Rough Cider

TWENTY-ONE

A ringing sound. Shrill, insistent, and painful. I opened my eyes and saw daylight seeping into the space above the curtains. Fingered the swelling at the back of my skull. Groaned.

The ringing wasn’t all in my head.

At some stage of the night I’d emerged from unconsciousness sufficiently to drag myself as far as the sofa and collapse there. Now I was cold, my clothes were clammy, and I needed about a dozen aspirins.

I groped for my stick. It wasn’t there, of course. I made the effort to roll off the sofa and crawl to the phone.

Picked it up and listened.

“Ah, so all life is not extinct in Pangbourne. Is this the ear of Dr. Theodore Sinclair?” A man’s voice, resonant, bombastic, pleased with itself. The voice that could spell diarrhea without the aid of a dictionary.

“Who else?”

“This is Watmore, Digby Watmore. I suppose I got you out of bed.”

“No. What time is it?”

“Eight-twenty or thereabouts. Wednesday. Two or three days without, you said.”

“Two or three days without what?”

“Miss Ashenfelter on your back, to quote you verbatim.

Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten. We made an agreement.”

I recalled it faintly, as if from another incarnation. “When was this, Digby?”

“Sunday evening. The last two days have been no picnic for me, I can assure you. I say, are you sure I haven’t disturbed your sleep?”

“What happened to Miss Ashenfelter?”

He gave what sounded like an exasperated snort. “She’s been my constant companion for the past forty-eight hours.”

“Day and night, Digby?”

“I put my studio couch at her disposal, but she prefers to pass the night having interminable conversations about the Donovan case.”

I yawned sympathetically. “Was it instructive?”

“That’s beside the point now,” said Digby testily. “Events have overtaken us, haven’t they?”

“Quite a lot has happened, yes.”

“That’s precisely why I’m on the line. A fine shock I had this morning, picking up the Western Morning Press and reading about this fire in Bath. Have you seen it?”

“The paper? No.”

“Did you know about the fire? The Ashenfelters’ place gutted. Mrs. Ashenfelter dead.”

“Er.·.yes. I was in Bath.”

There was a moment’s offended silence.

“Well, thanks for sweet F.A., Sinclair.”

“What?”

“Couldn’t you have given me a buzz? You promised me an exclusive. Hang it all, I’m a newsman, first and last.”

“Last, in this case,” I said, smiled to myself, and felt a little better. Possibly I hadn’t suffered permanent brain damage.

“You think you’re bloody amusing, don’t you?” said Digby in a burst of fury I wasn’t prepared for. “Listen to this, Sinclair. I know bloody well why you didn’t call me. You’re as guilty as hell. I’ve got my sources. You saw Sally Ashenfelter yesterday and made damn sure she couldn’t speak to anyone else. You murdered her.”

“Get lost.”

He ranted on. “I’ve written the story. It’s the lead on Sunday. So you can stuff your exclusive. When I put this down, I’m going to call the police and, by Jesus, I hope they rough you up.”

I slammed down the phone and went to look for the aspirin bottle. Then I moved fast.

A shower, a shave, a change of clothes. Black coffee. More black coffee.

I was using a blackthorn stick to help me around the house. Now I devoted more precious minutes to recovering my regular ebony cane, cursing Harry as I hobbled about the wet garden, hampered by the morning mist that afflicts us near the river. My shoes and trouser ends were saturated before I located the stick on the paved area in front of the summerhouse. The leather handle was soggy to the touch. I still preferred it to the blackthorn.

Back to the house. One more item to collect.

Earlier, while shaving, I’d tried to fathom Harry’s behavior. Couldn’t think why he’d chosen to attack me when he was already clear and on his way. I was no longer a threat. We were all but shaking hands when he’d left.

Now I understood. He’d taken the gun.

I crawled about on the living room carpet for a minute or two, feeling under furniture in case I’d kicked the thing out of sight when I staggered across the room in the night. I was wasting my time.

