Rough Cider

NINETEEN

The bad news wasn’t over. On the stairs, my way was barred by a busybody in a brown suit. He raised his hands, palms facing me, in an officious manner that I thought was a shade excessive for the National Health Service. Probably a nut case, I decided.

He said, “Hey.”

To humor him I nodded as I stepped sideways.

He put his hands on my arm and said, “We’d like a few words with you.”

“Who are we? I asked.

He produced from his pocket a card in a plastic folder. “Detective-Inspector Voss, CID, Bath Police.”

I gave it a glance. It appeared to be an authentic police identity. I raised my face. Looked right into his brown eyes under thick black smudges of eyebrow. I’d read somewhere that policemen attach a lot of importance to the way our eyes first react to theirs. If you blink and look at the back of your hand, they start filling in the charge sheet.

When I reckoned I’d passed that test, I took in the rest: the squat nose, the lumpy chin, and the muscled neck that looked ready for a scrumdown. Quite ten years older than I, yet in good shape physically. A fit forty. Not one to raise my stick to.

He said, “Is that your MG outside?” and for an optimistic moment I wondered if this was simply a complaint about the place I’d chosen to park in.

It wasn’t. He wanted me to drive behind his car to the central police station.

I asked, “What’s this about, exactly?”

“You’ll find out.”

“Do you want to know what I’m doing here?” I asked, prepared to be cooperative. “I can tell you that now. We don’t need to go to the police station.”

He eyed me as he decided between asserting brute authority and providing a reason. Either way, he wasn’t amenable to suggestions from me. “This is the casualty department of a hospital. They don’t want us here, getting in their way.”

So we drove in convoy to the station where I parked beside his Triumph and followed him inside. Give the police their due, they found me a cup of coffee in a paper cup before they left me on a bench in front of a notice board. I may be cynical, but I interpreted that to mean that I was in for a long wait, and I was right. I spent an hour and twenty minutes with the notice board. By the time I was called, I could have passed an exam on foot-and-mouth disease or the Colorado beetle.

Inspector Voss had removed his jacket and looked ready to take on the All Blacks football team at Twickenham single-handedly. From the angle I had in the chair in front of his desk, he was hunched forward with his shoulders at the level of his ears. It was some comfort to have a uniformed man seated in the corner behind me, though I could have taken that as a bad sign.

I was right about the aggressive posture. He started with a head-down charge. No apology for keeping me waiting. Just: “I’ve been hearing things about you, Dr. Sinclair.”

“From Harry Ashenfelter, I suppose.”

He tensed and pulled back a fraction.

I explained, “He must have given you my name.”

He said with derision, “This is the CID, chum. We’re not incapable of finding out a man’s name.”

“By asking Harry Ashenfelter?”

He thrust his jaw forward aggressively. “How long have you known Mr. Ashenfelter?”

“I met him twenty-one years ago when he was with the American Army, based at Shepton Mallet.”

“And since?”

I hesitated. If only to keep this inquisition to a minimum, I didn’t want the entire story to come out now, yet I couldn’t be sure how much Harry had said already. “Last Sunday afternoon I visited him and his wife. The first time since the war. His stepdaughter, Alice, had called on me, and I helped her to find Harry in Bath.”

“A family reunion, then?”

“In a way.”

“So Alice is a friend of yours?”

I sidestepped that one. “She just turned up at the university where I work-that’s Reading-and made herself known to me.”

“Why didn’t she go straight to Bath?”

“Didn’t have their address.”

Voss curled his lip in disbelief. “Didn’t have her stepfather’s address?”

“I gather he walked out on her mother years ago and they lost touch.”

“So she met Mrs. Ashenfelter-the lady who died in the fire-for the first time on Sunday?”

“Correct.”

While we were talking, he’d picked up a pencil and inscribed a thick, asymmetrical circle on the notepad in front of him. Now he lifted the pencil off the sheet and jabbed it down heavily in the center. “Let’s talk about you. You’d met Sally Ashenfelter before.” He expressed it as a statement.

“When I was a child.”

“Of what age?”

“Nine.”

“The circumstances?”

