The Jewel That Was Ours (26 page)

For all the swiftness of his thought, Morse was quite a slow reader. And as Lewis (who had already read through the statement) watched his chief going through the same pages, he felt more than a little encouraged. It was like finding a Senior Wrangler from Cambridge unable to add seventy-seven and seventeen together without demanding pencil and paper.

‘Well?' asked Morse at long last. 'What did you make of that?'

'One odd thing, sir. It's an alibi for Aldrich all right, but not really one for Stratton, is it?' 'It isn't?’

'Surely not. Aldrich didn't actually
see
Stratton - on the train, did he?'

'You mean Stratton might
not
have been on the train? Ye-es . . . But if so, how did he know
Aldrich
was on the train?'

Lewis shook his head: 'I'm thinking about it, sir.'

'But you're right, Lewis,' added Morse slowly, as he sat back and stared at the ceiling for a few seconds. 'And I'll tell you something else: he writes well!'

'Clever man, sir!'

'More literate than his daughter, I should think. Only those couple or so spelling mistakes, wasn't it?'

'Only the two I spotted,' replied Lewis, his features as impassive as those of a professional poker-player, as

Morse, with a half-grin of acknowledgement, started shuffling inconsequentially through the completed questionnaires.

'Bit sad’ ventured Lewis, 'about Mr Aldrich's daughter.'

'Mm?'

‘Wonder why she didn't turn up at Paddington.' 'Probably met a well-oiled sheik outside The Dorchester.' 'She'd
agreed
to meet him, though.' 'So he says.'

'Don't you believe him?' Lewis's eyes looked up in puzzlement. 'He can't have made up all that stuff about the army
...
or the train—'

'Not those bits, no.'

'But you don't believe the bits in the middle?'

'As you just said, he's a clever man. I think he went up to London, yes, but I'm not at all sure what he
did
 
there. All a bit vague, don't you think? Just as I'm not quite sure what
Kemp
was doing, after he left his publishers. But if they
met
each other, Lewis . . . ? Interesting, don't you think?'

Lewis shook his head. It was almost invariably the same: halfway through any case Morse would be off on some improbable and complicated line of thought which would be just as readily abandoned as soon as a few more facts emerged. And, blessedly, it was
facts
that Morse now seemed to be concentrating on as, forgetting Aldrich for the moment, he browsed once again through the questionnaires.

'See here, Lewis!' He passed over three of the sheets and pointed to the answers to question (e):

P. Aldrich
     
10-27-90

E. Stratton
    
27th Oct 1990

H. Brown
     
October
2
7

'Not conclusive though, is it, sir?'

But Morse appeared to have boarded a completely different train of thought: 'I was just wondering about their dates of birth . . .’

'Soon find out. I got Ashenden to collect in all their passports this morning.' ‘You did?'

Lewis felt gratified to note the surprise and appreciation in Morse's eyes and voice, and very soon he was back with the passports.

'All here, are they?'

'Except Ashenden's. You're not, er, forgetting Ashenden, are you, sir?'

'Oh no! I'm not forgetting Ashenden,' replied Morse quietly, as taking out his Parker pen he wrote three d.o.b.s on a table napkin:

Aldrich:
       
8.4.1922
Stratton:
       
29.9.1922
Brown:
           
           
3.8.1918

'Two of 'em sixty-eight now, and one seventy-two . . .' 'You wouldn't
think
Brown was the oldest, though, would you, sir? He trots around like a two-year-old.' 'A two-year-old
what?
Lewis sighed, but said nothing.

'He stayed in his room when his wife went off for a jaunt round Oxford, remember? And I still think one of the oddest things in this case is why Stratton didn't see his wife safely up to her room. It's not natural, Lewis. It's not how things
happen.
¹

'What are you suggesting?' asked Lewis, vaguely.

'Brown said he stayed in his room when his wife and Stratton decided to look round Oxford. Said he was tired. Huh! As you said, he's as sprightly as a two-year-old.'

'A two-year-old
what,
sir?'

But Morse appeared to have missed the question.

In the Annexe, as if on cue, a tune could be heard quite clearly. First a few exploratory notes, presumably on the Steinway Grand that Morse had earlier admired in the

Lancaster Room; then the whole melody as the pianist hired for the afternoon tea-room session fingered his way through the nostalgic chords of 'Love's Old Sweet Song’.

