The Jewel That Was Ours (14 page)

It was a dignified little speech, and Sheila now felt desperately ashamed. For a few seconds, a look of mild regret gleamed in her slightly bloodshot eyes, and she had begun to apologise when immediately next to them, on a table below the window overlooking the Taylor Institution, the phone rang.

It was 12.35 p.m. when Mrs Celia Freeman, a pleasantry spoken and most competent woman, took the call on the telephone exchange at the rear of the main Reception area. Only approximately 12.35 p.m., though. When later questioned (and questioned most earnestly) on this matter, she had found on her note-pad that both the name of the caller ('Dr Kemp') and the name of the person called ('Mr Ashenden') had been jotted down soon after a timed call at 12.31 p.m. And it was at 12.48 p.m., exactly, that John Ashenden phoned back from the St John's Suite to Reception to order a taxi to meet the train from Paddington arriving 15.00, and to pick up a Dr Theodore Kemp at Oxford Station.

In the police-procedural, a fair degree of realism is possible, but it cannot be pushed too far for fear that the book might be as dull as the actual days of a policeman

(Julian Symons,
Bloody Murder)

It was not until 10 a.m. that same morning that Morse had recovered the Jaguar; 10.15 a.m. when he finally put in an appearance at Kidlington HQ.

'Hope you had a profitable evening, Lewis?'

'Not particularly.'

'Not arrested the thief yet?'

Lewis shook his head. He'd already put in three hours' work, trying to sort out and collate various statements, and he was in no mood to appreciate the sarcasm of a man who had seemingly lost most of the little enthusiasm he'd started with.

'Well?' asked Morse.

'Nothing, really. These Americans - well, they seem a nice lot of people. Some of 'em not all that sure about
exactly
where they were - but you'd expect that, wouldn't you? Settling in, drinking tea, unpacking, having a wash, trying to get the telly going—'

'Studying the Fire Instructions, I hope.'

'Doubt it. But as far as I could see, they all seemed to be telling the truth.'

'Except one.'

'Pardon, sir?'

'Ashenden was lying.'

Lewis looked puzzled: 'How can you say that?' 'He said he had a look round Magdalen.'

‘So?'

'He told me all about it - he was virtually reciting phrases from the guide-book’ 'He
is
a guide.'

'Pages 130 - something of Jan Morris's
Oxford.
Word for word - nearly.'

'He'd probably swotted it up for when he was going round with the group.'

'Magdalen's not on the programme.'

'But you can't just say he's lying because—'

'Ashenden's a liar!'

Lewis shook his head: it was hardly worth arguing with Morse in such a mood, but he persisted a little longer. 'It doesn't
matter
though, does it? If Ashenden decided to go and look round Magdalen—'

'He didn't,' said Morse quietly.

'No?'

'I rang the Porters' Lodge there this morning. The College was closed to visitors all day: they're doing some restoration in the cloisters and the scaffolders were there from early morning. No one, Lewis
- no one -
was allowed in Magdalen yesterday except the Fellows, by order of the Bursar, an order the Head Porter assured me was complied with without a single exception - well only a fellow without a capital "f" who brought a stock of superfine toilet paper for the President.'

'Oh!' Lewis looked down and surveyed the sheets on his desk, neatly arranged, carefully considered - and probably wasted. They might just as well be toilet paper, too. Here was Morse making a mockery of all his efforts with just a single phone call. 'So he was telling us lies,' he said, without enthusiasm.

'Some of us spend most of our lives telling lies, Lewis.'

'Do you want me to bring him in?'

'You can't arrest a man for telling lies. Not
those
lies, anyway. He's probably got a fancy bit of skirt along Holywell Street somewhere. Just as well he
was
there, perhaps.'

'Sir?'

'Well, it means he wasn't in The Randolph pinching handbags, doesn't it?'

'He could have pinched it
before
he went out. Mrs Stratton was one of the first up to her room, and Ashenden was there for a good ten minutes or so—'

'What did he do with it?’

'We ought to have searched the rooms, sir.'

Morse nodded vaguely, then shrugged his shoulders.

'We wasting our time?' asked Lewis.

'What? About the handbag? Oh yes! We shall never find that - you can safely put your bank balance on that.'

'I wouldn't lose all that much if I did,' mumbled the dispirited Lewis.

'Has Max rung?'

'No. Promised to, though, didn't he?'

'Idle sod!' Morse picked up the phone and dialled the lab. 'If he still says it was just a heart attack, I think I'll just leave this little business in your capable hands, Lewis, and get back home.'

'I reckon you'd be as happy as a sandboy if he tells you she was murdered.'

