Peter Lovesey: Rough Cider

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.