Rough Cider

by Peter Lovesey

  I checked my watch ostentatiously. “I’m not likely to forget.”

  With a grave stare he warned me, “You don’t appear to understand how serious this is. I’d better acquaint you with the facts. That fire up at the Crescent. On the face of it you’d think it was a straight case of a tipsy woman chucking a cigarette into a waste bin and sending the place up in flames. Not so simple. The lads from the fire service found Sally Ashenfelter lying in the living room where the fire started. Evidence of heavy smoking and heavy drinking, yes. Fire appears to have started in a waste bin, yes. But things were stacked around that bin, Dr. Sinclair. Flammable things. Bits of wooden furniture, magazines, some African ornaments carved in ebony, a cigar box-”

  “It was arson, you mean?” I cut in.

  “Murder,” said Voss, watching me interestedly, waiting to see me squirm after he’d put the boot in. He’d learned his trade from Superintendent Judd.

  I said automatically as my mind raced through the implications. “This is certain?”

  “It has to be confirmed, but I’m satisfied with what I saw up there.”

  “You don’t think she might have moved those things herself?”

  “Suicide?” He shook his head. “She was awash with vodka. Paralytic.” He glanced towards the policeman in the corner. “Did you ever hear of anyone killing themselves like that?”

  I didn’t turn my head to check the response.

  Voss picked up the pencil again and prodded the air with it to punctuate his next speech. “How about the other thing? Someone visits the lady, knowing she’s an alcoholic, gets her drinking vodka until she’s out to the world, then makes a bonfire of the furniture, drops a cigarette into the bin, and leaves. How’s that for a hypothesis?”

  I said, “Don’t ask me. You’re the detective.”

  The pencil snapped in his hand.

  For a moment I thought he was going to reach across the desk and grab me, but he took a deep breath and said with a show of self-control that strained him to the limit, “All right, my friend, I’ll ask you this instead. What were you doing in Bath today?”

  “Waiting in the Pump Room most of the time. I’d arranged to meet Sally Ashenfelter at three.”

  “Again? You said you saw her on Sunday.”

  “Not for long. She was, em… indisposed before the end of the visit.”

  “Smashed out of her mind?”

  “A fair description,” I admitted.

  “So you knew about Sally’s drinking?” The image of the rugby forward was right for Voss; he was all intimidation and thrust.

  “So did half of Somerset, I imagine,” I said, gathering it and booting it back. “Alcoholics aren’t known for their discretion.” Encouraged, I said, “I wouldn’t have waited in the Pump Room for practically an hour and a half if I’d known she was at the bottle this morning.”

  Voss didn’t seem particularly impressed. “What time did you arrive in Bath?”

  “About two-thirty.”

  “Where were you at one-thirty?”

  “On the road from Reading.”

  “Did you stop anywhere? Petrol? A spot of lunch?”

  “No. I drove straight here.”

  “And before that?”

  “I was at home, preparing a lecture.”

  Voss eased back in his chair and took a long, speculative look at me. “We’ll have to take your word for that, won’t we? The fire was started between one and two, when you say you were on the road.” The disbelief he managed to put into that word, say, was an obvious taunt.

  I refused to rise to it.

  When it had sunk in that I was unwilling to respond, he said, “You’d better tell me what was behind this meeting with Mrs. Ashenfelter.”

  Tricky. He wouldn’t be overjoyed to hear doubts raised about his idol Judd’s most triumphant case. I stalled a little. “There was nothing sinister in it, I can assure you, Inspector. Just that she said enough before she started on the vodkas on Sunday to make me think it would be profitable to speak to her again. I had the feeling she’d have more to say if her husband wasn’t listening, so I phoned her up and arranged to meet.”

  His eyes narrowed. “More to say about what?”

  I answered offhandedly, “Nothing in particular.”

  “I want a better answer than that,” said Voss, gritting his teeth.

  “Really,” I insisted, “it wouldn’t have mattered what she talked about.” I’d decided that diversionary tactics were necessary here, and to be convincing I needed to let Inspector Voss flounder a little first.

  He warned me, “You’d better not play silly buggers with me.

