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suspected) several £10, £20, even £50, notes would hardly be strangers in the purses and wallets of some of California's wealthier citizens. So a casual thief might have been pleasantly surprised by the sum of the monies often carried? But Mr Stratton - Eddie Stratton - he'd   be the man to ask about such things, wouldn't he? Really?
    She turned her large, melancholy eyes upon Morse; and for a few seconds Lewis found himself wondering if his chief wasn't temporarily mesmerised. So much so that he decided not to withhold his own contribution:
    'You say, Mrs Williams, that the group won't perhaps mind me asking them all where they were between four-thirty and five-fifteen? Would you mind if you told us where you were?'
    The effect of such an innocent question was quite unexpectedly melodramatic. Sheila Williams placed her empty glass on the table in front of her, and immediately burst into tears, during which time Morse glowered at his subordinate as if he had simultaneously broken all the rules of diplomacy, etiquette, and freemasonry.
    But Morse himself, as he thought, was equal to the task: he nodded peremptorily to the empty glass, and immediately Lewis found himself pouring yet another generous measure of Gordon's gin, tempered again with but a little slim-line tonic.
    Suddenly, and with a defiant glare at the two policemen, Sheila sat up in her chair, sought to regain a precarious state of equipoise, and drank down the proffered mixture in a single draught - much to Morse's secret admiration. She spoke just five words: 'Ask Dr Kemp - he'll explain!'
    After she was gone, guided in gentlemanly fashion along the corridor by Sergeant Lewis, Morse quickly opened the drinks-cabinet, poured himself half a tumbler of Glenfiddich, savoured a large and satisfying swallow, thereafter placing the tumbler strategically on a convenient shelf, just below the line of vision of anyone entering. Including Sergeant Lewis.
    Strangely, neither Sergeant Lewis nor Inspector Morse himself seemed particularly conscious of the fact that Mrs Sheila Williams had signally failed to answer the only significant question that had been put to her.

9

    Such is the wonderful effect of any woman's tears.
    Often I have wished myself dead, but well under my blanket, so that neither death nor man could hear me
    (George Lichtenberg)

    John Ashenden would later remember exactly what he had done during the vital forty-five minutes that Morse had specified . . .
    It was a quarter to five when he had walked out of The Randolph, and crossed over by the Martyrs' Memorial into Broad Street. The sun no longer slanted across the pale-yellow stone, the early evening was becoming much cooler, and he was wearing a lightweight rain-coat. He strode fairly quickly past the front of Balliol, the great gates of Trinity, Blackwell's Book Shop; and was waiting by the New Bodleian building to cross at the traffic lights into Holywell Street when he saw them standing there outside the Sheldonian, sub imperatoribus, her arm through his, neither of them (as it seemed) taking too much notice of anything except their mutual selves. Even more briskly now, Ashenden walked past the King's Arms, the Holywell Music Room, the back of New College - until he came to Longwall Street. Here he turned left; and after two hundred yards or so went through the wooden gate that led into Holywell Cemetery, where under the stones and crosses - so many Celtic crosses! -were laid to rest the last remains of eminent Oxford men, in these slightly unkempt, but never neglected, acres of the dead. A curving path through the grass led him to a wooden seat above which, wired to a yew tree, was a rectangular board showing the plot of the cemetery, with the memorials of the particularly eminent marked by numbers:

    Kenneth Grahame (1859-1932)
    Maurice Bowra (1898-1971)
    Kenneth Tynan (1927-1980)
    H.V.D. Dyson (1896-1975)
    James Blish (1921-1975)
    Theodore and Sibley, Drowned (1893)
    Sir John Stainer