by Colin Dexter
'We'd like you to come with us, sir. If you just hand over your car-keys to me, Sergeant Lewis here will see that your car is picked up later and returned to your home address.'
'Surely this isn't necessary, is it? I know where the police station is, for Christ's sake!' Suddenly, within the last few words, Downes had lost whatever composure he had hitherto sought to sustain.
'The keys, please!' insisted Morse quietly.
'Look! I just don't know what all this bloody nonsense is about. Will you please tell me.'
'Certainly! You can hear me all right now?'
Downes almost snarled his reluctant 'Yes'; and listened, mouth agape with incredulity, as Morse beckoned over to the two detective-constables from the second police car.
'Cedric Downes, I arrest you on suspicion of the murder of Dr Theodore Kemp. It is my duty to advise you that anything you now say may be noted by my sergeant here and possibly used in evidence in any future criminal prosecution.'
But as one of the detective-constables clicked a pair of handcuffs round his wrists, Cedric Downes was apparently in no state at all to mouth as much as a monosyllable, let alone give utterance to any incriminating statement. For many seconds he just stood where he was, as still as a man who has gazed into the eyes of the Medusa.
43
As usual he was offering explanations for what other people had not even noticed as problems
(Bryan Magee, Aspects of Wagner)
After Downes had been driven away, Morse and Lewis walked back to their own car, where Morse gave urgent instructions to the forensic lab to send a couple of their whizz-kids over to the railway station - immediately! - and to Kidlington HQ to see that a breakdown van would be available in about an hour's time to ferry away a certain Metro.
'You're absolutely sure about Downes, aren't you,' said Lewis. But it was a statement, not a question.
‘Oh, yes!'
'What now, sir?'
‘We'll wait for forensics. Then we'll go and see how Downes is making out - do him good to kick his heels in a cell for half an hour. He was lucky, you know, Lewis. Bloody lucky, one way or another.'
'Hadn't you better start at the beginning, sir? We've got a few minutes' wait, like as not.'
So Morse told him.
The key thing in the case was the phone call made by Kemp. And, yes, it was made by Kemp, although some doubt could quite properly have been harboured on the matter: Ashenden knew the man, and knew his voice; and in spite of what was probably a poorish extension-line, confirmation that the call was from Kemp had come from the telephone-operator, someone else who knew him - knew him very well, in fact. No, the call was not made by anyone pretending to be Kemp. But Kemp had not made the call, as he'd claimed, from Paddington! He'd made it from Oxford.
He was anxious about making absolutely sure that another person was present in The Randolph at the lunch session with the American tourists; and he learned quite unequivocally that this person was there, although he didn't actually speak to him. Furthermore, Kemp's absence that afternoon would mean that this other person - yes, Downes - would be all the more committed to staying with the tourists for the scheduled 'informal get-together'. This arrangement, cleverly yet quite simply managed, would give him a couple of hours to get on with what he desperately wanted to get on with: to climb into bed with Downes's beautiful and doubtlessly over-sexed wife, Lucy, and get his bottom on the top sheet before his time ran out. The pair of them had probably not been having an affair for long - only perhaps after Kemp's long infatuation with the semi-permanently sozzled Sheila had begun to wear off. But where can they meet? It has to be at Downes's place: Kemp hasn't got a room in college, and it can't be at Kemp's place because his wife is a house-bound invalid. So, that morning presented a wonderful opportunity - and just a little compensation perhaps for the huge disappointment Kemp must undoubtedly have experienced over the theft of the Wolvercote Tongue. The jewel was almost in his grasp; almost about to be displayed and photographed and written up in all the right journals: a jewel he himself had traced, and one he'd worked so hard to get donated to the Ashmolean. No wonder his interest in swopping pleasantries with ageing Americans had sunk to zero; no wonder the prospect of the lubricious Lucy Downes proved so irresistible. Now the deception practised by Kemp was a very clever one. If he was going to be late on parade - 3 p.m., he'd promised -every pressure would be on the other two group leaders, Sheila Williams and Cedric Downes, to keep the tourists adequately amused by each of them shouldering an extra responsibility. It would not, incidentally, have occurred to Kemp that a consequence of such last-minute re-arrangements was that several members of the group took the opportunity this afforded to perform a strange assortment of extra-mural
activities - from viewing steam locomotives to tracing lost offspring. Red herrings, all.
