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  The Jewel That Was Ours

  ( Inspector Morse - 9 )

  Colin Dexter

  For Oxford, the arrival of twenty-seven American tourists is nothing out of the ordinary. until one of their number is found dead in Room 310 at the Randolph Hotel. It looks like a sudden — and tragic — accident. Only Chief Inspector Morse appears not to overlook the simultaneous theft of a jewel-encrusted antique from the victim’s handbag. Then, two days later, a naked and battered corpse is dragged from the River Cherwell. A coincidence? Maybe. But this time Morse is determined to prove the link.

  Colin Dexter

  The Jewel That Was Ours

  For my wife, Dorothy

  Espied the god with gloomy soul

  The prize that in the casket lay

  Who came with silent tread and stole

  The jewel that was ours away.

  (Lilian Cooper, 1904–1981)

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  The author and publishers wish to thank the following who have kindly given permission for use of copyright materials:

  Extract from Oxford by Jan Morris published by Oxford University Press, 1987, reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press;

  Extract from the introduction by Lord Jenkins of Hillhead to The Oxford Story, published by Heritage Projects (Management) Ltd, reprinted by permission of the Peters Fraser & Dunlop Group Ltd;

  Extract from Lanterns and Lances published by Harper & Row and by Hamish Hamilton in the United Kingdom and Commonwealth, copyright © 1961 James Thurber. Copyright © 1989 Rosemary A. Thurber;

  Julian Symons for the extract from Bloody Murder;

  Marilyn Yurdan for the extract from Oxford: Town & Gown;

  Basil Swift for the extracts from Collected Haiku;

  Martin Amis for the extract from Other People, published byJonathan Cape;

  Max Beerbohm for the extract from Mainly on the Air, published by William Heinemann Ltd;

  A. P. Watt Ltd on behalf of Crystal Hale and Jocelyn Herbert for the extract from ‘Derby Day’, Comic Opera, by A. P. Herbert;

  Extract from Aspects of Wagner by Bryan Magee, reprinted by permission of the Peters Fraser & Dunlop Group Ltd;

  The Estate of Virginia Woolf for the extract from Mrs. Dalloway, published by the Hogarth Press

  Every effort has been made to trace all the copyright holders but if any have been inadvertently overlooked, the author and publishers will be pleased to make the necessary arrangements at the first opportunity.

  This novel is based in part on an original storyline written by Colin Dexter for Central Television’s Inspector Morse series.

  Part One

  CHAPTER ONE

  It is not impossible to become bored in the presence of a mistress

  (Stendhal)

  THE RED-SEAL Brut Imperial Moët & Chandon stood empty on the top of the bedside table to her left; empty like the champagne glass next to it, and like the champagne glass on the table at the other side of the bed. Everything seemed empty. Beside her, supine and still, hands behind his head, lay a lean, light-boned man in his early forties, a few years older than herself. His eyes were closed, and remained closed as she folded back her own side of the floral-patterned duvet, rose quickly, put her feet into fur-lined slippers, drew a pink silk dressing gown around a figure in which breasts, stomach, thighs, were all a little over-ripe perhaps — and stepped over to peer through the closed curtains.

  Had she consulted her Oxford University Pocket Diary, she would have noticed that the sun was due to set at 16.50 that early Wednesday evening in late October. The hour had gone back the previous week-end, and the nights, as they said, were pulling in fast. She had always found difficulty with the goings back and forth of the clock — until she had heard that simple little jingle on Radio Oxford: Spring Forward/Fall Back. That had pleased her. But already darkness had fallen outside, well before its time; and the rain still battered and rattled against the window-panes. The tarmac below was a glistening black, with a pool of orange light reflected from the street lamp opposite.

  When she was in her junior school, the class had been asked one afternoon to paint a scene on the Thames, and all the boys and girls had painted the river blue. Except her. And that was when the teacher had stopped the lesson (in midstream, as it were) and asserted that young Sheila was the only one of them who had the natural eye of an artist. Why? Because the Thames might well be grey or white or brown or green or yellow — anything, in fact, except those little rectangles of Oxford blue and Cambridge blue and cobalt and ultramarine into which all the wetted brushes were dipping. So, would all of them please start again, and try to paint the colours they saw, and forget the postcards, forget the atlases? All of them, that is, except Sheila; for Sheila had painted the water black.

  And below her now the street was glistening black.

  Yes.

  Everything seemed black.

  Sheila hugged the thin dressing gown around her and knew that he was awake; watching her; thinking of his wife, probably — or of some other woman. Why didn't she just tell him to get out of her bed and out of her life? Was the truth that she needed him more than he needed her? It had not always been so.

  It was so very hard to say, but she said it: 'We were happy together till recently, weren't we?'

  'What?' The tongue tapped the teeth sharply at the final 't'

  She turned now to look at him lying there, the moustache linking with the neatly trimmed Vandyke beard in a darkling circle around his mouth — a mouth she sometimes saw as too small, and too prim, and, yes, too bloody conceited!