But Morse was through: 'Max? Morse. Done your homework?'

'Massive coronary.'

'Positive?'

Morse heard the exasperated expiration of breath at the other end of the line; but received no answer.

'Could it have been brought on, Max - you know, by her finding a fellow fiddling with her powder-compact?'

‘Couldn't say.'

'Someone she didn't expect - coming into her room?' 'Couldn't say.'

'No sign of any injury anywhere?' ‘No.'

'You looked everywhere?' 'I always look everywhere.'

'Not much help, are you.'

'On the contrary, Morse. I've told you exactly what she died of. Just like the good Dr Swain.'

But Morse had already put down the phone; and five minutes later he was driving down to North Oxford.

Lewis himself remained in the office and spent the rest of the morning rounding off the dull routine of his paper work. At 12.50 p.m., deciding he couldn't emulate the peremptory tone that Morse usually adopted with commissionaires, he took a number 21 bus down to St Giles’, where he alighted at the Martyrs' Memorial and began to walk across to The Randolph. Sheila Williams was stepping out briskly, without glancing behind her, up the left-hand side of St Giles', past the columns of the Taylorian and the front of Pusey House, before being lost to the mildly interested gaze of Sergeant Lewis. And as the latter turned into Beaumont Street, with the canopy of The Randolph immediately in front of him, he stopped again. A man walked down the steps of the hotel, looking quickly back over his shoulder before turning left and scurrying along the street towards Worcester College, where he turned left once more at the traffic lights, and passed beneath the traffic sign there announcing 'British Rail'. In normal circumstances, such an innocent-seeming occurrence would hardly have deserved a place in the memory. But these were not normal circumstances, and the man who had just left The Randolph in such haste was
Eddie Stratton.

Diffidently, Lewis followed.

It was during this hour, between 1 p.m. and 2 p.m., as Morse and Lewis were later to learn, that the scene was irreversibly set for murder.

At 3.20 p.m., to an audience slightly smaller than anticipated, Cedric Downes was pointing to the merits of the stained-glass windows in University College chapel, and especially to the scene in the Garden of Eden, where the apples on the tree of knowledge glowed like giant golden Jaffas. At 3.30 p.m., in the Archive Room of the New Bodleian, Sheila Williams was doing her best to enthuse over a series of Henry Taunt photographs taken in the 1880s - also to an audience slightly smaller than anticipated. But the slides selected by Dr Theodore Kemp, to illustrate the development of jewelled artefacts in pre-Conquest Britain, were destined to remain in their box in the Elias Ashmole Memorial Room that sunny afternoon.

At Oxford nude bathing was, and sometimes still is, indulged in, which used to cause mutual embarrassment when ladies passed by in boats

(Marilyn Yurdan,
Oxford: Town & Gown)

At 9.30 p.m. the University Parks had long been closed - since before sundown in fact. Yet such a circumstance has seldom deterred determined lovers, and others slightly crazed, from finding passage-ways through or over fences and hedges into this famous precinct - the setting for countless copulations since the Royalist artillery was quartered on its acres during the Civil War.

Two of these latter-day lovers, Michael Woods (aged seventeen) and Karen Jones (two years older), and both from the village of Old Marston to the east of the Parks, had sauntered over the high-arched Rainbow Bridge across the Cherwell, and come to 'Mesopotamia', a pathway between two branches of the river, when young Michael, encouraged by the fact that he was now resting the palm of his right hand upon the right buttock of the slightly forbidding Karen - and without any perceptible opposition on her part - steered the nymphet into the enclosure known as Parson's Pleasure. This famous and infamous bathing place is to be found at a point where the Cherwell adapts itself to a pleasingly circumscribed swimming area at a bend of the river, with a terrace of unsophisticated, though adequate, cubicles enabling would-be bathers to shed their clothing and to don, or not to don, their swimming costumes there. Green-painted, corrugated-iron fencing surrounds Parson's Pleasure, with the access gate fairly jealously guarded during the summer months, and firmly locked after the waters are deemed too cold for even the doughtiest of its homoerotic habitués. But whether from an unseasonable gale, or whether from recent vandalism, one section of the perimeter fencing lay forlornly on the ground that evening; and very soon the young pair found themselves seated side by side in one of the cubicles. In spite of her seniority in years, Karen was considerably the more cautious of the two in the progress of this current courtship. And justifiably so, for Michael, as vouched for by several of the village girls, was a paid-up member of the Wandering Hands Brigade. After several exploratory fingerings along the left femur, a sudden switch of tactics to the front of her blouse had heralded a whole new manual offensive - when at that point she decided to withdraw to previously prepared positions.