The Wench is Dead

by Colin Dexter

  Lewis, whilst fully accepting the probability of the alternative reading, did not appear to share the excitement which was now visibly affecting Morse; and it was time for the bad news.

  ‘No chance of checking this out in the old Summertown graveyard, sir.’

  ‘Why not? The gravestones are still there, some of them – it says so, doesn’t it? – and I’ve seen them myself—’

  ‘They were all removed, when they built the flats there.’

  ‘Even those the Colonel mentioned?’

  Lewis nodded.

  Morse knew full well, of course, that any chance of getting an exhumation order to dig up a corner of the greenery in a retirement-home garden was extremely remote. Yet the thought that he might have clinched his theory … It was not a matter of supreme moment, though, he knew that; it wasn’t even important in putting to rights a past and grievous injustice. It was of no great matter to anyone – except to himself. Ever since he had first come into contact with problems, from his early schooldays onwards – with the meanings of words, with algebra, with detective stories, with cryptic clues – he had always been desperately anxious to know the answers, whether those answers were wholly satisfactory or whether they were not. And now, whatever had been the motive leading to that far-off murder, he found himself irked in the extreme to realize that the woman – or a woman – he sought had until so very recently been lying in a marked grave in North Oxford. Had she been Joanna Franks, after all? No chance of knowing now – not for certain. But if the meticulous Dr Willis had been correct in his measurements, she couldn’t have been Joanna, surely?

  After Lewis had gone, Morse made a phone call.

  ‘What was the average height of women in the nineteenth century?’

  ‘Which end of the nineteenth century, Morse?’

  ‘Let’s say the middle.’

  ‘Interesting question!’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘It varied, I suppose.’

  ‘Come on!’

  ‘Poor food, lack of protein – all that sort of stuff. Not very big, most of ’em. Certainly no bigger than the Ripper’s victims in the 1880s: four foot nine, four foot ten, four foot eleven – that sort of height: well, that’s about what those dear ladies were. Except one. Stride, wasn’t her name? Yes, Liz Stride. They called her “Long Liz” – so much taller than all the other women in the work-houses. You follow that, Morse?’

  ‘How tall was she – “Long Liz”?’

  ‘Dunno.’

  ‘Can you find out?’

  ‘What, now?’

  ‘And ring me back?’

  ‘Bloody hell!’

  ‘Thanks.’

  Morse was three minutes into the love duet from Act One of Die Walküre when the phone rang.

  ‘Morse? Five foot three.’

  Morse whistled.

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Thanks, Max! By the way, are you at the lab all day tomorrow? Something I want to bring to show you.’

  So the ‘petite’ little figure had measured three quarters of an inch more than ‘Long Liz’ Stride! And her shoes as Lewis had ascertained, were about size 5! Well, well, well! Virtually every fact now being unearthed (though that was probably not le mot juste) was bolstering Morse’s bold hypothesis. But, infuriatingly, there was, as it seemed, no chance whatever of establishing the truth. Not, at any rate, the truth regarding Joanna Franks.

  * * *

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  * * *

  Marauding louts have shot the moping owl:

  The tower is silent ’neath the wat’ry moon;

  But Lady Porter, lately on the prowl

  Will sell the place for pennies very soon

  (E. O. Parrot, The Spectator)

  THE COMMUNICATION FROM the Insurance Company had been a third and final demand for his previous month’s premium; and the first thing Morse did the following morning was to write out a cheque, with a brief letter of apology. He understood very little about money, but a dozen or so years previously he had deemed it provident (as it transpired, Prudential) to pay a monthly premium of £55 against a lump sum of £12,000, with profits, at sixty – an age looming ever closer. He had never given a thought about what would happen if he pre-deceased his policy. No worry for him: for the present he had no financial worries, no dependants, a good salary, and a mortgage that would finish in two years’ time. He knew it, yes! – compared with the vast majority of mankind he was extremely fortunate. Still, he ought perhaps to think of making a will …

