The Wench is Dead

by Colin Dexter

  Just after twelve noon, with one of her female colleagues, she walked over to the King’s Arms, on the corner of Holywell Street – in which hostelry she was accustomed to enjoy her fifty-five minute lunch-break, with a single glass of white wine and a salmon-and-cucumber sandwich. It was when Christine got to her feet and offered to get in a second round of drinks, that her colleague eyed her curiously.

  ‘You always said two glasses sent you to sleep.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So I’ll go to sleep as well, all right?’

  They were good friends; and doubtless Christine would have given some castrated account of her visit to the JR2 the previous evening, had not another colleague joined them. Whereafter the three were soon engaged in happily animated conversation about interior decorating and the iniquity of current mortgage repayments.

  Or two of them were, to be more accurate. And the one who had been the least lively of the trio found herself doing rather less work than usual that same afternoon. After carefully photocopying her finds, she wished the p.m. hours away, for she was impatient to parade the fruits of her research; and she just, simply – well, she just wanted to see the man again. That was all.

  At 6.30 p.m. at her home in the village of Bletchington, some few miles out of Oxford, towards Otmoor, she slowly stroked red polish on to her smoothly manicured oval nails, and at 7 p.m. started out for the JR2.

  Equally, from his own vantage point, Morse was looking forward to seeing Christine Greenaway once again. The previous evening he’d quickly appreciated her professionalism as she’d listened to his request, as she’d calculated how it might be implemented. In a more personal way he’d noted, too, the candour and intelligence of her eyes – eyes almost as blue as his own – and the quiet determination around her small mouth. So it was that at 7.25 p.m. he was sitting in his neatly remade bed, newly washed, erect against his pillows, his thinning hair so recently re-combed – when his stomach suddenly felt as though it was being put through a mangle; and for two or three minutes the pain refused to relax its grinding, agonizing grip. Morse closed his eyes and squeezed his fists with such force that the sweat stood out on his forehead; and with eyes still shut he prayed to Someone, in spite of his recent conversion from agnosticism to outright atheism.

  Two years earlier, at the Oxford Book Association, he had listened to a mournful Muggeridge propounding the disturbing philosophy of The Fearful Symmetry, in which the debits and the credits on the ledgers are balanced inexorably and eternally, and where the man who tries to steal a secret pleasure will pretty soon find himself queuing up to pay the bill – and more often than not with some hefty service-charges added in. What a preposterous belief it was (the sage had asserted) that the hedonist could be a happy man!

  Oh dear!

  Why had Morse ever considered the pleasure of a little glass? The wages of sin was death, and the night before was seldom worth the morning after (some people said). All mortals, Morse knew, were ever treading that narrow way by Tophet flare to Judgement Day, but he now prayed that the last few steps in his own case might be deferred at least a week or two.

  Then, suddenly as it had come, the pain was gone, and Morse opened his eyes once more.

  The clock behind Sister’s desk (as earlier and darkly rumoured, Nessie was going to be on the night-shift) was showing 7.30 when the visitors began to filter through with their offerings stashed away in Sainsbury or St Michael carriers, and, some few of them, with bunches of blooms for the newly hospitalized.

  Life is, alas, so full of disappointments; and it was to be an unexpected visitor who was to monopolize Morse’s time that evening. Bearing a wilting collection of white chrysanthemums, a sombre-looking woman of late-middle age proceeded to commandeer the sole chair set at his bedside.

  ‘Mrs Green! How very nice of you to come!’

  Morse’s heart sank deeply, and took an even deeper plunge when the dutiful charlady mounted a sustained challenge against Morse’s present competence to deal, single-handedly, with such crucial matters as towels, toothpaste, talcum-powder, and clean pyjamas (especially the latter). It was wonderfully good of her (who could deny it?) to take such trouble to come to see him (three buses, as Morse knew full well); but he found himself consciously willing her to get up and go.

  At five minutes past eight, after half a dozen ‘I-really must-go’s, Mrs G. rose to her poorly feet in preparation for her departure, with instructions for the care of the chrysanthemums. At last (at last!), after a mercifully brief account of her latest visit to her ‘sheeropodist’ in Banbury Road, Mrs G. dragged her long-suffering feet away from Ward 7C.

