The Wench is Dead

by Colin Dexter

  Go to sleep, Morse!

  At 7.30 a.m., after breakfasting on a single wafer of Weetabix with an inadequate pour-over of semi-skimmed milk (and no sugar), Morse noted with great satisfaction that the NIL BY MOUTH embargo was now in abeyance, and he poured himself a glass of water with the joy of a liberated hostage. There followed for him, that morning, the standard readings of pulse-rate and blood-pressure, a bedside wash in a portable basin, the remaking of his bed, the provision of a fresh jug of water (!), a flirting confab with Fiona, the purchase of The Times, a cup of Bovril from the vivacious Violet, and (blessedly) not a single spoke stuck in the hospital machinery from the eminence grise installed at the seat of power.

  At 10.50 a.m. a white-coated cohort of consultant-cum-underlings came to stand around his bed, and to consider the progress of its incumbent. The senior man, after briefly looking through Morse’s file, eyed the patient with a somewhat jaundiced eye.

  ‘How are you feeling this morning?’

  ‘I think I’ll live on for a few more weeks – thanks to you,’ said Morse, with somewhat sickening sycophancy.

  ‘You mention here something about your drinking habits,’ continued the consultant, unimpressed as it appeared with such spurious gratitude.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘You drink a lot.’ It was a statement.

  ‘That’s a lot, you think?’

  The consultant closed the file with a sigh and handed it back to Nessie. ‘During my long years in the medical profession, Mr Morse, I have learned that there are two categories of statistics which can invariably be discounted: the sexual prowess of those suffering from diabetes mellitus; and the boozing habits of our country’s middle management.’

  ‘I’m not a diabetic.’

  ‘You will be if you keep drinking a bottle of Scotch a week.’

  ‘Well – perhaps not every week.’

  ‘You sometimes drink two a week, you mean?’

  There was a twinkle in the consultant’s eye as he waved his posse of acolytes across to the bed of the weakly Greenaway, and sat himself down on Morse’s bed.

  ‘Have you had a drop yet?’

  ‘Drop of what?’

  ‘It’s a dreadful give-away, you know’ (the consultant nodded to the locker) ‘ – that tissue paper.’

  ‘Oh!’

  ‘Not tonight – all right?’

  Morse nodded.

  ‘And one further word of advice. Wait till Sister’s off duty!’

  ‘She’d skin me alive!’ mumbled Morse.

  The consultant looked at Morse strangely. ‘Well, since you mention it, yes. But that wasn’t what I was thinking of, no.’

  ‘Something worse?’

  ‘She’s about the most forbidding old biddy in the profession; but just remember she comes from north of the border.’

  ‘I’m not quite sure …’

  ‘She’d probably’ (the consultant bent down and whispered in Morse’s ear) ‘ – she’d probably draw the curtains and insist on fifty-fifty!’

  Morse began to feel more happily settled; and after twenty minutes with The Times (Letters read, Crossword completed), one-handedly he folded back the covers of The Blue Ticket, and moving comfortably down against his pillows started Chapter One.

  ‘Good book?’

  ‘So-so!’ Morse had not been aware of Fiona’s presence, and he shrugged non-committally, holding the pages rigidly in his left hand.

  ‘What’s it called?’

  ‘Er – The Blue – The Blue City.’

  ‘Detective story, isn’t it? I think my mum’s read that.’

  Morse nodded uneasily. ‘Do you read a lot?’

  ‘I used to, when I was young and beautiful.’

  ‘This morning?’

  ‘Sit up!’

  Morse leaned forward as she softened up his pillows with a few left hooks and right crosses, and went on her way.

  ‘Lovely girl, isn’t she?’ It wasn’t Lewis this time who made the obvious observation, but the stricken Greenaway, now much recovered, and himself reading a book whose title was plain for all to see: The Age of Steam.

  Morse pushed his own novel as unobtrusively as possible into his locker: it was a little disappointing, anyway.

  ‘The Blue Ticket – that’s what it is,’ said Greenaway.

