The Wench is Dead

by Colin Dexter

  Christmas was coming up fast, and he was glad not to have that tiring traipsing round the shops – no stockings, no scent to buy. He himself received half a dozen cards; two invitations to Drinks Evenings; and a communication from the JR2:

  XMAS PARTY

  The Nursing Staff of the John Radcliffe

  Hospital request the pleasure of your company

  on the evening of Friday, 22nd December,

  from 8p.m. until midnight,

  at the Nurses’ Hostel, Headington Hill, Oxford.

  Disco Dancing, Ravishing Refreshments, Fabulous fun!

  Please Come! Dress informal. RSVP.

  The printed card was signed, in blue biro, ‘Ward 7C’ – and followed by a single ‘X’.

  It was on Friday, 15th December, a week before the scheduled party, that Morse’s eye caught the name in the Oxford Times ‘Deaths’ column:

  DENISTON, Margery – On December 10th, peacefully at her home in Woodstock, aged 78 years. She wished her body to be given to medical research. Donations gratefully received, in honour of the late Colonel W. M. Deniston, by the British Legion Club, Lambourn.

  Morse thought back to the only time he’d met the quaint old girl, so proud as she had been of her husband’s work – a work which had brought Morse such disproportionate interest; a work which he’d not even had to pay for. He signed a cheque for £20, and stuck it in a cheap brown envelope. He had both first- and second-class stamps to hand, but he chose a second-class: it wasn’t a matter of life and death, after all.

  He would (he told himself) have attended a funeral service, if she’d been having one. But he was glad she wasn’t: the stern and daunting sentences from the Burial Service, especially in the A.V., were ever assuming a nearer and more personal threat to his peace of mind; and for the present that was something he could well do without. He looked up the British Legion’s Lambourn address in the telephone directory, and after doing so turned to ‘Deniston, W. M.’. There it was: 46 Church Walk, Woodstock. Had there been any family? It hardly appeared so, from the obituary notice. So? So what happened to things, if there was no one to leave them to? As with Mrs Deniston, possibly? As with anyone childless or unmarried …

  It was difficult parking the Lancia, and finally Morse took advantage of identifying himself to a sourpuss of a traffic warden who reluctantly sanctioned a temporary straddling of the double-yellows twenty or so yards from the grey-stoned terraced house in Church Walk. He knocked on the front door, and was admitted forthwith.

  Two persons were in the house: a young man in his middle twenties who (as he explained) had been commissioned by Blackwells to catalogue the few semi-valuable books on the late Denistons’ shelves; and a great-nephew of the old Colonel, the only surviving relative, who (as Morse interpreted matters) was in for a very pretty little inheritance indeed, if recent prices for Woodstock property were anything to judge by.

  To the latter, Morse immediately and openly explained what his interest was: he was begging nothing – apart from the opportunity to discover whether the late Colonel had left behind any notes or documents relating to Murder on the Oxford Canal. And happily the answer was ‘yes’ – albeit a very limited ‘yes’. In the study was a pile of manuscript, and typescript, and clipped to an early page of the manuscript was one short letter – a letter with no date, no sender’s address, and no envelope:

  Our dear Daniel,

  We do both trust you are keeping well these past months. We shall be in Derby in early Sept. when we hope we shall be with you. Please say to Mary how the dress she did was very successfull and will she go on with the other one if she is feeling recovered.

  Yours Truely and Afectionatly,

  Matthew

  That was all. Enough, though, for the Colonel to feel that it was worth preserving! There was only one ‘Daniel’ in the case, Daniel Carrick from Derby; and here was that one piece of primary-source material that linked the Colonel’s narrative in a tangible, physical way to the whole sorry story. Agreed, Daniel Carrick had never figured all that prominently in Morse’s thinking; but he ought to have done. He was surely just as damningly implicated as the other two in the deception – the twin deception – which had seen the Notts and Midlands Friendly Society having to fork out, first for the death of the great uncoffined Donavan, and then for the death of the enigmatic Joanna, the great undrowned.

