Rough Cider

by Peter Lovesey

  There was nothing I could do except jump down from the loft and run frantically to find someone, anyone. Fate decreed that it was Duke.

  He was coming out of the shed where the farm machinery was stored. I shouted to him that Barbara was in the small barn, and the man Cliff had taken off her clothes and was hurting her. Duke didn’t say a word. He dashed past me across the yard to the barn. I ran on, crying, to the farmhouse where Mrs. Lockwood was talking to Sally, and blurted out what I’d seen. I told them Duke had gone in there. I couldn’t do any more.

  Mrs. Lockwood ran out, leaving Sally and me in the kitchen. After about five minutes she came back with her arm around Barbara, who was sobbing hysterically. They went straight up to Barbara’s bedroom.

  The only thing I remember about that day is much later, lying in bed. Mrs. Lockwood was leaning over me, giving me something to drink. I asked if Barbara was going to be all right, and she said yes, she would be all right, and I was to get some sleep.

  They kept me indoors most of the next day. As soon as I got up, I asked about Barbara and was told she was resting, but I noticed that the curtains of her bedroom weren’t drawn. That night I could hear her sobbing.

  I didn’t ever see her again. The next memory I have is the hammering on Sunday morning when they had to break down her door. And the screaming when they found her dead. She’d cut her own throat with her father’s razor.

  Later that morning my headmaster, Mr. Lillicrap, collected me from the house. On Monday one of the teachers took me back in the train to London and home. I wasn’t evacuated again.

  SEVEN

  The rest is on public record, so if you’re familiar with the relevant volume of Notable English Trials, or James Harold’s The Christian Gifford Murder, why not skip this chapter? For completeness I’m going to bring the story up to date, but most of what follows will be secondhand, picked out from the evidence of police and other witnesses. My part in it was mercifully short.

  I’ll continue as before, reporting the facts as I told them that night to Alice. She’d kept her promise and allowed me to get this far without interruption, except a muttered “Oh, my God!” when I came to Barbara’s suicide, which hadn’t been mentioned in the press clippings she’d found among her mother’s papers.

  One evening in October 1944, almost a year after the tragic events I’ve been describing, a man in a public house in Frome, the Shorn Ram, ordered a pint of local cider, a drink strongly preferred in wartime to the watered-down stuff that masqueraded as beer. People didn’t object to drinking from jam jars in those days of crockery shortages, but they were still choosy about what went into the jam jars.

  So when the customer complained that the cider was “ropy,” it was a serious matter. The publican had just put a new barrel on, a large one, a hogshead, from Lockwood, a reliable cider maker. He drew off a little for himself and sampled it.

  It’s worth pausing to reflect that if the publican had been prepared to admit right away that the cider was off, Duke Donovan might never have been brought to trial. Yet these were days of austerity when you could be fined for throwing bread to the birds. It was against the war effort to throw anything away if there was the remotest possibility that it might be consumed. So the publican sipped the cider and agreed that it tasted more bitter than the previous barrel but adjudged it palatable. He carried on serving it for the rest of the week. Scores of customers imbibed it, but few came back for a second glass.

  At the weekend, two of the Shorn Ram regulars went down with food poisoning. The cider was mentioned as a possible source of infection. Ugly rumors circulated of local cider makers who believed in leaving the bunghole of the barrel open after fermentation. It was said that if you looked closely at the sticky surface on the top, you’d see the footprints of rats. They approached but never returned from the open hole.

  A Ministry of Health inspector arrived at the pub on Monday and took a sample of the cider for analysis. It was indeed “ropy”; not from the taste of dead rat but from contamination by some form of metal.

  The hogshead was opened. When they removed the lid and poured the rest of the liquid down the drain in the yard behind the pub, everyone was expecting to find a metal implement in the lees that had collected at the bottom. Perhaps some careless farmhand had dropped a hand tool in there when they were fastening the lid.

  What they found was a human skull with a bullet hole through it.

