Rough Cider

by Peter Lovesey

  SIXTEEN

  You won’t be surprised to learn that I got up and walked out of the Annual Cure Hotel. Settled the bill, removed Alice Ashenfelter’s rucksack from the car, dumped it in the hall, and drove off.

  I think if any other driver on the A4 that evening had cut across me or just tried to hold the center, there’d have been blood on the road. I wasn’t merely angry. It’s a crimson blur in my memory.

  I was through Chippenham before the rage turned inwards. I’d seen trouble coming and ignored it because it was blonde, nineteen, and willing to climb into my bed.

  I’d taken the bait.

  Too late now to race off down the A4. Escape was a delusion. She’d got it firmly into her mind that I’d killed her daddy, and she was out for blood. Never mind that I was nine at the time. I had to be made to suffer.

  I had a fair idea how she’d arrange it. She’d run to Digby Watmore, her pet reporter. News on Sunday didn’t need hard facts. They’d stitch me up with innuendo. Photos of the skull, a Colt.45, and me. And, somewhere down the page, Alice, sexy but soulful, captioned, “I found the murder weapon in Dr. Sinclair’s house.”

  In the way of British justice seeking to right itself and keep its dignity, there would follow a protracted period of investigation, off the record for a while, then, in unhurried stages, handed over from police to lawyers to politicians. Grinding to the same tempo, the university would systematically strip me of my responsibilities, a tutor group here, a place on a committee there, loading me with extramural work at the expense of degree-level lecturing, until my position became untenable. Gently but inexorably easing me out.

  Something had to be done about Alice.

  I had to be positive.

  I was home by nine. My first positive action was to pour myself a restoring Scotch and sink it fast. Then I went to the shelf in the hall where I kept the bills and junk mail and picked up something I’d placed there earlier: Digby Watmore’s visiting card. I confirmed what I’d half remembered, that the fat reporter was a local man, a stringer. I took the card to the phone and called him.

  Digby was at home. Yes, he remembered me. No, he wouldn’t mind meeting me for a drink. Yes, he could get to Pangbourne in half an hour. He looked forward to seeing me in the lounge of the Copper Inn.

  Considering that the last words I’d spoken to him were “Sod off,” he was either very forgiving or a true professional.

  You’ll find the Copper Inn in Egon Ronay, a trendy, well-appointed place, too classy for the likes of Digby, but I didn’t want to be seen with him in my local. He was waiting for me just inside the door in his blue raincoat and green trilby. The small eyes shone with anticipation. There was a faint aroma of sweat. For a heavyweight he’d moved fast to get there before me.

  No prizes for guessing that Digby was a beer drinker. I carried two pints to the table farthest from the bar.

  Naturally, he wanted to know how Alice and I had spent the day.

  I admitted we’d been to Somerset. Why deny it? One of my reasons for being here was to get my version in first.

  Digby said nostalgically, “Recapturing those war years… Remember the Land Girls? I once went out with one. You You wouldn’t believe the muscles on her.” Almost as an after thought he asked, “Meet anyone you knew?”

  “Bernard, the son. He didn’t invite us in.”

  “So the Lockwoods are still there?”

  “Apparently. We didn’t meet the old farmer and his wife.”

  “Pity, they’d have made you welcome, I’m sure. How did the place look?”

  “Smaller… and very muddy.”

  “You don’t sound too enchanted, if you don’t mind me mentioning it,” commented Digby.

  “It wasn’t my idea of a day out,” I said, adding quickly, “Alice thought of it.”

  Digby wobbled with amusement. “The eager Miss Ashenfelter. Extremely pretty girl, though. Worth doing a favor for, I daresay.”

  “I had no ulterior motive, if that’s what you mean,” I said tersely.

  “Wouldn’t dream of suggesting it, old boy,” Digby assured me. “Not so much a favor as a reward, eh?”

  I stared back and passed no comment.

  “She had spent the night at your house when we called this morning, had she not?”

  “True,” I answered. “She arrived very late.”

