The Jewel That Was Ours (42 page)

It had been the night at the University Arms in Cambridge that Plan B had been agreed. Such a
simple
plan, that 'plan' seemed far too grand an appellation: audibly (not a difficult task!) Laura would complain about her feet on the journey to Oxford; quite naturally (for her regular seat was on the row second to the front) she would be first in the queue at Reception in The Randolph - even Mrs Roscoe probably conceding her customary prerogative; she would leave her handbag immediately inside the allocated, unlocked bedroom; she would take a bath; she would leave the thief the childishly simple assignment of putting a hand inside the door. His own role? Principally to keep as far away from his room as possible. The police (no way in which they could not be involved) would be primarily interested in who was going to profit from any insurance, and he, Stratton himself, would have to vie with Caesar's wife in immunity from any suspicion. As it happened, he'd already prepared the ground for that by making something of a fuss of Shirley Brown; not at all difficult, because he
wanted
to make a fuss of Shirley Brown; and that lady had been flattered to follow his suggestion for a twilit stroll round Radcliffe Square - a stroll on which they'd seen their courier, Ashenden, and in turn been seen by the all-seeing Roscoe, a woman whom no one could abide, yet one whom everyone believed. Clever little touch, that! The problem that had worried Stratton about the earlier (now discarded) Plan A was where on earth he was going to dispose of the handbag. But need he have worried? Would it really have mattered if the bag had been found fairly soon in the nearest litter-bin? No, it wouldn't! The only thing that had to be disposed of was the jewel itself - not only because the insurance money must not be put in jeopardy, but also because someone else desired
Kemp
to be deprived of it. Desired it desperately.

Then Laura had to put her foot in it! Put her goddamned, aching, corny, foot right in it.

She'd gone and died.

Not that he (Stratton) had been involved in any way in that first death. No! But as far as the second death was concerned? Ah! That was a different matter. And whatever happened he would never tell the whole truth about that to anyone - not voluntarily - not even to that smart-alec copper, Chief Inspector Morse himself.

Yet he respected the man; couldn't help it, remembering the initial broadside on the transatlantic telephone, when Morse had immediately breached the outer fortifications.

'No, Inspector. There's nothing I can tell you about Kemp's death. Nothing.'

'I was more interested in the jewel, sir.'

'Ah! "The jewel that was ours", as Laura used to think of it.' 'Come off it!' 'Pardon, Inspector?' 'I said "Bullshit!"'

What's in a name? that which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet

(Shakespeare,
Romeo and Juliet)

Although it had been a rather chilly morning, several of the people seated in the Beau Nash Room wished that the central heating could be turned down a few degrees. Howard Brown wiped his high forehead with a large handkerchief, and John Ashenden brushed the sleeve of his sports jacket across his upper lip where he felt the sweat-prickles forming. Morse himself drew a forefinger half a circuit round the neck of his slightly over-tight collar, and continued:

'I know who stole the Wolvercote Tongue. I know where it is, and I am quite sure that it will soon be recovered. I also know which one of you - which one of you here - killed Dr Kemp.' The hush was now so intense that Lewis found himself wondering whether his involuntary swallow had been audible, as for thirty seconds or so Morse stood silent and still, only his eyes moving left and right, and left and right again across the central aisle. No one in the audience moved either. No one dared even to cough.

'I'd hoped that the guilty person would have come forward by now. I say that because you may have read of several cases in England recently where the police have been criticised - in some cases rightly so - for depending for a prosecution on the uncorroborated confessions of accused persons, confessions which, certainly in one or two cases, might have been extorted in less than safe and satisfactory circumstances. How much better it would have been, then, if Kemp's murderer came forward -
comes
forward - in the presence of his friends and fellow tourists . . .' Morse again looked around the room; but if there were any one person upon whom those blue eyes focused, it was not apparent to the others seated there. 'No?'

‘No?' queried Morse again.