  The process of identifying the victim is a story that has been graphically told elsewhere. Personally, I feel like wearing rubber gloves when I handle books about forensic science. Trust me: I’ll rush you through the really gruesome bits. Suffice to say that the skull was taken to the forensic laboratory at Bristol, to be examined by Dr. Frank Atcliffe, a rising young pathologist who was himself killed tragically the following year in a civil airline crash.

  There was precious little to go on. The action of the cider had destroyed all the skin, flesh, and brain tissue. There were no traces of hair remaining. Although the lees were sifted minutely, nothing else of significance was found in the barrel. Care for a glass of water? Or cider?

  Dr. Atcliffe found that the skull was that of a man aged between eighteen and twenty-five. Mention sex to a pathologist and he thinks of mastoid processes and orbital ridges. And age is the ossification of the epiphyses.

  Some newspapers mistakenly reported that the bullet had been the metallic agent that had caused the cider to go ropy. In fact, the bullet wasn’t found in the cask. It had passed through the skull, leaving a clear exit wound. So what do you think caused the metal contamination?

  A couple of dental fillings.

  As Dr. Atcliffe later mentioned, had the victim possessed a perfect set of teeth, the cider would have been unimpaired. The cask and what was left at the bottom would have been returned to Gifford Farm for reuse.

  Take a deep breath and let’s deal with the bullet holes. The one on the left side, about one and a half inches above the aural orifice, was the entrance wound. The bullet had smashed through the right cheekbone on exit, just behind the eye. Dr. Atcliffe estimated from the size of the holes that the caliber was.45. It had been fired not less than a yard from the victim and not closer than eighteen inches. It wasn’t possible to estimate the date of death.

  The prospect of more grisly discoveries was widely discussed. Two more hogshead casks were opened and examined at the Shorn Ram, as well as a further seventeen supplied by Gifford Farm to public houses in Frome, Shepton Mallet, and surrounding villages. The publicans made no objection; there had been a marked falling-off in their sales of cider. But the casks contained nothing more sinister than bones of sheep. You and I might flinch at mutton-fed cider, but they didn’t in Somerset in 1944.

  The murder investigation was headed by Superintendent Judd of the Somerset Police, a God-fearing Glastonbury man famed for his lay preaching. People packed the chapel each first Sunday in Lent to hear him rattle the tin roof with his famous sermon on temperance. He despised the demon drink. He started his inquiry at the place he named with sinister emphasis “the source/’ Gifford Farm.

  They said in the pubs that George Lockwood would be hanged, drawn, and quartered before the case ever came to court. Things couldn’t have looked worse for him. The cask had his name on it. He’d supplied it in August. He’d personally hammered down the top the previous November. There were no indications that anyone had tampered with it.

  George Lockwood was unable to recall anyone behaving suspiciously in the three weeks of cider making. Nor was he able to throw any light on the victim’s identity. He listed his farmhands and helpers for Superintendent Judd. Each one was traced and interviewed, with three exceptions: Barbara, Duke, and Harry. Barbara, of course, was dead. Both GIs had left England in June 1944, to take part in the invasion of Europe.

  When Judd raised the question of Barbara’s suicide, George Lockwood admitted that it had happened on November 30, two days after the cider making had finished and the last cask was clo
sed, but he could see no possible connection with what had happened. The coroner at the inquest had established that Barbara had taken her own life while the balance of her mind was disturbed. Judd didn’t press any further at that stage but ordered one of his senior men to take another look at the circumstances surrounding Barbara’s death.

  In the meantime a check was made of missing persons, particularly young men aged between eighteen and twenty-five, in the Frome and Shepton Mallet districts. This wasn’t easy. Some had volunteered for military service without informing their families; others had gone missing as deserters; and some had been killed visiting places like Bristol where there’d been massive bombing action.

  But a list was compiled, and within days the victim was identified. Several lines of inquiry converged in a most convincing way.

