Colin Dexter - The Wench Is Dead
The Wench Is Dead
Colin Dexter
Hmmm, looks like another genie got out of the bottle
Me
Mystery And Detective

The Wench Is Dead.

Colin Dexter

Chapter One

Thought depends absolutely on the stomach; but,
in spite of that, those who have the best stomachs are not the best thinkers

(Voltaire, in a
letter to d'Alemberi)

Intermittently, on the Tuesday, he felt sick.
Frequently, on the Wednesday, he was sick. On the Thursday, he felt sick
frequently, but was actually sick only intermittently. With difficulty, early
on the Friday morning - drained, listless, and infinitely weary - he found the
energy to drag himself from his bed to the telephone, and seek to apologize to
his superiors at Kidlington Police HQ for what was going to be an odds-on
non-appearance at the office that late November day.

When
he awoke on the Saturday morning, he was happily aware that he was feeling
considerably better; and, indeed, as he sat in the kitchen of his bachelor flat
in North Oxford, dressed in pyjamas as gaudily striped as a lido deckchair, he
was debating whether his stomach could cope with a wafer of Weetabix - when the
phone rang.

'Morse here,' he said.

'Good morning, sir.' (A pleasing
voice!) 'If you can hold the line a minute, the Superintendent would like a word
with you.'

Morse held the line. Little option,
was there? No option, really; and he scanned the headlines of The Times which
had just been pushed through the letter-box in the small entrance hall - late,
as usual on Saturdays. 'I'm putting you through to the Superintendent,' said
the same pleasing voice - 'just a moment, please!'

Morse said nothing; but he almost
prayed (quite something for a low-church atheist) that Strange would get a
move on and come to the phone and say whatever it was he'd got to say . . . The
prickles of sweat were forming on his forehead, and his left hand plucked at
his pyjama top pocket for his handkerchief.

'Ah! Morse? Yes? Ah! Sorry to hear
you're a bit off-colour, old boy. Lots of it about, you know. The wife's
brother had it - when was it now? - fortnight or so back? No! I tell a lie -
must have been three weeks, at least. Still, that's neither here nor there, is
it?'

In enlarged globules, the prickles
of sweat had re-formed on Morse's forehead, and he wiped his brow once more as
he mumbled a few dutifully appreciative noises into the telephone.

'Didn't get you out of bed, I
hope?'

'No - no, sir.'

'Good. Good! Thought I'd just have
a quick word, that's all. Er . . . Look here, Morse!' (Clearly Strange's
thoughts had moved to a conclusion.) 'No need for you to come in today - no
need at all! Unless you feel suddenly very much better, that is. We can just
about cope here, I should think. The cemeteries are full of indispensable men -
eh? Huh!'

'Thank you, sir. Very kind of you
to ring - I much appreciate it - but I am officially off duty this weekend in
any case—'

'Really? Ah! That's good! That's er
. . . very good, isn't it? Give you a chance to stay in bed.'

'Perhaps so, sir,' said Morse
wearily.

'You say you're up, though?'

'Yes, sir!'

'Well you go back to bed, Morse!
This'll give you a chance for a jolly good rest - this weekend, I mean - won’t
it? Just the thing - bit o' rest - when you're feeling a bit off-colour - eh?
It's exactly what the quack told the wife's brother - when was it now . . . ?'

Afterwards, Morse thought he remembered
concluding this telephone conversation in a seemly manner - with appropriate
concern expressed for Strange's convalescent brother-in-law; thought he
remembered passing a hand once more over a forehead that now felt very wet and
very, very cold - and then taking two or three hugely deep breaths and then
starting to rush for the bathroom . . .

It was Mrs Green, the charlady who came in on
Tuesday and Saturday mornings, who rang treble-nine immediately and demanded an
ambulance. She had found her employer sitting with his back to the wall in the
entrance-hall: conscious, seemingly sober, and passably presentable, except for
the deep-maroon stains down the front of his deckchair pyjamas - stains that in
both colour and texture served vividly to remind her of the dregs in the bottom
of a coffee percolator. And she knew exactly what they meant, because
that thoughtlessly cruel doctor had made it quite plain - five years ago now,
it had been - that if only she'd called him immediately, Mr Green might still .
. .

'Yes, that's right,' she heard
herself say - surprisingly, imperiously, in command: 'just on the southern side
of the Banbury Road roundabout. Yes. I'll be looking out for you.'

At 10.15 a.m. that same morning, an only
semi-reluctant Morse condescended to be helped into the back of the ambulance,
where, bedroom-slippered and with an itchy, grey blanket draped around a clean
pair of pyjamas, he sat defensively opposite a middle-aged, uniformed woman who
appeared to have taken his refusal to lie down on the stretcher-bed as a
personal affront, and who now sullenly and silently pushed a white enamel
kidney-bowl into his lap as he vomited copiously and noisily once more, while
the ambulance climbed Headley Way, turned left into the grounds of the John
Radcliffe Hospital complex, and finally stopped outside the Accident, Casualty,
and Emergency Department.

As he lay supine (on a hospital
trolley now) it occurred to Morse that he might already have died some half a
dozen times without anyone recording his departure. But he was always an
impatient soul (most particularly in hotels, when awaiting his breakfast); and
it might not have been quite so long as he imagined before a white-coated
ancillary worker led him in leisurely fashion through a questionnaire that
ranged from the names of his next of kin (in Morse's case, now non-existent) to
his denominational preferences (equally, alas, now non-existent). Yet once
through these initiation rites - once (as it were) he had joined the club and
signed the entry forms - Morse found himself the object of considerably
increased attention. Dutifully, from somewhere, a young nurse appeared, flipped
a watch from her stiffly laundered lapel with her left hand and took his pulse
with her right; proceeded to take his blood pressure, after tightening the
black swaddling-bands around his upper-arm with (for Morse) quite needless
ferocity; and then committing her findings to a chart (headed MORSE, E.) with
such nonchalance as to suggest that only the most dramatic of irregularities
could ever give occasion for anxiety. The same nurse finally turned her
attention to matters of temperature; and Morse found himself feeling somewhat
idiotic as he lay with the thermometer sticking up from his mouth, before its
being extracted, its calibrations consulted, its readings apparently
unsatisfactory, it being forcefully shaken thrice, as though for a few backhand
flicks in a ping-pong match, and then being replaced, with all its earlier
awkwardness,  just underneath his tongue.

‘I'm going to survive?' ventured
Morse, as the nurse added her further findings to the data on his chart.

‘You've got a temperature,' replied
the uncommunicative teenager.

‘I thought everybody had got
a temperature,' muttered .'Morse

For the moment, however, the nurse
had turned her  back on him to consider
the latest casualty.

A youth, his legs caked with mud,
and most of the rest him encased in a red-and-black-striped Rugby jersey, had
just been wheeled in - a ghastly looking Cyclopean slit across his forehead.
Yet, to Morse, he appeared wholly at his ease as the (same) ancillary worker
quizzed him comprehensively about his life-history, his religion, his
relatives. And when, equally at his ease, the (same) nurse put him through his
paces with stethoscope, watch, and thermometer, Morse could do little but envy
the familiarity that was effected forthwith between the young lad and the
equally young lass. Suddenly - and almost cruelly - Morse realized that she,
that same young lass, had seen him -Morse! - exactly for what he was: a man
who'd struggled through life to his early fifties, and who was about to face the
slightly infra-dignitatem embarrassments of hernias and haemorrhoids, of
urinary infections and - yes! - of duodenal ulcers.

The kidney-bowl had been left
within easy reach, and Morse was retching violently, If unproductively, when a
young houseman (of Morse's age, no more than half) came to stand beside him and
to scan the reports of ambulance, administrative staff, and medical personnel.

'You've got a bit of nasty tummy
trouble - you realize that?'

Morse shrugged vaguely: 'Nobody's
really told me anything yet.'

'But you wouldn't have to be
Sherlock Holmes to suspect you've got something pretty radically wrong with
your innards, would you?'

Morse was about to reply when the
houseman continued. 'And you've only just come in, I think? If you could give
us - Mr, er, Morse, is it? - if you give us a chance, we'll try to tell
you more about things as soon as we can, OK?'

I’m all right, really,' said the
duly chastened Chief Inspector of Police, as he lay back and tried to unloose
the knot that had tied itself tight inside his shoulder muscles.

'You're not all right, I'm
afraid! At best you've got a stomach ulcer that's suddenly decided to burst out
bleeding' - Morse experienced a sharp little jerk of alarm somewhere in his
diaphragm - 'and at worst you've got what we call a perforated
ulcer ; and if that is the case . . . '

'If that is the case . . .
?' repeated Morse weakly. But the young doctor made no immediate answer, and
for the next few minutes prodded, squeezed, and kneaded the paunchy flesh
around Morse's abdomen.

'Found anything?' queried Morse, with
a thin and forced apology for a grin.

'You could well lose a couple of
stone. Your liver's enlarged.'

'But I thought you just said it was
the stomach!'

'Oh yes, it is! You've had a
stomach haemorrhage.'

'What's - what's that got to do
with my liver?'

'Do you drink a lot, Mr Morse?'

'Well, most people have a drink or
two most days, don't they?'

'Do you think a lot?' (The
same words - a semitone of exasperation lower.)

As non-commitally as his incipient
panic would permit, Morse shrugged his shoulders once more: 'I like a glass of
beer, yes.'

'How many pints do you drink a
week?'

A week?' squeaked Morse, his face
clouding over like that of a child who has just been given a complex problem in
mental multiplication.

'A day, then?' suggested the
houseman helpfully.

Morse divided by three: 'Two or
three, I suppose.'

Do you drink spirits?'

‘Occasionally.'

'What spirits do you drink?'

Morse shrugged his tautened
shoulders once again: 'Scotch - sometimes I treat myself to a drop of Scotch.'

'How long would a bottle of Scotch
last you?'

'Depends how big it was.'

But Morse immediately saw that his
attempt at humour was ill appreciated; and he swiftly multiplied by three:
'Week - ten days - about that.'

'How many cigarettes do you smoke a day?'

'Eight . . . ten?' replied Morse,
getting the hang of things now and smoothly dividing by three.

'Do you ever take any exercise -
walking, jogging, cycling, squash . . . ?'

But before Morse could switch back
to his tables, he reached for the kidney-bowl that had been left within reach.
And as he vomited, this time productively, the houseman observed with some
alarm the coffee-grounds admixed with the tell-tale brightly crimsoned specks
of blood - blood that was de-oxygenated daily with plentiful nicotine and
liberally lubricated with alcohol.

For some while after these events,
Morse's mind was somewhat hazy. Later, however, he could recall a nurse bending
over him - the same young nurse as earlier; and he could remember the
beautifully manicured fingers on her left hand as she flipped the watch out
again into her palm; could almost follow her thoughts as with contracted brow
she squinted at the disturbing equation between his half-minute pulse-rate and
the thirty-second span upon her watch ...

At this point Morse knew that the
Angel of Death had fluttered its wings above his head; and he felt a sudden
frisson of fear, as for the first time in his life he began to think of dying.
For in his mind's eye, though just for a second or two, he thought he almost
caught sight of the laudatory obituary, the creditable paragraph.

Chapter Two

Do you know why we are more fair
and just towards the dead? We are not obliged to them, we can take our time, we
can fit in the paying of respects between a cocktail party and an affectionate
mistress - in our spare time

(Albert Camus,
The Fall)

When Morse awoke the following morning, he was
aware of a grey dawn through the window of the small ward, 10 his left; and of
a clock showing 4.50 a.m. on the wall above the archway to his right, through
which he could see a slimly attractive nurse, sitting in a pool of light behind
a desk, and writing in a large book. Was she writing, Morse wondered, about
him? If so, there would be remarkably little to say; for apart from one very
brief bout of vomiting in the small hours, he had felt, quite genuinely, so
very much better; and had required no further attention. The tubing strapped to
his right wrist, and stretching up to the saline-drip bottle hooked above his
bed, was still dragging uncomfortably against his skin most of the time, as if
the needle had been stuck in slightly off-centre; but he'd determined to make
no mention of such a minor irritant. The awkward apparatus rendered him
immobile, of course - at least until he had mastered the skills of the young
man from the adjacent bed who had spent most of the previous evening wandering
freely (as it seemed) all over the hospital, holding his own drip high above
his head like some Ethiopian athlete brandishing the Olympic torch. Morse had felt
most self-conscious when circumstances utterly beyond his control had finally
induced him to beg for a 'bottle'. Yet - thus far - he had been spared the
undignified palaver of the dreaded 'pan'; and he trusted that his lack of solid
nutriment during the preceding days would be duly acknowledged with some
reciprocal inactivity by his bowels. And so far so good!

The nurse was talking earnestly to
a slightly built, fresh-faced young houseman, his white coat reaching almost to
his ankles, a stethoscope hooked into his right-hand pocket. And soon the two
of them were walking, quietly, unfussily, into the ward where Morse lay; then
disappearing behind the curtains (drawn across the previous evening) of the bed
diagonally opposite.

When he'd first been wheeled into
the ward, Morse had noticed the man who occupied that bed - a proud-looking
man, in his late seventies, perhaps, with an Indian Army moustache, and a thin
thatch of pure-white hair. At that moment of entry, for a second or two, the
old warrior's watery-pale eyes had settled on Morse's face, seeming almost to
convey, same faint message of hope and comradeship. And indeed the dying old
man would certainly have wished the new patient well, had he been able to
articulate his intent; but the rampaging septicaemia which had sent a
bright-pink suffusion to his waxen cheeks had taken from him all the power of
speech.

It was 5.20 a.m. when the houseman
emerged from behind the curtains; 5.30 a.m. when the swiftly summoned porters
had wheeled the dead man away. And when, exactly half an hour later, the full
lights flickered on in the ward, the curtains round the bed of the late Colonel
Wilfrid Deniston, OBE, MC, were standing open, in their normal way, to reveal
the newly laundered sheets, with the changed blankets professionally mitred at
the foot. Had Morse known how the late Colonel could not abide a chord of
Wagner he would have been somewhat aggrieved; yet had he known how the Colonel
had committed to memory virtually the whole poetic opus of A. E. Housman,
he would have been most gratified.

At 6.45 a.m. Morse was aware of
considerable activity the immediate environs of the ward, although initially
could see no physical evidence of it: voices, clinking of crockery, squeaking
of ill-oiled wheels - and finally Violet, a happily countenanced and
considerably overweight West Indian woman hove into view pushing a tea-trolley.
This was the occasion, clearly, for a pre-dawn beverage, and Morse welcomed it!
For the first time in the past fey days he was conscious of a positive appetite
for and drink; and already, and with envy, he had surveyed the jugs of water
and bottles of squash that stood on the bedside tables of his fellow-patients,
though for some reason not on the table of the man immediately opposite, one
Walter Greenaway, above whose bed there hung a rectangular plaque bearing the
sad little legend NIL BY MOUTH.

‘Tea or coffee, Mr Greenaway?'

‘I'll just settle for a large
gin-and-tonic, if that's all right by you.'

'Ice and lemon?'

'No ice, thank you: it spoils the
gin.'

Violet moved away massively to the
next bed, leaving Mr Greenaway sans ice, sans everything. Yet the perky
sixty-odd-year-old appeared far from mortified by his exclusion from the
proceedings, and winked happily across at Morse.

'All right, chief?'

'On the mend,' said Morse
cautiously.

'Huh! That's exactly what the old
Colonel used to say: On the mend . Poor old boy!'

'I see,' said Morse, with some
unease.

After Greenaway's eyes had
unclouded from their appropriate respect for the departed Colonel, Morse
continued the dialogue.

'No tea for you, then?'

Greenaway shook his head. 'They
know best, though, don't they?'

'They do?'

'Wonderful - the doctors here! And
the nurses!'

Morse nodded, hoping indeed that it
might be so.

'Same trouble as me?' enquired
Greenaway confidentially.

'Pardon?'

'Stomach, is it?'

'Ulcer - so they say.'

'Mine's perforated!' Greenaway
proclaimed this fact with a certain grim pride and satisfaction, as though a
combination of the worst of disorders with the best of physicians was a cause
for considerable congratulation. 'They're operating on me at ten o'clock -
that's why I'm not allowed a drink, see?'

'Oh!' For a few seconds Morse found
himself almost wishing he could put in some counter-claim for a whole gutful of
mighty ulcers that were not only perforated but pierced and punctured into the
bargain. A more important matter, however, was now demanding his attention, for
Violet had effected a U-turn and was (at last!) beside his bed.

She greeted her new charge with a
cheerful grin. 'Morning, Mr, er' (consulting the Biro'd letters on the
name-tab) 'Mr Morse!'

'Good morning!' replied Morse.
'I'll have some coffee, please - two spoonfuls of sugar.'

'My, my! Two-sugars!' Violet's
eyes almost soared out of their whitened sockets towards the ceiling; then she
turned to share the private joke with the grinning Greenaway.

‘Now, look you here!' (reverting to
Morse): 'You can't have no coffee nor no tea nor no sugar neither. Oh right?'
She wagged a brown forefinger at a point somewhere above the bed; and twisting
his neck Morse could see, behind his saline apparatus, a rectangular plaque
bearing the sad little legend NIL BY MOUTH.

Chapter Three

Flowers, writing materials, and
books are always welcome gifts for patients; but if you wish to bring food or
drink, do ask the Sister, and she will tell you what is advisable

(Oxford Health
Authority, Handbook for
Patients and Visitors)

Detective Sergeant Lewis came into the ward just
after seven o'clock that Sunday evening, clutching a Sainsbury carrier-bag with
the air of a slightly guilty man walking through the Customs' shed; and at the
sight of his old partner, Morse felt very glad, and just a little lachrymose.

'How come you knew I was here?'

'I'm a detective, sir - remember?'

'They phoned you, I suppose.'

'The Super. He said you sounded
awful poorly when he rang yesterday morning. So he sent Dixon round, but you'd
just been carried off in the ambulance. So he rang me and said I might like to
see if the NHS is still up to scratch - see if you wanted anything.'

'Something like a bottle of Scotch,
you mean?'

Lewis ignored the pleasantry:
I'd've come in last night, but they said you weren't to have any visitors -
only close relatives.'

‘I’ll have you know I'm not quite
your Orphan Annie , Lewis. I've got a great-aunt up in Alnwick
somewhere.'

'Bit of a long way for her to come,
sir.'

'Especially at ninety-seven’

'Not a bad fellow, Strange, is he?'
suggested Lewis, after a slightly awkward little pause.

'Not when you get to know him, I
suppose,' admitted Morse.

'Would you say you've got to
know him?'

Morse shook his head.

'Well?' said Lewis briskly. 'How are
things? What do they say's the trouble?'

‘Trouble? No trouble! It's just a
case of mistaken identity.'

Lewis grinned. 'Seriously, though?'

'Seriously? Well they've put me on
some great big round white pills that cost a couple of quid a time, so the -
nurses say. Do you realize you can get a very decent little  bottle of claret for that price?'

'What about the food - is that all
right?'

'Food? What food? Except for
the pills they haven't given me a thing.'

'No drink, either?'

'Are you trying to set back my
medical progress, Lewis?'

'Is that what - what that means?'
Lewis jerked his eyes upwards to the fateful warning above the bed.

'That's just precautionary,' said
Morse, with unconvincing nonchalance.

Lewis's eyes jerked, downwards this
time, towards the carrier-bag.

'Come on, Lewis! What have you got
in there?'

Lewis reached inside the bag and
brought out a bottle of lemon-and-barley water, and was most pleasantly
surprised to witness the undisguised delight on Morse's lace.

'It was just that the missus
thought - well, you know, you wouldn't be allowed to drink - to drink anything
else much.'

'Very kind of her! You just tell
her that the way things are I'd rather have a bottle of that stuff than a whole
crate of whisky.'

'You don't mean that, do you, sir?'

'Doesn't stop you telling her,
though, does it?'

'And here's a book,' added Lewis,
withdrawing one further item from the bag - a book entitled Scales of
Injustice: A Comparative Study of Crime and its Punishment as Recorded in the
County of Shropshire, 1842-1852.

Morse took the thick volume and
surveyed its inordinately lengthy title, though without any obvious enthusiasm.
'Mm! Looks a fairly interesting work.'

'You don't mean that, do you?'

'No,' said Morse.

'It's a sort of family heirloom and
the missus just thought—'

'You tell that wonderful missus of
yours that I'm very pleased with it.'

'Perhaps you'll do me a favour and
leave it in the hospital library when you come out.'

Morse laughed quietly; and Lewis
was strangely gratified by his chief's reactions, and smiled to himself.

He was still smiling when an
extraordinarily pretty young nurse, with a freckled face and
mahogany-highlighted hair, came to Morse's bedside, waved an admonitory finger
at him, and showed her white and beautifully regular teeth in a dumbshow of
disapproval as she pointed to the lemon-and-barley bottle which Morse had
placed on his locker-top. Morse, in turn, nodded his full appreciation of the
situation and showed his own reasonably regular, if rather off-white, teeth as
he mouthed a silent 'OK'.

'Who's that?' whispered Lewis, when
she had passed upon her way.

'That, Lewis, is the Fair Fiona.
Lovely, don't you think? I sometimes wonder how the doctors manage to keep
their dirty hands off her.'

'Perhaps they don't.'

‘I thought you'd come in here to
cheer me up!'

But
for  the  moment
good  cheer  seemed
in  short supply. The ward sister
(whom Lewis had not noticed when he'd entered - merely walking straight
through, like everyone else, as he'd thought) had clearly been keeping dragon's
eye on events in general, and in particular events around the bed where the
dehydrated Chief Inspector lay. To which bed, with purposeful stride, she now
took the few steps needed from the vantage point behind the main desk. Her left
hand immediately grasped the offending bottle on the locker-top, while her eyes
fixed unblinkingly upon the luckless Lewis.

We have our regulations in this
hospital - a copy of them is posted just outside the ward. So I shall be glad
if you follow those regulations and report to me or whoever's in charge if you
intend to visit again. It's absolutely vital that we follow a routine here -
try to understand that! Your friend here is quite poorly, and we're all trying
our very best to see that he gets well again quickly. Now we canna do that if
you are going to bring in any thing you think might do him good, because
you'd bring in all the wrong things, OK? I'm sure you appreciate what
I'm saying.'

She had spoken in a soft Scots
accent, this grimly visaged, tight-lipped sister, a silver buckle clasped
around her dark-blue uniform; and Lewis, the colour tidally risen under his
pale cheeks, looked wretchedly uncomfortable as she turned away - and was gone.
Even Morse, for a few moments, appeared strangely cowed and silent.

'Who's that?' asked Lewis (for the
second time that evening).

'You have just had an encounter
with the embittered soul of our ward sister - devoted to an ideal of humourless
efficiency: a sort of Calvinistic Thatcherite.'

'And what she says . . . ?'

Morse nodded. 'She is, Lewis, in
charge, as I think you probably gathered.'

'Doesn't have to be so sharp, does
she?'

'Forget it, Lewis! She's probably disappointed in her
love-life or something. Not surprising with a face—'

'What's her name?'

'They call her Nessie .'

'Was she born near the Loch?'

'In it, Lewis.'

The two men laughed just a little;
yet the incident had been unpleasant and Lewis in particular found it difficult
to put it behind him. For a further five minutes he quizzed Morse quietly about
the other patients; and Morse told him of the dawn departure of the
ex-Indian-Army man. For still another five minutes, the two men exchanged words
about Police HQ at Kidlington; about the Lewis family; about the
less-than-sanguine prospects of Oxford United in the current soccer campaign.
But nothing could quite efface the fact that 'that bloody sister' (as Morse
referred to her) had cast a darkling shadow over the evening visit; had certainly
cast a shadow over Lewis. And Morse himself was suddenly feeling hot and
sweaty, and (yes, if he were honest) just a fraction wearied of the
conversation.

'I'd better be off then, sir.'

'What else have you got in that
bag?'

'Nothing—'

'Lewis! My stomach may be out of
order for the minute but there's nothing wrong with my bloody ears!'

Slowly the dark clouds began to
lift for Lewis, and when, after prolonged circumspection, he decided that the
Customs Officer was momentarily off her guard, he withdrew a small, flattish
bottle, wrapped in soft, dark-blue tissue-paper - much the colour of Nessie's
uniform.

'But not until it's official like!'
hissed Lewis, palming the gift surreptitiously into Morse's hand beneath the
bedclothes.

'Bell's?' asked Morse.

Lewis nodded.

It was a happy moment.

For the present, however, the attention of all
was diverted by another bell that sounded from somewhere, and visitors began to
stand and prepare for their departure: a few, perhaps, with symptoms of
reluctance; but the majority with signs of only partially concealed relief. As
Lewis himself rose to take his leave, he dipped his hand once more into the
carrier-bag and produced his final offering: a paperback entitled The Blue
Ticket, with a provocative picture of an economically clad nymphet on the
cover.

'I thought - I thought you might
enjoy something : little bit lighter, sir. The missus doesn't know—'

'I hope she's never found you
reading this sort of rubbish, Lewis!'

'Haven't read it yet, sir.'

'Well, the, er, title's a bit
shorter than the other thing ...

Lewis nodded, and the two friends
shared a happy grin.

‘Time to go, I'm afraid!' The Fair
Fiona was smiling down at them, especially (it seemed) smiling down at Lewis,
for whom every cloud was suddenly lifted from the weather-chart. As for Morse,
he was glad to be alone again; and when the ward finally cleared of its last
visitor, the hospital system smoothly, inexorably, reoriented itself once more
to the care and treatment of the sick.

It was only after further testings
of pulse and blood pressure, after the administration of further medicaments,
that Morse had the opportunity (unobserved) of reading the blurb of the second
work of literature (well, literature of a sort) which was now in his
possession:

Diving into the water, young Steve Mingella had
managed to pull the little girl's body on to the hired yacht and 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 for the months (and years) ahead.
Furthermore, as a token of their muted optimism, the patient was that very
evening be allowed one half-bowl of oxtail soup and a portion vanilla ice-cream
- and for Morse any gourmand à la carte menu could hardly
have been more gloriously welcome.

Lewis reported to Sister Maclean at
7.30 p.m., and was unsmilingly nodded through Customs without having to declare
one get-well card (from Morse's secretary), a tube of mint-flavoured toothpaste (from Mrs Lewis), and clean
hand-towel (same provenance). Contentedly, for ten minutes or so, the two men
talked of this and that, with Lewis receiving the firm impression that his
chief as recovering rapidly.

Fiona the Fair put in a brief
appearance towards the end of this visit, shaking out Morse's pillows and
placing jug of cold water on his locker.

'Lovely girl,' ventured Lewis.

'You're married - remember?'

'Done any reading yet?' Lewis
nodded towards the locker.

'Why do you ask?'

Lewis grinned: 'It's the missus —
she was just wondering ...'

‘I’m half-way through it, tell her.
Riveting stuff!'

'You're not serious—'

'Do you know how to spell
riveting ?'

'What - one t or two,
you mean?'

'And do you know what stools
are?'

'Things you sit on?'

Morse laughed - a genuine,
carefree, pain-free laugh. It was good to have Lewis around; and the vaguely
puzzled Lewis was glad to find the invalid in such good spirits.

Suddenly, there beside the bed,
re-mitreing the bottom right-hand corner of the blankets, was Sister Maclean
herself.

'Who brought the jug of water?' she
enquired in her soft but awesome voice.

'It's all right, Sister,' began
Morse, 'the doctor said—'

'Nurse Welch!' The ominously quiet
words carried easily across the ward, and Lewis stared at the floor in pained
embarrassment as Student Nurse Welch walked warily over to Morse's bed, where
she was firmly admonished by her superior. Free access to liquids was to be
available only w.e.f. the following dawn - and not before. Had the
student nurse not read the notes before going the rounds with her water-jugs?
And if she had, did she not realize that no hospital could function
satisfactorily with such sloppiness? If it mightn't seem important on this occasion,
did the student nurse not realize that it could be absolutely vital on the next.

*    *    *

Another sickening little episode; and for Lewis
one still having a nasty taste when a few minutes later he bade chief farewell.
Morse himself had said nothing at the time, and said nothing now. Never, he
told himself, would have reprimanded any member of his own staff in such
cavalier fashion in front of other people: and then, sadly, recalled that quite
frequently he had done precisely that. All the same, he would have welcomed the
opportunity of a few quiet words with the duly chastened Fiono before she went
home.

There was virtually no one around in the ward
now: the Ethiopian athlete was doing the hospital rounds once more and two of
the other patients had shuffled their way to the gents. Only a woman of about
thirty, a slimly attractive blonde-headed woman (Walter Greenaway's daughter,
he guessed - and guessed correctly) still sat beside her father. She had given
Morse a quick glance as she'd come in but now hardly appeared to notice him as
she made way out of the ward, and pressed the 'Down' button in front of the
top-floor lifts. It was her father who was monopolising her thoughts, and she
gave no more than a cursory thought to the man whose name appeared to be ‘Morse'
and whose eyes, as she had noticed, had followed figure with a lively interest
on her exit

The time was 8.40 p.m.

