The Jewel That Was Ours

'At Oxford, you mean? He was waiting at Oxford?'

'Of course. I was just trying to get past some people in front of me and I stepped off the pavement and the driver — he didn't have a chance. It was my fault, don't you believe me? He braked and. It was the case really. If it hadn't been for the case, I think perhaps. '

'The car hit the case, you mean? Hit the case first?'

Lucy nodded. 'It sort of, well — cushioned things, and I hit a litter-bin on the kerb and. ' She lifted her right hand and pointed vaguely across to the left-hand side of her body.

'So you still had the case with you, then? When the car hit you?'

For the first time the hitherto lucid Lucy looked a little bemused, as if she was unable to follow Lewis's last question. 'I don't quite follow. I'm sorry.'

'I just wanted to know if you were carrying the case, that's all.'

'Of course I was.'

'Do you — do you know where it is now, Mrs. Downes?'

'Isn't it still under the bed, Sergeant?'

Morse took the call just after 11 p.m.

'You'll never guess what's happened, sir!'

'Don't put your bank balance on it, Lewis!'

'She's going to be all right, they think, sir. The Met got it wrong about the ICU.'

Morse said nothing.

'You are — well, pleased about that, aren't you?'

'I take no delight in death, Lewis, and if one thing worries me above all else it is accidents — the random concourse of atoms in the void, as Epicurus used to say.'

'You feeling tired, sir?'

'Yes.'

'You knew it was an accident all the time?'

'No. Not all the time.'

'You're losing me — as usual.'

'What is this news of yours, Lewis, that I shall never guess?'

'The case, sir! The case we both saw Mrs. Downes take up to London.'

'We both saw her put in the taxi, if we are to be accurate.'

'But she did bring it to London! And you won't guess what was in it.'

'Curtains, Lewis? Any good? Curtains with French pleats? By the way, remind me one day to explain this business of French pleats to you. Mrs. Lewis would be glad if you took a bit more interest in household furnishings and interior decoration.'

'What do you want me to do about this left-luggage key, sir?'

'What are you talking about? What makes you think that's a left-luggage key?'

After Lewis had rung off, Morse sat at his desk and smoked three Dunhill International cigarettes one after the other. He'd been shaken, certainly, when Cedric Downes had invited him to go along to the North Oxford Golf Club and knock up the caretaker if necessary. And Lewis's phone call had surely hammered the last coffin-nail into the Cedric-Lucy theory. Yet Morse's mind was never more fertile than when faced with some apparently insuperable obstacle, and even now he found it difficult to abandon his earlier, sweet hypothesis about the murder of Theodore Kemp. He gazed out through the curtainless window on to the well-lit, virtually deserted parking-area: only his own red Jaguar and two white police cars. He could — should! — get off now and go to bed. He would be home in ten minutes. Less, perhaps, at this hour. Yes, it was extremely useful to have a car, whatever people said about traffic and pollution and expense. yes.

Morse was conscious that his mind was drifting off into an interesting avenue of thought, but also that he was drifting off to sleep, as well. It was the cars that had started some new idea. For the minute, though, it was gone. Yet there were other new ideas that jostled together in his brain for some more prominent recognition. First, the conviction that there was — must be! — a link, perhaps a blindingly obvious link, between the theft of the Wolvercote Jewel and the murder of Theodore Kemp. Second, the growing belief that two people must have been involved in things, quite certainly in the murder. Third, the worrying suspicion that amongst the evidence already accumulated, the statements taken, the people interviewed, the personal relationships observed, the obiter dicta, the geography of North Oxford — that amongst all these things somewhere there was a fact that he had seen or heard but never fully recognised or understood. Fourth, the strange reluctance he felt about abandoning Downes as Suspect Number One. And as Morse opened his passenger door, he stood for a while looking up at the Pole Star, and asking himself the question he had been asking for the past two hours: was there any way in which Downes could still have been the murderer after all?

Many of Morse's ideas were either so strange or so wildly improbable that most of them were always doomed to early disappointment. Yet, as it happened, he was registering well above par that evening, for three of the four ideas he had formulated were finally to prove wholly correct.

Lewis had fallen fast asleep on the back seat of the police car and remained so for the whole of the journey back to Oxford. In his younger days, he had been a middle-weight Army boxing champion, and now he dreamed that he was in the ring again, with a right-cross from a swarthy, swift-footed opponent smashing into the left-hand side of his jaw. He had tried to feel inside his mouth to see if any teeth were broken or missing, but the great bulk of his boxing-glove precluded any such investigation.