The Jewel That Was Ours (28 page)

But Morse interrupted the man, and his eyes were ice. 'Look, lad! Once you've lost as much money as me on the horses -
then
you come and give me a sermon on gambling, all right?' He flicked his right hand in dismissal. 'And tell your coach-driver he can leave at
five
o'clock. That should please everybody. It's only thirty-seven or thirty-eight miles to Stratford - and Lewis here once managed it in half an hour.'

The west yet glimmers with some streaks of day: Now spurs the lated traveller apace To gain the timely inn

(Shakespeare,
Macbeth)

On the coach, as it headed north up the Woodstock Road, and thence out on to the A34, the members of the touring party were mostly silent, their thoughts monopolised perhaps by the strange and tragic events they had left behind them in Oxford. What tales they would be able to tell once they got back home again! John Ashenden, seated alone in the front nearside seat, debated with himself about reaching for the microphone and saying a few words about Somerville College, the Radcliffe Infirmary, the Tower of the Winds, the large, late nineteenth-century redbrick residences, St Edward's School. . . But he decided against it: the mood was not upon him - nor upon anyone else in the coach, as far as he could gather.

Opposite him, in the seat immediately behind the driver, sat a sour-faced Mrs Roscoe, her nicely shaped little nose stuck deep into the text
of
A Midsummer Night's Dream.
Immediately behind him sat Howard and Shirley Brown, silent and sombre, each thinking thoughts that were quite impossible for any observer to ascertain - even for the two of them themselves fully to comprehend. And behind the Browns, the enigmatic Kronquists, now the only other married couple registered on the tour, reluctant, it seemed, to engage in even the most perfunctory of conversations: she now reading
Lark Rise to Candleford;
he, the
Good Beer Guide
(just published) for 1991. At the back, as if distanced to the utmost from the woman who
ab initio
had publicly sought to claim him as escort, friend, and guide, sat Phil Aldrich, slowly reading the evening's edition of
The Oxford Mail.
Nor had the sudden coolness between himself and Mrs J. Roscoe escaped most of the other tourists; indeed, this development was proving one of the few topics of conversation as the coach accelerated along the dual carriageway towards Woodstock.

Only two of the party that had arrived at The Randolph, some fifty hours earlier, were no longer in their original seats - the seats immediately behind Mrs Roscoe. One of these missing persons was still lying (lying still, rather!) in the police mortuary in St Aldate's; the other person, with Morse's full permission, had that afternoon departed by train for London, not stopping on this occasion (as he had claimed to have stopped earlier) at Didcot Parkway, but travelling straight through - past Reading, Maidenhead, Slough - to Paddington, whence he had taken a taxi to the Tour Company HQ in Belgravia in order to discuss the last wishes and the last rites of his erstwhile legal spouse, Mrs Laura Mary Stratton.

As the coach pulled powerfully up the hill away from Woodstock, Ashenden once again looked slightly anxiously at his watch. He had rung through to the Swan Hotel in Stratford to set a revised time of arrival at 6.15 p.m.; but by the look of things it was going to be, in Wellington's words, 'a damn close-run thing'. Yet he made no attempt to harass the driver into any illegitimate speed. They'd arrive a little late? So what! Twenty-six plates of 'Mousse Arbroath Smokies' were already laid out, they'd said - with just the single carrot juice for just the single Vegan girl.

Was Inspector Morse (Ashenden pondered) quite the man most people seemed to think he was? A man with a mind that might have left even the mythical Mycroft just floundering a fraction? Ashenden doubted it, his doubt redoubling as the coach drew further and further away from Oxford along the A34.

Everything would be all right.

I feel like I done when Slippery Sun Romped 'ome a winner at 30 to 1

(A.
P.
Herbert,
'Derby Day')

From the street-window of the coffee-lounge, Morse and Lewis had watched them go.

'Think we shall be seeing any of them again, sir?'

'No,' said Morse flatly.

'Does that mean you've got some idea—?'

'Ideas, plural, Lewis! We've seldom had so many clues, have we? But I can't help feeling we've missed all the really vital ones—' Morse broke off and resumed the drift of his earlier thought. 'It's this wretched
love
business - and I still think that Kemp was killed because he had one too many fancy woman.'