Feeling minimally guilty that he
had not as yet so much as opened the cover of the precious work that Mrs Lewis
had vouchsafed to his keeping, Morse reached for book from his locker, and
skimmed through its first paragraph:

‘Diversity rather than uniformity
has almost invariably been seen to characterize the criminal behaviour-patterns
of any technologically developing society. The attempt to resolve any conflicts
and/or inconsistencies which may arise in the analysis and interpretation of
such patterns (see Appendix 3, pp. 492 ff.) is absolutely vital; and the
inevitable re-interpretation of this perpetually variable data is the raw material
for several recent studies into the causation of criminal behaviour. Yet
conflicting strategic choices within heterogeneous areas, starkly
differentiated creeds, greater knowledge of variable economic performances, as
well as physical, physiological, or physiognomical peculiarities -all these
facts (as we shall maintain) can suggest possible avenues never exhaustively
explored by any previous student of criminal behaviour in nineteen-century
Britain.'

'Christ!' muttered Morse (for the
second time that evening). A few years ago he might possibly have considered
persevering with such incomprehensible twaddle. But no longer. Stopping
momentarily only to marvel at the idiocy of the publisher who had allowed such
pompous polysyllaby ever to reach the compositor in the first place, he closed
the stout work smartly - and resolved to open it never again.

As it happened, he was to break
this instant resolution very shortly; but for the moment there was a rather
more attractive proposition awaiting him in his locker: the pornographic
paperback which Lewis (praise the Lord!) had smuggled in.

A yellow flash across the glossy
cover made its promise to the reader of Scorching Lust and Primitive Sensuality
- this claim supported by the picture of a superbly buxom beauty sunning
herself on some golden-sanded South-sea island, completely naked except for a
string of native beads around her neck. Morse opened the book and skimmed
(though a little more slowly than before) a second paragraph that evening. And
he was immediately aware of a no-nonsense, clear-cut English style that was
going to take the palm every time from the sprawling, spawning, sociological
nonsense he had just encountered:

'She surfaced from the pool and
began to unbutton her clinging, sodden blouse. And as she did so, the young men
all fell silent, urging her - praying her! - in some unheard but deafening
chorus, to strip herself quickly and completely - their eyes now riveted to the
carmined tips of her slimly sinuous fingers as they slipped inside her blouse,
and so slowly, so tantalizingly, flicked open a further button ...

'Christ!!' It was the third time
that Morse had used the same word that evening, and the one that took the prize
for blasphemous vehemence. He leaned back against his pillows with a satisfied
smile about his lips, clasping to himself the prospect of a couple of hours of
delicious titillation on the morrow. He could bend those covers back easily
enough; and it would be no great difficulty temporarily to assume the facial
expression of a theological student reading some verses from the Minor
Prophets. But whatever happened, the chances that Chief Inspector Morse would
ever be fully informed about crime and its punishment in nineteenth-century
Shropshire had sunk to zero.

For the moment, at any rate.

He replaced The Blue Ticket in
his locker, on top Scales of Injustice - both books now lying on top of
the hitherto neglected Murder on the Oxford Canal, that slim volume
printed privately under the auspices of The Oxford and County Local History
Society.

As Morse nodded off once more, his brain was
debating whether there was just the one word misspelled in the brief paragraph
he had just read. He would look it up in Chambers when he got home. Lewis
hadn't seemed to know, either ...

Chapter Six

I
enjoy convalescence.   It is the
part that makes the illness worth while

(G. B. Shaw, Back to
Methuselah)

At 2 a.m. the inevitable occurred; but
fortunately Morse managed to attract the quick attention of the nurse as she'd
flitted like some Nightingale around the darkened wards. The noise of the
curtains being drawn around his bed sounded to Morse loud enough to rouse the
semi-dead. Yet none of his fellow-patients seemed to stir, and she - the
blessed girl! - had been quite marvellous.

'I don't even know which way up the
thing should go,' confided Morse.

'Which way round, you mean!'
Eileen (such was her name) had whispered, as she proceeded without the slightest
embarrassment to explain exactly how the well-trained patient would negotiate
this particular crisis. Then, leaving him with half a roll of white
toilet-paper, and the firm assurance of a second coming within the next ten
minutes, she was gone.

It was all over - consummated with
a bowl of warm water and a brief squirt of some odiferous air-freshener. Whew!
Not half as bad as Morse had feared - thanks to that ethereal girl; and as he
smiled up gratefully at her, he thought there might have been a look in her
eyes that transgressed the borders of perfunctory nursing. But Morse would
always have thought there was, even if there wasn't; for he was the sort of man
for whom some area of fantasy was wholly necessary, and his imagination
followed the slender Eileen, as elegantly she walked away: about 5' 8 in
height - quite tall really; in her mid-twenties; eyes greenish-hazel, in a
delicately featured, high-cheekboned face; no ring of any on either hand. She
looked so good, so wholesome, in her white uniform with its dark-blue
trimmings.

Go to sleep, Morse!

At 7.30 a.m., after breakfasting on a single wafer of weetabix with
an inadequate pour-over of semi-skimmed and no sugar), Morse noted with great
satisfaction he NIL BY MOUTH embargo was now in abeyance, he poured himself a
glass of water with the joy of a liberated hostage. There followed for him,
that morning, standard readings of pulse-rate and blood-pressure, a bedside
wash in a portable basin, the remaking of his bed, provision of a fresh jug of
water (!), a flirting confab with Fiona, the purchase of The Times, a
cup of Bovril from the gorgeous Violet, and (blessedly) not a single spoke
stuck in the hospital machinery from the éminence grise installed at the
seat of power.

At 10.50 a.m.  a white-coated cohort of
consultant-cum-underlings came to stand around his bed, and to consider the progress
of its incumbent. The senior man, briefly looking through Morse's file, eyed
the patient with a somewhat jaundiced eye.

‘How are you feeling this morning?'

'I think I'll live on for a few
more weeks - thanks to you' said Morse, with somewhat sickening sycophancy.

‘You mention here something about
your drinking habbits.' continued the consultant, unimpressed as it appeared
with such spurious gratitude.

‘Yes?'

‘You drink a lot.' It was a
statement.

‘That's a lot, you think?'

‘The consultant closed the file
with a sigh and handed it back to Nessie. 'During my long years in the medical
profession, Mr Morse, I have learned that there are two categories of
statistics which can invariably be discounted: the sexual prowess of those
suffering from diabetes mellitus; and the boozing habits of our country's
middle management.'

'I'm not a diabetic.'

'You will be if you keep drinking a
bottle of Scotch a week.'

'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

Murder on the Oxford Canal

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.

PART ONE

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!

Beyond this poignant (if unusually
lengthy) epitaph there lies a tale of unbridled lust and drunken lechery; a
tale of a hapless and a helpless young woman who found herself at the mercy of
coarse and most brutally uninhibited boatmen, during an horrendous journey made
nearly one hundred and twenty years ago -a journey whose details are the
subject-matter of our present narrative.

Joanna Franks hailed originally
from Derby. Her father, Daniel Carrick, had been accredited as an agent to the
Nottinghamshire and Midlands Friendly Society; and for a good deal of his
married life he appears to have maintained a position as a reasonably
prosperous and well-respected figure in his home community. Later, however -
and certainly in the few years prior to the tragic death of his only daughter
(there was a younger brother, Daniel) - he encountered a period of hard times.

Joanna's first husband was F. T.
Donavan, whose family sprang from County Meath. He is described by one of his
contemporaries as an Irishman of many parts , and being a man of
large physique we learn that he was familiarly (and predictably) known by the
nickname of Hefty' Donavan. He was a conjurer by profession (or byone of them!)
and appeared in many theatres and music-halls, both in London and in the
provinces. In order to attract some badly needed publicity, he had at some
unspecified date assumed the splendidly grandiloquent title of 'Emperor of all
the Illusionists'; and the following theatre handbill was printed at his own
expense to herald his appearance at the City of Nottingham Music Hall in early
September 1856:

'Mr DONAVAN, citizen of the
World and of Ireland, most humbly and respectfully informs all members of the
upper and the lower nobilities, folk of the landed gentry, and the citizens of
the historic district of Nottingham, that in view of his superior and
unrivalled excellencies in MAGIC and DECEPTION, he has had conferred upon him,
by the supreme conclave of the Assembly of Superior Magicians, this last year,
the unchallenged title of EMPEROR of all the Illusionists, and this
particularly by virtue of the amazing trick of cutting off a cockerel's head
and then restoring the bird to its pristine animation. It was this same
DONAVAN, the greatest man in the World, who last week diverted his great
audience in Croydon by immersing his whole body, tightly secured and chained,
in a tank of the most corrosive acid for eleven minutes and forty-five seconds,
as accurately measured by scientific chronometer.'

Three years earlier Donavan had
written (and found a publisher for) his only legacy to us, a work entitled The
Comprehensive Manual of the Conjuring Arts. But the great man's career was
beginning to prove progressively unsuccessful, and no stage appearances
whatsoever are traceable to 1858. In that year, he died, a childless and
embittered man, whilst on holiday with a friend in Ireland, where his grave now
rests in a burial-plot overlooking Bertnaghboy Bay. Some time afterwards his
widow, Joanna, met and fell deeply in love with one Charles Franks, an ostler
from Liverpool. Like her first,  Joanna's  second
marriage  appears to have
been a happy one, in spite of the fact that times were still hard and money
still scarce. The new Mrs Franks was to find employment, as a dressmaker and
designers' model, with a Mrs Russell of 34 Runcorn Terrace, Liverpool. But
Franks himself was less successful in his quest for regular employment, and
finally decided to try his luck in London. Here his great expectations were
soon realized for he was almost immediately engaged as an ostler at the busy
George Dragon Inn on the Edgware Road, where we find him duly lodged in
the spring of 1859. In late May of that same year he sent his wife a guinea
(all he could afford) and begged her to join him in London as soon as possible.

On the morning of Saturday, June
11th, 1859, Joanna Franks, carrying two small trunks, bade her farewell to Mrs
Russell in Runcorn Terrace, and made her way by barge from Liverpool to
Preston Brook, the northern terminus of the Trent and Mersey Canal, which had
been opened some eighty years earlier. Here she joined one of Pickford
Co.'s express (or 'fly') boats^1 which was departing for
Stoke-on-Trent and Fradley Junction, and thence, via the Coventry and Oxford
Canals, through to London on the main Thames waterway. The fare of sixteen
shillings and eleven pence was considerably cheaper than the fare on the
Liverpool-London railway line which had been opened some twenty years earlier.

Joanna was an extremely petite and
attractive figure, wearing an Oxford-blue dress, with a white kerchief around
her neck, and a figured silk bonnet with a bright pink ribbon. The clothes may
not have been new; but they were not inexpensive, and they gave to Joanna a
very tidy appearance indeed. A very tempting appearance, too, as we shall soon
discover.

The captain of the narrow-boat Barbara
Bray was a certain Jack 'Rory' Oldfield from Coventry. According to later
testimony of fellow boat-people and other acquaintances, he was basically a
good-natured sort of fellow, of a blunt, blustery type of address. He was
married, though childless, and was aged 42 years. The fellow-members of his
crew were: the 30-year-old Alfred Musson, alias Alfred Brotherton, a tall,
rather gaunt figure, married with two young children; Walter Towns, alias
Walter Thorold, the 26-year-old illiterate son of a farm-labourer, who had left
his home town of Banbury in Oxfordshire some ten years earlier; and a teenaged
lad, Thomas Wootton, about whom no certain facts have come down to us beyond
the probability that his parents came from Ilkeston in Derbyshire.

The Barbara Bray left
Preston Brook at 7.30 p.m. on Saturday, 11th June. At Fradley Junction, at the
southern end of the Mersey Canal, she successfully negotiated her passage
through the locks; and at 10 p.m. on Sunday, 19th June, she slipped quietly
into the northern reaches of the Coventry Canal, and settled to a course,
almost due south, that would lead down to Oxford. Progress had been
surprisingly good, and there had been little or no forewarning of the tragic
events which lay ahead for the Barbara Bray, and for her solitary paying
passenger — the small and slimly attractive person of Joanna Franks, for whom
such a little span of life remained.

Chapter Eight

Style is the hallmark of a
temperament stamped upon the material at hand

(Andre
Maurois, The Art of Writing)

After
reading  these  few
pages,  Morse  found
himself making some mental queries about a few minor items, and
harbouring some vague unease about one or two major ones. Being reluctant to
disfigure the printed text with a series of marginalia, he wrote a few notes on
the back of a daily hospital menu which had been left (mistakenly) on locker.

The Colonel's style was somewhat on
the pretentious - a bit too high-flown for Morse's taste; and yet the writing
was a good deal above the average of its kind -a pleasing peroration,
calculated to ensure in most listeners some semi-compulsive page-turning to
Part Two. One of the most noticeable characteristics of the writing was the
influence of Gray's 'Elegy Written in a Country churchyard' - a poem doubtless
stuck down the author's throat as a lad in some minor public school, and one
leaving him with a rather lugubrious view of the human lot. One or two very nice
touches, though, and Morse was prepared to a couple of ticks to that epithet
'supra-corporal'. He wished, though, he had beside him that most faithful of
jail his literary companions, Chambers English Dictionary, for although
he had frequently met 'ostler' in crossword puzzles, he wasn't sure exactly what
an ostler did; and 'figured' bonnet wasn't all that obvious, was it?

Thinking of writing - and writing
books - old Donavan {Joanna's first) must have been pretty competent. After
all, he'd 'found a publisher' for his great work. And until the last few years
of his life, this literate Irish conjurer was seemingly pulling in the crowds
at all points between Croydon and Burton-on-Trent ... He must certainly have
had something about him, this man of many parts. 'Greatest man in the
World' might be going over the top a bit, yet a mild degree of megalomania was
perhaps forgivable in the publicity material of such a multi-talented
performer?

'Bertnaghboy Bay?' - Morse wrote on
the menu. His knowledge of geography was minimal. At his junior school, his
teachers had given him a few assorted facts about the exports of Argentina,
Bolivia, Chile, and the rest; and at the age of eight he had known - and still
knew (with the exception of South Dakota) - all the capital cities of the
American States. But that was the end of his apprenticeship in that discipline.
After winning a scholarship to the local grammar school, the choice of the
three 'G's had been thrust upon him: Greek, German, or Geography. Little real
choice, though, for he had been thrust willy-nilly into the Greek set, where
the paradigms of nouns and verbs precluded any knowledge of the Irish counties.
Where was - what was the name? - Bertnaghboy Bay?

It was paradoxical, perhaps, that
Morse should have suddenly found himself so fascinated by the Oxford Canal. He
was aware that many people were besotted with boat-life, and he deemed it
wholly proper that parents should seek to hand on to their offspring some love
of sailing, or rambling, or keeping pets, or bird-watching, or whatever. But
in Morse's extremely limited experience, narrow-boating figured as a grossly
over-rated activity. Once, on the invitation of a pleasant enough couple, he
had agreed to be piloted from the terminus of the Oxford Canal at Hythe Bridge
Street up to the Plough at Wolvercote - a journey of only a couple of miles,
which would be accomplished (he was assured) within the hour; but which in fact
had been so fraught with manifold misfortunes that the finishing line was
finally reached with only five minutes' drinking-time remaining - and that on a
hot and thirsty Sunday noon. That particular boat had required a couple of
people - one to steer the thing and one to keep hopping out for locks and what
the handbook called 'attractive little drawbridges'. Now, Joanna's boat had got
four of them on it - five with her; so it must surely have been awfully crowded
on that long and tedious journey, pulled slowly along by some enthusiastic
horse. Too long! Morse nodded to himself he was beginning to get the picture .
. . Far quicker by rail, of course! And the fare she'd paid, 16s 11d,
seemed on the face of it somewhat on the steep side for a trip as a
passenger on a working-boat. In 1859? Surely so! What would the rail-fare have
been then? Morse had no idea. But there were ways of finding out; there were
people who knew these things . . .

He could still see in his mind's
eye the painting on the cabin in which he'd travelled, with its lake,
its castle, its sailing boat, and range of mountains -all in the traditional
colours of red, yellow, green. But what was it like to live in such
boats? Boats that in the nineteenth century had been crewed by assortments of
men from all over the place: from the Black Country; from the colliery villages
around Coventry and Derby and Nottingham; from the terraced cottages in Upper
Fisher Row by the terminus in Oxford - carrying their cargoes of coal, salt,
china, agricultural produce . . . other things. What  other things? And why on earth all those
'aliases'? Were the crewmen counted a load of crooks before they ever came to
court? Did every one on the Canal have two names - a 'bye-name', as it were, as
well as one written in the christening-book? Surely any jury was bound to feel
a fraction of prejudice against such . . . such . . . even before ... He was
feeling tired, and already his head had jerked up twice after edging by degrees
towards his chest.

Charge Nurse Eileen Stanton had
come on duty at 9 p.m., and Morse was still sound asleep at 9.45 p.m. when she
went quietly to his bedside and gently took the hospital menu from his hand and
placed it on his locker. He was probably dreaming, she decided, of some haute
cuisine from Les Quat' Saisons, but she would have to wake him up very
shortly, for his evening pills.

Chapter Nine

What a convenient and delightful
world is this world books - if you bring to it not the obligations of the
student, or look upon it as an opiate for idleness, but enter it rather with
the enthusiasm of the adventurer

(David
Grayson, Adventures in
Contentment)

The following morning (Wednesday) was busy and
blessed. Violet's early offerings of Bran Flakes, semi-burnt cold toast, and
semi-warm weak tea, were wonderfully welcome; and when at 10 a.m. Fiona had
come to remove the saline-drip (permanently), Morse knew that the gods were
smiling. When, further, he walked down the corridor now to the bathroom,
without encumbrance, and without attendant, he felt like Florestan newly
released from confinement in Act 2 of Fidelia. And when with full
movement of both arms he freely soaped his hands and face, and examined the
rather sorry job he'd earlier made of shaving, he felt a wonderfully happy man.
Once out of this place (he decided) he would make some suitable, not too
startling, donation to the staff in general, and invite, in particular, his
favourite nurse (odds pretty even for the moment between the Fair and the
Ethereal) to that restaurant in North Oxford where he would  show off his (limited) knowledge of modern
Greek and order a Mezethes Tavernas menu, the one billed as 'an epicurean feast
from first dip to final sweet'. Ten quid per person, or a little more; and with
wine - and liqueurs, perhaps - and one or two little extras, £30 should cover
it, he hoped . . . Not that the creamy-skinned Eileen would be on duty that
night. Some domestic commitments, she'd said. 'Domestic?' It worried Morse,
just a little. Still, so long as Nessie wasn't going to be prowling around . .
. because Morse had decided that; in the interests of his
convalescence, he might well twist the little bottle's golden cap that very
night.

Back in the ward, the time passed, one
could say, satisfactorily. A cup of Bovril at 10.30 a.m. was followed by a
further recital from Mr Greenaway of his daughter's quite exceptional qualities
- a woman without whom, it appeared, the Bodleian would have considerable
difficulty in discharging any of its academic functions. After which, Morse was
visited by one of the ten-a-penny dieticians in the place - a plain-looking,
serious-souled young madam, who took him seriatim through a host of
low-calorie vegetables on which he could 'fill up' ad libitum: asparagus;
bamboo-shoots; beans (broad); beans (French); beans (runner); bean-sprouts;
broccoli; Brussels sprouts; cabbage (various); cauliflower; celery; chicory;
chives; courgettes; cucumber - and that was only the first three letters in the
eternal alphabet of a healthy dietary. Morse was so impressed with the recital
of the miraculous opportunities which awaited him that he even forbore to
comment on the assertion that both tomato-juice and turnip-juice were
wonderfully tasty and nutritious alternatives to alcoholic beverages.
Dutifully, he sought to nod at suitable intervals, knowing deep down that he
could, should, and bloody well would, shed a couple of stone fairly
soon. Indeed, as an earnest of his new-found resolution, he insisted on only one
scoop of potatoes, and no thickened gravy whatsoever, when Violet brought her
lunch-time victuals round.

In the early afternoon, after
listening to the repeat of The Archers, the most pleasing thought struck
him: no work that day at Police HQ; no worries about an evening meal; no
anxieties for the morrow, except perhaps those occasioned by his newly awakened
consciousness of infirmity - and of death. But not that even that worried
him too much, as he'd confessed to Lewis: no next of kin, no dependants, no
need for looking beyond a purely selfish gratification. And Morse knew exactly
what he wanted now, as he sat upright, clean, cool, relaxed, against the
pillows. Because, strange as it may seem, for the present he wouldn't have
given two Madagascan monkeys for a further couple of chapters of The Blue
Ticket. At that moment, and most strongly, he felt the enthusiasm of the
voyager - the voyager along the canal from Coventry to Oxford. Happily,
therefore, he turned to Murder on the Oxford Canal, Part Two.

Chapter Ten

PART TWO

A Proven Crime

Although at the
time there were a few conflicting statements about individual circumstances in
the following, and fatal, sequence of events, the general pattern as presented
here is - and, indeed, always has been -undisputed.

The 38-odd mile stretch of the
Coventry Canal (of more interest today to the industrial archaeologist than to
the lover of rural quietude) appears to have been negotiated without any
untoward incident, with recorded stops at the Three Tuns Inn at Fazely, and
again at the Atherstone Locks, further south. What can be asserted with
well-nigh certitude is that the Barbara Bray reached Hawkesbury
Junction, at the northern end of Oxford Canal, an hour or so before midnight on
Monday, 20th June. Today, the distance from Hawkesbury Junction down to Oxford
is some 77 miles; and in 1859 the journey was very little longer. We may
therefore assume that even with one or two protracted stops along the route,
the double crew of the 'fly' boat Barbara Bray should have managed the
journey within about thirty-six hours. And this appears to have been the case.
What now follows is a reconstruction of those crucial hours, based both upon
the evidence given at the subsequent trials (for there were two of them) and
upon later research, undertaken by the present author and others, into the
records of the Oxford Canal Company Registers and the Pickford Co. Archives.
From all the available evidence, one saddening fact stands out, quite stark and
incontrovertible: the body of Joanna Franks was found just after 5.30 a.m. on
Wednesday, 22nd June, in the Oxford Canal - in the triangular-shaped basin of
water known as 'Duke's Cut', a short passage through to the River Thames dug by
the fourth Duke of Marlborough in 1796, about two and a half miles north of the
(then) canal terminus at Hayfield Wharf in the city of Oxford.

For the moment, however, let us
make a jump forward in time. After a Coroner's inquest at The Running Horses
Inn (now demolished, but formerly standing on the corner of Upper Fisher Row by
Hythe Bridge in Oxford) the four crew members of the Barbara Bray were
straightly charged with the murder of Joanna Franks, and were duly committed to
the nearby Oxford Gaol. In the preliminary trial, held at the Oxford Summer
Assizes of August 1859, there were three indictments against these men: the
wilful murder of Joanna Franks by throwing her into the canal; rape upon the
said woman, with different counts charging different prisoners with being
principals in the commission of the offence
and  the  others
as   aiders  and
abettors; and the stealing of various articles, the property of her
husband. To a man, the crew pleaded not guilty all charges. (Wootton, the boy,
who was originally charged with them, was not named in the final indictments.)

Mr Sergeant Williams, for the
prosecution, said he should first proceed on the charge of rape. However, after
the completion of his case, the Judge (Mr Justice Traherne) decided that there
could be no certain proof of the prisoners having committed the crime, and the
Jury was therefore directed to return a verdict of 'Not Guilty' on that charge.
Mr Williams then applied to the Court for a postponement of the trial under the
indictment for murder,  until  the
next Assizes,  on  the
grounds

that
a  material witness, Joseph
Jarnell, formerly a co-prisoner in Oxford Gaol, and previously committed for
bigamy, could not be heard before the Court until he had obtained a free pardon
from the Secretary of State. Oldfield, the boat's captain, was understood to
have made some most important disclosure to Jarnell while the two men shared
the same prison-cell. Although this request was strenuously opposed by
Oldfield's Counsel. Mr Judge Traherne finally consented to the suggested
postponement.

The Judge appointed for the second
trial, held in April 1860, was Mr Augustus Benham. There was intense public
feeling locally, and the streets leading to the Assize Court in Oxford were
lined with hostile crowds. The case had also excited considerable interest
among many members of the legal profession. The three prisoners appeared at the
bar wearing the leather belts and sleeve waistcoats usually worn at that time
by the canal boatmen, and were duly charged with wilful murder, by
casting, pushing, and throwing the said Joanna Franks into the Oxford Canal by
which means she was choked, suffocated, and drowned . What exactly, we
must ask, had taken place on those last few fatal miles above the stretch of
water known as Duke's Cut on the Oxford Canal? The tragic story soon began to
unfold itself.

There are more than adequate
grounds for believing that the journey from Preston Brook down to the top of the
Oxford Canal at Hawkesbury was comparatively uneventful, although it soon
became known that Oldfield had sat with Joanna in the cabin while the boat was
negotiated through the Northwich and Harecastle Tunnels, However, from the
time the Barbara Bray reached the lonely locks of Napton Junction -
30-odd miles down from Hawkesbury, and with Oxford still some 50 miles distant
- the story appears to change, and to change (as we shall see) dramatically.

William Stevens, a canal clerk
employed by Pickford Co., confirmed^2 that the Barbara
Bray reached the Napton Locks at about 11 a.m. on Tuesday 21st June, and at
the boat remained there, in all, for about an hour and half. There was a
woman passenger on board , and she complained immediately to Stevens about
the conduct of the men with whom she was driven to associate . It
would, he agreed, have been proper for him to have logged the complaint (the Barbara
Bray was, after all, a Pickford Co. transport); but he had not done so,
confining his advice to the suggestion that the woman should report forthwith
to the Company offices in Oxford, where it should be possible for her to switch
to another boat on the last leg of her journey. Stevens had witnessed some
shouted altercations between Joanna and a member of the crew, and remembered
hearing-Joanna speak the words: Leave me alone - I'll have nothing to do
with you! Two of the men (Oldfield and Musson, he thought) had used some
utterly disgraceful language, although he agreed with Counsel for the defence
that the language of almost all boatmen at these times was equally deplorable.
What seemed quite obvious to Stevens was that the crew were beginning to get
very much the worse for drink, and he gave it as his opinion that they were
making very free with the spirit which was the cargo . Before
setting off, the woman had complained yet again about the behaviour of the men,
and Stevens had repeated his advice to her to reconsider her position once the
boat reached the terminus of the Oxford Canal — where a partial off-loading of
the cargo was officially scheduled.

It appears, in fact, that Stevens's
advice did not go unheeded. At Banbury, some twelve miles further down the
canal, Joanna made a determined effort to seek alternative transport for the
remainder of her journey. Matthew Laurenson, wharfinger at Tooley's Yard,
remembered most clearly Joanna's urgent enquiries about the times
of immediate coaches to London — and coaches from Oxford to
Banbury . But nothing was convenient, and again Joanna was advised to
wait until she got to Oxford - now only some 20 miles away. Laurenson put the
time of this meeting as approximately 6.30-7 p.m (it is hardly surprising that
times do not always coincide exactly in the court evidence — let us recall that
we are almost ten months after the actual murder), and was able to give as his
general impression of the unfortunate woman that she was somewhat flushed
and afeared .

As it happened, Joanna was now to
have a fellow passenger, at least for a brief period, since Agnes Laurenson,
the wharfinger's wife, herself travelled south on the Barbara Bray down
to King's Sutton Lock (five miles distant); she, too, was called to give
evidence at the trial. Recalling that there was a fellow passenger aboard
who looked very agitated , Mrs Laurenson stated that Joanna may have had a
drink, but that she seemed completely sober, as far as could be judged - unlike
Oldfield and Musson - and that she was clearly most concerned about her
personal safety.

The tale now gathers apace towards
its tragic conclusion; and it was the landlord of The Crown Castle at
Aynho (just below Banbury) who was able to provide some of the most telling and
damning testimony of all. When Mrs Laurenson had left the boat three miles
upstream at King's Sutton, it would appear that Joanna could trust herself with
the drunken boatmen no longer, according to the landlord, who had encountered
her at about 10 p.m. that night. She had arrived, on foot, a little earlier and
confessed that she was so frightened of the lecherous drunkards on the Barbara
Bray that she had determined to walk along the tow-path, even at that late
hour, and to take her chances with the considerably lesser evils of foot-pads
and cut-purses. She hoped (she'd said) that it would be safely possible for her
to rejoin the boat later when its crew might be a few degrees the more sober.
Whilst she waited for the boat to come up, the landlord offered her a glass of
stout, but Joanna declined. He had kept an eye on her, however, and noticed
that as she sat by the edge of the canal she appeared to be secretly sharpening
a knife on the side of the lock (Musson was later found to have a cut on his
left cheek, and this could have been, and probably was, made with the same
knife). As the boat had drawn alongside Aynho wharf, one of the crew (the
landlord was unable to say which) had cursed the eyes of the woman and
wished her in hell flames, for he loathed and detested the very sight of
her . As she finally re-boarded the boat, the landlord remembered seeing
Joanna being offered a drink; and, in fact, he thought she might have taken a
glass. But this evidence must be discounted wholly, since Mr Bartholomew
Samuels, the Oxford surgeon who conducted an immediate post-mortem, found
no evidence whatsoever of any alcohol in poor Joanna's body.

George Bloxham, the captain of a
northward-bound Pickford boat, testified that he had drawn alongside Oldfield's
boat just below Aynho, and that a few exchanges had been made, as normal,
between the two crews. Oldfield had referred to his woman passenger in terms
which were completely disgusting , vowing, in the rudest language,
what he would do with her that very night or else he would burke
her .3 Bloxham added that Oldfield was very drunk; and Musson
and Towns, too, were rather well away, the pair of 'em .

