The Wench Is Dead

Ellis

Emmett

Erskine

Farmer

Favant

Fielding

Tom Eagleston, yes; and Jack Farmer, yes; and…

Morse stopped, and looked again at the middle of the three delegates in the Fs. The name was vaguely familiar, wasn't it? Yet he couldn't remember where… Unusual name, though. Morse's eye continued down the list – and then he remembered. Yes! It was the name of the man who had been walking along the Oxford Canal at the time when Joanna Franks was murdered – when Joanna Franks was supposedly murdered; the man, perhaps, who had been traced to the Nag's Head where he'd signed the register. A mystery man. Maybe not his real name at all, for the canal had been full of men who used an alias. In fact, as Morse recollected, two of the crew of the Barbara Bray itself had done so: Alfred Musson, alias Alfred Brotherton; Walter Towns, alias Walter Thorold. It might well be of some deep psychological significance that criminals sometimes seemed most unwilling to give up their names, even if this involved a greater risk of future identification: Morse had known it quite often. It was as if a man's name were almost an intrinsic part of him; as if he could never shed it completely; as if it were as much part of his personality as his skin. Musson had kept his Christian name, hadn't he? So had Towns.

Morse spent the rest of the journey looking idly out of the window, his brain tidying up a few scattered thoughts as the train drew into Paddington: Donald Bradman -Don Bradman, the name by which everyone recognized the greatest batsman ever born; and F. T. Donavan, the greatest man in all the world; and…

Ye Gods!!

The blood was running cold through Morse's limbs as he remembered the man who had identified the body of Joanna Franks; the man who had been physically incapable (as it seemed!) of raising his eyes to look into the faces of the prisoners; the man who had held his hands to his own face as he wept and turned his back on the men arraigned before the court. Why did he do these things, Morse? Because the boatmen might just have recognized him. For they had seen him, albeit fleetingly, in the dawn, as 'he had made to get further on his way with all speed', Donald Favant! – or Don Favant, as he would certainly have seen himself.

Morse wrote out those letters D-O-N-F-A-V-A-N-T along the bottom margin of the Oxford Times; and then, below them, the name of which they were the staggering anagram: the name of F T DONAVAN – the greatest man in all the world.

Colin Dexter

Colin Dexter lives in Oxford. He has won many awards for his novels and in 1997 was presented with the CWA Cartier Diamond Dagger for outstanding services to crime literature.

***

,

[1] A 'fly' boat travels round the clock, with a double crew, taking shifts, with horses exchanged at regular intervals along the canals.

[2] Many of the facts in the account used here are taken from the Court Registers of the Oxford Assizes, 1860, and from the verbatim transcript of those parts of the trial reported in Jackson's Oxford Jouarnal, April 1860 (passim).

[3] Burke was a criminal who had been executed some thirty years earlier for smothering his victims and then selling their bodies for medical dissection.

[4] Travels and Talks in the Antipodes, Samuel Carter (Farthinghill Press, Nottingham, 1886).