Rough Cider (11 page)
When she came in, she handed me Digby’s card, which he’d wanted me to have in case I changed my mind about a photograph. She told me that he’d promised to keep in touch, and I took the hint. There was to be no ducking out of the Somerset trip.
I insisted that the rucksack traveled with us, telling Alice that she might wish to spend a few days in Somerset. She was a dream of a girl, terrific in bed, only, please God, not mine again. For peace of mind I was going to have to settle for Val, who went at it like a blanket bath but never mentioned her daddy.
For some while the only sound in the car had been the moan of the windscreen wipers working on a steady but meager drizzle. I can assure you that the weather wasn’t on our minds. I was still stewing over Digby when Alice rather fazed me by saying, “I had no idea he would be so handsome.”
I frowned. I simply couldn’t see it.
After a pause she added, “I mean my daddy.”
“Ah.” My brain did some quick backtracking. She must have found those mug shots of Duke in the books on the trial that I’d tried to hide from her. Sad, wasn’t it, that the first sight she’d ever had of her father had to be a picture like that? I don’t know whether you’d agree, but I found it pathetic, really pathetic, in the old-fashioned meaning of the word. It was the kind of thing that gets to me. More touching, I think, because she was unaware of it herself.
I’d be a right bastard to abandon her.
I’m not a total idiot when it comes to women. I know when I’m being manipulated. For two days I’d been putting up a wall of cynicism, and she kept knocking it down.
She continued unselfconsciously and with a touch of pride. “I mean, it’s not surprising that a girl like Barbara should have found him attractive. I can picture that first meeting between them, the day the two guys drove you back to the farm in the jeep. He must have looked terrific in his uniform.”
I gave a nod.
We let the wipers take over again.
Sometime after Newbury she said, “The jury was out for less than an hour. That’s not long, is it?”
“Not long.”
Another silence. Her thinking was precise and unhurried. She meshed in her statements with the car’s engine note, making sure I was listening.
“The prosecution had a very strong case.”
“Devastating.”
“All that ballistics evidence. I skimmed through it, but it must have impressed the court.”
“Textbook stuff.”
“They found some bullets fired from the same gun, right?”
“Right,” I said.
“Where did they pick them up, Theo?”
“I told you about the shooting lesson Duke and Harry gave to me and Barbara.”
“Oh, yes.”
“The police combed that field and collected all the used bullets they could find and compared them with the bullet found in the barn.”
Alice sighed. “And proved it was fired from Daddy’s gun.”
“Beyond any doubt.”
After a pause she commented, “So they didn’t actually need the gun to prove their case.”
“Clever, wasn’t it?”
She doggedly pursued her point. “It didn’t make any difference that you had the gun all the time.”
I said tersely, “We’ve been over this once.”
She switched the emphasis. “All this forensic science, the skull and the superimposed photograph, the dental records and the bullets, sounds really impressive. The jury was bound to be dazzled by stuff like that.”
I didn’t like the drift. I decided to take a firmer line. “The case against Duke would have stuck without all that. He was guilty, Alice, there isn’t any question. Listen, I know what I
saw. After me Duke was the first to know about Cliff Morton attacking Barbara. I watched him dash towards the barn.”
“You actually saw him go into the barn?”
“He ran in there. I’m sorry if this is painful to accept, but he really cared for Barbara. It was a crime of passion.”
She shook her head. “To me it doesn’t add up.”
“Why?”
“He runs into the barn, right? This girl he really cares for is being raped. What does he do about it? Pull the guy off her and throttle him? No, he leaves them there and goes back to the farmhouse to fetch his gun. Is that the conduct of a passionate man?”
I said, “It’s the difference between manslaughter and murder.”
“Okay, but how do you explain it?”
I sighed. “The prosecution went deeply into this. When Duke got into the barn, the attack was over. He could hear voices from the loft, Barbara pitifully distressed, Morton dismissing it all as unimportant. Duke was incensed by what he heard. He could have started a fight with Morton, but a beating-up was nothing to what Barbara had suffered. He ran back to the farmhouse to collect the gun, returned, and went up to the loft.”