  The inspector who reopened the file in Barbara’s death learned from the postmortem report that she had been two months’ pregnant. Her sense of shame about the pregnancy, which she hadn’t mentioned to her family, was held to be the main reason why she took her life. The identity of the man responsible wasn’t established, and it wasn’t a function of the inquest to name anyone. The family had been unable or unwilling to comment, but there were strong rumors locally that the man was Cliff Morton. It was said that he was obsessed by Barbara and pestered her frequently. On one occasion in September during the apple gathering, he’d tried to force his attentions on her and been ordered off the farm by George Lockwood.

  Cliff Morton was a single man, aged eighteen. His parents had gone to live abroad when he was twelve, leaving him in the care of a maternal aunt who lived in a tied cottage a mile south of Christian Gifford. Two weeks after the inquest into Barbara’s death, police had visited the cottage to interview Morton on another matter: he’d been sent his call-up papers for military service in mid-September and failed to report. The aunt told them that he’d left home suddenly without telling her where he was going.

  So Cliff Morton’s name was on the list of missing men prepared by the police. The age was right, and there was a connection with Gifford Farm. He had been employed gathering apples there, although so briefly that George Lockwood hadn’t listed him for the police-an oversight he presently came to regret.

  Detectives visited a dentist in Frome and obtained Morton’s dental record. In January 1941, he’d been given two fillings in adjacent upper bicuspids that exactly corresponded with the fillings in the skull.

  As final proof of identification, Dr. Atcliffe photographed the skull and superimposed the negative on the enlargement of a snapshot of Morton provided by the aunt. If criminology is your hobby, you’ll know that this was a method pioneered by Professor Glaister in the Ruxton case in 1935. The match was perfect. Beyond reasonable doubt, Cliff Morton was the murder victim.

  The police descended on Gifford Farm in vanloads and began an exhaustive search. It continued for nine days. They checked every building minutely. They dug up the silage pits and dismantled the haystacks.

  If you feel sorry for George Lockwood, I can tell you that he wasn’t there to see his farm being taken apart. He was at Frome Police Station with Superintendent Judd, “helping the police with their inquiries.” On all evidence he was better placed to help them than anyone else. He’d had both motive and opportunity. The motive was revenge for his daughter’s suicide. He was convinced that Cliff Morton had got Barbara pregnant, and he didn’t mind the police knowing it. And as for opportunity, Morton was known to have been hanging around the farm towards the end of November. Then who could have shot him, dismembered him, and put the head into a Lockwood cider cask but George Lockwood himself?

  Lockwood admitted ordering Morton off his land in September after he’d found him “interfering” with Barbara. He blamed him for her pregnancy and suicide. He’d stupidly failed to notify the police that Morton had worked for him. But he denied murdering him. And he denied possessing a pistol.

  Despite the thoroughness of the search, no further remains were found on Gifford Farm. Nor was the murder weapon discovered.

  But the exercise wasn’t wasted. After the bales of hay had been removed from the loft of the smallest barn, an alert constable spotted something embedded in one of the beams: a bullet.

  Dr. Atcliffe was summoned to Gifford Farm, and he spent the rest of that day and the next alone in the loft, while Judd paced the farmyard like a dispossessed rooster. When Atcliffe finally emerged, he solemnly confirmed that a shot had been fired there. Forensic pathology is a cautious branch of science, but I strongly suspect that someone was being strung along. Judd blew his top, and Atcliffe waited for him to subside before announcing his second finding: traces of blood on the floorboards of the loft. The stains were not recent, and he couldn’t say yet whether they were human in origin, but the pattern of staining, so far as he could trace it, suggested that the victim had lain for some time with the source of bleeding close to the floor.

  Judd was all smiles again. Atcliffe smiled back and told him that he wasn’t ready to identify the bullet. After photographing it in situ, he had sawn away a section of the beam and was taking it away for analysis.

  The following afternoon he phoned through his preliminary report. The blood was human, from the group 0, common to about half the population. He’d identified the bullet as a 45, of U.S. Army issue, probably fired from an automatic pistol.

