by Colin Dexter
'Sit down! Sit down! You look as if you could do with a drink, Mrs Williams.'
'Well, I - it is all a bit of a shock, isn't it?'
'Anything suitable in there, Lewis?' Morse pointed to the drinks-cabinet, not without a degree of self-interest.
'Looks like he's just about got the lot, sir.'
'Mrs Williams?'
'G and T - that would be fine.'
'Gin and tonic for the lady, Lewis . . . Ice?'
'Why dilute the stuff, Inspector?'
'There's no ice anyway,' muttered Lewis.
'Look,' began Sheila Williams, 'I'm not myself in charge of this group. I do liaise with the group and arrange speakers
and so on - but it's John Ashenden who's the tour leader.'
Morse, however, appeared wholly uninterested in the activities of Mr Ashenden: 'Mrs Williams, I'm going to have to ask everyone in the group what they were doing between about four-thirty and five-fifteen this afternoon - that's between the time Mr Stratum last saw his wife and when he got back from his walk with, er, with Mrs Brown . . .'
As Sheila tossed back the last of her G and T, Lewis thought he saw the hint of a smile about her full lips; but Morse had turned to the wall on his left where he was minutely studying a late nineteenth-century Henry Taunt photograph of some brewery drays, and his last few words may well have been spoken without the slightest hint of implication or innuendo.
'I'm sure they'll all co-operate, Inspector, but they don't know yet about. . .'
'No. Perhaps we should wait a while? After dinner? No later than that. I wouldn't want Sergeant Lewis here to be too late in bed - Ah! Another, Mrs Williams?'
'I'm sorry ... I seem to be—'
'Nothing to be sorry about, is there?'
'Same again then, please, Sergeant. Little less tonic, perhaps?'
Lewis's eyebrows rose a centimetre. 'Anything for you, sir?'
'No thank you, Lewis. Not on duty.'
Lewis's eyebrows rose a further centimetre as he collected Mrs Williams's glass.
The tour was, as Morse and Lewis learned, a pretty expensive, pretty exclusive business really. Most of them had been to England before (not all, though) and most of them were well enough off to be coming back again before too long, whatever the strength of the pound sterling. One of them wouldn't be, though . . . Yes, Sheila Williams knew quite a bit about the Wolvercote Tongue, although Dr Kemp was the real authority, of course. It seemed that Laura Stratum's first husband, a real-estate man operating in California and, in later life, quite a collector, had come to find himself in possession of a jewelled artefact which, after learning of its provenance, he had bequeathed - he had died two years since - to the Curators of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. Oh yes, she had seen it dozens of times, though only in a series of technicolour slides, from which she had been able to sketch out a diagram of the whole jewel, buckle and tongue; and in fact she herself had executed the final coloured illustration which was at that moment on show at the Ashmolean. Come to think of it, she was glad she had done the drawings; whatever happened now, people could know exactly how the Wolvercote Jewel in its entirety would have appeared. Doubtless the police would find the Tongue, but. . .
‘We shall certainly do our best, madam,' Lewis had interposed, the tone of his voice suggesting something less than brimming optimism.
The Tongue itself? Well, again, Kemp was really the one to ask. But she could certainly tell them all about the look of it: of triangular shape, some 3 inches long, and 2 inches wide at the base; of a dull dirtyish brown colour (gold!), with (originally) three ruby-stones, one on each corner of the triangle - but now reduced to just the one, and that at the narrower end of things. The great, the unique, value of the tongue was the fact that it fitted (perfectly!) into the gold buckle which had been discovered during an archaeological dig at the village of Wolvercote in the early 1930s; and which, since 1947, had been proudly exhibited in the Ashmolean as evidence (hitherto unsuspected) of the exquisite craftsmanship of the goldsmith's art in the late eighth-century ad. Laura Stratton (so Sheila had learned from John Ashenden) had carried the jewel with her, in a black velvet-lined case, and kept it in her handbag - refusing to entrust the precious artefact either to transatlantic postal services, international tour operators, or burglar-and-fire-proof safe-deposit boxes. In the same handbag, it appeared, Laura had also carried a beautiful-looking string of wholly phoney pearls, which she had worn on most evenings with her dinner-dresses. Of any other valuables which might have been stolen with the handbag, Sheila had no idea whatsoever, although she volunteered the information that from her own recent experiences - and in spite of the equally recent strength of the pound sterling - some of the Americans seemed less than fully aware of the denominational value of the English currency they carried on their persons. With almost all of the party (she suspected) several £10, £20, even £50, notes would hardly be strangers in the purses and wallets of some of California's wealthier citizens. So a casual thief might have been pleasantly surprised by the sum of the monies often carried? But Mr Stratton - Eddie Stratton - he'd be the man to ask about such things, wouldn't he? Really?
