The Secret of Annexe 3

It was a highly euphoric Lewis who came in at a quarter past one, thrusting a statement - four pages of it - on the desk in front of Morse. 'Maybe a few little errors in English usage here and there, sir; but on the whole a splendid piece of prose, I think you'll find.' Morse took the statement and scanned the last page: in the normal way, but we were hard up and I lost my job in November and there was only playing in the group left with a wife and my four little children to feed and look after. We'd got the Social Security but the HP was getting bad, and then this came along. All I had to do was what he told me and that wasn't very difficult. I didn't really have any choice because I needed the money bad and it wasn't because I wanted to do anything that was wrong. I know what happened because I saw it in the Oxford Mail but when I agreed I just did what I was told and I never knew what things were all about at the time. I'm very sorry about it. Please remember I said that, because I love my wife and my little children.

As dictated to Sergeant Lewis, Kidlington CID, by Mr Winston Grant, labourer (unemployed), of 29 Rose Hill Gardens, Rose Hill, Oxford. 8 Jan.

The adverb from "bad" is "badly",' mumbled Morse. 'Shall we keep him here?' asked Bell. 'He's your man,' said Morse. 'And the charge - officially?'

'"Accessory to murder", I suppose - but I'm not a legal man.'

'"Party to murder", perhaps?' suggested Lewis, who had seldom looked so happy since his elder daughter announced her first pregnancy.

Back at Kidlington HQ, Morse sat back in the old black leather armchair, looking (for the while) imperturbably expansive. The man arrested at Gatwick, almost two hours earlier, was well on his way to Oxfordshire, expected (Morse learned) within the next fifteen minutes. It was a time to savour.

Lewis himself now knew exactly what had happened on New Year's Eve in Annexe 3; knew, too, that the murderer of Thomas Bowman had neither set foot inside the main hotel building, nor bedecked himself in a single item of fancy dress. And yet, as to how Morse had arrived at the truth, he felt as puzzled as a small boy witnessing his first conjuring performance. 'What really put you on to it, sir?'

'The key point was, as I told you, that the murderer tried desperately hard to persuade us that the crime was committed as late as possible: after midnight. But as you yourself rightly observed, Lewis, there would seem to be little point in such a deception if the murderer stayed on the scene the whole time from about eight that night to one o'clock the next morning. But there was every point if he wasn't on the scene in the latter part of the evening - a time for which he had an alibi.’

'But, sir—'

There were three clues in this case which should have put us on to the truth much earlier than they did. Each of these three clues, in itself, looks like a pedestrian little piece of information; but taken together - well ... The first vital clue came largely from Sarah Jonstone - the only really valuable and coherent witness in the whole case - and it was this: that the man posing as "Mr Ballard" ate virtually nothing that evening! The second vital clue - also brought to our notice, among others, by Miss Jonstone - was the fact that the man posing as "Mr Ballard" was still staining whatever he touched late that evening! Then there was the third vital clue - the simplest clue of the lot, and one which was staring all of us in the face from the very beginning. So obvious a clue that none of us - none of us! - paid the slightest attention to it: the fact that the man posing as "Mr Ballard" won the fancy-dress competition!

'You see, Lewis, there are two ways of looking at each of these clues - the complex way, and the simple way. And we'd been looking at them the wrong way - we've been looking at them the complex way.'

‘I see,' said Lewis, unseeing.