  Coincidentally, he had been talking to Lewis about insurances the day before and (he admitted it to himself) largely making it all up as he went along. But it was far from improbable, wasn’t it – what he’d guessed? Those insurance fiddles? He looked out the first material that Christine had brought in to him at the JR2, and once again studied the facts and figures of the Nottinghamshire and Midlands Friendly Society for 1859:

  Joanna had been born in 1821, so she was thirty-eight in 1859. If she’d taken out a policy a year, two years earlier, that would be – age next birthday thirty-six – an annual premium of £3. 8s 9d. Under £7, say, for a return of £100. Not bad at all. And if Donavan had already pocketed a similar packet …

  Morse left his flat in mid-morning (the first excursion since his return) and posted his single letter. He met no one he knew as he turned right along the Banbury Road, and then right again into Squitchey Lane; where, taking the second turning on his left, just past the evangelical chapel (now converted into a little group of residences) he walked down Middle Way. It was a dark, dankish morning, and a scattering of rooks (mistaking, perhaps, the hour) squawked away in the trees to his right. Past Bishop Kirk Middle School he went on, and straight along past the attractive terraced houses on either side with their mullioned bay-windows – and, on his left, there it was: Dudley Court, a block of flats built in cinnamon-coloured brick on the site of the old Summertown Parish Cemetery. A rectangle of lawn, some fifty by twenty-five yards, was set out behind a low containing wall, only about eighteen inches high, over which Morse stepped into the grassy plot planted with yew-trees and red-berried bushes. Immediately to his left, the area was bounded by the rear premises of a Social Club; and along this wall, beneath the straggly branches of winter jasmine, and covered with damp beech-leaves, he could make out the stumps of four or five old headstones, broken off at their roots like so many jagged teeth just protruding from their gums. Clearly, any deeper excavation to remove these stones in their entirety had been thwarted by the proximity of the wall; but all the rest had been removed, perhaps several years ago now – and duly recorded no doubt in some dusty box of papers on the shelves of the local Diocesan Offices. Well, at least Morse could face one simple fact: no burial evidence would be forthcoming from these fair lawns. None! Yet it would have been good to know where the stone had marked (as the Colonel had called it) the ‘supra-corporal’ site of Joanna Franks.

  Or whoever.

  He walked past Dudley Court itself where a Christmas tree, bedecked with red, green, and yellow bulbs, was already switched on; past the North Oxford Conservative Association premises, in which he had never (and would never) set foot; past the Spiritualist Church, in which he had never (as yet) set foot; past the low-roofed Women’s Institute HQ, in which he had once spoken about the virtues of the Neighbourhood Watch Scheme; and finally, turning left, he came into South Parade, just opposite the Post Office – into which he ventured once a year and that to pay the Lancia’s road-tax. But as he walked by the old familiar landmarks, his mind was far away, and the decision firmly taken. If he was to be cheated of finding one of his suspects, he would go and look for the other! He needed a break. He would have a break.

  There was a travel agency immediately across the street, and the girl who sat at the first desk to the right smiled brightly.

  ‘Can I help you, sir?’

  ‘Yes! I’d like’ (Morse sat himself down) ‘I’d like to book a holiday, with a car, in Ireland – the Rep
ublic, that is.’

  Later that day, Morse called at the William Dunn School of Pathology in South Parks Road.

  ‘Have a look at these for me, will you?’

  Refraining from all cynical comment, Max looked dubiously across at Morse over his half-lenses.

  ‘Max! All I want to know is—’

  ‘—whether they come from M&S or Littlewoods?’

  ‘The tear, Max – the tear.’

  ‘Tear? What tear?’ Max picked up the knickers with some distaste and examined them (as it seemed to Morse) in cursory fashion. ‘No tear here, Morse. Not the faintest sign of any irregular distension of the fibre tissue – calico, by the way, isn’t it?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Well, we don’t need a microscope to tell us it’s a cut: neat, clean, straight-forward cut, all right?’

