The Jewel That Was Ours (31 page)

'Er - yes.' Lewis hardly managed to climb up to any plateau of assertiveness.

'Well, I've nothing more to tell you, I'm afraid. Nothing I can add to the statement I've already—'

'Meeting your wife, Mr Downes?' interrupted Morse.

'Pardon? Just a minute, Inspector! I. . . just a minute, please.' Downes fitted a hearing-aid taken from his pocket into his right ear, the aid prompdy emitting a series of shrill whistles as he fiddled rather fecklessly with the controls.

'I was asking whether you were meeting—' bawled Morse - to no avail, as it appeared.

'If you'll just bear with me a few minutes, gentlemen, I'll just nip along to the car, if I may. I always keep a spare aid in the glove compartment.' The beseeching grin around the slightly lop-sided mouth gave his face an almost schoolboyish look.

Morse gestured vaguely: 'Of course. We'll walk along with you, sir.'

In front of the railway station, a second police car (summoned by a confident Morse as Lewis had driven him from North Oxford) was now waiting, and the Chief Inspector nodded a perfunctory greeting to the two detective-constables who sat side by side in the front seats as they watched, and awaited, developments; watched the three men walk over to the twenty-minute waiting-area set aside for those meeting passengers from British Rail journeys - an area where parking cost nothing at all; watched them as they passed through that area and walked into the main car-park, with the bold notice affording innocent trespassers the clearest warning:

PARKING FOR BRITISH RAIL

PASSENGERS ONLY. FOR OTHER USERS WITHOUT PARKING-TOKENS, £10 PER DAY

'Mind telling me, sir, why you didn't just wait in the twenty-minute car-park? Parking where you have done seems a rather unnecessary expense, doesn't it? Doesn't it. . . ?'

'Pardon, Inspector? If you give me just a second
...
a
second or two . . . just. . .'

Downes took a bunch of car-keys from his pocket, opened the door of a British-Racing-Green MG Metro, got into the driver's seat, and leaned over left to open the glove compartment.

Both Morse and Lewis stood, rather warily, beside the car as Downes began to fiddle (once more) with a hearing-aid - one which looked to them suspiciously like the model that had earlier given rise to such piercing oscillation.

There we are then!' said Downes, as he got out of the car and faced them, his face beaming with an almost childlike pleasure. 'Back in the land of the living! I think you were trying to say something, Inspector?'

'No. I wasn't
trying
to say anything, Mr Downes. I
was
saying something. I was saying how odd it seemed to me that you didn't park your car in the twenty-minute car-park.'

'Ah! Well, I did in a way. I seem to have collected an awful lot of those parking-tokens over the last few months. You see, I often have to go to London and sometimes I don't get back until pretty late. And late at night the barrier here where you slip in your parking-token is often open, and you can just drive straight through.'

'But why
waste
one of your precious tokens?' persisted Morse.

'Ah! I see what you're getting at. I'm a very law-abiding citizen, Inspector. I came here a bit early this evening, and I didn't want to risk any of those clamps or fines or anything. There's an Antiques Fair this week just along Park End Street, and I'd got my eye on a little set of drawers, yew-wood veneer. Lucy's birthday's coming up, November the seventh ..'

'And then you called in the Royal Oxford, no doubt?'

'I did
not,
I no longer drink and drive. Never!'

'Some people do, sir,' said Morse. 'It's the most common cause of road accidents, you know.'

There was a silence between the three men who now. stood slightly awkwardly alongside the MG Metro. Downes, as it appeared, had read the situation adequately, and was expecting to accompany the policemen - well, somewhere! -and he opened the driver's door of the Metro once more. But Morse, leaning slightly towards him, opened his right palm, like a North-African Berber begging for alms.

'We'd like you to come with us, sir. If you just hand over your car-keys to me, Sergeant Lewis here will see that your car is picked up later and returned to your home address.'

'Surely this isn't necessary, is it? I know where the police station is, for Christ's sake!' Suddenly, within the last few words, Downes had lost whatever composure he had hitherto sought to sustain.

'The keys, please!' insisted Morse quietly.

'Look! I just don't know what all this bloody nonsense is about. Will you please
tell
me.'

'Certainly! You can
hear
me all right now?'

Downes almost snarled his reluctant 'Yes'; and listened, mouth agape with incredulity, as Morse beckoned over to the two detective-constables from the second police car.

'Cedric Downes, I arrest you on suspicion of the murder of Dr Theodore Kemp. It is my duty to advise you that anything you now say may be noted by my sergeant here and possibly used in evidence in any future criminal prosecution.'

But as one of the detective-constables clicked a pair of handcuffs round his wrists, Cedric Downes was apparently in no state at all to mouth as much as a monosyllable, let alone give utterance to any incriminating statement. For many seconds he just stood where he was, as still as a man who has gazed into the eyes of the Medusa.

