Colin Dexter - The Wench Is Dead

'Happy Chrismas!' She bent down, and Morse could still feel the dryness of her lips against his cheek as she introduced the embarrassed youth, repeated her Christmas greeting, and then was gone – throwing herself once more into a series of jerky contortions like some epileptic puppet.

Morse's plastic cup was empty and he walked slowly past a long line of tables, where beneath the white coverings he glimpsed sugared mince-pies and skewered sausages.

'We'll be starting on them soon!' said a familiar voice behind him, and Morse turned to find Eileen, blessedly alone and, like only a few of the others, wearing her uniform.

'Hullo!' said Morse.

'Hullo!' she said softly.

'It's good to see you!'

She looked at him, and nodded, almost imperceptibly.

A tall man, looking as if he might have been involved in a fight recently materialized from somewhere.

'This is Gordon,' said Eileen, looking up into the shaded planes of Gordon's skull-like face. And when Morse had shaken hands with the man, he once more found himself alone, wondering where to walk, where to put himself, how to make an inconspicuous exit, to cease upon the five-minutes-to-eleven with no pain.

He was only a few feet from the main door when she was suddenly standing in front of him.

'You're not trying to sneak away, I hope!'

Nessie!

'Hullo, Sister. No! I'm – I mustn't stay too long, of course, but-'

'I'm glad you came. I know you're a wee bit old for this sort of thing… ' Her lilting Scottish accent seemed to be mocking him gently.

Morse nodded; it was difficult to argue the point, and he looked down to pick out the one remaining apple-cube from his cup.

'Your sergeant did you rather better – with the drink, I mean.'

Morse looked at her – suddenly – almost as if he had never looked at her before. Her skin in this stroboscopic light looked almost opaline, and the colour of her eyes was emerald. Her auburn hair was swept upward, emphasizing the contours of her face, and her mouth was thinly and delicately lipsticked. For a woman, she was quite tall, certainly as tall as he was; and if only (as Morse thought) she'd worn something other than that miserably dowdy, unflattering dress…

'Would you like to dance, Inspector?'

'I – no! It's not one of my, er, things, dancing, I'm afraid.'

'What-?'

But Morse was never to know what she was going to ask him. A young houseman – smiling, flushed, so happily at home here – grabbed her by the hand and was pulling her to the floor.

'Come on, Sheila! Our dance, remember?'

Sheila!

'You won't try to sneak away-?' she was saying over her shoulder. But she was on, the dance-floor now, where shortly all the other dancers were stopping and moving to the periphery as the pair of them, Sheila and her young partner, put on a dazzling display of dance-steps to the rhythmic clapping of the audience.

Morse felt a stab of jealousy as his eyes followed them, the young man's body pressed close to hers. He had fully intended to stay, as she had asked. But when the music had finished, the newly metamorphosed Nessie, pretending to collapse, had become the centre of enthusiastic admiration, and Morse placed his plastic cup on the table by the exit, and left.

At 9.30 the following morning, after a somewhat fitful sleep, he rang the JR2 and asked for Ward 7C.

'Can I speak to Sister, please?'

'Who shall I say is calling?'

'It's – it's a personal call.'

'We can't take personal calls, I'm afraid. If you'd like to leave your name-'

'Just tell her one of her old patients from the ward-'

'Is it Sister Maclean you wanted?'

'Yes.'

'She's left – she left officially last week. She's off to be Director of Nursing Services-'

'She's left Oxford?'

'She's leaving today. She stayed on for a party last night-'

'I see. I'm sorry to have bothered you. I seem to have got the wrong end of things, don't I?'

'Yes, you do.'

'Where is she going to?'

'Derby – Derby Royal Infirmary.'

Since fast driving was his only significant vice (apart from egg-and-chips) Lewis was delighted, albeit on one of his 'rest'-days, to be invited to drive the Lancia. The car was a powerful performer, and the thought of the stretch of the Ml up to the A52 turn-off was, to Lewis, most pleasurable. Nor had Morse made the slightest secret of the fact that the main object of the mission was to find out if a thoroughfare called 'Spring Street' still stood – as it had stood until 1976 – on the northern outskirts of Derby.

'Just humour me, Lewis – that's all I ask!'

Lewis had needed little persuasion. It had been a momentous 'plus' in his life when Morse had intimated to his superiors that it was above all with him, Sergeant Lewis, that his brain functioned most fluently; and now – moving the Lancia across into the fast lane of the Ml at Weedon – Lewis felt wholly content with the way of life which had so happily presented itself to him those many years since. He knew, of course, that their present mission was a lost cause. But then Oxford was not unfamiliar with such things.

Spring Street proved difficult to locate, in spite of a city-map purchased from a corner-newsagent in the northern suburbs. Morse himself had become progressively tetchier as the pedestrians to whom Lewis wound down his window appeared either totally ignorant or mutually contradictory. Finally, however, the Lancia homed in on an area, marked off by hoardings, announcing itself as the 'Derby Development Complex', with two enormously tall, yellow cranes tracing and retracing their sweeping arcs above the demolition squads below.

'Could be too late, could we?' ventured Lewis.

'It doesn't matter – I've told you, Lewis.' Morse wound down his own window and spoke to a brick-dusted, white-helmeted workman.

'Have you flattened Spring Street yet?'

'Won't be long, mate,' the man replied, pointing vaguely towards the next-but-one block of terraced houses.

Morse, somewhat irked by the 'mate' familiarity, wound up his window, without a 'thank you', and pointed, equally vaguely, to Lewis, the latter soon pulling the Lancia in behind a builder's skip a couple of streets away. A young coloured woman pushing a utility pram assured Morse that, yes, this was Spring Street, and the two men got out of the car and looked around them.

Perhaps, in some earlier decades, the area had seen some better times; yet, judging from its present aspect it seemed questionable whether any of the houses in this unlovely place had ever figured in the 'desirable' category of residences. Built, by the look of them, in the early 1800s, many were now semi-derelict, and several boarded-up completely. Clearly a few remained tenanted, for here and there smoke rose up into the grey air from the narrow, yellow chimney-pots; and white-lace curtains still framed the windows yet unbroken. With distaste, Morse eyed the squashed beer-cans and discarded fish-and-chip wrappings that littered the narrow pavement. Then he walked slowly along, before stopping before a front door painted in what fifty years earlier had been a Cambridge blue, and into which a number-plaque '20' was screwed. The house was in a terraced group of six; and walking further along, Morse came to the door of an abandoned property on which, judging from the outlines, the figures '16' had once been fixed. Here Morse stopped and beckoned to Lewis – the eyes of both now travelling to the two adjacent houses, boarded up against squatters or vandals. The first house must, without question, have once been Number 14 – and the second, Number 12.