James Robson, keeper of the
Somerton Deep Lock, said that he and his wife, Anna, were awakened at about
midnight by a scream of terror coming from the direction of the lock. At first
they had assumed it was the cry of a young child; but when they looked down
from the bedroom window of the lock-house, they saw only some men by the side
of the boat, and a woman seated on top of the cabin with her legs hanging down
over the side. Three things the Robsons were able to recall from that grim
night, their evidence proving so crucial at the trial. Joanna had called out in
a terrified voice I'll not go down! Don't attempt me! Then one of
the crew had shouted Mind her legs! Mind her legs! And
after that the passenger had resumed her frightened screams: What have
you done with my shoes - oh! please tell me! Anna Robson enquired who the
woman was, and was told by one of the crew: A passenger - don't
worry! , the crewman adding that she was having words with her husband,
who was with her aboard.

Forbidding to Joanna as the tall
lock-house must have appeared that midnight, standing sentinel-like above the
black waters, it presented her with her one last chance of life - had she
sought asylum within its walls.

But she made no such request.

At this point, or shortly after, it
appears that the terrified woman took another walk along the towpath to escape
the drunken crew; but she was almost certainly back on board when the boat
negotiated Gibraltar Lock. After which - and only some very short time after -
she must have been out walking (yet again!) since Robert Bond, a crew-hand from
the narrow-boat Isis, gave evidence that he passed her on the towpath.
Bond recorded his surprise that such an attractive woman should be out walking
on her own so late, and he recalled asking her if all was well. But she had
only nodded, hurriedly, and passed on into the night. As he approached
Gibraltar lock, Bond had met Oldfield's boat, and was asked by of its crew if
he had seen a woman walking the path, the man adding, in the crudest terms,
what would do to her once he had her in his clutches once again.

No one, apart from the evil boatmen
on the Barbara Bray, was ever to see Joanna Franks alive again.

Chapter Eleven

‘Pon my word, Watson, you are
coming along wonderfully. You have really done very well indeed. It is true
that you have missed everything of importance, but you have hit upon the method

(Sir Arthur
Conan Doyle, A Case of Identity)

As with Part One, Morse found himself making a
few notes (mentally, this time) as he read through the unhappy narrative. For
some reason he felt vaguely dissatisfied with himself. Something was nagging at
his brain about Part One; but for the present he was unable to put a finger on
it. It would come back to him once he'd re-read a few pages. No hurry, was
there? None. The theoretical problem which his mind had suddenly seized upon
was no more than a bit of harmless, quite inconsequential amusement. And yet
the doubts persisted in his brain: could anyone, anyone, read this story
and not find himself questioning one or two of the points so confidently
reported? Or two or three of them? Or three or four?

What was the normal pattern of
entertainment for canal boatmen, like Oldfield, on those 'protracted stops' of
theirs? Changing horses was obviously one of the key activities on such
occasions, but one scarcely calculated to gladden every soul. Dropping in at
the local knocking-shop, then? A likely port-of-call for a few of the more
strongly sexed among them, most surely. And drink? Did they drink their wages
away, these boatmen, in the low-beamed bars that were built along their way?
How not? Why not? What else was there to do? And though drink (as the Porter once
claimed) might take away the performance, who could gainsay that frequently
provoked the desire? The desire, in this case, to rape a beautiful
woman-passenger.

So many questions.

But if sex was at the bottom of
things, why were the rape charges dropped at the first trial? Agreed, there was
no biological fingerprinting in the 1850s; no genetic code that could be read
into some desperate fellow's swift dilations. But even in that era, the charge
of rape could be made to stick without too much difficulty; and Confucius's old
pleasantry about the comparative immobility of a man with his trousers
round his ankles must of sounded just as hollow then as now. Certainly to the
ears of Joanna Franks.

The footnote referring to the Court
Registers had been surprise, and it would be of interest, certainly to the
sociologist, to read something of contemporary attitudes rape in 1859. Pretty
certainly it would be a few leagues less sympathetic than that reflected in
Morse's morning of The Times: 'Legal Precedent in Civil Action -£35.000
damages for Rape Victim'. Where were those Registers, though - if they still
existed? They might (Morse supposed) have explained the Colonel's bracketed
caveat about discrepancies. But what discrepancies? There must  been something in old Deniston's
mind, something that bothered him just that tiny bit. The Greeks had a word for
it - parakrousis - the striking of a slightly wrong note in an othrrwise
tuneful harmony.

Was that  'wrong
note'  struck  by  Mrs  Laurenson, perhaps? Whatever the situation
had been with Joanna, this - Laurenson woman (with her husband's full
assent, one must assume) had joined the Barbara Bray for the journey
down to King's Sutton with - as the reader was led to believe –a boat-load of
sexually rampant dipsomaniacs. Difficult to swallow? Unless of course the
wharfinger, Laurenson, was perfectly happy to get rid of his missus for the
night -for any night. But such a line of reasoning seemed fanciful and there
was a further possibility - a very simple, really rather a startling one: that
the crew of the Barbara Bray had not been all that belligerently
blotto at the time. But no. Every piece of evidence - surely! - pointed in
opposite direction; pointed to the fact that the boatmens robes of honour (in
Fitzgeraldian phrase) were resting, like the Confucian rapist's, only just
above their boot-laces.

Boots . . . shoes ...

What was all that about
those shoes? Why were figuring so repeatedly in the story? There would have
been more intimate items of Joanna's to wardrobe pilfer if the crewmen had been
seeking to effect easier sexual congress. One of them might, perhaps,
have been a clandestine foot-fetishist . . .

Morse, telling himself not to be so
stupid, looked again, at the last couple of pages of the text. A bit over-written
all that stuff about the sentinel-like old lock-house, look out over the dark
waters. Not bad, though: and at least: made Morse resolve to drive out and see
it for himself, once he was well again. Unless the planners and the developers
had already pulled it down.

Like they'd pulled down St Ebbe's .
. .

Such were some of Morse's thoughts after reading
second instalment. It was quite natural that he should wish to eke out the
pleasures afforded by the Colonel's text. Yet it: must be admitted that, once again,
Morse had almost totally failed to conceive the real problems raised by this
narrative. Usually, Morse was a league and a league in front of any competitive
intellects; and even now his thought processes
were clear and unorthodox. But for the time being, he far below his
best. Too near the picture. He was standing where the coloured paints on the
narrow-boat's sides had little chance of imposing any pattern on his eye. What
he really needed was to stand that bit further back from the picture to get a
more synoptic view of things. 'Synoptic' had
always been one of Morse's favourite words. Quickly he re-read Part Two.
But he seemed to see little more general terms than he had done earlier,
although there e a few extra points of detail which had evaded him on first
reading, and he stored them away, haphazardly, in his brain, there was that
capital 'J', for example, that the Colonel favoured whenever he wished to
emphasize the enormity of humnan iniquity and the infallibility of Jury and
Judicature like the capital 'G' the Christian Churches always used for God.

Then there were those journeys
through the two tunnels, when Oldfield had sat with Joanna ... or when, as
Morse translated things, he put his arm around the frightened girl in the eerie
darkness, and told her not to be afraid . . .

And those last complex, confusing
paragraphs!  She had been desperately
anxious to get off the boat and away from her tipsy persecutors - so much
seemed beyond any reasonable doubt. But, if so, why, according to that selfsame
evidence, had she always been so anxious to get back  on again?

Airy-fairy speculation, all this;
but there were at least two things that could be factually checked. 'Nothing
was convenient', it had said, and any researcher worth his salt could easily
verify that. What was available, at the time Joanna reached
Banbury? He could also soon discover how much any alternative route to London
would have cost. What, for example, was the rail-fare to London in 1859? For
that matter, what exactly had been the rail-fare between Liverpool and
London, a fare which appeared to have been beyond the Franks's joint financial
resources?

Interesting . . .

As, come to think of it, were those
double quotation marks in the text - presumably the actual words, direct
transcribed, and reported verbatim, and therefore primary source
material for the crewmen's trial. Morse looked: through the interspersed
quotations again, and one in particular caused his mind to linger:
coaches to London -and coaches from Oxford to Banbury . Now, if
those were the exact words Joanna had used . . . if they were . .
. Why had she asked for the times of coaches 'from Oxford to Banbury'? Surely,
she should have been asking about coaches ‘from Banbury to Oxford?’ Unless
. . . unless . . .

Again, it all seemed most
interesting - at least to Morse What, finally, was he to make of that drink
business? Had Joanna been drinking - or had she not? There was some curious
ambivalence in the text; and perhaps this may have been in the Colonel's mind
when he referred to 'a few conflicting statements'? But no - that was
impossible Mr Bartholomew Samuels had found no alcohol in Joanna s body, and that
was that!

Or, rather, would have been, to
most men.

The thought of drink had begun to
concentrate Morse's mind powerfully, and with great circumspection and care.
Morse poured a finger of Scotch into his bedside glass, with the same amount of
plain water. Wonderful! Pity that no one would ever believe his protestations
that Scotch was a necessary stimulant to his brain cells! For after a few
minutes his mind was flooding with ideas - exciting ideas! - and furthermore he
realized that he could begin to test one or two of his hypotheses that very
evening.

That is, if Walter Greenaway's
daughter came to visit.

Chapter Twelve

Th’ first thing to have in a libry
is a shelf. Fr’m time to time this can be decorated with lithrachure. But th'
shelf is the' main thing

(Finley Peter
Dunne, Mr Dooley Says)

As she walked down Broad Street at
7.40 a.m. the following morning (Thursday), Christine Greenaway was thinking (still
thinking) about the man who had spoken to her the previous evening in Ward
7C on the top floor of the JR2. (It was only on rare occasions that she
welcomed her father’s pride in his ever-loving daughter!) It wasn't that she’d
been obsessively preoccupied with the man ever since; but there had been a
semi-waking, overnight awareness of him. All because he'd asked her, so nicely,
to look up something for him in the Bodley. So earnest, so grateful, he’d
seemed. And that was silly, really, because she'd willingly have helped him,
anyway. That's why she'd become librarian in the first place: to be able to
locate some of landmarks in the fields of History and Literature, and provide
where she could the correct map-references for so many curious enquiries. Even
as a five-year-old, with blonde plaits reaching half-way down her bony back,
she'd envied the woman in the Summertown Library who similarly located tickets
somewhere in the long drawers behind the high counter; envied, even more, the
woman who stamped the dates in the front of the borrowed books, and inserted
each little ticket into its appropriate, oblong folder. Not that she, Christine
Greenaway, performed any longger such menial tasks herself. Almost forgotten
now were those inevitable queries of who wrote The Wind the Willows; for
she, Christine, was now the senior of the three august librarians who sat at
the northern end of the Bodleian's Lower Reading Room, where her daily duties
demanded assistance to both senior and junior members of the University:
checking slips, identifying shelf-marks, suggesting reference-sections, making
and taking phone-calls (one, yesterday, from the University of Uppsala And over
these last years she had felt a sense of importance and enjoyment in her job -
of functioning happily in workings of the University.

Of course, there had been some
major disappointed in her life, as there had been, she knew, with most folk.
Married at twenty-two, she had been a divorcee at twenty three. No other woman
on his part; no other man on hers - although there'd been (still were) so many
opportunities No! It was simply that her husband had been so immature and
irresponsible - and, above all, so boring! Once the pair of them had got down
to running a home, kept, a monthly budget, checking bank-statements - well,
she'd known he could never really be the man for her. And as things now stood,
she could no longer stomach the prospect of another mildly ignorant,
semi-aggressively macho figure of a bed-mate. Free as she was of any financial
worries, she could do exactly as she wished about issues that were
important to her; and she had become a modestly active member of several
organizations, including Greenpeace, CND, Ramblers' Association, and the RSPB.
Quite certainly, she would never join one of those match-making societies with
the hope of finding a more interesting specimen than her former spouse. If ever
she did look for another husband, he would have to be someone she could,
in some way, come to respect: to respect for his conversation or his
experience his intellect or his knowledge or his - well, his anything an all,
really, except a pride in his sexual prowess. So what (she asked herself) had
all this got to do with him'? Not much to look at, was he? Balding, and
quite certainly carrying considerable excess weight around the midriff. Though,
to be honest with herself, she was beginning to feel a grudging regard for
those men who were just slightly overweight, perhaps because she herself
seemed never able to put on a few pounds - however much she over-indulged in
full-cream cakes and deep-fried fish and chips.

Forget him! Forget him, Christine!

Such self-admonition prevailed as
she walked that morning down the Broad, past Balliol and Trinity on her left,
before crossing over the road, just before Blackwell's, and proceeding, sub
imperatoribus, up the semi-circular steps to the gravelled courtyard of the
Sheldonian. Thence, keeping to her right, she walked past the SILENCE PLEASE
notice under the archway, and came out at into her real home territory - the
Quadrangle of the Schools.

For many days, when six years
earlier she had first started working at the Bodleian, she had been conscious
of the beautiful setting there. Over the months and years, though, she had
gradually grown over-familiar with what the postcards on sale in the Proscholium
still called The Golden Heart of Oxford'; grown familiar, as she'd regularly
trodden the gravelled quad, with the Tower of the Five Orders to her left, made
her way past the bronze statue the third Earl of Pembroke, and entered the
Bodleian Library through the great single doorway in the West side, beneath the
four tiers of blind arches in their gloriously mellowed stone.

Different today though - so very
different! She felt once again the sharp irregularities of the gravel-stones
beneath the soles of her expensive, high-heeled, leather shoes. And she was
happily aware once more of the mediaeval Faculties painted over those familiar
doors around the quad. In particular, she looked again at her favourite sign:
SCHOLA NATURALIS PHILOSOPHIAE, the gilt capital-letters set off, with their
maroon border, against a background of the deepest Oxford-blue. And as she
climbed the wooden staircase to the Lower Reading Room, Christine Greenaway
reminded herself, with a shy smile around her thinly delicious lips, why
perhaps it had taken her so long to re-appreciate those neglected delights that
were all around her.

She hung her coat in the
Librarians' Cloakroom, and started her daily duties. It was always tedious,
that first hour (7.45-8.45 a.m.), clearing up the books left on the tables from
the previous day, and ensuring that the new day's readers could be justifiably
confident that the Bodley's books once more stood ready on their appointed
shelves.

She thought back to the brief
passages of conversation the previous evening, when he'd nodded over to her
(only some six feet away):

'You work at the Bodleian, I hear?'

'Uh - huh!'

'It may be - it is! - a bit of a
cheek, not knowing you . . . '

' - but you'd like me to look
something up for you.'

Morse nodded, with a winsome smile.

She'd known he was some sort of
policeman - things like that always got round the wards pretty quickly. His
eyes had held hers for a few seconds, but she had been conscious neither of
their blueness nor of their authority: only their melancholy and their
vulnerability. Yet she had sensed that those complicated eyes of his had seemed
to look, somehow, deep down inside herself, and to like what they had seen.

'Silly twerp, you are!' she told
herself. She was behaving like some adolescent schoolgirl, smitten with a
sudden passion for a teacher. But the truth remained - that for that moment she
was prepared to run a marathon in clogs and calipers for the whitish-haired and
gaudily pyjamaed occupant of the bed immediately opposite her father's.

Chapter Thirteen

Ah, fill the Cup: - what boots it
to repeat

How Time is
slipping underneath our Feet:

Unborn To-morrow,
and dead Yesterday,

Why fret about them if To-day be
sweet!

(Edward Fitzgerald, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam,

He'd been rather vague, and it had been somewhat
difficult precisely to assess what he wanted: some specific details about any
assurance or insurance companies in the: mid-nineteenth century - especially,
if it were possible about companies in the Midlands. Off and on, during the
morning, it had taken her an hour or more to hunt down the appropriate
catalogues; and another hour to locate pertinent literature. But by lunch-time
(praise be!) she had completed her research, experiencing, as she assumed,
elation similar to that of the scholars who daily dug into treasury of her
Great Library to extract their small nugget of gold. She had found a work of
reference which told exactly what Morse (the man responsible for ruffling her
wonted calm) had wanted her to find.

Just after twelve noon, with one of
her female colleagues, she walked over to the King's Arms, on the corner of
Holywell Street - in which hostelry she was accustomed to enjoy her fifty-five
minute lunch-break, with a single glass of white wine and a salmon-and-cucumber
sandwich. It was when Christine got to her feet and offered to get in a second
round of drinks, that her colleague eyed her curiously.

'You always said two glasses sent
you to sleep.'

'So?'

'So I'll go to sleep as well, all
right?'

They were good friends; and
doubtless Christine would i fcave given some castrated account of her visit to
the JR2 e previous evening, had not another colleague joined them.
Whereafter the three were soon engaged in happily animated conversation about
interior decorating and the iniquity of current mortgage repayments.

Or two of them were, to be more
accurate. And the who had been the least lively of the trio found herself doing
rather less work than usual that same afternoon. After carefully photocopying
her finds, she wished the p.m. hours away, for she was impatient to parade the
fruits of her research; and she just, simply - well, she just wanted to see the
man again. That was all.

At 6.30 p.m. at her home in the
village of Bletchington, some few miles out of Oxford, towards Otmoor, she
slowly stroked red polish on to her smoothly manicured oval nails, and at 7
p.m. started out for the JR2.

Equally, from his own vantage
point, Morse was looking forward to seeing Christine Greenaway once again. The
previous evening he'd quickly appreciated her professionalism as she'd listened
to his request, as she'd calculated how it might be implemented. In a more
personal way he'd noted, too, the candour and intelligence of her eyes - eyes
almost as blue as his own - and the quiet determination around her small mouth.
So it was that at 7.25 p.m. he was sitting in his neatly re-made bed, newly
washed, erect against his pillows, his thinning hair so recently re-combed -
when his stomach suddenly felt as though it was being put through a mangle; and
for two or three minutes the pain refused to relax its grinding, agonizing
grip. Morse closed his eyes and squeezed his fists with such force that the
sweat stood out on his forehead; and with eyes still shut he prayed to Someone,
in spite of his recent conversion from agnosticism to outright atheism.

Two years earlier, at the Oxford
Book Association, he had listened to a mournful Muggeridge propounding the
disturbing philosophy of The Fearful Symmetry, in which the debits and the
credits on the ledgers are balanced inexorably and eternally, and where the man
who tries to steal a secret pleasure will pretty soon find himself queuing up
to pay the bill - and more often than not with some hefty service-charges added
in. What a preposterous belief it was (the sage had asserted) that the hedonist
could be a happy man!

Oh dear!

Why had Morse ever considered the
pleasure of a little glass? The wages of sin was death, and the night before
was seldom worth the morning after (some people said). All mortals, Morse knew,
were ever treading that narrow way by Tophet flare to Judgement Day, but he now
prayed that the last few steps in his own case might be deferred at least a
week or two.

Then, suddenly as it had come, the
pain was gone, and Morse opened his eyes once more.

The clock behind Sister's desk (as
earlier and darkly rumoured, Nessie was going to be on the night-shift) was showing
7.30 when the visitors began to filter through with their offerings stashed
away in Sainsbury or St Michael carriers, and, some few of them, with bunches
of blooms for the newly hospitalised.

Life is, alas, so full of
disappointments; and it was to be an unexpected visitor who was to monopolize
Morse's time that evening. Bearing a wilting collection of white
chrysanthemums, a sombre-looking woman of late-middle age proceeded to
commandeer the sole chair set at his bedside.

'Mrs Green! How very nice of you to
come!'

Morse's heart sank deeply, and took
an even deeper, plunge when the dutiful charlady mounted a sustained challenge
against Morse's present competence to deal, single-handedly, with such crucial
matters as towels, toothpaste, talcum-powder, and clean pyjamas (especially the
latter). It was wonderfully good of her (who could deny to take such trouble to
come to see him (three buses, as he knew full well); but he found
himself consciously willing her to get up and go. At five minutes past
eight, after half a dozen 'I-really-must-go's, Mrs G. rose to her poorly feet
in preparation her departure, with instructions for the care of the
chrysanthemums. At last (at last!), after a mercifully brief account of her
latest visit to her 'sheeropodist' in Banbury road, Mrs G. dragged her
long-suffering feet away from,Ward 7C.

On several occasions, from her
father's bedside, Christine Greenaway had half-turned in the course of her
filial obligations; and two or three times her eyes had locked with Morse's: hers
with the half-masked smile of understanding; his with all the impotence of some
stranded whale.

Just as Mrs Green was on her way, a
white-coated consultant, accompanied by the Charge Nurse, decided
-considerately)  to  give
ten  minutes  of his
time  to Greenaway Senior, and
then in some sotto voce asides, confide his prognosis to Greenaway
Junior. And for Morse, this hiatus in the evening's ordering was getting just
about as infuriating as waiting for breakfast in some Fawlty Towers' hotel.

Then Lewis came.

Never had Morse been less glad to
see his sergeant; yet he had instructed Lewis to pick up his post from
the flat, and he now took possession of several envelopes and a couple of
cards: Morse's shoes (his other pair) were now ready for collection from Grove
Street; his car licence was due to be renewed within the next twenty days; a
ridiculously expensive book on The Transmission of Classical Manuscripts now
awaited him at OUP; a bill from the plumber for the repair of a malfunctioning
stop-cock was still unpaid; the Wagner Society asked if he wanted to enter his
name in a raffle for Bayreuth Ring tickets; and Peter Imbert invited him
to talk in the new year at a weekend symposium, in Hendon, on inner-city crime.
It was rather like a cross-section of life, his usual correspondence: half of
it was fine, and half of it he wanted to forget.

At twenty-three minutes past eight,
by the ward clock, Lewis asked if there was anything else he could do.

'Yes, Lewis. Please go, will
you? I want to have five minutes with - ' Morse nodded vaguely over to
Greenaway's bed.

'Well, if that's what you want,
sir.' He rose slowly to his feet.

'It is what I bloody want, Lewis!
I've just told you, haven't I?'

Lewis took a large bunch of white
seedless grapes (£2.50 a pound) from his carrier-bag. 'I thought - we thought,
the missus and me - we thought you'd enjoy them, sir.'

He was gone; and Morse knew, within
a second of his going, that he would not be forgiving himself easily for such
monumental ingratitude. But the damage was done: nescit vox missa reverti.

The bell rang two minutes later,
and Christine came across to Morse's bed as she left, and handed him six large
photocopied sheets.

'I hope this is what you wanted.'

'I'm ever so grateful. It's - it's
a pity we didn't have a chance to . . . '

'I understand. I do understand,'
she said. 'And you will let me know if I can do anything else?'

'Look . . . perhaps if we—'

'Come along now, please!' The
Charge Nurse's voice sounded to Morse almost as imperious as Nessie's as she
walked quickly around the beds.

I’m so grateful,' said Morse. 'I
really am! As I say it's . . . '

'Yes,' said Christine softly.

'Will you be in tomorrow?' asked
Morse quickly.

‘No - not tomorrow. We've got some
librarians coming from California—'

'Come along now, please?

Mrs Green, Sergeant Lewis, Christine Greenaway -
now all of them gone; and already the medicine-trolley had been wheeled into
the ward, and the nurses were starting out on yet another circuit of
measurements and medicaments.

And Morse felt sick at heart.

It was at 9.20 p.m. that he finally
settled back against his piled pillows to glance quickly through the
photocopied material Christine had found for him. And soon he was deeply and
happily engrossed - his temporary despondency departing on the instant.

Chapter Fourteen

Being in the land of the living was
itself the survivor's privilege, for so many of one's peers - one's brothers
and sisters - had already fallen by the wayside, having died at birth, at
infancy or childhood

(Roy
Dorothy Porter, In Sickness and
in Health)

The documents which Morse now handled were just
the thing (he had little doubt) for satisfying the original-source-material
philosophy which was just then swamping the GCSE and A-level syllabuses. And
for Morse, whose School Certificate in History (Credit) had demanded little
more than semi-familiarity with the earliest models of seed-drills and similar
agricultural adjuncts of the late eighteenth century, the reading of them was
fascinating. Particularly poignant, as it appeared to Morse, was the Foreword
to the Insurance Guide and Hand-Book 1860 (bless the girl! - she'd even
got the exact year) where the anonymous author stated his own determination to
soldier along in 'this vale of tears’ for as long as decently
possible:

'Thus it is that all our efforts
are forever required, not to surpass what we may call the biblical
par for life - that famous three-score years and ten -
but to come reasonably near to attaining it at all. For it is only by
continuous vigilance and energy in the work for self preservation that the
appointed average can be brought into view; and with good fortune and good
sense (and God's grace) be achieved.

It was interesting to find the Almighty in
parenthesis, even in 1860, and Morse felt he would like to have known the
author.  Yet when that same author went
on to assert that 'mortality had decreased by two-fifths between 1720 and
1820', Morse began to wonder what earth such a bafflingly unscientific -
indeed, quite sensational statement might mean.
What did seem immediately clear, as he read through the small print,
that people during those years were beginning to live longer, and that by the
middle of the nineteenth century insurance companies were beginning to match
this sociological phenomenon with increasingly attractive rates and premiums,
in spite of the sombre statistics appended : each year, right up to the 1850s.
Like 1853, e.g. - the figures for which Morse now considered. Of the half
million or departed souls reported in the pages of the Guide, 55,000 had died
of consumption, 25,000 of pneumonia, 500 of convulsions, 23,000 of bronchitis,
20,000 of premature death and debility, 19,000 of typhus, 16,000 scarlatina,
15,000 of diarrhoea, 14,000 of heart disease, 12,000 of whooping cough, 11,000
of dropsy, 9,000 of apoplexy, 8,500 of paralysis, 6,000 of asthma, 5,750 of
cancer, 4,000 of teeth troubles, 3,750 of measles, 3,500 of croup, 3,250 of
small-pox, 3,000 of (mothers) giving birth; and so on to the smaller numbers
succumbing to diseases of brain, kidney, liver, and other perishable parts of
the anatomy - and to old age! As he added up such numbers quickly in his head,
Morse realized that about two-thirds of the 500,000 were unaccounted for; and
he had to assume that even with a few more categories added (‘murder' for one!)
there must have been vast numbers of people in those days whose deaths were for
some reason or other not specifically 'accounted for' at all, albeit being
registered in the national statistics. Perhaps a lot of them were just not important
enough to get their own particular malady spelled out on any death certificate;
perhaps many of the physicians, midwives, nurses, poor-law-attendants, or
whatever, just didn't know, or didn't want to know, or didn't care.

As he lay back in the pillows and
thought of the circumstances besetting the luckless Joanna Franks, who had
died neither of consumption nor pneumonia . . . nor ... he suddenly fell into a
sleep so deep that he missed his 10 p.m. Horlicks and his treasured digestive
biscuit; and then he woke up again, somewhat less than refreshed, at 11.45
p.m., with a dry throat and a clear head. The lights hi the ward were turned
down to half power, and the other patients around him seemed contentedly asleep
- apart from the man who'd been admitted late that afternoon and around whom
the medical staff had been fussing with a rather ominous concern; the man who
now lay staring at the ceiling, doubtless contemplating the imminent collapse
of his earthly fortunes.

Nessie was nowhere to be seen: the
desk was empty.

He'd just had a nasty little dream.
He'd been playing cricket in his early days at Grammar School; and when it came
to his turn to bat, he couldn't find his boots . . . and then when he did find
them the laces kept snapping; and he was verging on a tearful despair - when
he'd awoken. It might have been Mrs Green talking about her chiropody? Or was
it Lewis, perhaps, who'd brought the card from the cobblers? Or neither of
them? Was it not more likely to have been a young woman in 1859 who'd shouted,
with her particular brand of terrified despair, 'What have you done with my
shoes?'

He looked around again: the desk
was still empty.

Surely he wasn't likely to imperil
the well-being of the ward if he turned on his angle-lamp? Especially if
focused directly into a small pool of light on his own pillows? No! Reading a
book wasn't going to hurt anyone and the sick man had had his light on
all the time.

Pushing in the button switch, he
turned on his own light, with no reaction from anyone; and still no sign of
Nessie.

Part Three of Murder on the
Oxford Canal was close to hand; but Morse was reluctant to finish that too
quickly. He remembered when he'd first read Bleak House (still to his
mind the greatest novel in the English language) he'd deliberately decelerated
his reading as the final pages grew thinner beneath his fingers. Never had he
wanted to hang on to a story so much! Not that the Colonel's work was anything
to wax all that lyrical about; and yet Morse did want to eke it out - or
so he told himself. Which left the not displeasing possibility of a few further
chapters of The Blue Ticket - with Mr Greenaway now fast asleep. The
pattern of crime in nineteenth-century Shropshire had already joined the local
legion of lost causes.

Morse was soon well into the
exploits of a blonde who would have had arrows on her black stockings pointing
northward and reading 'This way for the knickers' - that is, if she'd worn any
stockings; or worn any knickers, for that matter. And it was amid much parading
of bodies, pawing of bosoms, and patting of buttocks, that Morse now spent in
enjoyable little interval of erotic pleasure; indeed, was he engrossed that he
did not mark her approach.

'What do you think you're doing?'

'I was just—'

'Lights go out at ten o'clock.
You're disturbing everyone on the ward.'

