Oldfield and Musson were duly hanged in public at Oxford. According to the newspaper reports, as many as ten thousand people were estimated to have witnessed the macabre spectacle. It is reported that from an early hour men sat high on walls, climbed trees, and even perched on the roofs of overlooking houses in order to obtain a good view of those terrible events. A notice-board placed by the Governor in front of the gaol door stated that, the execution would not proceed until after eleven o'clock; but although this occasioned much disappointment among the spectators, it did not deter their continued attendance, and not a spare square-foot of space was to be found when, at the appointed hour, the execution finally occurred.

First to appear was the Prison Chaplain, solemnly reading the funeral service of the Church of England; next came the two culprits; and following them the Executioner, and the Governor, as well as some other senior officers from the prison. After the operation of pinioning had been completed, the two men walked with firm step to the platform, and ascended the stairs to the top without requiring assistance. When the ropes had seen adjusted round their necks, the Executioner shook hands with each man; and then, as the Chaplain intoned his melancholy service, the fatal bolt was drawn, and in a minute or two, after much convulsion, the wretched malefactors were no more. The dislocation of the cervical vertebrae and the rupture of the jugular vein had been, if not an instantaneous, at least an effective procedure. The gallows appeared to have sated the sadistic fascination of the mob once more, for there are no reports of any civic disorders as the great throng dispersed homewards on that sunlit day. It was later disclosed, though it had not been observable at the time, that Oldfield's last action in life had been to hand over to the Chaplain a post-card, to be delivered to his young wife, in which to the very end he proclaimed his innocence of the crime for which he had now paid the ultimate penalty.

Locally produced broadsheets, giving every sensational detail of trial and execution, were very quickly on sale in the streets of Oxford – and were selling fast. They were even able to give a full account, with precise biblical reference, of the last sermon preached to the men at 6 p.m. on the Sunday before their hangings. The text, clearly chosen with ghoulish insensitivity, could hardly have brought the condemned prisoners much spiritual or physical solace: 'Yet they hearkened not unto me, nor inclined their ear, but hardened their neck: they did worse than their fathers' (Jeremiah, ch. 7, v. 26).

The horror felt by the local population at the murder of Joanna Franks did not end with the punishment of the guilty men. Many, both lay and clerical, thought that something more must be done to seek to improve the morals of the boatmen on the waterways. They were aware, of course, that the majority of boatmen were called upon to work on the Sabbath, and had therefore little or no opportunity of attending Divine worship. A letter from the Revd Robert Chantry, Vicar of Summertown Parish, was typical of many in urging a greater degree of concern amongst the boatmen's employers, and suggesting some period of time free from duties on the Sabbath to allow those having the inclination the opportunity of attending a Church service. Strangely enough, such attendance would have been readily possible for the crew-members of the Barbara Bray had Oxford been a regular port-of-call, since a special 'Boatmen's Chapel' had been provided by Henry Ward, a wealthy coal-merchant, in 1838 – a floating chapel, moored off Hythe Bridge, at which services were held on Sunday afternoons and Wednesday evenings. For Joanna Franks, as well as for her sorrowing husband and parents, it was a human tragedy that the sermon preached to the murderers on the Sunday prior to their execution was perhaps the first – as well as the last -they ever heard.

But it is all a long time ago now. The floating chapel has long since gone; and no one today can point with any certainty to the shabby plot in the environs of Oxford Gaol where notorious criminals and murderers and others of the conjecturally damned were once buried.

Morse was glad that the Colonel had ignored Doctor Johnson's advice to all authors that once they had written something particularly fine they should strike it out. For Part Four was the best-written section, surely, of what was proving to be one of the greatest assets in Morse's most satisfactory (so far) convalescence; and he turned back the pages to relish again a few of those fine phrases. Splendid, certainly, were such things as "sated the sadistic fascination"; and, better still, that "ghoulish insensitivity". But they were more than that. They seemed to suggest that the Colonel's sympathies had shifted slightly, did they not? Where earlier the bias against the boatmen had been so pronounced, it appeared that the longer he went on the greater his compassion was growing for that disconsolate crew.

Like Morse's.

It was such a good story! So it was no surprise that the Colonel should have disinterred the bare bones of this particular one from the hundreds of other nineteenth-century burial-grounds. All the ingredients were there for its appealing to a wide readership, if once it got its foot wedged in the doorway of publicity. Beauty and the Beasts – that's what it was, quintessentially.

At least as the Colonel had seen it.

For Morse, who had long ago rejected the bland placebos of conventional religion, the facility offered to errant souls to take the Holy Sacrament before being strangled barbarously in a string seemed oddly at variance with the ban on the burial of these same souls within some so-called 'holy ground'. And he was reminded of a passage which had once been part of his mental baggage, the words of which now slowly returned to him. From Tess of the d'Urbervilles – where Tess herself seeks to bury her legitimate infant in the place where 'the nettles grow; and here all unbaptised infants, notorious drunkards, suicides, and others… ' What was the end of it? Wasn't it – yes! – 'others of the conjecturally damned are laid'. Well, well! A bit of plagiarism on the Colonel's part. He really should have put quotation marks around that memorable phrase. Cheating just a little, really. Were there any other places where he'd cheated? Unwittingly, perhaps? Just a little?

Worth checking?

That floating chapel interested Morse, too, particularly since he had read something about it in a recent issue of the Oxford Times. He remembered, vaguely, that although the Oxford Canal Company gave regular monies towards is upkeep the boat on which it was housed had finally sunk (like the boatmen's hopes) and was terrestrialized, as it were, later in the century as a permanent chapel in Hythe Bridge Street; was now, at its latest conversion, metamorphosed to a double-glazing establishment.

Without looking back, Morse could not for the moment remember which of the other crew-members had been married. But it was good to learn that Oldfield's wife had stood beside her husband, for better or for worse. And a pretty bloody 'worse' it had turned out to be! How interesting it would have been to know something of her story, too. How Morse would like to have been able to interview her, then and there! The recipient (presumably she had been) of that terrible card addressed to her, and handed to the Chaplain at the very foot of the gallows, she must have found it well-nigh impossible to believe that her husband could commit so foul a deed. But then had been only a small role in the drama: only a couple of walking-on appearances, the first ending with a dead faint, and the second with a poignant little message from the grave. Morse nodded rather sadly to himself. These days there would be a legion of reporters from the News of the World, the Sunday Mirror, and the rest, hounding the life of the poor woman and seeking to prise out of her such vital information as whether he'd snored, or been tattooed on either upper or nether limbs, or how frequently they'd indulged in sexual intercourse, or what had been the usual greeting of the loving husband after coming back from one of his earlier murderous missions.