  On several occasions, from her father’s bedside, Christine Greenaway had half-turned in the course of her filial obligations; and two or three times her eyes had locked with Morse’s: hers with the half-masked smile of understanding; his with all the impotence of some stranded whale.

  Just as Mrs Green was on her way, a white-coated consultant, accompanied by the Charge Nurse, decided (inconsiderately) to give ten minutes of his time to Greenaway Senior, and then in some sotto voce asides, to confide his prognosis to Greenaway Junior. And for Morse, this hiatus in the evening’s ordering was getting just about as infuriating as waiting for breakfast in some ‘Fawlty Towers’ hotel.

  Then Lewis came.

  Never had Morse been less glad to see his sergeant; yet he had instructed Lewis to pick up his post from the flat, and he now took possession of several envelopes and a couple of cards: Morse’s shoes (his other pair) were now ready for collection from Grove Street; his car licence was due to be renewed within the next twenty days; a ridiculously expensive book on The Transmission of Classical Manuscripts now awaited him at OUP; a bill from the plumber for the repair of a malfunctioning stop-cock was still unpaid; the Wagner Society asked if he wanted to enter his name in a raffle for Bayreuth Ring tickets; and Peter Imbert invited him to talk in the new year at a weekend symposium, in Hendon, on inner-city crime. It was rather like a cross-section of life, his usual correspondence: half of it was fine, and half of it he wanted to forget.

  At twenty-three minutes past eight, by the ward clock, Lewis asked if there was anything else he could do.

  ‘Yes, Lewis. Please go, will you? I want to have five minutes with – ’ Morse nodded vaguely over to Greenaway’s bed.

  ‘Well, if that’s what you want, sir.’ He rose slowly to his feet.

  ‘It is what I bloody want, Lewis! I’ve just told you, haven’t I?’

  Lewis took a large bunch of white seedless grapes (£2.50 a pound) from his carrier-bag. ‘I thought – we thought, the missus and me – we thought you’d enjoy them, sir.’

  He was gone; and Morse knew, within a second of his going, that he would not be forgiving himself easily for such monumental ingratitude. But the damage was done: nescit vox missa reverti.

  The bell rang two minutes later, and Christine came across to Morse’s bed as she left, and handed him six large photocopied sheets.

  ‘I hope this is what you wanted.’

  ‘I’m ever so grateful. It’s – it’s a pity we didn’t have a chance to …’

  ‘I understand. I do understand,’ she said. ‘And you will let me know if I can do anything else?’

  ‘Look … perhaps if we—’

  ‘Come along now, please!’ The Charge Nurse’s voice sounded to Morse almost as imperious as Nessie’s as she walked quickly around the beds.

  ‘I’m so grateful,’ said Morse. ‘I really am! As I say it’s …’

  ‘Yes,’ said Christine softly.

  ‘Will you be in tomorrow?’ asked Morse quickly.

  ‘No – not tomorrow. We’ve got some librarians coming from California—’

  ‘Come along now, please!’

  Mrs Green, Sergeant Lewis, Christine Greenaway – now all of them gone; and already the medicine-trolley had been wheeled into the ward, and the nurses were starting out on yet another circuit of measurements and medicaments.

  And
Morse felt sick at heart.

  It was at 9.20 p.m. that he finally settled back against his piled pillows to glance quickly through the photocopied material Christine had found for him. And soon he was deeply and happily engrossed – his temporary despondency departing on the instant.

