The Wench is Dead Read online

  ‘But not until it’s official like!’ hissed Lewis, palming the gift surreptitiously into Morse’s hand beneath the bedclothes.

  ‘Bell’s?’ asked Morse.

  Lewis nodded.

  It was a happy moment.

  For the present, however, the attention of all was diverted by another bell that sounded from somewhere, and visitors began to stand and prepare for their departure: a few, perhaps, with symptoms of reluctance; but the majority with signs of only partially concealed relief. As Lewis himself rose to take his leave, he dipped his hand once more into the carrier-bag and produced his final offering: a paperback entitled The Blue Ticket, with a provocative picture of an economically clad nymphet on the cover.

  ‘I thought – I thought you might enjoy something a little bit lighter, sir. The missus doesn’t know—’

  ‘I hope she’s never found you reading this sort of rubbish, Lewis!’

  ‘Haven’t read it yet, sir.’

  ‘Well, the, er, title’s a bit shorter than the other thing …’

  Lewis nodded, and the two friends shared a happy grin.

  ‘Time to go, I’m afraid!’ The Fair Fiona was smiling down at them, especially (it seemed) smiling down at Lewis, for whom every cloud was suddenly lifted from the weather-chart. As for Morse, he was glad to be alone again; and when the ward finally cleared of its last visitor, the hospital system smoothly, inexorably, reorientated itself once more to the care and treatment of the sick.

  It was only after further testings of pulse and blood pressure, after the administration of further medicaments, that Morse had the opportunity (unobserved) of reading the blurb of the second work of literature (well, literature of a sort) which was now in his possession:

  Diving into the water, young Steve Mingella had managed to pull the little girl’s body on to the hired yacht and to apply to her his clumsy version of the kiss-of-life. Miraculously, the six-year-old had survived, and for a few days Steve was the toast of the boat clubs along the Florida Keys. After his return to New York he received a letter – and inside the letter a ticket from the young girl’s father, the playboy proprietor of the city’s most exclusive, expensive, and exotic night-spot, a club specializing in the wildest sexual fantasies. The book opens as Steve treads diffidently across the thick carpeted entrance of that erotic wonderland, and shows to the topless blonde seated at Reception the ticket he has received – a ticket coloured deepest blue …

  * * *

  CHAPTER FOUR

  * * *

  My evening visitors, if they cannot see the clock, should find the time in my face

  (Emerson, Journals)

  HALF AN HOUR after Lewis’s departure, Fiona came again to Morse’s bedside and asked him to unfasten his pyjama bottoms, to turn over on his left side, and to expose his right buttock. Which orders having been obeyed (as Morse used to say when he studied the Classics), the unsmiling Nessie was summoned to insert a syringe of colourless liquid into his flank. This insertion (he could see nothing over his right shoulder) seemed to Morse to have been effected with less than professional finesse; and he heard himself grunt ‘Christ!’ when the plunger was pressed, his body twitching involuntarily as what felt like a bar of iron was implanted into his backside.

  ‘You’ll feel a wee bit sleepy,’ was the laconic comment of the Loch Ness Monster; and Fiona was left to pour some disinfectant on to a piece of gauze, which she proceeded to rub vigorously across and around the punctured area.

  ‘She’d have landed a top job in Buchenwald, that woman!’ said Morse. But from the uncomprehending look on her face, he suddenly realized that Nazi concentration camps were as far back in the young nurse’s past as the relief of Mafeking was in his own; and he felt his age. It was forty-four years now since the end of the Second World War … and this young … nurse … could only be … Morse was conscious of feeling very weary, very tired. ‘What I mean is …’ (Morse pulled his pyjama bottoms up with some difficulty) ‘… she’s so … sharp!’ Yes, Lewis had used that word.

  ‘Did you realize that was my very first injection? Sorry if it hurt a bit – I’ll get better.’

  ‘I thought it was …’

  ‘Yes, I know.’ She smiled down at him and Morse’s eyelids drooped heavily over his tired eyes. Nessie had said he’d feel a wee bit … weary …

  His head jerked down against his chest, and Fiona settled him against the pillows, gently looking at him as he lay there, and wondering for the dozenth time in her life why all the men who attracted her had either been happily married long, long since, or else were far, far, far too old.

  Morse felt a soft-fingered hand on his right wrist, and opened his eyes to find himself staring up into the face of an extraordinary-looking personage. She was a very small woman, of some seventy-five to eighty summers, wispily white-haired, her face deeply wrinkled and unbeautiful, with an old-fashioned NHS hearing-aid plugged into her left ear, its cord stretching down to a batteried appliance in the pocket of a dirty, loose, grey-woollen cardigan. She appeared naïvely unaware that any apology might perhaps be called for in wakening a weary patient. Who was she? Who had let her in? It was 9.45 p.m. by the ward clock and two night nurses were on duty. Go away! Go away, you stupid old crow!

  ‘Mr Horse? Mr Horse, is it?’ Her rheumy eyes squinted myopically at the Elastoplast name-tag, and her mouth distended in a dentured smile.

