The Wench is Dead Read online

  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 tow-path 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 tow-path. 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 one of its crew if he had seen a woman walking the tow-path, the man adding, in the crudest terms, what he 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.

  * * *

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  * * *

  ’Pon my word, Watson, you are coming along wonderfully. You have really done very well indeed. It is true that you have missed everything of importance, but you have hit upon the method

  (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, A Case of Identity)

  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 it 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 DNA biological fingerprinting in the 1850s; no genetic code that could be read into some desperate fellow’s swift ejaculations. But even in that era, the charge of rape could often 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 have sounded just as hollow then as now. Certainly to the ears of Joanna Franks.

  The footnote referring to the Court Registers had been a surprise, and it would be of interest, certainly to the sociologist, to read something of contemporary attitudes to rape in 1859. Pretty certainly it would be a few leagues less sympathetic than that reflected in Morse’s morning copy 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 have 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 otherwise 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 – or for any night. But such a line of reasoning seemed fanciful, and there was a further possibility – a very simple, and 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 the opposite direction; pointed to the fact that the boatmen’s 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 they figuring so repeatedly in the story? There would surely have been more intimate items of Joanna’s wardrobe to pilfer if the crewmen had been seeking to effect some 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, looking out over the dark waters. Not bad, though: and at least it 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 his 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 was 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 Morse re-read Part Two. But he seemed to see little more in general terms than he had done earlier, although there were a few extra points of detail which had evaded him on the 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 human 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?

  Interesting …

  As, come to think of it, were those double quotation marks
in the text – presumably the actual words, directly transcribed, and reported verbatim, and therefore primary source material for the crewmen’s trial. Morse looked through the interspersed quotations again, and one in particular caused his mind to linger: “coaches to London – and coaches from Oxford to Banbury”. Now, if those were the exact words Joanna had used … if they were … Why had she asked for the times of coaches ‘from Oxford to Banbury’? Surely, she should have been asking about coaches from Banbury to Oxford. Unless … unless …

  Again, it all seemed most interesting – at least to Morse. What, finally, was he to make of that drink business? Had Joanna been drinking – or had she not? There was some curious ambivalence in the text; and perhaps this may have been in the Colonel’s mind when he referred to ‘a few conflicting statements’? But no – that was impossible. Mr Bartholomew Samuels had found no alcohol in Joanna’s body, and that was that!

  Or, rather, would have been, to most men.

  The thought of drink had begun to concentrate Morse’s mind powerfully, and with great circumspection and care, Morse poured a finger of Scotch into his bedside glass, with the same amount of plain water. Wonderful! Pity that no one would ever believe his protestations that Scotch was a necessary stimulant to his brain cells! For after a few minutes his mind was flooding with ideas – exciting ideas! – and furthermore he realized that he could begin to test one or two of his hypotheses that very evening.

  That is, if Walter Greenaway’s daughter came to visit.

  * * *

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  * * *

  Th’ first thing to have in a libry is a shelf. Fr’m time to time this can be decorated with lithrachure. But th’ shelf is th’ main thing

  (Finley Peter Dunne, Mr Dooley Says)

  AS SHE WALKED down Broad Street at 7.40 a.m. the following morning (Thursday), Christine Greenaway was thinking (still thinking) about the man who had spoken to her the previous evening in Ward 7C on the top floor of the JR2. (It was only on rare occasions that she welcomed her father’s pride in his ever-loving daughter!) It wasn’t that she’d been obsessively preoccupied with the man ever since; but there had been a semi-waking, overnight awareness of him. All because he’d asked her, so nicely, to look up something for him in the Bodley. So earnest, so grateful, he’d seemed. And that was silly, really, because she’d willingly have helped him, anyway. That’s why she’d become a librarian in the first place: to be able to locate some of the landmarks in the fields of History and Literature, and to provide where she could the correct map-references for so many curious enquiries. Even as a five-year-old, with her blonde plaits reaching half-way down her bony back, she’d envied the woman in the Summertown Library who similarly located tickets somewhere in the long drawers behind the high counter; envied, even more, the woman who stamped the dates in the front of the borrowed books, and inserted each little ticket into its appropriate, oblong folder. Not that she, Christine Greenaway, performed any longer such menial tasks herself. Almost forgotten now were those inevitable queries of who wrote The Wind in the Willows; for she, Christine, was now the senior of the three august librarians who sat at the northern end of the Bodleian’s Lower Reading Room, where her daily duties demanded assistance to both senior and junior members of the University: checking slips, identifying shelf-marks, suggesting reference-sections, making and taking phone calls (one, yesterday, from the University of Uppsala). And over these last years she had felt a sense of importance and enjoyment in her job – of functioning happily in the workings of the University.

