The Wench is Dead (23 page)

‘You look as though you’ve already found something, sir.’

‘Do I?’

As the Lancia accelerated along the approach road to the M1 (South) Lewis was still smiling quietly to himself, recalling the happy look on Morse’s face as he had turned
and walked once more towards the automatic doors.

O
N THE MORNING
of Friday, 11th January (he had resumed duties on New Year’s Day) Morse caught the early Cathedrals’ Express to Paddington.
He was programmed to speak on Inner City Crime at 11 a.m. at the Hendon Symposium. Tube to King’s Cross, then out on the Northern Line. Easy. Plenty of time. He enjoyed trains, in any case;
and when Radio Oxford had announced black ice on the M40, his decision was made for him; it would mean, too, of course, that he could possibly indulge a little more freely with any refreshments
that might be available.

He bought
The Times
and the
Oxford Times
at the bookstall, got a seat at the rear of the train, and had solved
The Times
crossword by Didcot. Except for one clue. A quick
look in his faithful Chambers would have settled the issue immediately; but he hadn’t got it, and as ever he was vexed by his inability to put the finishing touch to anything. He quickly
wrote in a couple of bogus letters (in case any of his fellow-passengers were waiting to be impressed) and then read the letters and the obituaries. At Reading he turned to the
Oxford Times
crossword. The setter was ‘Quixote’; and Morse smiled to himself as he remembered ‘Waggie’ Greenaway finally solving the same setter’s ‘Bradman’s famous
duck (6)’ and writing in DONALD at 1 across. Nothing
quite
so amusing here – but a very nice puzzle. Twelve minutes to complete. Not bad!

Morse caught a subliminal glimpse of ‘Maidenhead’ as the train sped through, and he took a sheaf of papers from his briefcase, first looking through the alphabetical list of those
who would be attending the conference. Nobody he knew in the A-D range, but then he scanned the E-F:

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 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.

¹
A ‘fly’ boat travels round the clock, with a double crew, working 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 Journal
, 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).