The Wench Is Dead

Chapter Thirty-six

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 Nursing Staff of the John Radcliffe Hospital

request the pleasure of your company on the evening of Friday, 22nd December,

from 8 p.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 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?