  That bullet turned the investigation on its head. George Lockwood was questioned for another hour and then allowed home to rebuild his haystacks. The suspicion had shifted to Duke. He, too, had a plausible motive. He’d been dating Barbara. It was an open secret that she was slipping out in the evenings to meet him. He knew about Morton pestering her.

  Moreover, Duke had opportunity. He was around on the crucial dates. And it emerged that he’d brought a gun out to the farm, a.45 service-issue automatic.

  Superintendent Judd hated GIs. If that sounds to you like unfair comment, try reading his memoirs. According to him, they destroyed our culture and seduced our women. The fact that they fought our war isn’t mentioned.

  He notified the U.S. Army base of his suspicions. The Americans agreed that there was a case to answer. They confided to Judd that Duke and Harry were “somewhere in Europe.” To invite them back for questioning in the middle of an invasion was a practical impossibility. The American Army Criminal Investigation Department would deal with it at the earliest opportunity. This wasn’t bloody-mindedness. Parliament had laid down a procedure under the U.S.A. Visiting Forces Act of 1942.

  Judd must have gone spare with frustration. All he could do now was wait for the war to end. He went back to Gifford Farm and redoubled the search for the murder weapon and the rest of the body. The haystacks came down again, the silage was given another airing. Nothing surfaced.

  I firmly believe it was only because time hung so heavily for Superintendent Judd that he decided to interview me.

  By then we were into 1945. I’d been back in London over a year when the policeman knocked on our door. I’d come back from Somerset just in time for Hitler’s buzz bombs. We’d had one in our street that killed six people. After that, Gifford Farm seemed like another world. I’d stopped crying over Barbara; our minds have ways of adjusting to grief. But I sometimes wondered about Duke. Everything had happened in a rush at the end. I’d left without seeing him. I had no idea how he’d taken the news of Barbara’s suicide. I wished I’d had the chance to speak to him.

  As I said, a policeman called. It was lunchtime, so I was home from school. When I saw the shape of the helmet through the frosted glass, I opened the door myself, remembering how it was a policeman who came in 1940 after Dunkirk to tell us that Dad was dead. I couldn’t think of anyone else who might have been killed, but I didn’t want Mum to faint again.

  Instead of doing long division and nature study with Junior 5 and Miss Coombs, I spent that afternoon in the police station. Superintendent Judd questioned me for a long time. He told me at the beginning that God would be listening, bu
t all I could see was a lady policeman with a shorthand notebook.

  I remember Judd for his shaggy brown eyebrows. They twitched a lot, sometimes together, sometimes independently. I must have given him a few surprises.

  Most of his questions concerned Duke and Barbara, and I told him everything I’ve told you. I had no reason to be evasive. You see, he didn’t say anything to me about the murder or his suspicions of Duke. I thought he was on about Barbara’s suicide. At the end he reminded me that God had terrible punishments in store for boys who didn’t keep His Commandments and asked me if everything I’d told him was the truth. It was.

  Months went by. The buzz bombs stopped, and we kept hearing that the end of the war was coming. Everyone at school was back from Somerset. We had a Daily Telegraph colored map of Europe pinned to the notice board, and Mr. Lillicrap regularly shaded in the areas conquered by the Allies. When he announced to the whole school in assembly that General Patton and the U.S. Third Army had reached the Rhine, I had a strong intuition that Duke was with them.

  One morning in the last month of the war, my mother told me to put on my gray flannel suit, because we were going to London. She wouldn’t say any more, and I convinced myself that we were going to Buckingham Palace to cheer the king and queen because it was Victory Day. Instead we made our way to Lincolns Inn. I was shown into an office where Superintendent Judd was sitting with two American Army officers and a man in a wig and a black gown. It was a terrible letdown. They spent the rest of the day going over the same old ground we’d covered in my previous meeting with Judd. Before we left, they told me I might be asked to appear in court soon, but there was nothing to worry about so long as I continued to tell the truth.