous partiality for egg and chips, and a passion for fast driving.

Sergeant Lewis looked up to the window of the flat, and acknowledged Morse's gesture of recognition. And had Lewis been able to observe more closely at that moment he might have seen that in the deep shadows of Morse's rather cold blue eyes there floated some reminiscences of an almost joyful satisfaction.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Wednesday, January 1st: P.M.

I therefore come before you armed with the delusions of adequacy with which so many of us equip ourselves.

(AIR VICE-MARSHAL A. D. BUTTON)

LEWIS PULLED IN behind the two other police cars outside the Haworth Hotel, where a uniformed constable in a black-and-white chequered hat stood outside the main entrance, with one of his colleagues, similarly attired, guarding the front door of the adjacent property further down the Banbury Road.

'Who's in charge?' asked Morse, of the first constable, as he passed through into the foyer, stamping the snow from his shoes on the doormat.

'Inspector Morse, sir.'

'Know where he is?' asked Morse.

'Not sure, sir. I've only just got here.'

'Know him by sight, do you?'

'I don't know him at all'

Morse went on in, but Lewis tapped the constable on the shoulder and whispered in his ear: 'When you meet this Morse fellow, he's a chief inspector—all right?—and a nasty one at that! So watch your step, lad!'

'Famous pair, we are!' murmured Morse as the two of them stood at Reception, where in a small room at the back of the desk Sergeant Phillips of the City CID (Morse recognized him) stood talking to a pale-faced, worried-looking man who was introduced as Mr. John Binyon, the hotel proprietor. And very soon Morse and Lewis knew as much—or as little—as anyone about the tragedy so recently discovered in his own hotel by the proprietor himself.

The two Anderson children had been putting the finishing touches to their snowman just as it was getting dark that afternoon when they were joined by their father, Mr. Gerald Anderson. And it had been he who had observed that one of the rear windows on the ground floor of the annexe was open; and who had been vaguely uneasy about this observation, since the weather was raw, with a cutting wind sweeping down from the north. He had finally walked closer and seen the half-drawn curtains flapping in the icy draught—although he had not gone all the way up to the window, under which (as he'd noticed) the snow was still completely undisturbed. He had mentioned this fact to his wife once he was back in the hotel, and it was at her instigation that he reported his disquiet to the proprietor himself—at about 5 p.m., that was; with the result that the pair of them, Anderson and Binyon, had walked across to the annexe and along the newly carpeted corridor to the second bedroom on the right, where over the doorknob was hooked a notice, written in English, French, and German, instructing potential intruders that the incumbent was not to be disturbed. After repeated knockings, Binyon had opened the door with his master-key, and had immediately discovered why the man they found there had been incapable (for some considerable time, it seemed) of responding to any knocking from within or to any icy blast from without.

For the man on the bed was dead and the room was cold as the grave.

The news of the murder was known almost immediately to everyone in the hotel; and despite Binyon's frenetic protestations, some few of the guests (including, it appeared, everyone from the annexe) had taken the law into their own hands, packed their belongings, strapped up their cases (and in one case not paid any part of the bill), and disappeared from the Haworth Hotel before Sergeant Phillips from St. Aldates had arrived at about 5.40 p.m.

'You what?' bellowed Morse as Phillips explained how he'd allowed four more of the guests to leave the hotel when full names and addresses had been checked.

'Well, it was a very difficult situation, sir, and I thought—'

'Christ man! Didn't someone ever tell you that if you've got a few suspicious circumstances you're expected to hold on to a few of the suspects? And what do you do, Sergeant? You tell 'em all to bugger off!'

'I got all the details—'

'Bloody marvellous!' snapped Morse.

Binyon, who had been standing by in some embarrassment as Morse (not, it must be admitted, without just cause) lashed the luckless Phillips, decided to come to the rescue.

'It really was a very difficult situation, Inspector, and we thought—'

'Thought?' Morse's instantaneous repetition of the monosyllable sounded like a whiplashed retaliation for such impertinence, and it was becoming abundantly clear that he had taken an instant dislike to the hotel proprietor. 'Mr. Binyon! They don't pay you, do they, for having any thoughts about this case? No? But they do pay me! They even pay Sergeant Phillips here; and if I was angry with him just now it was only because I basically respect what he thought and what he tried to do. But I shall be obliged if you will kindly keep your thoughts out of things until I ask for them—all right?'

In the latter part of this little homily, Morse's voice was as cool and as level as the snow upon which Sarah Jonstone had looked out early that same morning; and she herself as she sat silently at Reception was more than a little alarmed by this new arrival; more than a little upset by his harsh words. But gossip had it that the corpse found in the room called Annexe 3 had been horridly mutilated about the face; and she was relieved that the police seemed at