The Secret of Annexe 3

Through the side door of the annexe they proceeded, where Morse looked along the newly carpeted passage that stretched some ten to twelve yards in front of him, its terminus marked by pieces of boarding, nailed (not too professionally) across an aperture which would, in due course, lead through to the front entrance hall of the annexe. Morse strode to the far end of the corridor and looked through the temporary slats to the foyer beyond, where rickety-looking planks, resting on pairs of red bricks, were set across the recently cemented floor. Dust from such activities had filtered through, and was now lying, albeit lightly, on the surfaces just a few feet inside the completed section of the ground-floor annexe, and it seemed clear that there had been no recent entrance, and no recent exit, from that particular point. Morse turned, and for a few seconds looked back up the short corridor down which they had walked; looked at the marks of many muddy shoes (including their own) on the purple carpeting - the latter seeming to Morse almost as distasteful as the reproduction of the late Renoir, 'Les nues dans l'herbe', which hung on the wall to his right.

As he stood there, still looking back up to the side entrance, he noted the simple geography of the annexe. Four doors led off the corridor: to his right were those numbered 2 and 1; immediately opposite 1 was 4; and then, set back behind a narrow, uncarpeted flight of stairs (temporarily blocked off but doubtless leading to the hitherto undeveloped first floor) a door numbered 3. From what he had already learned, Morse could see little hope of lifting any incriminatory fingerprints from the doorknob of this last room which had been twisted quite certainly by Binyon and probably by others. Yet he looked at the knob with some care, and at the trilingual notice that was still hooked over it.

"There should be an umlaut over the "o" in "Storen'7 said Morse.

Ma! Das sagen mir alle,' replied Binyon.

Morse, whose only knowledge of German stemmed from his addiction to the works of Richard Wagner and Richard Strauss, and who was therefore supremely unfitted to converse in the language, decided that it would be sensible to say no more on the point; decided, too, that Binyon was not perhaps quite the nonentity that his weak-chinned appearance might seem to signify.

Inside Annexe 3, a door immediately to the right gave access to a small, rather cramped toilet area, with a washbasin, a WC, and a small bath with shower attachment. In the bedroom itself, the main items of furniture were twin beds, pulled close together, with matching white coverlets; a dressing table opposite them, a TV set in the corner; and just to the left of the main door a built-in wardrobe. Yet it was not the furniture which riveted the attention of Morse and Lewis as they stood momentarily in the doorway. Across the further of the two beds, the one that stood only some three or four feet from the opened window, lay the body of a dead man. Morse, as he invariably did, recoiled from an immediate inspection of the corpse; yet he knew that he had to look. And an extraordinary oddity it was upon which he looked: a man dressed in Rastafarian clothes lay on his side, his face towards them, his head lying in a great, coldly clotted pool of blood, like red wine poured across the snow. The dead man's left hand was trapped beneath the body; but the right hand was clearly visible below the long sleeve of a light blue shirt; and it was - without any doubt - the hand of a white man.

Morse, now averting his eyes from this scene of gory mutilation, looked long and hard at the window, then at the TV set, and finally put his head inside the small washroom.

'You've got a good fingerprint man coming?' he asked Phillips.

'He's on his way, sir.'

Tell him to have a go at the radiator, the TV, and the lever on the WC 'Anything else, sir?'

Morse shrugged. – ‘Leave it to him. I've never had much faith in fingerprints myself.'

'Oh, I don't know, sir—‘ began Phillips.

But Morse lifted his hand like a priest about to pronounce a benediction, and cut off whatever Phillips had intended to say. 'I'm not here to argue, lad!' He looked around again, and seemed just on the point of leaving Annexe 3 when he stepped back inside the room and opened the one drawer, and then the other, of the chest below the TV set, peering carefully into the corners of each.

'Were you expecting to find something?' asked Lewis quietly as he and Morse walked back across to the Haworth Hotel.

Morse shook his head. 'Just habit, Lewis. I once found a ten-pound note in a hotel in Tenby, that's all.'

Chapter Nine

Wednesday, January 1st: p.m.

The great advantage of a hotel is that it's a refuge from home life.

(G. B. SHAW)