the Jewel That Was Ours

by Colin Dexter

  33

  No doubt, as Lewis saw things, 'deducing'.

  If you are afraid of loneliness, don't marry

  (Chekhov)

  Sheila Williams was feeling miserable. When Morse, himself looking far from serene, had come into The Randolph and demanded to see Messrs Aldrich and Brown immediately, he had resolutely avoided her eyes, appearing to have no wish to rekindle the brief moments of intimacy which had occurred in the morning's early hours. And the tourists, most of them, were getting restless - understandably so. Only Phil Aldrich had seemed as placid as ever, even after being interrupted in the middle of his lunch, and thereafter being seated in the Lancaster Room, writing busily on the hotel notepaper; and being interrupted just the once, and then only briefly, by Janet Roscoe - the latter intent, it appeared, on fomenting further dissatisfaction whenever possible. Like now, for instance.

  ‘I really do think, Sheila—'

  'I do envy you so, Mrs Roscoe. I haven't had a genuine thought in years, Oh, Cedric! Cedric?'

  He had been trying to steal silently away from the post-lunch chatter, but was stopped in his tracks at the foot of the great staircase as Sheila, glass in her left hand, laid the crimson-nailed fingers of her right hand along his lapel.

  'Cedric! How that bloody woman has lived this long without getting murdered . . .'

  Cedric grinned his sad, lopsided grin, removed the somewhat disturbing hand, and looked at her - her upper and lower lips of almost equal thickness, moist and parted, and temptingly squashable. She was a woman he had known for several years now; one with whom he had never slept; one who half repelled, and ever half attracted him.

  'Look! I've got to be off. I've got a tutorial shortly, and I ought to sober up a bit between times.'

  ‘Why do that, darling?'

  'Sheila! You're a lovely girl, but you - you let yourself down when you drink too much.'

  'Oh, for Christ's sake! Not you as well.'

  'Yes! Me as well! And I've got to go. I'm meeting Lucy off the train later on anyway, and if you want to know the truth' - he looked about him with rolling eyes - 'I'm completely pissed off with the whole of this bloody set-up. I've done my best, though. First I stood in for—' Suddenly he stopped. 'Sorry, Sheila! I shouldn't have said that. Forgive me!' He kissed her lightly on the cheek, then turned and walked out of the hotel.

  As Sheila watched him go, she knew that in spite of the hurtful words he had just spoken she would always have a soft spot for the man. But she knew, too, what a lousy judge of men she'd always been. Her husband! God! A quietly cultivated, top-of-the-head English don, incurably in the grip of the Oxford Disease - that tragic malady which deludes its victims into believing they can never be wrong in any matter of knowledge or opinion. What a disaster that had all been! Then a series of feckless, selfish, vain admirers . . . then Theo. Poor Theo! But at least he was -had been - an interesting and vital and daring sort of man.

  Sheila walked slowly over to the window and watched Cedric as he wheeled his bicycle across Beaumont Street towards St Giles'. He never drove his car if he was having any drink with his lunch. Not like some people she'd known. Not like Theo, for instance . . . He'd been over the limit, they'd said, when he'd crashed his BMW, and there could have been no sympathy whatsoever for him from the relatives of the woman killed in the other car. Or from his wife, of course - his bloody wife! And yet there was the suggestion that he'd been just a little unlucky, perhaps? Certainly many people had

  mumbled all that stuff about 'there but for the grace of God . ..' And there was a lot of luck in life: some people would go to jail for badger-baiting; but if they'd baited just the foxes they'd like as not be having sherry the next day with the Master of the Foxhounds. Yes, Theo may have been a fraction unlucky about that accident. Even unluckier now.

  And Cedric? Was he right - about what he'd just said? Already that morning she had drunk more than the weekly average for women she'd noticed displayed on a chart in the Summertown Health Centre waiting-room. But when she was drinking, she was (or so she told herself) perfectly conscious of all her thoughts and actions. It was only when she was reasonably sober, when, say, she woke up in the morning, head throbbing, tongue parched, that she suspected in retrospect that she hadn't been quite so rationally conscious of those selfsame thoughts and actions . . .