'They're all asleep.'

'Not for much longer, with you
around!'

'I'm sorry—'

'What's this you're reading?'

Before he could do anything about
it, Nessie had removed the book from his hands, and he had no option but to
watch her helplessly. She made no comment, passed no moral judgement, and for a
brief second Morse wondered if he had not seen a glint of some semi-amusement
in those-sharp eyes as they had skimmed a couple of paragraphs.

'Time you were asleep!' she said,
in a not unkind; fashion, handing him back the book. Her voice was a crisp as
her uniform, and Morse replaced the ill-starred volume in his locker. 'And be
careful of your fruit juice She moved the half-filled glass one millimetre to
the left turned off the light, and was gone. And Morse gently eased himself
down into the warmth and comfort of his bed, like Tennyson's lily sliding
slowly into the bosom of the lake ...

That night he dreamed a dream in
Technicolor (he swore it!), although he knew such a claim would be
contradicted: by the oneirologists. He saw the ochre-skinned, scantily; clad
siren in her black, arrowed stockings, and he could even recall her
lavender-hued underclothing. Almost it was the perfect dream! Almost. For there
was a curiously insistent need in Morse's brain which paradoxically demanded a
factual name and place and time before, in fantasy, that:
sexually unabashed freebooter could be his. And in Morse's muddled computer of
a mind, that siren took the name of one Joanna Franks, provocatively walking
along towards Duke's Cut, in the month of June in 1859.

When he awoke (was woken, rather) the following
morning, he felt wonderfully refreshed, and he resolved that he would take no
risks of any third humiliation over The Blue Ticket. With breakfast,
temperature, wash, shave, blood-pressure, newspaper, tablets, Bovril, all these
now behind him - and with not a visitor in sight - he settled down to discover
exactly what had happened to that young woman who had taken control of his
nocturnal fantasies.

Chapter Fifteen

PART THREE

A Protracted Trial

Joanna Franks's body was found at Duke's Cut at
about 5.30 a.m. on Wednesday, 22nd June 1859. Philip Tomes, a boatman, said he
was passing, down-canal towards Oxford when he saw something in the water -
something which was soon identified as, in part, a woman's gown; what else
though, he could not for the moment make out in the darkened waters. The object
was on the side of the canal opposite the tow-path, and in due course he
discovered to be the body of a female, without either bonnet or shoes. She was
floating alongside the bank, head north, feet south, and there was no
observable movement about her. She was lying on her face, which seemed quite
black. Tomes stopped his boat, and with a boat-hook gently pulled the body to
the tow-path side, where he lifted it out of the water, in which latter task he
was assisted by John Ward, a Kidlington fisherman, who happened to be

passing alongside the canal at that early hour.
In fact, it as Ward who had the presence of mind to arrange for the body, which
was still warm, to be taken down to the Plough Inn at Wolvercote.

It appears from various strands of
inter-weaving evidence, albeit some of it from the guilty parties themselves,
that Oldfield and Musson (and, by one account, Towns also) left the Barbara
Bray at roughly the point where Joanna met her death, and that they were
seen standing together on the tow-path side of the canal just below Duke's Cut.
A certain man passed by the area at the crucial time, 4 a.m. or just after, and
both Oldfield and Musson, with great presence of mind, asked him if he had seen
a woman walking beside the canal. The man had replied, as they clearly
recalled, with a very definite 'No!', and had made to get further on his way
with all speed. Yet the two (or perhaps three) men had asked him the same
question again and again, in rather an agitated manner.

(It is clear that this man's
testimony could have been vital in substantiating the boatmen's claims. But he
was never traced, in spite of wide-scale enquiries in the area. A man roughly
answering his description, one Donald Favant, had signed the register at the
Nag's Head in Oxford for either the 20th or the 21st June - there was some
doubt - but this man never came forward. The strong implication must therefore
remain, as it did at the time, that the whole story was the clever concoction
of desperate men.)

Jonas Bamsey, wharfinger in the
employ of the Oxford Canal Authority at Oxford's Hayfield Wharf, gave evidence
at the trial that the Barbara Bray had duly effected its partial
unloading, but that Oldfield had not reported the loss of any passenger - which
quite certainly should have been the duty of the boat's captain under the
Authority's Regulations. Instead, according to the scant and inconsistent
evidence at this point, the boatmen do appear to have confided in some of their
acquaintances in Upper Fisher Row, claiming that their passenger had been out
of her mind; that she had committed suicide; and that on at least one occasion
they had been called upon to save her from an attempted drowning on the journey
down from Preston Brook.

Later that dreadful day, when the
crew of the Barbara Bray came to negotiate the lock on the Thames at
Iffley, two miles downstream from Folly Bridge, Oldfield spoke to the keeper,
Albert Lee, and reported to him and his wife (coincidentally also named Joanna)
that a passenger on his boat had been drowned; but that she was most sadly
deranged, and had been a sore trial to him and his fellow crew-members ever
since she had first embarked at Preston Brook. Oldfield was still
obviously very drunk. Pressed to explain what he was seeking to say, Oldfield
asserted only that It was a very bad job that had happened . The
passenger was off her head and had been last seen by the crew off
Gibraltar Lock. Yet Oldfield was vehemently unwilling to listen to Lee's
suggestion returning to Oxford to sort out the whole tragedy; and this made Lee
more than somewhat suspicious. On the departure of the Barbara Bray, therefore,
he himself  immediately set off for
Oxford, where he contacted the Pickford Office; and where the Pickford Office,
in turn, contacted the Police Authority.

When the infamous boat finally
arrived at Reading (for some reason, over two hours behind schedule) Constable
Harrison was on hand, with appropriate support, to take the entire crew into
custody, and to testify that all of them, including the youth, were still
observably drunk and excessively abusive as he put them in darbies and escorted
them to temporary cell-accommodation in the gaol at Reading. One of them, as
Harrison vividly recalled, was vile enough to repeat some of his earlier
invective against Joanna Franks, and was heard to mutter 'Damn and blast that
wicked woman!'

Hannah MacNeill, a serving woman at
the Plough Inn, Wolvercote, testified that when the sodden body had been
brought from the canal, she had been employed, under direction, to take off
Joanna's clothes. The left sleeve was torn out of its gathers and the cuff on
the same hand was also torn. Tomes and Ward, for their part, were quite firm in
their evidence that they themselves had made no rips or tears in Joanna's
clothing as they lifted her carefully from the water at Duke's Cut.

Katharine Maddison testified that
she was a co-helper with Hannah MacNeill in taking off Joanna's drenched
garments. Particularly had she noticed the state of Joanna's calico knickers
which had been ripped right across the front. This garment was produced in
Court: and many were later to agree that the production of such an intimate
item served further to heighten the universal feeling of revulsion against
those callous men who were now arraigned with her murder.

Mr Samuels, the Oxford surgeon who
examined the body at the inquest, reported signs of bruising below the elbow of
the left arm, and further indications of subcutaneous bruising below left and
right cheekbones; the same man described the dead woman's face as presenting a
state of 'discoloration and disfigurement'. Mr Samuels agreed that it was
perhaps possible for the facial injuries, such as they were, to have been
caused by unspecified and accidental incidents in the water, or in the process
of taking-up from the water. Yet such a possibility was now seeming, both to Judge
and Jury, more and more remote.

The youth Wootton then gave his
version of the tragic events, and on one point he expressed himself forcefully:
that Towns had got himself good and half-seas-over the night before
Joanna was found, and that he was sound asleep at the time the murder must have
occurred, for he (Wootton) had heard him snoring loudly : We shall
never be in a position to know whether Towns had forced Wootton to give this
evidence to the Court — under some threat or other, perhaps. From subsequent
developments, however, it seems clear that we may give a substantial degree of
credence to Wootton's testimony.

Joseph Jarnell, the co-prisoner
pending whose evidence the re-trial had been agreed, related to the Court the
damning confessions Oldfield had betrayed whilst the two men shared a
prison-cell. In essence such 'confessions' amounted to a rather crude attempt
on Oldfield's part to settle the majority of blame for almost everything which
had happened on Musson and Towns. But in spite of the man's earnest manner and
consistency of his account, Jarnell's story made little no impression. Yet his
testimony carried interest, if not conviction. Amongst the strongest of the
fabrications which Oldfield had sought to put about was that Joanna Franks had
in excess of fifty golden sovereigns in one of her two boxes; that Towns had
discovered this fact, and that Joanna had found him rummaging through her  trunks. She had threatened (so the allegation
ran) to report him to the next Pickford Office if he did not mend his ways and
make immediate apology and restoration. (Such nonsense was wholly discredited
at the time, and may be safely discounted now.)

Together with many other items, the
knife which Joanna had been observed sharpening was later found in one of her trunks, the cord of which
had been cut, and which still remained untied. The assumption was that at some
point the men had opened Joanna's belongings after the murder, and had replaced
the knife in one of the trunks. It must certainly be considered a strong
possibility that the men intended to steal some of her possessions, for as we
have seen a charge of theft was included, in the most strongly worded terms, in
the original indictment of the crew at the first trial in August 1859. It
seems, however, that Prosecuting Counsel at the second trial were sufficiently
confident to forgo such a charge and to concentrate their accusations on
murder, since the lesser charge (difficult, in any case, as it would have been
to substantiate) was subsequently excluded. We have seen a similar procedure
operating, in first trial, concerning the charges of rape; and perhaps it is of
some strange and macabre interest to note that in the original trial the
charges of both rape and theft (as well as murder) were made against each
individual member of the crew - including the youth Wootton.

Out of all the evidence given at
that memorable second trial at Oxford in April 1860, fairly certainly that of
Charles Franks himself evoked the greatest feeling and the widest sympathy. The
poor man was weeping aloud as he entered the witness-box, and it seemed as if
it were almost beyond his physical powers to raise his eyes in order to bear
the sight of the prisoners and to look upon their faces. He had obviously been
deeply in love with Joanna, and, turning his back on the vile men arraigned
before the Court he explained how in consequence of some information he had
come into Oxfordshire and seen his wife's dead body at the time of the inquest.
For although it was dreadfully disfigured (here the poor fellow could not at
all restrain his feelings) yet he knew it by a small mark behind his wife's
left ear, a mark of which only a parent or an intimate lover could have known.
Corroboration of identification (if, in fact, corroboration was needed) was
afforded by the shoes, later found in the fore-cabin of the Barbara Bray, which
matched in the minutest degrees the contours of the dead woman's feet.

At the conclusion of the hearing,
and after a lengthy summing-up by Mr Augustus Benham, the Jury, under their
duly appointed chairman, begged permission of his Lordship to retire to
consider their verdict.

Chapter Sixteen

At a hotel facing the sea at
Brighton, he ate a good breakfast of bacon and eggs, toast and marmalade; then
took a stroll round the town before returning to the station and boarding a
train for Worthing

(Court Record of evidence given
in the trial of Neville George Clevely Heath, on the morning after

the murder of Margery Gardner)

Perhaps it was the dream.

Whatever it was, Morse knew that something had
at prodded him into a slightly more intelligent appraisal the Colonel's story,
because he was now beginning to take account of two or three major
considerations which had been staring at him all the while.

The first of these was the
character of Joanna Franks herself. How had it come about - whatever the
fortuitous, voluntary, or deliberate circumstances in which Joanna met her
death - that the crew of the Barbara Bray had insisted time and time
again that the wretched woman , had been nothing but one long, sorry
trial to them all ever since she'd first jumped on board at Preston Brook? How was
it that they were still damning and blasting the poor woman's soul to
eternity way, way after they had pushed her into the Canal and, for all
Morse or anyone else knew, held her head under the black waters until she
writhed in agony against their murderous hands no longer? Had a satisfactory
explanation been forthcoming for such events? All right, there was still Part
Four of the story to come. But so far, the answer was 'no'.

There was, though (as it now
occurred to Morse), one possible
dimension to the case that the good Colonel had never even hinted at - either
through an excessive sense of propriety, or from a lack of imagination - namely
that Joanna Franks had been a seductive tease: a woman who over those
long hours of that long journey had begun drive the crew towards varied degrees
of insanity with her provocative overtures, and to foster the inevitable
jealousies arising therefrom.

Come off it, Morse!

Yes, come off it! There was no
evidence to support such a view. None! Yet the thought stayed with him,
reluctant to leave. An attractive woman . . . boredom . . . drink. a tunnel . .
. continued boredom . . . more drink another tunnel . . . darkness . . . desire
. . . opportunity . . . still more drink . . . and more Priapic promptings in
the loins . . . Yes, all that, perhaps, the Colonel himself: may have
understood. But what if she, Joanna herself, had been the active catalyst in the
matter? What if she had craved for the men just as much as they had craved for
her? What (put it simply, Morse!) what if she'd wanted sex just as badly as they did? What if she
were the precursor of Sue Bridehead in Jude the Obscure, driving poor
old Phillotson potty, as well as poor old Jude?

'Men's questions!' he heard a voice
say. 'Just the sort of thoughts that would occur to an ageing MCP like you!'

There was a second general
consideration which, from the point of view of criminal justice, struck Morse
as considerably more cogent and a good deal less contentious. In the court-room
itself, the odds did seem, surely, to have been stacked pretty heavily against
the crew of the Barbara Bray - with 'presumption of innocence' playing
decidedly second fiddle to 'assumption of guilt'. Even the fair-minded Colonel
had let his prejudgements run away with him a little: already he'd decided that
any ostensible concern on the part of the boatmen for the missing passenger
(believed drowned?) was only shown great presence of mind' in order to
establish a semi-convincing alibi for themselves; already he'd decided that
these same boatmen, 'still obviously very drunk' (and by implication still
knocking it back at top-tipplers' rates) had manoeuvred their 'infamous' craft
down the Thames to Reading without having the common decency to mention to
anyone the little matter of the murder they'd committed on the way. Did (Morse
asked himself) wicked men tend to get more drunk - or more sober - after
committing such callous crimes? Interesting thought ...

Yes, and there was a third general
point - one that  seemed to Morse most
curious: the charges both of theft and of Rape had, for some reason, been
dropped against the boatmen. Was this because the Prosecution had been wholly confident,
and decided to go for the graver charge of Murder - with the expectation (fully
justified) that they had sufficient evidence to convict 'Rory' Oldfield and Co.
on the capital indictment? Or was it, perhaps, because they had too little confidence
in their ability to secure conviction on the lesser charges? Obviously,
as Morse seemed vaguely to remember from his schooldays, neither rape nor theft
would have been considered too venial an offence in the middle of the last
century, but ... Or was it just possible that these charges were dropped
because there was no convincing evidence to support them? And if so, was the
indictment for murder entered upon by the Prosecution for one simple reason -
that it presented the only hope of bringing those miserable men to
justice? Certainly, as far as multiple rape was concerned, the evidence must
have been decidedly dodgy - as the Judge in the first trial had pronounced. But
what about theft? The prerequisite of theft was that the aggrieved party
possessed something worth the stealing. So what was it that poor Joanna had
about her person, or had in either of her two travelling-boxes, that was worth
the crime? The evidence, after all, pointed to the fact that she hadn't got a
couple of pennies to rub together. Her fare for the canal-trip had been sent up
from her husband in London; and even facing the terrible risks of travelling
with a drunken, lecherous crew - certainly after Banbury had been reached - she
had not taken, or not been able to take, any alternative means of
transport to get to the husband who was awaiting her in the Edgware Road. So?
So what had she got, if anything, that was worth stealing?

There were those shoes again, too!
Did Joanna deliberately leave off her shoes? Did she enjoy the feel of the mud
between her toes along the tow-path - like some bare-foot hippie on a watery
walk round Stonehenge in the dawn?

What a strange case it had been!
The more he thought about it, the greater the number of questions that kept
occurring to Morse's mind. He had a good deal of experience in cases where the
forensic and pathological evidence had been vital to the outcome of a court
case. But he wasn't particularly impressed with the conclusions that
(presumably) must have been drawn from Mr Samuels' comparatively scientific
findings. For Morse (wholly, it must be admitted, without medical or scientific
qualifications) the state of the dress, and the bruising described, would have
been much more consistent with Joanna being held firmly from behind, with the
assailant's (?) left hand gripping her left wrist; and his (her?) right hand
being held forcibly across her mouth, where thumb and forefinger would almost
invariably produce the sort of bruising mentioned in the recorded description.

What of this Jarnell fellow? The
Prosecution must have been considerably impressed, at the first hearing, with
his  potential testimony.  Why,
otherwise,  would anone be willing
to postpone a trial for six months - on the word of a gaolbird?  Even the Colonel had given the fellow a good
write-up! So why was it that when he duly turned up to tell his tale, at the
second trial, no one wished to listen to him? Had there been something, some
knowledge, somewhere, that had caused the court to discount, or at least
discredit, the disclosures his cell-mate, Oldfield, had allegedly made to him?
Because whatever accusations could be levelled against Oldfield, the charge of
inconsistency was not amongst them. On three occasions,  after Joanna's death,  he had insisted that  she
was  out  of her
mind ,  sadly  deranged , off her head . . . And
there had, it appeared, been no conflict of evidence between the crewmen that
on one occasion at least (did that mean two?) they had been called upon to save
Joanna from drowning herself. The one vital point Jarnell disclosed was that
Oldfield had not only protested his own innocence of the murder, but had also
sought to shift all responsibility on to his fellow crewmen. Not, to be sure, a
very praiseworthy piece of behaviour! Yet, if Oldfield himself were
innocent, where else  could  he have
laid the blame?  At  the
time,  in any case, no one had
been willing to listen seriously either to what Jarnell or to what Oldfield
might have say. But if they were right? Or if one of them were right?

A curious little thought struck
Morse at this point, and dredged itself in a corner of his brain - for future
reference. And a rather bigger thought struck him simultaneously: that he
needed to remember he was only playing a game with himself; only trying to get
through a few days' illness with a happy little problem to amuse himself with –
like a tricky cryptic crossword from The Listener. It was just a little
worrying, that was all ... the way the dice had been loaded all the time
against those drunkards who had murdered Joanna Franks.

And the niggling doubt persisted.

If they had . . .

Chapter Seventeen

The detective novelist, as a class,
hankers after complication and ingenuity, and is disposed to reject the obvious
and acquit the accused if possible. He is uneasy until he has gone further and
found some new and satisfying explanation of the problem

(Dorothy L.
Sayers, The Murder of Julia
Wallace)

The thought that the crewmen may not have been
guilty 'Joanna Franks's murder proved to be one of those heady notions that
evaporate in the sunrise of reason. For if the crewmen had not been
responsible, who on earth had? Nevertheless, it seemed to Morse pretty much
odds-on that if the case had been heard a century later, there would been no
certain conviction. Doubtless, at the time, the jury's verdict had looked safe
and satisfactory, especially to hostile crowds lining the streets and baying
for blood, but should the verdict have been reached? True, there was
enough circumstantial suspicion to sentence a saint; yet no really direct evidence,
was there? No witnesses to murder; no indication of how the murder had
been committed; no adequately convincing motive for why. Just a time,
and a place, and Joanna lying face-downwards in Duke's Cut all that while ago.

Unless, of course, there were some
passages of evidence not reported - either from the first or the second trial?
The Colonel had clearly been rather more interested in the lax morals of the
boatmen than in any substantiation of the evidence, and he could just have
omitted the testimony of any corroborative witnesses who might have been
called. Perhaps it would be of some interest - in this harmless! game he was
playing - to have a quick look through those Court Registers, if they still
existed; or through the relevant copies of Jackson's Oxford Journal, which
certainly did exist: as Morse knew, filed on microfiche in the Oxford
Central Library. (Doubtless in the Bodley, too!) And, in any case he hadn't
finished the Colonel's book yet. Why, there might be much still to be revealed
in that last exciting episode! Which he now began to read.

Almost immediately he was conscious of Fiona
standing beside him - the amply bosomed Fiona, smelling vaguely of the summer
and strongly of disinfectant. Then she sat down on the bed, and he felt the
pneumatic pressure of her against him as she leaned across and looked over his
shoulder.

'Interesting?'

Morse nodded. 'It's the book the
old girl brought round - you know, the Colonel's wife.'

Fiona stayed where she was, and
Morse found himself, reading the same short sentence for the third, fourth,
fifth time - without the slightest degree of comprehension - as her softness
gently pressed against him. Was she conscious, herself, of taking the
initiative in such memorable intimacy, however mild?

Then she ruined everything.

'I don't go in much for reading
these  days. Last book I read was Jane
Eyre - for GCSE, that was.'

'Did you enjoy it?' (Poor, dear
Charlotte had long had a special place in Morse's heart.)

'Pretty boring stuff. We just had
to do it, you know, for the exam.'

Oh dear!

Crossing her black-stockinged legs,
she took off one of her flat-heeled black shoes, and shook out some invisible
irritant on to the ward floor.

'When do people take their shoes
off?' asked Morse. ‘Normally, I mean?'

'Funny question, isn't it?'

'When they've a stone in them -
like you?'

Fiona nodded. 'And when they go to
bed.'

'And?'

'Well - when they go paddling at
Blackpool.'

'Yes?'

'When they sit watching the telly
with their feet on the sofa - if they've got a mum as fussy as mine.'

'Anything else?'

'What do you want to know all this
for?'

‘If they've got corns or
something,' persisted Morse, and go to the chiropodist.' ('Kyropodist', in
Morse's book.)

'Yes. Or if their feet get sore or
tired. Or if they have to take their tights off for some reason—'

'Such as?'

Morse saw the flash of sensuous
amusement in her eyes, as she suddenly stood up, pulled his sheets straight,
and shook out his pillows. 'Well, if you don't know at your age-'

Oh dear!

Age.

Morse felt as young as he'd ever
done; but suddenly, and so clearly, he could see himself as he was seen
by this young girl.

Old!

But his mood was soon to be
brightened by the totally unexpected re-appearance of Sergeant Lewis, who
explained that the purpose of his unofficial visit (it was 2.15 p.m.) was to
interview a woman, still in intensive care, in connection with yet another
horrendous crash on the A34.

'Feeling OK this morning, sir?'

'I shall feel a jolly sight better
once I've had the chance of apologizing to you - for being so bloody
ungrateful!'

'Oh yes? When was that, sir? I
thought you were always ungrateful to me.'

'I'm just sorry, that's all,' said
Morse simply and quietly.

Lewis, whose anger had been
simmering and spitting like soup inadvertently left on the stove, had come into
the ward with considerable reluctance. Yet when some ten minutes later he
walked out, he felt the same degree of delight he invariably experienced when
he knew that Morse needed him - even if it were only, as in this case,
to do a bit of mundane research (Morse had briefly explained the case) and to
try to discover if the Court Registers of the Oxford Assizes, 1859-60, were
still available; and if so to see if any records of the trials were still
extant.

After Lewis had gone, Morse felt
very much more in tune with the universe. Lewis had forgiven him, readily; and
he felt a contentment which he, just as much as Lewis, could ill define and
only partly comprehend. And with Lewis looking into the Court Registers, there
was another researcher in the field: a qualified librarian, who could very
quickly sort out Jackson's Oxford Journals. Not that she was coming in
that evening, alas!

Patience, Morse!

At 3 p.m. he turned once again to
the beginning of the fourth and final episode in the late Colonel Deniston's
book.

Chapter Eighteen

PART FOUR

A Pronounced Sentence

A bailiff was
sworn in to attend the Jury, who immediately retired to the Clerk of
Indictments' Room. After an absence of three-quarters of an hour, they returned
to the Court; and, their names having been read over, every person appeared to
wait with breathless anxiety for their verdict. In reply to the usual questions
from Mr Benham, the foreman replied that the Jury was all agreed and that they
were unanimous in finding each of the three prisoners at the bar GUILTY of the
murder of Joanna Franks. It is said that no visible alteration marked the
countenances of the crew on the verdict being given, except that Oldfield for
the moment became somewhat paler.

The black coif, emblematical of
death, was placed on the Judge's head; and after asking the prisoners if they
had anything to say, he passed his sentence in the following awesome terms:

'Jack Oldfield, Alfred Musson,
Walter Towns - after a long and patient hearing of the circumstances in this
case, and after due deliberation on the part of the Jury, you have each and all
of you been found guilty of the most foul crime of murder - the murder of an
unoffending and helpless woman who was under your protection and who, there is
now no doubt as to believe, was the object of your lust; and thereafter, to
prevent detection of your crime, was the object of your cruelty. Look not for
pardon in this world! Apply to the God of Mercy for that pardon which He alone
can extend to sinners who are penitent for their misdeeds, and henceforth
prepare yourselves for the ignominious death which now awaits you. This case is
one of the most painful, the most disgusting, and the most shocking, that has
ever come to my knowledge, and it must remain only for me to pass upon you the
terrible and just sentence of the Law, that you be taken whence you came, and
from thence to the place of execution, and that you, and each of you, be hanged
by the neck until you be dead, and that your bodies be afterward buried within
the precincts of the prison and be not accorded the privilege of consecrated
ground. And may God have mercy on your souls!'

After the trial was over, and
sentence pronounced, the three men still persisted in maintaining their
innocence Indeed, Oldfield's wife, who visited the prison, was so agitated by
her husband's protestations that she herself was thrown into a sore fit .

It had seemed reasonably clear,
from various statements including those of Oldfield and Musson that Towns had
been somewhat less involved in the happenings on the canal journey than the
other two. It was no surprise, therefore, that some members of the legal
profession now thought there was a case for the last-minute reconsideration of
the sentence imposed upon Towns; so a letter setting forth their agreed view
was taken to London by a barrister, and a special interview with the Secretary
of State was obtained. As a result of such representations, Towns was reprieved
at (almost literally) the eleventh hour. The good, news was broken to him as
the three men were receiving for the last time the Holy Sacrament from the
Prison Chaplain. Towns immediately burst into a flood of tears, and taking each
of his former associates by the hand kissed them affectionately, repeating
God bless you, dear friend! God bless you, dear friend!
He was later transported to Australia for life, where he was still alive in
1884 when he was seen and interviewed by one Samuel Carter (like Oldfield and
Towns, a citizen of Coventry), who took a lively interest in local history and
who wrote of his experiences on his return to England the following year.4

Oldfield and Musson were duly
hanged in public at Oxford. According to the newspaper reports, as many as ten
thousand people were estimated to have witnessed the macabre spectacle. It is
reported that from an early hour men sat high on walls, climbed trees, and even
perched on the roofs of overlooking houses in order to obtain a good view of
those terrible events. A notice-board placed by the Governor in front of the
gaol door stated that, the execution would not proceed until after eleven
o'clock; but although this occasioned much disappointment among the spectators,
it did not deter their continued attendance, and not a spare square-foot of
space was to be found when, at the appointed hour, the execution finally
occurred.

First to appear was the Prison Chaplain,
solemnly reading the funeral service of the Church of England; next came the
two culprits; and following them the Executioner, and the Governor, as well as
some other senior officers from the prison. After the operation of pinioning
had been completed, the two men walked with firm step to the platform, and
ascended the stairs to the top without requiring assistance. When the ropes had
seen adjusted round their necks, the Executioner shook hands with each man; and
then, as the Chaplain intoned his melancholy service, the fatal bolt was drawn,
and in a minute or two, after much convulsion, the wretched malefactors were no
more. The dislocation of the cervical vertebrae and the rupture of the jugular
vein had been, if not an instantaneous, at least an effective procedure. The
gallows appeared to have sated the sadistic fascination of the mob once more,
for there are no reports of any civic disorders as the great throng dispersed
homewards on that sunlit day. It was later disclosed, though it had not been observable
at the time, that Oldfield's last action in life had been to hand over to the
Chaplain a post-card, to be delivered to his young wife, in which to the very
end he proclaimed his innocence of the crime for which he had now paid the
ultimate penalty.

Locally produced broadsheets,
giving every sensational detail of trial and execution, were very quickly on
sale in the streets of Oxford — and were selling fast. They were even able to
give a full account, with precise biblical reference, of the last sermon
preached to the men at 6 p.m. on the Sunday before their hangings. The text,
clearly chosen with ghoulish insensitivity, could hardly have brought the
condemned prisoners much spiritual or physical solace: 'Yet they hearkened not
unto me, nor inclined their ear, but hardened their neck: they did worse than
their fathers' (Jeremiah, ch. 7, v. 26).

The horror felt by the local
population at the murder of Joanna Franks did not end with the punishment of
the guilty men. Many, both lay and clerical, thought that something more must
be done to seek to improve the morals of the boatmen on the waterways. They
were aware, of course, that the majority of boatmen were called upon to work on
the Sabbath, and had therefore little or no opportunity of attending Divine
worship. A letter from the Revd Robert Chantry, Vicar of Summertown Parish, was
typical of many in urging a greater degree of concern amongst the boatmen's
employers, and suggesting some period of time free from duties on the Sabbath
to allow those having the inclination the opportunity of attending a Church
service. Strangely enough, such attendance would have been readily possible for
the crew-members of the Barbara Bray had Oxford been a regular
port-of-call, since a special 'Boatmen's Chapel' had been provided by Henry
Ward, a wealthy coal-merchant, in 1838 - a floating chapel, moored off Hythe
Bridge, at which services were held on Sunday afternoons and Wednesday
evenings. For Joanna Franks, as well as for her sorrowing husband and parents,
it was a human tragedy that the sermon preached to the murderers on the Sunday
prior to their execution was perhaps the first - as well as the last -they ever
heard.