But then things started to go wrong. Downes is not very deaf at all yet; but sometimes, with certain kinds of background noise, and when people are asking questions, well, there can be difficulty. A deaf person, as Lucy Downes told us, is not so much worried about not knowing the answer to any question put to him; he's worried, embarrassingly so, about not hearing the question. And at lunchtime - there are witnesses - Downes's hearing-aid began to play up and he discovered he wasn't carrying his spare aid with him. He decided to go home and pick it up, and in fact he was seen going up St Giles' on his bicycle towards North Oxford. It's hardly difficult to guess the sequence of events immediately after he'd quietly inserted his key in the Yale lock. He may have had a sixth sense about the presence of some stranger in the house; more likely he saw some physical evidence - a coat, a hat - belonging to a person he knew. He picked up a walking-stick - or something - from the hall-stand, and leapt up the stairs to find his wife and Kemp in medio coitu, both of them completely naked. In a fury of hatred and jealousy he thrashed his stick about Kemp's head while Kemp himself tried to extricate himself from the twisted sheets, to get out of the bed, and to defend himself - but he didn't make it. He staggered back and fell, and got his head crashed - a second time, as we know - against the corner-post of the double bed or the sharp edge of the fireplace. He had a thin skull - a medical fact - and there was a sudden, dreadful silence; and a great deal of blood. The despairing, faithless, gaping, horrified wife looked down at her lover, and knew that he was dead. Now, sometimes it is extremely difficult to kill a man. Sometimes it is quite extraordinarily easy, as it was then . . .
And Downes himself? The emotions of hatred and jealousy are immediately superseded by the more primitive instinct of survival, and he begins to realise that all may yet be well if he can keep his head. For he is suddenly, miraculously, aware that he has got a wonderful - no! - a perfect alibi; an alibi which has been given to him by the very person he has just killed. O lovely irony! Kemp had told Ashenden, and Ashenden had then told everyone else, that he (Kemp) would not be back from London until 3 p.m. And that meant that Downes could not possibly have killed Kemp before that time, and Downes was going to make absolutely certain - as he did - that he was never out of sight or out of touch with his group - except for the odd, brief visit to the loo - at any time that afternoon or early evening.
It is hardly difficult to guess what happened at the Downes's residence immediately after the death of Kemp. Downes himself could not stay for more than a few minutes. He instructed his panic-stricken, guilt-ridden wife to pack up Kemp's clothes in a suitcase, and to clean up the bloody mess that must have been left on the carpet, and probably on the sheets. The body was left - had to be. left - in the bedroom. Downes himself would have to deal with that. But later. For the present he seeks to compose himself as he cycles back down to The Randolph.
That evening, at about seven o'clock, he returns to his house in Lonsdale Road, the very far end of Lonsdale Road, where the lawn slopes down directly to the bank of the River Cherwell. He manoeuvres Kemp's body down the stairs and carries it across the lawn, probably in a wheelbarrow. It was a dark night, and doubtless he c
overed the corpse with a ground-sheet or something. Then slowly, carefully, without even the suspicion of a splash perhaps, he slid Kemp into the swift-flowing waters of a river swollen by the recent heavy rains. Two hours later, the body has drifted far downstream, finally getting wedged at the top of the weir in Parson's Pleasure - the place where the careless Howard Brown had earlier left his yellow programme - and his continental seven . . .
It was at this point in Morse's recapitulation that the forensic brigade arrived; and soon afterwards a royal-blue BMW carrying no lesser a personage than Chief Superintendent Bell from the City Police.
'You know, Morse,' began Bell, 'you seem to breed about as many problems as a pregnant rabbit.'
'You could look at it the other way, I suppose,' replied the radiant Morse. 'Without me and Lewis half of these fellows in forensics would be out on the dole, sir.'
