The Jewel That Was Ours (40 page)

'Are we running out of suspects, then? Almost, I agree. Your tour started with only three married couples, did it not? And already we have eliminated two of these: the Strattons and the Browns.' In the tense silence which followed this remark, all eyes now turned upon the couple who had been fetched from their bedroom; the couple who had decided that any further diet of delightful architecture would have amounted to a sort of cultural force-feeding. But the pivoting glances which now fell full upon Sam and Vera Kronquist almost immediately reverted to Chief Inspector Morse as the latter rounded off his background summary.

'But Mr Kronquist, as several of you already know, was assisting Mrs Sheila Williams during most of die afternoon in question with the temperamental kaleidoscope allocated to her for her illustrated talk on "Alice". Now Mr Kronquist may be a very clever man, but
he
is not permitted, either, to suspend the physical laws of the Universe. And you do see, don't you, that Mrs Williams, too, must now be crossed off our list of suspects? And finally we shall cross the name of Cedric Downes off that same list, and for exactly the same reason. If anyone from the group here met Kemp at 3 p.m., it wasn't Downes, because nine or ten of you here will willingly testify to the incontrovertible fact that he was talking to you from that time onwards. Did I say running out of likely suspects? And yet, ladies and gentlemen, someone
did
meet Kemp at the railway station that afternoon.

'One
of you
did!'

Either what woman having ten pieces of silver, if she lose one piece, doth not light a candle, and sweep the house, and seek diligently till she find it?

(St Luke,
ch. 15, v. 8)

Throughout the morning on which Morse was addressing his audience in Bath, and stripping away the deceptions and the half-truths which hitherto had veiled the naked truth of the case, there was much activity at the Trout Inn, a fine riverside hostelry set between the weir and the Godstow Lock in the village of Wolvercote, only a couple of miles out on the western side of North Oxford. During the summer months hordes of visitors regularly congregate there to eat and drink at their leisure on the paved terrace between the mellow sandstone walls of the inn itself and the river's edge, where many sit on the low stone parapet and look below them through the clear, greenish water at the mottled dark-brown and silvery backs of the carp that rise to the surface.to snap up the crisps and the crusts thrown down to them.

But that Wednesday morning, the few customers who had called for an early drink were much more interested in other underwater creatures: four of them, with sleek black skins and disproportionately large webbed feet, circling up and down, and round and round, and sweeping the depths diligently below the weir, streams of bubbles intermittently rising to the surface from the cylinders strapped to their backs. Each of the four was an experienced police frogman, and each of them knew exactly what he was looking for -knew indeed the exact dimensions of the object and the positioning of the three great ruby eyes once set into it.

Thus far they had found nothing, and above the bed of the river their searchings were stirring up a cloudy precipitate of mud as the white waters gushed across the weir. Yet hopes were reasonably high. The frogmen had been briefed - and with such a degree of certitude! - as to the exact point on the hump-backed bridge whence the Tongue had been thrown. So they were able to plot their operation with some precision as first they swam slowly abreast across the river, then turning and recrossing the current, ever feeling, ever searching, as they worked their way slowly downstream into the more placid reaches of the water. But nothing.

After its discovery in 1873, the Tongue had found its way into the hands of a treasure-hunter, who had kept quiet about it and sold it to a London dealer, who in turn had sold it to an American collector, who had lent it to an exhibition in Philadelphia in 1922 - which latter appearance had provided the clues, sixty-five years later, for a detective-story-like investigation on the part of Theodore Kemp of the Ashmolean Museum - a man who now lay dead in the mortuary at the Radcliffe Infirmary. But the man who had agreed to tell Chief Inspector Morse precisely where he had stood, and with what impetus thrown the Tongue back into the river at Wolvercote - this man was seated, very much alive, in the vastly confusing complex of Kennedy Airport. Beside him sat a man of such immense proportions that Eddie Stratton wondered how he could ever fit into the seat that had been booked for him on the flight to Heathrow, scheduled to leave in forty minutes' time. He wondered, too, whether the man would be willing to unlock the handcuff that chafed away at his right wrist. For he, Stratton, was contemplating no high-jinks or high-jacks in mid-Atlantic flight.

In great affairs we ought to apply ourselves less to creating chances than to profiting from those that offer

(La Rochefoucauld,
Maxims)

It was way past coffee-break time in the Chesterton Hotel, but no one seemed to notice.

'Kemp was met at the railway station,' continued Morse. 'He was there told something - I'm guessing - which persuaded him to accompany the driver to his own flat in Water Eaton Road. Perhaps he was told that his wife was suddenly taken very ill; was dead, even. Perhaps some less dramatic disclosure sufficed. There, at Kemp's home -again I'm guessing - a quarrel took place in which Kemp was struck over the head and sent stumbling in his own living room, where his right temple crashed against the kerb of the fire-place - and where he died. I'm amazed how difficult it is occasionally for a murderer to despatch his victim: in the Thames Valley we once had a case where no fewer than twenty-three vicious stab-wounds were insufficient to complete the sorry business. But at the same time it is occasionally so terribly easy to rob a fellow human being of his life: a slight nudge, let us say, from a car-bumper, and a cyclist is knocked down and hits his head against the road -and in a second or two a life has gone. In this case, Kemp had a thin skull, and his murder was no problem. But the body? Oh yes, the body was a problem all right!