  I said with high seriousness, “I’m trying to explain that what Mrs. Ashenfelter said was of less importance to me than how she said it.” The mystification written across his features was gratifying, but I sensed that it might have been dangerous to prolong it, so I added, “She’s a Somerset woman, lived in the county all her life, and uses dialect words that I first heard twenty years ago, long before I trained as a medieval historian. I don’t specialize in philology”-kidology, more like, I thought in passing-“but there are obvious points of contact.” Watching the indecision in his eyes, I decided that the tutorial method was more appropriate here than a lecture. “Now you, as a Somerset man, must have heard of the word dimpsy, for example, for twilight.”

  Voss gave a guarded nod.

  I said, “Did you know it’s straight from the Anglo-Saxon dimse? Fascinating, isn’t it, to find the word surviving in the dialect? Just one example of the sort of thing I had ambitions of exploring with Sally Ashenfelter’s help.”

  Voss said in a voice that was not yet convinced but more than halfway there, “You’re telling me you arranged to meet her to talk about words?”

  “Precisely,” I said encouragingly. “I can give you other examples if you like.” My mind ran rapidly through the few I’d retained. It was a long time since I’d compiled those lists for Duke.

  “Don’t bother,” he told me.

  “Someone has to,” I persisted, playing the zealous academic with all the conviction at my command. “Many of these old expressions will be irretrievably lost if no one cares about them, Inspector.” I launched into an impassioned appeal for the collection and preservation of sound archives.

  He cut me off in mid-sentence. “I haven’t time to listen to you rabbiting on about words. I’m investigating a suspected murder.” But for all his bluster he’d lost his grip on the interview. He wasn’t in Judd’s class. His next question was more of an appeal than a demand. “Is there anything else you can tell me that might assist me in my inquiries?”

  I let him wait. If I played this right, I could be out of here in a few minutes. I screwed up my face and rubbed my chin thoughtfully. Finally, I said, “It may be unimportant, but when I phoned Sally to arrange a meeting, she said she couldn’t see me in the morning because someone was coming.”

  He seized on it. “She was expecting someone? Who?”

  “She didn’t say.”

  “A man?”

  “I’ve no idea. All she told me was that someone was coming in the morning and she couldn’t put them off.”

  He got up from his chair to pace the room, beating his fist repeatedly into the palm of his left hand. “A visitor. The husband didn’t mention a visitor.”

  “Maybe he wasn’t told.”

  This prompted Voss to clap his hand to the back of his neck. “A secret visitor. Someone she didn’t mention to her husband. Who? A lover?” He sounded encouraged, then pressed his hand to his forehead. “But why should the lover want to kill her?”

  I listened in a bored way and took a look at my watch.

  “This opens it up,” said Voss. “By Jesus, it opens it up!”

  I cleared my throat. “Have you finished with me?”

  Voss looked at me abstractedly. “Finished? For the present, yes. Have we got your address?”

  “I gave it to the sergeant at the desk.”

&nbs
p; “Fair enough.” He made a dismissive gesture.

  I didn’t say good-bye as I went out.

  TWENTY

  Pressure. I’d tried ignoring it, turning my back on it, meeting it halfway, laughing in its face, arguing with it, defying it, but still it closed in, unstoppable. Now it had got to me.

  I needed the gun.

  From Bath I drove fast along the Wiltshire roads, main beam probing the evening mist, wipers working intermittently. I kept checking the mirror, because I had a suspicion that I was being tailed. One set of headlamps stayed consistently fifty yards behind me whatever speed I was doing, and at times I was going flat out.

  The victim of my own imagination?

  No. The threat of pursuit was real. I was suspected of murder. Doubly suspected. First Alice had pointed the finger at me. Now Inspector Voss.

  You may think I was overreacting to Alice’s charge of shooting Cliff Morton in 1943, that it was too absurd to take seriously. But I’d learned enough about that young woman in the last five days to regard her as dangerous. She kept nothing to herself. It was a sure bet that she’d mouthed her suspicions to Digby Watmore by now. With the press on to me, as well as the police, what chance would I have?

