'Uh?'
'She just said to get a pint for you when you came up for a refill.'
'She said "when", did she?'
'She probably knows your habits, sir,' said Michelle, with an understanding smile.
Morse went to sit in the virtually deserted Annexe now, and thought for more than a few minutes of Sheila Williams. He'd had a girl-friend called Sheila when he'd been an undergraduate just across St. Giles' at St. John's — the very college from which A. E. Housman, the greatest Latinist of the twentieth century, had also been kicked out minus a degree. A hundred years ago in Housman's case, and a thousand years in his own. Sheila. the source, in Milton's words, of all our woe.
After his fourth pint of beer, Morse walked out to Reception and spoke to the senior concierge.
'I've got a car in the garage.'
'I'll see it's brought round, sir. What's the number?'
'Er. ' For the moment Morse could not recall the number. 'No! I'll pick it up in the morning if that's all right.'
'You a resident here, sir?'
'No! It's just that I don't want the police to pick me up on the way home.'
'Very sensible, sir. I'll see what I can do. Name? Can I have your name?'
'Morse. Chief Inspector Morse.'
'They wouldn't pick you up, would they?'
'No? Funny lot the police, you know.'
'Shall I call a taxi?'
'Taxi? I'm walking. I only live at the top of the Banbury Road, and a taxi'd cost me three quid at this time of night. That's three pints of beer.'
'Only two here, sir!' corrected Roy Halford as he watched the chief inspector step carefully — a little too carefully? — down the shallow steps and out to Beaumont Street.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Solvitur ambulando
(The problem is solved by walking around)
(Latin proverb)
AS HE WALKED UP the Banbury Road that Thursday night, Morse was aware that by this time Lewis would know considerably more than he did about the probable contents of Laura Stratton's handbag, the possible disposition of the loot, and the likely circle of suspects. Yet he was aware, too, that his mind seemed — was! — considerably more lucid than he deserved it to be, and there were a few facts to be considered — certainly more facts than Lewis had gleaned in his school-days about Alfred the Great.
Facts: carrying her handbag, a woman had gone up to Room 310 at about 4.35 p.m.; this woman had not been seen alive again — or at least no one so far would admit to seeing her alive again; inside 310 a bath had been run and almost certainly taken; a coffee-sachet and a miniature tub of cream had been used; a DO NOT DISTURB sign had been displayed on the outside door-knob at some point, with the door itself probably left open; the woman's husband had returned at about 5.15 p.m., and without reporting to Reception had gone up to the third floor, in the guest-lift, with a fellow tourist (female); thence a hurried scuttle down to Reception via the main staircase where a duplicate key was acquired. On finally gaining access to his room, the husband had discovered his wife's body on the floor, presumably already dead; the hotel's house-doctor had arrived some ten or fifteen minutes later, and the body duly transferred from floor to bed — all this by about 5.40 p.m. At some point before, during, or after these latter events, the husband himself had noticed the disappearance of his wife's handbag; and at about 6 p.m. a call had been received by St. Aldate's CID with a request for help in what was now looking a matter of considerably more moment than any petty theft.
Yes, those were the facts.
So move on, Morse, to a few non-factual inferences in the problem of the Wolvercote Tongue. Move on, my son — and hypothesize! Come on, now! Who could have stolen it?
Well, in the first place, with the door to 310 locked, only those who had a key: the Manager, the housekeeper, the room-maids — namely, anyone with, or with access to, a duplicate key to the aforementioned room. Not the husband. In the second place, with the door to 310 open, a much more interesting thieves' gallery was open to view: most obviously, anyone at all who would happen to be passing and who had glimpsed, through the open door, a handbag that had proved too tempting an opportunity. Open to such temptation (if not necessarily susceptible to it) would have been the room-maids, the occupants of nearby rooms, any casual passer-by. But just a moment! Room 310 was off the main corridor, and anyone in its immediate vicinity would be there for a reason: a friend, perhaps, with a solicitous enquiry about the lady's feet; a fellow tourist wanting to borrow something; or learn something. Then there was Ashenden. He'd said he would be going around at some point to all the rooms to check up on the sachets, shampoos, soaps, switches. Opportunity? Yes! But hardly much of a motive, surely? What about the three guest speakers? Out of the question, wasn't it? They hadn't been called to the colours at that point — weren't even in The Randolph. Forget them! Well, no — not altogether, perhaps; not until Lewis had checked their statements.