'Now, if the murder took place at about three forty-five p.m., as I believe it did, why do we find Kemp's wife, Marion, doing nothing about it? For we can be absolutely sure she was there, the whole time. Maybe the reason for this was that she was vindictively happy
not
to do anything, and it is the opinion of my sergeant here that she probably hated her husband almost as intensely as the murderer himself did. But Marion Kemp could not, in my view, have killed her husband, and quite certainly she could hardly have moved the body a single centimetre from where it lay. On the other hand, Kemp was a slimly built, light-boned man, and it
would
have been possible for most people here, let us say - anyone reasonably mobile, reasonably fit - to have moved that body at least some small distance.
Even for a woman,
if she were sturdily or athletically built.'

The innuendo in this remark proved too much for the petite figure in the front row, who during the last few words was showing signs of unmistakable distress.

'Inspector! Chief Inspector, rather! For you even to
suggest
that I, for one, could have shifted a bardy, why, that is utterly absurd! And if you think that I am going to sit here—'

Morse smiled wanly at the lady as she sat in the front row, a lady turning the scales at not much more, surely, than around five stone.

'I should never accuse
you
of that, Mrs Roscoe. Please believe me!'

Mollified, it seemed, Janet sat back primly and slimly in her seat, as John Ashenden, seated immediately opposite (beside Dr Moule), looked across at her with a troublous, darkling gaze. And Morse continued:

'In the concreted yard at the back of the flats at Water Eaton Road stood a light-weight, rubber-wheeled, aluminium wheelbarrow which one of the maintenance men had been using earlier that day. It was into this barrow, under cover of the night, at about seven p.m., that the body was put, covered with plastic sacks, themselves in turn covered with a fair sprinkling of autumn leaves, before being wheeled across the low wooden bridge there, across a well-worn path through the field, and across to the swiftly flowing current of the River Cherwell, where unceremoniously the body was tipped into the water. And as I say' (Morse looked slowly around his

audience) 'it was one of your own group who performed this grisly task - a
man -
a man who would have felt little squeamishness about first stripping the dead man of his clothes - for there had been much blood, much messy, sticky blood which almost inevitably would have transferred itself to the clothes of the man disposing of the body; a man who for the last ten years of his working life had been inured to such gruesome matters, as a moderately competent "mortician" in America.'

There was a sudden communal intake of breath from the audience, and clearly no need for Morse to spell things out further. But he did:

'Yes! Afr
Eddie Stratton:

'No,
sir!'

The voice from the back of the room caused every head to crane round, although the mild tones of Phil Aldrich were known so well by now to everyone.

'You have my testimony, sir, and you have Eddie's too that we—'

'Mr Aldrich! I do accept your point, and I shall explain. Let us return to Stratton briefly. He had become a small-time mortician, specialising in the beautification - please allow the word! - of corpses that had died an ugly or disfiguring death. And a bachelor. Until two and a bit years ago, that is, when he met and married the widow of a middle-bracket philanthropist. The marriage was mostly an accommodation of interests; a convenience. Eddie did the shopping, tended the garden, mended the taps and the fuses, and serviced the family car. Laura - Laura Stratton as she now was - was reasonably content with the new arrangements: she was less anxious about burglars, she was chauffeured to her twice-weekly consultations with the latest chiropodist, she forgot most of her worries about the upkeep of the household, and she still found herself able to indulge the twin passions of her life, smoking cigarettes and playing contract bridge -simultaneously, wherever possible.

'But there had been disappointed expectations, on both sides, when the estate of the late philanthropist had finally, well almost finally, been settled, with the lawyers still growing fat on the pickings.
Objets d’art
there were aplenty, but most of them were held in trust for some collection or gallery. And so the prospects of a happily-monied marriage of convenience were ever
diminishing,
until an idea occurred to the pair of them - certainly to Laura Stratton. The Wolvercote Tongue was insured for half a million dollars, and one of the safest ways of transferring it over to England had got to be on the person of the traveller: few people would entrust such an item to letter-post or parcel-post or courier-service; and even if they did, the insurance-risk premium would be prohibitive. So the Strattons took it themselves -
and then made sure it was stolen.
That was their plan. The reason the plan went so sadly askew was the not-wholly-unexpected but extremely untimely death of Laura Stratton herself, though whether this was occasioned by her own complicity, excitement, remorse - whatever! - we shall never really know. The plan - a simple one - was for the Tongue to be stolen immediately after Laura had installed herself in her room at The Randolph. She would be sure to make such a song and dance about her aching feet that she would get right to the head of the queue for the room-key -well, apart from Mrs Roscoe, naturally!'