The Wench is Dead (16 page)

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 21st 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 the
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’).

S
TANDING 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 6
d
, 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 6
d
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 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
black
!’

‘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.)

T
HE
‘R
EPORT
’
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!’