My brain was still functioning at ninety percent or less, but I forced it to make some deductions. Harry knew that the Colt was the murder weapon. He’d found me in possession of it. Nothing I’d said had shaken his conviction that I’d shot Morton all those years ago and was desperately covering my traces, leaving Sally to die in the burning house. The gun was his evidence. Where else could he have taken it, except to the police?

And if Harry hadn’t turned me in, Digby certainly had. The squad car could be in the lane by now.

I went to the door.

The first time I tried to start the MG, it failed. What a day to let me down, the most reliable car I’d ever owned. Tried again, three or four times. Nothing. This way I’d rapidly exhaust the battery.

Harry must have done something to immobilize the engine, blast him.

I clambered out and lifted the bonnet.

No disconnected leads that I could see. Plug covers all secure. Distributor cap in place. Everything as it should be. Not sabotage: simply the legacy of leaving the car out all night instead of garaging it. Misty weather is worse than rain for depositing a film of moisture on everything.

I collected a cloth, heated it on the kitchen boiler, and systematically dried the ignition system. Switched on again, got action first time-and overchoked. When anyone wants to make a fast getaway in the movies, they get in their cars and go. I swore, tried again, and achieved a stuttering response that persevered into a regular engine note. I was finally ready to leave.

No police car met me as I rattled up the lane. I was soon on the A4, heading west. The mist that I’d assumed was local persisted right through Marlborough, slowing my speed but making it less likely that I’d be spotted if a call had been radioed to patrol cars. It lifted for a stretch in the approach to Devizes on the A36l, and as quickly returned when I was through the town.

Swiftly into Somerset. Frome, wedged steeply between two hills, where I’d disembarked from the train with my fellow evacuees in 1943. The prison town of Shepton Mallet, the stark, unhappy place where they’d based the GIs. Finally, spectrally pale in the mist, Christian Gifford.

I stopped a few hundred yards short of the farm, drove the car up a track into a wooded section where it wouldn’t be seen from the lane, and walked the rest. Hard work for me, but I preferred to make my cumbersome exit from the car unobserved and out of shotgun range.

The old cliche of mist enshrouding the landscape was peculiarly apt. The absence of bird song in the country is more sepulchral than a churchyard. There was only the irregular crunch of shoes and stick on the road surface. I cursed Harry again for robbing me of my gun.

I reached the farm entrance where the milk churns waited to be collected. Ahead, in normal visibility, I would have seen the house and other buildings instead of just the blanched, overhanging hedgerow festooned with cobwebs and droplets of moisture.

I limped into the yard, my eyes compensating in mobility for my legs.

I stood for a moment scanning the gray buildings for a movement, reminded of the day when Duke and Harry had driven the jeep in there, with me in the back, triumphant, but nervous about the outcome until Barbara, radiant, her black hair springing against the white sweater, had stepped from the house and smiled.

I bit back my thoughts and approached the farmhouse.

My knock was answered by George Lockwood. Twenty years can render dramatic changes in a face. His was little altered. Some extra gaps among the teeth, a slightly more hollow look to the cheekbones, but the left eye still had its bloodshot wedge, and the eyebrows were as dark as formerly, though the rest of his hair had whitened.

He said nothing. He assessed me. The look was steady, interested, unsurprised. He knew me. He might even have expected me.

I explained superfluously, “I called on Sunday, hoping to see you and Mrs. Lockwood. I’m Theo Sinclair,”

He nodded. At least I was understood.

“May I come in?”

The focus of his eyes altered. He looked past me, taking in the yard.

I told him, “I’m alone this time.”

He stepped back from the door, leaving it open, and turned and shuffled along the passage.

I followed, closing the door after me.