  * * *

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  * * *

  Being in the land of the living was itself the survivor’s privilege, for so many of one’s peers – one’s brothers and sisters – had already fallen by the wayside, having died at birth, at infancy or childhood

  (Roy & Dorothy Porter, In Sickness and in Health)

  THE DOCUMENTS WHICH Morse now handled were just the thing (he had little doubt) for satisfying the original-source-material philosophy which was just then swamping the GCSE and A-level syllabuses. And for Morse, whose School Certificate in History (Credit) had demanded little more than semi-familiarity with the earliest models of seed-drills and similar agricultural adjuncts of the late eighteenth century, the reading of them was fascinating. Particularly poignant, as it appeared to Morse, was the Foreword to the Insurance Guide and Hand-Book 1860 (bless the girl! – she’d even got the exact year) where the anonymous author stated his own determination to soldier along in ‘this vale of tears’ for as long as decently possible:

  ‘Thus it is that all our efforts are forever required, not to surpass what we may call the biblical “par” for life – that famous “three-score years and ten” – but to come reasonably near to attaining it at all. For it is only by continuous vigilance and energy in the work for self preservation that the appointed average can be brought into view; and with good fortune and good sense (and God’s grace) be achieved.’

  It was interesting to find the Almighty in parenthesis, even in 1860, and Morse felt he would like to have known the author. Yet when that same author went on to assert that ‘mortality had decreased by two-fifths between 1720 and 1820’, Morse began to wonder what on earth such a bafflingly unscientific – indeed, quite nonsensical – statement might mean. What did seem immediately clear, as he read through the small print, was that people during those years were beginning to live rather longer, and that by the middle of the nineteenth century insurance companies were beginning to match this sociological phenomenon with increasingly attractive rates and premiums, in spite of the sombre statistics appended to each year, right up to the 1850s. Like 1853, e.g. – the figures for which Morse now considered. Of the half million or so departed souls reported in the pages of the Guide, 55,000 had died of consumption, 25,000 of pneumonia, 24,500 of convulsions, 23,000 of bronchitis, 20,000 of premature death and debility, 19,000 of typhus, 16,000 of scarlatina, 15,000 of diarrhoea, 14,000 of heart disease, 12,000 of whooping cough, 11,000 of dropsy, 9,000 of apoplexy, 8,500 of paralysis, 6,000 of asthma, 5,750 of cancer, 4,000 of teeth troubles, 3,750 of measles, 3,500 of croup, 3,250 of smallpox, 3,000 of (mothers) giving birth; and so on to the smaller numbers succumbing to diseases of brain, kidney, liver, and other perishable parts of the anatomy – and to old age! As he added up such numbers quickly in his head, Morse realized that about two-thirds of the 500,000 were unaccounted for; and he had to assume that even with a few more categories added (‘murder’ for one!) there must have been vast numbers of people in those days whose deaths were for some reason or other not specifically ‘accounted for’ at all, albeit being registered in the national statistics. Perhaps a lot of them were just not important enough to get their own particular malady spelled out on any death certificate; perhaps many of the physicians, midwives, nurses, poor-law-attendants, or whatever, just didn’t know, or didn’t want to know, or didn’t care.

  As he lay back on the pillows and thought of the circumstances besetting the luckless Joanna Franks, who had died neither of consumption nor pneumonia … nor … he suddenly fell into a sleep so deep that he missed his 10 p.m. Horlicks and his treasured digestive biscuit; and then he woke up again, somewhat less than refreshed, at 11.45 p.m., with a dry throat and a clear head. The lights in the ward were turned down to half power, and the other patients around him seemed contentedly asleep – apart from the man who’d been admitted late that afternoon and around whom the medical staff had been fussing with a rather ominous concern; the man who now lay staring at the ceiling, doubtless contemplating the imminent collapse of his earthly fortunes.

  Nessie was nowhere to be seen: the desk was empty.

  He’d just had a nasty little dream. He’d been playing cricket in his early days at Grammar School; and when it came to his turn to bat, he couldn’t find his boots … and then when he did find them the laces kept snapping; and he was verging on a tearful despair – when he’d awoken. It might have been Mrs Green talking about her chiropody? Or was it Lewis, perhaps, who’d brought the card from the cobblers? Or neither of them? Was it not more likely to have been a young woman in 1859 who’d shouted, with her particular brand of terrified despair, ‘What have you done with my shoes?’

  He looked around again: the desk was still empty.

  Surely he wasn’t likely to imperil the well-being of the ward if he turned on his angle-lamp? Especially if focused directly into a small pool of light on his own pillows? No! Reading a book wasn’t going to hurt anyone and the sick man had had his light on all the time.