So that was that, really. That set the 'parameters' (the buzz-word at HQ recently) for the crime. No other portraits in the gallery.
Not really.
No!
Or were there?
What about the husband? Morse had always entertained a healthy suspicion of anyone found first on the scene of a crime; and Eddie Stratton had been a double-first: the first to report both the death of his wife, and the theft of the jewel. But any man who finds his wife dead — dead! — surely he's not going to. Nobody could suspect that.
Except Morse.
And what about — what about the most unlikely, improbable, unthinkable. Unthinkable? Well, think about it, Morse! What about the wife herself: Mrs. Laura Stratton? Could she have been responsible for the disappearance of the jewel? But why? Was it insured? Surely so! And doubdess for a hefty sum. All right, the thing was unsellable, unbuyable; the thing was useless — except, that is, as a link in a cultural continuum in a University Museum. Or else — yes! — or else as an insurance item which in terms of cash was worth far more lost than found; and if the Strattons were getting a bit hard up it might not have been so much if it were lost as when. And what — it was always going to hit Morse's brain sooner or later — what if the thing had never been there to get lost in the first place? Yes, the possibility had to be faced: what if the Wolvercote Tongue had never been inside the handbag at all? (Keep going, Morse!) Never even left America?
Morse already found himself in the Summertown shopping centre; and it was some five minutes later, as he came to his bachelor flat just south of the A40 Ring Road, that the oddest possibility finally struck him: what if the Wolvercote Tongue didn't exist at all? But surely there would have been all sorts of descriptive and photographic pieces of evidence, and so on? Surely such an authority as Dr. Theodore Kemp could never have been so duped in such a matter? No! And he'd almost certainly flown over to see it, anyway. No! Forget it! So Morse almost forgot it, and let himself into his flat, where he played the first two movements of the Bruckner No. 7 before going to bed.
He woke up at 2.50 a.m., his mouth very dry. He got out of bed and went to the bathroom, where he drank a glass of water; and another glass of water. In truth, water — a liquid which figured little during Morse's waking life — was his constant companion during the early hours of almost every morning.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances.
The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible
(Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray)
THE BACHELOR MORSE had only the wraith-like, gin-ridden spectre of a lush divorcee to share his pillow that night, unlike the male speakers scheduled for the following day's Historic Cities of England programme, both of whom, when Morse had made his first visit to the bathroom, were dutifully asleep beside their respective spouses and in their own homes — homes in North Oxford, separated by only about a quarter of a mile.
The traveller who heads north from the centre of Oxford may take, at St. Giles' Church, either the fork which leads up the Woodstock Road, or the right-hand fork, the Banbury Road, which leads after a mile or so to Summertown. Here, just past the shopping area, he will come to the new, yellow-bricked premises of Radio Oxford on his left; and then, almost immediately on his right, the first of the four roads — Lonsdale, Portland, Hamilton, Victoria — which stretch between the main Banbury Road and the River Cherwell (pronounced by most of the locals 'Charwell'). At all hours, each of these roads is suitable only for one-way traffic because of the continuous lines of parked cars on either side. The majority of houses here, built in the 1920s and 30s, are without integral garages; and many an amateurishly painted sign, alongside the edges of the pavement or on boards beside front gates, urges with courtesy, warns with threats of trespass, or simply begs with a pathetic 'Please', those motorists who commute to Summertown not to park their wretched vehicles there. In vain! For the life-blood along these roads ever flows, as it were, through arteries clogged with atherosclerosis.
But Dr. Kemp no longer drives a car.
