The Secret of Annexe 3

'Yes! - for what it's worth, I have. Clearly Bowman found this letter somewhere, and he realized that his wife was going with another fellow. I suspect he told her what he knew and gave her an ultimatum. Most men perhaps would have accepted the facts and called it a day - however much it hurt. But Bowman didn't! He loved his wife more than she could ever have known, and his first instinctive reactions mustered themselves - not against his wife - but against her lover. He probably told her all this, in his own vague way; and I think he decided that the best way to help Margaret and, at the same time, to save his own deeply injured pride, was to get rid of her lover! We've been on a lot of cases together, Lewis - with lots of people involved; but I don't reckon the motives are ever all that different - love, hate, jealousy, revenge ... Anyway, I think that Bowman got his wife to agree to collaborate with him in a plot to get rid of the man who - at least for the moment - was a threat to both of them. What exactly that plan involved, we may never know - unless Margaret Bowman decides to tell us. The only firm thing we know about it so far is that Bowman himself wrote a wholly genuine letter which would rather cleverly serve two purposes when lover-boy was found murdered - that is, if any suspicion were ever likely to fall on either of the Bowmans: first, it would put Margaret Bowman in a wholly sympathetic light; second, it would appear to put Tom Bowman some few hundreds of miles away from the scene of the immediate crime.'

'Didn't we know most of that already —'

'Let me finish, Lewis! At some particular point - I don't know when - the plan was switched, and it was switched by the only person who could switch it - by Margaret Bowman, who decided that if she had to take a profoundly important decision about life (as she did!) she would rather throw in her lot with her illicit lover than with her licit husband. Is that clear? Forget the details for the minute, Lewis! The key thing to bear in mind is this: instead of having a plot involving the death of a troublesome lover, we have a plot involving the death of an interfering husband!'

'You don't think the letter helps much at all, then?' Lewis's initial euphoria slipped a notch or two towards his wonted diffidence.

'My goodness, yes! And your own reading of that letter was a model of logic and lucidity! But...'

Lewis's heart sank. He knew what Morse was going to say, and he said it for him. 'But you mean I missed some vital clue in it-is that right?'

Morse waited awhile, and then smiled with what he trusted was sympathetic understanding: 'No, Lewis. You didn't miss one vital clue, at all. You missed two.'

Chapter Thirty-seven

Tuesday, January 7th: p.m.

Stand on the highest pavement of the stair -

Lean on a garden urn -

Weave, weave the sunlight in your hair

(T. S. ELIOT)

'Apart from your own admirable deductions, Lewis, there are, as I say, a couple of other things you could have noticed, perhaps. First' (Morse turned to the letter and found the appropriate reference) 'he says, "You remember how careful I always was and how none of your colleagues ever knew". Now that statement's very revealing. It suggests that this fellow could have been very careless about meeting Margaret Bowman; careless in the sense that, if he'd wanted to, he could easily have made Margaret's colleagues aware of what was going on between them - pretty certainly by others actually seeing the evidence. It means, I think, that the pair of them were very often near each other, and that he very sensibly agreed to avoid all contact with her in the place where they found themselves. And you don't need me to tell you where that might have been - must have been - do you? It was on the Locals site itself, where twenty-odd workmen were employed on various jobs -but mostly on the roof - between May and September last year.'

'Phew!' Lewis looked down at the letter again. If what Morse was saying were true...

'But there's a second thing,' continued Morse, 'that's more specific still. There's a rather nice little bit of English at the end of the letter - "but I think I was in love with you the very first time I saw the top of your golden head in the summer sunshine". Now you were right in saying that this tells us roughly when he first met her. But it also tells us something else, and something even more important. Don't you see? It tells us from which angle he first saw her, doesn't it, Lewis? He saw her from above!’

Lewis was weighing up what Morse had just said: 'You mean this fellow might have been on the roof, sir?'