The Jewel That Was Ours

'Couldn't he have heard without it?'

'I don't know. Perhaps not. The line was a bit faint, I remember.'

Morse looked across at Lewis, whose eyebrows had risen a self-congratulatory millimetre.

'Perhaps you only thought it was Dr. Kemp, sir?' continued Morse.

But Ashenden shook his head firmly. 'No! I'm ninety-nine per cent certain it was him.'

'And Sheila — Mrs. Williams — she spoke to him then?'

'Yes. But you put it most accurately, Inspector. She spoke to him. And when she did, he put the phone down. So he didn't actually speak to her—that's what she told me anyway.'

Oh!

'We've still only got his word for it,' said Lewis, after Ashenden had gone. 'Like we said, sir, if it wasn't Kemp, we'd have a different time-scale altogether, wouldn't we? A whole lot of alibis that wouldn't wash at all.'

Morse nodded thoughtfully. 'Yes, I agree. If Kemp was already dead at twelve-thirty. '

'There was somebody else who heard him, sir.'

'Was there?'

'The woman on the switchboard who put the call through.'

'She wouldn't have known the voice, Lewis! She gets thousands of calls every day—'

'She'd be a very busy girl if she got a hundred, sir.'

Morse conceded another trick. 'Fetch her in!'

Celia Freeman was of far greater help than either Morse or Lewis could have wished. Especially Morse. For just as he had begun to survey the picture from a wholly different angle, just as he thought he espied a gap in the clouds that hitherto had masked the shafts of sunlight — the switchboard-operator dashed any hope of such a breakthrough with the simple statement that she'd known Theodore Kemp very well indeed. For five years she had worked at the Ashmolean before moving across the street to The Randolph; and for the latter part of that time she had actually worked for Dr. Kemp, amongst others. In fact, it had been Dr. Kemp who had written a reference for her when she'd changed jobs.

'Oh yes, Inspector! It was Dr. Kemp who rang — please believe that! He said, 'Celia? That you?' or some such thing.'

'Mr. Ashenden said that the line was a bit faint and crackly.'

'Did he? You do surprise me. It may be a little faint on one or two of the extensions, but I've never heard anyone say it was crackly. Not since we've had the new system.'

'He never said it was 'crackly',' said Lewis after she had gone.

'Do you think I don't know that?' snapped Morse.

'I really think we ought to be following up one or two of those other leads, sir. I mean, for a start there's. '

But Morse was no longer listening. One of the most extraordinary things about the man's mind was that any check, any set-back, to some sweet hypothesis, far from dismaying him, seemed immediately to prompt some second hypothesis that soon appeared even sweeter than the first.

'. this man Brown, isn't there?'

'Brown?'

'The continental-seven man.'

'Oh yes, we shall have to see Brown, and hear whatever cock-and-bull story he's cooked up for us.'

'Shall I go and get him, sir?'

'Not for the minute. He's on the walkabout with Mr. Downes.'

'Perhaps he's not,' said Lewis quietly.

Morse shrugged his shoulders, as if Brown's present whereabouts were a matter of indifference. 'At least Mr. Downes is on the walkabout, though? So maybe we should take the opportunity. What's Downes's address again, Lewis?'

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

There is much virtue in a window. It is to a human being as a frame is to a painting, as a proscenium to a play

(Max Beerbohm, Mainly on the Air)

IT WAS JUST BEFORE mid-day when Lewis braked sedately outside the Downes's residence at the furthest end of Lonsdale Road.

'Worth a few pennies, sir?' suggested Lewis as they crunched their way to the front door.

'Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's house, Lewis. Just ring the bell!'

Lucy Downes was in, and soon stood at the door: an attractive, slim, fair-haired woman in her early thirties, dressed in a summerish cotton suit of pale green, with a light-beige mackintosh over her left arm. Her eyes held Morse's for a few seconds — eyes that seemed rather timid, yet potentially mischievous, too — until her mouth managed a nervous little 'Hullo'.