'Well – perhaps not every week.'

'You sometimes drink two a week, you mean?'

There was a twinkle in the consultant's eye as he waved his posse of acolytes across to the bed of the weakly Greenaway, and sat himself down on Morse's bed.

'Have you had a drop yet?'

'Drop of what?'

'It's a dreadful give-away, you know' (the consultant nodded to the locker) '- that tissue paper.'

'Oh!'

'Not tonight – all right?'

Morse nodded.

'And one further word of advice. Wait till Sister's off duty!'

'She'd skin me alive!' mumbled Morse.

The consultant looked at Morse strangely. 'Well, since you mention it, yes. But that wasn't what I was thinking of, no.'

'Something worse?'

'She's about the most forbidding old biddy in the profession; but just remember she comes from north of the border.'

'I'm not quite sure… '

'She'd probably' (the consultant bent down and whispered in Morse's ear) ' – she'd probably draw the curtains and insist on fifty-fifty!'

Morse began to feel more happily settled; and after twenty minutes with The Times (Letters read, Crossword completed), one-handedly he folded back the covers of The Blue Ticket, and moving comfortably down against pillows started Chapter One.

‘Good book?',

‘So-so!' Morse had not been aware of Fiona's presence,; he shrugged non-committally, holding the pages rigidly his left hand.

‘ What's it called?'

‘Er The Blue – The Blue City.'

‘Detective story, isn't it? I think my mum's read that.'

Morse nodded uneasily. 'Do you read a lot?'

‘I used to, when I was young and beautiful.'

'This morning?'

'Sit up!'

Morse leaned forward as she softened up his pillows With a few left hooks and right crosses, and went on her way.

'Lovely girl, isn't she?' It wasn't Lewis this time who made the obvious observation, but the stricken Greenaway, now much recovered, and himself reading a book whose title was plain for all to see: The Age of Steam.

Morse pushed his own novel as unobtrusively as possible into his locker: it was a little disappointing, anyway.

'The Blue Ticket – that's what it is,' said Greenaway.

'Pardon?'

'You got the tide wrong – it's The Blue Ticket.'

'Did I? Ah yes! I, er, I don't know why I'm bothering to read it, really.'

'Same reason I did, I suppose. Hoping for a bit of sex every few pages.'

Morse grinned defeatedly.

'It's a bit of a let-down,' went on Greenaway in his embarrassingly stentorian voice. 'My daughter sometimes brings me one or two books like that.'

'She was the woman – last night?'

The other nodded. 'In library work ever since she was eighteen – twelve years. In the Bodley these last six.'

Morse listened patiently to a few well-rehearsed statistics about the mileage of book-shelving in the warrens beneath the Bodleian; and was already learning something of the daughter's curriculum vitae when the monologue was terminated by cleaners pushing the beds around in a somewhat cavalier fashion, and slopping their mops into dingily watered buckets.

At 1.30 p.m., after what seemed to him a wretchedly insubstantial lunch, Morse was informed that he was scheduled that afternoon to visit various investigative departments; and that for this purpose the saline-drip would be temporarily removed. And when a hospital porter finally got him comfortably into a wheelchair, Morse felt that he had certainly climbed a rung or two up the convalescence ladder.

It was not until 3.30 p.m. that he returned to the ward, weary, impatient, and thirsty – in reverse order of severity. Roughly, though oddly painlessly, a silent Nessie, just before going off duty, had reaffixed into his right wrist the tube running down from a newly hung drip; and with the eyes of a now fully alert Greenaway upon him, Morse decided that Steve Mingella's sexual fantasies might have to be postponed a while. And when a small, mean-faced Englishwoman (doubtless Violet's understudy) had dispensed just about enough viscous liquid from her tureen to cover the bottom of his soup bowl, Morse's earlier euphoria had almost evaporated. He wouldn't even be seeing Lewis – the latter (as he'd told Morse) taking out the missus for some celebration (reason unspecified). At 7.05 p.m. he managed to sort out his headphones for The Archers; and at 7.20 p.m., he decided to dip into the late Colonel's magnum opus. By 7.30 p.m. he was so engrossed that it was only after finishing Part One that he noticed presence of Christine Greenaway, the beautiful blonde from the Bodley.

Chapter Seven

Copyright ©1978 by Wilfrid M. Deniston, QBE, MC. No part whatsoever of this publication may be reproduced, by any process, without the written authority of the copyright owner.

The author wishes to acknowledge the help he has so freely received from several sources; but particularly from the Bodleian Library, Oxford; from the Proceedings of the North Oxford Local History Society; and from the Court Registers of the City of Oxford Assizes, 1859 and 1860.

Further details of the trials mentioned in the following pages may be found in the editions of Jackson's Oxford Journal for 20th and 27th August, 1859; and of the same journal for 15th and 22nd April, 1860.

A Profligate Crew

Those who explore the back-streets and the by-ways of great cities, or indeed our small cities, will sometimes stumble (almost literally, perhaps) upon sad memorials, hidden in neglected churchyards – churchyards which seem wholly separated from any formal ecclesiastical edifice and which are come across purely by accident at far side of red-bricked walls, or pressed upon by tall houses – untended, silent, forgotten. Until recent years, such a churchyard was to be found at the lower end of pretty little road in North Oxford, now designated Middle Way, which links the line of Summertown shops South Parade with the expensively elegant houses along Squitchey Lane, to the north. But in the early nineteen-sixties most of those tomb-stones which had stood in irregular ranks in the Summertown Parish Churchyard (for such was its official name) were removed from their original, supra-corporal sites in order to afford a rather less melancholic aspect to those who were about pay their deposits on the flats being built upon those highly desirable if slightly lugubrious acres. Each there in narrow cell had once been laid, and each would there remain; yet after 1963 no one, for certain, could have marked that final resting place.

The few headstones which are adequately preserved which are to be found – even to this day -leaning almost upright against the northern perimeter of the aforesaid enclave, are but one tenth or so of the memorials once erected there, in the second and third quarters of the nineteenth century, by relatives, and friends whose earnest wish was to perpetuate the

names of those souls, now perhaps known only to God, who passed their terrestrial lives in His faith and fear. One of these headstones, a moss-greened, limestone slab (standing the furthest away but three from the present thoroughfare) bears an epitaph which may still be traced by the practised eye of the patient epigraphist – though make haste if you are to decipher that disintegrating lettering!