by Colin Dexter
Morse was conscious that his mind was drifting off into an interesting avenue of thought, but also that he was drifting off to sleep, as well. It was the cars that had started some new idea . . . For the minute, though, it was gone. Yet there were other new ideas that jostled together in his brain for some more prominent recognition. First, the conviction that there was - must be! - a link, perhaps a blindingly obvious link, between the theft of the Wolvercote Jewel and the murder of Theodore Kemp. Second, the growing belief that two people must have been involved in things, quite certainly in the murder. Third, the worrying suspicion that amongst the evidence already accumulated, the statements taken, the people interviewed, the personal relationships observed, the obiter dicta, the geography of North Oxford - that amongst all these things somewhere there was a fact that he had seen or heard but never fully recognised or understood. Fourth, the strange reluctance he felt about abandoning Downes as Suspect Number One. And as Morse opened his passenger door, he stood for a while looking up at the Pole Star, and asking himself the question he had been asking for the past two hours: was there any way in which Downes could still have been the murderer after all?
Many of Morse's ideas were either so strange or so wildly improbable that most of them were always doomed to early disappointment. Yet, as it happened, he was registering well above par that evening, for three of the four ideas he had formulated were finally to prove wholly correct.
Lewis had fallen fast asleep on the back seat of the police car and remained so for the whole of the journey back to Oxford. In his younger days, he had been a middle-weight Army boxing champion, and now he dreamed that he was in the ring again, with a right-cross from a swarthy, swift-footed opponent smashing into the left-hand side of his jaw. He had tried to feel inside his mouth to see if any teeth were broken or missing, but the great bulk of his boxing-glove precluded any such investigation.
When the car finally pulled up in St Aldate's, the young driver opened the rear door and shook Sergeant Lewis awake, failing to notice that the first action of his passenger was to run the forefinger of his left hand slowly along his upper teeth.
Part Three
49
Where water, warm or cool, is Good for gout - at Aquae Sulis (Graffito in the Pump Room, Bath, c.1760)
'Bairth? This is Bairth?'
Seated on the nearside front seat of the luxury coach, John Ashenden glanced across at the diminutive septuagenarian from California. 'Yes, Mrs Roscoe, this is Bath.'
With less than conspicuous enthusiasm, he leaned forward for his microphone, turned it on, and began. Not quite so confidently as in Stratford; or in Oxford, of course, where he had memorised whole sentences from the Jan Morris guide. - 'Bath, ladies and gentlemen, is the site of a Roman spa, Aquae Sulis, probably built in the first and second centuries ad. A good deal of the extensive baths has been excavated and the city presents the tourist of today with perhaps the most splendidly restored of all Roman remains in Europe.'
On either side of the central aisle, heads nodded at the buildings and streets around them as a now livelier Ashenden continued, himself (like the site, it appeared) splendidly restored from whatever malaise had affected him over the previous two days, a malaise which had been noted and commented upon by several others of the group besides Mrs Shirley Brown - the latter sitting comfortably now in her usual seat, the effects of the sting having cleared up fairly quickly under the twin application of Mrs Roscoe's unguents.
'Looks a swell place, Shirl,' ventured Howard Brown. 'Yeah. Just wish Laura was with us - and Eddie. It all seems so sad.' 'Too right! Bus seems sorta empty somehow.'
As scheduled, the tourists had lunched at Cirencester, after leaving Stratford earlier that Sunday morning. The weather was still holding, if only just: another golden day in late autumn. And perhaps in the minds of many, the memories of their tragic stay in Oxford were slowly softening at the edges.
One of the slightly younger widows, Mrs Nancy Wiseman, a librarian from Oklahoma City, was seated at the back of the coach beside Phil Aldrich. She had observed with a quiet pleasure how the strident Roscoe woman had markedly cooled towards her former partner after his refusal (and that of most of the others) to sign her petulant letter of complaint concerning Sheila Williams. Although Phil had been slightly reserved in his manner towards her (Nancy), she knew that that was his way and she was enjoying the company of that wiry, small-boned, gently spoken citizen from Sacramento who almost invariably found himself at the back of every queue that ever formed itself. Yes, the tour was definitely looking up a little, and only the previous evening she had written a card to her daughter to say that in spite of a death and a theft and a murder she was 'beginning to make one or two very nice friends on the trip'.
