'Sir!'
Morse held up his right hand. 'Joanna Franks was never murdered, Lewis! She was the mastermind – mistressmind – behind a deception that was going to rake in some considerable, and desperately needed, profit. It was another woman, roughly the same age and the same height, who was found in the Oxford Canal; a woman provided by Joanna's second husband, the ostler from the Edgware Road, who had already made his journey – not difficult for him – with horse and carriage from London, to join his wife at Oxford. Or, to be more accurate, Lewis, at some few points north of Oxford. You remember in the Colonel's book?' (Morse turned to the passage he had in mind.) 'He – here it is! -"he explained how in consequence of some information he had come into Oxfordshire" – Bloody liar!'
Lewis, now interested despite himself, nodded a vague concurrence of thought. 'So what you're saying, sir, is that Joanna worked this insurance fiddle and probably made quite a nice little packet for herself and for her father as well?'
'Yes! But not only that. Listen! I may just be wrong, Lewis, but I think that not only was Joanna wrongly identified as the lawful wife of Charles Franks – by Charles Franks – but that Charles Franks was the only husband of the woman supposedly murdered on the Barbara Bray. In short, the "Charles Franks" who broke down in tears at the second trial was none other than Donavan.'
'Phew!'
'A man of many parts: he was an actor, he was a conjurer, he was an impersonator, he was a swindler, he was a cunning schemer, he was a callous murderer, he was a loving husband, he was a tearful witness, he was the first and only husband of Joanna Franks: F. T. Donavan! We all thought – you thought – even I thought – that there were three principal characters playing their roles in our little drama; and now I'm telling you, Lewis, that in all probability we've only got two. Joanna; and her husband – the greatest man in all the world; the man buried out on the west coast of Ireland, where the breakers come rolling in from the Atlantic… so they tell me……'
Chapter Thirty-three
Stet Difficilior Lectio
(Let the more difficult of the readings stand)
(The principle applied commonly by editors faced with variant readings in ancient manuscripts)
Lewis was silent. How else? He had a precious little piece of evidence in his pocket, but while Morse's mind was still coursing through the upper atmosphere, there was little point in interrupting again for the minute. He put the envelope containing the single photocopied sheet on the coffee-table – and listened further.
'In the account of Joanna's last few days, we've got some evidence that she could have been a bit deranged; and part of the evidence for such a possibility is the fact that at some point she kept calling out her husband's name – "Franks! Franks! Franks!" Agreed? But she wasn't calling out that at all – she was calling her first husband, Lewis! I was sitting here thinking of "Waggie" Greenaway-'
'And his daughter,' mumbled Lewis, inaudibly.
'- and I thought of "Hefty" Donavan. F. T. Donavan. And I'll put my next month's salary on that "F" standing for "Frank"! Huh! Who's ever heard of a wife calling her husband by his surname?'
'I have, sir.'
'Nonsense! Not these days.'
'But it's not these days. It was-'
'She was calling Frank Donavan – believe me!'
'But she could have been queer in the head, and if so-'
'Nonsense!'
'Well, we shan't ever know for sure, shall we, sir?'
'Nonsense!'
Morse sat back with the self-satisfied, authoritative of a man who believes that what he has called 'nonsense three times must, by the laws of the universe, be necessarily untrue. 'If only we knew how tall they were – Joanna and… and whoever the other woman was. But then is just a chance, isn't there? That cemetery, Lewis-'
'Which do you want first, sir? The good news or the bad news?'
Morse frowned at him. 'That's…?' pointing to the envelope.
'That's the good news.'
Morse slowly withdrew and studied the photocopied sheet.
‘Not the Coroner's Report, sir, but the next best thing.
‘This fellow must have seen her before the post-mortem. Interesting, isn't it?'
‘Very interesting.'
The report was set out on an unruled sheet of paper, dated, and subscribed by what appeared as a 'Dr Willis', for writing was not only fairly typical of the semi-legibility forever associated with the medical profession, but was also beset by a confusion with 'm's, 'w's, 'n's, and 'u's – all these letters appearing to be incised with a series of what looked like semi-circular fish-hooks. Clearly the notes of an orderly-minded local doctor called upon to certify death and to take the necessary action – in this case, almost certainly, to pass the whole business over to some higher authority. Yet there were one or two real nuggets of gold here: the good Willis had made an exact measurement of height, and had written one or two most pertinent (and, apparently, correct) observations. Sad, however, from Morse's point of view, was the unequivocal assertion made here that the body was still warm. It must have been this document which had been incorporated into the subsequent post-mortem findings, thenceforth duly reiterated both in Court and in the Colonel's history. And it was a pity; for if Morse had been correct in believing that another body had been substituted for that of Joanna Franks, that woman must surely have been killed in the early hours of the morning, and could not therefore have been drowned some three or four hours later. Far too risky. It was odd, certainly, that the dead woman's face had turned black so very quickly; but there was no escaping the plain fact that the first medical man who had examined the corpse had found it still warm.
Is that what the report had said, though – 'still warm'? No! No, it hadn't! It just said 'warm'… Or did it?
Carefully Morse looked again at the report – and sensed the old familiar tingling around his shoulders. Could it be? Had everyone else read the report wrongly? In every case the various notes were separated from each other by some form of punctuation – either dashes (eight of them) or full stops (four) or question-marks (only one). All the notes except one, that is: the exception being that 'body warm / full clothes… ' etc. There was neither a dash nor a stop between these two, clearly disparate, items – unless the photocopier had borne unfaithful witness. No! The solution was far simpler. There had been no break requiring any punctuation! Morse looked again at line 10 of the report,
and considered three further facts. Throughout, the 's's were written almost as straight vertical lines; of the fifteen or so 'i' dots, no fewer than six had remained un-dotted; and on this showing Willis seemed particularly fond of the word 'was'. So the line should perhaps – should certainly! – read as follows: 'on mouth (rt side) – body was in'. The body 'was in full clothes'! The body was not 'warm'; not] in Morse's book. There, suddenly, the body was very, very cold.