She turned her large, melancholy eyes upon Morse; and for a few seconds Lewis found himself wondering if his chief wasn't temporarily mesmerised. So much so that he decided not to withhold his own contribution:
'You say, Mrs Williams, that the group won't perhaps mind me asking them all where they were between four-thirty and five-fifteen? Would you mind if you told us where you were?'
The effect of such an innocent question was quite unexpectedly melodramatic. Sheila Williams placed her empty glass on the table in front of her, and immediately burst into tears, during which time Morse glowered at his subordinate as if he had simultaneously broken all the rules of diplomacy, etiquette, and freemasonry.
But Morse himself, as he thought, was equal to the task: he nodded peremptorily to the empty glass, and immediately Lewis found himself pouring yet another generous measure of Gordon's gin, tempered again with but a little slim-line tonic.
Suddenly, and with a defiant glare at the two policemen, Sheila sat up in her chair, sought to regain a precarious state of equipoise, and drank down the proffered mixture in a single draught - much to Morse's secret admiration. She spoke just five words: 'Ask Dr Kemp - he'll explain!'
After she was gone, guided in gentlemanly fashion along the corridor by Sergeant Lewis, Morse quickly opened the drinks-cabinet, poured himself half a tumbler of Glenfiddich, savoured a large and satisfying swallow, thereafter placing the tumbler strategically on a convenient shelf, just below the line of vision of anyone entering. Including Sergeant Lewis.
Strangely, neither Sergeant Lewis nor Inspector Morse himself seemed particularly conscious of the fact that Mrs Sheila Williams had signally failed to answer the only significant question that had been put to her.
9
Such is the wonderful effect of any woman's tears.
Often I have wished myself dead, but well under my blanket, so that neither death nor man could hear me
(George Lichtenberg)
John Ashenden would later remember exactly what he had done during the vital forty-five minutes that Morse had specified . . .
It was a quarter to five when he had walked out of The Randolph, and crossed over by the Martyrs' Memorial into Broad Street. The sun no longer slanted across the pale-yellow stone, the early evening was becoming much cooler, and he was wearing a lightweight rain-coat. He strode fairly quickly past the front of Balliol, the great gates of Trinity, Blackwell's Book Shop; and was waiting by the New Bodleian building to cross at the traffic lights into Holywell Street when he saw them standing there outside the Sheldonian, sub imperatoribus, her arm through his, neither of them (as it seemed) taking too much notice of anything except their mutual selves. Even more briskly now, Ashenden walked past the King's Arms, the Holywell Music Room, the back of New College - until he came to Longwall Street. Here he turned left; and after two
hundred yards or so went through the wooden gate that led into Holywell Cemetery, where under the stones and crosses - so many Celtic crosses! -were laid to rest the last remains of eminent Oxford men, in these slightly unkempt, but never neglected, acres of the dead. A curving path through the grass led him to a wooden seat above which, wired to a yew tree, was a rectangular board showing the plot of the cemetery, with the memorials of the particularly eminent marked by numbers:
Kenneth Grahame (1859-1932)
Maurice Bowra (1898-1971)
Kenneth Tynan (1927-1980)
H.V.D. Dyson (1896-1975)
James Blish (1921-1975)
Theodore and Sibley, Drowned (1893)
Sir John Stainer (1840-1901)
Walter Pater . . .
That was him!
