The Wench is Dead (13 page)

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 2
¹
⁄
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.’

I
N 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 ‘D’!

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 in 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.’

D
URING 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.