The smell of baking wafted to me with the pungent, remembered odor of the house, the mustiness of old carpets and ancient stone. More evocative still, I heard Mrs. Lock-wood’s small, muted voice ask, “Who is it, George?” Then I entered the kitchen, and as she saw me she said, “Theo, my dear!” and opened her arms for me to embrace her.

She’d altered more than her husband, shed most of the stoutness of her middle years, and acquired a network of wrinkles that gave her a depressed look when the smile receded. Arthritis had begun to deform her finger joints. She wore her hair, now silver-white, in the same severe style, scraped back from the forehead and fastened above the neck.

She said, “You can still find room for a plateful of fresh-baked scones, I reckon.”

“Emphatically.” More of a welcome than last time, I thought. Casually, I asked, “Where’s Bernard this morning?”

“Plowing. He’ll come by presently.”

I tried not to register panic at the prospect. Presently, I remembered, has infinite limits of meaning in the West Country. You learn as much from the speaker’s face as you do from the intonation. I’d never been much good at divining Mrs. Lockwood’s utterances.

So the three of us sat around the old-fashioned wooden table and ate hot scones with strawberry jam and drank tea from the brown pot simmering on the range while I told them what I’d done with my life since 1944. In a few, crisp sentences.

“And what brings you back?” Mrs. Lockwood asked.

“Duke Donovan’s daughter persuaded me to bring her here on Sunday. We met Bernard.”

“I heard.”

“Didn’t have the good fortune to see you, though, so I came back.”

George Lockwood now found his voice and used it ex-pressively, on a rising note of disbelief. “Donovan had a daughter?”

“Bernard told us,” Mrs. Lockwood reminded him quite sharply, adding, with a confidential smile in my direction, “Father’s not so quick on the uptake as he were.”

“Didn’t know he were married,” persisted George.

“George,” said Mrs. Lockwood in a hard-pressed, discouraging voice. Turning to me, she switched to a more generous note. “Theo, my dear, have some more butter on that. ‘Tisn’t the war now, you know.”

I took the butter dish and said, “Duke Donovan’s daughter, Alice, believes her father was innocent.”

“What do she know about it?” said George, not so tardy on the uptake as his wife alleged.

“She’s not the only one,” I said. “Do you remember Harry Ashenfelter, the other GI?”

Behind me, a new voice said, “What about Ashenfelter?” Bernard’s.

I don’t know how he’d managed to enter so quietly or how long he’d been there while his parents talked on, buttering their scones and registering nothing. It shook me, literally. I spilled tea on my trousers. I turned and looked into the twin barrels of the shotgun.

“Sit down, Bernard,” said his mother placidly. “It’s only Theo, come to see us.”

“For no good purpose,” said Bernard, inching the gun towards my eyes. “He’s coming with me.”

Mother and son faced each other across the room, mentally squaring up. Once, I’d have backed Mrs. Lockwood. Her small voice was misleading. She possessed a steely personality with the will to enforce it, as I’d discovered painfully during the war when I learned the secondary purpose of the mangle. In those days she’d been more than a match for Bernard, large as he was. He’d always backed off. Twenty years on, I wasn’t so confident. Bernard’s status had altered. He was the farmer now.

To his credit, George Lockwood sided with his wife and spoke up. “What’s got into ‘ee today?” he demanded of Bernard. “We don’t carry guns in this house.”

Bernard said in a low, level voice that conceded nothing, “If the bastard do what I say, there won’t be no shooting indoors.” He kicked my leg hard. “Get up!”

Mrs. Lockwood scraped back her chair and slapped her gnarled right hand on the table. “Bernard, this is no way to deal with it.”

“Mother,” said Bernard in the same tightly controlled voice, “you’d best not interfere.” This time he jabbed the muzzle of the gun hard against my throat. “Out.”

The neck is a vulnerable area. There isn’t much flesh to absorb such a thrust. The pain was intense, but the effect on my windpipe was worse. I hawked and gulped for breath. It was like drowning, gasping for air that couldn’t reach my lungs. As I rocked forward I felt one of Bernard’s hands across the breadth of my forehead, forcing it back and upward, compelling me to rise. He virtually picked me off the chair one-handedly and stood me up. I was propped against the table facing him, spluttering wretchedly.