In truth, however, Phil himself was finding Nancy Wiseman a little too effusive for his liking and - perversely, as it seemed - would have preferred sitting next to Janet Roscoe, up there at the front of the coach, as he listened to (and indeed almost wholly managed to hear) the end of Ashenden's introduction to Bath:
'In the eighteenth century the city was transformed into a resort for English high society - being particularly associated, of course, with the name of Beau Nash, the great dandy and gamester who lived here during the 1740s and 50s. Among its many literary connections, Bath can number such great figures as Henry Fielding, Fanny Burney, Jane Austen, William Wordsworth, Walter Scott, Charles Dickens - and most famous of all, perhaps, Geoffrey Chaucer and The Wife of Bath's Tale.'
It was a good note on which to end.
Opposite him, he noticed that Janet Roscoe had delved once more into the deep handbag, this time producing a very slim volume, whose title it was impossible for him not to see, and which he could have guessed in any case: CHAUCER, Tale of the Wyf of Bathe.
He smiled across at her, and as she opened her book at the Prologue, she smiled quite sweetly back at him.
It seemed a good omen for the stay in Bath.
Only seemed.
50
During late visits to Stinsford in old age he would often visit the unmarked grave of Louisa Harding (Florence Emily Hardy, The Early Life of Thomas Hardy)
According to the hospital bulletin on the Monday afternoon, the condidon of Lucy Downes was now officially listed as 'comfortable', one notch above the 'satisfactory' of the Sunday, and two above the earlier 'stable'. Three visits from her husband had helped, perhaps (the first in the small hours of the Sunday morning, two hours after his release from custody), but some slight complications had arisen with continued internal bleeding, and she had become deeply and embarrassingly conscious of how she must appear to everyone whenever she smiled. So she forbore to do so altogether, even to Cedric, and as she lay in her bed that day, her arm now beginning to give her some considerable pain, she would willingly (she knew) have cracked two of her ribs rather than chipped, a couple of her teeth.
Vanity, all is vanity, saith the preacher. And 'satisfactory' was arguably too favourable a judgement on her circumstances. But that was the word Morse repeated to the first question Lewis put to him about Lucy's progress at 8.30 a.m. on the Tuesday. It may have been that Morse had smiled a little at the question. But it may not.
Activity in the two days following Cedric Downes's release had hardly afforded a model of investigative collaboration, with Morse sleeping through until the late afternoon of the Sunday, then idling away most of the Monday in his office, moodily perusing the documents in the case; and with Lewis doing the converse, making what he felt had been a fairly significant contribution to the case on the Sunday afternoon, and then spending the whole of the Monday abed, where he
had lain dead to the wideawake world, and where, even when Mrs Lewis had gently rocked his shoulder at 6.30 p.m. and quietly breathed the prospect of egg and chips into his ear, he had turned his head over into the pillow and blissfully resumed his slumbers. But now he felt fully refreshed.
By the look of him, however, his chief had not perhaps shared a similarly succes
sful period of recuperation, for he sounded tetchy as he picked up the brief note Lewis had left him.
'You say Stratton was quite definitely out at Didcot when Kemp was being killed?' 'No doubt about it, sir. I went over there yesterday—' 'You were in bed yesterday.' 'Sunday, I mean. They remembered him.' 'Who's "they"?'
'One of 'em took a photo of him on the footplate of "The Cornishman". He'd already got it developed and was going to post it to America. Stratton gave him a fiver. He's going to get a copy and send it here.'
'And it was Stratton?'
'It was Stratton.'
'Oh!'
'Where does all this leave us, sir? I just don't know where we are.'
'And you think I do?' mumbled the ill-shaven Morse. 'Here! Read this - came this morning.'