'So be it! There is little more to tell you. The biggest single clue in this case I passed over almost without reading it, until my sergeant jogged my memory. It was contained in a police report of the road accident in which Kemp crippled his wife - and also killed the driver of the other car, a Mrs P. J. Mayo, a thirty-five-year-old woman from California: Mrs Philippa J. Mayo, whose husband had earlier been killed in a gunnery accident on the USS
South Dakota.
That would have been bad enough for Philippa Mayo's parents-in-law, would it not? But at least the man had been serving his country; at least he'd died for some
cause
- whether that cause was justified or not. What of Philippa's own parents, though, when
she
is killed? Their daughter. Their only daughter. Their only child. A child killed needlessly, pointlessly, tragically, and wholly
reprehensibly
- by a man who must have appeared to those parents, from the reports they received, as a drunken, selfish, wicked swine who deserved to be as dead as their daughter . . . Above all, I suspect, the parents were appalled by what seemed to them the quite extraordinary leniency of the magistrates at the criminal hearing, and they came over to England, father and mother, to lay the ghost that had haunted them night and day for the past two years. But why only then, you may ask? I learn that the wife had been suffering from cervical cancer for the previous three years; had just endured her second massive session of chemotherapy; had decided that she could never face a third; had only at the outside six more months to live. So the pair came over to view the killer of their daughter, and if they deemed him worthy of death, they vowed that he would die. They met him the once only, on the night before he died: a cocky philanderer, as they saw him; a cruel, conceited specimen; and now a man who, like Philippa Mayo's mother, had so very little time to live. The link between the two crimes, and the motivation for them, was clear to me at last, and the link and the motivation merged into a single whole: the implacable hatred of a man and his wife for the person who had killed their daughter. 'For Theodore Kemp.

'I keep mentioning "man
and
wife" because I finally persuaded myself that no one single person on his own could have carried through the murder of Kemp. It could have been
any
two people, though, and we had to try to find out as much about all of you as we could. When you signed in at The Randolph, you all filled in a form which asked overseas visitors to complete full details of nationality, passport number, place passport issued, permanent home address, and so on. But, as you know, I also had to ask Mr Ashenden to collect your passports, and from these, my sergeant here' (the blood rose slowly in Lewis's cheeks) 'checked all the details you had given and found that two of you lived in the same block of retirement flats. But these two were not registered as man and wife; rather they had decided to play the waiting game, to take advantage of anything that might crop up, to "optimise the opportunity", as I believe you say in America. And that opportunity materialised - in the person of Eddie Stratton.

'Stratton had been out at Didcot on the afternoon Kemp died, and what is more he could prove his presence there conclusively - with photographic evidence. And I - we -were led to believe that his quite innocent statements about his train journey back to Oxford were equally true.
But they weren't.
Cleverly, unwittingly, as it seemed, he gave a wholly unimpeachable alibi to a man he saw in the carnage ahead of him - a man to whom he owed a very great deal. But he did
not
see that man, ladies and gendemen! Because that man was
not
on the Didcot-Oxford train that afternoon. He was in Oxford . . . murdering Dr Kemp.'

The last few words sank into the noiselessness of the stifling room. And then Morse suddenly smiled a little, and spoke quiedy:

'Can you hear me all right at the back, Mr Aldrich?' 'Pardon, sir?'

'Don't you think it would be far better if you . . .' Morse held out the palm of his right hand and seemed to usher some invisible spirit towards the front row of the seats.

Aldrich, looking much perplexed, rose from his seat and walked forward hesitantly down the central aisle; and, turning towards him, Janet Roscoe smiled expectantly and pointed her hand to the empty seat beside her. But Aldrich ignored the gesture, and slipped instead into one of the empty seats immediately behind her.

'As I say,' resumed Morse, 'the person Stratton claimed to have seen was never on the train at all. That person told me he'd been to London to see his daughter; but he'd only ever had the one daughter . . . and she was
dead.'

Morse's audience was hanging on his every word, yet few seemed able to grasp the extraordinary implications of what he was saying.

'Names, you know' (Morse's tone was suddenly lighter) 'are very important things. Some people don't like their own names . . . but others are extremely anxious to perpetuate them - both Christian names and surnames. Let's say, for example, that Mr and Mrs Brown here - Howard and Shirley, isn't it - wanted to christen their house, they might think of sucking half of their two names together. What about "W-a-r-d" from his name and
"l
-
e-y" from hers? Make a reasonable house-name, wouldn't it? "Wardley"?'

'Gee, that's exactiy—' began Shirley; but Howard laid a hand on her arm, and the embarrassed lady held her peace.

'Not much good trying to perpetuate a surname, though - not if your daughter gets married. She
can
keep her maiden name, of course. Can't she?
Can't
she
...
? But it's easier with Christian names, especially sometimes. A father whose name is "George", say, can call his daughter "Georgie", "Georgina", "Georgette".' (Lewis glanced up at Morse.) 'And the woman who was killed in the road accident was called Mrs Philippa J. Mayo, remember? Her father couldn't give her his own name exactly, but he could give her the female equivalent of "Philip". And Philippa Mayo was the daughter of the only man here who has that name.

Wasn't she, Mr Aldrich?'
asked Morse in a terrifying whisper.