The Secret of Annexe 3

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.