The Wench Is Dead (13 page)

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.'

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.

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.