It took Ashenden some twenty minutes or so, treading through overgrown grasses, and parting ivy from many semi-decipherable inscriptions, to find the strong, squat cross:
In te, Domine, speravi WALTER PATER Died July 30 1894
Then, almost immediately, he saw that other stone, the one he was looking for - an even simpler memorial:
JAMES ALFRED BOWDEN 1956 - 1981 Requiescat
For several minutes Ashenden stood there silently under the darkening shadows: it seemed a wonderfully unforbidding piece of ground in which to find a final resting-place. Yet no one wanted to die - certainly not John Ashenden, as he remained standing by the grave, wondering whether Jimmy Bowden, during the pain of his terminal illness, had ever recanted the dogmatic and confident atheism he had once
propounded in the early hours of one most memorable day. But Ashenden doubted it. He recalled, too, that final postcard to which he had never replied . . .
There was no one else in the cemetery; no one there to observe the strange little incident when Ashenden, after looking round about him for a last reassurance, parted the thickly twined rootage of ivy at the rear of Bowden's small cross, took something from the right-hand pocket of his raincoat, and laid it carefully at the foot of the stone before replacing the ivy and patting it, almost effeminately, back into its pristine state.
He was in no hurry, and on his leisurely way back to the cemetery gate he stopped and read several of the gravestones, including 'Kenneth Grahame, who passed the river on the 6th July 1932, leaving childhood and literature through him the more blest for all time'. Ashenden loved the wording. He looked vaguely for 'Theodore and Sibley, Drowned (1893)'; but it was too dark now, and he could find no clue as to who they were and where they had perished.
He regained the main street, and on his way back to The Randolph called in the back bar of The King's Arms to order a pint of cask-conditioned Flowers. For which choice, Inspector Morse would have been quietly proud of him.
Shirley Brown had disengaged her arm as she and Eddie Stratton crossed into Beaumont Street at ten-past five.
'Whatever you say, Ed, I'd still like to know where he was going.'
'Like I say, forget it, Shirl!'
'He was trying to get out of sight - quick. You know he was.' 'You still reckon he saw us?'
'I still reckon he saw us,' said Shirley Brown, in her Californian drawl. They were the only two in the guest-lift; and Eddie bade his temporary leave as they reached the third floor.
'See you in a little while, Shirl.'
'Yeah. And tell Laura I hope her feet are rested.'
Eddie Stratum had made no reply as he walked towards Room 310.
10
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds
(Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays)
Too long had Morse been in the police business for him to believe that a death and a theft, or (as he was now beginning to think) a theft and a death, were likely to be a pair of fortuitously contingent events. Not that he was even remotely hopeful about the theft. He would never mind pitting his brains against a murderer; but he'd always discounted his chances against a reasonably competent burglar - even, come to think of it, against a reasonably incompetent burglar. And if, as seemed the consensus of opinion now, Laura Stratton had left her door ajar for her husband to let himself in; if she had carelessly left her handbag on the bedside table immediately inside her partially opened door; if someone had known of these things - even if someone had not known of these things . . . well, certainly, the odds were pretty strong on the prompt disappearance of the handbag. Give it fifteen minutes? At the outside, thought Morse. We all might pray (some of us might pray) 'Lead us not into temptation', yet most people seemed perfectly happy to stick their cameras, binoculars, radios, squash rackets, handbags . . . mm . . . yes, stick any of 'em on the back seats of their cars, and then complain to the police when they found their rear windows smashed into splinters and— Come off it!
The truth was, of course, that Morse had virtually lost all interest in the case already, his only enduring memory being the admiration he'd felt for the alcoholic capacity of a lady named Mrs Sheila Williams.
He just managed to hide the tumbler when without even a sociable knock Max put his head round the door and, seeing Morse in the Manager's chair, promptly entered and seated himself.
'They told me I'd find you here. Not that I needed much direction. Any pathologist worth his meagre remuneration tends to develop a fairly keen sense of smell.'
‘Well?'
'Heart attack. Massive coronary.' (Swain's words.) Morse nodded slowly.
