The Secret of Annexe 3

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.