“Crap,” said Harry.
“True! I was on the road when the fire started.”
“How’d you know when it started?”
“From the police. Listen, Harry, I had no reason to harm Sally. I had an appointment to meet her this afternoon. I was waiting in the Pump Room over an hour.”
“Making sure you were seen, huh?”
“Balls.”
He rocked my head back with the bar and jammed a knee into my stomach. With the reflex I practically decapitated myself. I vomited. He drew back and cuffed me with the back of his right hand. I doubled up, groaning.
He said close to my ear, “So help me, creep, I’m going to have the truth out of you.”
I asked for water.
He hit me across the face again. My lip split, and warm blood oozed down my chin.
He shouted, “Sit up!”
I did as he commanded, pressing my shoulders against the back of the chair.
Harry had boobed. He’d stepped back to admire his work. And now he saw a Colt. 45 leveled at his chest. His hands tightened on the lead piping.
“Drop it,” I said. “This is in good nick, and loaded.”
His face twitched and turned gray, but he obeyed.
I said, “Back against he wall, facing me.”
I had a clear line of fire from the chair.
I said as evenly as circumstances allowed, “Maybe now I can get some sense out of you. Apparently, you believe I started the fire. Why?”
Silence. He was drained of aggression.
“Lost your voice? Touch of laryngitis?”
He wetted his lips nervously. Panic had manifestly set in.
By contrast, I was back to my sarcastic best. “Don’t tell me you’re one of those jumpy types who can’t look into the barrel of a gun and talk rationally.”
“Don’t shoot,” he finally managed to say, adding limply, “You’ll regret it.”
“Come off it, Harry. I’ve got a right to defend myself from a thug like you.”
“With a murder weapon?” he said frenziedly. “I know that gun. It’s a U.S. Army automatic, the one the police never found after Morton was shot. Tell me it isn’t.”
Honest, as usual, I shrugged and said nothing.
Harry was back in business as a communicator. He started talking fast on a high, hysterical note. “I know about you, Sinclair. You’re in real trouble now. You must be out of your mind. I guess you flipped when Alice turned up out of nowhere wanting to dig up the past. It was all buried and forgotten, tidy and grassed over. You live in style now, this smart place in the country, a good job in the university. No one here knows about your past.”
“What past?”
“Like blowing Morton’s brains out with that thing in your hand.”
I stared back at him with supreme indifference. I’d listened to the buildup, in no doubt about what was coming. Harry Ashenfelter was just one more self-appointed amateur detective out to shock.
“You killed the guy,” he said superfluously, his big scene in ruins around him, “and you let my buddy swing for it.” Sensing the need to tone it down, he put up a quivering hand. “Okay, you were just a kid at the time. Under pressure. All that. I give you all that. You could get help, you know. You need a good lawyer.”
I sighed. He was pathetic.
He said with all the concern he could register in that lumpy, combative face, “Did you know Sally was actually sorry for you? She told me you got Barbara Lockwood all wrong.”
I reminded him wearily, “I heard this from you on Sunday. It doesn’t mean I shot Cliff Morton.”
Harry showed no sign of having heard. He was too keyed-up to draw any kind of deduction. The words were gushing from him on the Scheherazade principle, in a breathless bid to stop me from pulling the trigger. “Sally and I did some serious talking since. She told me things I didn’t know. Nobody knew but Sally. Jesus Christ, is it any wonder she was an alcoholic?”
“What things did she tell you?”
“About Barbara. Barbara’s secrets.”
My mouth suddenly felt drained. Trying to sound unconcerned, I said, “Oh, yes?”
“Listen to this, Sinclair. Barbara was nuts on Morton. She really loved the guy. She was carrying his baby.”
Pulses started throbbing in my head. It isn’t easy after twenty years to accept that you were totally wrong about someone you would have gone to the wall for. I’d heard this from Alice, but she couldn’t have known for certain. She’d guessed about Barbara and Morton, and I hadn’t believed her. Deep down I’d felt sure that Sally would expose it as a cruel defamation.
But it wasn’t. Barbara, my Barbara, had misled me. She’d used me to promote the lie that she wanted Duke. I was forced to accept it now.