  ‘With a knife?’

  ‘What the hell else do you cut things with?’

  ‘Cheese-slicer? Pair of—?’

  ‘What a wonderful thing, Morse, is the human imagination!’

  It was a wonderful thing, too, that Morse had received such an unequivocal answer to one of his questions; the very first such answer, in fact, in their long and reasonably amicable acquaintanceship.

  * * *

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  * * *

  Heap not on this mound

  Roses that she loved so well;

  Why bewilder her with roses

  That she cannot see or smell?

  (Edna St Vincent Millay, Epitaph)

  INSPECTOR MULVANEY SPOTTED him parking the car in the ‘Visitor’ space. When the little station had been converted ten years earlier from a single detached house into Kilkearnan’s apology for a crime-prevention HQ, the Garda had deemed it appropriate that the four-man squad should be headed by an inspector. It seemed, perhaps, in retrospect, something of an over-reaction. With its thousand or so inhabitants, Kilkearnan regularly saw its ration of fisticuffs and affray outside one or more of the fourteen public-houses; but as yet the little community had steered clear of any involvement in international smuggling or industrial espionage. Here, even road accidents were a rarity – though this was attributable more to the comparative scarcity of cars than to the sobriety of their drivers. Tourists there were, of course – especially in the summer months; but even they, with their Rovers and BMWs, were more often stopping to photograph the occasional donkey than causing any hazard to the occasional drunkard.

  The man parking his Lancia in the single (apart from his own) parking-space, Mulvaney knew to be the English policeman who had rung through the previous day to ask for help in locating a cemetery (for, as yet, no stated purpose) and who thought it was probably the one overlooking Bertnaghboy Bay – that being the only burial ground marked on the local map. Mulvaney had been able to assure Chief Inspector Morse (such was he) that indeed it would be the cemetery which lay on the side of a hill to the west of the small town: the local dead were always likely to be buried there, as Mulvaney had maintained – there being no alternative accommodation.

  From the lower window, Mulvaney watched Morse with some curiosity. It was not every day (or week, or month) that any contact was effected between the British Police and the Garda; and the man who was walking round to the main (only) entrance looked an interesting specimen: mid-fifties, losing his whitish hair, putting on just a little too much weight, and exhibiting perhaps, as was to be hoped, the tell-tale signs of liking his liquor more than a little. Nor was Mulvaney disappointed in the man who was shown into his main (only) office.

  ‘Are you related to Kipling’s Mulvaney?’ queried Morse.

  ‘No, sor! But that was a good question – and educashin, that’s a good thing, too!’

  Morse explained his unlikely, ridiculous, selfish mission, and Mulvaney warmed to him immediately. No chance whatsoever, of course, of any exhumation order being granted, but perhaps Morse might be interested in hearing about the business of grave digging in the Republic? A man could never dig a grave on a Monday, and that for perfectly valid reasons, which he had forgotten; and in any case it wasn’t Monday, was it? And if a grave was dug, even on a Monday, it had always – always, sor! – to be in the morning, or at least the previous evening. That was an important thing, too, about all the forks and shovels: placed across the open grave, they had to be, in the form of the holy cross, for reasons which a man of Morse’s educashin would need no explanation, to be sure. Last, it was always the custom for the chief mourner to supply a little quantity of Irish whiskey at the graveside for the other members of the saddened family; and for the grave-diggers, too, of course, who had shovelled up the clinging, cloggy soil. ‘For sure, ’tis always a t’irsty business, sor, that working of the soil!’

  So Morse, the chief mourner, walked out into the main (only) High Street, and purchased three bottles of Irish malt. An understanding had been arrived at, and Morse knew that whatever the problems posed by the Donavan-Franks equation, the left-hand side would be solved (if solved it could be) with the full sympathy and (unofficial) co-operation of the Irish Garda.