But it is all a long time ago now.
The floating chapel has long since gone; and no one today can point with any
certainty to the shabby plot in the environs of Oxford Gaol where notorious
criminals and murderers and others of the conjecturally damned were once
buried.

Chapter Nineteen

We read fine things but never feel
them to the full until we have gone the same steps as the author

(John Keats, Letter to John Reynolds)

Morse was glad that the Colonel had ignored
Doctor Johnson's advice to all authors that once they had written something
particularly fine they should strike it out. For Part Four was the best-written
section, surely, of what was proving to be one of the greatest assets in
Morse's most satisfactory (so far) convalescence; and he turned back the pages
to relish again a few of those fine phrases. Splendid, certainly, were such
things as sated the sadistic fascination ; and, better still, that
ghoulish insensitivity . But they were more than that. They
seemed to suggest that the Colonel's sympathies had shifted slightly, did they
not? Where earlier the bias against the boatmen had been so pronounced, it
appeared that the longer he went on the greater his compassion was growing for
that disconsolate crew.

Like Morse's.

It was such a good story! So it was no surprise
that the Colonel should have disinterred the bare bones of this particular one
from the hundreds of other nineteenth-century burial-grounds. All the
ingredients were there for its appealing to a wide readership, if once it got
its foot wedged in the doorway of publicity. Beauty and the Beasts - that's
what it was, quintessentially.

At least as the Colonel had seen
it.

For Morse, who had long ago
rejected the bland placebos of conventional religion, the facility offered to
errant souls to take the Holy Sacrament before being strangled barbarously in a
string seemed oddly at variance with the ban on the burial of these same souls
within some so-called 'holy ground'. And he was reminded of a passage which had
once been part of his mental baggage, the words of which now slowly returned to
him. From Tess of the d'Urbervilles — where Tess herself seeks to bury
her legitimate infant in the place where 'the nettles grow; and here all
unbaptised infants, notorious drunkards, suicides, and others . . . ' What was
the end of it? Wasn't it - yes! - 'others of the conjecturally damned are laid'.
Well, well! A bit of plagiarism on the Colonel's part. He really should have
put quotation marks around that memorable phrase. Cheating just a little,
really. Were there any other places where he'd cheated? Unwittingly, perhaps?
Just a little?

Worth checking?

That floating chapel interested
Morse, too, particularly since he had read something about it in a recent issue
of the Oxford Times. He remembered, vaguely, that although the Oxford
Canal Company gave regular monies towards is upkeep the boat on which it was
housed had finally sunk (like the boatmen's hopes) and was terrestrialized, as
it were, later in the century as a permanent chapel in Hythe Bridge Street; was
now, at its latest conversion, metamorphosed to a double-glazing establishment.

Without looking back, Morse could
not for the moment remember which of the other crew-members had been married.
But it was good to learn that Oldfield's wife had stood beside her husband, for
better or for worse. And a pretty bloody 'worse' it had turned out to be! How
interesting it would have been to know something of her story, too. How
Morse would like to have been able to interview her, then and there! The
recipient (presumably she had been) of that terrible card addressed to her, and
handed to the Chaplain at the very foot of the gallows, she must have found it
well-nigh impossible to believe that her husband could commit so foul a deed.
But then had been only a small role in the drama: only a couple of walking-on
appearances, the first ending with a dead faint, and the second with a poignant
little message from the grave. Morse nodded rather sadly to himself. These days
there would be a legion of reporters from the News of the World, the Sunday
Mirror, and the rest, hounding the life of the poor woman and seeking to
prise out of her such vital information as whether he'd snored, or been
tattooed on either upper or nether limbs, or how frequently they'd indulged in
sexual intercourse, or what had been the usual greeting of the loving husband
after coming back from one of his earlier murderous missions.

We live in a most degenerate age,
decided Morse. Yet he knew, deep down, what nonsense such thinking was. He was
no better himself, really, than one of those scandal-sheet scouts. He'd just
confessed - had he not? how much he himself wanted to interview Mrs Oldfield
and talk about all the things she must have known. And what (sobering thought!)
what if she had invited each of them in, one after the other, separately
- and asked for £20,000 a time?

No chance of any interview or talk
now though - not with any of them . . . But, suddenly, it struck Morse that
perhaps there was: Samuel Carter's Travels and Talks in the Antipodes. That
might be a most interesting document, surely? And (it struck Morse with particular
pleasure) it would certainly be somewhere on the shelves of the three or four
great UK libraries, the foremost of which was always going to be the Bodleian.

Lewis  had already been  given his research project; and work was noe
beginning to pile up for his second researcher in the field: what with Jackson's
Oxford Journal, and now Carter's book . . . Had the Colonel consulted that?
Must have done, Morse supposed - which was a -little disappointing.

That Friday evening, Morse was visited by both
Sergeant Lewis and Christine Greenaway, the latter suddenly changing her mind
and foregoing a cocktail reception in Wellington Square. No trouble at all.
Just the opposite.

Morse was very happy.

Chapter Twenty

Those hateful persons called
Original Researchers

(J. M. Barrie,
My Lady Nicotine)

As usual when she went into Oxford on a
Saturday, Christine Greenaway drove down to the Pear Tree roundabout and
caught the Park-and-Ride bus. Alighting in Cornmarket, she walked up to Carfax,
turned right into Queen's Street, and along through the busy pedestrian
precinct to Bonn Square, where just past the Selfridges building she pushed
through the doors of the Westgate Central Library. Among the wrong assumptions
made by Chief Inspector Morse the previous evening was the fact that it would
be sheer child's play for her to fish out the fiche (as it were) of any
newspaper ever published, and that having effected such effortless entry into
times past she had the technical skill and the requisite equipment to carry out
some immediate research. She hadn't told him that the Bodleian had not, to the
best of her knowledge, ever micro-filmed the whole of the nation's press from
the nineteenth century, nor that she herself was one of those people against
whom all pieces of electrical gadgetry waged a non-stop war. She'd just agreed
with him: yes, it would be a fairly easy job; and she'd be glad to help -
again. To be truthful, though, she was. Earlier that morning she'd telephoned
one of her acquaintances in the Reference Section of the Westgate Central, and
learned that she could have immediate access to Jackson's Oxford Journal for
1859 and 1860. How long did she want to book things for? One hour? Two?
Christine thought one hour would be enough.

10.30-11.30 a.m., then?

Perhaps Morse had been right all
along. It was going to be easy.

On the second floor of the Central Library, in
the Local History and Study Area, she was soon seated on an olive-green vinyl
chair in front of a Micro-Film-Reader, an apparatus somewhat resembling the upper
half of a British Telecom telephone-kiosk, with a vertical surface, some two
feet square, facing her, upon which the photographed sheets of the newspaper
appeared, in columns about 2l/2 inches wide. No
lugging around or leafing through heavy bound-volumes of unmanageable
newspapers. 'Child's play.' The controls marked Focusing Image, Magnification,
and Light Control had all been pre-set for her by a helpful young library
assistant (male), and Christine had only to turn an uncomplicated
winding-handle with her right hand to skip along through the pages, at whatever
speed she wished, of Jackson's Oxford Journal.

She was relieved, nevertheless, to
discover that the Journal was a weekly, not a daily publication; and very soon
she found the appropriate columns relating to the first trial of August 1859,
and was making a series of notes about what she found; and, like Morse,
becoming more and more interested. Indeed, by the time she had finished her
research into the second trial, of April 1860, she was fascinated. She would
have liked to go back and check up a few things, but her eyes were getting
tired; and as soon as the print began to jump along like a line of soldiers
dressing by the right, she knew that what the splendid machine called the
Viewer Operator had better have a rest. She'd found a couple of pieces of
information that might please Morse. She hoped so.

She was looking quickly through her
scribbled notes, making sure that she could transcribe them later into some
more legible form, when she became aware of a conversation taking place only
three or four yards behind her at the Enquiries desk.

'Yes, I've tried County Hall - no
help, I'm afraid.'

'Your best bet I should think,
then, is the City Archivists. They've got an office in—'

'They sent me here!'

'Oh!' The phone rang and the
assistant excused himself to answer it.

Christine gathered up her notes, turned off the
MFR (as it seemed to be known), and went up to the desk.

'We met yesterday evening—' began
Christine.

Sergeant Lewis smiled at her and
said, 'Hullo.'

'Seems I'm having more luck than
you, Sergeant.'

'Augh! He always gives me the lousy
jobs - I don't know why I bother - my day off, too.'

'And mine.'

'Sorry we can't help, sir,' said
the assistant (another query dealt with). 'But if they've got no trace at the
Archivists ...

Lewis nodded. 'Well, thanks,
anyway.'

Lewis escorted Christine to the
swing doors when the assistant had a final thought: 'You could try St Aldate's
Police Station. I have heard that quite a lot of documents and stuff got
housed by the police in the war' ('Which war?' mumbled Lewis, inaudibly) 'and,
well, perhaps—'

'Thanks very much!'

'They can't really be all that
helpful to the public, though - I'm sure you know—'

'Oh yes!'

But the phone had been ringing
again, and now the attendant answered it, convinced that he'd sent his latest
customer on what would prove a wholly unproductive mission.

When alone in crowded streets,
Christine sometimes felt a little apprehensive; but she experienced a pleasing
sense of being under protection as she walked back towards Carfax with the
burly figure of Sergeant Lewis beside and above her. Great Tom was striking
twelve noon.

'I don't suppose you fancy a
drink—' began Lewis.

'No - not for me, thank you. I don't
drink much, anyway, and it's a bit - bit early, isn't it?'

Lewis grinned: 'That's something I
don't hear very often from the Chief!' But he felt relieved. He wasn't much
good at making polite conversation; and although she seemed a very nice young
lady he preferred to get about his business now.

'You like him, don't you? The
Chief , I mean?'

'He's the best in the business.'

'Is he?' asked Christine, quietly.

'Will you be going in tonight?'

'I suppose so. What about you?'

'If I find anything - which seems
at the moment very doubtful.'

'You never know.'

Chapter Twenty-one

From the cradle to the coffin, underwear comes
first

(Benolt
Brecht, The Threepenny Opera)

In the late 1980s the premises of the City
Police HQ in St Aldate's were being extensively renovated and extended - and
the work was still in progress when Sergeant Lewis walked in through the main
door that Saturday morning. The Force had always retained its obstinately
hierarchical structure, and friendships between the higher and the lower ranks
would perhaps always be slightly distanced. Yet Lewis knew Chief Superintendent
Bell fairly well from the old days up at Kidlington and was glad to find him in
the station.

Yes, of course Bell would help if
he could: in fact, the timing of Lewis's visit might be very opportune, because
many corners and crannies had only just been cleared out, and the contents of
scores of cupboards and dust-covered cases and crates had recently seen the light
of day for the first time within living memory. Bell's orders on this had been
clear: if any documents seemed even marginally worth the keeping, let them be
kept; if not, let them be destroyed. But strangely, up to now, almost
everything so newly rediscovered had appeared potentially valuable to someone;
and the upshot was that a whole room had been set aside in which the
preserved relics and mementos from the earliest days - certainly from the 1850s
onwards - had been unsystematically stacked, awaiting appropriate evaluation
by academic historians, sociologists, criminologists, local-history societies -
and authors. In fact a WPC was in the room now, as Bell thought - doing a bit
of elementary cataloguing; and if Lewis wanted to look around . . .

Explaining that this was her lunch-break, WPC
Wright, a pleasant enough brunette in her mid-twenties, continued eating her
sandwiches and writing her Christmas cards, waving Lewis to any quarter of the
room he wished after he had briefly stated his mission.

'It's all yours, Sergeant. Or, at
least, I wish it was!'

Lewis could see what she meant.
Morse had given him a copy of the Colonel's work (several spares had been left
on the ward); but for the moment Lewis could see little or no chance of linking
anything that had occurred in 1860 with the chaotic heaps of boxes, files,
bags, crates, and piles of discoloured, dog-eared documents that lay around. To
be fair, it was clear that a start had been made on sorting things out, for
fifty-odd buff-coloured labels, with dates written on them, were attached to
the rather neater agglomeration of material that had been separated from the
rest, and set out in some semblance of chronological order. But amongst these
labels Lewis looked in vain for 1859 or 1860. Was it worth having a quick look
through the rest?

It was at 1.45 p.m., after what had proved to be
a long look, that Lewis whistled softly.

'You found something?'

'Do you know anything about this?'
asked Lewis. He had lifted from one of the tea-chests a chipped and splintered
box, about two feet long, by one foot wide, and about 9-10 inches deep; a small
box, by any reckoning, and one which could be carried by a person with little
difficulty, since a brass plate, some 4 inches by half an inch, set in the
middle of the box's top, held a beautifully moulded semi-circular handle, also
of brass. But what had struck Lewis instantly - and with wondrous excitement –
were the initials engraved upon the narrow plate: 'J.D.'! Lewis had not read
the slim volume with any great care (or any great interest, for that matter);
but he remembered clearly the two 'trunks' which Joanna had taken on to the
boat and which presumably had been found in the cabin after the crew's arrest.
Up to that point, Lewis had just had a vague mental picture of the sort of
'trunks' seen outside Oxford colleges when the undergraduates were arriving.
But surely it had said that Joanna was carrying them, hadn't it? And by
the well-worn look of the handle it looked as if this box had been carried -
and carried often. And the name of Joanna's first husband had begun with a 'DM

The policewoman came over and knelt
beside the box. The two smallish hooks, one on each side of the lid, moved
easily; and the lock on the front was open, for the lid lifted back to reveal,
inside the green-plush lining, a small canvas bag, on which, picked out in
faded yellow wool, were the same initials as on the box.

Lewis whistled once more. Louder.

'Can you - can we - ?' He could
scarcely keep the excitement from his voice, and the policewoman looked at him
curiously for a few seconds, before gently shaking out the bag's contents on to
the floor: a small, rusted key, a pocket comb, a metal spoon, five
dress-buttons, a crochet-hook, a packet of needles, two flat-heeled,
flimsy-looking shoes, and a pair of calico knickers.

Lewis shook his head his
dumbfounded disbelief. He picked up the shoes in somewhat gingerly fashion as
if he suspected they might disintegrate; then, between thumb and forefinger,
the calico knickers.

‘Think I could borrow these shoes
and the er . . . ?' he asked.

WPC Wright eyed him once again with
amused curiosity.

'It's all right,' added Lewis.
'They're not for me.'

'No?'

'Morse - I work for Morse.'

'I suppose you're going to tell me
he's become a knicker-fetishist in his old age.'

'You know him?'

'Wish I did!'

'He's in hospital, I'm afraid—'

'Everybody says he drinks far too
much.'

'A bit, perhaps.'

'Do you know him well, would you
say?'

'Nobody knows him all that well.'

'You'll have to sign for them—'

'Fetch me the book!'

'—and bring them back.'

Lewis grinned. 'They'd be a bit
small for me, anyway, wouldn't they? The shoes, I mean.'

Chapter Twenty-two

Don't take action because of a
name! A name is an uncertain thing, you can't count on it!

(Bertolt
Brecht, A Man's a Man)

During that same Saturday which saw Sergeant
Lewis and Christine Greenaway giving up their free time on his behalf, Morse
himself was beginning to feel fine again. Exploring new territory, too, since
after lunch-time he was told he was now free to wander along the corridors at
will. Thus it was that at 2.30 p.m. he found his way to the Day Room, an area
equipped with armchairs, a colour TV, table-skittles, a book-case, and a great
pile of magazines (the top one, Morse noted, a copy of Country Life dating
from nine years the previous August). The room was deserted; and after making
doubly sure the coast was clear, Morse placed one of the three books he was
carrying in the bottom of the large wastepaper receptacle there: The Blue
Ticket had brought him little but embarrassment and humiliation, and now,
straightway, he felt like Pilgrim after depositing his sackful of sin.

The surfaces of the TV set seemed
universally smooth, with not the faintest sign of any switch, indentation,' or
control with which to set the thing going; so Morse settled down in an armchair
and quietly contemplated the Oxford Canal once more.

The question for the Jury, of course, had not
been 'Who committed the crime?' but only 'Did the prisoners do it?'; whilst for
a policeman like himself the question would always have to be the first one. So
as he sat there he dared to say to himself, honestly, 'All right! If the
boatmen didn't do it, who did? Yet if that were now the Judge's key
question, Morse couldn't see the case lasting a minute longer; for the simple
answer was he hadn't the faintest idea. What he could set his mind to,
though, was some considered reflection upon the boatmen's guilt. Or innocence
...

A quartet of questions, then.

First. Was it true that a jury
should have been satisfied, beyond any reasonable doubt, that the boatmen
murdered Joanna Franks? Answer: no. Not one shred of positive evidence had been
produced by the prosecution which could be attested in court by any
corroborative witnesses to murder - and it had been on the count of murder that
the boatmen had been convicted.

Second. Was it true that the
prisoners at the bar had been afforded the time-honoured 'presumption of
innocence' the nominal glory of the British Legal System? Answer: it most
definitely was not. Prejudgements - wholly pejorative prejudgements - had been
rife from the start of the first trial, and the attitude of the law officers no
less than the general public had been, throughout, one of unconcealed contempt
for, and revulsion against, the crude, barely literate, irreligious crew of the
Barbara Bray.

Third. Was it true that the
boatmen, or some of them, were likely to have been guilty of something? Answer:
almost certainly, yes; and (perversely) most probably guilty on the two charges
that were dropped -those of rape and theft. At the very least, there was no
shortage of evidence to suggest that the men had lusted mightily after their
passenger, and it was doubtless a real possibility that all three - all four? -
had sought to force their advances on the hapless (albeit sexually
provocative?) Joanna.

Fourth. Was there a general sense -
even if the evidence was unsatisfactory, even if the Jury were unduly
prejudiced - in which the verdict was a reasonable one, a 'safe' one, as some
of the jurisprudence manuals liked to call it? Answer: no, a thousand times no!

Almost, now, Morse felt he could put his finger on the
major cause of his unease. It was all those conversations, heard and duly
reported, between the principal characters in the story: conversations between
the crew and Joanna; between the crew and other boatmen; between the crew and
lock-keepers, wharfingers, and constables - all of it was wrong somehow.
Wrong, if they were guilty. It was as if some inexperienced playwright
had been given a murder-plot, and had then proceeded to write page after page
of inappropriate, misleading, and occasionally contradictory dialogue. For
there were moments when it looked as if it were Joanna Franks who was the
avenging Fury, with the crewmen merely the victims of her fatal power.

Then, too, the behaviour of
Oldfield and Musson after the murder seemed to Morse increasingly a
matter of considerable surprise, and it was difficult to understand why Counsel
for the Defence had not sought to ram into the minds of Judge and Jury alike
the utter implausibility of what, allegedly, they did and said. It was
not unknown, admittedly, for the odd psychopath to act in a totally irrational
and irresponsible manner. But these men were not a quartet of
psychopaths. And, above all, it seemed quite extraordinary to Morse that, even
after (as was claimed) the crew had somehow and for some reason managed to
murder Joanna Franks, they were - some twenty-four, thirty-six hours later -
still knocking back the booze, still damning and blasting the woman's soul to
eternity. Morse had known many murderers, but never one who had subsequently
acted in such a fashion - let alone four. No! It just didn't add up; didn't
add up at all. Not that it mattered, though - not really - after all these
years.

Morse flicked open the index of the
stout volume recording the misdeeds of Old Salopians, and his eye caught
'Shropshire Union Canal (The)'. He turned idly to the page reference, and there
read through the paragraph, and with growing interest. (Well done, Mrs Lewis!)
The author was still most horribly enmeshed in his barbed-wire style, still
quite incapable of calling a spade anything else but a broad-bladed digging-tool;
but the message was clear enough:

'With such an incidence of crime on
the canals, it can scarcely be a source of surprise that we find countless
instances of evasiveness, on the part of many of the boatmen, in matters such
as the registering of names, both those of the boats they crewed and of their
own persons. Specifically, with regard to the latter of these deceptions, we
discover that many of those working both on the water and on the wharfs had a
duality of names, and were frequently considerably better known by their
'bye-names' than by their christened nomenclature. For varied sociological
reasons (some of which we have yet to analyse) it can more than tentatively be
suggested that boatmen as a generality were likely to be potentially
predisposed to the regular commission of crime, and certain it must be held
that their profession (if such it may be called) afforded ample opportunities
for the realization of such potentiality. Sometimes they sold parts of their
cargoes, replacing, for example, quantities of coal with similar quantities of
rocks or stone; frequently we come across recorded instances (see esp. SCL, Canal
and Navigable Waters Commission, 1842, Vol. IX, pp. 61-4, 72-5, 83-6, el
passim) of crewmen drinking from their cargoes of fine wines and whiskies,
and refilling the emptied bottles with water. Toll officials, too, do not
always appear blameless in these affairs, and could occasionally be bribed into
closing their eyes . . . '

Morse's eyes were beginning to close, too, and
he laid the book aside. The point had been made: boatmen were a load of crooks
who often nicked bits of their cargoes. Hence Walter Towns, aka Walter Thorold,
and the rest. All as simple as that - once you knew the answers. Perhaps it
would all be like that one day, in that Great Computer Library in the
Sky, when the problems that had beset countless generations of sages and
philosophers would be answered immediately, just by tapping in the questions on
some celestial key-board.

The youth with the portable
saline-drip walked in, nodded to Morse, picked up a small TV control-panel from
somewhere, and began flicking his way around the channels with, for Morse,
irritating impermanence. It was time to get back to the ward.

As he was leaving his eyes roamed
automatically over the book-case, and he stopped. There, on the lower row, and
standing side by side, were the titles Victorian Banbury and OXFORD
(Rail Centres Series'). Having extracted both, he walked back. Perhaps, if
you kept your eyes open, you didn't need any Valhallan VDUs at all.

Walter Algernon Greenaway had been
trying, with little success, to get going with the Oxford Times crossword. He had little or no competence
in the skill, but it had always fascinated him; and when the previous day he had watched
Morse complete
The Times crossword in about ten minutes, he felt most envious. Morse had just settled back in his bed when Greenaway (predictably known to his friends,
it appeared, as 'Waggie') called
across.

'You're pretty good at crosswords—'

'Not bad.'

'You know anything about cricket?'

'Not much. What's the clue?'

' Bradman's famous duck .'

'How many letters?'

'Six. I saw Bradman at the Oval in
1948. He got a duck then.'

'I shouldn't worry too much about
cricket,' said Morse. 'Just think about Walt Disney.'

Greenaway licked the point of his
pencil, and thought, unproductively, about Walt Disney.

'Who's the setter this week?' asked
Morse.

'Chap called Quixote .'

Morse smiled. Coincidence, wasn't
it! 'What was his Christian name?'

'Ah! I have you, sir!' said Waggie,
happily entering the letters at 1 across.

Chapter Twenty-three

All that mankind has done, thought, gained, or
been, it is all lying in magic preservation in the pages of books

(Thomas
Carlyle)

Embanas de richesses - for Morse couldn't have chosen a more
informative couple of books if he'd sauntered all day round the shelves in the
local Summertown Library.

First, from Victorian Banbury, he
gleaned the information that by about 1850 the long-distance stage-coach routes
via Banbury to London had been abandoned, almost entirely as a result of the
new railway service from Oxford to the capital. Yet, as a direct result of this
service, coaches between Banbury and Oxford had actually increased, and
regular and efficient transportation was readily available between Banbury and
Oxford (only twenty miles to the south) during the 1850s and 1860s.
Furthermore, the author gave full details of the actual stage-coaches that
would have been available, on the day in question, and about which Joanna
Franks must have made enquiry: quite certainly coach-horses would have been
seen galloping southwards on three separate occasions in the earlier half of
the following day, delivering passengers picked up at the Swan Inn, Banbury,
to the Angel Inn in the High at Oxford. That for the sum of 2s/1d. Even
more interesting for Morse was the situation pertaining at Oxford itself, where
trains to Paddington, according to his second work of reference, were far more
frequent, and far quicker, than he could have imagined. And presumably Joanna
herself, at Banbury on that fateful day, had been presented with exactly the
same information: no less than ten trains daily, leaving at 2.10 a.m.,
7.50 a.m., 9 a.m., 10.45 a.m., 11.45 a.m., 12.55 p.m., 2.45 p.m., 4.00 p.m.,
5.50 p.m., and 8.00 p.m. Embanas du choix. Admittedly, the fares seemed
somewhat steep, with 1st-, 2nd-, and 3rd-class carriages priced respectively
at 16s, 10s, and 6s, for the 60-odd-mile journey. But the historian of Oxford's
railways was fair-minded enough to add the fact that there were also three
coaches a day, at least up until the 1870s, making the comparatively slow
journey to London via the Henley and Reading turnpikes: The Blenheim and
The Prince of Wales, each departing at 10.30 a.m., with The Rival an
hour later, the fare being a 'whole shilling' less than the 3rd-class railway
fare. And where did they finish up in the metropolis? It was quite
extraordinary. The Edgware Road!

So, for a few minutes Morse looked
at things from Joanna's point of view - a Joanna who (as he had no option but
to believe) was in extremis. Arriving at Banbury, as she had, in the
latish evening, she would very soon have seen the picture. No chance of anything
immediately, but the ready opportunity of a stay over-night in Banbury, in one
of the taverns along the quay-side, perhaps. Not four-star AA accommodation -
but adequate, and certainly costing no more than 2s or so. Then one of the
coaches to Oxford next morning - the book of words mentioned one at 9.30 a.m.,
reaching Oxford at about 1 p.m. That would mean no difficulty at all about
catching the 2.45 p.m. to Paddington - or one of the three later trains, should
any accident befall the horses. Easy! If she had eventually made a firm
decision to escape her tormentors for good, then the situation was
straightforward. 2s overnight, say, 2s/ld coach-fare, 6s 3rd-class
rail-fare - that meant that for about 10s she was offered a final chance of
saving her life. And without much bother, without much expense, she could have
done so.

But she hadn't. Why not? Received wisdom maintained that she
hadn't got a penny-piece to her name, let alone half a guinea. But had she
nothing she could sell, or pawn? Had she no negotiable property with her? What had
she got in those two boxes of hers? Nothing of any value whatsoever? Why,
then, if that were so, could there ever have been the slightest suspicion of theft'?
Morse shook his head slowly. Ye gods! - how he wished he could have a quick
look into one of those boxes!

It was tea-time, and Morse was not aware that
his wish had already been granted.

Chapter Twenty-four

Magnus Alexander corpora parvus erat (Even Alexander
the Great didn't measure up to the height-requirement of the Police Force)

(Latin
Proverb)

Normal shifts for the nursing staff at the JR2
were Early (07.45-15.45), Late (13.00-21.30), and Night (21.00-08.15). Always
more of an owl than a lark, Eileen Stanton shared none of the common objections
that were levelled against the Night shift: born with a temperament slightly
tinged with melancholy, she was perhaps a natural creature of the dark. But
this particular week had been unusual. And that day she was on Late.

Married at the age of nineteen and divorced at
twenty, she was now, five years later, living out at Wantage with a man,
fifteen years her senior, who had celebrated his fortieth birthday the previous
evening (hence the re-arrangements). The party had gone splendidly until just
after midnight when the celebrant himself had been involved in a pathetic
little bout of fisticuffs, over her Now, in films or on TV, after being
knocked unconscious with a vicious blow from an iron bar, the hero has only to
rub the sore spot for a couple of minutes before resuming his mission. But life
itself, as Eileen knew, wasn't like that - the victim was much more likely to
end up in the ICU, with permanent brain-damage, to boot. Much more cruel. Like
last night (this morning!) when her cohabitee had been clouted in the face, his
upper lip splitting dramatically, and one of his front teeth being broken off
at the root. Not good for his looks, or his pride, or the party, or Eileen, or
anybody. Not good at all!

For the umpteenth time her mind
dwelt on that incident as she drove into Oxford, parked her apple-jack-green
Metro in the Staff Only park of the JR2, and walked down to the Basement Cloak
Room to change her clothes. It would do her good to get back on the Ward, she
knew that. She'd found it easy enough so far to steer clear of any emotional
involvement with her patients, and for the moment all she wanted was to get a
few hours of dutiful nursing behind her — to forget the previous night, when
she'd drunk a little too freely, and flirted far too flagrantly with a man she'd
never even met before . . . No hangover - although she suddenly began to wonder
if she did have a hangover after all: just didn't notice it amid her
other mental agitations. Anyway, it was high time she forgot all her own
troubles and involved herself with other people's.

She'd noticed Morse (and he her) as
he'd walked along to the Day Room; watched him walk back, half an hour later,
and spend the rest of the afternoon reading. Bookish sort of fellow, he seemed.
Nice, though - and she would go and have a word with him perhaps once he put
his books down. Which he didn't.

