The Wench Is Dead

to apply to her his clumsy version of die kiss-of-life. Miraculously, the six-year-old had survived, and for a few days Steve was the toast of the boat clubs along die 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 specialising in the wildest sexual fantasies. The book opens as Steve treads diffidently across the thick carpeted entrance of dial 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, could find the time in my face

(Emerson, Journals)

Half an hour after Lewis's departure, Fiona came again 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 say when he studied the Classics), the unsmiling Nessie was summoned to insert a syringe of colourless liquid into flank. This insertion (he could see nothing over his his 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 in 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 naively 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 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 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 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 he 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