Colin Dexter - The Jewel That Was Ours

Then it was the telephone call.

Janet had heard everything, clearly, And a plan was immediately formulated. Eddie Stratton was despatched somewhere — anywhere! — so long as he could establish a firm alibi for himself; and Phil sent off to a nearby car-hire firm, whilst she, Janet, remained seated by the extension-phone in her bedroom to deal with the necessary reference for the car firm. The confusion caused by Kemp's delay that day was a godsend; and Phil, after picking up Janet from Gloucester Green, had met Kemp at the railway station (his train two minutes early) informing him that his wife had been taken ill, that his duties were fully taken care of, and that he (Aldrich) was there to drive him directly up to his North Oxford home.

After the deed was done, Janet had found herself waiting anxiously for the return of Eddie Stratton; and as soon as she — and no one else! — had spotted him, she steered him away from The Randolph, handed him the Wolvercote Tongue and acquainted him with the second of his duties in the criminal conspiracy in which he was now a wholly committed accessory: the disposal of the body.

Marion Kemp (this from Stratton's evidence now) had admitted him at Water Eaton Road, where he had divested the corpse of its clothes — how else shift the body without staining his own? And. well, the rest was now known. It had not been an unduly gruesome task to a man for whom such post-mortem grotesqueries had been little more than a perfunctory performance. He had wrapped the carpet round the clothes of the murdered man, depositing the bundle behind the boiler in the airing-cupboard. And what of Marion Kemp? Throughout she had sat, Stratton claimed, in the hallway. In silence.

'And greatly disturbed,' opined Morse.

'Oh no, Inspector!' Stratton had replied.

After leaving Water Eaton Road, Stratton had walked via First Turn and Goose Green to the Trout Inn at Wolvercote where he had thrown the Tongue into the river — and then caught a Nipper Bus back to St. Giles', where he'd met Mrs. Williams.

Sheila's evidence tallied with Stratton's account. She had invited Stratton back to her house in North Oxford, and he had accepted. Anxious as he was to drink himself silly, and with a co-operative partner to boot, Stratton had consumed considerable quantities of Glenfiddich — and had finally staggered into a summoned taxi at around midnight.

Such was the picture of the case that had finally emerged; such the picture that Morse painted on the Friday morning of that same week when Chief Superintendent Strange had come into his office, seating himself gruntingly into the nearest chair.

'None of your bullshit, Morse! Just the broad brush, my boy! I'm off to lunch with the C.C. in half an hour.'

'Give him my very best wishes, sir.'

'Get on with it!'

Strange sat back (and looked at his watch) when Morse had finished. 'She must have been an amazing woman.'

'She was, sir. I think Janet Roscoe is possibly the—'

'I'm not talking about her, I'm talking about the Kemp woman — Marion, wasn't it? Didn't the Aldrich pair take a huge gamble though? You know, assuming she would play along with 'em, and so on?'

'Oh, yes. But they were gambling all along — with the very highest stakes, sir.'

'And you just think, Morse! Staying in that house — with that bloody corpse — in her bedroom — in the hall — wherever — I don't know. I couldn't do it. Could you? It'd send me crackers.'

'She could never forgive him—'

'It'd still send me crackers.'

'She did commit suicide, sir,' said Morse slowly, beginning only now, perhaps, to see into the abyss of Marion's despair.

'So she did, Morse! So she did!'

Strange looked at his watch again and tilted his heavily jowled head: 'What put you on to 'em? The Aldriches?'

'I should have got there earlier, I suppose. Especially after that first statement Aldrich made, about his fictional trip to London. He wrote it straight out — only three crossings-out in three pages. And if only I'd looked at what he'd crossed out instead of what he'd left in! He was writing under pressure and, if my memory serves me, he crossed out things like "we could have done something" and "our telephone number". He was worried about giving himself away, because he was writing like a married man. He was a married man. And there was another clue, too. He even mentioned his daughter's name in that statement: "Pippa" — which as you know, sir, is a diminutive of "Philippa".'

Strange rose to his feet and pulled on his heavy winter coat. 'Some nice bits of thinking, Morse!'

'Thank you, sir!'

'I'm not talking about you! It's this Roscoe woman. Very able little lady! Did you know that a lot of 'em have been little —these big people: Alexander, Augustus, Attila, Nelson, Napoleon. '

'They tell me Bruckner was a very small man, sir.'

'Who?'

The two men smiled briefly at each other as Strange reached the door.

'Just a couple of points, Morse. How did Janet Roscoe get rid of that handbag?'

'She says she walked round the corner into Cornmarket, and went into Salisbury's, and stuck it in the middle of the leather handbags on sale there.'

'What about the murder weapon? You say you've not recovered that?'

'Not yet. You see, she walked along to the Radcliffe Infirmary, so she says, and saw a notice there about an Amnesty — for anything you'd had from the place which you should have returned: "Amnesty — No Questions Asked", it said. She just handed it in.'

'Why haven't you got it, then?'

'Sergeant Lewis went along, sir. But there were seventy-one walking sticks in the Physio department there.'

'Oh!'

'Do you want any forensic tests on them?'

'Waste of money.'

'That's what Sergeant Lewis said.'

'Good man, Lewis!'

'Excellent man!'

'Not so clever as this Roscoe woman, though.'

'Few cleverer.'

'She'd be useful in the Force.'

'No chance, sir. She had a thorough medical yesterday. They don't even give her a fortnight.'

'Any doctor who tells you when you're going to die is a bloody fool!'

'Not this one,' said Morse quietly — and sadly.

'Think you'll get that jewel back?'

'Hope so, sir. But they won't, will they?'

'Say that again?'

'The jewel that was theirs, sir. They won't ever get her back, will they?'

Was Morse imagining things? For a second or two he thought that Strange's eyes might well have glistened with a film of tears. But there was no way of telling this for certain, for Strange had suddenly looked down fixedly at the threadbare carpet beside the door, before departing for his lunch with the Chief Constable.

CHAPTER SIXTY

Accipe fraterno multum manantia fletu,

Atque in perpetuum, frater, ave atque vale

( Catullus, Poem CI)

A WEEK AFTER HIS meeting with Strange, Morse took the bus down from North Oxford to Cornmarket. He had managed two complete days' furlough, had re-read Bleak House, listened again (twice) to Parsifal, and (though he would never have admitted it) begun to feel slightly bored.

Not today, though!

When he had said farewell to Sheila Williams the previous week, he had suggested a second rendezvous. He was (he assured her) a reasonably civilised sort of fellow, and it would be pleasant for both of them to meet again fairly soon, and perhaps have lunch together: the Greek Taverna, perhaps, up in Summertown? So a time and a place were carefully agreed: 12 a.m. (twelve noon ) in the foyer (the foyer) of The Randolph.

Where else?

As usual (for appointments), he was ten minutes early, and stood for a while in the foyer talking to Roy, the bespectacled Head Concierge, and congratulating this splendid man on his recent award of the BEM. A quarter of an hour later, he walked down the hotel steps and for several minutes stood immobile on the pavement there, some of his thoughts centred on the Ashmolean Museum opposite and on its former Keeper of Anglo-Saxon and Mediaeval Antiquities; but most of his thoughts, if truth be told, on Mrs. Sheila Williams. At 12.20 p.m., when he found himself looking at his wristwatch about three times per minute, he returned to the foyer, and stood there rather fecklessly for a further few minutes. At 12.25 p.m., he asked the concierge if there'd been any messages. No! At 12.30 p.m., he abandoned all hope and decided to drown his disappointment in the Chapters Bar.