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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').
Chapter Twenty-seven
Imagination, that dost so abstract us
That we are not aware, not even when
A thousand trumpets sound about our ears!
(Dante, Purgatorio)
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 Joa
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.
Joa
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 Joa
As agreed, Thomas Wootton provided her with the lantern. The night, though dark, was dry and still; and the flame nodded only spasmodically as she took it, and leaped lightly off the Barbara Bray – her bo
It was not unusual, of course, for women passengers to jump ashore at fairly regular intervals from a narrow-boat: female toiletry demanded a greater measure of decorum than did that for men. But Joa
She stood back in the undergrowth, watching the configuration of the boat melt deeper and deeper into the night. Then, gauging she was out of ear-shot of the crew, she called out the man's name – without at first receiving a reply: then again; then a third time – until she heard a rustling movement in the bushes beside her, against the stone wall of a large mansion house – and a suppressed, tense, 'Shsh!'
The night air was very still, and her voice had carried far too clearly down the canal, with both the youth at the helm, and the man with the stoical horse, turning round simultaneously to look into the dark. But they could see nothing; and hearing nothing further, neither of them was giving the matter much further thought.
But one of the men supposedly asleep had heard it, too!
Meanwhile Joa
For the Barbara Bray, the next three miles of the Oxford Canal would interpose the Roundham, Kidlington Green, and Shuttleworth's locks – the latter just north of the basin of water known as Duke's Cut. Negotiation of these locks (so carefully calculated!) would afford appropriate opportunity. No real problem. Much more difficult had been the arrangements for meeting each other; and certainly Oldfield, more than once, had looked at Joa
'Everything ready?'
He nodded, brusquely. 'Don't talk now!'
They walked across to a covered carrier's wagon which stood, a piebald horse between its shafts, tethered to a beech tree just beside the verge. The moon appeared fitfully from behind the slow-moving cloud; not a soul was in sight.