The Jewel That Was Ours (22 page)

'No need. Just say "because of" and you'll always be right.'

'As I was saying, sir, the buffet was shut.'

'Interesting point!' remarked Morse, suddenly turning again to a now distinctly uncomfortable-looking Stratton. 'So if you didn't stay on the station between about five-thirty and six-thirty, where exactly
were
you, sir?'

Stratton sighed deeply, and seemed to be pondering his position awhile. Then he sighed again, before opening the palms of his hands in a gesture of resignation. 'Your Sergeant's right, Inspector. I asked if I could get a drink

anything. But, like he says, they were refurbishing all the places there. I
did
stay, though. I stayed about half an hour

longer, perhaps. I'd gotten myself a
Herald Tribune
and I sat reading it on one of the red seats there.'

'Bit chilly, wasn't it?' Stratton remained silent.

'Was there someone outside you didn't want to meet?' suggested Morse.

'I didn't - I didn't want to go out of the station for a while. It, er, it might have been a little awkward for me

-
          
meeting someone who might. . . might be waiting for a bus, or a taxi.'

'You saw someone from the group on the train, is that what you're saying? Someone sitting in a compartment in front of you when you got on the train at Didcot?'

Stratum nodded.
'He'd
not got on at Didcot, though. He must have come from Reading, I suppose—' 'Or Paddington,' added Morse quietly. 'Yes, or Paddington.'

Morse looked across at Lewis. Paddington was beginning to loom slightly larger than a man's hand on the horizon; Paddington was where the murdered Kemp had stood and phoned The Randolph the previous day. So was it too much to believe that it was
Kemp
that Stratton had seen - about five o'clock, hadn't he said?

'You'll have to tell me, you know that,' said Morse gently.

'It was Phil Aldrich,' replied Stratton quietly, his eyes searching those of the two policemen with a look of puzzlement - and perhaps of betrayal, too.

Phew!

'Let me ask you one more question, please, sir. Do you stand to profit much from your wife's death?'

'I do hope so,' replied Stratton, almost fiercely. 'You see, I'm pretty hard-up these days, and to be honest with you I'm certainly not going to say "no" to any insurance money that might be pushed my way.'

'You're an honest man, Mr Stratton!'

'Not always, Inspector!'

Morse smiled to himself, and was walking over to the door when Stratton spoke again: 'Can I ask you a favour?' 'Go ahead!'

'Can you leave me another coupla those Alka Seltzer things?'

Precision of communication is important, more important than ever, in our era of hair-trigger balances, when a false, or misunderstood word may create as much disaster as a sudden thoughdess act

(James Thurber,
Lanterns and Lances)

Morse thought it must be the splendid grandfather clock he'd seen somewhere that he heard chiming the three-quarters (10.45 a.m.) as he and Lewis sat beside each other in a deep settee in the Lancaster Room. Drinking coffee.

'We're getting plenty of suspects, sir.'

'Mm. We're getting pretty high on content but very low on analysis, wouldn't you say? I'll be all right though once the bar opens.'

'It
is
open - opened half-past ten.'

'Why are we drinking
this
stuff, then?'

'Stimulates the brain, coffee.'

But Morse was consulting the Paddington-Oxford timetable which Lewis had picked up for him from Reception, and was nodding to himself as he noted that the 13.30 arrived at Oxford 14.57, just as Kemp had claimed. Now if Kemp had been held up, for some reason, for even longer than he'd expected
...
for considerably longer than he'd expected . . . Yes, interesting! The train Stratum must have caught -
said
he'd caught - must have been the 16.20 from Paddington, arriving at Didcot 17.10, and Oxford 17.29. For several seconds Morse stared across Beaumont Street at the great Ionic pillars of the Ashmolean . . . What time
had
Kemp left Paddington? For left Paddington he certainly had, at some point, after ringing through to The Randolph to explain his delayed departure.

But what if
...
?

'You know, sir, I was just wondering about that telephone call. What if—?'

Morse grinned at his sergeant. 'Great minds, Lewis - yours and mine!'

'You really think there's a possibility it
wasn't
Kemp who rang?'

'Yes, I do. And it would give us a whole new time perspective, wouldn't it? You know, with the best will in the world, Max will never give us too much help if he thinks he
can't.
Quite right, too. He's a scientist. But if
we
can narrow the time down - or rather, widen it out, Lewis . . .'

For a while he appeared deep in thought. Then, pushing his half-finished coffee away from him, he stood up and gave Lewis his orders: 'Go and find Ashenden for me. I shall be in the bar.'

'There we are, then!' said John Ashenden. ' It was twenty minutes later, and Morse had decided (insisted) that his temporary HQ in the Lancaster Room should be moved to more permanent quarters in the Chapters Bar Annexe. He had questioned Ashenden in detail for several minutes about the crucial phone call with Kemp, and asked him to write down in dialogue-form the exchanges as far as he could recall them. Ashenden himself now sat back in his armchair, crossed his lanky legs, and watched with slightly narrowed eyes as Morse took the sheet from him and proceeded to read the reconstructed conversation:

'You write fairly well,' said Morse, after reading through the sheet for a second time, and still refraining from pointing out the single grammatical monstrosity. 'You ought to try your hand at some fiction one of these days.'

'Fact,
Inspector - it's not fiction. Just ask that nosy Roscoe woman if you don't believe me! She was sitting near the phone and she misses
nothing.’

Morse smiled, if a little wanly, and conceded the trick to his opponent. Yet he sensed that those next few minutes, after

Ashenden had finished speaking with Kemp, might well have been the crucial ones in that concatenation of events which had finally led to murder; and he questioned Ashenden further.

'So you called over to Mr Downes?'

'I
went
over to Mr Downes.'

'But he didn't want to talk to Dr Kemp?'

'I don't know about that. He was having trouble with his hearing-aid. It kept whistling every now and then.'

'Couldn't he have heard without it?'

'I don't know. Perhaps not. The line
was
a bit faint, I remember.'

Morse looked across at Lewis, whose eyebrows had risen a self-congratulatory millimetre.

'Perhaps you only
thought
it was Dr Kemp, sir?' continued Morse.

But Ashenden shook his head firmly. 'No! I'm ninety-nine per cent certain it was him.'

'And Sheila - Mrs Williams - she spoke to him then?'

'Yes. But you put it most accurately, Inspector. She spoke to
him.
And when she did, he put the phone down. So he didn't actually speak to
her
- that's what she told me anyway.'