  As a News on Sunday man, Digby’s mind was on one track. “And after your day in the country together, is she taking a long, relaxing bath or warming up the bed?”

  It seemed she hadn’t phoned him yet. “I left her drinking coffee,” I answered, declining to say where. “I’d like to ask you about Alice.”

  He grinned lewdly. “I wouldn’t have thought there’s much more to find out.”

  “On the contrary. She arrives from America and asks to see the News on Sunday files, and in no time at all she has a reporter and a photographer in tow, What’s going on? Has she done a deal with you?”

  “Not with me, old man. I take my instructions from London.”

  “Come on, what does the paper stand to get out of it?”

  “A human-interest story. She’s blonde, twenty years old, and the daughter of a convicted killer. She comes to England to find out about him. All good copy.”

  “There’s more to it than that. You went to all the trouble of tracing me. Why? I was only a child in 1943.”

  “A key witness,” said Digby.

  “What do you want from me, then?”

  “She asked to meet you.”

  “She’s convinced that her father was wrongly convicted.”

  “Apparently.”

  “You don’t seem at all surprised. I suppose the paper put her up to this.”

  Digby tried to look inscrutable.

  I said with my anger held in check, “Doesn’t your rag have any sense of responsibility? The girl is fanatical. She’s loosing off some extraordinary accusations. At one stage today she even suggested I fired the fatal shot. A kid of nine.”

  ‘That is a bit over the top,” Digby had the graciousness to say.

  I hoped he would still feel the same when she put it to him herself. I added, “It’s slanderous nonsense, and if I took it seriously, I’d want to know precisely how your paper is involved.”

  Digby dipped his mouth to the beer.

  Having got that across, I said in a public-spirited vein, “What bothers me is that if there were grounds for doubting the Donovan verdict, this is not the right way to examine them.”

  “Possibly not,” Digby conceded.

  “As a crime reporter, you know the form,” I went on. “Let’s suppose some evidence turned up suggesting that a miscarriage of justice had occurred, and a man had been falsely convicted of murder. Hanged, in fact. Is there anything one could do within the law to clear his name?”

  The fleshy mounds around Digby’s eyes slid aside to reveal an interested gleam. “This is hypothetical?”

  “Naturally.”

  “It would depend.”

  “On what?”

  “In the first place, the quality of the evidence.”

  “Irrefutable.”

  Digby sniffed. “You’d be unwise to claim that it was. Are we speaking of forensic evidence, a new witness, or what?”

  “Never mind. Let’s say that the case for a new hearing was overwhelming.”

  He grinned. “It might overwhelm you or me, old sport, but try overwhelming the Home Office and see what happens.”

  “Is that the procedure? One applies to the Home Office?”

  “You can try.”

  “You don’t sound optimistic.”

  “I have personal knowledge of three families who’ve been sending in petitions for years.”

  “So what would you suggest?”

  He drained his glass, peered at me artfully, and said, “I haven’t enough to go on yet.”

  Waiting to be served, I took stock. Talking to the press goes against the grain, but I was damn sure Alice would be on to
him in the morning.

  Over that second pint I gave him a rapid rundown on the day’s discoveries, stopping with our departure from the Royal Crescent. I didn’t explain why Alice was spending the night in a seedy hotel in Bath. He listened and made no comment except a belch that I like to believe was inadvertent.

  He must have felt he’d profited in some way, because he heaved himself off the chair to buy the next round. When he returned with the glasses, he asked what I proposed to do next.

  “That’s why I’m here,” I explained. “Is there any point in pursuing this, opening old wounds, if it achieves nothing in the end?”

  Digby pondered the question. “Candidly, the chances of getting a royal pardon for Donovan, if that’s what you have in mind, are smaller than infinitesimal.” He beamed. “Said that well after two pints, didn’t I? It’s a textbook case, as you know. Every lad who’s passed through police college has heard of the skull in the cider.”

  “No one’s questioning the work that was done on the skull,” I pointed out.

  “Ah, but it takes the gilt off the gingerbread if some bright chappy from Pangbourne proves that they got the wrong man in the end.”