She watched him again, at 7.40
p.m., as he sat against the pillows; and more particularly watched the woman
who sat beside him, in a dark-blue dress, with glints of gold and auburn in her
hair, the regular small-featured face leaning forward slightly as she spoke to
him. To Eileen the pair of them seemed so eager to talk to each other - so
different from the conversational drought which descended on so many hospital
visitations. Twice, even as she watched, the woman, in the middle of some
animated little passage of dialogue, placed the tips of her fingers against the
sleeve of his gaudy pyjamas, fingers that were slim and sinewy, like those of
an executant musician. Eileen knew all about that sort of gesture! And
what about him, Morse? He, too, seemed to be doing his level, unctuous best to
impress her, with a combination of that happily manufactured half-smile
and eyes that focused intently upon hers. Oh yes! She could see what each of
them was feeling - nauseating couple of bootlickers! But she knew she envied
them; envied especially the woman - Waggie's clever-clogs of a daughter! From
the few times she'd spoken to Morse, she knew that his conversation - and
perhaps, she thought, his life, too - was so interesting. She'd met just
a few other men like that - men who were full of fascinating knowledge about
architecture, history, literature, music ... all the things after which over
these last few years she'd found herself yearning. How relieved she suddenly
felt that most probably her swollen-lipped forty-year-old wouldn't be able to
kiss her that evening!

A man (as she now realized) had
been standing patiently at the desk.

'Can I help you?'

Sergeant Lewis nodded and looked
down at her. 'Special instructions. I've got to report to the boss whenever I
bring the Chief Inspector a bag of plastic explosive. You're the boss tonight,
aren't you?'

'Don't be too hard on Sister
Maclean!'

Lewis bent forward and spoke
softly. 'It's not me - it's him! He says she's an argumentative, bitchy old . .
. old something.'

Eileen smiled. 'She's not very
tactful, sometimes.'

'He's, er - looks like he's got a
visitor for the moment.'

'Yes.'

'Perhaps I'd better not interrupt,
had I? He gets very cross sometimes.'

'Does he?'

'Especially if . . . '

Eileen nodded, and looked up into Lewis's kindly
face, feeling that menfolk weren't quite so bad as she'd begun to think.
'What's he like - Inspector Morse?' she asked.

Christine Greenaway stood up to go, and Morse
was suddenly conscious, as she stood so closely beside the bed, how small she
was - in spite of the high-heeled shoes she habitually wore. Words came back to
his mind, the words he'd read again so recently: ' . . . petite and attractive
figure, wearing an Oxford-blue dress . . . '

'How tall are you?' asked Morse, as
she smoothed her dress down over her thighs.

'How small am I, don't you
mean?' Her eyes flashed and seemed to mock him. 'In stockinged feet, I'm five
feet, half an inch. And don't forget that half-inch: it may not be very
important to you, but it is to me. I wear heels all the time - so I come up to
about normal, usually. About five three.'

'What size shoes do you take?'

‘Threes. You wouldn't be able to
get your feet in them.'

'I've got very nice feet,' said
Morse seriously,

'I think I ought to be more worried
about my father than about your feet,' she whispered quietly, as she touched
his arm once more, and as Morse in turn placed his own left hand so briefly, so
lightly upon hers. It was a little moment of magic, for both of them.

'And you'll look up that—?'

'I won't forget.'

Then she was gone, and only the
smell of some expensive perfume lingered around the bed.

'I just wonder,' said Morse, almost
absently, as Lewis took Christine's place in the plastic chair, 'I just wonder
what size shoes Joanna Franks took. I'm assuming, of course, they had shoe-sizes
in those days. Not a modern invention, like women's tights, are they? -
shoe-sizes? What do you think, Lewis?'

'Would you like me to show you exactly what size
she did take, sir?'

Chapter Twenty-five

Those who are incapable of committing great
crimes do not readily suspect them in others

(La
Rochefoucauld, Maxims)

Morse was invariably credited, by his police
colleagues, with an alpha-plus intelligence, of a kind which surfaced rarely on
the tides of human affairs, and which almost always gave him about six
furlongs' start in any criminal investigation. Whatever the truth of this
matter, Morse himself knew that one gift had never been bestowed on him - that
of reading quickly. It was to be observed, therefore, that he seemed to
spend a disproportionately long time that evening - Christine gone, Lewis gone,
Horlicks drunk, pills swallowed, injection injected - in reading through the
photocopied columns from Jackson's Oxford Journal. Christine had not
mentioned to him that, dissatisfied with her hand-written notes, she had
returned to the Central Library in the early afternoon and prevailed upon one
of her vague acquaintances there to let her jump the queue and photocopy the
original material directly from their bulky originals. Not that Morse, even had
he known, would have exhibited any excessive gratitude. One of his weaknesses
was his disposition to accept loyalty without ever really understanding,
certainly not appreciating, the sacrifices that might be involved.

When, as a boy, he had been
shepherded around various archaeological sites, Morse had been unable to share
the passion of some fanatic drooling over a few (disintegrating) Roman bricks.
Even then, it had been the written word, rather than the tangible artefact,
which had pricked his curiosity, and promoted his subsequent delight in the
ancient world. It was to be expected, therefore, that although Lewis's quite
extraordinary discovery was to prove the single most dramatic break-through in
the supposed 'case', the sight of a sad-looking pair of shrivelled shoes and
an even sadder-looking pair of crumpled knickers was, for Morse, a little
anti-climactic. At least, for the present. As for Christine's offerings,
though, how wonderfully attractive and suggestive they were!

From the newspaper records, it was
soon clear that the Colonel had omitted no details of any obvious importance.
Yet, as in most criminal cases, it was the apparently innocuous, incidental,
almost irrelevant, details that could change, in a flash, the interpretation of
accepted facts. And there were quite a few details here (to Morse, hitherto
unknown) which caused him more than a millimetric rise of the eyebrows.

First, reading between the somewhat
smudged lines of the photocopied material, it seemed fairly clear that the
charge of theft had probably been dropped at the first trial for the reason
that the evidence (such as it was) had pointed predominantly to the youth,
Wootton, therefore necessitating an individual prosecution - and that against a
minor. If any of the other crewmen were involved, it was Towns (the man
deported to Australia) who figured as the safest bet; and quite certainly no
obvious evidence could be levelled against the two men eventually hanged for murder.
What was it then that the young man's covetous eyes may have sought to
steal from Joanna Franks's baggage? No answer emerged clearly from the
evidence. But there was surely one thing, above all, that thieves went for,
whether in 1859 or 1989: money.

Mmm.

Second,
there  was  sufficient
contemporary  evidence to suggest
that it was Joanna who was probably the sustaining partner in her second
marriage. Whatever it was that had caused her to 'fall deeply in love with
Charles Franks, an ostler from Liverpool', it was Joanna who had
besought her new husband to keep up his spirits during the ill fortune which
had beset the early months of their marriage. An extract from a letter to
Charles Franks had indeed been read out in court, presumably (as Morse saw
things) to substantiate the point that, quite contrary to the boatmen's claim
of Joanna being demented, it was Charles who seemed the nearer to
a mental breakdown: 'Sorry I am to read, my dear husband, your sadly wandering
letter - do, my dear, strive against what I fear will await you should you not
rest your tortured mind. The loss of reason is a terrible thing and will blight
our hopes. Be strong and know we shall soon be together and well provided for.'
A poignant and eloquent letter.

Were both of them a bit
unbalanced?

Mmm.

Third, various depositions from
both trials made it clear that although 'fly' boats worked best with a strict
enforcement of a 'two on - two off arrangement, it was quite usual, in
practice, for the four members of such a crew to permutate their different
duties in order to accommodate individual likings or requirements. Or desires,
perhaps? For Morse now read, with considerable interest, the evidence
adduced in court (Where were you, Colonel Deniston?) that Oldfield, captain of
the Barbara Bray, had paid Walter Towns 6d to take over from him
the arduous business of 'legging' the boat through the Barton tunnel. Morse
nodded to himself: for his imagination had already travelled there.

Mmm.

Fourth, the evidence, taken as a
whole, suggested strongly that for the first half of the journey Joanna had
joined in quite happily with the boatmen at the various stops: staying in their
company, eating at the same table, drinking with them, laughing with them at
their jokes. Few jokes, though, on the latter half of the day, when, as the
prosecution had pressed home again and again, Joanna figured only as a
helpless, hapless soul crying out (at times, literally) for help, sympathy,
protection, mercy. And one decisive and dramatic fact: as the crew themselves
grew progressively inebriated, Joanna was becoming increasingly sober; for the
coroner's evidence, as reported at the trial, was incontestable: no alcohol
at all was  in her body.

Mmm.

Morse proceeded to underline in
blue Biro the various, most curious, altercations which the law-writer of Jackson's
Oxford Journal had deemed it worthy to record: 'Will you have anything of
this?' (Oldfield) 'No, I have no inclination.' (Bloxham) '—'s already had his
with concerns her tonight; and I will, or else I shall — her.' (Oldfield) 'D—n
and blast the woman! If she has drowned herself, I (cannot help it.' (Oldfield)
'She said she'd do it afore, and now she seems to 'a done it proper.' (Musson)
'I hope the ! b—y w—e is burning in hell!' (Oldfield) 'Blast the woman! What do
we know about her? If she had a mind to drown herself, why should we be in all
this trouble?' (Towns) 'If he is going to be a witness against us, it is for
other things, not for the woman.' (Oldfield)

Mmm.

Randomly quoted, incoherent,
unchronological as they (were, these extracts from the trials served most
strongly to reinforce Morse's earlier conviction that they were not the sort of
comments one would expect from murderers. One might expect some measure of
shame, remorse, fear - yes! - even, in a few cases, triumph and jubilation in
the actual performance of the deed. But not - no! – not the fierce anger and
loathing perpetuated by the boat through the hours and the days after Joanna
had met he death.

Finally, there was a further
(significant?) passage of evidence which the Colonel had not cited. It
was, apparently, Oldfield's claim that, at about 4 a.m. on the fateful morning,
the boatmen had, in fact, caught up with Joanna - the latter in a state
of much mental confusion; both he and Musson had discovered her whereabouts
only by the anguished cries in which she called upon the name of her husband:
'Franks! Franks! Franks!' Furthermore, Oldfield claimed, he had actually
persuaded her to get back on the boat, although he agreed that she had fairly
soon jumped off again (again!) to resume her walking along the tow-path. Then,
according to Oldfield, two of them, he and Towns on this occasion, had
once more gone ashore, where they met another potential witness (the Donald
Favant mentioned in the Colonel's book). But the boatmen had not been believed.
In particular this second meeting along the tow-path had come in for withering
scorn from the prosecution: at best, the confused recollection of hopelessly
drunken minds; at worst, the invention of 'these callous murderers'. Yes! That
was exactly the sort of comment which throughout had disquieted Morse's passion
for justice. As a policeman, he knew only the rudiments of English Law; but he
was a fervent believer in the principle that a man should be presumed innocent
until he was pronounced guilty: was a fundamental principle, not only of
substantive law, but of natural justice . . .

'You comfy?' asked Eileen,
automatically pulling folds of his sheets tidy.

'I thought you'd gone off duty.'

'Just going.'

'You're spoiling me.'

'You enjoy reading, don't you?'

Morse nodded: 'Sometimes.'

'You like reading best of all?'

'Well, music - music, I suppose,
sometimes more.'

'So, if you're reading a book with
the record-player going—'

'I can't enjoy them both together.'

'But they're the best'?'

'Apart from a candle-lit
evening-meal with someone like you.'

Eileen coloured, her pale cheeks suddenly as
bright as those of the dying Colonel.

Before going to sleep that night, Morse's hand
glided into the bedside cabinet and poured out a small measure; and as he
sipped the Scotch, at his own pace, the world of a sudden was none too bad a
place...

When he awoke (was awoken, rather) the following
morning (Sunday) he marvelled that the blindingly obvious notion that now
occurred to him had taken such an age to materialize. Usually, his cerebral
analysis was as swift as the proverbial snap of a lizard's eyelid.

Or so he told himself.

Chapter Twenty-six

Now, there is a law written in the
darkest of the Books of Life, and it is this: If you look at a thing nine
hundred and ninety-nine times, you are perfectly safe; if you look at it for
the thousandth time, you are in frightful danger of seeing it for the first
time

(G. K. Chesterton, The Napoleon of Netting Hill)

Just the same with crossword puzzles, wasn't it?
Sit and ponder more and more deeply over some abstruse clue - and get nowhere.
Stand away, though - further back! - further back still! - and the answer will
shout at you with a sort of mocking triumph. It was those shoes, of course . .
. shoes at which he'd been staring so hard he hadn't really seen them.

Morse waited with keen anticipation until his
morning ablutions were complete before re-re-reading the Colonel's work,
lingering over things - as he'd always done as a boy when he'd carved his way
meticulously around the egg-white until he was left only with the golden circle
of the yolk, into which, finally, to dip the calculated balance of his chips.

What were the actual words of the
trial report? Yes, Morse nodded to himself: when Charles Franks had looked at
the body, he had recognized it, dreadfully disfigured as it was, by 'a small
mark behind his wife's left ear, a mark of which only a parent or an intimate
lover could have known'. Or a scoundrel. By all the gods, was ever
identification so tenuously asserted and attested in the English Courts?
Not only some tiny disfigurement in a place where no one else would have been
aware of it, but a tiny disfigurement which existed on the head of
Joanna Franks only because it existed in the head of her new husband! Oh, it
must have been there all right! The doctor, the coroner, the inspector of
police, those who'd undressed the dead woman, and redressed her for a proper
Christian burial - so many witnesses who could, if need ever arose, corroborate
the existence of such a blemish on what had once been such a pretty face. But
who could, or did, corroborate the fact that the face had been Joanna's? The
husband? Yes, he'd had his say. But the only others who might have known, the
parents - where were they? Apparently, they'd played no part at all in the
boatmen's trial at Oxford. Why not? Was the mother too stricken with grief to
give any coherent testimony? Was she alive, even, at the time of the
trial? The father was alive, though, wasn't he? The insurance man . . .

Morse brought his mind back to the
central point he was seeking to establish before his own imagined jury (little
'j'). No court would have accepted such unilateral identification without something
to support it -and there had been something (again Morse looked back
to the actual words): corroboration was afforded 'by the shoes, later found in
the fore-cabin of the Barbara Bray, which matched in the minutest
degrees the contours of the dead woman's feet'. So, the matter was clear: one,
the shoes in the cabin belonged to Joanna Franks; two, the shoes had been worn
by the drowned woman; therefore, three, the drowned woman was Joanna Franks -
QED. Even Aristotle might have been satisfied with such a syllogism.
Incontrovertible! All three statements as true as the Eternal Verities; and if
so, the shoes must belong to the woman who was drowned. But . . . but
what if the first statement was not true? What if the shoes had not belonged
to Joanna? Then the inexorable conclusion must be that whatever was; found
floating face-downward at Duke's Cut in 1859, it was not the body of Joanna
Franks.

Just one moment, Morse!! (The voice
of the prosecution: was deafening against his ear.) All right! The
identification as it stood, as it stands, may perchance appear a trifle
tenuous? But have you - you - any - any - reason for discrediting
such identification? And the answering voice in Morse's brain - Morse's voice
- was firm and confident Indeed! And if it should please my learned friends I
shall now proceed to tell you exactly what did happen between 3 a.m. and
5 a.m. on the morning of Wednesday, the 21s June, in 1859.

Gentlemen! We who are engaged in seeking to
reconstruct the course as well as the causation of crime are often tormented by
the same insistent thought: something must have happened, and happened in
a specific way. All theory, all reconstruction, all probability, are as
nothing compared with the simple, physical truth of what actually happened
at time. If only ... if only….., we say, we could see it all; see it
all as it actually happened! Gentlemen, I am about to tell you—

Proceed! said the judge (little
'j').

Chapter Twenty-seven

Imagination, that dost so abstract
us

That we are not aware, not even
when

A thousand trumpets sound about our
ears!

(Dante, Purgatorio)

Standing by the door at the left of the
fore-cabin, she could see them both. A reporter, perhaps, would have had them
dribbling or vomiting; snoring 'stertorously', certainly. But Joanna was to
notice, at that point, only the simple fact, the undramatic circumstance:
asleep, the pair of them Oldfield and Musson - only the slight rise and fall of
the faded maroon eiderdown that covered them both betraying their fitful
breathing. Drunk? Yes, very drunk: but Joanna herself had seen to that.
Little or no persuasion required, but the timing important . . . She
smiled grimly to herself, and consulted the little silver time-piece she always
kept so carefully about her person: the watch her father had given her on her
twenty-second birthday (not her twenty-first) -when some fees had been
forthcoming from the London Patent Office. And again, now, her hand closed
around the precious watch as if it were a talisman for the success of the
imminent enterprise.

Occasionally she spoke quietly -
very quietly - to the shifty, silly, spotty-faced youth who stood beside her at
the entrance to the cabin: his left hand upon the Z-shaped tiller, painted in
alternate bands of red, green, yellow; his right hand (where she had placed it
herself!) fondling the bosom of her dress. Twenty-five yards ahead, the horse
(rather a good one!) was plodding along a little more slowly now, the wooden
bobbins stretched taut along its flanks as it forged forward along the silent
tow-path -with only the occasional flap of the waters heard as they slurped against
the Barbara Bray, heading ever southwards into the night.

Joanna looked briefly behind her
now, at the plaited basket-work that protected the narrow-boat's stern. 'Over a
bit more, Tom!' she whispered, as the boat moved into the elbow-bend at
Thrupp, just past the village of Hampton Gay. 'And don't forget our little
bargain,' she added as she stepped up on to the side, whilst Wootton gently
manoeuvred the boat ever closer in towards the right-hand bank.

Wootton would not be celebrating
his fifteenth birthday until the February of 1860, but already, in several
ways, he was a good deal older than his years. Not in every way, though.
Never, before Joanna had come on board at Preston Brook, had he felt so
besotted with a woman as he was with her. Exactly, as he knew, the rest
of the crew had been. There was something sexually animated, and compelling,
about Joanna Franks. Something about the way she flashed her eyes when she
spoke; something about the way her tongue lightly licked the corners of her
mouth after a plate of mutton chops and peas at some low-roofed tavern
alongside the canal; something wickedly and calculatedly controlled about her,
as she'd drunk her own full share of liquor - that happily awaited,
worry-effacing liquor that all the boatmen (including Wootton) drank so
regularly along their journeys. And Oldfield had taken possession of her - of
that Wootton was quite sure! Taken her in one of the pitch-black
transit-tunnels when he, Wootton, had gladly taken Oldfield's 6d, and
'legged' the Barbara Bray slowly towards that pin-point of light which
had gradually grown ever larger as darkly he'd listened to the strangely
exciting noises of the love-making taking place in the bunk below him. Towns,
too, had taken Oldfield's 6d in a tunnel further south. And both Towns
and Musson - the lanky, lecherous-eyed Musson! - knew only too well what was
going on, soon wanting a share of things for themselves. No surprise, then,
that nasty incident when Towns had gone for Musson - with a knife!

As agreed, Thomas Wootton provided
her with the lantern. The night, though dark, was dry and still; and the flame
nodded only spasmodically as she took it, and leaped lightly off the Barbara
Bray - her bonnet around her head, her shoes on her feet - on to the
tow-path bank where, very soon, she had disappeared from the youth who now kept
looking straight ahead of him, a smile around his wide, lascivious mouth.

It was not unusual, of course, for
women passengers to jump ashore at fairly regular intervals from a narrow-boat:
female toiletry demanded a greater measure of decorum than did that for men.
But Joanna might be gone a little longer than was usual that night ... so she'd
said.

She stood back in the undergrowth,
watching the configuration of the boat melt deeper and deeper into the night.
Then, gauging she was out of ear-shot of the crew, she called out the man's
name - without at first receiving a reply: then again; then a third time -
until she heard a rustling movement in the bushes beside her, against the stone
wall of a large mansion house - and a suppressed, tense, 'Shsh!'

The night air was very still, and her voice had
carried far too clearly down the canal, with both the youth at the helm, and
the man with the stoical horse, turning round simultaneously to look into the
dark. But they could see nothing; and hearing nothing further, neither
of them was giving the matter much further thought.

But one of the men supposedly
asleep had heard it, too!

Meanwhile  Joanna
and  her  accomplice
had  flitted stealthily along the
row of small, grey-stoned, terraced cottages which lined the canal at Thrupp,
keeping to the shadows; then, gliding unobserved past the darkened, silent
windows of the Boat Inn, they moved, more freely now, along the short
hedge-lined lane that led to the Oxford-Banbury highway.

For the Barbara Bray, the
next three miles of the Oxford Canal would interpose the Roundham, Kidlington
Green, and Shuttleworth's locks - the latter just north of the basin of water
known as Duke's Cut. Negotiation of these locks (so carefully calculated!)
would afford appropriate opportunity. No real problem. Much more difficult had
been the arrangements for meeting each other; and certainly Oldfield, more than
once, had looked at Joanna suspiciously in the last twenty-four hours as she
had taken (but of necessity!) her diurnal and nocturnal promenades. She knew,
though, how to deal with Oldfield, the skipper of the Barbara Bray ...

'Everything ready?'

He nodded, brusquely. 'Don't talk
now!'

They walked across to a covered
carrier's wagon which stood, a piebald horse between its shafts, tethered to a
beech tree just beside the verge. The moon appeared fitfully from behind the
slow-moving cloud; not a soul was in sight.

'Knife?' he asked.

'I sharpened it.'

He nodded with a cruel
satisfaction.

She took off her cloak and handed
it to him; taking, in return, the one he passed to her - similar to her own,
though cheaper in both cloth and cut, and slightly longer.

'You didn't forget the
handkerchief?'

Quickly she re-checked, drawing
from the right-hand pocket of her former cloak the small, white square of
linen, trimmed with lace, the initials J.F. worked neatly in pink silk in one
corner.

Clever touch!

'She's - she's in there?' Joanna
half-turned to the back of the wagon, for the first time her voice sounding
nervous, though unexpectedly harsh.

He jerked his head, once, his small
eyes bright in the heavily bearded face.

'I don't really want to see her.'

'No need!' He had taken the
lantern; and when the two of them had climbed up to the front of the wagon, he
shone it on a hand-drawn map, his right forefinger pointing to a bridge over
the canal, some four-hundred yards north of Shuttleworth's Lock. 'We go down to
here! You wait there, and catch up with them, all right? Then get on board
again. Then after that - after you get through the lock - you . . .’

'What we agreed!'

'Yes. Jump in! You can stay in the
water as long as you like. But be sure no one sees you getting out! The
wagon'll be next to the bridge. You get in! And lie still! All right? I'll be
there as soon as I've ...’

Joanna took the knife from her
skirt. 'Do you want me to do it?'

'No!' He took the knife quickly.

'No?'

'It's just,' he resumed, 'that her
face, well - well, it's gone blackl'

'I thought dead people usually went
white,' whispered Joanna.

The man climbed on to the
fore-board, and helped her up, before disappearing briefly into the darkness of
the covered cart; where, holding the lantern well away from the face, he lifted
the dead woman's skirts and with the skill of a surgeon made an incision of
about five or six inches down the front of her calico knickers.

The man was handing Joanna two
bottles of dark-looking 'Running Horse' ale, when he felt the firm grip of her
hand on his shoulder, shaking, shaking, shaking . . .

'Some soup for you, Mr Morse?'

It was Violet.

(Not the soup.)

Chapter Twenty-eight

Mendacity is a system that we live
in. Liquor is one way out and death's the other

(Tennessee
Williams, Cat on a Hot Tin
Roof)

The 'Report' was a regular feature of all the
wards in the JR2, comprising a meeting of hospital and medical staff at the
change-over points between the Early, Late, and Night shifts. In several of the
wards, the weekends offered the chance for some top consultants and other
senior medical personnel to concentrate their attention on such sidelines as
boating and BMWs. But in many of the semi-surgical wards, like Ward 7C, the
Reports went on very much as at any other times; as they did on what was now
the second Sunday of Morse's stay in hospital.

The 1 p.m. meeting that day was, in
fact, well attended: the Senior Consultant, a junior houseman, Sister Maclean,
Charge Nurse Stanton, and two student nurses. Crowded into Sister's small
office, the group methodically appraised the patients in the ward, briefly
discussing convalescences, relapses, prognoses, medications, and associated
problems.

Morse, it appeared, was no longer
much of a problem.

'Morse!' The hint of a smile could
be observed on the Consultant's face as he was handed the relevant notes.

'He's making fairly good progress,'
Sister asserted, slightly defensively, like some mother at a Parents' Evening
hearing that her child was perhaps not working as hard as he should be.

'Some of us,' confided the
Consultant (handing back the notes) 'would like to persuade these dedicated
drinkers that water is a wonderful thing. I wouldn't try to persuade you, of
course, Sister, but . . . '

For a minute or two Sister
Maclean's pale cheeks were flooded with a bright-pink suffusion, and one of the
student nurses could barely suppress a smile of delight at the Dragon's
discomfiture. But oddly, the other of the two, the Fair Fiona, was suddenly
aware of lineaments and colouring in Sister's face that could have made it
almost beautiful.

'He doesn't seem to drink that much,
does he?' suggested the young houseman, his eyes skimming the plentiful notes,
several of which he had composed himself.

The Consultant snorted
contemptuously: 'Nonsense!' He flicked his finger at the offending sheets.
'Bloody liar, isn't he? Drunkards and diabetics!' - he turned to the houseman -
'I've told you that before, I think?'

It was wholly forgivable that for a
few seconds the suspicion of a smile hovered around the lips of Sister Maclean,
her cheeks now restored to their wonted pallidity.

'He's not diabetic—' began the
houseman.

'Give him a couple of years!'

'He is on the mend, though.' The
houseman (and rightly!) was determined to claim some small credit for
the reasonably satisfactory transit of Chief Inspector Morse through the NHS.

'Bloody lucky! Even I was thinking
about cutting half his innards away!'

'He must be a fundamentally strong
sort of man,' admitted Sister, composure now fully recovered.

'I suppose so,' conceded the
Consultant, 'apart from his stomach, his lungs, his kidneys, his liver -
especially his liver. He might last till he's sixty if he does what we tell him
- which I doubt.'

'Keep him another few days, you
think?'

'No!' decided the Consultant, after
a pause. 'No! Send him home! His wife'll probably do just as good a job as we
can. Same medication - out-patients' in two weeks - to see me. OK?'

Eileen Stanton was about to correct
the Consultant on his factual error when a nurse burst into the office. 'I'm
sorry, Sister - but there's a cardiac arrest, I think - in one of the Amenity
Beds.'

'Did he die?' asked Morse.

Eileen, who had come to sit on his
bed, nodded sadly. It was mid-afternoon.

'How old was he?'

'Don't know exactly. Few years
younger than you, I should think.' Her face was glum. 'Perhaps if ...’

'You look as you could do with a
bit of tender loving care yourself,' said Morse, reading her thoughts.

'Yes!' She looked at him and
smiled, determined to snap out of her mopishness. 'And you, my good sir,
are not going to get very much more of our wonderful loving care - after today.
We're kicking you out tomorrow - had quite enough of you!'

‘I’m going out, you mean?' Morse
wasn't sure if it was good news or bad news; but she told him.

'Good news, isn't it?'

‘I shall miss you.'

'Yes, I shall . . . ' But Morse
could see the tears welling up in her eyes.

'Why don't you tell me what's
wrong?' He spoke the words softly; and she told him. Told him about her
wretched week; and how kind the hospital had been in letting her switch her
normal nights; and how kind, especially, Sister had been . . . But the
big tears were rolling down her cheeks and she turned away and held one hand to
her face, searching with the other for her handkerchief. Morse put his own
grubby handkerchief gently into her hand, and for a moment the two sat together
in silence.

‘I’ll tell you one thing,' said
Morse at last. 'It must be pretty flattering to have a couple of fellows
fighting over you.'

'No! No, it isn't!' The tears were
forming again in the large, sad eyes.

'No! You're right. But listen! It
won't do you any good at all - in fact' (Morse whispered) 'it'll make you feel
far worse. But if I'd been at that party of yours -when they were
fighting over you - I'd have taken on the pair of 'em! You'd have had three
men squabbling over you - not just two.'

She smiled through her tears, and
wiped her wet cheeks, already feeling much better. 'They're big men, both of
them. One of them takes lessons in some of those Martial Arts.'

'All right - Id've lost! Still have
fought for you, though, wouldn't I? Remember the words of the poet?
Better to have fought and lost than . . . something . . . something . . .
' (Morse himself had apparently forgotten the words of the poet.)

She brought her face to within a
few inches of his, and looked straight into his eyes: 'I wouldn't have minded a
little bit if you had lost, providing you'd let me look after you.'

'You have been looking after
me,' said Morse, 'and thank you!'

Getting to her feet, she said no
more. And Morse, with a little wistfulness, watched her as she walked away.
Perhaps he should have told her that she'd meant 'provided', not 'providing'?
No! Such things, Morse knew, were no great worry to the majority of his fellow
men and women.

But they were to him.

Chapter Twenty-nine

I think it frets the saints in
heaven to see

How many desolate
creatures on the earth

Have learnt the
simple dues of fellowship

And social comfort, in a hospital

(Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora
Leigh)

There is a sadness which invariably and
mysteriously accompanies the conclusion of any journey, and the end of any
sojourn. Whether or not such sadness is a presage of the last journey we all
must take; whether or not it is, more simply, a series of last, protracted
goodbyes - it is not of any import here to speculate. But for Morse, the news
that he was forthwith to be discharged from the JR2 was simultaneously
wonderful and woeful. Music awaited him? Indeed! Soon he would be luxuriating
again in Wotan's Farewell from the last act of Die Walkure; and turning
up Pavarotti fff from one of the Puccini’s - certainly in mid-morning,
when his immediate neighbours were always out and about on their good works for
Oxfam. Books, too. He trusted that the Neighbourhood Watch had done its duty in
North Oxford, and that his first edition of A Shropshire Lad (1896) was
still in its place on his shelves, that slim, white volume that stood proudly
amongst its fellows, carrying no extra insurance-cover, like a Royal Prince without
a personal bodyguard. Yes, it would be good to get home again: to please
himself about what he listened to, or read, or ate ... or drank. Well, within
reason. Yet, quite certainly, he would miss the hospital! Miss the nurses, miss
the fellow-patients, miss the routine, miss the visitors miss so much about the
institution which, with its few faults and its many virtues, had admitted him
in his sickness and was now discharging him in a comparative health.