“And put the bullet in Morton’s head right in front of Barbara? Is that what she told her parents?”
“She told her parents nothing. Duke shot Morton and covered his body with hay, maybe pushed it to the back of the loft behind some bales until he could come back later when no one was about. When he did return, either that night or the next, he had a plan. You have to see it from his point of view, as a serviceman waiting to join the invasion of Europe.”
“He figured he’d soon be clear and away?”
“Yes. Obviously, his first concern was how to get rid of the body. He could use the jeep to transport it somewhere by night, bury it or sink it into a lake with weights attached, but that’s not so simple as it sounds. Digging a grave of any depth is more than one night’s work, and how was a stranger to Britain going to find a boat and a deep, deserted lake? Even if he succeeded, bodies have an inconvenient habit of turning up. Someone walking his dog—”
“You don’t have to spell it out,” Alice broke in. “We both know what happened. He hacked off the head and put it in the cider barrel so the police wouldn’t know whose body it was or how the killing was done.”
We were making progress. From the way she was talking now, she was getting reconciled to Duke’s guilt. It was painful for her, and I understood her reasons for seizing on anything that challenged the verdict, but she had to come to terms with what had happened.
Obstinately, I
did
spell out the process of disposing of the head. “There were twenty or more open casks in the cider house. They’d been collected from the public houses and scoured ready for the new pressing. They were hogsheads. Are you familiar with the word?”
“Large barrels,” said Alice, adding sullenly, “You told me last night.”
“Not just large. Huge. Over five feet high. You have to picture the size of them to understand why the head wasn’t discovered when the tops were hammered down. After the top of a cask was fastened, the cider would be poured in through the bunghole and left to ferment. The cask wouldn’t be opened for scouring for another year. By then Duke expected to be out of England.”
“And he was.” She was silent again.
We’d reached the stretch of the Bath Road to the west of Marlborough, flanked on each side by an awesome expanse of downland, profuse with ancient trackways and prehistoric sites. It can be an exhilarating drive, but this morning it was somber. We forked left on the A36l. We were through Devizes before Alice made her next observation. It was a truism that might have been a line in a black comedy.
“I guess he lost all chance of a sympathetic hearing when he cut off the head.”
“Fair comment,” I admitted. “A
crime passionné
turned into a horror story.”
“How did he manage it, Theo?”
I gave a shrug. “What do you mean, with an ax or a hacksaw? There were plenty of implements about the farm.”
“He must have been covered in blood.”
“There’s no bleeding after death. He put the head into the cask and carried the rest of the body to the jeep to dispose of it somewhere else, somewhere clever, because it was never found.”
If it sounds ghoulish to report that soon after this I suggested lunch, I can only insist that it didn’t seem so at the time. We stopped at a pub in the center of Frome (not the Shorn Ram, which no longer exists) and had the traditional Sunday roast with Yorkshire pudding in a snuggery where no one could overhear us.
Alice was persistent as usual. “One thing that still puzzles me is the reaction of the Lockwood family. They knew what happened, didn’t they?”
“I couldn’t say.”
She was into one of her speculative phases. “They must have had some sympathy for my daddy. After all, it was their daughter who was raped. They may have kept silent so as not to incriminate him.”
“Possibly.”
“After the skull was found, Farmer Lockwood was under suspicion himself.”
“Yes.”
“And then it shifted to Daddy.” She studied me intently through the glasses.
I suggested gently, “It might be easier to accept if you thought of him as Duke.”
Sharply she replied, “I’ll think of him exactly as I want.
I’m not ashamed to call him Daddy.”
I didn’t react.
Alice hadn’t finished. “We were talking about the Lock-woods. They knew Barbara was raped, right? They got that from you, and they saw the pitiful state she was in.”
I nodded.
“But they didn’t call the police.”
“Apparently not.”
“Why not, Theo? It’s a criminal offense, for heaven’s sake.”
I hesitated. To be truthful, it was a point that I’d never considered before. She’d forced me into speculation. “Plenty of rapes never get reported. Maybe they thought it was kinder to Barbara to spare her the medical examination and all the questions.”