From behind me, I heard Mrs. Lockwood repeat, more as a plea than a command, “Bernard, this isn’t the way,” and through my discomfort I concluded that this was the limit of her protest.

I was mistaken. She was out of her chair in the next second and round the table wrestling with him for the gun. He easily could have knocked her down, but he simply gripped the stock with one hand and the twin barrels with the other, and resisted.

They persevered with this unequal struggle for perhaps a quarter of a minute, until she gave up the attempt and settled instead for keeping a token handhold on the gun, shouting bitterly at her husband. “Can’t you do nothing but sit there?”

I suspect that George Lockwood knew his son was physically more than a match for them both. He didn’t stir from his seat at the table.

By now you’re thinking what about Theo Sinclair? What was he doing to support the old lady and help himself? But you’ve got to remember the situation I was in. The shotgun was still a matter of inches from my chest. There wasn’t anything I could usefully do except try to appease Bernard. I found sufficient breath to gasp, “All right, All go. I’m on the way out.”

Bernard commented, “Too bloody true.”

He’d given my words an ugly twist, turning them into a threat that I didn’t seriously believe. I’d never rated him as a likely killer. He was dangerous because the shotgun was a lethal weapon, but I doubted whether he was sufficiently passionate or stupid to kill a man willfully.

So I made an appeal to his better nature. Leaning heavily on my stick, that old friend in adversity, I picked my way pathetically towards the door.

As Bernard moved the gun to keep me covered, his mother tensed again and tried to drag it downwards. There was never a chance that she could deflect the aim long enough for me to escape, but as I shortly discovered, she was more concerned about Bernard than me. She blurted out a frenzied appeal to him. “I won’t let you. My son is not a killer. Thou shalt not kill. Killing is something else, Bernard.”

He said tersely, “You should know, Mother,” and in those four words told me what I’d come to find out.

I didn’t believe it.

Mrs. Lockwood stared at him blankly. She released her grip on the gun and took a step back. She raised one hand to her mouth and pressed it edgewise between her teeth, emitting a long, stifled moan. Then she seemed to shrink into herself, crumpling into a posture of despair.

Bernard had refrained from physical aggression towards her, but his words were relentless. “Blaspheming hypocrite. Quoting the Lord’s Commandments at me when the smell of death is still on you.”

She’d sunk into a chair. She looked up and said, “That isn’t true.”

“Isn’t true?” Bernard challenged her, eyes alight with the force of his recrimination. “Like yesterday?”

Mrs. Lockwood winced, as if he’d struck her. She tried to form a word and couldn’t.

He aped her voice cruelly. “ ‘Bernard, darling, would you drive me into Frome early? I made an appointment with the optician’ Optician be buggered! I watched you go into the off-license and come out of it with two bottles of spirit in the carrier bag. I saw you make off to the railway station and buy a ticket. Your appointment weren’t in Frome at all, and it weren’t with no optician. You took the train to Bath.” He half turned and said, “Father! Have you looked at the paper, seen what happened to Sally Ashenfelter yesterday?”

Old George Lockwood had emerged enough from his passive state to stare in horror at his wife.

Bernard continued inexorably to nail the charge. “Mother were always claiming to be sorry for Sally and her weakness for liquor. Forever meaning to visit her again for old time’s sake. Well, she finally did, with two bottles of vodka and a box of matches.”

Then George spoke up with surprising tenderness. “Molly, what have you done, my love? You promised no more killing. No more blood, you said.”

There was a pained cry from Mrs. Lockwood. “I did it to protect us. It was all forgotten and then-” She covered her face.

Bernard was unmoved. He tightened his grip on the gun and gestured to me to get out.