But the departure from Ward 7C was
not, for Morse, to be a memorable experience. When the message came - hardly a
bugle-call! - to join a group of people who were to be ambulanced up to North
Oxford, he had little opportunity of saying farewell to anyone. One of his
ward-mates ('Waggie') was performing his first post-operatively independent
ablutions in the wash-room; another was very fast asleep; one had just been
taken to the X-ray Department; the Ethiopian torch-bearer was sitting in his
bed, with Do-Not-Disturb written all over him, reading The Blue Ticket (!);
and the last was (and had been for hours) closeted behind his curtains, clearly
destined little longer for this earthly life; perhaps, indeed, having already
said his own farewells to everybody. As for the nurses, most were bustling
purposively about their duties (one or two new faces, anyway), and Morse
realized that he was just another patient, and one no longer requiring that
special care of just one week ago. Eileen he had not expected to see again, now
back to her normal Nights, as she'd told him. Nor was Sister herself anywhere
to be seen as he was wheeled out of the ward by a cheerful young porter with a
crew-cut and ear-rings. The Fair Fiona, though, he did see - sitting patiently
in the next bay beside an ancient citizen, holding a sputum-pot in front of his
dribbling lips. With her free hand she waved, and mouthed a 'Good luck!'. But
Morse was no lip-reader and, uncomprehending, he was pushed on through the exit
corridor where he and his attendant waited for the service-lift to arrive at
Level 7.

Chapter Thirty

Lente currite, noctis equi!

(Oh
gallop slow, you horses of the night!)

(Ovid, Amores)

Although Mrs Green had kept Morse's partial
central-heating partially on, the flat seemed cold and unwelcoming. It would
have been good for anyone to be there to welcome him: certainly (and
especially) Christine - or Eileen, or Fiona; even, come to think of it, the
dreaded Dragon of the Loch herself. But there was no one. Lewis had not been in
to clear up the stuff stuck through the letter-box, and Morse picked up two
white-enveloped Christmas cards (one from his insurance company, with the
facsimiled signature of the managing director); and his two Sunday newspapers.
Such newspapers, although there was an occasional permutation of titles, invariably
reflected the conflict in Morse's mind between the Cultured and the Coarse -
the choice between the front page of the present one, Synod in Dispute over
Disestablishment, and Sex Slave's Six-Week Ordeal in Silk-lined Coffin of
the other. If Morse chose the latter first (as, in fact, he did) at least he
had the excuse that it was undoubtedly the finer headline. And this Sunday, as
usual, he first flicked through the pages of full-breasted photographs and
features on Hollywood intrigues and Soap infidelities. Then, he made himself a
cup of instant coffee (which he much preferred to 'the real thing') before
settling down to read about the most recent fluctuations on the world's
stock-markets, and the bleak prospects for the diseased and starving millions
of the world's unhappy continents.

At half-past five the phone rang,
and Morse knew that if he had one wish only it would be for the caller to be
Christine.

The caller was Christine.

Not only had she located the rare
(and extraordinarily valuable) book of which Morse had enquired, but she had
spent an hour or so that afternoon ('Don't tell anyone!') reading through the
relevant pages, and discovering ('Don't be disappointed!') that only one short
chapter was given over to the interview, between Samuel Carter and an ageing
Walter Towns, concerning the trial of the boatmen.

'That's wonderful!' said Morse.
'Where are you ringing from?'

'From, er, from home.' (Why the
hesitation?)

'Perhaps—'

'Look!' she interrupted. 'I've made
a photocopy. Would you like me to send it through the post? Or I could—'

'Could you read it quickly over the
phone? It's fairly short, you say?'

'I'm not a very good reader.'

‘Put the phone down - and I'll ring
you back! Then we can talk as long as we like.'

'I'm not as hard up as all that,
you know.'

'All right - fire away!'

'Page 187, it begins - ready?'

'Ready, miss!'

'Of the persons encountered in
Perth in these last months of 1884 was a man called Walter Towns. Although he
was known as a local celebrity, I found it difficult to guess the quality which
had avowedly brought such renown to the rather - nay, wholly! - miserable
specimen to whom I soon was introduced. He was a small man, of only some five
feet in stature, thin, and of a gaunt mien, with deeply furrowed creases down
each of his cheeks from eye to mouth; furthermore, his exceedingly sallow
complexion had remained untouched by the rays of a sun that is powerful in this
region, and his hollow aspect was further enhanced by the complete absence of
teeth in the upper jaw. Yet his eyes spoke a latent (if limited) intelligence;
and also a certain dolefulness, as if he were remembering things done long ago
and things done ill. In truth, the situation pertaining to this man was fully
as melodramatic as my readers could have wished; for he had been reprieved from
the gallows with minutes only to spare. It was with the utmost interest and
curiosity, therefore, that I questioned him.

A woman had been
murdered near Oxford in 1860, on the local canal, and suspicion had centred on
the crew of a narrowboat plying south towards London. The four members of the
crew, including both Towns himself and a lad of some fourteen years, had duly
been arrested and brought to Court. Whilst the youth had been acquitted, the
three others had been convicted, and incarcerated in the gaol in the city of
Oxford, awaiting public execution. It was here, two or three minutes following
the final visit of the Court Chaplain to the prisoners in their condemned
cells, that Towns had received the news of his reprieve. Few humans, certainly,
can have experienced a peripeteia' (Christine here reverted to the spelling)
'so dramatic to their fortunes. Yet my conversation with Towns proved a matter
of some considerable disappointment. Barely literate as the man was (though
wholly understandably so) he was also barely comprehensible. His West Country
dialect (as I straightway placed it) was to such an extent o'erlaid with the
excesses of the Australian manner of speech that I could follow some of his
statements only with great difficulty. In short, the man I now met seemed
ill-equipped to cope with the rigours of life - certainly those demanded of a
free man. And Towns was a free man, after serving his
fifteen years' penal servitude in the Longbay Penitentiary. A broken, witless
man; a man old before his time (he was but 47), a veteran convict (or
crawler ) who had experienced the ineffable agonies of a man faced
with execution on the morrow.

Concerning the gruesome
and macabre events invariably associated with the final hours of such
criminals, I could learn but little. Yet a few facts may be of interest to my
readers. It is clear, for example, that the prisoners each breakfasted on
roasted lamb, with vegetables, although it seems probable from Towns' hazy
recollection that such or similar breakfasts had been available during the
whole period following the fixing of the date for their execution. More
distressing, from Towns' viewpoint, was being denied access to his fellow
criminals; and if I understood the unfortunate man aright it was this
deprivation which had been the hardest thing for him to bear.
Whether he had slept little or not at all during the fateful night, Towns could
not well remember; nor whether he had prayed for forgiveness and deliverance.
But a miracle had occurred!

Surprisingly, it
had not been the hanging itself which had been the focal-point of Towns'
tortured thoughts that night. Rather it had been the knowledge of the public
interest aroused in the case - the notoriety, the infamy, the horror, the
abomination, the grisly spectacle, the fame; a fame which might bring
those hapless men to walk the last few, fatal yards with a degree of fortitude
which even the most pitiless spectators could admire.

Of the crime
itself, Towns protested his complete innocence - a protestation not without
precedent in criminal archives! But his recollection of the canal journey - and
especially of the victim herself, Joanna Franks - was vivid and most poignant.
The woman had been, in Towns' eyes, quite wondrously attractive, and it may
cause no surprise that she became, almost immediately, the object of the men's
craving, and the cause of open jealousies. Indeed, Towns recalled an occasion
when two of the crew (the two who were eventually hanged) had come to blows
over that provocative and desirable woman. And one of them with a knife! Even
the young boy, Harold Wootton, had come under her spell, and the older woman
had without much doubt taken advantage of his infatuation. At the same time,
from what Towns asserted, and from the manner of his assertion, I am of the
view that he himself did not have sexual dealings with the woman.

There is one
interesting addendum to be made. In the first indictment (as I have subsequently
read) the charge of either rape or theft would possibly have been prosecuted
with more success than that of murder. Yet it was to be the charge of murder
that was brought in the second trial. In similar instances, we may observe that
the minor charge will frequently be suppressed when the major charge appears
the more likely to be sustained. Was this, then, the reason why Towns seemed
comparatively loquacious about the suggestion of theft'? I know not. But
it was his belief, as recounted to me, that Wootton had rather more interest in
theft than in rape. After all, the availability of sexual dealings in 1860 was
hardly, as now, a rarity along the English canals.'

'Well, that's it! I'll put it in
the post tonight, so you should—'

'Can't you call round, and bring
it?'

'Life's, well, it's just a bit
hectic at the minute,' she replied, after a little, awkward silence.

'All right!' Morse needed no
further excuses. Having dipped the thermometer into the water, he'd found the
reading a little too cold for any prospect of mixed bathing.

'You see,' said Christine, 'I - I'm
living with someone—'

'And he doesn't think you should go
spending all your time helping me.'

'I kept talking about you, too,'
she said quietly.

Morse said nothing.

'Is your address the same as in the
telephone directory? E. Morse?'

'That's me! That is I, if you
prefer it.'

'What does the E stand
for? I never knew what to call you.'

'They just call me
Morse .'

'You won't forget me?' she asked,
after a little pause.

'I'll try to, I suppose.'

Morse thought of her for many
minutes after he had cradled the phone. Then he recalled the testimony of
Samuel Carter, and marvelled that a researcher of Carter's undoubted experience
and integrity could make so many factual errors in the course of three or four
pages: the date of the murder; Towns's accent; Towns's age; Wootton's Christian
name; the dropping of the rape charge . . . Very interesting, though. Why,
Morse had even guessed right about that dust-up with the knife! Well, almost
right: he'd got the wrong man, but . . .

Chapter Thirty-one

The second coastline is turned
towards Spain and the west, and off it lies the island of Hibernia, which
according to estimates is only half the size of Britain

(Julius
Caesar, de Bello Gallico -on
the geography of Ireland)

Ten minutes later the phone rang again, and
Morse knew in his bones that it was Christine Greenaway.

It was Strange.

'You're out then, Morse - yes?
That's good. You've had a bit of a rough ride, they tell me.'

'On the mend now, sir. Kind of you
to ring.'

'No great rush, you know -
about getting back, I mean. We're a bit understaffed at the minute, but give
yourself a few days - to get over things. Delicate thing, the stomach, you
know. Why don't you try to get away somewhere for a couple of days - new
surroundings - four-star hotel? You can afford it, Morse.'

'Thank you, sir. By the way,
they've signed me off for a fortnight - at the hospital.'

'Fortnight? A fort-night?'

'It's, er, a delicate thing, the
stomach, sir.'

'Yes, well

'I'll be back as soon as I can,
sir. And perhaps it wouldn't do me any harm to take your advice - about getting
away for a little while.'

'Do you a world of good! The wife's
brother' (Morse groaned inwardly) 'he's just back from a wonderful holiday.
Ireland - Southern Ireland - took the car - Fishguard-Dun Laoghaire - then the
west coast - you know, Cork, Kerry, Killarney, Connemara - marvellous, he said.
Said you couldn't have spotted a terrorist with a telescope!'

It had been kind of Strange to ring; and
as he sat in his armchair Morse reached idly for the World Atlas from his
'large-book' shelf, in which Ireland was a lozenge shape of green and yellow on
page 10 - a country which Morse had never really contemplated before. Although
spelling errors would invariably provoke his wrath, he confessed to himself
that he could never have managed 'Dun Laoghaire', even with a score of
attempts. And where was Kerry? Ah yes! Over there, west of Tralee - he was on
the right bit of the map - and he moved his finger up the coast to Galway Bay.
Then he saw it: Bertnaghboy Bay! And suddenly the thought of going over
to Connemara seemed overwhelmingly attractive. By himself? Yes, it probably
had to be by himself; and he didn't mind that, really. He was somewhat of a
loner by temperament - because though never wholly happy when alone he was
usually slightly more miserable when with other people. It would have been good
to have taken Christine, but . . . and for a few minutes Morse's thoughts
travelled back to Ward 7C. He would send a card to Eileen and Fiona; and one to
'Waggie' Greenaway, perhaps? Yes, that would be a nice gesture: Waggie had been
out in the wash-room when Morse had left, and he'd been a pleasant old—

Suddenly Morse was conscious of the
tingling excitement in the nape of his neck, and then in his shoulders. His
eyes dilated and sparkled as if some inner current had been activated; and he
sat back in the armchair and smiled slowly to himself.

What, he wondered, was the routine in the Irish
Republic for exhumation'?

Chapter Thirty-two

Oh what a tangled web we weave When
first we practise to deceive!

(Sir Walter
Scott, Marmion)

'You what? asked a flabbergasted Lewis,
who had called round at 7.30 p.m. ('Not till The Archers has finished'
had been his strict instruction.) He himself had made an interesting little
discovery - well, the WPC in St Aldates' had made it, really - and he was
hoping that it might amuse Morse in his wholly inconsequential game of 'Find
Joanna Franks'. But to witness Morse galloping ahead of the Hunt, chasing (as
Lewis was fairly certain) after some imaginary fox of his own, was, if not
particularly unusual, just a little disconcerting.

'You see, Lewis' (Morse was
straightway in full swing) 'this is one of the most beautiful little deceptions
we've ever come across. The problems inherent in the case - almost all
of them - are resolved immediately once we take one further step into
imaginative improbability.'

'You've lost me already, sir,'
protested Lewis.

'No, I haven't! Just take one more
step yourself. You think you're in the dark? Right? But the dark
is where we all are. The dark is where I was, until I took one more step
into the dark. And then, when I'd taken it, I found myself in the sunshine,'

'I'm very glad to hear it,' mumbled
Lewis.

'It's like this. Once I read that story, I was
uneasy about it - doubtful, uncomfortable. It was the identification bit
that worried me - and it would have worried any officer in the Force today, you
know that! But, more significantly, if we consider the psychology of the
whole—'

'Sir!' (It was almost unprecedented
for Lewis to interrupt the Chief in such peremptory fashion.)

'Could we - could you - please
forget all this psychological referencing? I just about get my fill of it all
from some of these Social Services people. Could you just tell me, simply and—'

'I'm boring you - is that what
you're saying?'

'Exactly what I'm saying, sir.'

Morse nodded to himself happily.
'Let's put it simply. then, all right? I read a story in hospital. I get
interested. I think - think - the wrong people got arrested, and some of
'em hanged, for the murder of that little tart from Liverpool. As I say, I
thought the identification of that lady was a bit questionable; and when I read
the words the boatmen were alleged to have used about her - well, I knew there
must be something fundamentally wrong. You see—'

'You said you'd get to the point,
sir.'

'I thought that Joanna's father -
No! Let's start again' Joanna's father gets a job as an insurance rep. Like
most people in that position he gets a few of his own family, if they're daft
enough, to take out a policy with him. He gets a bit of commission, and he's
not selling a phoney product, anyway, is he? I think that both Joanna and her first
husband, our conjurer friend, were soon enlisted in the ranks of the
policy-holders. Then times get tough; and to crown all the misfortunes, Mr
Donavan, the greatest man in all the world, goes and dies. And when Joanna's
natural grief has abated - or evaporated, rather - she finds she's done
very-nicely-thank-you out of the insurance taken on his life. She receives
£100, with profits, on what had been a policy taken out only two or three years
previously. Now, £100 plus in 1850-whenever was a very considerable sum of
money; and Joanna perhaps began, at that point, to appreciate the potential for
malpractice in the system. She began to see the insurance business not
only as a potential future benefit, but as an actual, present source
of profit. So, after Donavan's death, when she met and married Franks, one of
the first things she insisted on was his taking out a policy - not on his
life - but on hers. Her father could, and did, effect such a
transaction without any trouble, although it was probably soon after this that
the Notts and Midlands Friendly Society got a little suspicious about
Joanna's father, Carrick - Daniel Carrick - and told him his services were no
longer—'

'Sir!'

Morse held up his right hand.
'Joanna Franks was never murdered, Lewis! She was the mastermind - mistressmind
- behind a deception that was going to rake in some considerable, and
desperately needed, profit. It was another woman, roughly the same age
and the same height, who was found in the Oxford Canal; a woman provided by
Joanna's second husband, the ostler from the Edgware Road, who had
already made his journey - not difficult for him - with horse and
carriage from London, to join his wife at Oxford. Or, to be more accurate,
Lewis, at some few points north of Oxford. You remember in the Colonel's
book?' (Morse turned to the passage he had in mind.) 'He - here it is!
- he explained how in consequence of some information he had come into
Oxfordshire - Bloody liar!'

Lewis, now interested despite
himself, nodded a vague concurrence of thought. 'So what you're saying, sir, is
that Joanna worked this insurance fiddle and probably made quite a nice little
packet for herself and for her father as well?'

'Yes! But not only that. Listen! I may just be
wrong, Lewis, but I think that not only was Joanna wrongly identified as the
lawful wife of Charles Franks - by Charles Franks - but that Charles Franks was
the only husband of the woman supposedly murdered on the Barbara
Bray. In short, the Charles Franks who broke down in tears at
the second trial was none other than Donavan.'

'Phew!'

'A man of many parts: he was an
actor, he was a conjurer, he was an impersonator, he was a swindler, he was a
cunning schemer, he was a callous murderer, he was a loving husband, he was a
tearful witness, he was the first and only husband of Joanna Franks: F.
T. Donavan! We all thought - you thought – even I thought - that there were
three principal characters playing their roles in our little drama; and now I'm
telling you, Lewis, that in all probability we've only got two. Joanna;
and her husband - the greatest man in all the world; the man buried out on the
west coast of Ireland, where the breakers come rolling in from the Atlantic ...
so they tell me .. ..'

Chapter Thirty-three

Stet Difficilior Lectio

(Let the more difficult of the
readings stand)

(The principle applied commonly by editors
faced with variant readings in ancient manuscripts)

Lewis was silent. How else? He had a precious
little piece of evidence in his pocket, but while Morse's mind was still
coursing through the upper atmosphere, there was little point in interrupting
again for the minute. He put the envelope containing the single photocopied
sheet on the coffee-table - and listened further.

'In the account of Joanna's last
few days, we've got some evidence that she could have been a bit deranged; and
part of the evidence for such a possibility is the fact that at some point she
kept calling out her husband's name - Franks! Franks! Franks!
Agreed? But she wasn't calling out that at all - she was calling her
first husband, Lewis! I was sitting here thinking of Waggie
Greenaway—'

'And his daughter,' mumbled Lewis,
inaudibly.

'— and I thought of
Hefty Donavan. F. T. Donavan. And I'll put my next month's salary
on that F standing for Frank ! Huh! Who's ever heard of
a wife calling her husband by his surname?'

'I have, sir.'

'Nonsense! Not these days.'

'But it's not these days. It
was—'

'She was calling Frank Donavan -
believe me!'

'But she could have been
queer in the head, and if so—'

'Nonsense!'

'Well, we shan't ever know for
sure, shall we, sir?'

'Nonsense!'

Morse sat back with the
self-satisfied, authoritative of a man who believes that what he has called
'nonsense three times must, by the laws of the universe, be necessarily untrue.
'If only we knew how tall they were - Joanna and . . . and whoever the
other woman was. But then is just a chance, isn't there? That cemetery,
Lewis—'

'Which do you want first, sir? The
good news or the bad news?'

Morse frowned at him. 'That's . . .
?' pointing to the envelope.

'That's the good news.'

Morse slowly withdrew and studied
the photocopied sheet.

‘Not the Coroner's Report, sir, but
the next best thing.

‘This fellow must have seen her
before the post-mortem. Interesting, isn't it?'

‘Very interesting.'

The report was set out on an
unruled sheet of paper, dated, and subscribed by what appeared as a 'Dr
Willis', for writing was not only fairly typical of the semi-legibility forever
associated with the medical profession, but was also beset by a confusion with
'm's, 'w's, 'n's, and 'u's - all these letters appearing to be incised with a
series of what looked like semi-circular fish-hooks. Clearly the notes of an
orderly-minded local doctor called upon to certify death and to take the
necessary action - in this case, almost certainly, to pass the whole business
over to some higher authority. Yet there were one or two real nuggets of gold
here: the good Willis had made an exact measurement of height, and had written
one or two most pertinent (and, apparently, correct) observations. Sad,
however, from Morse's point of view, was the unequivocal assertion made
here that the body was still warm. It must have been this document
which had been incorporated into the subsequent post-mortem findings,
thenceforth duly reiterated both in Court and in the Colonel's history. And it
was a pity; for if Morse had been correct in believing that another body had
been substituted for that of Joanna Franks, that woman must surely have been
killed in the early hours of the morning, and could not therefore have
been drowned some three or four hours later. Far too risky. It was odd,
certainly, that the dead woman's face had turned black so very quickly; but
there was no escaping the plain fact that the first medical man who had
examined the corpse had found it still warm.

Is that what the report had said,
though - 'still warm'? No! No, it hadn't! It just said 'warm' ... Or did it?

Carefully Morse looked again at the
report – and sensed the old familiar tingling around his shoulders. Could it
be? Had everyone else read the report wrongly? In every case the various notes
were separated from each other by some form of punctuation - either dashes
(eight of them) or full stops (four) or question-marks (only one). All the
notes except one, that is: the exception being that 'body warm / full
clothes . . . ' etc. There was neither a dash nor a stop between these two,
clearly disparate, items - unless the photocopier had borne unfaithful witness.
No! The solution was far simpler. There had been no break requiring any
punctuation! Morse looked again at line 10 of the report,

and considered three further facts. Throughout,
the 's's were written almost as straight vertical lines; of the fifteen or so
'i' dots, no fewer than six had remained un-dotted; and on this showing Willis
seemed particularly fond of the word 'was'. So the line should perhaps - should
certainly! - read as follows: 'on mouth (rt side) - body was in'. The body 'was
in full clothes'! The body was not 'warm'; not] in Morse's book. There,
suddenly, the body was very, very cold.

Lewis, whilst fully accepting the
probability of the alternative reading, did not appear to share the excitement which
was now visibly affecting Morse; and it was time for  the bad news.

'No chance of checking this out in
the old Summertown graveyard, sir.'

'Why not? The gravestones are still
there, some of them - it says so, doesn't it? - and I've seen them myself — '

'They were all removed, when they
built the flats there.'

'Even those the Colonel mentioned?'

Lewis nodded.

Morse knew full well, of course,
that any chance of getting an exhumation order to dig up a corner of the
greenery in a retirement-home garden was extremely remote. Yet the thought that
he might have clinched his theory ... It was not a matter of supreme moment,
though, he knew that; it wasn't even important in putting to rights a past and
grievous injustice. It was of no great matter to anyone - except to himself.
Ever since he had first come into contact with problems, from his early
schooldays inwards - with the meanings of words, with algebra, with detective
stories, with cryptic clues - he had always been desperately anxious to know
the answers, whether those answers were wholly satisfactory or whether
they were not. And now, whatever had been the motive leading to that far-off
murder, he found himself irked in the extreme to realize that the woman - or a
woman - he sought had until so very recently been lying in a marked grave
in North Oxford. Had she been Joanna Franks, after all? No chance of knowing
now - not for certain. But if the meticulous Dr Willis had been correct in his
measurements, she couldn't have been Joanna, surely?

After Lewis had gone, Morse made a phone call.

'What was the average height of
women in the nineteenth century?'

'Which end of the nineteenth
century, Morse?'

'Let's say the middle.'

'Interesting question!'

'Well?'

'It varied, I suppose.'

'Come on!'

'Poor food, lack of protein - all that sort of
stuff. Not very big, most of 'em. Certainly no bigger than the Ripper's victims
in the 1880s: four foot nine, four foot ten, four foot eleven - that sort of
height: well, that's about what those dear ladies were. Except one.
Stride, wasn't her name? Yes, Liz Stride. They called her Long Liz
- so much taller than all the other women in the work-houses. You follow that,
Morse?'

'How tall was she - Long
Liz ?'

'Dunno.'

'Can you find out?'

'What, now?'

'And ring me back?'

'Bloody hell!'

Thanks.'

Morse was three minutes into the
love duet from Act One of Die Walkiire when the phone rang.

'Morse? Five foot three.'

Morse whistled.

'Pardon?'

'Thanks, Max! By the way, are you
at the lab all day tomorrow? Something I want to bring to show you.'

So the 'petite' little figure had
measured three quarters of an inch more than 'Long Liz' Stride! And her
shoes as Lewis had ascertained, were about size 5! Well, well, well! Virtually
every fact now being unearthed (though that was probably not le mot juste) was
bolstering Morse's bold hypothesis. But, infuriatingly, there was, as it
seemed, no chance whatever of establishing the truth. Not, at any rate, the
truth regarding Joanna Franks.

Chapter Thirty-four

Marauding louts have shot the
moping owl:

The tower is
silent 'neath the wat'ry moon;

But Lady Porter, lately on the
prowl

Will sell the
place for pennies very soon

(E. O. Parrot,
The Spectator)

The communication from the Insurance Company had
been a third and final demand for his previous month's premium; and the first
thing Morse did the following morning was to write out a cheque, with a brief
letter of apology. He understood very little about money, but a dozen or so
years previously he had deemed it provident (as it transpired, Prudential) to
pay a monthly premium of £55 against a lump sum of £12,000, with profits, at
sixty -an age looming ever closer. He had never given a thought about what would
happen if he pre-deceased his policy. No worry for him: for the present
he had no financial worries, no dependants, a good salary, and a mortgage that
would finish in two years' time. He knew it, yes! - compared with the vast
majority of mankind he was extremely fortunate. Still, he ought perhaps to
think of making a will . . .

Coincidentally, he had been talking
to Lewis about insurances the day before and (he admitted it to himself)
largely making it all up as he went along. But it was far from improbable,
wasn't it - what he'd guessed? Those insurance fiddles? He looked out the first
material that Christine had brought in to him at the JR2, and once again
studied the facts and figures of the Nottinghamshire and Midlands Friendly
Society for 1859:

Joanna had been born in 1821, so
she was thirty-eight in 1859. If she'd taken out a policy a year, two years
earlier, that would be - age next birthday thirty-six - an annual premium of
£3. 8s, 9d. Under £7, say, for a return of £100. Not bad at all.
And if Donavan had already pocketed a similar packet . . .

Morse left his flat in mid-morning (the first
excursion since his return) and posted his single letter. He met no one he knew
as he turned right along the Banbury Road, and then right again into Squitchey
Lane; where, taking the second turning on his left, just past the evangelical
chapel (now converted into a little group of residences) he walked down Middle
Way. It was a dark, dankish morning, and a scattering of rooks (mistaking,
perhaps, the hour) squawked away in the trees to his right. Past Bishop Kirk
Middle School he went on, and straight along past the attractive terraced
houses on either side with their mullioned bay-windows - and, on his left, there
it was: Dudley Court, a block of flats built in cinnamon-coloured brick on
the site of the old Summertown Parish Cemetery. A rectangle of lawn, some fifty
by twenty-five yards was set out behind a low containing wall, only about
eighteen inches high, over which Morse stepped into the grassy plot planted
with yew-trees and red-berried bushes. Immediately to his left, the area was
bounded by the rear premises of a Social Club; and along this wall, beneath the
straggly branches of winter jasmine, and covered with damp beech-leaves, he
could make out the stumps of four or five old headstones, broken off at their
roots like so many jagged teeth just protruding from their gums. Clearly, any
deeper excavation to remove these stones in their entirety had been thwarted by
the proximity of the wall; but all the rest had been removed, perhaps several
years ago now - and duly recorded no doubt in some dusty box of papers on the
shelves of the local Diocesan Offices. Well, at least Morse could face one
simple fact: no burial evidence would be forthcoming from these fair lawns.
None! Yet it would have been good to know where the stone had marked (as the
Colonel had called it) the 'supra-corporal' site of Joanna Franks.

Or whoever.

He walked past Dudley Court itself where a
Christmas tree, bedecked with red, green, and yellow bulbs, was already
switched on; past the North Oxford Conservative Association premises, in which
he had never (and would never) set foot; past the Spiritualist Church, in which
he had never (as yet) set foot; past the low-roofed Women's Institute HQ, in
which he had once spoken about the virtues of the Neighbourhood Watch Scheme;
and finally, turning left, he came into South Parade, just opposite the Post
Office - into which he ventured once a year and that to pay the Lancia's
road-tax. But as he walked by the old familiar land-marks, his mind was far
away, and the decision firmly taken. If he was to be cheated of finding one of
his suspects, he would go and look for the other! He needed a break. He would have
a break.

There was a travel agency
immediately across the street, and the girl who sat at the first desk to the
right smiled brightly.

'Can I help you, sir?'