The two men listened in silence, before Morse resumed:

'You know, I'm beginning to wonder exactly who was having an affair with who.'

Lewis's eyebrows shot up yet again.

'All right! "Whom", if you prefer it. Stratton and Shirley Brown go out together and everybody says "tut-tut". Agreed? And we all focus our attention on the potential scandal -completely ignoring a far more suggestive state of affairs. Brown and Laura Stratton are there right next to each other in Rooms 308 and 310. It's shenanigans between the sheets, Lewis! It's a
crime passionnel.
Stratton comes back in and catches Brown in the missionary position - and all this Wolvercote Tongue business is just a secondary blind.'

But Lewis would have nothing to do with such futile speculation: 'She was tired, sir. She'd be far more interested in a bath than . . .'

'. . . than in a bonk?'

'Well, people that age—'

'What? I've heard that sex can be very good for the over sixty-fives.'

'Only ten years for you to go, then.'

Morse grinned, though with little conviction. 'I'm sure of it, though. It's Love's Old Sweet Song - that
must
come into things somewhere. A woman dies. An art-work goes missing. An art-expert gets murdered. You following me, Lewis? There's a link - there's got to be a
link.
But for the present I can't—' He broke off, and looked at the three dates again. 'You realise, don't you, that those three would have been -what? - twenty-two, twenty-two, and twenty-six in 1944?' His eyes gleamed with what might have been taken for some inner iUumination. ‘What about all of them being stationed in or near Oxford?'

‘What difference would that make, sir?'

Morse seemed not to know.

Picking up Aldrich's statement, Lewis rose to his feet. 'Shall I go and get Howard Brown?'

But again Morse's mind seemed to be tuned to another wave-length. 'Why did you say ‘he' - indicating the statement - 'he was a clever man?'

'Well, for a start, there's only the three crossings out, aren't there? And he just - well, he just sort of sat down and wrote it straight off.'

'Ye-es,' said Morse, but to himself, for Lewis had already left the Annexe to summon Brown.

He looked around at the two other tables occupied in the Bar-Annexe. At the first, a middle-aged woman with an enormous bosom was digging a fork into a plate of salad with the precision of an accountant jabbing at his calculator, before transferring the accumulated forkful up to her rapidly masticating jaws; and Morse knew that if he had married
her,
it would all have been over within the week. But there was another woman, at the second table: a woman only half the age of her executively suited escort; a woman who was having a fairly difficult time by the look of things, earnestly rehearsing a whole chapter of body language with her ringless hands. Perhaps, thought Morse, the illicit little office affair was drawing to its close. Then her sad eyes met Morse's in a sort of distant, anonymous camaraderie: she smiled across, almost fully. And Morse did the same, feeling for a few small moments an intense and splendid happiness.

Their meetings made December June

(Tennyson)

Faced with the evidence of the tell-tale Howard Brown capitulated immediately. Yes, Morse was right in one respect: Aldrich, Stratton, and himself had been stationed in or around Oxford in 1944, and he (Brown) had in fact known Stratton vaguely in those far-off days. They'd been delighted therefore to renew acquaintanceship at the beginning of the tour; and thereafter had spent many an hour together, talking about old comrades they'd known - those who'd come through, and those who hadn't. . . and reminiscing about some of the 'local talent' the GIs had been only too happy to discover, in Oxford itself and in some of the surrounding towns and villages. Brown had fallen miserably in love (so he said) with a girl named Betty Fowler, whom he'd met one Friday evening at a hop held in the Oxford Town Hall, and already on their second meeting they had vowed a mutual, eternal love.

Then, when the war ended in the summer of 1945, after being demobbed from Germany, he'd gone straight back to the US, with no possible hope of any real communication between them except for one or two impermanent and unreliable addresses. So, slowly, the memories of their idyllic times together had faded. He'd met up with a marvellous girl in Minister, anyway; then a fully consenting Hausfrau from Hamburg . . . and so it had gone on. He'd gradually come to terms with the fairly obvious fact (as most of his comrades already had) that wartime associations were almost inevitably doomed to dissolution.