  Pushing in the button switch, he turned on his own light, with no reaction from anyone; and still no sign of Nessie.

  Part Three of Murder on the Oxford Canal was close to hand; but Morse was reluctant to finish that too quickly. He remembered when he’d first read Bleak House (still to his mind the greatest novel in the English language) he’d deliberately decelerated his reading as the final pages grew ever thinner beneath his fingers. Never had he wanted to hang on to a story so much! Not that the Colonel’s work was anything to wax all that lyrical about; and yet Morse did want to eke it out – or so he told himself. Which left the not displeasing possibility of a few further chapters of The Blue Ticket – with Mr Greenaway now fast asleep. The pattern of crime in nineteenth-century Shropshire had already joined the local legion of lost causes.

  Morse was soon well into the exploits of a blonde who would have had arrows on her black stockings pointing northward and reading ‘This way for the knickers’ – that is, if she’d worn any stockings; or worn any knickers, for that matter. And it was amid much parading of bodies, pawing of bosoms, and patting of buttocks, that Morse now spent an enjoyable little interval of erotic pleasure; indeed, was so engrossed that he did not mark her approach.

  ‘What do you think you’re doing?’

  ‘I was just—’

  ‘Lights go out at ten o’clock. You’re disturbing everyone on the ward.’

  ‘They’re all asleep.’

  ‘Not for much longer, with you around!’

  ‘I’m sorry—’

  ‘What’s this you’re reading?’

  Before he could do anything about it, Nessie had removed the book from his hands, and he had no option but to watch her helplessly. She made no comment, passed no moral judgement, and for a brief second Morse wondered if he had not seen a glint of some semi-amusement in those sharp eyes as they had skimmed a couple of paragraphs.

  ‘Time you were asleep!’ she said, in a not unkindly fashion, handing him back the book. Her voice was as crisp as her uniform, and Morse replaced the ill-starred volume in his locker. ‘And be careful of your fruit juice!’ She moved the half-filled glass one millimetre to the left, turned off the light, and was gone. And Morse gently eased himself down into the warmth and comfort of his bed, like Tennyson’s lily sliding slowly into the bosom of the lake …

  That night he dreamed a dream in Technicolor (he swore it!), although he knew such a claim would be contradicted by the oneirologists. He saw the ochre-skinned, scantily clad siren in her black, arrowed stockings, and he could even recall her lavender-hued underclothing. Almost it was the perfect dream! Almost. For there was a curiously insistent need in Morse’s brain which paradoxically demanded a factual name
and place and time before, in fantasy, that sexually unabashed freebooter could be his. And in Morse’s muddled computer of a mind, that siren took the name of one Joanna Franks, provocatively walking along towards Duke’s Cut, in the month of June in 1859.

  When he awoke (was woken, rather) the following morning, he felt wonderfully refreshed, and he resolved that he would take no risks of any third humiliation over The Blue Ticket. With breakfast, temperature, wash, shave, blood-pressure, newspaper, tablets, Bovril, all these now behind him – and with not a visitor in sight – he settled down to discover exactly what had happened to that young woman who had taken control of his nocturnal fantasies.

  * * *

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  * * *

  PART THREE

  A Protracted Trial

  JOANNA FRANK’S BODY was found at Duke’s Cut at about 5.30 a.m. on Wednesday, 22nd June 1859. Philip Tomes, a boatman, said he was passing down-canal towards Oxford when he saw something in the water – something which was soon identified as, in part, a woman’s gown; what else, though, he could not for the moment make out in the darkened waters. The object was on the side of the canal opposite the tow-path, and in due course he discovered it to be the body of a female, without either bonnet or shoes. She was floating alongside the bank, head north, feet south, and there was no observable movement about her. She was lying on her face, which seemed quite black. Tomes stopped his boat, and with a boat-hook gently pulled the body to the tow-path side, where he lifted it out of the water, in which latter task he was assisted by John Ward, a Kidlington fisherman, who happened to be passing alongside the canal at that early hour. In fact, it was Ward who had the presence of mind to arrange for the body, which was still warm, to be taken down to the Plough Inn at Wolvercote.