  ‘Morse!’ said Morse. ‘M-O …’

  ‘Do you know, I think they’ve spelt your name wrong, Mr Horse. I’ll try to remember to tell—’

  ‘Morse! M-O-R-S-E!’

  ‘Yes – but it was expected, you know. They’d already told me that Wilfrid had only a few days left to live. And we all do get older, don’t we? Older every single day.’

  Yes, yes, clear off! I’m bloody tired, can’t you see?

  ‘Fifty-two years, we’d been together.’

  Morse, belatedly, realized who she was, and he nodded more sympathetically now: ‘Long time!’

  ‘He liked being here, you know. He was so grateful to you all—’

  ‘I’m afraid I only came in a couple of days ago—’

  ‘That’s exactly why he wanted me to thank all of you – all his old friends here.’ She spoke in a precise, prim manner, with the diction of a retired Latin mistress.

  ‘He was a fine man …’ began Morse, a little desperately. ‘I wish I’d got to know him. As I say, though, I only got in a day or two ago – stomach trouble – nothing serious …’

  The hearing-aid began to whistle shrilly, picking up some internal feedback, and the old lady fiddled about ineffectually with the ear-piece and the control switches. ‘And that’s why’ (she began now to talk in intermittent italics) ‘I’ve got this little book for you. He was so proud of it. Not that he said so, of course – but he was. It took him a very long time and it was a very happy day for him when it was printed.’

  Morse nodded with gratitude as she handed him a little booklet in bottle-green paper covers. ‘It’s very kind of you because, as I say, I only came in—’

  ‘Wilfrid would have been so pleased.’

  Oh dear.

  ‘And you will promise to read it, won’t you?’

  ‘Oh yes – certainly!’

  The old lady fingered her whistling aid once more, smiled with the helplessness of a stranded angel, said ‘Goodbye, Mr Horse!’ and moved on to convey her undying gratitude to the occupant of the adjacent bed.

  Morse looked down vaguely at the slim volume thus presented: it could contain no more than – what? – some twenty-odd pages. He would certainly look at it later, as he’d promised. Tomorrow, perhaps. For the moment, he could think of nothing but closing his weary eyes once more, and he placed Murder on the Oxford Canal, by Wilfrid M. Deniston, inside his locker, on top of Scales of Injustice and The Blue Ticket – the triad of new works he’d so recently acquired. Tomorrow, yes …

  Almost immediately he fell into a deep slumber, where he dreamed of a long cross-country
race over the fields of his boyhood, where there, at the distant finishing-line, sat a topless blonde, a silver buckle clasped around her waist, holding in her left hand a pint of beer with a head of winking froth.

  * * *

  CHAPTER FIVE

  * * *

  This type of writing sometimes enjoys the Lethean faculty of making those who read it forget to ask what it means, or indeed if it means anything very substantive

  (Alfred Austin, The Bridling of Pegasus)

  THE ENDOSCOPY, PERFORMED under a mild anaesthetic at 10 o’clock the following morning (Monday), persuaded the surgeons at the JR2 that in Morse’s case the knife was probably not needed; their prognosis, too, was modestly encouraging, provided the patient could settle into a more cautiously sober and restrictive regimen for the months (and years) ahead. Furthermore, as a token of their muted optimism, the patient was that very evening to be allowed one half-bowl of oxtail soup and a portion of vanilla ice-cream – and for Morse any gourmand à la carte menu could hardly have been more gloriously welcome.

  Lewis reported to Sister Maclean at 7.30 p.m., and was unsmilingly nodded through Customs without having to declare one get-well card (from Morse’s secretary), a tube of mint-flavoured toothpaste (from Mrs Lewis), and a clean hand-towel (same provenance). Contentedly, for ten minutes or so, the two men talked of this and that, with Lewis receiving the firm impression that his chief was recovering rapidly.

  Fiona the Fair put in a brief appearance towards the end of this visit, shaking out Morse’s pillows and placing a jug of cold water on his locker.

  ‘Lovely girl,’ ventured Lewis.

  ‘You’re married – remember?’

  ‘Done any reading yet?’ Lewis nodded towards the locker.

  ‘Why do you ask?’

  Lewis grinned: ‘It’s the missus – she was just wondering …’

  ‘I’m half-way through it, tell her. Riveting stuff!’

  ‘You’re not serious—’

  ‘Do you know how to spell “riveting”?’

  ‘What – one “t” or two, you mean?’

  ‘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 leaving a nasty taste when a few minutes later he bade his chief farewell. Morse himself had said nothing at the time, and said nothing now. Never, he told himself, would he have reprimanded any member of his own staff in such cavalier fashion in front of other people: and then, sadly, he 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 Fiona 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, Morse 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 her way out of the ward, and pressed the ‘Down’ button in front of the top-floor lifts. It was her father who was monopolizing 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 her 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 the 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 reinterpretation 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 nineteenth-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 rivetted 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 of 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 …

  * * *

  CHAPTER SIX

  * * *

  I enjoy convalescence. It is the part that makes the illness worth while

  (G. B. Shaw, Back to Methuselah)

  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 odoriferous 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 sort on either hand. She looked so good, so wholesome, in her white uniform with its dark-blue trimmings.