“Maybe.” She pushed her plate aside. “But there is another explanation, isn’t there? They knew Cliff Morton was already dead.”
T
orrential rain on the canopy roof of an MG convertible is a sure conversation-stopper. It pelted down after lunch, all the way out to Christian Gifford. In these conditions I didn’t do badly to find the village without a false turn, but I then had a problem locating the lane to the farm. I’d expected to use the schoolhouse or Miss Mum-ford’s store to get my bearings. Both had gone. A row of new houses in that clinically smooth, beige-colored material that masquerades as Bath stone now dominated the center of the village. At the end of the row was a shop called Quick-serve with a stack of wire baskets outside.
The pub across the street, the Jolly Gardener, was apparently unchanged, though as a nine-year-old in 1943, I hadn’t taken much note of it. All I could recall was that Barbara’s friend Sally Shœsmith had been the publican’s daughter. I stopped the car and went over to get some directions. The name on the lintel was no longer Shœsmith.
The barmaid, familiar only in the sense that she called me darling, obligingly came to the door with me and pointed the way. I didn’t inquire whether the Lockwoods still owned the farm. I wasn’t pressing for a reunion.
Even when we started up the lane, it was different. Where I seemed to remember the apple orchard were three large greenhouses. A gleaming silo soared above the hedgerow ahead. No trees at all.
I slowed the car and swiveled my head.
“Sure it’s the right place?” asked Alice.
“Far from sure,” I admitted as I swung the car onto a mud track pitted with tractor ruts, “only I don’t see anywhere else.”
Well, it wasn’t exactly
Brideshead Revisited,
but I did get a prickling sensation at the back of my neck as a cluster of stone buildings swam into focus through the wet windscreen. Smaller than the picture I’d held in my mind yet more solid: the stark, gray-tiled farmhouse with the ancient cider house close by; the tin-roofed cowshed extending past the end of the vegetable garden; the open structure that housed the farm vehicles; the main barn opposite the house; and, standing alone, the smaller barn of sinister memory.
“We’ve found it?” asked Alice in a stage whisper.
I murmured something affirmative and steered the car across the cobbled yard and parked beside a tractor.
Alice flexed and clenched her hands. “I feel kind of nervous.”
“Changed your mind?”
“Are you kidding?” She opened the car door and stepped out.
No one came out to ask who we were. We stood in the center of the yard with the rain lashing our faces. I waved my stick towards the honey-colored building adjacent to the farmhouse. “The cider house. Want to go in?”
“Sure.”
I should have had the sense to realize that Gifford Farm ceased producing cider in 1945. In the local pubs jokers with a macabre turn of humor probably still talked about the days when you could get a drink with a good head.
The cider-making equipment had gone. The building had become a store for animal feed, and the acrid smell stopped us in our tracks. We stood in the open doorway.
“This used to be the meeting place,” I informed Alice, nostalgic as if I’d worked there all my life. “On a day like this we’d all be in here, complaining about the weather. Sunday morning, it was like a pub, with neighbors calling in for a pint.”
“My daddy was in here sometimes?” asked Alice.
“He parked the jeep right here, where we’re standing.”
She bit her lip and turned away. “Would you show me the barn where it happened.”
I pointed to the small, gray building set back from the rest. “Sure you can face it?”
“Try me.”
She took my free hand to trace a course between the puddles. She needed some creature comfort, and so did I.
Out in the yard, the rain obliterated the farm smells, so when I pushed open the barn door, the sweet pungence of hay was overpoweringly evocative. The place was still used for its original purpose, and the familiar dryness penetrated my throat and nostrils.
Holding my emotions in check, I told Alice, “It’s just as I remember it. The smell. The way the bales are stored. Everything.”
“It’s darker than I expected.”
“We’ll soon take care of that.” I let go of her hand and took out my Ronson.
“Be careful.”
“There.” I held the flame high, showing her the loft floor.
A rustle startled her and she grabbed my arm. “Mouse, I expect.” I felt a surge of bravado. “Want to go up? There’s a ladder.”
She hesitated. “Would you go first?”