I was reeling under a welter of emotions, repelled, shocked, angry, and pitying. I might as well own up to a slight sense of gratification too. My assumption that the answer to the mystery lay here, with the Lockwoods, had been right. But I hadn’t cast Mrs. Lockwood as a double murderess.

Had you?

Do you need any more convincing?

I did. I backtracked mentally to 1943 and spun the crucial events at the speed of a tape recorder on fast forward. Morton having Barbara in the barn. Me, blurting out my story. To Duke. And to Mrs. Lockwood.

Duke didn’t murder Morton. He looked into the barn, listened, reached his own conclusion, and left.

The Lockwoods had put a ban on Morton. Incensed, Mrs. Lockwood collected the gun from the hallstand drawer. To her, it was irrelevant whether Morton had just raped her daughter or made love to her. She shot him at point-blank range, dropped the gun, and brought Barbara back to the farmhouse.

Sally and I had been in the farmhouse kitchen when Mrs. Lockwood brought Barbara in. Sally, and only Sally outside the family, knew that Barbara and Morton were lovers and that Barbara’s hysteria couldn’t have been caused by rape.

Yet when Duke was put on trial, Sally wasn’t called as a witness. Mine was the evidence that had hanged Duke. Mine, and the Lockwoods’. Prosecution and defense both accepted that Morton was killed because he attacked Barbara. Sally’s story conflicted with both.

They gossiped about poor Sally’s alcoholism in Christian Gifford, but only one couple knew the reason for it: the Lockwoods. So when Alice and I turned up at Gifford Farm and learned from Bernard that Sally was living in Bath, Mrs. Lockwood saw disaster looming. She made an appointment with Sally and bought some vodka.

A murder cold-bloodedly planned and executed.

And not the last I have to describe.

If you’re of a nervous disposition or hoping to get some peaceful sleep in the next hours, better close the book at this point. Thanks for your company, and good night.

For you, the unshakably persistent page-turner, I’ll tell the rest as it happened. We left Bernard pointing the shotgun at me, maneuvering me out of the farmhouse. His mother was sobbing her guilty heart out while the hapless George attempted to comfort her.

I cooperated by opening the door and stepping into the yard. I suppose it was too optimistic to hope that Bernard would let me make a discreet exit while he sorted out his domestic crisis. He prodded me in the back with the shotgun to let me know he was right behind me.

Try to take the heat out of this, I thought. I told him as casually as I could, “I left my car up the lane, but there’s no need for you to come with me.”

Bernard ignored me. He said in a toneless statement of fact that was more chilling than a threat, “You’re going across to the barn.”

I said, “What for?”

He answered in the same level tone. “You’ve got to be put down.”

Like a stricken animal.

My first reaction was petrified funk. A few seconds of numbness, when I felt as if my feet weren’t in contact with the ground. Then anger. The urge to lash out and fight for my life.

I didn’t stand a chance.

Reason, I told myself. You’ve got some wits. Use them.

I said, “That’s murder you’re talking about.”

He stuck the gun harder into my backbone, forcing me forward. I limped slowly towards the barn, the same small bam where Morton had been shot. The stone building set back from the rest, its gray-tiled roof hoary for the freezing mist.

Talk to him. It’s all you can do.

“You don’t want to kill me,” I told him, putting it as a genial observation between friends. “That’s sure to make more trouble for you. You’re not a murderer, Bernard. You don’t have to repeat your mother’s mistakes.”

He muttered behind me, “Step out or I’ll drop you here.”

I kept moving, talking as we went, trying desperately to hammer home the message. “You’ve got no blood on your hands. It was your father who helped her dispose of Morton’s body after she shot him, wasn’t it? He put the head in one of his cider barrels and buried the rest somewhere off the farm. He meant to keep the barrel here, but someone mistakenly loaded it onto a lorry and delivered it to the Shorn Ram. That’s what happened, isn’t it?”

