The Jewel That Was Ours (35 page)

'There was nothing
to
say. It was my fault, what else do you want me to say?'

'Just
how
_,
you know . . .'

'I was walking along there. I was in a hurry to catch the tube - it was the rush hour - I didn't want to miss the train - Cedric
...
you see, Cedric was waiting—'

'At Oxford, you mean? He was waiting at Oxford?' 'Of course. I was just trying to get past some people in front of me and I stepped off the pavement and the driver - he didn't have a chance. It was
my
fault, don't you believe me? He braked and
...
It was the
case
really. If it hadn't been for the case, I think perhaps . . .'

'The car hit the case, you mean? Hit the case first?'

Lucy nodded. 'It sort of, well - cushioned things, and I hit a litter-bin on the kerb and . . .' She lifted her right hand and pointed vaguely across to the left-hand side of her body.

'So you still had the case with you, then? When the car hit you?'

For the first time the hitherto lucid Lucy looked a little bemused, as if she was unable to follow Lewis's last question. 'I don't quite follow . . . I'm sorry.'

'I just wanted to know if you were carrying the case, that's all.'

'Of course I was.'

'Do you - do you know where it is now, Mrs Downes?' 'Isn't it still under the bed, Sergeant?'

Morse took the call just after 11 p.m.

'You'll never guess what's happened, sir!'

'Don't put your bank balance on it, Lewis!'

'She's going to be all right, they think, sir. The Met got it wrong about the ICU.'

Morse said nothing.

'You are - well, pleased about
that,
aren't you?'

'I take no delight in death, Lewis, and if one thing worries me above all else it is accidents - the random concourse of atoms in the void, as Epicurus used to say.'

'You feeling tired, sir?'

'Yes.'

'You
knew
it was an accident all the time?' 'No. Not all the time.' 'You're losing me - as usual.'

‘What is this news of yours, Lewis, that I shall never guess?'

'The case, sir! The case we both saw Mrs Downes take up to London.'

‘We both saw her put in the
taxi,
if we are to be accurate.'

'But she did bring it to London! And you won't guess what was in it.'

'Curtains, Lewis? Any good? Curtains with French pleats? By the way, remind me one day to explain this business of French pleats to you. Mrs Lewis would be glad if you took a bit more interest in household furnishings and interior decoration.'

'What do you want me to do about this left-luggage key, sir?'

'What are you talking about? What makes you think that's a left-luggage key?'

After Lewis had rung off, Morse sat at his desk and smoked three Dunhill International cigarettes one after the other. He'd been shaken, certainly, when Cedric Downes had invited him to go along to the North Oxford Golf Club and knock up the caretaker if necessary. And Lewis's phone call had surely hammered the last coffin-nail into the Cedric-Lucy theory. Yet Morse's mind was never more fertile than when faced with some apparently insuperable obstacle, and even now he found it difficult to abandon his earlier, sweet hypothesis about the murder of Theodore Kemp. He gazed out through the curtainless window on to the well-lit, virtually deserted parking-area: only his own red Jaguar and two white police cars. He could - should! - get off now and go to bed. He would be home in ten minutes. Less, perhaps, at this hour. . . Yes, it was extremely useful to have a car, whatever people said about traffic and pollution and expense . . . yes . . .

Morse was conscious that his mind was drifting off into an interesting avenue of thought, but also that he was drifting off to sleep, as well. It was the cars that had started some new idea . . . For the minute, though, it was gone. Yet there were other new ideas that jostled together in his brain for some more prominent recognition. First, the conviction that there was - must be! - a link, perhaps a blindingly obvious link, between the theft of the Wolvercote Jewel and the murder of Theodore Kemp. Second, the growing belief that
two
people must have been involved in things, quite certainly in the murder. Third, the worrying suspicion that amongst the evidence already accumulated, the statements taken, the people interviewed, the personal relationships observed, the
obiter dicta,
the geography of North Oxford - that amongst all these things
somewhere
there was a fact that he had seen or heard but never fully recognised or understood. Fourth, the strange reluctance he felt about abandoning Downes as Suspect Number One. And as Morse opened his passenger door, he stood for a while looking up at the Pole Star, and asking himself the question he had been asking for the past two hours: was there
any
way in which Downes could still have been the murderer after all?

