The Jewel That Was Ours

fancy bit of skirt along Holywell Street somewhere. Just as well he was there, perhaps.'

'Sir?'

'Well, it means he wasn't in The Randolph pinching handbags, doesn't it?'

'He could have pinched it before he went out. Mrs. Stratton was one of the first up to her room, and Ashenden was there for a good ten minutes or so—'

'What did he do with it?'

'We ought to have searched the rooms, sir.'

Morse nodded vaguely, then shrugged his shoulders.

'We wasting our time?' asked Lewis.

'What? About the handbag? Oh yes! We shall never find that — you can safely put your bank balance on that.'

'I wouldn't lose all that much if I did,' mumbled the dispirited Lewis.

'Has Max rung?'

'No. Promised to, though, didn't he?'

'Idle sod!' Morse picked up the phone and dialled the lab. 'If he still says it was just a heart attack, I think I'll just leave this little business in your capable hands, Lewis, and get back home.'

'I reckon you'd be as happy as a sandboy if he tells you she was murdered.'

But Morse was through: 'Max? Morse. Done your homework?'

'Massive coronary.'

'Positive?'

Morse heard the exasperated expiration of breath at the other end of the line; but received no answer.

'Could it have been brought on, Max — you know, by her finding a fellow fiddling with her powder- compact?'

'Couldn't say.'

'Someone she didn't expect — coming into her room?'

'Couldn't say.'

'No sign of any injury anywhere?'

'No.'

'You looked everywhere?'

'I always look everywhere.'

'Not much help, are you.'

'On the contrary, Morse. I've told you exactly what she died of. Just like the good Dr. Swain.'

But Morse had already put down the phone; and five minutes later he was driving down to North Oxford.

Lewis himself remained in the office and spent the rest of the morning rounding off the dull routine of his paper work. At 12.50 p.m., deciding he couldn't emulate the peremptory tone that Morse usually adopted with commissionaires, he took a number 21 bus down to St. Giles', where he alighted at the Martyrs' Memorial and began to walk across to The Randolph. Sheila Williams was stepping out briskly, without glancing behind her, up the left-hand side of St. Giles', past the columns of the Taylorian and the front of Pusey House, before being lost to the mildly interested gaze of Sergeant Lewis. And as the latter turned into Beaumont Street, with the canopy of The Randolph immediately in front of him, he stopped again. A man walked down the steps of the hotel, looking quickly back over his shoulder before turning left and scurrying along the street towards Worcester College, where he turned left once more at the traffic lights, and passed beneath the traffic sign there announcing 'British Rail'. In normal circumstances, such an innocent-seeming occurrence would hardly have deserved a place in the memory. But these were not normal circumstances, and the man who had just left The Randolph in such haste was Eddie Stratton.

Diffidently, Lewis followed.

It was during this hour, between 1 p.m. and 2 p.m., as Morse and Lewis were later to learn, that the scene was irreversibly set for murder.

At 3.20 p.m., to an audience slightly smaller than anticipated, Cedric Downes was pointing to the merits of the stained-glass windows in University College chapel, and especially to the scene in the Garden of Eden, where the apples on the tree of knowledge glowed like giant golden Jaffas. At 3.30 p.m., in the Archive Room of the New Bodleian, Sheila Williams was doing her best to enthuse over a series of Henry Taunt photographs taken in the 1880s — also to an audience slightly smaller than anticipated. But the slides selected by Dr. Theodore Kemp, to illustrate the development of jewelled artefacts in pre-Conquest Britain, were destined to remain in their box in the Elias Ashmole Memorial Room that sunny afternoon.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

At Oxford nude bathing was, and sometimes still is, indulged in, which used to cause mutual embarrassment when ladies passed by in boats

(Marilyn Yurdan, Oxford: Town & Gown)

AT 9.30 P.M. THE University Parks had long been closed — since before sundown in fact. Yet such a circumstance has seldom deterred determined lovers, and others slightly crazed, from finding passage-ways through or over fences and hedges into this famous precinct — the setting for countless copulations since the