'What now, sir?'
'We'll wait for forensics. Then we'll go and see how Downes is making out — do him good to kick his heels in a cell for half an hour. He was lucky, you know, Lewis. Bloody lucky, one way or another.'
'Hadn't you better start at the beginning, sir? We've got a few minutes' wait, like as not.'
So Morse told him.
The key thing in the case was the phone call made by Kemp. And, yes, it was made by Kemp, although some doubt could quite properly have been harboured on the matter: Ashenden knew the man, and knew his voice; and in spite of what was probably a poorish extension-line, confirmation that the call was from Kemp had come from the telephone-operator, someone else who knew him — knew him very well, in fact. No, the call was not made by anyone pretending to be Kemp. But Kemp had not made the call, as he'd claimed, from Paddington! He'd made it from Oxford. He was anxious about making absolutely sure that another person was present in The Randolph at the lunch session with the American tourists; and he learned quite unequivocally that this person was there, although he didn't actually speak to him. Furthermore, Kemp's absence that afternoon would mean that this other person — yes, Downes — would be all the more committed to staying with the tourists for the scheduled 'informal get-together'. This arrangement, cleverly yet quite simply managed, would give him a couple of hours to get on with what he desperately wanted to get on with: to climb into bed with Downes's beautiful and doubtlessly over-sexed wife, Lucy, and get his bottom on the top sheet before his time ran out. The pair of them had probably not been having an affair for long — only perhaps after Kemp's long infatuation with the semi-permanently sozzled Sheila had begun to wear off. But where can they meet? It has to be at Downes's place: Kemp hasn't got a room in college, and it can't be at Kemp's place because his wife is a house-bound invalid. So, that morning presented a wonderful opportunity — and just a little compensation perhaps for the huge disappointment Kemp must undoubtedly have experienced over the theft of the Wolvercote Tongue. The jewel was almost in his grasp; almost about to be displayed and photographed and written up in all the right journals: a jewel he himself had traced, and one he'd worked so hard to get donated to the Ashmolean. No wonder his interest in swopping pleasantries with ageing Americans had sunk to zero; no wonder the prospect of the lubricious Lucy Downes proved so irresistible. Now the deception practised by Kemp was a very clever one. If he was going to be late on parade—3 p.m., he'd promised — every pressure would be on the other two group leaders, Sheila Williams and Cedric Downes, to keep the tourists adequately amused by each of them shouldering an extra responsibility. It would not, incidentally, have occurred to Kemp that a consequence of such last-minute rearrangements was that several members of the group took the opportunity this afforded to perform a strange assortment of extra-mural activities — from viewing steam locomotives to tracing lost offspring. Red herrings, all.
But then things started to go wrong. Downes is not very deaf at all yet; but sometimes, with certain kinds of background noise, and when people are asking questions, well, there can be difficulty. A deaf person, as Lucy Downes told us, is not so much worried about not knowing the answer to any question put to him; he's worried, embarrassingly so, about not hearing the question. And at lunchtime — there are witnesses — Downes's hearing-aid began to play up and he discovered he wasn't carrying his spare aid with him. He decided to go home and pick it up, and in fact he was seen going up St. Giles' on his bicycle towards North Oxford. It's hardly difficult to guess the sequence of events immediately after he'd quietly inserted his key in the Yale lock. He may have had a sixth sense about the presence of some stranger in the house; more likely he saw some physical evidence — a coat, a hat — belonging to a person he knew. He picked up a walking-stick — or something — from the hall-stand, and leapt up the stairs to find his wife and Kemp in medio coitu, both of them completely naked. In a fury of hatred and jealousy he thrashed his stick about Kemp's head while Kemp himself tried to extricate himself from the twisted sheets, to get out of the bed, and to defend himself — but he didn't make it. He staggered back and fell, and got his head crashed — a second time, as we know — against the corner-post of the double bed or the sharp edge of the fireplace. He had a thin skull — a medical fact — and there was a sudden, dreadful silence; and a great deal of blood. The despairing, faithless, gaping, horrified wife looked down at her lover, and knew that he was dead. Now, sometimes it is extremely difficult to kill a man. Sometimes it is quite extraordinarily easy, as it was then.
And Downes himself? The emotions of hatred and jealousy are immediately superseded by the more primitive instinct of survival, and he begins to realise that all may yet be well if he can keep his head. For he is suddenly, miraculously, aware that he has got a wonderful — no! — a perfect alibi; an alibi which has been given to him by the very person he has just killed. O lovely irony! Kemp had told Ashenden, and Ashenden had then told everyone else, that he (Kemp) would not be back from London until 3 p.m. And that meant that Downes could not possibly have killed Kemp before that time, and Downes was going to make absolutely certain — as he did — that he was never out of sight or out of touch with his group — except for the odd, brief visit to the loo — at any time that afternoon or early evening.
It is hardly difficult to guess what happened at the Downes's residence immediately after the death of Kemp. Downes himself could not stay for more than a few minutes. He instructed his panic-stricken, guilt-ridden wife to pack up Kemp's clothes in a suitcase, and to clean up the bloody mess that must have been left on the carpet, and probably on the sheets. The body was left—had to be left — in the bedroom. Downes himself would have to deal with that. But later. For the present he seeks to compose himself as he cycles back down to The Randolph.
That evening, at about seven o'clock, he returns to his house in Lonsdale Road, the very far end of Lonsdale Road, where the lawn slopes down directly to the bank of the River Cherwell. He manoeuvres Kemp's body down the stairs and carries it across the lawn, probably in a wheelbarrow. It was a dark night, and doubtless he covered the corpse with a ground-sheet or something. Then slowly, carefully, without even the suspicion of a splash perhaps, he slid Kemp into the swift-flowing waters of a river swollen by the recent heavy rains. Two hours later, the body has drifted far downstream, finally getting wedged at the top of the weir in Parson's Pleasure — the place where the careless Howard Brown had earlier left his yellow programme — and his continental seven.
It was at this point in Morse's recapitulation that the forensic brigade arrived; and soon afterwards a royal- blue BMW carrying no lesser a personage than Chief Superintendent Bell from the City Police.
'You know, Morse,' began Bell, 'you seem to breed about as many problems as a pregnant rabbit.'
'You could look at it the other way, I suppose,' replied the radiant Morse. 'Without me and Lewis half of these fellows in forensics would be out on the dole, sir.'
About an hour before these last events were taking place, the American tourists had registered into the two-star Swan Hotel in Stratford-upon-(definitely 'upon')Avon. As throughout the tour, Ashenden had observed the opportunist self-seekers at the front of the queue (as ever) for the room-keys; and in the rear (as ever) the quieter, seemingly contented souls who perhaps knew that being first or last to their rooms would make little difference to the quality of their living. And at the very back, the small, patient figure of Phil Aldrich, seeking (of this, Ashenden could have little doubt) to avoid the embarrassment of refusing to sign Janet Roscoe's latest petition.
The evening meal had been re-scheduled for 8.30 p.m.; and with time to spare, after throwing his own large hold-all on to the counterpane of his single bed, Ashenden joined a few of the other tourists in the Residents' Lounge, where he took some sheets of the hotel's own note-paper, and began to write a letter. When he had