'Yes! I'd like' (Morse sat himself
down) I'd like to book a holiday, with a car, in Ireland - the Republic, that
is.'

Later that day, Morse called at the
William Dunn School of Pathology in South Parks Road.

'Have a look at these for me, will
you?'

Refraining from all cynical
comment, Max looked dubiously across at Morse over his half-lenses.

'Max! All I want to know is—'

'— whether they come from M S
or Littlewoods?'

'The tear, Max - the tear.'

'Tear? What tear?' Max
picked up the knickers with some distaste and examined them (as it seemed to
Morse) in cursory fashion. 'No tear here, Morse. Not the faintest sign of any
irregular distension of the fibre tissue - calico,  by the way, isn't it?'

'I think so.'

'Well, we don't need a microscope
to tell us it's a cut: neat, clean, straight-forward cut, all right?'

'With a knife?'

'What the hell else do you cut
things with?'

'Cheese-slicer? Pair of—?'

'What a wonderful thing, Morse, is
the human imagination!'

It was a wonderful thing, too, that
Morse had received such an unequivocal answer to one of his questions; the very
first such answer, in fact, in their long and reasonably amicable
acquaintanceship.

Chapter Thirty-five

Heap not on this mound

Roses that she loved so well;

Why bewilder her with roses

That she cannot see or smell?

(Edna St Vincent Millay, Epitaph)

Inspector Mulvaney spotted him parking the car
in the 'Visitor' space. When the little station had been converted ten years
earlier from a single detached house into Kilkearnan's apology for a
crime-prevention HQ, the Garda had deemed it appropriate that the four-man
squad should be headed by an inspector. It seemed, perhaps, in retrospect,
something of an over-reaction. With its thousand or so inhabitants, Kilkeafnan
regularly saw its ration of fisticuffs and affray outside one or more of the
fourteen public-houses; but as yet the little community had steered clear of
any involvement in international smuggling or industrial espionage. Here, even
road accidents were a rarity - though this was attributable more to the comparative
scarcity of cars than to the sobriety of their drivers. Tourists there were, of
course - especially in the summer months; but even they, with their Rovers and
BMWs, were more often stopping to photograph the occasional donkey than causing
any hazard to the occasional drunkard.

The man parking his Lancia in the
single (apart from his own) parking-space, Mulvaney knew to be the English
policeman who had rung through the previous day to ask for help in locating a
cemetery (for, as yet, no stated purpose) and who thought it was probably the
one overlooking Bertnaghboy Bay - that being the only burial ground marked on
the local map. Mulvaney had been able to assure Chief Inspector Morse (such was
he) that indeed it would be the cemetery which lay on the side of a hill to the
west of the small town: the local dead were always likely to be buried there,
as Mulvaney had maintained - there being no alternative accommodation.

From the lower window, Mulvaney
watched Morse with some curiosity. It was not every day (or week, or month)
that any contact was effected between the British Police and the Garda; and the
man who was walking round to the main (only) entrance looked an interesting
specimen: mid-fifties, losing his whitish hair, putting on just a little too
much weight, and exhibiting perhaps, as was to be hoped, the tell-tale signs of
liking his liquor more than a little. Nor was Mulvaney disappointed in the man
who was shown into his main (only) office.

'Are you related to Kipling's
Mulvaney?' queried Morse.

'No, sor! But that was a good
question - and educashin, that's a good thing, too!'

Morse explained his unlikely, ridiculous,
selfish mission, and Mulvaney warmed to him immediately. No chance whatsoever,
of course, of any exhumation order being granted, but perhaps Morse might be
interested in hearing about the business of grave-digging in the Republic? A
man could never dig a grave on a Monday, and that for perfectly valid
reasons, which he had forgotten; and in any case it wasn't Monday, was it? And
if a grave was dug, even on a Monday, it had always - always, sor!
- to be in the morning, or at least the previous evening. That was an important
thing, too, about all the forks and shovels: placed across the open grave, they
had to be, in the form of the holy cross, for reasons which a man of Morse's
educashin would need no explanation, to be sure. Last, it was always the custom
for the chief mourner to supply a little quantity of Irish whiskey at the
graveside for the other members of the saddened family; and for the
grave-diggers, too, of course, who had shovelled up the clinging, cloggy soil.
'For sure, 'tis always a t'irsty business, sor, that working of the soil!'

So Morse, the chief mourner, walked
out into the main (only) High Street, and purchased three bottles of Irish
malt. An understanding had been arrived at, and Morse knew that whatever the
problems posed the Donavan-Franks equation, the left-hand side would be solved
(if solved it could be) with the full sympathy and (unofficial)
co-operation of the Irish Garda.

In his mind's eye, Morse had envisaged
a bank of arc-lights, illuminating a well-marked grave, with barricades erected
around the immediate area, a posse of constables to keep the public from
prying, and press photographers training their telescopic lenses on the site.
The time? That would be 5.30 a.m. - the usual exhumation hour. And excitement
would be intense.

It was not to be.

Together, Morse and Mulvaney had
fairly easily located the final habitation of the greatest man in all the
world. In all, there must have been about three or four hundred graves within
the walled area of the hill-side cemetery. Half a dozen splendidly sculptured
angels and madonnas kept watch here and there over a few former dignitaries,
and several large Celtic crosses marked other burial-plots. But the great majority
of the dead lay unhonoured here beneath untended, meaner-looking memorials.
Donavan's stone was one of the latter, a poor, mossed-and-lichened thing, with
white and ochre blotches, and no more than two feet high, leaning back at an
angle of about 20 degrees from the vertical. So effaced was the weathered stone
that only the general outlines of the lettering could be followed - and that
only on either side of a central disintegration:

‘That's him,' said Morse
triumphantly. It looked as if his name had been Frank.

'God rest his soul!' added
Mulvaney. ' - that's if it's there, of course.'

Morse grinned, and wished he'd
known Mulvaney long ago. 'How are you going to explain . . . ?'

'We are digging yet another grave,
sor. In the daylight - and just as normal.'

It was all quite quick. Mulvaney had bidden the
two men appointed to the task to dig a clean rectangle to the east of the
single stone; and after getting down only two or three feet, one of the spades
struck what sounded like, and was soon revealed to be, a wooden coffin. Once
all the dark-looking earth had been removed and piled on each side of the
oblong pit, Morse and Mulvaney looked down to a plain coffin-top, with no plate
of any sort screwed into it. The wood, one-inch elm-boarding, and grooved round
the top, looked badly warped, but in a reasonable state. There seemed no reason
to remove the complete coffin; and Morse, betraying once again his inveterate
horror of corpses, quietly declined the honour of removing the lid.

It was Mulvaney himself, awkwardly
straddling the hole, his shoes caked with mud, who bent down and pulled at the
top of the coffin, which gave way easily, the metal screws clearly having
disintegrated long ago. As the board slowly lifted, Mulvaney saw, as did Morse,
that a whitish mould hung down from the inside of the coffin-lid; and in the
coffin itself, covering the body, a shroud or covering of some sort was
overspread with the same creeping white fungus.

Round the sides at the bottom of
the coffin, plain for all to see, was a bed of brownish, dampish sawdust,
looking as fresh as if the body which lay on it had been buried only yesterday.
But what body?

' Tis wonderfully well preserved,
is it not, sor? 'Tis the peat in the soil that's accountin' forrit.'

This from the first grave-digger,
who appeared more deeply impressed by the wondrous preservation of the wood
than by the absence of any body. For the coffin contained no body at all. What
it did contain was a roll of carpet, of some greenish dye, about five feet in
length, folded round what appeared to have been half a dozen spaded squares of
peat. Of Donavan there was no trace whatsoever - not even a torn fragment from
the last handbill of the greatest man in all the world.

Chapter Thirty-six

A man's learning dies with him;
even his virtues fade out of remembrance; but the dividends on the stocks he
bequeaths may serve to keep his memory green

(Oliver
Wendell Holmes, The Professor
at the Breakfast Table)

Morse grew somewhat fitter during the days
following his return from Ireland; and very soon, in his own judgement at
least, he had managed to regain that semblance of salubrity and strength which
his GP interpreted as health. Morse asked no more.

He had recently bought himself the
old Furtwängler recording of The Ring; and during the hours of Elysian
enjoyment which that performance was giving him, the case of Joanna Franks, and
the dubious circumstances of the Oxford Tow-path Mystery, assumed a slowly
diminishing significance. The whole thing had brought him some recreative
enjoyment, but now it was finished. Ninety-five per cent certain (as he was)
that the wrong people had been hanged in 1860, there was apparently nothing
further he could do to dispel that worrying little five per cent of doubt.

Christmas was coining up fast, and
he was glad not to have that tiring traipsing round the shops - no stockings,
no scent to buy. He himself received half a dozen cards; two invitations to
Drinks Evenings; and a communication from the JR2:

The Nursing Staff of the John Radcliffe Hospital

request the pleasure of your company on the
evening of Friday, 22nd December,

from 8 p.m. until midnight,

at the Nurses' Hostel, Headington Hill, Oxford.

Disco Dancing, Ravishing Refreshments, Fabulous
Fun!

Please Come! Dress informal. RSVP.

The printed card was signed, in blue Biro, 'Ward
7C - and followed by a single 'X'.

It was on Friday, 15th December, a week before
the scheduled party, that Morse's eye caught the name in the Oxford Times' 'Deaths'
column:

DENISTON, Margery - On December
10th, peacefully at her home in Woodstock, aged 78 years. She wished her body
to be given to medical research. Donations gratefully received, in honour of
the late Colonel W. M. Deniston, by the British Legion Club, Lambourn.

Morse thought back to the only time
he'd met the quaint old girl, so proud as she had been of her husband's work -
a work which had brought Morse such disproportionate interest; a work which
he'd not even had to pay for. He signed a cheque for £20, and stuck it in a
cheap brown envelope. He had both first- and second-class stamps to hand, but
he chose a second-class: it wasn't a matter of life and death, after all.

He would (he told himself) have
attended a funeral service, if she'd been having one. But he was glad she
wasn't: the stern and daunting sentences from the Burial Service, especially in
the A.V., were ever assuming a nearer and more personal threat to his peace of
mind; and for the present that was something he could well do without. He
looked up the British Legion's Lambourn address in the telephone directory, and
after doing so turned to 'Deniston, W. M.'. There it was: 46 Church Walk,
Woodstock. Had there been any family? It hardly appeared so, from the obituary
notice. So? So what happened to things, if there was no one to leave them to?
As with Mrs Deniston, possibly? As with anyone childless or unmarried ...

It was difficult parking the Lancia, and finally
Morse took advantage of identifying himself to a sourpuss of a traffic warden
who reluctantly sanctioned a temporary straddling of the double-yellows twenty
or so yards from the grey-stoned terraced house in Church Walk. He knocked on
the front door, and was admitted forthwith.

Two persons were in the house: a
young man in his middle twenties who (as he explained) had been commissioned
by Blackwells to catalogue the few semi-valuable books on the late Denistons'
shelves; and a great-nephew of the old Colonel, the only surviving relative,
who (as Morse interpreted matters) was in for a very pretty little inheritance
indeed, if recent prices for Woodstock property were anything to judge by.

To the latter, Morse immediately
and openly explained what his interest was: he was begging nothing - apart from
the opportunity to discover whether the late Colonel had left behind any notes
or documents relating to Murder on the Oxford Canal. And happily the
answer was 'yes' -albeit a very Limited 'yes'. In the study was a pile of
manuscript, and typescript, and clipped to an early page of the manuscript was
one short letter - a letter with no date, no sender's address, and no envelope:

Our dear Daniel,

We do both trust you are keeping
well these past months. We shall be in Derby in early Sept. when we hope we
shall be with you. Please say to Mary how the dress she did was very successful
and will she go on with the other one if she is feeling recovered.

Yours Truely and
Afectionatly, Matthew

That was all. Enough, though, for the Colonel to
feel that it was worth preserving! There was only one 'Daniel' in the case,
Daniel Carrick from Derby; and here was that one piece of primary-source
material that linked the Colonel's narrative in a tangible, physical way to the
whole sorry story. Agreed, Daniel Carrick had never figured all that
prominently in Morse's thinking; but he ought to have done. He was
surely just as damningly implicated as the other two in the deception - the twin
deception - which had seen the Notts and Midlands Friendly Society having to
fork out, first for the death of the great uncoffined Donavan, and then for the
death of the enigmatic Joanna, the great undrowned.

Morse turned over the faded, deeply
creased letter and saw, on the back, a few pencilled notes, pretty certainly in
the Colonel's hand: 'No records from Ins. Co. - Mrs C. very poorly at this
time? Not told of J.'s death? 12 Spring St. still occupied 12.4.76!'

There it was then - palpable paper
and writing, and just a finger-tip of contact with one of the protagonists in
that nineteenth-century drama. As for the two principal! actors, the only
evidence that could have been forthcoming about them was buried away with their
bodies. And where Joanna was buried - or where the greatest man in all the
world - who knew, or who could ever know?

Chapter Thirty-seven

Modern dancers give a sinister
portent about our times. The dancers don't even look at one another. They are
just a lot of isolated individuals jiggling in a kind of self-hypnosis

(Agnes de
Mille, The New York Times)

The party-goers were fully aware that when the
caretaker said midnight he meant 11.55 p.m.; but few had managed to arrive at
the Nurses' Hostel before 9 p.m. In any case, the event was never destined to
be of cosmic significance, and would have little to show for itself apart from
a memory or two, a few ill-developed photographs, and a great deal of clearing
up the following morning.

As soon as he took his first steps
across the noisy, throbbing, flashing room - it was now 10.30 p.m. - Morse
realized that he had made a tragic error in accepting the invitation. 'Never go
back!' - that was the advice he should have heeded; yet he had been fool enough
to recall the white sheets and the Fair Fiona and the Ethereal Eileen. Idiot!
He sat down on a rickety, slatted chair, and sipped some warm insipid 'punch'
that was handed out in white plastic cups to each new arrival. Constituted, if
taste were anything to go by, of about 2% gin, 2% dry Martini, 10% orange
juice, and 86% lemonade, it was going to take a considerable time, by Morse's
reckoning, before such Ravishing Refreshments turned him on; and he had just
decided that the best thing about it was the little cubes of apple floating on
the top when Fiona detached her sickly-looking beau from the dance-floor and
came up to him.

'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.'

Chapter Thirty-eight

The very designation of the term
'slum' reflects a middle-class attitude to terrace-housing, where grand values
are applied to humble situations

(James Stevens
Curl, The Erosion of Oxford)

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.

The latter, the sorry-looking
object of Morse's pilgrimage, stood on the corner, the sign 'Burton Road'
still fastened to its side-wall, although no sign of Burton Road itself was any
longer visible. Below the sign, a wooden gate, hanging forlornly from one of
its rusted hinges, led to a small patch of back-yard, choked with litter and
brownish weeds, and cluttered with a kiddy's ancient tricycle and a brand-new
trolley from a supermarket. The dull-red bricks of the outer walls were flaking
badly, and the single window-frame here had been completely torn away, leaving
the inside of the mean little abode open to the elements. Morse poked his face
through the empty frame, across the blackened sill, before turning away with a
sickened disgust: in one corner of the erstwhile kitchen was what appeared to
be a pile of excrement; and beside it, half a loaf of white bread, its slices
curled and mildew-green.

'Not a pretty sight, is it?'
whispered Lewis, standing at Morse's shoulder.

'She was brought up here,' said
Morse quietly. 'She lived here with her mother . . . and her father . . .

' . . . and her brother,' added Lewis.

Yes! Morse had forgotten the
brother, Joanna's younger brother, the boy named after his father - forgotten
him altogether.

Reluctantly Morse left the small back-yard, and
slowly walked round to the front again, where he stood in the middle of the
deserted street and looked at the little terrace-house in which Joanna
Carrick-Donavan-Franks had probably spent - what? - the first twenty or so
years of her life. The Colonel hadn't mentioned exactly where she was born, but
. . . Morse thought back to the dates: born in 1821, and married to the great
man in 1842. How reassuring it would have been to find a date marked on one of
the houses! But Morse could see no sign of one. If the house had been built by
the 1820s, had she spent those twenty years in and around that pokey little
kitchen, competing for space with the sink and the copper and the mangle and the
cooking-range and her parents . . . ? And her younger brother? He, Morse, had
his own vivid recollections of a similarly tiny kitchen in a house which (as he
had been told) had been demolished to make way for a carpet-store. But he'd
never been back. It was always a mistake to go back, because life went on
perfectly well without you, thank-you-very-much, and other people got along
splendidly with their own jobs - even if they were confined to selling carpets.
Yes, almost always a mistake: a mistake, for example, as it had been to go back
to the hospital; a mistake as it would have been (as he'd intended) to go along
to the Derby Royal and nonchalantly announce to Nessie that he just happened to
be passing through the city, just wanted to congratulate her on becoming the
Big White Chief . . .

Lewis had been talking whilst these
and similar thoughts were crossing and recrossing Morse's mind, and he hadn't
heard a word of what was said.

'Pardon, Lewis?'

'I just say that's what we used to
do, that's all - over the top of the head, as I say, and put the date against
it.'

Morse, unable to construe such
manifest gobbledegook, nodded as if with full understanding, and led the way to
the car. A large white-painted graffito caught his eye, sprayed along the lower
wall of a house in the next terrace: HANDS OFF CHILE - although it was
difficult to know who in this benighted locality was being exhorted to such
activity - or, rather, inactivity. TRY GEO. LUMLEY's TEA 1s 2d, seemed a more
pertinent notice, painted over the bricked-up first-floor window of the next
corner house, the lettering originally worked in a blue paint over a
yellow-ochre background, the latter now a faded battleship-grey; a notice (so
old was it) that Joanna might well have seen it every day as she walked along
this street to school, or play - a notice from the past which a demolition gang
of hard-topped men would soon obliterate from the local-history records when
they swung their giant skittle-balls and sent the side-wall crumbling in a
shower of dust.

Just like the Oxford-City-Council
Vandals when . . .

Forget it, Morse!

'Where to now, sir?'

It took a bit of saying, but he
said it: 'Straight home, I think. Unless there's something else you want to
see?'

Chapter Thirty-nine

And what you
thought you came for

Is only a shell, a husk of meaning

From which the purpose breaks only
when it is

fulfilled

If at all. Either you had no
purpose

Or the purpose is beyond the end
you figured

And is altered in fulfilment

(T. S. Eliot, Little Gidding)

Morse seldom engaged in any conversation in a
car, and he was predictably silent as Lewis drove the few miles out towards the
motorway. In its wonted manner, too, his brain was meshed into its complex
mechanisms, where he was increasingly conscious of that one little irritant. It
had always bothered him not to know, not to have heard - even the smallest
things:

'What was it you were saying back
there?'

'You mean when you weren't
listening?'

'Just tell me, Lewis!'

'It was just when we were children,
that's all. We used to measure how tall we were getting. Mum always used to do
it - every birthday - against the kitchen wall. I suppose that's what reminded
me, really - looking in that kitchen. Not in the front room - that was the best
wallpaper there; and, as I say, she used to put a ruler over the top of our
heads, you know, and then put a line and a date . . . '

Again, Morse was not listening.

'Lewis! Turn round and go back!'

Lewis looked across at Morse with
some puzzlement.

'I said just turn round,' continued
Morse - quietly, for the moment. 'Gentle as you like - when you get the chance,
Lewis - no need to imperil the pedestrians or the local pets. But just turn
round?

Morse's finger on the kitchen switch produced only
an empty 'click', in spite of what looked like a recent bulb in the fixture
that hung, shadeless, from the disintegrating plaster-boards. The yellowish,
and further yellowing, paper had been peeled away from several sections of the
wall in irregular gashes, and in the damp top-corner above the sink it hung
away in a great flap.

'Whereabouts did you use to measure
things, Lewis?'

' 'Bout here, sir.' Lewis stood
against the inner door of the kitchen, his back to the wall, where he placed
his left palm horizontally across the top of his head, before turning round and
assessing the point at which his fingertips had marked the height.

'Five-eleven, that is - unless I've
shrunk a bit.'

The wallpaper at this point was
grubby with a myriad fingerprints, appearing not to have been renovated for
half a century or more; and around the non-functioning light-switch the plaster
had been knocked out, exposing some of the bricks in the partition-wall. Morse
tore a strip from the yellow paper, to reveal a surprisingly well-preserved,
light-blue paper beneath. But marked memorials to Joanna, there were none; and
the two men stood silent and still there, as the afternoon seemed to grow
perceptibly colder and darker by the minute.

'It was a thought, though, wasn't
it?' asked Morse.

'Good thought, sir!'

'Well, one thing's certain! We are not
going to stand here all afternoon in the gathering gloom and strip all
these walls of generations of wallpaper.'

'Wouldn't take all that long, would
it?'

'What? All this bloody stuff—'

'We'd know where to look.'

'We would?'

'I mean, it's only a little house;
and if we just looked along at some point, say, between four feet and five feet
from the floor - downstairs only, I should think—'

'You're a genius - did you know
that?'

'And you've got a good torch in the
car.'

'No,' admitted Morse. I’m afraid—'

'Never mind, sir! We've got about
half an hour before it gets too dark.'

It was twenty minutes to four when Lewis emitted
a child-like squeak of excitement from the narrow hallway. 'Something here,
sir! And I think, I think—' 'Careful! Careful' muttered Morse,
coming nervously alongside, a triumphant look now blazing in his blue-grey
eyes.

Gradually the paper was pulled away
as the last streaks of that December day filtered through the filthy skylight
above the heads of Morse and Lewis, each of them looking occasionally at the
other with wholly disproportionate excitement. For there, inscribed on the
original plaster of the wall, below three layers of subsequent papering - and
still clearly visible - were two sets of black-pencilled lines: the one to the
right marking a series of eight calibrations, from about 3' 6 of the
lowest one to about 5' of the top, with a full date shown for each; the one to
the left with only two calibrations (though with four dates) - a diagonal of
crumbled plaster quite definitely precluding further evidence below.

For several moments Morse stood
there in the darkened hallway and gazed upon the wall as if upon some holy
relic.

'Get a torch, Lewis! And a
tape-measure!'

'Where—?'

'Anywhere. Everybody's got a torch,
man.'

'Except you, sir!'

'Tell 'em you're from the Gas Board
and there's a leak in Number 12.'

‘The house isn't on gas.'

'Get on with it, Lewis!'

When Lewis returned, Morse was
still considering his wall-marks - beaming as happily at the eight lines on the
right as a pools-punter surveying a winning-line of score-draws on the Treble
Chance; and, taking the torch, he played it joyously over the evidence. The new
light (as it were) upon the situation quickly confirmed that any writing below
the present extent of their findings was irredeemably lost; it also showed a
letter in between the two sets of measurements, slightly towards the right, and
therefore probably belonging with the second set.

The letter 'D'!

Daniel!

The lines on the right must mark
the heights of Daniel Carrick; and, if that were so, then those to the left
were those of Joanna Franksl

'Are you thinking what I'm
thinking, Lewis?'

'I reckon so, sir.'

'Joanna married in 1841 or 1842' -
Morse was talking to himself as much as to Lewis - 'and that fits well because
the measurements end in 1841, finishing at the same height as she was in 1840.
And her younger brother, Daniel, was gradually catching her up - about the same
height in 1836, and quite a few inches taller in 1841.'

Lewis found himself agreeing. 'And
you'd expect them that way round, sir, wouldn't you? Joanna first; and then her
brother, to Joanna's right.'

'Ye-es.' Morse took the white
tape-measure and let it roll out to the floor. 'Only five foot, this.'

'Don't think we're going to need a
much longer one, sir.'

Lewis was right. As Morse held the
'nought-inches' end of the tape to the top of Joanna's putative measurements,
Lewis shone the torch on the other end as he knelt on the dirty red tiles. No!
A longer tape-measure was certainly not needed here, for the height measured
only 4' 9 , and as Lewis knew, the woman who had been pulled out of Duke's
Cut had been 5' 3^3/4 - almost seven inches taller
than Joanna had been after leaving Spring Street for her marriage! Was it
possible - even wildly possible - that she had grown those seven inches between
the ages of twenty-one and thirty-eight? He put his thoughts into words:

'I don't think, sir, that a woman
could have—'

'No, Lewis - nor do I! If not
impossible, at the very least unprecedented, surely.'

'So you were right, sir . . . '

'Beyond any reasonable doubt? Yes,
I think so.'

'Beyond all doubt?' asked
Lewis quietly.

'There'll always be that one per
cent of doubt about most things, I suppose.'

'You'd be happier, though, if—'

Morse nodded: 'If we'd found just
that one little thing extra, yes. Like a 'J' on the wall here or ... I
don't know.'

'There's nothing else to find,
then, sir?'

'No, I'm sure there isn't,' said
Morse, but only after hesitating for just a little while.

Chapter Forty

The world is round and the place which may seem
like the end may also be only the beginning

(Ivy Baker Priest, Parade)

It sounded an anti-climactic question: 'What do
we do now, sir?'

Morse didn't know, and his mind was
far away: 'It was done a long time ago, Lewis, and done ill,' he said slowly.

Which was doubtless a true
sentiment, but it hardly answered the question. And Lewis pressed his point -
with the result that together they sought out the site-foreman, to whom,
producing his warranty-card, Morse dictated his wishes, making the whole thing
sound as if the awesome authority of MI5 and MI6 alike lay behind his
instructions regarding the property situated at Number 12 Spring Street,
especially for a series of photographs to be taken as soon as possible of the
pencil-marks on the wall in the entrance hall. And yes, the site-foreman
thought he could see to it all without too much trouble; in fact, he was a bit
of a dab hand with a camera himself, as he not so modestly admitted. Then,
after Lewis had returned torch and tape-measure to a slightly puzzled-looking
householder, the afternoon events were over.

It was five’ minutes to six when Lewis finally
tried once again to drive away from the environs of Derby (North) and to make
for the A52 junction with the Ml (South). At 6 p.m., Morse leaned forward and
turned on the car-radio for the news. One way or another it had been a bad
year, beset with disease, hunger, air crashes, railway accidents, an oil-rig
explosion, and sundry earthquakes. But no cosmic disaster had been reported since
the earlier one o'clock bulletin, and Morse switched off - suddenly aware of
the time.

'Do you realize it's gone opening
time, Lewis?'

'No such thing these days, sir.'

'You know what I mean!'

'Bit early—'

'We've got something to celebrate,
Lewis! Pull in at the next pub, and I'll buy you a pint.'

'You will?’

Morse was not renowned for his
generosity in treating his subordinates - or his superiors - and Lewis smiled
to himself as he surveyed the streets, looking for a pub-sign; it was an
activity with which he was not unfamiliar. I’m driving, sir.'

'Quite right, Lewis. We don't want
any trouble with the police.'

As he sat sipping his St Clements and listening
to Morse conducting a lengthy conversation with the landlord about the
wickedness of the lager-brewers, Lewis felt inexplicably content. It had been a
good day; and Morse, after draining his third pint with his wonted rapidity,
was apparently ready to depart.

'Gents?' asked Morse.

The landlord pointed the way.

'Is there a public telephone I
could use?'

'Just outside the Gents.'

Lewis thought he could hear Morse
talking over the phone - something to do with a hospital; but he was never a
man to eavesdrop on the private business of others, and he walked outside and
stood waiting by the car until Morse re-appeared.

'Lewis - I, er - I'd like you just to call round
quickly to the hospital, if you will. The Derby Royal. Not too far out of our
way, they tell me.'

'Bit of stomach trouble again,
sir?'

'No!'

'I don't think you should have had
all that beer, though—'

'Are you going to drive me there or
not, Lewis?'

Morse, as Lewis knew, was becoming increasingly
reluctant to walk even a hundred yards or so if he could ride the distance, and
he now insisted that Lewis park the Lancia in the AMBULANCES ONLY area just
outside the Hospital's main entrance.

'How long will you be, sir?'

'How long? Not sure, Lewis. It's my
lucky day, though, isn't it? So I may be a little while.'

It was half an hour later that Morse emerged to
find Lewis chatting happily to one of the ambulance-men about the road-holding
qualities of the Lancia family.

'All right, then, sir?'

'Er - well. Er . . . Look, Lewis!
I've decided to stay in Derby overnight.'

Lewis's eyebrows rose.

'Yes! I think - I think I'd like to
be there when they take those photographs - you know, in, er . . . '

‘I can't stay, sir! I'm on duty
tomorrow morning.'

'I know. I'm not asking you to, am
I? I'll get the train back - no problem - Derby, Birmingham, Banbury — easy!'

'You sure, sir?'

'Quite sure. You don't mind do you, Lewis?'

Lewis shook his head. 'Well, I
suppose, I'd better—'

'Yes, you get off. And don't drive
too fast!'

'Can I take you - to a hotel or
something?'

'No need to bother, I'll - I'll
find something.'

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

'Do I?'

As the Lancia accelerated along the approach
road to the Ml (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.

Epilogue

The name of a man is a numbing blow
from which he never recovers

(Marshall
McLuhan, Understanding Media)

On 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:

Eagleston

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.

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

2Many 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).

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

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

eBook Info

Identifier:

Colin Dexter - The Wench Is Dead

Title:

The Wench Is Dead

Creator:

Colin Dexter

Copyrights:

Hmmm, looks like another genie got out of the bottle

Publisher:

Me

Subject:

Mystery And Detective