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘You got the title wrong – it’s The Blue Ticket.’

  ‘Did I? Ah yes! I, er, I don’t know why I’m bothering to read it, really.’

  ‘Same reason I did, I suppose. Hoping for a bit of sex every few pages.’

  Morse grinned defeatedly.

  ‘It’s a bit of a let-down,’ went on Greenaway in his embarrassingly stentorian voice. ‘My daughter sometimes brings me one or two books like that.’

  ‘She was the woman – last night?’

  The other nodded. ‘In library work ever since she was eighteen – twelve years. In the Bodley these last six.’

  Morse listened patiently to a few well-rehearsed statistics about the mileage of book-shelving in the warrens beneath the Bodleian; and was already learning something of the daughter’s curriculum vitae when the monologue was terminated by cleaners pushing the beds around in a somewhat cavalier fashion, and slopping their mops into dingily watered buckets.

  At 1.30 p.m., after what seemed to him a wretchedly insubstantial lunch, Morse was informed that he was scheduled that afternoon to visit various investigative departments; and that for this purpose the saline-drip would be temporarily removed. And when a hospital porter finally got him comfortably into a wheelchair, Morse felt that he had certainly climbed a rung or two up the convalescence ladder.

  It was not until 3.30 p.m. that he returned to the ward, weary, impatient, and thirsty – in reverse order of severity. Roughly, though oddly painlessly, a silent Nessie, just before going off duty, had reaffixed into his right wrist the tube running down from a newly hung drip; and with the eyes of a now fully alert Greenaway upon him, Morse decided that Steve Mingella’s sexual fantasies might have to be postponed a while. And when a small, mean-faced Englishwoman (doubtless Violet’s understudy) had dispensed just about enough viscous liquid from her tureen to cover the bottom of his soup bowl, Morse’s earlier euphoria had almost evaporated. He wouldn’t even be seeing Lewis – the latter (as he’d told Morse) taking out the missus for some celebration (reason unspecified). At 7.05 p.m. he managed to sort out his headphones for The Archers; and at 7.20 p.m., he decided to dip into the late Colonel’s magnum opus. By 7.30 p.m. he was so engrossed that it was only after finishing Part One that he noticed the presence of Christine Greenaway, the beautiful blonde from the Bodley.

  * * *

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  * * *

  Murder on the Oxford Canal

  Copyright ®1978 by Wilfrid M. Deniston, OBE, MC. No part whatsoever of this publication may be reproduced, by any process, without the written authority of the copyright owner.

  The author wishes to acknowledge the help he has so freely received from several sources; but particularly from the Bodleian Library, Oxford; from the Proceedings of the North Oxford Local History Society; and from the Court Registers of the City of Oxford Assizes, 1859 and 1860.

  Further details of the trials mentioned in the following pages may be found in the editions of Jackson’s Oxford Journal for 20th and 27th August, 1859; and of the same journal for 15th and 22nd April, 1860.

  PART ONE

  A Profligate Crew

  THOSE WHO EXPLORE the back-streets and the by-ways of our great cities, or indeed our small cities, will sometimes stumble (almost literally, perhaps) upon sad memorials, hidden in neglected churchyards – churchyards which seem wholly separated from any formal ecclesiastical edifice, and which are come across purely by accident at the far side of red-bricked walls, or pressed upon by tall houses – untended, silent, forgotten. Until recent years, such a churchyard was to be found at the lower end of the pretty little road in North Oxford, now designated Middle Way
, which links the line of Summertown shops in South Parade with the expensively elegant houses along Squitchey Lane, to the north. But in the early nineteen-sixties most of those tomb-stones which had stood in irregular ranks in the Summertown Parish Churchyard (for such was its official name) were removed from their original, supra-corporal sites in order to afford a rather less melancholic aspect to those who were about to pay their deposits on the flats being built upon those highly desirable if slightly lugubrious acres. Each there in his narrow cell had once been laid, and each would there remain; yet after 1963 no one, for certain, could have marked that final resting place.

  The few headstones which are adequately preserved and which are to be found – even to this day – leaning almost upright against the northern perimeter of the aforesaid enclave, are but one tenth or so of the memorials once erected there, in the second and third quarters of the nineteenth century, by relatives and friends whose earnest wish was to perpetuate the names of those souls, now perhaps known only to God, who passed their terrestrial lives in His faith and fear.

  One of these headstones, a moss-greened, limestone slab (standing the furthest away but three from the present thoroughfare) bears an epitaph which may still be traced by the practised eye of the patient epigraphist – though make haste if you are to decipher that disintegrating lettering!

  Beyond this poignant (if unusually lengthy) epitaph there lies a tale of unbridled lust and drunken lechery; a tale of a hapless and a helpless young woman who found herself at the mercy of coarse and most brutally uninhibited boatmen, during an horrendous journey made nearly one hundred and twenty years ago – a journey whose details are the subject-matter of our present narrative.

  Joanna Franks hailed originally from Derby. Her father, Daniel Carrick, had been accredited as an agent to the Nottinghamshire and Midlands Friendly Society; and for a good deal of his married life he appears to have maintained a position as a reasonably prosperous and well-respected figure in his home community. Later, however – and certainly in the few years prior to the tragic death of his only daughter (there was a younger brother, Daniel) – he encountered a period of hard times.

  Joanna’s first husband was F. T. Donavan, whose family sprang from County Meath. He is described by one of his contemporaries as “an Irishman of many parts”, and being a man of large physique we learn that he was familiarly (and predictably) known by the nickname of ‘Hefty’ Donavan. He was a conjurer by profession (or by one of them!) and appeared in many theatres and music-halls, both in London and in the provinces. In order to attract some badly needed publicity, he had at some unspecified date assumed the splendidly grandiloquent title of ‘Emperor of all the Illusionists’; and the following theatre handbill was printed at his own expense to herald his appearance at the City of Nottingham Music Hall in early September 1856:

  ‘Mr DONAVAN, citizen of the World and of Ireland, most humbly and respectfully informs all members of the upper and the lower nobilities, folk of the landed gentry, and the citizens of the historic district of Nottingham, that in view of his superior and unrivalled excellencies in MAGIC and DECEPTION, he has had conferred upon him, by the supreme conclave of the Assembly of Superior Magicians, this last year, the unchallenged title of EMPEROR of all the Illusionists, and this particularly by virtue of the amazing trick of cutting off a cockerel’s head and then restoring the bird to its pristine animation. It was this same DONAVAN, the greatest man in the World, who last week diverted his great audience in Croydon by immersing his whole body, tightly secured and chained, in a tank of the most corrosive acid for eleven minutes and forty-five seconds, as accurately measured by scientific chronometer.’

  Three years earlier Donavan had written (and found a publisher for) his only legacy to us, a work entitled The Comprehensive Manual of the Conjuring Arts. But the great man’s career was beginning to prove progressively unsuccessful, and no stage appearances whatsoever are traceable to 1858. In that year, he died, a childless and embittered man, whilst on holiday with a friend in Ireland, where his grave now rests in a burial-plot overlooking Bertnaghboy Bay. Some time afterwards his widow, Joanna, met and fell deeply in love with one Charles Franks, an ostler from Liverpool.

  Like her first, Joanna’s second marriage appears to have been a happy one, in spite of the fact that times were still hard and money still scarce. The new Mrs Franks was to find employment, as a dressmaker and designers’ model, with a Mrs Russell of 34 Runcorn Terrace, Liverpool. But Franks himself was less successful in his quest for regular employment, and finally decided to try his luck in London. Here his great expectations were soon realized for he was almost immediately engaged as an ostler at the busy George & Dragon Inn on the Edgware Road, where we find him duly lodged in the spring of 1869. In late May of that same year he sent his wife a guinea (all he could afford) and begged her to join him in London as soon as possible.