About an hour before these last events were taking place, the American tourists had registered into the two-star Swan Hotel in Stratford-upon-(definitely 'upon')Avon. As throughout the tour, Ashenden had observed the opportunist self-seekers at the front of the queue (as ever) for the room-keys; and in the rear (as ever) the quieter, seemingly contented souls who perhaps knew that being first or last to their rooms would make little difference to the quality of their living. And at the very back, the small, patient figure of Phil Aldrich, seeking (of this, Ashenden could have little doubt) to avoid the embarrassment of refusing to sign Janet Roscoe's latest petition.
The evening meal had been re-scheduled for 8.30 p.m.; and with time to spare, after throwing his own large hold-all on to the counterpane of his single bed, Ashenden joined a few of the other tourists in the Residents' Lounge, where he took some sheets of the hotel's own note-paper, and began to write a letter. When he had finished, he found a red, first-class stamp in his wallet, fixed it to the envelope, and walked out into Bridge Street to find a pillar-box. The letter was addressed to Chief Inspector Morse, St Aldate's Central Police Station, Oxford, and in the top left-hand corner was written the one word: URGENT.
44
'When my noble and learned brother gives his Judgment, they're to be let go free,' said Krook, winking at us again. 'And then,' he added, whispering and grinning, 'if that ever was to happen - which it won't - the birds that have never been caged would kill 'em.'
(Dickens, Bleak House)
Unwontedly, Lewis was philosophising as he and Morse sat in the canteen at St Aldate's: 'Amazing, really: you get all these statements and alibis and secret little meetings, and then really, in the end, it's just - well, it's just the same old story, isn't it? Chap goes home and finds the missus in bed with one of the neighbours.'
'Remember, though, this is only half the case. And we've got to get some evidence. No, that's wrong! We've got some evidence - or we shall have, very soon.'
'Perhaps we shouldn't wait too much longer, sir?'
'It'll be here. Patience, Lewis! Eat your cheese sandwich!'
'I couldn't help feeling just a bit sorry for him, though.'
'Sorry? Why do you say that?'
'Well, you know, it might have been a bit sort of accidental, don't you reckon?' 'I do not,' replied Morse, with the fullest conviction.
Downes sat at the table in Interview Room Two on the ground floor, spell-bound and motionless, as if a witch had drawn a circle round him thrice. Seated opposite, Sergeant Dixon was finding the silence and the stillness increasingly embarrassing.
'Like a cuppa tea?'
'No! Er, yes! Yes please.'
'Milk and sugar?'
But Downes appeared not to hear the supplementary questions, and Dixon nodded to the constable who stood at the door, the latter now making for the canteen on a less than wholly specific mission.
At the Swan Hotel in Stratford, Mrs Roscoe had just completed her evening meal, a concoction of beans so splendidly bleak as to delight the most dedicated Vegan. She immediately wrote a brief congratulatory note, insisting that the waiter convey it forthwith to the chef de cuisine himself.
At this same time (it was now 9 p.m.) Eddie Stratton was sitting on the only chair in a small third-floor room of a hotel just north of Russell Square. The facilities here were minimal - a cracked wash-basin, one minuscule bar of soap, and one off-white towel. Yet the bed looked clean-sheeted and felt comfortable; and there was a lavatory just along the corridor (the lady had said), a bathroom one floor down, and a Residents' TV Lounge beside Reception. On the bedside table was a Gideon Bible, and beside it an entry form which, if and when completed and dispatched, would entitle the fortunate applicant to inclusion in a free draw for a ticket to one of the following summer's golfing championships. Stratton availed himself of neither opportunity.
Earlier he had visited the American Consulate, where an attractive and sympathetic fellow countrywoman from North Carolina had advised him on all the sad yet necessary procedures consequent upon the death of an American national in Britain, and acquainted him with the costs of the transatlantic conveyancing of corpses. And now, as he sat staring fixedly at the floral configuration on the faded green carpet, he felt a little sad as he thought of Laura, his wife for only the last couple of years. They had been as contented together as could have been expected, he supposed, from a union which had been largely one of convenience and accommodation; and he would always remember, with a sort of perverse affection,
her rather loud voice, her over-daubed war-paint - and, of course, the painful state of those poor feet of hers ... He nodded slowly to himself, then looked up and across at the lace-curtained window, like a bird perhaps suddenly spotting the open door of its cage. And an observer in that small room would have noticed the suspicion of a smile around his loose and slightly purplish lips.
