The Jewel That Was Ours

'Well, I shall have to wake her up then, Lewis. Our job, as you rightly say, is full of difficult and sometimes distasteful duties.'

Lewis smiled in spite of himself. Why he ever enjoyed working with this strange, often unsympathetic, superficially quite humourless man, well, he never quite knew. He didn't even know if he did enjoy it. But his wife did. For whenever her husband was working with Morse, Mrs. Lewis could recognise a curious contentment in his eyes that was not only good for him, but good for her, too. Very good. And in a strange sort of way, she was almost as big an admirer of Morse as that faithful husband of hers — a husband whose happiness had always been her own.

'Perhaps, I'd better run you round there, sir.'

'No, no, Lewis! The walk may do me good.'

'As you say.'

'Er. just one more thing, Lewis. About the Jaguar. I left it just outside St. John's, I think. If, er. ' He held up his car-keys between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand, as if saving his nostrils the distress of some malodorous handkerchief. Then he got out of the car.

As Lewis watched him walk away up to Hamilton Road, he wondered, as he'd so often wondered, what exactly Morse was thinking; wondered about what was going on in Morse's mind at that very moment; the reading of the clues, those clues to which no one else could see the answers; those glimpses of motive that no one else could ever have suspected; those answers to the sort of questions that no one else had even begun to ask.

When Morse opened the ramshackle gate to number 97, his mind was anticipating a potentially most interesting encounter. If a diabetic patient was in need of so-called 'balance'—namely, the appropriate injection of human insulin for the control of blood-sugar levels — equally so did Morse require the occasional balance of some mildly erotic fancy in order to meet the demands of what until recently he had diagnosed as a reasonably healthy libido. Earlier that very week, in fact, as he'd filled up the Jaguar with Gulf-inflated gasoline, he'd found himself surveying the display of the semi-pornographic magazines arranged along the highest shelf above the dailies; and re-acquainted himself with such reasonably familiar titles as Men Only, Escort, Knave, Video XXXX, and so many others, each of them enticing the susceptible motorist with its cover of some provocatively posed woman, vast-breasted and voluptuous. And it was just after he'd flicked through one of them that Detective Constable Hodges (blast his eyes!) had come in, walked over to the newspaper stall, and picked up the top copy but one from the Daily Mirror pile. Morse had immediately picked up a copy of The Times, and proceeded to hold this newspaper like a crusader flaunting his emblazoned shield as he'd stood beside Hodges at the check-out.

'Nice day, sir?'

'Very nice.'

It had seemed to Morse, at that moment, that the dull eyes of Hodges had betrayed not the slightest suspicion of Morse's susceptibility. But even Morse — especially Morse! — was sometimes wholly wrong.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Yet the first bringer of unwelcome news

Hath but a losing office

(Shakespeare, King Henry IV, Part 2)

LEWIS WATCHED THE silhouette gradually form behind the opaque glass in the upper half of the front door.

'Hullo? Who is it?' The voice sounded sharp, and well educated.

'Police, Mrs. Kemp. You rang—'

'All right! All right! You took your time. Let me take mine!'

With much clicking of locks and a final scrabbling of a chain, the door was opened, and Lewis looked down with ill-disguised surprise.

'For Heaven's sake! Didn't they tell you I was a cripple?' And before Lewis could reply: 'Where's the policewoman?'

'Er, what policewoman, Mrs. Kemp?'

'Well, I'm not going to be put to bed by you—let's get that straight for a start!'

Lewis might almost have been amused by the exchanges thus far, were it not for the heavy burden of the news he was bearing.

'If I could just come in a minute—'

Marion Kemp turned her chair through one hundred and eighty degrees with a couple of flicks of her sinewy wrists, then wheeled herself swiftly and expertly into the front room. 'Close the door behind you, will you? Who are you by the way?'

Lewis identified himself, though Marion Kemp appeared but little interested in the proffered warranty.

'Have you found him yet?' The voice which Lewis had earlier thought well under control now wavered slightly, and with her handkerchief she quickly wiped away the light film of sweat that had formed on her upper lip.

'I'm afraid—' began Lewis.

But for the moment Marion simulated a degree of hospitality. 'Do sit down, Sergeant! The settee is quite comfortable — though I have little first-hand experience of it myself, of course. Now, the only reason I rang — the chief reason — was that I need a little help, as you can see.'

'Yes, I do see. I'm, er, sorry. '

'No need! My husband managed to crash into another car on the Ring Road down near Botley.'