Peter Lovesey - Rough Cider

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 passionne 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.”