Lewis took the envelope handed him, postmarked Stratford-upon-Avon, and withdrew the two hand-written sheets.
'Well?'
'I suppose you want me to tell you how many spelling mistakes he's made.' That would be something.'
'Looks all right to me. There's an apostrophe missing, though.'
Morse's face brightened. 'Well done! Excellent! There is the one spelling mistake, but you're definitely improving . . . That's a clue, by the way . . . No? Never mind!'
'At least we're getting some of the loose ends tied up.'
'You mean we cross Ashenden off the suspect-list?'
'Don't know, sir. But we can cross Stratton off, I reckon. He was in Didcot most of the afternoon. That's for sure.'
'So he couldn't have killed Kemp?'
'I don't see how.'
'Nor do I,' said Morse.
'Back to square one!'
'You know where we went wrong, don't you? It was that phone call that sent me up the cul-de-sac. You see, we can't get away from the fact that if Kemp was in London, he could easily have caught an earlier train. That still puzzles me! He rang at twelve-thirty-five and there was a train at twelve-forty-five. Ten minutes to walk across from the phone to the platform!'
'You know, we haven't really checked that, have we? I mean the train could have been cancelled ... or something.'
Morse said, 'I've checked. It's almost the only profitable thing I did yesterday.' He lit a cigarette and sat staring gloomily out of the window.
Lewis found himself looking at the back page of The Oxford Times which lay on the desk. Morse had not started the crossword yet ('Ichabod' this week), but just to the right of it Lewis noticed a brief item on a fatal accident at the Marston Ferry Road traffic lights: a young student who had been taking a crash course in EFL. Crash course! Huh!
'Don't tell me you've done one across, Lewis?'
'No. Just reading about this accident at the Marston Ferry lights. Bad junction, you know, that is. I think there ought to be a "filter right" as you go into the Banbury Road.'
'Fair point!'
Lewis read on aloud. ' "Georgette le . . . something . . . daughter of M. Georges le . . . something of Bordeaux . . ."' But now his eyes had spotted the date. ' 'Sfunny! This accident was a week last Saturday, sir, at half-past five. That's exactly one week earlier than Mrs Downes.'
'Life's full of coincidences, I keep telling you that.'
'It's just that when you get two things happening like that, people say there's going to be three, don't they? That's what the wife always says.'
'Look, if a third accident'll please you, volunteer for the ambulance crew this morning. It's a fiver to a cracked piss-pot that some irresponsible sod—' Suddenly Morse stopped, the old tingle of high excitement thrilling strangely across his shoulders.
'Christ! What a fool you've been!' he murmured softly to himself.
'Sir?'
Morse rattled out his words: 'What's the name of Kemp's publisher? The one you rang to make sure he'd been there.'
' "Babington's". The fellow there said it was named after Macaulay' (Lewis smiled with distant memories) 'Thomas Babington Macaulay, sir - you know, the one who wrote the Lays of Ancient Rome. That's the one poem I—'
'Get on to the American Consulate! Quick, for Christ's sake! Find out where Stratton is - they'll know, I should think. We've got to stop him leaving the country.'
Morse's blue eyes gleamed triumphantly. 'I think I know, Lewis! I think I know.'
But Eddie Stratton had left the country the previous evening on a Pan Am jumbo bound for New York - together with his late wife Laura, the latter lying cold and stiff in a coffin in a special compartment just above the undercarriage.
51
At day's end you came, and like the evening sun, left an afterglow
(Basil Swift, Collected Haiku)
Lewis was enjoying that Tuesday, the day on which Morse had suddenly spurted into a frenetic flurry of activity. Six extra personnel: Sergeant Dixon, three detective PCs, and two WPCs for the telephones. The administrative arrangement and supervision required for such teamwork was exactly the sort of skill in which Lewis excelled, and the hours passed quickly with the progressive gleaning of intelligence, the gradual build up of hard fact to bolster tentative theory
- and always that almost insolent gratification that shone in Morse's eyes, for the latter appeared to have known (or so it seemed to Lewis) most of the details before the calls and corroboration had been made.
