The Wench Is Dead (9 page)

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.

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.