I said in a dry, distant voice, “Barbara told Sally this?”
“Sure.” Harry locked one of his forefingers over the other and said, “Those two girls were like this. Barbara confided to Sal that she let Cliff Morton make it with her whenever he wanted. But old man Lockwood and his lady didn’t care for Morton at all. He was bad news.”
“That part is true,” I admitted. “What else?”
“They ordered Barbara to stop seeing the guy. This was after George Lockwood caught them together.”
“In the orchard?”
“Right. Barbara was shattered. The poor kid was pregnant, and on top of that, Morton’s call-up papers had just arrived. Then Morton came up with a plan. He wasn’t a total jerk. He offered to marry the girl. He figured he could dodge the call-up by taking Barbara to Ireland. Neutral territory. She could marry him there and have the baby.” Harry paused for breath, studying my reception of the story. I must have looked poleaxed. “This is on the level, Sinclair.”
“Is that all?”
He wound himself up again. “Hell, no. There’s more. They had to get new identities. Morton knew a guy in the Town Hall who said he would fix it in a matter of days if the money was right. Then they’d find a boatman along the Bristol Channel willing to ship them to Ireland. Meantime, Morton needed a place to lay up. So Barbara came up with a suggestion. She said he could hide in one of the barns on the farm. She’d keep him supplied with food. And that’s what happened.”
I screwed up my face in disbelief. “He was there on the farm?”
“Right up to the day you shot him.”
I was so stunned by the information that I allowed the remark to stand. Harry had got the dumb, undivided attention he wanted.
“Barbara was smart. She encouraged her parents to think she was seeing Duke, and they didn’t mind too much. In their eyes anyone was better than Morton, even a GI.” A nervous grin streaked across his lips. “People generally locked up their daughters when the Yanks hit town. Not the Lockwoods. Barbara put it around that she had something going with Duke. As you know, she went out with him a couple of times. And she used you to stoke up the story.”
And I’d repeated it at Duke’s trial. My skin prickled. “Did Sally tell you that or are you embroidering?”
“She had it from Barbara. Gospel truth. You got to believe it.”
I did. I knew, sickeningly, resoundingly, that it was true.?d been pitchforked into a living hell. My discredited evidence had helped to hang an innocent man.
At last Harry had dried up. The next move was up to me, and I was in no shape for action. He sensed the softening in my resolve, or just the wish to be rid of him and work things out for myself, because his eyes traveled upwards from the gun. He was assessing his chances of getting oµt alive.
Stalemate.
I wouldn’t shoot him in Cold blood, but it wasn’t safe to lower the gun. He couldn’t move and neither could I, without my stick. I couldn’t even escort him to his car and send him on his way.
Rashly, through my tormented emotions, I grasped at reason. Harry believed?d shot Morton and killed Sally.
I said, “Do me the favor of answering one straightforward question. If Morton was Barbara’s lover, why
would I have shot him?”
“Jealousy.”
“For Christ’s sake. I was in short trousers.”
“I was there. Remember?” said Harry, picking up confidence by the second. “You had a crush on the girl, right? Puppy love. I saw it. Sally saw it. Barbara used it. Her fatal mistake. Never mess with a kid’s emotions.”
I said heatedly, bitterly, “What am I supposed to have done? Shot Morton in a jealous passion and cut up the body? At nine years old? Who are you kidding?”
Harry was sounding more in control than I. “No,” he said evenly. “Duke disposed of the body. He took pity on you.”
“What?”
“He was like a father to you. He’d do anything to get you off the hook. He drove back to the farm that night, hacked off the head and put it in the cider barrel, and then transported the rest someplace else, miles away.”
I was practically speechless. “He didn’t tell you that.”
“No. But it has to be true. It was typical of the guy. He adored kids.”
“It doesn’t have to be true at all.”
Harry was determined to complete the explanation. “When they finally caught up with him, he refused to put the finger on you. Stupid and brave. That was Duke Donovan.”
“And you think I kept silent at the trial?” I shouted at him as my anger erupted. “Allowed them to hang the man who’s supposed to have saved me? What kind of vicious bastard do you take me for? If I could have thought of anything to stop them hanging Duke, I’d have spoken up.”