  Two murders down to me. Put them together and News on Sunday would have a field day. I’d be in the same league as Heath and Christie.

  Each time I drove through a stretch lit by street lamps I slowed and tried to identify the car trailing me. Difficult, because he kept his distance, and the mist lingered right into Berkshire, but by degrees I reached a few conclusions. A large black limousine with a wide axis and low lines, possibly a Jaguar, driven by a man, no passengers.

  At Thatcham I stopped for petrol. While the girl was unfastening the cap I stepped quickly into the road to see what my faithful follower would do. Nowhere in sight. Yet two minutes after I got on the road again, I checked the mirror, and he was back with me.

  On familiar territory, where the A34O forks left to Pangbourne, I slipped the leash by turning sharp left a short way up the road towards Englefield Park, then left again by the lake and back to the A4. I believe he overshot at the first turn.

  I switched my thoughts to more useful activity. I’d arranged with Danny Leftwich to pick up the Colt.45 at the range on Wednesday morning, only I couldn’t wait that long. He should have finished cleaning it by now. So I drove past Reading on the A4 almost as far as Sonning and then branched right to seek out Danny’s sixteenth-century cottage by the golf course. I’d played bridge there several times the previous winter.

  My lights first picked out the hump of his Volkswagen above a low stone wall, then the squat structure of the thatched cottage. Smoke, coiling into the night sky from one of the two chimneys, encouraged me; the unlit interior didn’t. I stopped by the wall, followed the winding route between soggy lavender bushes to the front door, touched the bellpush, heard it chime two notes, and waited hopefully. A dog barked. Nothing else.

  No point in trying the bell again. Between the chimes and the barking, most of Sonning must have heard that Danny Leftwich had a visitor. I should have guessed that a man of Danny’s energy didn’t spend his nights indoors in front of the TV. Looking around, I spotted a brick-built garage or workshop at the end of the garden.

  One thing was clear: He didn’t expend much of that energy in the garden. It was a job finding the crazy paving in the long grass. Worth it, though. When I rapped the door, Danny’s voice piped up at once, “Who is it?”

  I told him.

  He called, “Hold on, Theo. I’ll be right with you.”

  I waited over a minute, then the door opened and I got a whiff of the chemicals and understood why the delay had been necessary. The building was a photographic darkroom. I had to bend my head to avoid touching a set of still wet prints pegged to plastic lines.

  “Not bad, hm?” he said as I glanced at them.

  They were nude shots. One shot, to be accurate, a blowup in black and white, printed ten times over. So-called glamour photography. A girl bending slightly forward, head turned to look over her shoulder at the camera, as if in a relay race, except that her bottom was too plump for a runner, and her pouting expression suggested it wasn’t a baton she was looking out for.

  “Something new in cottage industries,” I commented.

  “My spinning wheel’s got woodworm,” said Danny.

  “I suppose you’ve got an outlet for these?”

  There was a glint of mischief from Danny as he said, “Rikky Patel.”

  I winced in disbelief. Rikky was another of our bridge team, an unfailingly solemn senior technician in the biology department.

  “Rikky goes in for this?”

  He enjoyed the idea for a moment and then explained, “Rikky’s uncle is a publisher. The Indian subcontinent is a fabulous market for soft porn.” He poured the contents of a developing tray into a beaker. “Come for your gun? I thought we said Wednesday.”

  “Is it ready? You’re a pal.”

  Danny wiped his hands and led me out and through the lavender to the cottage. The Colt was lying on a cloth on the kitchen table among a collection of bristle brushes, screwdrivers, jags, alien keys, cocktail sticks, and tins of gun oil. He picked it up and operated the slide. “I haven’t adjusted the sights. I was hoping to test-fire it.”

  “I know,” I told him. “Something has come up. Did you by any chance get hold of some…”

  “New cartridges? Sure. They’ll cost you a bit.”

  I paid him generously, and nothing was said about the use I expected to make of them. “As a matter of interest,” I asked him, “the Colt is a pretty heavy weapon, isn’t it? I mean, the recoil is something to reckon with.”