  Of course, there had been some major disappointments in her life, as there had been, she knew, with most folk. Married at twenty-two, she had been a divorcee at twenty-three. No other woman on his part; no other man on hers – although there’d been (still were) so many opportunities. No! It was simply that her husband had been so immature and irresponsible – and, above all, so boring! Once the pair of them had got down to running a home, keeping a monthly budget, checking bank-statements – well, she’d known he could never really be the man for her. And as things now stood, she could no longer stomach the prospect of another mildly ignorant, semi-aggressively macho figure of a bed-mate. Free as she was of any financial worries, she could do exactly as she wished about issues that were important to her; and she had become a modestly active member of several organizations, including Greenpeace, CND, the Ramblers’ Association, and the RSPB. Quite certainly, she would never join one of those match-making societies with the hope of finding a more interesting specimen than her former spouse. If ever she did look for another husband, he would have to be someone she could, in some way, come to respect: to respect for his conversation or his experience or his intellect or his knowledge or his – well, his anything at all, really, except a pride in his sexual prowess. So what (she asked herself) had all this got to do with him? Not much to look at, was he? Balding, and quite certainly carrying considerable excess weight around the midriff. Though, to be honest with herself, she was beginning to feel a grudging regard for those men who were just slightly overweight, perhaps because she herself seemed never able to put on a few pounds – however much she over-indulged in full-cream cakes and deep-fried fish and chips.

  Forget him! Forget him, Christine!

  Such self-admonition prevailed as she walked that morning down the Broad, past Balliol and Trinity on her left, before crossing over the road, just before Blackwell’s, and proceeding, sub imperatoribus, up the semi-circular steps into the gravelled courtyard of the Sheldonian. Thence, keeping to her right, she walked past the SILENCE PLEASE notice under the archway, and came out at last into her real home territory – the Quadrangle of the Schools.

  For many days, when six years earlier she had first started working at the Bodleian, she had been conscious of the beautiful setting there. Over the months and years, though, she had gradually grown over-familiar with what the postcards on sale in the Proscholium still called ‘The Golden Heart of Oxford’; grown familiar, as she’d regularly trodden the gravelled quad, with the Tower of the Five Orders to her left, made her way past the bronze statue of the third Earl of Pembroke, and entered the Bodleian Library through the great single doorway in the West side, beneath the four tiers of blind arches in their gloriously mellowed stone.

  Different today though – so very different! She felt once again the sharp irregularities of the gravel-stones beneath the soles of her expensive, high-heeled, leather shoes. And she was happily aware once more of the mediaeval Faculties painted over those familiar doors around the quad. In particular, she looked again at her favourite sign: SCHOLA NATURALIS PHILOSOPHIAE, the gilt capital-letters set off, with their maroon border, against a background of the deepest Oxford-blue. And as she climbed the wooden staircase to the Lower Reading Room, Christine Greenaway reminded herself, with a shy smile around her thinly delicious lips, why perhaps it had taken her so long to re-appreciate those neglected delights that were all around her.

  She hung her coat in the Librarians’ Cloakroom, and started her daily duties. It was always tedious, that first hour (7.45–8.45 a.m.), clearing up the books left on the tables from the previous day, and ensuring that the new day’s readers could be justifiably confident that the Bodley’s books once more stood ready on their appointed shelves.

  She thought back to the brief passages of conversation the previous evening, when he’d nodded over to her (only some six feet away):

  ‘You work at the Bodleian, I hear?’

  ‘Uh-huh!’

  ‘It may be – it is! – a bit of a cheek, not knowing you …’

  ‘ – but you’d like me to look something up for you.’

  Morse nodded, with a winsome smile.

  She’d known he was some sort of policeman – things like that always got round the wards pretty quickly. His eyes had held hers for a few seconds, but she had been conscious neither of their blueness nor of their authority: only their melancholy and their vulnerability. Yet she had sensed that those complic
ated eyes of his had seemed to look, somehow, deep down inside herself, and to like what they had seen.

  ‘Silly twerp, you are!’ she told herself. She was behaving like some adolescent schoolgirl, smitten with a sudden passion for a teacher. But the truth remained – that for that moment she was prepared to run a marathon in clogs and calipers for the whitish-haired and gaudily pyjamaed occupant of the bed immediately opposite her father’s.

  * * *

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  * * *

  Ah, fill the Cup: – what boots it to repeat

  How Time is slipping underneath our Feet:

  Unborn To-morrow, and dead Yesterday,

  Why fret about them if To-day be sweet!

  (Edward Fitzgerald, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam)

  HE’D BEEN RATHER vague, and it had been somewhat difficult precisely to assess what he wanted: some specific details about any assurance or insurance companies in the mid-nineteenth century – especially, if it were possible, about companies in the Midlands. Off and on, during the morning, it had taken her an hour or more to hunt down the appropriate catalogues; and another hour to locate the pertinent literature. But by lunch-time (praise be!) she had completed her research, experiencing, as she assumed, an elation similar to that of the scholars who daily dug into the treasury of her Great Library to extract their small nuggets of gold. She had found a work of reference which told her exactly what Morse (the man responsible for ruffling her wonted calm) had wanted her to find.