  God! What a mess her life was in!

  She looked miserably back across the coffee-lounge, where several of the group were mumbling none too happily. Six o'clock. Morse had changed their departure-time to six o'clock, unless something dramatic occurred in the meantime.

  She walked through into the Lancaster Room again, where Phil Aldrich was still scribbling away on the hotel's notepaper; and for the moment (as Sheila stood in the doorway) looking up with his wonted patience and nodding mildly as Janet propounded her latest views on the injustice of the tour's latest delay. But even as Sheila stood there, his mood had changed. None too quietly, he asked the woman if she would mind leaving him alone, just for a while, since he had something more important to do for the minute than listen to her gripes and belly-aching.

  Who would have believed it?

  Sheila had heard most of the exchange; and, with the volume of Janet's voice, so probably had several of the others too. It had been a devastating rebuke from the quiet little fellow from California; and as Sheila watched the hurt face of the formidable little woman from the same State (wasn't it the same Church, too?), she almost felt a tinge of sympathy for Mrs Janet Roscoe. Almost.

  Lewis, too, had been watching as Aldrich wrote out his statement; and wondering how a man could write so fluently. Huh! When Aldrich handed it to him there were only three crossings out in the whole thing.

  34

  Thou hast committed Fornication; but that was in another country, And besides, the wench is dead

  (Christopher Marlowe, The Jew of Malta)

  35

  Just a song at twilight

  When the lights are low And the flick'ring shadows

  Softly come and go . . .

  (From the English Song Book)

  For all the swiftness of his thought, Morse was quite a slow reader. And as Lewis (who had already read through the statement) watched his chief going through the same pages, he felt more than a little encouraged. It was like finding a Senior Wrangler from Cambridge unable to add seventy-seven and seventeen together without demanding pencil and paper.

  ‘Well?' asked Morse at long last. 'What did you make of that?'

  'One odd thing, sir. It's an alibi for Aldrich all right, but not really one for Stratton, is it?' 'It isn't?’

  'Surely not. Aldrich didn't actually see Stratton - on the train, did he?'

  'You mean Stratton might not have been on the train? Ye-es . . . But if so, how did he know Aldrich was on the train?'

  Lewis shook his head: 'I'm thinking about it, sir.'

  'But you're right, Lewis,' added Morse slowly, as he sat back and stared at the ceiling for a few seconds. 'And I'll tell you something else: he writes well!'

  'Clever man, sir!'

  'More literate than his daughter, I should think. Only those couple or so spelling mistakes, wasn't it?'

  'Only the two I spotted,' replied Lewis, his features as impassive as those of a professional poker-player, as

  Morse, with a half-grin of acknowledgement, started shuffling inconsequentially through the completed questionnaires.

  'Bit sad’ ventured Lewis, 'about Mr Aldrich's daughter.'

  'Mm?'

  ‘Wonder why she didn't turn up at Paddington.' 'Probably met a well-oiled sheik outside The Dorchester.' 'She'd agreed to meet him, though.' 'So he says.'

  'Don't you believe him?' Lewis's eyes looked up in puzzlement. 'He can't have made up all that stuff about the army ... or the train—'

  'Not those bits, no.'

  'But you don't believe the bits in the middle?'

  'As you just said, he's a clever man. I think he went up to London, yes, but I'm not at a
ll sure what he did there. All a bit vague, don't you think? Just as I'm not quite sure what Kemp was doing, after he left his publishers. But if they met each other, Lewis . . . ? Interesting, don't you think?'

  Lewis shook his head. It was almost invariably the same: halfway through any case Morse would be off on some improbable and complicated line of thought which would be just as readily abandoned as soon as a few more facts emerged. And, blessedly, it was facts that Morse now seemed to be concentrating on as, forgetting Aldrich for the moment, he browsed once again through the questionnaires.

  'See here, Lewis!' He passed over three of the sheets and pointed to the answers to question (e):

  P. Aldrich 10-27-90

  E. Stratton 27th Oct 1990

  H. Brown October 27

  'Not conclusive though, is it, sir?'