It was just after 9 p.m. that a PC arrived from the railway station carrying a small brown envelope, which Morse accepted with delight, smiling radiantly at Lewis but saying nothing as he slit open the top and looked briefly inside. Then, with smile unfading, he handed the envelope to Lewis.
‘Wish me luck! I'll let you know when to come in.'
45
Perchance my too much questioning offends
(Dante, Purgatorio)
At least Morse spared Cedric Downes the charade of a cordial re-greeting; he even forbore to express the hope that conditions were satisfactory and that the prisoner was being well treated. In point of fact, the prisoner looked lost and defeated. Earlier he had been officially advised that it was his legal right to have his solicitor present; but surprisingly Downes had taken no advantage of the offer. A cup of tea (sweetened) stood untouched at his right elbow. He raised his eyes, morosely, as Morse took Dixon's seat opposite him and pulled another chair alongside for a very blonde young WPC, who amongst other accomplishments was the only person in St Aldate's HQ with a Pitman shorthand qualification for 130 w.p.m. Not that she was destined to get any practice at such a mega-speed, since Downes, at least for the first half of the interview, was to enunciate his words with the slow deliberation of a stupefied zombie. Morse waited patiently. That was always the best way, in the long run. And when Downes finally spoke, it was to ask about his wife.
'Did someone meet the train, Inspector? The next train?'
'Please don't worry about her, sir. She'll be looked after.'
Downes shook his head in stupefaction. This is madness - absolute madness! There's been some dreadful misunderstanding somewhere - don't you understand that? I -I can't think straight. I don't know what to say! I just pray I'm going to wake up any second.'
'Tell me about Dr Kemp,' said Morse.
'Tell you what? Everyone knows about Kemp. He was the biggest philanderer in Oxford.'
'You say "everyone"?'
'Yes! Including his wife. She knows.'
'Knew. She died this afternoon.'
'Oh God!' Downes closed his eyes and squeezed them tightly shut. Then he opened them, and looked across at Morse. 'I think I know what you're going to ask me now, Inspector.'
Mors
e tilted his head to the left: 'You do?'
'You're going to ask me whether Lucy - whether my wife was ... is aware of it, too.'
Morse tilted his head to the right, but made no reply.
‘Well, the answer's "yes". Once or twice he'd - well he'd tried to make some sort of advances to her. At receptions, parties - that sort of thing.'
'Your wife told you about this?'
'She was a bit flattered, I suppose.'
‘Was she?'
'And amused. More amused than flattered, I think.'
'And you? You, Mr Downes? Were you amused?'
'I could have killed the bloody swine!' So suddenly, so dramatically, the manner had changed - the voice now a harsh snarl, the eyes ablaze with hatred.
'It's not all that easy actually to kill a man,' said Morse.
'It isn't?' Downes's eyes appeared perplexed.
'What exactly did you hit him with? When you went home for - for whatever it was?'
‘I - pardon? - you don't—'
'Just in your own words, sir, if you will. Simply what happened, that's all. The WPC here will take down what you say and then she'll read it back to you, and you'll be able to change anything you may have got wrong. No problem!'
Wha—?' Downes shook his head in anguished desperation. 'When am I going to wake up?'
'Let's just start from when you put your key - Yale lock, isn't it? - into the front door, and then when you went in . . .'
'Yes, and I got my other hearing-aid, and some notes—'
'Whereabouts do you keep the spare hearing-aid?’ 'In the bedroom.'
Morse nodded encouragement. 'Twin beds, I suppose—'
'Double bed, actually - and I keep my spare aid in a drawer of the tallboy' - he looked directly into Morse's eyes again - 'next to the handkerchiefs and the cufflinks and the arm-bands. You do want me to be precise about what I tell you?'