Many of Morse's ideas were either so strange or so wildly improbable that most of them were always doomed to early disappointment. Yet, as it happened, he was registering well above par that evening, for three of the four ideas he had formulated were finally to prove wholly correct.

Lewis had fallen fast asleep on the back seat of the police car and remained so for the whole of the journey back to Oxford. In his younger days, he had been a middle-weight Army boxing champion, and now he dreamed that he was in the ring again, with a right-cross from a swarthy, swift-footed opponent smashing into the left-hand side of his jaw. He had tried to feel inside his mouth to see if any teeth were broken or missing, but the great bulk of his boxing-glove precluded any such investigation.

When the car finally pulled up in St Aldate's, the young driver opened the rear door and shook Sergeant Lewis awake, failing to notice that the first action of his passenger was to run the forefinger of his left hand slowly along his upper teeth.

Where water, warm or cool, is Good for gout - at Aquae Sulis (Graffito in the Pump Room, Bath, c.1760)

'Bairth? This is
Bairth?'

Seated on the nearside front seat of the luxury coach, John Ashenden glanced across at the diminutive septuagenarian from California. 'Yes, Mrs Roscoe, this is Bath.'

With less than conspicuous enthusiasm, he leaned forward for his microphone, turned it on, and began. Not quite so confidently as in Stratford; or in Oxford, of course, where he had memorised whole sentences from the Jan Morris guide. - 'Bath, ladies and gentlemen, is the site of a Roman spa,
Aquae Sulis,
probably built in the first and second centuries
ad.
A good deal of the extensive baths has been excavated and the city presents the tourist of today with perhaps the most splendidly restored of all Roman remains in Europe.'

On either side of the central aisle, heads nodded at the buildings and streets around them as a now livelier Ashenden continued, himself (like the site, it appeared) splendidly restored from whatever malaise had affected him over the previous two days, a malaise which had been noted and commented upon by several others of the group besides Mrs Shirley Brown - the latter sitting comfortably now in her usual seat, the effects of the sting having cleared up fairly quickly under the twin application of Mrs Roscoe's unguents.

'Looks a swell place, Shirl,' ventured Howard Brown. 'Yeah. Just wish Laura was with us - and Eddie. It all seems so sad.' 'Too right! Bus seems sorta empty somehow.'

As scheduled, the tourists had lunched at Cirencester, after leaving Stratford earlier that Sunday morning. The weather was still holding, if only just: another golden day in late autumn. And perhaps in the minds of many, the memories of their tragic stay in Oxford were slowly softening at the edges.

One of the slightly younger widows, Mrs Nancy Wiseman, a librarian from Oklahoma City, was seated at the back of the coach beside Phil Aldrich. She had observed with a quiet pleasure how the strident Roscoe woman had markedly cooled towards her former partner after his refusal (and that of most of the others) to sign her petulant letter of complaint concerning Sheila Williams. Although Phil had been slightly reserved in his manner towards her (Nancy), she knew that that was his way and she was enjoying the company of that wiry, small-boned, gently spoken citizen from Sacramento who almost invariably found himself at the back of every queue that ever formed itself. Yes, the tour was definitely looking up a little, and only the previous evening she had written a card to her daughter to say that in spite of a death and a theft and a murder she was 'beginning to make one or two very nice friends on the trip'.

In truth, however, Phil himself was finding Nancy Wiseman a little too effusive for his liking and - perversely, as it seemed - would have preferred sitting next to Janet Roscoe, up there at the front of the coach, as he listened to (and indeed almost wholly managed to hear) the end of Ashenden's introduction to Bath:

'In the eighteenth century the city was transformed into a resort for English high society - being particularly associated, of course, with the name of Beau Nash, the great dandy and gamester who lived here during the 1740s and 50s. Among its many literary connections, Bath can number such great figures as Henry Fielding, Fanny Burney, Jane Austen, William Wordsworth, Walter Scott, Charles Dickens - and most famous of all, perhaps, Geoffrey Chaucer and
The Wife of Bath's Tale.'

It was a good note on which to end.

Opposite him, he noticed that Janet Roscoe had delved once more into the deep handbag, this time producing a very slim volume, whose title it was impossible for him not to see, and which he could have guessed in any case: CHAUCER,
Tale of the Wyf of Bathe.