  But Morse appeared to have boarded a completely different train of thought: 'I was just wondering about their dates of birth . . .’

  'Soon find out. I got Ashenden to collect in all their passports this morning.' ‘You did?'

  Lewis felt gratified to note the surprise and appreciation in Morse's eyes and voice, and very soon he was back with the passports.

  'All here, are they?'

  'Except Ashenden's. You're not, er, forgetting Ashenden, are you, sir?'

  'Oh no! I'm not forgetting Ashenden,' replied Morse quietly, as taking out his Parker pen he wrote three d.o.b.s on a table napkin:

  Aldrich: 8.4.1922

  Stratton: 29.9.1922

  Brown: 3.8.1918

  'Two of 'em sixty-eight now, and one seventy-two . . .' 'You wouldn't think Brown was the oldest, though, would you, sir? He trots around like a two-year-old.' 'A two-year-old what? Lewis sighed, but said nothing.

  'He stayed in his room when his wife went off for a jaunt round Oxford, remember? And I still think one of the oddest things in this case is why Stratton didn't see his wife safely up to her room. It's not natural, Lewis. It's not how things happen.1

  'What are you suggesting?' asked Lewis, vaguely.

  'Brown said he stayed in his room when his wife and Stratton decided to look round Oxford. Said he was tired. Huh! As you said, he's as sprightly as a two-year-old.'

  'A two-year-old what, sir?'

  But Morse appeared to have missed the question.

  In the Annexe, as if on cue, a tune could be heard quite clearly. First a few exploratory notes, presumably on the Steinway Grand that Morse had earlier admired in the

  Lancaster Room; then the whole melody as the pianist hired for the afternoon tea-room session fingered his way through the nostalgic chords of 'Love's Old Sweet Song’.

  The two men listened in silence, before Morse resumed:

  'You know, I'm beginning to wonder exactly who was having an affair with who.'

  Lewis's eyebrows shot up yet again.

  'All right! "Whom", if you prefer it. Stratton and Shirley Brown go out together and everybody says "tut-tut". Agreed? And we all focus our attention on the potential scandal -completely ignoring a far more suggestive state of affairs. Brown and Laura Stratton are there right next to each other in Rooms 308 and 310. It's shenanigans between the sheets, Lewis! It's a crime passionnel. Stratton comes back in and catches Brown in the missionary position - and all this Wolvercote Tongue business is just a secondary blind.'

  But Lewis would have nothing to do with such futile speculation: 'She was tired, sir. She'd be far more interested in a bath than . . .'

  '. . . than in a bonk?'

  'Well, people that age—'

  'What? I've heard that sex can be very good for the over sixty-fives.'

  'Only ten years for you to go, then.'

  Morse grinned, though with little conviction. 'I'm sure of it, though. It's Love's Old Sweet Song - that must come into things somewhere. A woman dies. An art-work goes missing. An art-expert gets murdered. You following me, Lewis? There's a link - there's got to be a link. But for the present I can't—' He broke off, and looked at the three dates again. 'You realise, don't you, that those three would have been -what? - twenty-two, twenty-two, and twenty-six in 1944?' His eyes gleamed with what might have been taken for some inner iUumination. ‘What about all of them being stationed in or near Oxford?'

  ‘What difference would that make, sir?'

  Morse seemed not to know.

  Picking up Aldrich's statement, Lewis rose to his feet. 'Shall I go and get Howard Brown?'

  But again Morse's mind seemed to be tuned to another wave-length. 'Why did you say ‘he' - indicating the statement - 'he was a clever man?'

  'Well, for a start, there's only the three crossings out, aren't there? And he just - well, he just sort of sat down and wrote it straight off.'

  'Ye-es,' said Morse, but to himself, for Lewis had already left the Annexe to summon Brown.