It was just after a quick, non-alcoholic lunch that Morse had sought to explain to Lewis the nature of his earlier error.
'I once did a crossword in which all of the clues were susceptible of two quite different solutions. A sort of double-entendre crossword, it was. Get on the wrong wavelength with one across, and everything fits except one single interlocking letter. Brilliant puzzle! - set by Ximenes in The Observer. That's what I did - got off on the wrong foot. And I did it again in this case, with Downes. You know what one across was? That bloody phone call! I'd assumed it was important, Lewis, and I was right. But right for the wrong reasons. When I first learned that the line was bad, I thought it possible - likely, even - that the caller wasn't Kemp at all. Then, because he said he'd missed the train - although there was still ten minutes to go - I thought he wasn't at Paddington at all: I thought Kemp was probably in Oxford. And it all fitted, didn't it? Except for that one single letter . . .
'But all the time, that poor line we kept hearing about was of crucial significance, but for a totally different reason! It was Kemp all right who made the call. But he wasn't at Paddington: he was still at his publisher's in London -Babington Press, Fine Arts Publications, South Kensington - and doubdess he referred to it, like anyone would, as Babington's. Oh, yes! That's where he was, and he did exactly what he said he'd do. He caught the next train and arrived in Oxford, dead on schedule.'
In the circumstances 'dead on schedule' hardly seemed to Lewis the happiest of phrases, but he knew that Morse was right about the call from Babington's. It had been he himself, Lewis, who had finally got on to the man there who was in the process of completing the proofs for the forthcoming seminal opus entided Pre-Conquest Craftsmanship in Southern Britain, by Theodore S. Kemp, MA, DPhil; the man who had been closeted with Kemp that fateful morning, and who had confirmed that Kemp had not left the offices until about 12.30 p.m.
Sergeant Dixon (stripes newly stitched) was also enjoying himself, although initially he had serious doubts about whether he - or anyone else, for that matter - could successfully handle his assignment in the ridiculously short period of the three or four hours which Morse had asserted as 'ample'. But he had done it.
He had not realised quite how many customers were attracted by the Car Hire firms of Oxford, especially American customers; and checking the lists had taken longer than he'd imagined. In this particular respect Morse (suggesting the likelihood of the Botley Road area) had got things quite wrong, for it was at the Hertz 'Rent-a-Car' offices at the top
of the Woodstock Road where Dixon had finally spotted the name he was looking for with all the excitement of a young angler just hooking a heavyweight pike.
Tom Pritchard, the manag
er, went through the key points of the car-hire catechism to be faced by every client:
Full name and home address?
How many days' hire?
Make of car preferred?
Which dates?
One driver only?
Method of payment? (credit card preferred)
Valid driving licence? (US licence OK)
Telephone number of one referee?
After that, the manager went through the procedure adopted: a telephone call to the reference number cited; verification of credit card; verification of driving licence; verification of home address (the last three usually completed within ten minutes or so on the International Information Computer); preparation, presentation, and signing of the contract (including appropriate insurance clauses); then, paperwork now completed, the car brought round to the outer forecourt, with an assistant to give the client a quick run-over of the controls, and to hand over the keys. Bon voyage, cheerio, and Bob's your uncle.
By good fortune it had been the manager himself who had effected this particular transaction, and who remembered the occasion reasonably clearly. Well, it was only five days ago, wasn't it? The reference call to the hotel, The Randolph - that's what he'd remembered clearest of all, really: he'd looked up the telephone number and then been put through, on the extension given to him by his client, to the Deputy Manageress, who had promptly and effusively vouched for the bona fides of Rent-a-Car's prospective customer. Naturally, the manager had more details to offer: the car hired had been a red Cavalier, Registration H 106 XMT; it had been hired at 1.45 p.m. and returned at some time after the offices had closed at 6.30 p.m., with the keys pushed through the special letter-box, as requested. Mileage on the speedometer had been clocked as only 30.7. Probably, thought the manager, the car hadn't left Oxford at all?