  In his mind’s eye, Morse had envisaged a bank of arc-lights, illuminating a well-marked grave, with barricades erected around the immediate area, a posse of constables to keep the public from prying, and press photographers training their telescopic lenses on the site. The time? That would be 5.30 a.m. – the usual exhumation hour. And excitement would be intense.

  It was not to be.

  Together, Morse and Mulvaney had fairly easily located the final habitation of the greatest man in all the world. In all, there must have been about three or four hundred graves within the walled area of the hillside cemetery. Half a dozen splendidly sculptured angels and madonnas kept watch here and there over a few former dignitaries, and several large Celtic crosses marked other burial-plots. But the great majority of the dead lay unhonoured here beneath untended, meaner-looking memorials. Donavan’s stone was one of the latter, a poor, mossed-and-lichened thing, with white and ochre blotches, and no more than two feet high, leaning back at an angle of about 20 degrees from the vertical. So effaced was the weathered stone that only the general outlines of the lettering could be followed – and that only on either side of a central disintegration:

  ‘That’s him,’ said Morse triumphantly. It looked as if his name had been Frank.

  ‘God rest his soul!’ added Mulvaney. ‘ – that’s if it’s there, of course.’

  Morse grinned, and wished he’d known Mulvaney long ago. ‘How are you going to explain …?’

  ‘We are digging yet another grave, sor. In the daylight – and just as normal.’

  It was all quite quick. Mulvaney had bidden the two men appointed to the task to dig a clean rectangle to the east of the single stone; and after getting down only two or three feet, one of the spades struck what sounded like, and was soon revealed to be, a wooden coffin. Once all the dark-looking earth had been removed and piled on each side of the oblong pit, Morse and Mulvaney looked down to a plain coffin-top, with no plate of any sort screwed into it. The wood, one-inch elm-boarding, and grooved round the top, looked badly warped, but in a reasonable state. There seemed no reason to remove the complete coffin; and Morse, betraying once again his inveterate horror of corpses, quietly declined the honour of removing the lid.

  It was Mulvaney himself, awkwardly straddling the hole, his shoes caked with mud, who bent down and pulled at the top of the coffin, which gave way easily, the metal screws clearly having disintegrated long ago. As the board slowly lifted, Mulvaney saw, as did Morse, that a whitish mould hung down from the inside of the coffin-lid; and in the coffin itself, covering the body, a shroud or covering of some sort was overspread with the same creeping white fungus.

  Round the sides at the bottom of the coffin, plain for all to see, was a bed of brownish, dampish sawdust, looking as fresh as if the body which lay on it had been buried only yesterday. But what body?

  ‘’Tis wonderfully well preserved, is it not, so
r? ’Tis the peat in the soil that’s accountin’ forrit.’

  This from the first grave-digger, who appeared more deeply impressed by the wondrous preservation of the wood than by the absence of any body. For the coffin contained no body at all. What it did contain was a roll of carpet, of some greenish dye, about five feet in length, folded round what appeared to have been half a dozen spaded squares of peat. Of Donavan there was no trace whatsoever – not even a torn fragment from the last handbill of the greatest man in all the world.

  * * *

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  * * *

  A man’s learning dies with him; even his virtues fade out of remembrance; but the dividends on the stocks he bequeaths may serve to keep his memory green

  (Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Professor at the Breakfast Table)

  MORSE GREW SOMEWHAT fitter during the days following his return from Ireland; and very soon, in his own judgement at least, he had managed to regain that semblance of salubrity and strength which his GP interpreted as health. Morse asked no more.

  He had recently bought himself the old Furtwängler recording of The Ring; and during the hours of Elysian enjoyment which that performance was giving him, the case of Joanna Franks, and the dubious circumstances of the Oxford Tow-path Mystery, assumed a slowly diminishing significance. The whole thing had brought him some recreative enjoyment, but now it was finished. Ninety-five per cent certain (as he was) that the wrong people had been hanged in 1860, there was apparently nothing further he could do to dispel that worrying little five per cent of doubt.