  “True, but…”

  “There’s another thing. This is a jaundiced old pressman speaking, but let’s not forget the international angle. Young American soldier helps us win the war and how do we show our gratitude. Wouldn’t do much for the Atlantic alliance, would it? It’s a hot potato, this one.”

  “You’re saying we’d get nowhere through official channels?” Actually, it was what I’d expected him to say.

  “Nothing short of a confession signed by the murderer would do any good.” He emptied his glass again. “Mind you, that’s only a personal opinion.”

  “So what do you suggest?”

  Digby leaned back and displayed the triple-tiered flesh below his chin. “A direct appeal to Joe Public. It’s the only sure way to win this one.”

  Playing dumb, I asked, “How would you go about it?”

  “Through the paper-if we got that evidence.”

  I said in a low voice. “It’s just possible I could obtain it. The real thing, not wild accusations.”

  His mouth jutted open, and a glassy look appeared in his eyes. The scoop of a lifetime was beckoning to Digby Watmore. “And you need some help from me?”

  “No.”

  He reddened. “You and I could handle this together. No need to bring in the Fleet Street boys at this stage. We could come to terms, I’m certain. Generous terms.”

  “That’s not important to me.”

  “What do you need, then?”

  “Time. Two or three days without Miss Ashenfelter breathing down my neck.”

  “Then you’ll give me an exclusive?”

  I put out my right hand.

  Digby smiled hugely and gripped it.

  SEVENTEEN

  Monday morning, ten A.M. Twenty-six first-years looked expectantly towards me. On their syllabus sheets they had a lecture on the Venerable Bede scheduled for this hour. They were in for a disappointment.

  Adhering to my belief that honesty is the best policy, I announced, “I’d better confess that I neglected to prepare this lecture. I spent the weekend with a blonde instead of Bede.”

  This was met with disbelieving jeers and a shout that I ought to be ashamed of myself.

  “Indeed I am,” I told them. “And to save my good name and reputation, I’ve brought in my slides of the great cathedrals and abbeys of Europe. Would you turn out the lights, Miss Hooper?”

  Thank God for the great cathedrals and abbeys of Europe. My first reaction on waking at 8:50 A.M. had been to reach for the Alka-Seltzers and my slide projector. Just try ad-libbing for an hour on Bede.

  When it was over, I made a phone call from the Senior Common Room. Sally Ashenfelter answered, reciting her number with a crispness that sounded encouragingly sober.

  ‘This is Theo Sinclair,” I told her. “Visited you yesterday, remember?” I was far from confident that she would.

  “Why, yes. The evacuee. I’m afraid my husband isn’t here this morning, Mr. Sinclair.”

  “Actually, I wanted to speak to you.”

  “Me?”

  “We didn’t have much time to talk. There were a couple of things I’m most anxious to ask you about.”

  Oh?”

  “I’m speaking from the university, Mrs. Ashenfelter. It’s a little public here. Do you think we could meet?” I was about to say “For a drink,” when empty vodka bottles clinked a warning in my head.

  “In Bath, do you mean?” asked Sally.

  “The Pump Room,” I said on an impulse, “for a coffee.”

  She hesitated. “Which day did you have in mind?”

  “How about tomorrow?”

  “Let’s see… Harry’s going to be out all day, so that’s all right. Someone’s coming in the morning. I can’t put them off.” She thought a moment and suggested casually, “How about a lunchtime drink in the Francis?”

  Alcoholics are smart operators. “Difficult,” I said. “Afternoon tea in the Pump Room?”

  She laughed. “Cucumber sandwiches, the three-piece orchestra and all? All right. Let’s meet at three, before it gets too crowded.”

  “I’ll have reserved a table,” I promised.

  I spent the next hour in the history department’s library making up time.

  Towards lunch, I scooped my books into a more tidy pile, walked down a staircase, through two sets of swing doors, and into the narrow office where a far-from-narrow secretary called Pippa received visitors to the psychology department. Pippa could pin you to the wall with one deep breath.