“It was the war. I was evacuated to her village. She happened to work on the farm where I stayed.”

“Where does Harry Ashenfelter fit in?”

“He was a visitor to the farm, helping with the harvest. A GI.”

Voss inched his face closer to mine to add impact to his next observation. “The friend of the GI who murdered Clifford Morton.”

If it was calculated to throw me, it didn’t succeed. He was policeman, after all. He would have been pretty incompetent if he hadn’t made the connection. I simply gave a nod and returned his look.

He said as if he were accusing me of something, “You were the boy who gave evidence for the prosecution.”

“An unsworn statement.”

“And twenty years later you come back to Somerset with Alice Ashenfelter in tow, disturbing people with all kinds of questions about the case.”

I said, “Why should anyone be disturbed?”

By the way of a response he treated me to a gratuitous bit of nostalgia. “Matt Judd handled that case. I learned my trade with him. He was God to me.”

Remembering Superintendent Judd, I commented, “He put the fear of God into me.”

Voss brought his hands together in a reverential gesture with the fingers interlocking. “The finest nicker the West Country ever produced.”

“Always managed to pin it on someone?”

The wistful expression twitched into a scowl. “Remember where you are, sunny Jim.”

I checked my watch ostentatiously. “I’m not likely to forget.”

With a grave stare he warned me, “You don’t appear to understand how serious this is. I’d better acquaint you with the facts. That fire up at the Crescent. On the face of it you’d think it was a straight case of a tipsy woman chucking a cigarette into a waste bin and sending the place up in flames. Not so simple. The lads from the fire service found Sally Ashenfelter lying in the living room where the fire started. Evidence of heavy smoking and heavy drinking, yes. Fire appears to have started in a waste bin, yes. But things were stacked around that bin, Dr. Sinclair. Flammable things. Bits of wooden furniture, magazines, some African ornaments carved in ebony, a cigar box-”

“It was arson, you mean?” I cut in.

“Murder,” said Voss, watching me interestedly, waiting to see me squirm after he’d put the boot in. He’d learned his trade from Superintendent Judd.

I said automatically as my mind raced through the implications. “This is certain?”

“It has to be confirmed, but I’m satisfied with what I saw up there.”

“You don’t think she might have moved those things herself?”

“Suicide?” He shook his head. “She was awash with vodka. Paralytic.” He glanced towards the policeman in the corner. “Did you ever hear of anyone killing themselves like that?”

I didn’t turn my head to check the response.

Voss picked up the pencil again and prodded the air with it to punctuate his next speech. “How about the other thing? Someone visits the lady, knowing she’s an alcoholic, gets her drinking vodka until she’s out to the world, then makes a bonfire of the furniture, drops a cigarette into the bin, and leaves. How’s that for a hypothesis?”

I said, “Don’t ask me. You’re the detective.”

The pencil snapped in his hand.

For a moment I thought he was going to reach across the desk and grab me, but he took a deep breath and said with a show of self-control that strained him to the limit, “All right, my friend, I’ll ask you this instead. What were you doing in Bath today?”

“Waiting in the Pump Room most of the time. I’d arranged to meet Sally Ashenfelter at three.”

“Again? You said you saw her on Sunday.”

“Not for long. She was, em… indisposed before the end of the visit.”

“Smashed out of her mind?”

“A fair description,” I admitted.

“So you knew about Sally’s drinking?” The image of the rugby forward was right for Voss; he was all intimidation and thrust.

“So did half of Somerset, I imagine,” I said, gathering it and booting it back. “Alcoholics aren’t known for their discretion.” Encouraged, I said, “I wouldn’t have waited in the Pump Room for practically an hour and a half if I’d known she was at the bottle this morning.”

Voss didn’t seem particularly impressed. “What time did you arrive in Bath?”

“About two-thirty.”

“Where were you at one-thirty?”

“On the road from Reading.”

“Did you stop anywhere? Petrol? A spot of lunch?”

“No. I drove straight here.”

“And before that?”

“I was at home, preparing a lecture.”

