The Wench Is Dead

Chapter Twenty-six

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').