the Jewel That Was Ours

by Colin Dexter

'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.

  60

  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.

  As he came to the door, he looked inside - and stopped. There, seated at the bar, a large empty glass held high in her left hand, her right arm resting on the shoulder of a youngish (bearded!) man, sat Sheila Williams, her black-stockinged legs crossed provocatively, her body disturbingly close to her companion's.

  'If you insist!' Morse heard her say, as she pushed her glass across the bar. 'Gin - large one, please! - no ice - just half a glass of tonic - slim-line.'

  Morse held back, feeling a great surge of irrational and impotent jealousy. About which he could do nothing. Absolutely nothing. Like a stricken deer he walked back to the foyer, where he wrote a brief note ('Unavoidable, urgent police business'), and asked the concierge to take it through to the bar in about five minutes or so, and hand it to a Mrs Williams - a Mrs Sheila Williams.

  Roy had nodded. He'd been there in the hotel for forty-five years, now. That's why he'd been honoured by the Queen. He understood most things. He thought he understood this.

  Morse walked quickly along the Broad, past the King's Arms, the Holywell Music Room, the back of New College, turned left at Longwall Street, and after two hundred yards or so went through the wooden gate that led into Holywell Cemetery. He found the grave far more quickly than Ashenden had done; and behind the squat cross the envelope that Ashenden had left there, with the four lines written out neady on a white card therein. After replacing the envelope, Morse left the cemetery and walked slowly back along Holywell Street to the King's Arms, ordering there (as Ashenden had done before him) a pint of Flowers Bitter. He found himself ever thinking of Sheila, and at one point had been on the verge of rushing up to The Randolph to see if she were still there in the Chapters Bar.

  But he hadn't.

  And gradually thoughts of Mrs Williams were receding; and instead, he found his mind lingering on the sad quatrain he'd found beside the small stone cross in the Holywell cemetery:

  Life divided us from each other, Depriving friend of friend, Accept this leave-taking - with my tears - For it is all I have to bring.

  At the Trout Inn, the frogmen had given it four days, then called off the search for the Wolvercote Tongue. Sensibly so, as Eddie Stratton (now facing charges of perjury and perverting the course of justice) could have told them from the beginning. It had been a sort of back-up insurance, really - prising out that single remaining ruby, and hiding it privily beneath the white-silk lining of Laura's coffin. In New York his plans had been thwarted, but the jewel would still be there, would it not? Whenever, wherever they finally buried her. Was anyone ever likely to suspect such duplicity, such ghoulish duplicity? Surely not. Surely not, reflected Stratton. Yet he found himself remembering the man who had been in charge of things. Yes, just the one man, perhaps . . .