The Jewel That Was Ours

'You know, we haven't really checked that, have we? I mean the train could have been cancelled. or something.'

Morse said, 'I've checked. It's almost the only profitable thing I did yesterday.' He lit a cigarette and sat staring gloomily out of the window.

Lewis found himself looking at the back page of The Oxford Times which lay on the desk. Morse had not started the crossword yet ('Ichabod' this week), but just to the right of it Lewis noticed a brief item on a fatal accident at the Marston Ferry Road traffic lights: a young student who had been taking a crash course in EFL. Crash course! Huh!

'Don't tell me you've done one across, Lewis?'

'No. Just reading about this accident at the Marston Ferry lights. Bad junction, you know, that is. I think there ought to be a 'filter right' as you go into the Banbury Road.'

'Fair point!'

Lewis read on aloud. ' 'Georgette le. something. daughter of M. Georges le. something of Bordeaux. ' ' But now his eyes had spotted the date. ' 'Sfunny! This accident was a week last Saturday, sir, at half-past five. That's exactly one week earlier than Mrs. Downes.'

'Life's full of coincidences, I keep telling you that.'

'It's just that when you get two things happening like that, people say there's going to be three, don't they? That's what the wife always says.'

'Look, if a third accident'll please you, volunteer for the ambulance crew this morning. It's a fiver to a cracked piss-pot that some irresponsible sod—' Suddenly Morse stopped, the old tingle of high excitement thrilling strangely across his shoulders.

'Christ! What a fool you've been!' he murmured softly to himself.

'Sir?'

Morse rattled out his words: 'What's the name of Kemp's publisher? The one you rang to make sure he'd been there.'

' 'Babington's'. The fellow there said it was named after Macaulay' (Lewis smiled with distant memories) 'Thomas Babington Macaulay, sir — you know, the one who wrote the Lays of Ancient Rome. That's the one poem I—'

'Get on to the American Consulate! Quick, for Christ's sake! Find out where Stratton is — they'll know, I should think. We've got to stop him leaving the country.'

Morse's blue eyes gleamed triumphantly. 'I think I know, Lewis! I think I know.'

But Eddie Stratton had left the country the previous evening on a Pan Am jumbo bound for New York — together with his late wife Laura, the latter lying cold and stiff in a coffin in a special compartment just above the undercarriage.

CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

At day's end you came,

and like the evening sun,

left an afterglow

(Basil Swift, Collected Haiku)

LEWIS WAS ENJOYING that Tuesday, the day on which Morse had suddenly spurted into a frenetic flurry of activity. Six extra personnel: Sergeant Dixon, three detective PCs, and two WPCs for the telephones. The administrative arrangement and supervision required for such teamwork was exactly the sort of skill in which Lewis excelled, and the hours passed quickly with the progressive gleaning of intelligence, the gradual build up of hard fact to bolster tentative theory — and always that almost insolent gratification that shone in Morse's eyes, for the latter appeared to have known (or so it seemed to Lewis) most of the details before the calls and corroboration had been made.

It was just after a quick, non-alcoholic lunch that Morse had sought to explain to Lewis the nature of his earlier error.

'I once did a crossword in which all of the clues were susceptible of two quite different solutions. A sort of double-entendre crossword, it was. Get on the wrong wavelength with one across, and everything fits except one single interlocking letter. Brilliant puzzle! — set by Ximenes in The Observer. That's what I did — got off on the wrong foot. And I did it again in this case, with Downes. You know what one across was? That bloody phone call! I'd assumed it was important, Lewis, and I was right. But right for the wrong reasons. When I first learned that the line was bad, I thought it possible — likely, even — that the caller wasn't Kemp at all. Then, because he said he'd missed the train — although there was still ten minutes to go — I thought he wasn't at Paddington at all: I thought Kemp was probably in Oxford. And it all fitted, didn't it? Except for that one single letter.

'But all the time, that poor line we kept hearing about was of crucial significance, but for a totally different reason! It was Kemp all right who made the call. But he wasn't at Paddington: he was still at his publisher's in London — Babington Press, Fine Arts Publications, South Kensington — and doubdess he referred to it, like anyone would, as Babington's. Oh, yes! That's where he was, and he did exactly what he said he'd do. He caught the next train and arrived in Oxford, dead on schedule.'

In the circumstances 'dead on schedule' hardly seemed to Lewis the happiest of phrases, but he knew that Morse was right about the call from Babington's. It had been he himself, Lewis, who had finally got on to the man there who was in the process of completing the proofs for the forthcoming seminal opus entided Pre- Conquest Craftsmanship in Southern Britain, by Theodore S. Kemp, MA, DPhil; the man who had been closeted with Kemp that fateful morning, and who had confirmed that Kemp had not left the offices until about 12.30 p.m.

Sergeant Dixon (stripes newly stitched) was also enjoying himself, although initially he had serious doubts about whether he — or anyone else, for that matter — could successfully handle his assignment in the ridiculously