  Morse turned over the faded, deeply creased letter and saw, on the back, a few pencilled notes, pretty certainly in the Colonel’s hand: ‘No records from Ins. Co. – Mrs C. very poorly at this time? Not told of J.’s death? 12 Spring St. still occupied 12.4.76!’

  There it was then – palpable paper and writing, and just a finger-tip of contact with one of the protagonists in that nineteenth-century drama. As for the two principal actors, the only evidence that could have been forthcoming about them was buried away with their bodies. And where Joanna was buried – or where the greatest man in all the world – who knew, or who could ever know?

  * * *

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  * * *

  Modern dancers give a sinister portent about our times. The dancers don’t even look at one another. They are just a lot of isolated individuals jiggling in a kind of self-hypnosis

  (Agnes de Mille, The New York Times)

  THE PARTY-GOERS WERE fully aware that when the caretaker said midnight he meant 11.55 p.m.; but few had managed to arrive at the Nurses’ Hostel before 9 p.m. In any case, the event was never destined to be of cosmic significance, and would have little to show for itself apart from a memory or two, a few ill-developed photographs, and a great deal of clearing up the following morning.

  As soon as he took his first steps across the noisy, throbbing, flashing room – it was now 10.30 p.m. – Morse realized that he had made a tragic error in accepting the invitation. ‘Never go back!’ – that was the advice he should have heeded; yet he had been fool enough to recall the white sheets and the Fair Fiona and the Ethereal Eileen. Idiot! He sat down on a rickety, slatted chair, and sipped some warm insipid ‘punch’ that was handed out in white plastic cups to each new arrival. Constituted, if taste were anything to go by, of about 2% gin, 2% dry Martini, 10% orange juice, and 86% lemonade, it was going to take a considerable time, by Morse’s reckoning, before such Ravishing Refreshments turned him on; and he had just decided that the best thing about it was the little cubes of apple floating on the top when Fiona detached her sickly-looking beau from the dance-floor and came up to him.

  ‘Happy Christmas!’ She bent down, and Morse could still feel the dryness of her lips against his cheek as she introduced the embarrassed youth, repeated her Christmas greeting, and then was gone – throwing herself once more into a series of jerky contortions like some epileptic puppet.

  Morse’s plastic cup was empty and he walked slowly past a long line of tables, where beneath the white coverings he glimpsed sugared mince-pies and skewered sausages.

  ‘We’ll be starting on them soon!’ said a familiar voice behind him, and Morse turned to find Eileen, blessedly alone and, like only a few of the others, wearing her uniform.

  ‘Hullo!’ said Morse.

  ‘Hullo!’ she said softly.

  ‘It’s good to see you!’

  She looked at him, and nodded, almost imperceptibly.

  A tall man, looking as if he might have been involved in a fight recently, materialized from somewhere.

  ‘This is Gordon,’ said Eileen, looking up into the shaded planes of Gordon’s skull-like face. And when Morse had shaken hands with the man, he once more found himself alone, wondering where to walk, where to put himself, how to make an inconspicuous exit, to cease upon the five-minutes-to-eleven with no pain.

  He was only a few feet from the main door when she was suddenly standing in front of him.

  ‘You’re not trying to sneak away, I hope!’

  Nessie!

  ‘Hullo, Sister. No! I’m – I mustn’t stay too long, of course, but—’

 
; ‘I’m glad you came. I know you’re a wee bit old for this sort of thing …’ Her lilting Scottish accent seemed to be mocking him gently.

  Morse nodded; it was difficult to argue the point, and he looked down to pick out the one remaining apple cube from his cup.

  ‘Your sergeant did you rairther better – with the drink, I mean.’

  Morse looked at her – suddenly – almost as if he had never looked at her before. Her skin in this stroboscopic light looked almost opaline, and the colour of her eyes was emerald. Her auburn hair was swept upward, emphasizing the contours of her face, and her mouth was thinly and delicately lipsticked. For a woman, she was quite tall, certainly as tall as he was; and if only (as Morse thought) she’d worn something other than that miserably dowdy, unflattering dress …

  ‘Would you like to dance, Inspector?’