As usual he was offering explanations for what other people had not even noticed as problems

(Bryan Magee,
Aspects of Wagner)

After Downes had been driven away, Morse and Lewis walked back to their own car, where Morse gave urgent instructions to the forensic lab to send a couple of their whizz-kids over to the railway station - immediately! - and to Kidlington HQ to see that a breakdown van would be available in about an hour's time to ferry away a certain Metro.

'You're absolutely sure about Downes, aren't you,' said Lewis. But it was a statement, not a question.

‘Oh, yes!'

'What now, sir?'

‘We'll wait for forensics. Then we'll go and see how Downes is making out - do him good to kick his heels in a cell for half an hour. He was lucky, you know, Lewis. Bloody lucky, one way or another.'

'Hadn't you better start at the beginning, sir? We've got a few minutes' wait, like as not.'

So Morse told him.

The key thing in the case was the phone call made by Kemp. And, yes, it
was
made by Kemp, although some doubt could quite properly have been harboured on the matter: Ashenden knew the man, and knew his voice; and in spite of what was probably a poorish extension-line, confirmation that the call
was
from Kemp had come from the telephone-operator, someone else who knew him - knew him very well, in fact. No, the call was not made by anyone
pretending
to be Kemp. But Kemp had not made the call, as he'd claimed, from Paddington! He'd made it from
Oxford.

He was anxious about making absolutely sure that another person was present in The Randolph at the lunch session with the American tourists; and he learned quite unequivocally that this person
was
there, although he didn't actually speak to him. Furthermore, Kemp's absence that afternoon would mean that this other person - yes, Downes - would be all the more committed to
staying
with the tourists for the scheduled 'informal get-together'. This arrangement, cleverly yet quite simply managed, would give him a couple of hours to get on with what he desperately wanted to get on with: to climb into bed with Downes's beautiful and doubtlessly over-sexed wife, Lucy, and get his bottom on the top sheet before his time ran out. The pair of them had probably not been having an affair for long - only perhaps after Kemp's long infatuation with the semi-permanently sozzled Sheila had begun to wear off. But where can they meet? It has to be at Downes's place: Kemp hasn't got a room in college, and it can't be at Kemp's place because his wife is a house-bound invalid. So, that morning presented a wonderful opportunity - and just a little compensation perhaps for the huge disappointment Kemp must undoubtedly have experienced over the theft of the Wolvercote Tongue. The jewel was almost in his grasp; almost about to be displayed and photographed and written up in all the right journals: a jewel he himself had traced, and one he'd worked so hard to get donated to the Ashmolean. No wonder his interest in swopping pleasantries with ageing Americans had sunk to zero; no wonder the prospect of the lubricious Lucy Downes proved so irresistible. Now the deception practised by Kemp was a very clever one. If he was going to be late on parade - 3 p.m., he'd promised -every pressure would be on the other two group leaders, Sheila Williams and Cedric Downes, to keep the tourists adequately amused by each of them shouldering an extra responsibility. It would not, incidentally, have occurred to Kemp that a consequence of such last-minute re-arrangements was that several members of the group took the opportunity this afforded to perform a strange assortment of extra-mural

activities - from viewing steam locomotives to tracing lost offspring. Red herrings, all.

But then things started to go wrong. Downes is not very deaf at all yet; but sometimes, with certain kinds of background noise, and when people are asking questions, well, there can be difficulty. A deaf person, as Lucy Downes told us, is not so much worried about not knowing the answer to any question put to him; he's worried, embarrassingly so,
about not hearing the question.
And at lunchtime - there are witnesses - Downes's hearing-aid began to play up and he discovered he wasn't carrying his spare aid with him. He decided to go home and pick it up, and in fact he was
seen
going up St Giles' on his bicycle towards North Oxford. It's hardly difficult to guess the sequence of events immediately after he'd quietly inserted his key in the Yale lock. He may have had a sixth sense about the presence of some stranger in the house; more likely he saw some physical evidence - a coat, a hat - belonging to a person he knew. He picked up a walking-stick - or something - from the hall-stand, and leapt up the stairs to find his wife and Kemp
in medio coitu,
both of them completely naked. In a fury of hatred and jealousy he thrashed his stick about Kemp's head while Kemp himself tried to extricate himself from the twisted sheets, to get out of the bed, and to defend himself - but he didn't make it. He staggered back and fell, and got his head crashed - a
second
time, as we know - against the corner-post of the double bed or the sharp edge of the fireplace. He had a thin skull - a medical fact - and there was a sudden, dreadful silence; and a great deal of blood. The despairing, faithless, gaping, horrified wife looked down at her lover, and knew that he was dead. Now, sometimes it is extremely difficult to kill a man. Sometimes it is quite extraordinarily easy, as it was then . . .