'God knows why you ask me along here to confirm the obvious. Where's the booze, by the way?' Reluctantly, Morse pointed to the drinks-cabinet. 'You're not paying for it, are you?' 'What do you fancy?’ 'Nothing for me, Morse. I'm on duty.' 'All right.'
'Is, er, is it drinkable - the Scotch?'
Morse got to his feet, poured a miniature into a plastic cup, and handed it over. For a few minutes the two old enemies sat sipping in friendly silence.
'You quite sure, Max . . . ?'
'Not so bad, is it, this stuff?'
'. . . about the time of death?'
'Between four-thirty and five-fifteen.'
'Really?’ Never before had Morse heard anything remotely approaching such a definitive statement from the lips of the hump-backed police-surgeon. 'How on earth—?'
'Girl at Reception, Morse. Said the poor old dear had gone up to her room at four-thirty, on her own two tootsies, too. Then your people told me she was found by her ever-loving husband at five-fifteen.' Max took a large swallow of the Glenfiddich. 'We professionals in the Force, Morse, we have to interpret all the available clues, you know.' He drained his cup with deep appreciation.
'Another?'
'Certainly not! I'm on duty . . . And anyway I'm just off to a very nice little dinner.'
A distant temple-bell was tinkling in Morse's mind: 'Not the same nosh-up as whatshisname?' 'The very same, Morse.' 'He's the house-doctor here.' 'Try telling me something I don't know.' 'It's just that he looked at Mrs Stratton, that's all.' 'And you didn't have much faith in him.' 'Not much.'
'He's considered quite a competent quack, they tell me.' 'To be honest, I thought he was a bit of a . . .' 'Bit of a membrum virile? You're not always wrong, you know . . . Er, small top-up, perhaps, Morse?' 'You know him?'
'Oh yes. And you're quite wrong, in this case. He's not just a— No, let's put it the other way: he's the biggest one in Oxford.'
'She still died of a heart attack, though?'
'Oh yes! So don't go looking for any silly bloody nonsense here. And it's not Swain who's telling you, Morse -it's me.'
When, some ten minutes later, Max had departed for his BMA dinner, Morse had already performed what in political parlance would be termed a compromising U-turn. And when Lewis came in, with Dr Theodore Kemp immediately in tow, Morse knew that he had erred in his earlier thinking. The coincidence of a theft and a death (in whichever order) might often be shown to be causally connected.
But not in this case.
Lewis would have to interview them all, of course; or most of them. But that would be up to Lew
is. For himself, Morse wished for nothing more fervently than to get back to his bachelor flat in North Oxford, and to listen once again to the Second Movement of the Bruckner No. 7.
But he'd better see one or two of them.
11
History, n. An account mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers mostly knaves, and soldiers mostly fools
(Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary)
Almost immediately Kemp slotted into Morse's preconceptions of the we-are-an-Oxford-man, although he was aware that he could well be guilty of yet another instant inaccuracy. The bearded, clever-looking, ugly-attractive man (late thirties - Sheila's age?) who sat down only after lightly dusting the seat with a hyper-handkerchief, had clearly either been told (by Sheila?) or heard (gossip inevitable) something of what had occurred. Other persons might have been irritated only temporarily by the man's affected lisp. Not so Morse.
'Abtholutely pritheless, Inthpector!'
'Perhaps you could tell us a little more about the Wolvercote Tongue, sir.'
Kemp was well prepared. He opened his black brief-case, took out a pile of pale-blue leaflets, and handed one across the desk to Morse, one to Lewis.
The Wolvercote Jewel
During the last century or so archaeologists and historians have become increasingly conscious of the splendid workmanship of the late Saxon period, and the discovery in 1931 of a gold 'buckle' at Wolvercote had been extremely exciting. Particularly so since this buckle linked up with a corresponding 'tongue', fully documented and authenticated, known to be in the collection of one Cyrus C. Palmer Jnr, a citizen of Pasadena, California. The cloisonné enamel of the pear-shaped tongue, set in a solid gold frame, decorated in a distinctive type of delicate filigree, and set (originally) with three large ruby-stones, appeared to match the Ashmolean buckle with exact precision. And if further proof were sought, the tongue's lettering