Any person meeting for the first time those two distinguished academics, Theodore Kemp and Cedric Downes, would be fairly sure to come to the following judgements. Kemp would perhaps appear to merit such epithets as artistic, flamboyant, high-brow, selfish, aloof, rakish — the list could go on and on, in much the same direction; and this impression would be formed largely from a certain arrogance in the pale features, an affected upper-class diction, the almost invariable silk shirt and bow-tie, the casual elegance of the light-beige lightweight suits which he favoured in both summer and winter to bedeck his slim and small-boned figure. And what of Downes? Certainly not by any means such a clear-cut impression: rather languid in movement, somewhat overweight, a not-quite-top-echelon-public-school-man, a slightly bored expression round the mouth, the promise of a humorous twinkle in the eyes, a semi-florid colouring, a heavyish suit with trousers sorely in need of a press, longish and lank brown hair, and a careless, unpretentious drawl in a voice which still bore the flat traces of his Midlands origins. Everything about him qualified; everything 'rather', 'quite', 'somewhat'. And finally — most importantly, maybe — the obvious impression that he was going a bit, more than a bit, deaf. For increasingly noticeable was his habit of shepherding any interlocutor to his right-hand side; his frequent cupping of the hand behind his right ear; and occasionally his use of an NHS hearing-aid, recently provided for his rapidly developing otosclerosis.
Which things being so, it might be assumed that Kemp was probably having all the fun that was going in life in general, and in Oxford in particular; whilst the seedier, world-weary Downes was slowly running out of steam, and like as not running out of luck, too. Yet such an assumption would not be wholly correct: in fact it would be some considerable way distant from the truth.
Kemp's life had not blossomed as once it had promised. After fathering (as was rumoured) almost as many illegitimate offspring as almighty Zeus himself, and after successfully disclaiming most of the responsibility for such excessive multiplication of the species, he had married a rather plain, though neatly figured woman, named Marion (with an 'o'), whose parents were rumoured to be fairly wealthy. Then, now two years since, he had managed to crash his BMW in such a way that his not-wholly fair but fully pregnant wife had lost both her child and the use of her lower limbs, whilst he himself had received only a broken collar-bone, with a few slivers of glass embedded in his back. But at least Marion had survived: the driver of the other car involved, a thirty-five-year-old married woman, had been instantly killed. Definitive responsibility for the accident could not be fully determined, since the coroner found some of the evidence confusing, and far from competently reported. Yet Kemp had been drinking: and the charge he faced, a charge resulting in a fine and a three-year disqualification, had been one of driving whilst under the influence of alcohol, not that of reckless or of dangerous driving. Some of those who knew Kemp well, most of his University colleagues, and all of those who could never abide the man, considered him to have been extremely fortunate. Such disapprobation had probably accounted for the refusal of his college to elevate his status as a post-graduate researcher (or 'graduate researcher', as the pedantic Morse would have preferred) to that of the fellowship which had suddenly fallen vacant. Six weeks after this humiliation, he had been appointed to the post of Keeper of Anglo-Saxon and Mediaeval Antiquities at the Ashmolean. He now lived in a ground-floor flat in Cherwell Lodge, a brick-built block along Water Eaton Road — the latter stretching from the bottom of Victoria Road into the Cutteslowe Estate. The enforced move, made to accommodate his wheel-chaired wife, had taken place at exactly the wrong time in the housing market, and his property was presently worth little more than a quarter of the price likely to be fetched by that of his fellow-lecturer, the one who had temporarily forgotten the name of a Danish architect.
At the age of forty, five years previously, Cedric Downes had married Lucy, an engagingly attractive woman, eleven years his junior, fair-skinned and blonde, fully-figured and fully-sexed — though with a tendency towards a nervousness of manner on occasion — and with an IQ which was rated quite high by those meeting her for the first time, but which usually dipped a little upon more intimate acquaintance. Downes, a mediaeval historian, was a Fellow of Brasenose, and lived in a large detached house at the far end of Lonsdale Road, its beautifully tended back garden stretching down to the banks of the River Cherwell.
In the back bedroom of number 6 Cherwell Lodge, Marion Kemp lay supine. Marion Kemp had to lie supine. It would have been beneficial to the two of them, certainly would have guaranteed longer periods of sleep, if after the accident they had abandoned the double bed and settled for twin beds — perhaps even for separate rooms. Surprisingly, however, her husband would hear nothing of such a suggestion, and at first she had felt pleased and, yes! flattered that he still wished to lie each night beside her fruitless body. And even on that Thursday night some of the hatred which for so long had been slowly coalescing in her soul had perhaps abated minimally.
As he had promised, he had been home at 10 p.m., had clearly not been drinking much at all, had brought her a cup of Ovaltine and a digestive biscuit, and quite definitely had not been with that bitchy, boozy, whoreson Williams woman!