Then Laura had to put her foot in it! Put her goddamned, aching, corny, foot right in it.
She'd gone and died.
Not that he (Stratton) had been involved in any way in that first death. No! But as far as the second death was concerned? Ah! That was a different matter. And whatever happened he would never tell the whole truth about that to anyone — not voluntarily — not even to that smart-alec copper, Chief Inspector Morse himself.
Yet he respected the man; couldn't help it, remembering the initial broadside on the transatlantic telephone, when Morse had immediately breached the outer fortifications.
'No, Inspector. There's nothing I can tell you about Kemp's death. Nothing.'
'I was more interested in the jewel, sir.'
'Ah! 'The jewel that was ours', as Laura used to think of it.'
'Come off it!'
'Pardon, Inspector?'
'I said 'Bullshit!' '
CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
What's in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet
(Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet)
ALTHOUGH IT HAD been a rather chilly morning, several of the people seated in the Beau Nash Room wished that the central heating could be turned down a few degrees. Howard Brown wiped his high forehead with a large handkerchief, and John Ashenden brushed the sleeve of his sports jacket across his upper lip where he felt the sweat-prickles forming. Morse himself drew a forefinger half a circuit round the neck of his slightly over-tight collar, and continued:
'I know who stole the Wolvercote Tongue. I know where it is, and I am quite sure that it will soon be recovered. I also know which one of you — which one of you here — killed Dr. Kemp.' The hush was now so intense that Lewis found himself wondering whether his involuntary swallow had been audible, as for thirty seconds or so Morse stood silent and still, only his eyes moving left and right, and left and right again across the central aisle. No one in the audience moved either. No one dared even to cough.
'I'd hoped that the guilty person would have come forward by now. I say that because you may have read of several cases in England recently where the police have been criticised — in some cases rightly so — for depending for a prosecution on the uncorroborated confessions of accused persons, confessions which, certainly in one or two cases, might have been extorted in less than safe and satisfactory circumstances. How much better it would have been, then, if Kemp's murderer came forward—comes forward — in the presence of his friends and fellow tourists. ' Morse again looked around the room; but if there were any one person upon whom those blue eyes focused, it was not apparent to the others seated there.
'No?'
'No?' queried Morse again.
'So be it! There is little more to tell you. The biggest single clue in this case I passed over almost without reading it, until my sergeant jogged my memory. It was contained in a police report of the road accident in which Kemp crippled his wife — and also killed the driver of the other car, a Mrs. P. J. Mayo, a thirty-five-year-old woman from California: Mrs. Philippa J. Mayo, whose husband had earlier been killed in a gunnery accident on the USS South Dakota. That would have been bad enough for Philippa Mayo's parents-in-law, would it not? But at least the man had been serving his country; at least he'd died for some cause—whether that cause was justified or not. What of Philippa's own parents, though, when she is killed? Their daughter. Their only daughter. Their only child. A child killed needlessly, pointlessly, tragically, and wholly reprehensibly—by a man who must have appeared to those parents, from the reports they received, as a drunken, selfish, wicked swine who deserved to be as dead as their daughter. Above all, I suspect, the parents were appalled by what seemed to them the quite extraordinary leniency of the magistrates at the criminal hearing, and they came over to England, father and mother, to lay the ghost that had haunted them night and day for the past two years. But why only then, you may ask? I learn that the wife had been suffering from cervical cancer for the previous three years; had just endured her second massive session of chemotherapy; had decided that she could never face a third; had only at the outside six more months to live. So the pair came over to view the killer of their daughter, and if they deemed him worthy of death, they vowed that he would die. They met him the once only, on the night before he died: a cocky philanderer, as they saw him; a cruel, conceited specimen; and now a man who, like Philippa Mayo's mother, had so very little time to live. The link between the two crimes, and the motivation for them, was clear to me at last, and the link and the motivation merged into a single whole: the implacable hatred of a man and his wife for the person who had killed their daughter.
'For Theodore Kemp.
'I keep mentioning 'man and wife' because I finally persuaded myself that no one single person on his own could have carried through the murder of Kemp. It could have been any two people, though, and we had to try to find out as much about all of you as we could. When you signed in at The Randolph, you all filled in a form which asked overseas visitors to complete full details of nationality, passport number, place passport issued, permanent home address, and so on. But, as you know, I also had to ask Mr. Ashenden to collect your passports, and from these, my sergeant here' (the blood rose slowly in Lewis's cheeks) 'checked all the details you had given and found that two of you lived in the same block of retirement flats. But these two were not registered as man and wife; rather they had decided to play the waiting game, to take advantage of anything that might crop up, to 'optimise the opportunity', as I believe you say in America. And that opportunity materialised — in the person of Eddie Stratton.
'Stratton had been out at Didcot on the afternoon Kemp died, and what is more he could prove his presence there conclusively — with photographic evidence. And I — we — were led to believe that his quite innocent statements about his train journey back to Oxford were equally true. But they weren't. Cleverly, unwittingly, as it seemed, he gave a wholly unimpeachable alibi to a man he saw in the carriage ahead of him — a man to whom he owed a very great deal. But he did not see that man, ladies and gendemen! Because that man was not on the Didcot-Oxford train that afternoon. He was in Oxford. murdering Dr. Kemp.'