  He looked around at the two other tables occupied in the Bar-Annexe. At the first, a middle-aged woman with an enormous bosom was digging a fork into a plate of salad with the precision of an accountant jabbing at his calculator, before transferring the accumulated forkful up to her rapidly masticating jaws; and Morse knew that if he had married her, it would all have been over within the week. But there was another woman, at the second table: a woman only half the age of her executively suited escort; a woman who was having a fairly difficult time by the look of things, earnestly rehearsing a whole chapter of body language with her ringless hands. Perhaps, thought Morse, the illicit little office affair was drawing to its close. Then her sad eyes met Morse's in a sort of distant, anonymous camaraderie: she smiled across, almost fully. And Morse did the same, feeling for a few small moments an intense and splendid happiness.

  36

  Their meetings made December June

  (Tennyson)

  Faced with the evidence of the tell-tale Howard Brown capitulated immediately. Yes, Morse was right in one respect: Aldrich, Stratton, and himself had been stationed in or around Oxford in 1944, and he (Brown) had in fact known Stratton vaguely in those far-off days. They'd been delighted therefore to renew acquaintanceship at the beginning of the tour; and thereafter had spent many an hour together, talking about old comrades they'd known - those who'd come through, and those who hadn't. . . and reminiscing about some of the 'local talent' the GIs had been only too happy to discover, in Oxford itself and in some of the surrounding towns and villages. Brown had fallen miserably in love (so he said) with a girl named Betty Fowler, whom he'd met one Friday evening at a hop held in the Oxford Town Hall, and already on their second meeting they had vowed a mutual, eternal love.

  Then, when the war ended in the summer of 1945, after being demobbed from Germany, he'd gone straight back to the US, with no possible hope of any real communication between them except for one or two impermanent and unreliable addresses. So, slowly, the memories of their idyllic times together had faded. He'd met up with a marvellous girl in Minister, anyway; then a fully consenting Hausfrau from Hamburg . . . and so it had gone on. He'd gradually come to terms with the fairly obvious fact (as most of his comrades already had) that wartime associations were almost inevitably doomed to dissolution.

  Back home in California, he'd met Shirley; and married her. OK, there mightn't perhaps be all that much left over now from the early joys of their marriage; yet, in an odd sort of way, the longer they'd abjured the divorce-courts, the stronger had grown the ties that bound them together: home, children, friends, memories, insurance policies; and above all, perhaps, the sheer length - the ever-increasing length - of the time they'd spent together as man and wife. Forty-three whole years of it now.

  Before marrying Shirley, he'd written an honourable and honest letter to Betty Fowler, but he'd received no reply. Whatever the actual reasons for this, in his own mind he'd singled out the fact that she must have got married. She was an extraordinarily attractive girl, with a pale complexion, a freckled face, and ginger hair: a girl for whom most of the other GIs would willingly have given a monthly pay-packet. Or an annual one.

/>   Then, only six months since, he had received a letter ('Private and Strictly Confidential'). Although sent to his 1947 address in Los Angeles, it had finally, almost flukily, caught up with him - and thereby opened a floodgate of memories upon which the years had added their sentimental compound-interest. She had (Betty confessed) received his letter all that while ago; still had it, in fact. But by that time she had married a car-worker from Cowley, was four months' pregnant, and was eventually to become the mother of four lovely children - three girls and one boy. Her husband had retired in 1988 and then, so sadly, died only seven months later. She was all right, herself. No worries - certainly no financial worries. And eight (eight!) grandchildren, though she had not herself been tempted to enter the local 'Glamorous Grandmother' contest. So, the only reason for her writing was to say that if he ever did get the chance to come over to the UK again, well, she'd like - well, it would be nice . . .

  From America, how earnestly he'd longed to reach her on the telephone! But she had given him neither an address nor a telephone number; and the complexities of finding either had posed rather too much of a problem on a transatlantic line. Yet here he was now - so near to her! And with his wife gone out for long enough with one of her admirers ... So, he'd watched her go from the hotel, and then contacted Directory Enquiries from the phone-booth in the foyer. Miraculously, within a couple of minutes, he'd found himself speaking to a woman he'd kissed goodbye in the early May of 1944 - over forty-six years ago! Could she meet him? Would she like to meet him? The answer was yes, yes, yes. And so they had met (it had been so easy, as it happened, for him to sneak away the previous afternoon) nervously and excitedly outside the main entrance to the University Parks at 2.30 p.m.