  “Who’s in today?” I asked. “The prof?” Pippa shook her head, and it wasn’t her head that moved most. “A conference at Liverpool.”

  “And Dr. Ott?”

  “Just finished a seminar in room nineteen.”

  Simon Ott looked up in surprise when I found him rewinding a tape. I asked if he could spare a few minutes. We weren’t well-known to each other, but that, for me, was an encouragement.

  “I’m trying to clarify something slightly contentious,” I explained.

  “Concerning me?” A guarded expression dropped over his face like a visor. Small, neat, and in his thirties, he went in for dark suits and cream-colored shirts with one-color ties, that color generally being in the brown range.

  “Me. I’m after advice.”

  “Ah.” He looked marginally more approachable, then said, “I don’t have much time. A meeting at two.”

  “Could I join you for lunch, perhaps?”

  He glanced at my stick. “I generally take a walk.”

  “You think I wouldn’t keep up?”

  He hesitated. “If it doesn’t concern me personally…”

  “Your special field is the memory and how it functions, isn’t it?”

  The face did a double take. The mention of memory triggered an interested response, and the revelation that I’d made some inquiries about him turned him pink. Happily for me, curiosity prevailed. We compromised on a slow stroll across Whiteknights Park.

  Without much preamble I told him what I remembered having seen in the small barn at Gifford Farm on Thanksgiving Day, 1943. I told him about Barbara’s suicide, leaving out the murder and the trial. There was no need to go into all that sensational stuff. “The point is that I was required to make a statement,” I said, letting him assume that it was for the inquest. “It’s on record, so I can check my memory against what I said then. It hasn’t altered. I can picture everything as I described it. What I saw was definitely a violent sexual attack. But quite recently someone has claimed that I gave an inaccurate account of what really took place-that in fact it was passionate lovemaking. There’s some secondary evidence to back up this theory. I won’t say it’s shaken my confidence, because it hasn’t.”

  “Why come to me, then?” Ott reasonably asked.

  I flapped my hand vaguely. “There’s th
at old saying about memory playing tricks.”

  He looked away, following the flight of some starlings to a mown stretch of grass.near the Museum of Rural Life. “Tell me, did you know the people involved?”

  “The girl, better than the man. He was virtually a stranger.”

  “But you knew her. Would you say that you liked her enough to identify emotionally with her?”

  “Yes, I would.”

  “So this experience-whatever it was-must have distressed you?”

  “Certainly. I was in tears.”

  We walked on for some way while he reflected on this. He resumed. “The brain has various defense mechanisms for coping with anxiety. We can, for example, repress certain stressful or disturbing memories by pushing them down into the unconscious.”

  I said, “That’s a way of forgetting, isn’t it? In my case we’re talking about remembering something unpleasant.”

  “True.”

  “I mean, could I have been distorting the memory?”

  “That’s possible,” said Ott. “The classic example was cited by Piaget, the Swiss psychologist, who remembered a man trying to kidnap him from his pram in the Champs-Ely-sees. His nurse managed to fight off the kidnapper and was scratched across the face. The man fled when a gendarme with a short cloak and white baton arrived. Piaget retained a sharp visual memory of the scene right into adolescence. When he was fifteen, his father received a letter from the nurse, who had long since left the family. She was joining the Salvation Army, and she wanted to confess something. In particular, she wanted to return the watch she’d been given as a reward for saving the child. The story was untrue. She’d given herself the scratches.”

  “So Piaget imagined it?”

  “His explanation was that he must have heard the story from his parents and projected it into the past as a memory.”

  “What I saw definitely happened.”

  Ott didn’t challenge my assertion. With the skill of the analyst he found a way of justifying it while raising serious doubts. “You must have heard accounts from other sources. It’s not impossible that you modified your memory to fit someone else’s version of what happened. Research suggests that memory isn’t totally reliable. It’s influenced by what we subsequently think. So a stressful memory might well be modified in retrospect. Do you often picture this scene of rape?”