  On the morning of Saturday, June 11th, 1859, Joanna Franks, carrying two small trunks, bade her farewell to Mrs Russell in Runcorn Terrace, and made her way by barge from Liverpool to Preston Brook, the northern terminus of the Trent and Mersey Canal, which had been opened some eighty years earlier. Here she joined one of Pickford & Co.’s express (or ‘fly’) boats1 which was departing for Stoke-on-Trent and Fradley Junction, and thence, via the Coventry and Oxford Canals, through to London on the main Thames waterway. The fare of sixteen shillings and eleven pence was considerably cheaper than the fare on the Liverpool–London railway line which had been opened some twenty years earlier.

  Joanna was an extremely petite and attractive figure, wearing an Oxford-blue dress, with a white kerchief around her neck, and a figured silk bonnet with a bright pink ribbon. The clothes may not have been new; but they were not inexpensive, and they gave to Joanna a very tidy appearance indeed. A very tempting appearance, too, as we shall soon discover.

  The captain of the narrow-boat Barbara Bray was a certain Jack ‘Rory’ Oldfield from Coventry. According to later testimony of fellow boat-people and other acquaintances, he was basically a good-natured sort of fellow, of a blunt, blustery type of address. He was married, though childless, and was aged 42 years. The fellow-members of his crew were: the 30-year-old Alfred Musson, alias Alfred Brotherton, a tall, rather gaunt figure, married with two young children; Walter Towns, alias Walter Thorold, the 26-year-old illiterate son of a farm-labourer, who had left his home town of Banbury in Oxfordshire some ten years earlier; and a teenaged lad, Thomas Wootton, about whom no certain facts have come down to us beyond the probability that his parents came from Ilkeston in Derbyshire.

  The Barbara Bray left Preston Brook at 7.30 p.m. on Saturday, 11th June. At Fradley Junction, at the southern end of the Mersey Canal, she successfully negotiated her passage through the locks; and at 10 p.m. on Sunday, 19th June, she slipped quietly into the northern reaches of the Coventry Canal, and settled to a course, almost due south, that would lead down to Oxford. Progress had been surprisingly good, and there had been little or no forewarning of the tragic events which lay ahead for the Barbara Bray, and for her solitary paying passenger – the small and slimly attractive person of Joanna Franks, for whom such a little span of life remained.

  * * *

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  * * *

  Style is the hallmark of a temperament stamped upon the material at hand

  (André Maurois, The Art of Writing)

  AFTER READING THESE few pages, Morse found himself making some mental queries about a few minor items, and harbouring some vague unease about one or two major ones. Being reluctant to disfigure the printed text with a series of marginalia, he wrote a few notes on the back of a daily hospital menu which had been left (mistakenly) on his locker.

  The Colonel’s style was somewhat on the pretentious side – a bit too high-flown for Morse’s taste; and yet the writing a good deal above the average of its kind – with a pleasing peroration, calculated to ensure in most readers some semi-compulsive page-turning to Part Two. One of the most no
ticeable characteristics of the writing was the influence of Gray’s ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’ – a poem doubtless stuck down the author’s throat as a lad in some minor public school, and one leaving him with a rather lugubrious view of the human lot. One or two very nice touches, though, and Morse was prepared to give a couple of ticks to that epithet ‘supra-corporal’. He wished, though, he had beside him that most faithful of all his literary companions, Chambers English Dictionary, for although he had frequently met ‘ostler’ in crossword puzzles, he wasn’t sure exactly what an ostler did; and ‘figured’ bonnet wasn’t all that obvious, was it?

  Thinking of writing – and writing books – old Donavan (Joanna’s first) must have been pretty competent. After all, he’d ‘found a publisher’ for his great work. And until the last few years of his life, this literate Irish conjurer was seemingly pulling in the crowds at all points between Croydon and Burton-on-Trent … He must certainly have had something about him, this man of many parts. ‘Greatest man in the World’ might be going over the top a bit, yet a mild degree of megalomania was perhaps forgivable in the publicity material of such a multi-talented performer?