The Wench Is Dead (4 page)

'And do you know what "stools" are?'

'Things you sit on?'

Morse laughed – a genuine, carefree, pain-free laugh. It was good to have Lewis around; and the vaguely puzzled Lewis was glad to find the invalid in such good spirits.

Suddenly, there beside the bed, re-mitreing the bottom right-hand corner of the blankets, was Sister Maclean herself.

'Who brought the jug of water?' she enquired in her soft but awesome voice.

'It's all right, Sister,' began Morse, 'the doctor said-'

'Nurse Welch!' The ominously quiet words carried easily across the ward, and Lewis stared at the floor in pained embarrassment as Student Nurse Welch walked warily over to Morse's bed, where she was firmly admonished by her superior. Free access to liquids was to be available only w.e.f. the following dawn –
and not before.
Had the student nurse not read the notes before going the rounds with her water-jugs? And if she had, did she not realize that no hospital could function satisfactorily with such sloppiness? If it mightn't seem important on
this
occasion, did the student nurse not realize that it could be absolutely vital on the
next.

Another sickening little episode; and for Lewis one still having a nasty taste when a few minutes later he bade chief farewell. Morse himself had said nothing at the time, and said nothing now. Never, he told himself, would have reprimanded any member of his own staff in such cavalier fashion in front of other people: and then, sadly, recalled that quite frequently he had done precisely that. All the same, he would have welcomed the opportunity of a few quiet words with the duly chastened Fiono before she went home.

There was virtually no one around in the ward now: the Ethiopian athlete was doing the hospital rounds once more and two of the other patients had shuffled their way to the gents. Only a woman of about thirty, a slimly attractive blonde-headed woman (Walter Greenaway's daughter, he guessed – and guessed correctly) still sat beside her father. She had given Morse a quick glance as she'd come in but now hardly appeared to notice him as she made way out of the ward, and pressed the 'Down' button in front of the top-floor lifts. It was her father who was monopolising her thoughts, and she gave no more than a cursory thought to the man whose name appeared to be ‘Morse' and whose eyes, as she had noticed, had followed figure with a lively interest on her exit

The time was 8.40 p.m.

Feeling minimally guilty that he had not as yet so much as opened the cover of the precious work that Mrs Lewis had vouchsafed to his keeping, Morse reached for book from his locker, and skimmed through its first paragraph:

‘Diversity rather than uniformity has almost invariably been seen to characterize the criminal behaviour-patterns of any technologically developing society. The attempt to resolve any conflicts and/or inconsistencies which may arise in the analysis and interpretation of such patterns (see Appendix 3, pp. 492 ff.) is absolutely vital; and the inevitable re-interpretation of this perpetually variable data is the raw material for several recent studies into the causation of criminal behaviour. Yet conflicting strategic choices within heterogeneous areas, starkly differentiated creeds, greater knowledge of variable economic performances, as well as physical, physiological, or physiognomical peculiarities -all these facts (as we shall maintain) can suggest possible avenues never exhaustively explored by any previous student of criminal behaviour in nineteen-century Britain.'

'Christ!' muttered Morse (for the second time that evening). A few years ago he might possibly have considered persevering with such incomprehensible twaddle. But no longer. Stopping momentarily only to marvel at the idiocy of the publisher who had allowed such pompous polysyllaby ever to reach the compositor in the first place, he closed the stout work smartly – and resolved to open it never again.

As it happened, he was to break this instant resolution very shortly; but for the moment there was a rather more attractive proposition awaiting him in his locker: the pornographic paperback which Lewis (praise the Lord!) had smuggled in.

A yellow flash across the glossy cover made its promise to the reader of Scorching Lust and Primitive Sensuality – this claim supported by the picture of a superbly buxom beauty sunning herself on some golden-sanded South-sea island, completely naked except for a string of native beads around her neck. Morse opened the book and skimmed (though a little more slowly than before) a second paragraph that evening. And he was immediately aware of a no-nonsense, clear-cut English style that was going to take the palm every time from the sprawling, spawning, sociological nonsense he had just encountered:

'She surfaced from the pool and began to unbutton her clinging, sodden blouse. And as she did so, the young men all fell silent, urging her – praying her! – in some unheard but deafening chorus, to strip herself quickly and completely – their eyes now riveted to the carmined tips of her slimly sinuous fingers as they slipped inside her blouse, and so slowly, so tantalizingly, flicked open a further button…"

'Christ!!' It was the third time that Morse had used the same word that evening, and the one that took the prize for blasphemous vehemence. He leaned back against his pillows with a satisfied smile about his lips, clasping to himself the prospect of a couple of hours of delicious titillation on the morrow. He could bend those covers back easily enough; and it would be no great difficulty temporarily to assume the facial expression of a theological student reading some verses from the Minor Prophets. But whatever happened, the chances that Chief Inspector Morse would ever be fully informed about crime and its punishment in nineteenth-century Shropshire had sunk to zero.

For the moment, at any rate.

He replaced
The Blue Ticket
in his locker, on top
Scales of Injustice –
both books now lying on top of the hitherto neglected
Murder on the Oxford Canal,
that slim volume printed privately under the auspices of The Oxford and County Local History Society.

As Morse nodded off once more, his brain was debating whether there was just the one word misspelled in the brief
paragraph he had just read. He would look it up in Chambers when he got home. Lewis hadn't seemed to know, either…

At 2 a.m. the inevitable occurred; but fortunately Morse managed to attract the quick attention of the nurse as she'd flitted like some Nightingale around the darkened wards. The noise of the curtains being drawn around his bed sounded to Morse loud enough to rouse the semi-dead. Yet none of his fellow-patients seemed to stir, and she – the blessed girl! – had been quite marvellous.

'I don't even know which way up the thing should go,' confided Morse.

'Which way
round,
you mean!' Eileen (such was her name) had whispered, as she proceeded without the slightest embarrassment to explain exactly how the well-trained patient would negotiate this particular crisis. Then, leaving him with half a roll of white toilet-paper, and the firm assurance of a second coming within the next ten minutes, she was gone.

It was all over – consummated with a bowl of warm water and a brief squirt of some odiferous air-freshener. Whew! Not half as bad as Morse had feared – thanks to that ethereal girl; and as he smiled up gratefully at her, he thought there might have been a look in her eyes that transgressed the borders of perfunctory nursing. But Morse would always have thought there was, even if there wasn't; for he was the sort of man for whom some area of fantasy was wholly necessary, and his imagination followed the slender Eileen, as elegantly she walked away: about 5' 8" in height – quite tall really; in her mid-twenties; eyes greenish-hazel, in a delicately featured, high-cheekboned face; no ring of any on either hand. She looked so good, so wholesome, in her white uniform with its dark-blue trimmings.

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 and no sugar), Morse noted with great satisfaction he NIL BY MOUTH embargo was now in abeyance, he poured himself a glass of water with the joy of a liberated hostage. There followed for him, that morning, standard readings of pulse-rate and blood-pressure, a bedside wash in a portable basin, the remaking of his bed, provision of a fresh jug of water (!), a flirting confab with Fiona, the purchase of
The Times,
a cup of Bovril from the gorgeous Violet, and (blessedly) not a single spoke stuck in the hospital machinery from the
éminence 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, 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 habbits.' 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 pillows started Chapter One.

‘Good book?',

‘So-so!' Morse had not been aware of Fiona's presence,; he shrugged non-committally, holding the pages rigidly 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 tide 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 presence of Christine Greenaway, the beautiful blonde from the Bodley.