Voss eased back in his chair and took a long, speculative look at me. “We’ll have to take your word for that, won’t we? The fire was started between one and two, when you say you were on the road.” The disbelief he managed to put into that word, say, was an obvious taunt.

I refused to rise to it.

When it had sunk in that I was unwilling to respond, he said, “You’d better tell me what was behind this meeting with Mrs. Ashenfelter.”

Tricky. He wouldn’t be overjoyed to hear doubts raised about his idol Judd’s most triumphant case. I stalled a little. “There was nothing sinister in it, I can assure you, Inspector. Just that she said enough before she started on the vodkas on Sunday to make me think it would be profitable to speak to her again. I had the feeling she’d have more to say if her husband wasn’t listening, so I phoned her up and arranged to meet.”

His eyes narrowed. “More to say about what?”

I answered offhandedly, “Nothing in particular.”

“I want a better answer than that,” said Voss, gritting his teeth.

“Really,” I insisted, “it wouldn’t have mattered what she talked about.” I’d decided that diversionary tactics were necessary here, and to be convincing I needed to let Inspector Voss flounder a little first.

He warned me, “You’d better not play silly buggers with me.

I said with high seriousness, “I’m trying to explain that what Mrs. Ashenfelter said was of less importance to me than how she said it.” The mystification written across his features was gratifying, but I sensed that it might have been dangerous to prolong it, so I added, “She’s a Somerset woman, lived in the county all her life, and uses dialect words that I first heard twenty years ago, long before I trained as a medieval historian. I don’t specialize in philology”-kidology, more like, I thought in passing-“but there are obvious points of contact.” Watching the indecision in his eyes, I decided that the tutorial method was more appropriate here than a lecture. “Now you, as a Somerset man, must have heard of the word dimpsy, for example, for twilight.”

Voss gave a guarded nod.

I said, “Did you know it’s straight from the Anglo-Saxon dimse? Fascinating, isn’t it, to find the word surviving in the dialect? Just one example of the sort of thing I had ambitions of exploring with Sally Ashenfelter’s help.”

Voss said in a voice that was not yet convinced but more than halfway there, “You’re telling me you arranged to meet her to talk about words?”

“Precisely,” I said encouragingly. “I can give you other examples if you like.” My mind ran rapidly through the few I’d retained. It was a long time since I’d compiled those lists for Duke.

“Don’t bother,” he told me.

“Someone has to,” I persisted, playing the zealous academic with all the conviction at my command. “Many of these old expressions will be irretrievably lost if no one cares about them, Inspector.” I launched into an impassioned appeal for the collection and preservation of sound archives.

He cut me off in mid-sentence. “I haven’t time to listen to you rabbiting on about words. I’m investigating a suspected murder.” But for all his bluster he’d lost his grip on the interview. He wasn’t in Judd’s class. His next question was more of an appeal than a demand. “Is there anything else you can tell me that might assist me in my inquiries?”

I let him wait. If I played this right, I could be out of here in a few minutes. I screwed up my face and rubbed my chin thoughtfully. Finally, I said, “It may be unimportant, but when I phoned Sally to arrange a meeting, she said she couldn’t see me in the morning because someone was coming.”

He seized on it. “She was expecting someone? Who?”

“She didn’t say.”

“A man?”

“I’ve no idea. All she told me was that someone was coming in the morning and she couldn’t put them off.”

He got up from his chair to pace the room, beating his fist repeatedly into the palm of his left hand. “A visitor. The husband didn’t mention a visitor.”

“Maybe he wasn’t told.”

This prompted Voss to clap his hand to the back of his neck. “A secret visitor. Someone she didn’t mention to her husband. Who? A lover?” He sounded encouraged, then pressed his hand to his forehead. “But why should the lover want to kill her?”

I listened in a bored way and took a look at my watch.

“This opens it up,” said Voss. “By Jesus, it opens it up!”

I cleared my throat. “Have you finished with me?”

Voss looked at me abstractedly. “Finished? For the present, yes. Have we got your address?”

“I gave it to the sergeant at the desk.”

“Fair enough.” He made a dismissive gesture.

I didn’t say good-bye as I went out.