  “It has that reputation,” he agreed.

  “Do you reckon a boy of nine could handle it with any accuracy?”

  He frowned.

  “I know it’s against the law,” I said, “but just supposing it happened.”

  He gave me a puzzled look and said, “Theo, you already told me you fired the thing two-handed when you were a boy.”

  Stupid, I thought. Of course I mentioned it last time. Too much on my mind.

  I told him, “That was just messing about in a field, shooting at a tin can.”

  He gave a shrug and we left it at that.

  Although it was spotting with rain, he insisted on coming out to the car with me. Before I switched on, he made it obvious that there was something he wanted to mention. He bent his head confidentially to the window.

  To be frank, I was slightly annoyed. I thought I’d made it plain that I wouldn’t land him in trouble with the law. He’d done me a favor, I’d paid him handsomely, and the matter was closed. So before he got a word out, I said forcefully, “Great to have friends you can trust, Danny. Thanks, mate.” I started up.

  But he insisted on saying something else. He had to shout above the MG’s engine note. “She’s a bit sensitive about the posing. You won’t let on that you know about it, will you?”

  I said without understanding, “Of course not.”

  I was back on the A4 more than a mile from the cottage when it dawned on me. That’s how preoccupied I was with my own predicament. I had to make a profound mental effort to visualize the naked girl in the photograph. When I did, I whistled, not so much at the shock of identity as at Danny’s enterprising genius. She was familiar, but in another setting, seated at her typewriter in a white blouse and pleated skirt, the elegant secretary of the history department, Carol Dangerfield.

  Bully for you, Carol, I thought. Don’t worry, I can keep a secret.

  With the gun in my pocket and an empty road behind me, I felt better than I had all day. It lasted only as long as it took me to drive home.

  The black Jaguar that had followed me from Bath was parked in my driveway. I thought about slamming the car into reverse and leaving him to it. I thought about the newspapers. I thought about the police. In the end I drew up beside the Jaguar, switched off, took out the gun and t
he box of cartridges Danny had given me, slotted six of them into the magazine, and pressed it home. Then I heard the crunch of shoes on gravel. I thrust the Colt into my jacket pocket a split second before the car door was grabbed and swung open.

  “Out, jerk.”

  I knew the voice. Didn’t need to look any higher than the stubby hand gripping the two-foot length of lead piping from my garage.

  “What’s this about?” I asked Harry Ashenfelter as my heart pumped in double time.

  “Give me that.”

  I handed my walking stick to him, and he slung it far into the darkness of the garden.

  “Now get out.”

  I said, “You’re crazy.”

  He swung the piping high and cracked it down on the bonnet of the car. Chips of red paint hit the windscreen.

  I said, “You’ll pay for that.”

  He lifted it again.

  This time I did as he’d ordered, using my arms and good leg to achieve the vertical. Propped against the car, I faced him. “Now what?”

  He jerked his head in the direction of the house.

  I said, “Difficult.”

  “Brother, I don’t care if you have to crawl on your belly.”

  It didn’t come to that. By lolloping along the side of the car, I shunted myself from the MG to the Jaguar and then, with a couple of hops, to the storm porch. Felt for my key and let myself in.

  Harry was close behind, me, making sure I didn’t slam the door on him. I switched on the hall light and kept my momentum going as far as the living room. Sank into an armchair and in the same movement slipped the Colt automatic from my coat pocket and wedged it handily between my right thigh and the side of the chair, twisting my body so that he was unsighted.

  He switched on the main light and pulled the cord on the curtains. He was crimson with emotion or anger or sadistic anticipation. He crossed the room and stood over me, holding the pipe horizontally against my neck and forcing my jaw upwards. “Now, punk,” he said, giving me a faceful of his sour breath, “you better tell me why you set fire to my home and murdered my wife.”

  His priorities were instructive, but I thought it prudent not to comment. I couldn’t speak, anyway, with the piping jammed against my larynx. I made a strangled sound, and he eased the pressure enough for me to say, “I had nothing to do with the fire, for God’s sake. I gave the police a full account of my movements.”