  'I must go!' Abruptly he sat up, swung his legs to the floor, and reached for his shirt.

  'We can see each other tomorrow?' she asked softly.

  'Difficult not to, won't it?' He spoke with the clipped precision of an antique pedagogue, each of the five 't's articulated with pedantic completion. With an occasional lisp, too.

  'I meant — afterwards.'

  'Afterwards? Impossible! Impothible! Tomorrow evening we must give our full attention to our American clients, must we not? Motht important occasion, as you know. Lucky if we all get away before ten, wouldn't you say? And then—'

  'And then you must go home, of course.'

  'Of course! And you know perfectly well why I must go home. Whatever your faults, you're not a fool!'

  Sheila nodded bleakly. 'You could come here before we start.'

  'No!'

  'Wouldn't do much harm to have a drink, would it? Fortify ourselves for—'

  'No!'

  'I see.'

  'And it's healthy for the liver and kindred organs to leave the stuff alone for a while, uh? Couple of days a week? Could you manage that, Sheila?'

  He had dressed quickly, his slim fingers now fixing the maroon bow-tie into its usual decadent droop. For her part, she had nothing further to say; nothing she could say. She turned once again towards the window, soon to feel his hand on the back of her shoulders as he planted a perfunctory kiss at the nape of her neck. Then the door downstairs slammed. Miserably she watched the top of the black umbrella as it moved along the road. Then she turned off the bedside lamp, picked up the champagne bottle, and made her way down the stairs.

  She needed a drink.

  Dr. Theodore Kemp strode along swiftly through the heavy rain towards his own house, only a few minutes' walk away. He had already decided that there would be little, if any, furtherance of his affair with the readily devourable divorcee he had just left. She was becoming a liability. He realised it might well have been his fault that she now seemed to require a double gin before starting her daily duties; that she took him so very seriously; that she was demanding more and more of his time; that she
was prepared to take ever greater risks about their meetings. Well, he wasn't. He would miss the voluptuous lady, naturally; but she was getting a little too well-padded in some of the wrong places.

  Double chin. double gin.

  He'd been looking for some semblance of love — with none of the problems of commitment; and with Sheila Williams he had thought for a few months that he had found it. But it was not to be: he, Theodore Kemp, had decided that! And there were other women — and one especially, her tail flicking sinuously in the goldfish bowl.

  Passing through the communal door to the flats on Water Eaton Road, whither (following the accident) he and Marion had moved two years earlier, he shook the drenched umbrella out behind him, then wiped his sodden shoes meticulously on the doormat. Had he ruined them, he wondered?

  CHAPTER TWO

  For the better cure of vice they think it necessary to study it, and the only efficient study is through practic

  (Samuel Butler)

  MUCH LATER THAT same evening, with the iron grids now being slotted in from bar-top to ceiling, John Ashenden sat alone in the University Arms Hotel at Cambridge and considered the morrow. The weather forecast was decidedly brighter, with no repetition of the deluge which earlier that day had set the whole of southern and eastern England awash (including, as we have seen, the city of Oxford).

  'Anything else before we close, sir?'

  Ashenden usually drank cask-conditioned beer. But he knew that the quickest way to view the world in a rosier light was to drink whisky; and he now ordered another large Glenfiddich, asking that this further Touch of the Malt be added to the account of the Historic Cities of England Tour.

  It would help all round if the weather were set fairer; certainly help in mitigating the moans amongst his present group of Americans:

  — too little sunshine

  — too much food

  — too much litter

  — too early reveilles

  — too much walking around (especially that!)

  Not that they were a particularly complaining lot (except for that one woman, of course). In fact, by Ashenden's reckoning, they rated a degree or two above average. Twenty-seven of them. Almost all from the West Coast, predominantly from California; mosdy in the 65–75 age-bracket; rich, virtually without exception; and fairly typical of the abcde brigade — alcohol, bridge, cigarettes, detective-fiction, ecology. In the first days of the tour he had hoped that 'culture' might compete for the 'c' spot, since after joining the ranks of the non-smokers he was becoming sickened at seeing some of them lighting up between courses at mealtimes. But it was not to be.

  The downpour over Cambridge that day had forced the cancellation of trips to Grantchester and the American War Cemetery at Madingley; and the change of programme had proved deeply unpopular — especially with the ladies. Yes, and with Ashenden himself, too. He had duly elected himself their temporary cicerone, pointing neck-achingly to the glories of the late-Gothic fan-vaulting in King's; and then, already weary-footed, shuffling round the Fitzwilliam Museum to seek out a few of the ever-popular Pre-Raphaelite paintings.

  'They have a far better collection in the Ashmolean, Mr. Ashenden. Or so I've read. William Holman Hunt, and and Mill-ais.'

  'You'll be able to judge for yourself tomorrow, won't you?' Ashenden had replied lightly, suspecting that the doom-laden lady had forgotten (never known, perhaps) the Christian names of a painter she'd pronounced to rhyme with 'delay'.

