A quartet of questions, then.

First. Was it true that a jury should have been satisfied, beyond any reasonable doubt, that the boatmen murdered Joanna Franks? Answer: no. Not one shred of positive evidence had been produced by the prosecution which could be attested in court by any corroborative witnesses to murder – and it had been on the count of murder that the boatmen had been convicted.

Second. Was it true that the prisoners at the bar had been afforded the time-honoured 'presumption of innocence' the nominal glory of the British Legal System? Answer: it most definitely was not. Prejudgements – wholly pejorative prejudgements – had been rife from the start of the first trial, and the attitude of the law officers no less than the general public had been, throughout, one of unconcealed contempt for, and revulsion against, the crude, barely literate, irreligious crew of the Barbara Bray.

Third. Was it true that the boatmen, or some of them, were likely to have been guilty of something? Answer: almost certainly, yes; and (perversely) most probably guilty on the two charges that were dropped -those of rape and theft. At the very least, there was no shortage of evidence to suggest that the men had lusted mightily after their passenger, and it was doubtless a real possibility that all three – all four? – had sought to force their advances on the hapless (albeit sexually provocative?) Joanna.

Fourth. Was there a general sense – even if the evidence was unsatisfactory, even if the Jury were unduly prejudiced – in which the verdict was a reasonable one, a 'safe' one, as some of the jurisprudence manuals liked to call it? Answer: no, a thousand times no!

Almost, now, Morse felt he could put his finger on the major cause of his unease. It was all those conversations, heard and duly reported, between the principal characters in the story: conversations between the crew and Joanna; between the crew and other boatmen; between the crew and lock-keepers, wharfingers, and constables – all of it was wrong somehow. Wrong, if they were guilty. It was as if some inexperienced playwright had been given a murder-plot, and had then proceeded to write page after page of inappropriate, misleading, and occasionally contradictory dialogue. For there were moments when it looked as if it were Joanna Franks who was the avenging Fury, with the crewmen merely the victims of her fatal power.

Then, too, the behaviour of Oldfield and Musson after the murder seemed to Morse increasingly a matter of considerable surprise, and it was difficult to understand why Counsel for the Defence had not sought to ram into the minds of Judge and Jury alike the utter implausibility of what, allegedly, they did and said. It was not unknown, admittedly, for the odd psychopath to act in a totally irrational and irresponsible manner. But these men were not a quartet of psychopaths. And, above all, it seemed quite extraordinary to Morse that, even after (as was claimed) the crew had somehow and for some reason managed to murder Joanna Franks, they were – some twenty-four, thirty-six hours later – still knocking back the booze, still damning and blasting the woman's soul to eternity. Morse had known many murderers, but never one who had subsequently acted in such a fashion – let alone four. No! It just didn't add up; didn't add up at all. Not that it mattered, though – not really – after all these years.

Morse flicked open the index of the stout volume recording the misdeeds of Old Salopians, and his eye caught 'Shropshire Union Canal (The)'. He turned idly to the page reference, and there read through the paragraph, and with growing interest. (Well done, Mrs Lewis!) The author was still most horribly enmeshed in his barbed-wire style, still quite incapable of calling a spade anything else but a broad-bladed digging-tool; but the message was clear enough:

'With such an incidence of crime on the canals, it can scarcely be a source of surprise that we find countless instances of evasiveness, on the part of many of the boatmen, in matters such as the registering of names, both those of the boats they crewed and of their own persons. Specifically, with regard to the latter of these deceptions, we discover that many of those working both on the water and on the wharfs had a duality of names, and were frequently considerably better known by their 'bye-names' than by their christened nomenclature. For varied sociological reasons (some of which we have yet to analyse) it can more than tentatively be suggested that boatmen as a generality were likely to be potentially predisposed to the regular commission of crime, and certain it must be held that their profession (if such it may be called) afforded ample opportunities for the realization of such potentiality. Sometimes they sold parts of their cargoes, replacing, for example, quantities of coal with similar quantities of rocks or stone; frequently we come across recorded instances (see esp. SCL, Canal and Navigable Waters Commission, 1842, Vol. IX, pp. 61-4, 72-5, 83-6, el passim) of crewmen drinking from their cargoes of fine wines and whiskies, and refilling the emptied bottles with water. Toll officials, too, do not always appear blameless in these affairs, and could occasionally be bribed into closing their eyes… '

Morse's eyes were beginning to close, too, and he laid the book aside. The point had been made: boatmen were a load of crooks who often nicked bits of their cargoes. Hence Walter Towns, aka Walter Thorold, and the rest. All as simple as that – once you knew the answers. Perhaps it would all be like that one day, in that Great Computer Library in the Sky, when the problems that had beset countless generations of sages and philosophers would be answered immediately, just by tapping in the questions on some celestial key-board.

The youth with the portable saline-drip walked in, nodded to Morse, picked up a small TV control-panel from somewhere, and began flicking his way around the channels with, for Morse, irritating impermanence. It was time to get back to the ward.

As he was leaving his eyes roamed automatically over the book-case, and he stopped. There, on the lower row, and standing side by side, were the titles Victorian Banbury and OXFORD (Rail Centres Series'). Having extracted both, he walked back. Perhaps, if you kept your eyes open, you didn't need any Valhallan VDUs at all.

Walter Algernon Greenaway had been trying, with little success, to get going with the Oxford Times crossword. He had little or no competence in the skill, but it had always fascinated him; and when the previous day he had watched Morse complete The Times crossword in about ten minutes, he felt most envious. Morse had just settled back in his bed when Greenaway (predictably known to his friends, it appeared, as 'Waggie') called across.

'You're pretty good at crosswords-'

'Not bad.'

'You know anything about cricket?'

'Not much. What's the clue?'

' "Bradman's famous duck".'

'How many letters?'

'Six. I saw Bradman at the Oval in 1948. He got a duck then.'

'I shouldn't worry too much about cricket,' said Morse. 'Just think about Walt Disney.'

Greenaway licked the point of his pencil, and thought, unproductively, about Walt Disney.

'Who's the setter this week?' asked Morse.

'Chap called "Quixote".'

Morse smiled. Coincidence, wasn't it! 'What was his Christian name?'

'Ah! I have you, sir!' said Waggie, happily entering the letters at 1 across.