The Wench is Dead

by Colin Dexter

  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 journey, 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 found in her body.

  Mmm.

  Morse proceeded to underline in blue Biro the various, and 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 concerns with 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 boatman through the hours and the days after Joanna had met her 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: it was a fundamental principle, not only of substantive law, but of natural justice …

  ‘You comfy?’ asked Eileen, automatically pulling the 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 Notting 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 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’).

  * * *

  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.