  It had irked Ashenden that the Cambridge coach company would have to be paid in full for the non-outings that day. It had irked him even more that he had been obliged to forgo the whole of the afternoon in order to enlighten and entertain his ageing charges. He was (he knew it) a reasonably competent courier and guide. Yet in recent years he had found himself unable to cope properly without a few regular breaks from his round-the-clock responsibilities; and it had become his policy to keep his afternoons completely free whenever possible, though he had never fully explained the reasons for this to anyone.

  In November 1974 he had gone to Cambridge to take the entrance examination in Modern Languages. His A-level results had engendered not unreasonable optimism in his comprehensive school, and he had stayed on for a seventh term to try his luck. His father, as young John knew, would have been the proudest man in the county had his son succeeded in persuading the examiners of his linguistic competence. But the son had not succeeded, and the letter had dropped on to the doormat on Christmas Eve:

  From the Senior Tutor, Christ's College, Cambridge

  21.12.74

  Dear Mr. Ashenden,

  After giving full and sympathetic consideration to your application, we regret that we are unable to offer you a place at this college. We can understand the disappointment you will feel, but you are no doubt aware how fiercely competition for places

  There had been a huge plus from that brief time in Cambridge, though. He had stayed for two nights, in the Second Court at Christ's, in the same set of rooms as a fellow examinee from Trowbridge: a lanky, extraordinarily widely-read lad, who apart from seeking a scholarship in Classics was anxious to convert the University (or was it the Universe?) to the self-evident truths of his own brand of neo-Marxism. John had understood very little of it all, really; but he had become aware, suddenly, of a world of scholarship, intelligence, imaginative enthusiasm, sensitivity — above all of sensitivity — that he had never known before in his comprehensive school at Leicester.

  On their last afternoon together, Jimmy Bowden, the Trotskyite from Trowbridge, had taken him to see a double-bill from the golden age of the French cinema, and that afternoon he fell in love with a sultry, husky-voiced whore as she crossed her silk-clad legs and sipped her absinthe in some seedy bistro. It was all something to do with 'the synthesis of style and sexuality', as Jimmy had sought to explain, talking into the early hours. and then rising at six the following morning to stand outside Marks & Spencer to try to sell the Socialist Worker.

  A few days after being notified of his own rejection, Ashenden had received a postcard from Jimmy — a black and white photograph of Marx's tomb in Highgate Cemetery:

  The idiots have given me a major schol — in spite of that Greek prose of mine! Trust you've had your own good news. I enjoyed meeting you and look forward to our first term together — Jimmy.

  He had never replied to Jimmy. And it was only by chance, seven years later, that during one of his Oxford tours he'd met a man who had known Jimmy Bowden.

  After gaining his pre-ordained First in both parts of the Classical Tripos, Jimmy had been awarded a Junior Research Fellowship at Oxford to study early Etruscan epigraphy; and then, three years later, he had died of Hodgkin's disease. He had been an orphan (as events revealed) and been buried in Oxford's Holywell Cemetery, amongst many dead, but once pre-eminent, dons — only some twenty feet or so, as Ashenden learned, from the grave of Walter Pater. Yet though Jimmy had died, some small part of his legacy lived on — for John Ashenden had for many years subscribed to several specialist film magazines, printed in the UK and on the Continent, for cinema buffs such as he himself had soon become. Exactly where and when the degeneration had set in (if, indeed, 'degeneration' it were) John Ashenden could not be all that sure.

  Born in 1956, John had not grown up amidst the sexually repressive mores of his own father's generation. And once he started to work (immediately after school), started to travel, he had experienced little sense of guilt in satisfying his sexual curiosities by occasional visits to sauna clubs, sex cinemas, or explicit stage shows. But gradually such experiences began to nourish rather than to satisfy his needs; and he was becoming an inveterate voyeur. Quite often, at earlier times, he had been informed by his more experienced colleagues in the travel business (themselves totally immune, it appeared, from any corrupting influences) that the trouble with pornography was its being so boring. But was it?

  From his first introduction, the squalid nature of his incipient vice had been borne upon him — gropin
g his way like a blind man down a darkened aisle of a sleazy cinema, the Cockney voice still sounding in his ears: 'It's the real fing 'ere, sir, innit? No messin' about — nuffin like that — just straight inta fings!' And it disturbed him that he could find himself so excited by such crude scenes of fornication. But he fortified his self-esteem with the fact that almost all the cinemas he attended were fairly full, probably of people just as well adjusted as himself. Very soon, too, he began to understand something of that 'synthesis' that Jimmy had tried to explain to him — the synthesis of style and sexuality. For there were people who understood such things, with meetings held in private dwellings, the High Priest intoning the glorious Introit: 'Is everybody known?' That Ashenden had been forced to miss such a meeting of initiates that afternoon in Cambridge had been disappointing. Very disappointing, indeed.