  ‘I – no! It’s not one of my, er, things, dancing, I’m afraid.’

  ‘What—?’

  But Morse was never to know what she was going to ask him. A young houseman – smiling, flushed, so happily at home here – grabbed her by the hand and was pulling her to the floor.

  ‘Come on, Sheila! Our dance, remember?’

  Sheila!

  ‘You won’t try to sneak away – ?’ she was saying over her shoulder. But she was on the dance-floor now, where shortly all the other dancers were stopping and moving to the periphery as the pair of them, Sheila and her young partner, put on a dazzling display of dance-steps to the rhythmic clapping of the audience.

  Morse felt a stab of jealousy as his eyes followed them, the young man’s body pressed close to hers. He had fully intended to stay, as she had asked. But when the music had finished, the newly metamorphosed Nessie, pretending to collapse, had become the centre of enthusiastic admiration, and Morse placed his plastic cup on the table by the exit, and left.

  At 9.30 the following morning, after a somewhat fitful sleep, he rang the JR2 and asked for Ward 7C.

  ‘Can I speak to Sister, please?’

  ‘Who shall I say is calling?’

  ‘It’s – it’s a personal call.’

  ‘We can’t take personal calls, I’m afraid. If you’d like to leave your name—’

  ‘Just tell her one of her old patients from the ward—’

  ‘Is it Sister Maclean you wanted?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘She’s left – she left officially last week. She’s off to be Director of Nursing Services—’

  ‘She’s left Oxford?’

  ‘She’s leaving today. She stayed on for a party last night—’

  ‘I see. I’m sorry to have bothered you. I seem to have got the wrong end of things, don’t I?’

  ‘Yes, you do.’

  ‘Where is she going to?’

  ‘Derby – Derby Royal Infirmary.’

  * * *

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  * * *

  The very designation of the term ‘slum’ reflects a middle-class attitude to terrace-housing, where grand values are applied to humble situations

  (James Curl, The Erosion of Oxford)

  SINCE FAST DRIVING was his only significant vice (apart from egg-and-chips) Lewis was delighted, albeit on one of his ‘rest’ days, to be invited to drive the Lancia. The car was a powerful performer, and the thought of the stretch of the M1 up to the A52 turn-off was, to Lewis, most pleasurable. Nor had Morse made the slightest secret of the fact that the main object of the mission was to find out if a thoroughfare called ‘Spring Street’ still stood – as it had stood until 1976 – on the northern outskirts of Derby.

  ‘Just humour me, Lewis – that’s all I ask!’

  Lewis had needed little persuasion. It had been a momentous ‘plus’ in his life when Morse had intimated to his superiors that it was above all with him, Sergeant Lewis, that his brain functioned most fluently; and now – moving the Lancia across into the fast lane of the M1 at Weedon – Lewis felt wholly content with the way of life which had so happily presented itself to him those many years since. He knew, of course, that their present mission was a lost cause. But then Oxford was not unfamiliar with such things.

  Spring Street proved difficult to locate, in spite of a city-map purchased from a corner-newsagent in the northern suburbs. Morse himself had become progressively tetchier as the pedestrians to whom Lewis wound down his window appeared either totally ignorant or mutually contradictory. Finally, however, the Lancia homed in on an area, marked off by hoardings, announcing itself as the ‘Derby Development Complex’, with two enormously tall, yellow cranes tracing and retracing their sweeping arcs above the demolition squads below.

  ‘Could be too late, could we?’ ventured Lewis.

  ‘It doesn’t matter – I’ve told you, Lewis.’ Morse wound down his own window and spoke to a brick-dusted, white-helmeted workman.

  ‘Have you flattened Spring Street yet?’

  ‘Won’t be long, mate,’ the man replied, pointing vaguely towards the next-but-one block of terraced houses.

