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 Joanna and her accomplice had flitted stealthily along the row of small, grey-stoned, terraced cottages which lined the canal at Thrupp, keeping to the shadows; then, gliding unobserved past the darkened, silent windows of the Boat Inn, they moved, more freely now, along the short hedge-lined lane that led to the Oxford-Banbury highway.
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 Joanna suspiciously in the last twenty-four hours as she had taken (but of necessity!) her diurnal and nocturnal promenades. She knew, though, how to deal with Oldfield, the skipper of the Barbara Bray …
'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.
'Knife?' he asked.
'I sharpened it.'
He nodded with a cruel satisfaction.
She took off her cloak and handed it to him; taking, in return, the one he passed to her – similar to her own, though cheaper in both cloth and cut, and slightly longer.
'You didn't forget the handkerchief?'
Quickly she re-checked, drawing from the right-hand pocket of her former cloak the small, white square of linen, trimmed with lace, the initials J.F. worked neatly in pink silk in one corner.
Clever touch!
'She's – she's in there?' Joanna half-turned to the back of the wagon, for the first time her voice sounding nervous, though unexpectedly harsh.
He jerked his head, once, his small eyes bright in the heavily bearded face.
'I don't really want to see her.'
'No need!' He had taken the lantern; and when the two of them had climbed up to the front of the wagon, he shone it on a hand-drawn map, his right forefinger pointing to a bridge over the canal, some four-hundred yards north of Shuttleworth's Lock. 'We go down to here! You wait there, and catch up with them, all right? Then get on board again. Then after that – after you get through the lock – you…’
'What we agreed!'
'Yes. Jump in! You can stay in the water as long as you like. But be sure no one sees you getting out! The wagon'll be next to the bridge. You get in! And lie still! All right? I'll be there as soon as I've…’
Joanna took the knife from her skirt. 'Do you want me to do it?'
'No!' He took the knife quickly.
'No?'
'It's just,' he resumed, 'that her face, well – well, it's gone blackl'
'I thought dead people usually went white,' whispered Joanna.
The man climbed on to the fore-board, and helped her up, before disappearing briefly into the darkness of the covered cart; where, holding the lantern well away from the face, he lifted the dead woman's skirts and with the skill of a surgeon made an incision of about five or six inches down the front of her calico knickers.
The man was handing Joanna two bottles of dark-looking 'Running Horse' ale, when he felt the firm grip of her hand on his shoulder, shaking, shaking, shaking…
'Some soup for you, Mr Morse?'
It was Violet.
(Not the soup.)
Chapter Twenty-eight
Mendacity is a system that we live in. Liquor is one way out and death's the other
(Tennessee Williams, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof)
The 'Report' was a regular feature of all the wards in the JR2, comprising a meeting of hospital and medical staff at the change-over points between the Early, Late, and Night shifts. In several of the wards, the weekends offered the chance for some top consultants and other senior medical personnel to concentrate their attention on such sidelines as boating and BMWs. But in many of the semi-surgical wards, like Ward 7C, the Reports went on very much as at any other times; as they did on what was now the second Sunday of Morse's stay in hospital.
The 1 p.m. meeting that day was, in fact, well attended: the Senior Consultant, a junior houseman, Sister Maclean, Charge Nurse Stanton, and two student nurses. Crowded into Sister's small office, the group methodically appraised the patients in the ward, briefly discussing convalescences, relapses, prognoses, medications, and associated problems.
Morse, it appeared, was no longer much of a problem.
'Morse!' The hint of a smile could be observed on the Consultant's face as he was handed the relevant notes.
'He's making fairly good progress,' Sister asserted, slightly defensively, like some mother at a Parents' Evening hearing that her child was perhaps not working as hard as he should be.
'Some of us,' confided the Consultant (handing back the notes) 'would like to persuade these dedicated drinkers that water is a wonderful thing. I wouldn't try to persuade you, of course, Sister, but… '
For a minute or two Sister Maclean's pale cheeks were flooded with a bright-pink suffusion, and one of the student nurses could barely suppress a smile of delight at the Dragon's discomfiture. But oddly, the other of the two, the Fair Fiona, was suddenly aware of lineaments and colouring in Sister's face that could have made it almost beautiful.
'He doesn't seem to drink that much, does he?' suggested the young houseman, his eyes skimming the plentiful notes, several of which he had composed himself.
The Consultant snorted contemptuously: 'Nonsense!' He flicked his finger at the offending sheets. 'Bloody liar, isn't he? Drunkards and diabetics!' – he turned to the houseman – 'I've told you that before, I think?'
It was wholly forgivable that for a few seconds the suspicion of a smile hovered around the lips of Sister Maclean, her cheeks now restored to their wonted pallidity.
'He's not diabetic-' began the houseman.
'Give him a couple of years!'
'He is on the mend, though.' The houseman (and rightly!) was determined to claim some small credit for the reasonably satisfactory transit of Chief Inspector Morse through the NHS.
'Bloody lucky! Even I was thinking about cutting half his innards away!'
'He must be a fundamentally strong sort of man,' admitted Sister, composure now fully recovered.
'I suppose so,' conceded the Consultant, 'apart from his stomach, his lungs, his kidneys, his liver – especially his liver. He might last till he's sixty if he does what we tell him – which I doubt.'
'Keep him another few days, you think?'
'No!' decided the Consultant, after a pause. 'No! Send him home! His wife'll probably do just as good a job as we can. Same medication – out-patients' in two weeks – to see me. OK?'
Eileen Stanton was about to correct the Consultant on his factual error when a nurse burst into the office. 'I'm sorry, Sister – but there's a cardiac arrest, I think – in one of the Amenity Beds.'
'Did he die?' asked Morse.
Eileen, who had come to sit on his bed, nodded sadly. It was mid-afternoon.
'How old was he?'