Colin Dexter - The Wench Is Dead

Forbidding to Joanna as the tall lock-house must have appeared that midnight, standing sentinel-like above the black waters, it presented her with her one last chance of life – had she sought asylum within its walls.

But she made no such request.

At this point, or shortly after, it appears that the terrified woman took another walk along the towpath to escape the drunken crew; but she was almost certainly back on board when the boat negotiated Gibraltar Lock. After which – and only some very short time after – she must have been out walking (yet again!) since Robert Bond, a crew-hand from the narrow-boat Isis , gave evidence that he passed her on the towpath. Bond recorded his surprise that such an attractive woman should be out walking on her own so late, and he recalled asking her if all was well. But she had only nodded, hurriedly, and passed on into the night. As he approached Gibraltar lock, Bond had met Oldfield's boat, and was asked by of its crew if he had seen a woman walking the path, the man adding, in the crudest terms, what would do to her once he had her in his clutches once again.

No one, apart from the evil boatmen on the Barbara Bray, was ever to see Joanna Franks alive again.

As with Part One, Morse found himself making a few notes (mentally, this time) as he read through the unhappy narrative. For some reason he felt vaguely dissatisfied with himself. Something was nagging at his brain about Part One; but for the present he was unable to put a finger on it. It would come back to him once he'd re-read a few pages. No hurry, was there? None. The theoretical problem which his mind had suddenly seized upon was no more than a bit of harmless, quite inconsequential amusement. And yet the doubts persisted in his brain: could anyone, anyone, read this story and not find himself questioning one or two of the points so confidently reported? Or two or three of them? Or three or four?

What was the normal pattern of entertainment for canal boatmen, like Oldfield, on those 'protracted stops' of theirs? Changing horses was obviously one of the key activities on such occasions, but one scarcely calculated to gladden every soul. Dropping in at the local knocking-shop, then? A likely port-of-call for a few of the more strongly sexed among them, most surely. And drink? Did they drink their wages away, these boatmen, in the low-beamed bars that were built along their way? How not? Why not? What else was there to do? And though drink (as the Porter once claimed) might take away the performance, who could gainsay that frequently provoked the desire? The desire, in this case, to rape a beautiful woman-passenger.

So many questions.

But if sex was at the bottom of things, why were the rape charges dropped at the first trial? Agreed, there was no biological fingerprinting in the 1850s; no genetic code that could be read into some desperate fellow's swift dilations. But even in that era, the charge of rape could be made to stick without too much difficulty; and Confucius's old pleasantry about the comparative immobility of a man with his trousers round his ankles must of sounded just as hollow then as now. Certainly to the ears of Joanna Franks.

The footnote referring to the Court Registers had been surprise, and it would be of interest, certainly to the sociologist, to read something of contemporary attitudes rape in 1859. Pretty certainly it would be a few leagues less sympathetic than that reflected in Morse's morning of The Times: 'Legal Precedent in Civil Action -£35.000 damages for Rape Victim'. Where were those Registers, though – if they still existed? They might (Morse supposed) have explained the Colonel's bracketed caveat about discrepancies. But what discrepancies? There must been something in old Deniston's mind, something that bothered him just that tiny bit. The Greeks had a word for it – parakrousis – the striking of a slightly wrong note in an othrrwise tuneful harmony.

Was that 'wrong note' struck by Mrs Laurenson, perhaps? Whatever the situation had been with Joanna, this - Laurenson woman (with her husband's full assent, one must assume) had joined the Barbara Bray for the journey down to King's Sutton with – as the reader was led to believe -a boat-load of sexually rampant dipsomaniacs. Difficult to swallow? Unless of course the wharfinger, Laurenson, was perfectly happy to get rid of his missus for the night -for any night. But such a line of reasoning seemed fanciful and there was a further possibility – a very simple, really rather a startling one: that the crew of the Barbara Bray had not been all that belligerently blotto at the time. But no. Every piece of evidence – surely! – pointed in opposite direction; pointed to the fact that the boatmens robes of honour (in Fitzgeraldian phrase) were resting, like the Confucian rapist's, only just above their boot-laces.

Boots… shoes…

What was all that about those shoes? Why were figuring so repeatedly in the story? There would have been more intimate items of Joanna's to wardrobe pilfer if the crewmen had been seeking to effect easier sexual congress. One of them might, perhaps, have been a clandestine foot-fetishist…

Morse, telling himself not to be so stupid, looked again, at the last couple of pages of the text. A bit over-written all that stuff about the sentinel-like old lock-house, look out over the dark waters. Not bad, though: and at least: made Morse resolve to drive out and see it for himself, once he was well again. Unless the planners and the developers had already pulled it down.

Like they'd pulled down St Ebbe's…

Such were some of Morse's thoughts after reading second instalment. It was quite natural that he should wish to eke out the pleasures afforded by the Colonel's text. Yet it: must be admitted that, once again, Morse had almost totally failed to conceive the real problems raised by this narrative. Usually, Morse was a league and a league in front of any competitive intellects; and even now his thought processes were clear and unorthodox. But for the time being, he far below his best. Too near the picture. He was standing where the coloured paints on the narrow-boat's sides had little chance of imposing any pattern on his eye. What he really needed was to stand that bit further back from the picture to get a more synoptic view of things. 'Synoptic' had always been one of Morse's favourite words. Quickly he re-read Part Two. But he seemed to see little more general terms than he had done earlier, although there e a few extra points of detail which had evaded him on first reading, and he stored them away, haphazardly, in his brain, there was that capital 'J', for example, that the Colonel favoured whenever he wished to emphasize the enormity of humnan iniquity and the infallibility of Jury and Judicature like the capital 'G' the Christian Churches always used for God.

Then there were those journeys through the two tunnels, when Oldfield had sat with Joanna… or when, as Morse translated things, he put his arm around the frightened girl in the eerie darkness, and told her not to be afraid…

And those last complex, confusing paragraphs! She had been desperately anxious to get off the boat and away from her tipsy persecutors – so much seemed beyond any reasonable doubt. But, if so, why, according to that selfsame evidence, had she always been so anxious to get back on again?

Airy-fairy speculation, all this; but there were at least two things that could be factually checked. 'Nothing was convenient', it had said, and any researcher worth his salt could easily verify that. What was available, at the time Joanna reached Banbury? He could also soon discover how much any alternative route to London would have cost. What, for example, was the rail-fare to London in 1859? For that matter, what exactly had been the rail-fare between Liverpool and London, a fare which appeared to have been beyond the Franks's joint financial resources?