  Morse, somewhat irked by the ‘mate’ familiarity, wound up his window, without a ‘thank you’, and pointed, equally vaguely, to Lewis, the latter soon pulling the Lancia in behind a builder’s skip a couple of streets away. A young coloured woman pushing a utility pram assured Morse that, yes, this was Spring Street, and the two men got out of the car and looked around them.

  Perhaps, in some earlier decades, the area had seen some better times; yet, judging from its present aspect it seemed questionable whether any of the houses in this unlovely place had ever figured in the ‘desirable’ category of residences. Built, by the look of them, in the early 1800s, many were now semi-derelict, and several boarded-up completely. Clearly a few remained tenanted, for here and there smoke rose up into the grey air from the narrow, yellow chimney-pots; and white-lace curtains still framed the windows yet unbroken. With distaste, Morse eyed the squashed beer-cans and discarded fish-and-chip wrappings that littered the narrow pavement. Then he walked slowly along, before stopping before a front door painted in what fifty years earlier had been a Cambridge blue, and into which a number-plaque ‘20’ was screwed. The house was in a terraced group of six; and walking further along, Morse came to the door of an abandoned property on which, judging from the outlines, the figures ‘16’ had once been fixed. Here Morse stopped and beckoned to Lewis – the eyes of both now travelling to the two adjacent houses, boarded up against squatters or vandals. The first house must, without question, have once been Number 14 – and the second, Number 12.

  The latter, the sorry-looking object of Morse’s pilgrimage, stood on the corner, the sign ‘Burton Road’ still fastened to its side-wall, although no sign of Burton Road itself was any longer visible. Below the sign, a wooden gate, hanging forlornly from one of its rusted hinges, led to a small patch of back-yard, choked with litter and brownish weeds, and cluttered with a kiddy’s ancient tricycle and a brand-new trolley from a supermarket. The dull-red bricks of the outer walls were flaking badly, and the single window-frame here had been completely torn away, leaving the inside of the mean little abode open to the elements. Morse poked his face through the empty frame, across the blackened sill, before turning away with a sickened disgust: in one corner of the erstwhile kitchen was what appeared to be a pile of excrement; and beside it, half a loaf of white bread, its slices curled and mildew green.

  ‘Not a pretty sight, is it?’ whispered Lewis, standing at Morse’s shoulder.

  ‘She was brought up here,’ said Morse quietly. ‘She lived here with her mother … and her father …’

  ‘… and her brother,’ added Lewis.

  Yes! Morse had forgotten the brother, Joanna’s younger brother, the boy named after his father – forgotten him altogether.

  Reluctantly Morse left the small back-yard, and slowly walked round to the front again, where he stood in the middle of the deserted street and looked at the little terrace-house in which Joanna Carrick-Donavan-Franks had probably spent – what? – the first twen
ty or so years of her life. The Colonel hadn’t mentioned exactly where she was born, but … Morse thought back to the dates: born in 1821, and married to the great man in 1842. How reassuring it would have been to find a date marked on one of the houses! But Morse could see no sign of one. If the house had been built by the 1820s, had she spent those twenty years in and around that pokey little kitchen, competing for space with the sink and the copper and the mangle and the cooking-range and her parents …? And her younger brother? He, Morse, had his own vivid recollections of a similarly tiny kitchen in a house which (as he had been told) had been demolished to make way for a carpet-store. But he’d never been back. It was always a mistake to go back, because life went on perfectly well without you, thank-you-very-much, and other people got along splendidly with their own jobs – even if they were confined to selling carpets. Yes, almost always a mistake: a mistake, for example, as it had been to go back to the hospital; a mistake as it would have been (as he’d intended) to go along to the Derby Royal and nonchalantly announce to Nessie that he just happened to be passing through the city, just wanted to congratulate her on becoming the Big White Chief …

  Lewis had been talking whilst these and similar thoughts were crossing and recrossing Morse’s mind, and he hadn’t heard a word of what was said.

  ‘Pardon, Lewis?’

  ‘I just say that’s what we used to do, that’s all – over the top of the head, as I say, and put the date against it.’