'I know I keep on about Mrs Kemp, sir, but don't you think we ought—'

Morse ignored the interruption.
'Why
was he naked? I thought for a start it was because moving the dead body might have been a very messy business. Max said there'd have been buckets of blood, and if someone's going to get it all over a suit, or a dress . . . It's a possibility, Lewis. Or he may have been stripped to delay any identification, I suppose. The longer delayed it is—'

'—the more difficult it gets for us to disprove an alibi.'

Morse nodded. 'But I don't think it was either of those reasons.'

'You think he was making love to a lady?'

'Well, a
woman,
Lewis. And since we know that woman wasn't likely to have been his wife because she'd . . . well, because of the car crash, we've got to decide who it could have been. Just think a minute! We get the husband, or whoever the jealous party was, bounding into the boudoir and catching 'em copulating. Who was
she,
though? I can't for the life of me see how it could have been Sheila Williams he was with . . . No, we've got to look down the race-card for some attractive, available, acquiescent filly - and the likeliest filly is surely—'

Suddenly Morse stopped, his mind once more six furlongs ahead of the field. He had bought a copy of
The Times
before he had come to The Randolph that morning, but hitherto had not even glanced at the headlines:. Now he looked again at the two betting-slips that lay on the table in front of him; then turned to the back of the Business section for the Sport, his eye running down the results of the previous day's racing at Fontwell Park. Ashenden's stake in the 2.50 race, £3 win on Golden Surprise, had contributed further, it appeared, to the luxurious life-style of the bookmaking fraternity. But as Lewis now saw them, Morse's eyes seemed to grow significantly in circumference as they fell upon the result of the 3.15:

1
 
THETFORD QUEEN (J. Francis) 30-1

'Bloody 'ell!' whispered Morse. 'Sir?'

'Ashenden backed a horse yesterday - a horse he said someone in Cambridge had tipped - he put a fiver on it - and it won! Thetford Queen. There! - it's on the betting-slip.'

'Whew! That means he's got a hundred and fifty pounds coming to him.'

'No. He didn't pay any tax on it, so he'd only get one hundred and forty back - including his stake.'

'I didn't realise you knew quite so much about the gee-gees, sir?'

But again Morse ignored the comment: 'He says he was there, Lewis - in the betting-shop. He's put his money on the hot tip, and the thing wins, and
...
he doesn't pick up his winnings!'

Lewis considered what Morse was saying, and shook his head in puzzlement. Surely Ashenden
would
have gone up to the Pay-Out desk immediately, if he'd been there - especially since that was the only time he was going to be in the betting-shop. And if for some strange reason he'd been misinformed, been told that the horse had lost, then it was difficult to see why he'd kept the slips so carefully in his wallet. Why not tear them up like everyone else and contribute to the litter found on every bookie's floor?

Morse interrupted Lewis's thoughts: 'Shall I tell you exactly what our leader was doing in the betting-shop? Establishing his alibi! If you've backed a couple of horses, and if you'll be gone the next day, you stay there like everybody else and listen to the commentaries. But if you pick a couple of complete no-hopers, rank outsiders, well, there's no need to stay, is there? Look at the odds on Golden Surprise! 50-1! So Ashenden spent eight quid of his money
in order to buy himself an alibi.
^’

'Bit of bad luck the horse won, if you see what I mean, sir.'

'Where did he
go,
though?'

'Well he can't be that "jealous husband" you're looking for.'

'No, but he went somewhere he didn't want anyone to know about. I just wonder whether it might have been somewhere like—'

The Manager walked swiftly through: 'Can you come to the phone, Inspector? Very urgent, they say.' It was Max.

'Morse? Get over here smartish! Bloody Hell! Christ!'

'Tell me, Max,' said Morse softly.

'Mrs Kemp, that's what! Tried to cross the nighted ferry; might've made it but for a district-nurse calling unexpectedly.'

'She's not dead?'

'Not yet.'

'Likely to be?’

'Oh, I couldn't say.'

'For God's sake, Max!'
‘Not even for His.'

Morse had never seen Mrs Marion Kemp, but from the marriage photograph that hung in the living room he realised that she must once have been quite a vivacious woman: dark, curly hair; slim, firm figure; and curiously impudent, puckish eyes. She had already been removed to the Intensive Care Unit at the JR2, but in the bedroom there seemed quite sufficient evidence that she had planned a deliberate departure. A brown-glass bottle of sleeping pills stood capless and empty on the bedside table, and beside it, lying on the top of a Georgette Heyer novel, was a short, soberly legible (though unsigned) note: