The Jewel That Was Ours

deceptions and the half-truths which hitherto had veiled the naked truth of the case, there was much activity at the Trout Inn, a fine riverside hostelry set between the weir and the Godstow Lock in the village of Wolvercote, only a couple of miles out on the western side of North Oxford. During the summer months hordes of visitors regularly congregate there to eat and drink at their leisure on the paved terrace between the mellow sandstone walls of the inn itself and the river's edge, where many sit on the low stone parapet and look below them through the clear, greenish water at the mottled dark-brown and silvery backs of the carp that rise to the surface to snap up the crisps and the crusts thrown down to them.

But that Wednesday morning, the few customers who had called for an early drink were much more interested in other underwater creatures: four of them, with sleek black skins and disproportionately large webbed feet, circling up and down, and round and round, and sweeping the depths diligently below the weir, streams of bubbles intermittently rising to the surface from the cylinders strapped to their backs. Each of the four was an experienced police frogman, and each of them knew exactly what he was looking for — knew indeed the exact dimensions of the object and the positioning of the three great ruby eyes once set into it. Thus far they had found nothing, and above the bed of the river their searchings were stirring up a cloudy precipitate of mud as the white waters gushed across the weir. Yet hopes were reasonably high. The frogmen had been briefed — and with such a degree of certitude! — as to the exact point on the hump-backed bridge whence the Tongue had been thrown. So they were able to plot their operation with some precision as first they swam slowly abreast across the river, then turning and recrossing the current, ever feeling, ever searching, as they worked their way slowly downstream into the more placid reaches of the water.

But nothing.

After its discovery in 1873, the Tongue had found its way into the hands of a treasure-hunter, who had kept quiet about it and sold it to a London dealer, who in turn had sold it to an American collector, who had lent it to an exhibition in Philadelphia in 1922—which latter appearance had provided the clues, sixty-five years later, for a detective-story-like investigation on the part of Theodore Kemp of the Ashmolean Museum — a man who now lay dead in the mortuary at the Radcliffe Infirmary. But the man who had agreed to tell Chief Inspector Morse precisely where he had stood, and with what impetus thrown the Tongue back into the river at Wolvercote — this man was seated, very much alive, in the vastly confusing complex of Kennedy Airport. Beside him sat a man of such immense proportions that Eddie Stratton wondered how he could ever fit into the seat that had been booked for him on the flight to Heathrow, scheduled to leave in forty minutes' time. He wondered, too, whether the man would be willing to unlock the handcuff that chafed away at his right wrist. For he, Stratton, was contemplating no high-jinks or high-jacks in mid-Atlantic flight.

CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

In great affairs we ought to apply ourselves less to creating chances than to profiting from those that offer

(La Rochefoucauld, Maxims)

IT WAS WAY PAST coffee-break time in the Chesterton Hotel, but no one seemed to notice.

'Kemp was met at the railway station,' continued Morse. 'He was there told something — I'm guessing — which persuaded him to accompany the driver to his own flat in Water Eaton Road. Perhaps he was told that his wife was suddenly taken very ill; was dead, even. Perhaps some less dramatic disclosure sufficed. There, at Kemp's home — again I'm guessing — a quarrel took place in which Kemp was struck over the head and sent stumbling in his own living room, where his right temple crashed against the kerb of the fire-place — and where he died. I'm amazed how difficult it is occasionally for a murderer to despatch his victim: in the Thames Valley we once had a case where no fewer than twenty-three vicious stab-wounds were insufficient to complete the sorry business. But at the same time it is occasionally so terribly easy to rob a fellow human being of his life: a slight nudge, let us say, from a car-bumper, and a cyclist is knocked down and hits his head against the road — and in a second or two a life has gone. In this case, Kemp had a thin skull, and his murder was no problem. But the body? Oh yes, the body was a problem all right!

'Now, if the murder took place at about three forty-five p.m., as I believe it did, why do we find Kemp's wife, Marion, doing nothing about it? For we can be absolutely sure she was there, the whole time. Maybe the reason for this was that she was vindictively happy not to do anything, and it is the opinion of my sergeant here that she probably hated her husband almost as intensely as the murderer himself did. But Marion Kemp could not, in my view, have killed her husband, and quite certainly she could hardly have moved the body a single centimetre from where it lay. On the other hand, Kemp was a slimly built, light-boned man, and it would have been possible for most people here, let us say — anyone reasonably mobile, reasonably fit — to have moved that body at least some small distance. Even for a woman, if she were sturdily or athletically built.'

The innuendo in this remark proved too much for the petite figure in the front row, who during the last few words was showing signs of unmistakable distress.

'Inspector! Chief Inspector, rather! For you even to suggest that I, for one, could have shifted a bardy, why, that is utterly absurd! And if you think that I am going to sit here—'

Morse smiled wanly at the lady as she sat in the front row, a lady turning the scales at not much more, surely, than around five stone.

'I should never accuse you of that, Mrs. Roscoe. Please believe me!'

Mollified, it seemed, Janet sat back primly and slimly in her seat, as John Ashenden, seated immediately opposite (beside Dr. Moule), looked across at her with a troublous, darkling gaze. And Morse continued:

'In the concreted yard at the back of the flats at Water Eaton Road stood a light-weight, rubber-wheeled, aluminium wheelbarrow which one of the maintenance men had been using earlier that day. It was into this barrow, under cover of the night, at about seven p.m., that the body was put, covered with plastic sacks, themselves in turn covered with a fair sprinkling of autumn leaves, before being wheeled across the low wooden bridge there, across a well-worn path through the field, and across to the swiftly flowing current of the River Cherwell, where unceremoniously the body was tipped into the water. And as I say' (Morse looked slowly around his audience) 'it was one of your own group who performed this grisly task — a man—a man who would have felt little squeamishness about first stripping the dead man of his clothes — for there had been much blood, much messy, sticky blood which almost inevitably would have transferred itself to the clothes of the man disposing of the body; a man who for the last ten years of his working life had been inured to such gruesome matters, as a moderately competent 'mortician' in America.'

There was a sudden communal intake of breath from the audience, and clearly no need for Morse to spell things out further. But he did:

'Yes! Mr. Eddie Stratton:

'No, sir!'