Страница 18 из 39
'Men's questions!' he heard a voice say. 'Just the sort of thoughts that would occur to an ageing MCP like you!'
There was a second general consideration which, from the point of view of criminal justice, struck Morse as considerably more cogent and a good deal less contentious. In the court-room itself, the odds did seem, surely, to have been stacked pretty heavily against the crew of the Barbara Bray – with 'presumption of i
Yes, and there was a third general point – one that seemed to Morse most curious: the charges both of theft and of Rape had, for some reason, been dropped against the boatmen. Was this because the Prosecution had been wholly confident, and decided to go for the graver charge of Murder – with the expectation (fully justified) that they had sufficient evidence to convict 'Rory' Oldfield and Co. on the capital indictment? Or was it, perhaps, because they had too little confidence in their ability to secure conviction on the lesser charges? Obviously, as Morse seemed vaguely to remember from his schooldays, neither rape nor theft would have been considered too venial an offence in the middle of the last century, but… Or was it just possible that these charges were dropped because there was no convincing evidence to support them? And if so, was the indictment for murder entered upon by the Prosecution for one simple reason – that it presented the only hope of bringing those miserable men to justice? Certainly, as far as multiple rape was concerned, the evidence must have been decidedly dodgy – as the Judge in the first trial had pronounced. But what about theft? The prerequisite of theft was that the aggrieved party possessed something worth the stealing. So what was it that poor Joa
There were those shoes again, too! Did Joa
What a strange case it had been! The more he thought about it, the greater the number of questions that kept occurring to Morse's mind. He had a good deal of experience in cases where the forensic and pathological evidence had been vital to the outcome of a court case. But he wasn't particularly impressed with the conclusions that (presumably) must have been drawn from Mr Samuels' comparatively scientific findings. For Morse (wholly, it must be admitted, without medical or scientific qualifications) the state of the dress, and the bruising described, would have been much more consistent with Joa
What of this Jarnell fellow? The Prosecution must have been considerably impressed, at the first hearing, with his potential testimony. Why, otherwise, would anone be willing to postpone a trial for six months – on the word of a gaolbird? Even the Colonel had given the fellow a good write-up! So why was it that when he duly turned up to tell his tale, at the second trial, no one wished to listen to him? Had there been something, some knowledge, somewhere, that had caused the court to discount, or at least discredit, the disclosures his cell-mate, Oldfield, had allegedly made to him? Because whatever accusations could be levelled against Oldfield, the charge of inconsistency was not amongst them. On three occasions, after Joa
A curious little thought struck Morse at this point, and dredged itself in a corner of his brain – for future reference. And a rather bigger thought struck him simultaneously: that he needed to remember he was only playing a game with himself; only trying to get through a few days' illness with a happy little problem to amuse himself with – like a tricky cryptic crossword from The Listener. It was just a little worrying, that was all… the way the dice had been loaded all the time against those drunkards who had murdered Joa
And the niggling doubt persisted.
If they had…
Chapter Seventeen
The detective novelist, as a class, hankers after complication and ingenuity, and is disposed to reject the obvious and acquit the accused if possible. He is uneasy until he has gone further and found some new and satisfying explanation of the problem
(Dorothy L. Sayers, The Murder of Julia Wallace)
The thought that the crewmen may not have been guilty 'Joa
Unless, of course, there were some passages of evidence not reported – either from the first or the second trial? The Colonel had clearly been rather more interested in the lax morals of the boatmen than in any substantiation of the evidence, and he could just have omitted the testimony of any corroborative witnesses who might have been called. Perhaps it would be of some interest – in this harmless! game he was playing – to have a quick look through those Court Registers, if they still existed; or through the relevant copies of Jackson's Oxford Journal, which certainly did exist: as Morse knew, filed on microfiche in the Oxford Central Library. (Doubtless in the Bodley, too!) And, in any case he hadn't finished the Colonel's book yet. Why, there might be much still to be revealed in that last exciting episode! Which he now began to read.