The Wench Is Dead (20 page)

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, sor? '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.

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.

Christmas was coining 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:

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 successful 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?

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 Chrismas!' 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 rather 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.'