Read The Jewel That Was Ours for Free Online Page A

and T, Lewis thought he saw the hint of a smile about her full lips; but Morse had turned to the wall on his left where he was minutely studying a late nineteenth-century Henry Taunt photograph of some brewery drays, and his last few words may well have been spoken without the slightest hint of implication or innuendo.
    'I'm sure they'll all co-operate, Inspector, but they don't know yet about. . .'
    'No. Perhaps we should wait a while? After dinner? No later than that. I wouldn't want Sergeant Lewis here to be too late in bed - Ah! Another, Mrs Williams?'
    'I'm sorry ... I seem to be—'
    'Nothing to be sorry about, is there?'
    'Same again then, please, Sergeant. Little less tonic, perhaps?'
    Lewis's eyebrows rose a centimetre. 'Anything for you, sir?'
    'No thank you, Lewis. Not on duty.'
    Lewis's eyebrows rose a further centimetre as he collected Mrs Williams's glass.
    The tour was, as Morse and Lewis learned, a pretty expensive, pretty exclusive business really. Most of them had been to England before (not all, though) and most of them were well enough off to be coming back again before too long, whatever the strength of the pound sterling. One of them wouldn't be, though . . . Yes, Sheila Williams knew quite a bit about the Wolvercote Tongue, although Dr Kemp was the real authority, of course. It seemed that Laura Stratum's first husband, a real-estate man operating in California and, in later life, quite a collector, had come to find himself in possession of a jewelled artefact which, after learning of its provenance, he had bequeathed - he had died two years since - to the Curators of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. Oh yes, she had seen it dozens of times, though only in a series of technicolour slides, from which she had been able to sketch out a diagram of the whole jewel, buckle and tongue; and in fact she herself had executed the final coloured illustration which was at that moment on show at the Ashmolean. Come to think of it, she was glad she had done the drawings; whatever happened now, people could know exactly how the Wolvercote Jewel in its entirety would have appeared. Doubtless the police would find the Tongue, but. . .
    ‘We shall certainly do our best, madam,' Lewis had interposed, the tone of his voice suggesting something less than brimming optimism .
    The Tongue itself? Well, again, Kemp was really the one to ask. But she could certainly tell them all about the look of it: of triangular shape, some 3 inches long, and 2 inches wide at the base; of a dull dirtyish brown colour (gold!), with (originally) three ruby-stones, one on each corner of the triangle - but now reduced to just the one, and that at the narrower end of things. The great, the unique, value of the tongue was the fact that it fitted (perfectly!) into the gold buckle which had been discovered during an archaeological dig at the village of Wolvercote in the early 1930s; and which, since 1947, had been proudly exhibited in the Ashmolean as evidence (hitherto unsuspected) of the exquisite craftsmanship of the goldsmith's art in the late eighth-century ad . Laura Stratton (so Sheila had learned from John Ashenden) had carried the jewel with her, in a black velvet-lined case, and kept it in her handbag - refusing to entrust the precious artefact either to transatlantic postal services, international tour operators, or burglar-and-fire-proof safe-deposit boxes. In the same handbag, it appeared, Laura had also carried a beautiful-looking string of wholly phoney pearls, which she had worn on most evenings with her dinner-dresses. Of any other valuables which might have been stolen with the handbag, Sheila had no idea whatsoever, although she volunteered the information that from her own recent experiences - and in spite of the equally recent strength of the pound sterling - some of the Americans seemed less than fully aware of the denominational value of the English currency they carried on their persons. With almost all of the party (she