The Jewel That Was Ours (36 page)

He smiled across at her, and as she opened her book at the Prologue, she smiled quite sweetly back at him.

It seemed a good omen for the stay in Bath.

Only seemed.

During late visits to Stinsford in old age he would often visit the unmarked grave of Louisa Harding
(Florence Emily Hardy,
The Early Life of Thomas Hardy)

According to the hospital bulletin on the Monday afternoon, the condidon of Lucy Downes was now officially listed as 'comfortable', one notch above the 'satisfactory' of the Sunday, and two above the earlier 'stable'. Three visits from her husband had helped, perhaps (the first in the small hours of the Sunday morning, two hours after his release from custody), but some slight complications had arisen with continued internal bleeding, and she had become deeply and embarrassingly conscious of how she must appear to everyone whenever she smiled. So she forbore to do so altogether, even to Cedric, and as she lay in her bed that day, her arm now beginning to give her some considerable pain, she would willingly (she knew) have cracked two of her ribs rather than chipped, a couple of her teeth.

Vanity, all is vanity, saith the preacher. And 'satisfactory' was arguably too favourable a judgement on her circumstances. But that was the word Morse repeated to the first question Lewis put to him about Lucy's progress at 8.30 a.m. on the Tuesday. It may have been that Morse had smiled a little at the question. But it may not.

Activity in the two days following Cedric Downes's release had hardly afforded a model of investigative collaboration, with Morse sleeping through until the late afternoon of the Sunday, then idling away most of the Monday in his office, moodily perusing the documents in the case; and with Lewis doing the converse, making what he felt had been a fairly significant contribution to the case on the Sunday afternoon, and then spending the whole of the Monday abed, where he

had lain dead to the wideawake world, and where, even when Mrs Lewis had gently rocked his shoulder at 6.30 p.m. and quietly breathed the prospect of egg and chips into his ear, he had turned his head over into the pillow and blissfully resumed his slumbers. But now he felt fully refreshed.

By the look of him, however, his chief had not perhaps shared a similarly successful period of recuperation, for he sounded tetchy as he picked up the brief note Lewis had left him.

'You say Stratton
was
quite definitely out at Didcot when Kemp was being killed?' 'No doubt about it, sir. I went over there yesterday—' 'You were in bed yesterday.' 'Sunday, I mean. They remembered him.' 'Who's "they"?'

'One of 'em took a photo of him on the footplate of "The Cornishman". He'd already got it developed and was going to post it to America. Stratton gave him a fiver. He's going to get a copy and send it here.'

'And it
was
Stratton?'

'It was Stratton.'

'Oh!'

'Where does all this leave us, sir? I just don't know where we are.'

'And you think I do?' mumbled the ill-shaven Morse. 'Here! Read this - came this morning.'

Lewis took the envelope handed him, postmarked Stratford-upon-Avon, and withdrew the two hand-written sheets.

'Well?'

'I suppose you want me to tell you how many spelling mistakes he's made.' That would be something.'

'Looks all right to me. There's an apostrophe missing, though.'

Morse's face brightened. 'Well done! Excellent! There
is
the one spelling mistake, but you're
definitely
improving . . . That's a clue, by the way . . . No? Never mind!'

'At least we're getting some of the loose ends tied up.'

'You mean we cross Ashenden off the suspect-list?'

'Don't know, sir. But we can cross Stratton off, I reckon. He was in Didcot most of the afternoon. That's for sure.'

'So he couldn't have killed Kemp?'

'I don't see how.'

'Nor do I,' said Morse.

'Back to square one!'

'You know where we went wrong, don't you? It was that phone call that sent me up the cul-de-sac. You see, we can't get away from the fact that if Kemp
was
in London, he could easily have caught an earlier train. That still puzzles me! He rang at twelve-thirty-five and there was a train at twelve-forty-five. Ten minutes to walk across from the phone to the platform!'

'You know, we haven't really checked that, have we? I mean the train could have been cancelled
...
or something.'

Morse said, 'I've checked. It's almost the only profitable thing I did yesterday.' He lit a cigarette and sat staring gloomily out of the window.

Lewis found himself looking at the back page of
The Oxford Times
which lay on the desk. Morse had not started the crossword yet ('Ichabod' this week), but just to the right of it Lewis noticed a brief item on a fatal accident at the Marston Ferry Road traffic lights: a young student who had been taking a crash course in EFL.
Crash
course! Huh!

'Don't tell me you've done one across, Lewis?'

'No. Just reading about this accident at the Marston Ferry lights. Bad junction, you know, that is. I think there ought to be a "filter right" as you go into the Banbury Road.'

'Fair point!'

Lewis read on aloud. ' "Georgette le . . . something . . . daughter of M. Georges le . . . something of Bordeaux . . ."' But now his eyes had spotted the date. ' 'Sfunny! This accident was a week last Saturday, sir, at half-past five. That's exactly one week earlier than Mrs Downes.'

'Life's full of coincidences, I keep telling you that.'

'It's just that when you get two things happening like that, people say there's going to be three, don't they? That's what the wife always says.'

'Look, if a third accident'll please you, volunteer for the ambulance crew this morning. It's a fiver to a cracked piss-pot that some irresponsible sod—' Suddenly Morse stopped, the old tingle of high excitement thrilling strangely across his shoulders.

'Christ! What a fool you've been!' he murmured softly to himself.

'Sir?'

Morse rattled out his words: 'What's the name of Kemp's publisher? The one you rang to make sure he'd been there.'

' "Babington's". The fellow there said it was named after Macaulay' (Lewis smiled with distant memories) 'Thomas Babington Macaulay, sir - you know, the one who wrote the
Lays of Ancient Rome.
That's the one poem I—'

'Get on to the American Consulate! Quick, for Christ's sake! Find out where Stratton is - they'll know, I should think.
We've got to stop him leaving the country.'

Morse's blue eyes gleamed triumphantly. 'I think I know, Lewis! I think I
know.'

But Eddie Stratton had left the country the previous evening on a Pan Am jumbo bound for New York - together with his late wife Laura, the latter lying cold and stiff in a coffin in a special compartment just above the undercarriage.

At day's end you came, and like the evening sun, left an afterglow

(Basil Swift,
Collected Haiku)