Colin Dexter - The Wench Is Dead

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.

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 21s 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 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').

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!