We were twenty yards from the barn door, and for all the response I’d got, I could have saved my breath-1 was going to need it.

I persisted, “Your father’s an accessory after the fact, but you’re in the clear. There’s no way you can cover up your parents’ crimes. The police are coming here. The press. News on Sunday is sending a man. Today, Bernard. They’re on their way.”

We reached the barn. I thought about dashing inside and slamming the door in his face, but for me, it could only be a thought. It assumed agility that I didn’t possess.

Nor was my stick any use as a weapon against a shotgun jammed into my kidneys. He’d pull the trigger before I raised my arm. I knew he wasn’t bluffing. There’s an instinct, a primitive, feral sense that operates when death is imminent.

A bead of sweat ran down my side, as if it were high summer.

I went in.

The barn was moderately dark but not dark enough for me to surprise him with a sudden dive out of range.

What could I do, short of begging for my life?

I said, “It’s your future as well as mine. Have you thought of that?”

Bernard dug the muzzle harder into my back. “Up there.”

He wanted me to climb up to the hayloft where the previous murder had been committed. The precise place. The sweat on my body turned to ice. I’d assumed up to now that I was addressing a man who was rational, if hostile. At this moment I lost that confidence. He was planning a ritual slaughter.

Standing by the ladder to the hayloft, I told him flatly, “I can’t climb this.”

Immediately I keeled off-balance. He’d kicked my stick clean out of my hand. Instinctively, I grabbed one of the rungs of the ladder to stop myself falling. I hit the wood as I swung around it.

A piercing pain hit the small of my back, as if one of my ribs had snapped. Then another. He was jabbing me viciously in the kidneys with the point of the gun.

I groped upwards and started climbing like a demented ape to pull myself clear. Using my arms alone, I hauled myself most of the way, then got some leverage with my good leg and forced my aching body high enough to get a hold on the joist supporting the ladder. I put out a knee and heaved myself onto the boards.

Up there I doubled and writhed in agony as the pain bit into my back. I don’t think I cared if he put a shot through my head, so long as he didn’t attack my kidneys again. I rolled against the nearest bale of straw to protect them. But as the spasms subsided to tolerable levels and I became more conscious of my surroundings, I realized that Bernard hadn’t followed me up the ladder. I heard it scrape against the joist and hit the floor with a thud. For some unfathomable reason he’d pulled it away from the hayloft and stranded me up there.

There comes a stage when acute pain turns to a throbbing, generalized ache. I reached out for a handhold and dragged my protesting body close enough to give me a view over the edge. Then I forced myself to watch what was happening below me. I couldn’t believe that Bernard would simply leave me stranded in the hayloft. He meant to kill me, and I was damn sure nothing I’d said had shaken his resolution.

He’d rested the shotgun against the wall. For some obscure reason, he was rearranging the bales, dragging one from the back of the barn towards the center, than a second one. He took a knife from his pocket, cut the cord on the second bale, and scattered loose hay across the floor.

Presently he disappeared from view below me, and I heard a muffled, dragging sound, which I assumed was a third bale about to be added to the stack.

I was wrong. The object that Bernard was tugging across the barn was a body. A dead body. Male.

The jacket and shirt were heavily bloodstained. I couldn’t tell yet if I knew the face, because it was upside down from my vantage point.

Irrespective of who it was, I shivered. I understood now why Bernard had shrugged off my warnings. It was no use telling him that killing me would be something else, a different class of crime, because he’d already enrolled himself for the class. He was blooded, a killer like his mother.

Reasoning with him was a futile exercise. He meant to kill me, too, and there was no way I could dissuade him.

I watched him hump the corpse onto the bales. They served as a catafalque, as if for a lying-in-state. Except that the body was spreadeagled across the top with legs apart, one arm hanging down and eyes open, seeming to stare up at me.

I stared back, for the face was right-way-up now, and I could see who it was.

Harry Ashenfelter.