“The guy was innocent,” said Harry. “I told you he was innocent.”
“I know. It breaks my heart. It’s monstrous. Hideous. But I didn’t know at the time. For twenty years I swallowed the story that he was guilty. I’m bloody certain now that he wasn’t, and I’m going to find the killer. I don’t know for sure who it was, but I know where to go.”
A pause.
“The farm?”
I nodded and made a superhuman effort to sound rational.
“Do you know why I’m so certain?”
“Sally?”
“Yes. She was killed because of what she would have told me.
“You think whoever murdered Morton also…”
“Right.”
We faced each other in a tense, thoughtful silence, each wiser yet with our impasse, unresolved. I could have said more. I elected not to. What I’d expressed was spontaneous, impassioned, and enough.
Finally, Harry took the initiative. He said, “Okay, my friend, call me crazy, but I believe you. If I’m right that you didn’t kill Morton or Sally, I don’t have to worry. You won’t shoot me. So All tell you what I’m going to do. I’m going to walk right out of here, get in my car, and drive away. Understand?”
I gave a nod.
He wanted extra assurance. “You’re not planning to stop me? In that case, would you lower the gun?”
This, in essence, was what the superpowers had debated ever since Hiroshima. There had to be some trust between us. Disarmament was the only sane way forward. I glanced down and put my good foot on the lead piping he’d threatened me with. I stared at Harry. Then I slowly planted the gun on my lap and placed my hands on the arms of the chair.
Harry dipped his head in recognition, took a couple of tentative sideways steps, and started across the room towards the door. I followed him with my eyes, making no move.
A sitting duck.
It happened at speed, though I see it now in slow motion.
He was practically behind me and through the door when his right hand grabbed something off the top of the filing cabinet there.
A multicolored glass paperweight about the size of a cricket ball but twice as heavy.
An arc of light at the edge of my vision. The thing in his hand streaking towards my head.
The crunch.
Nothing.
TWENTY-ONE
A ringing sound. Shrill, insistent, and painful. I opened my eyes and saw daylight seeping into the space above the curtains. Fingered the swelling at the back of my skull. Groaned.
The ringing wasn’t all in my head.
At some stage of the night I’d emerged from unconsciousness sufficiently to drag myself as far as the sofa and collapse there. Now I was cold, my clothes were clammy, and I needed about a dozen aspirins.
I groped for my stick. It wasn’t there, of course. I made the effort to roll off the sofa and crawl to the phone.
Picked it up and listened.
“Ah, so all life is not extinct in Pangbourne. Is this the ear of Dr. Theodore Sinclair?” A man’s voice, resonant, bombastic, pleased with itself. The voice that could spell diarrhea without the aid of a dictionary.
“Who else?”
“This is Watmore, Digby Watmore. I suppose I got you out of bed.”
“No. What time is it?”
“Eight-twenty or thereabouts. Wednesday. Two or three days without, you said.”
“Two or three days without what?”
“Miss Ashenfelter on your back, to quote you verbatim.
Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten. We made an agreement.”
I recalled it faintly, as if from another incarnation. “When was this, Digby?”
“Sunday evening. The last two days have been no picnic for me, I can assure you. I say, are you sure I haven’t disturbed your sleep?”
“What happened to Miss Ashenfelter?”
He gave what sounded like an exasperated snort. “She’s been my constant companion for the past forty-eight hours.”
“Day and night, Digby?”
“I put my studio couch at her disposal, but she prefers to pass the night having interminable conversations about the Donovan case.”
I yawned sympathetically. “Was it instructive?”
“That’s beside the point now,” said Digby testily. “Events have overtaken us, haven’t they?”
“Quite a lot has happened, yes.”
“That’s precisely why I’m on the line. A fine shock I had this morning, picking up the Western Morning Press and reading about this fire in Bath. Have you seen it?”
“The paper? No.”
“Did you know about the fire? The Ashenfelters’ place gutted. Mrs. Ashenfelter dead.”
“Er.·.yes. I was in Bath.”
There was a moment’s offended silence.
“Well, thanks for sweet F.A., Sinclair.”
“What?”
“Couldn’t you have given me a buzz? You promised me an exclusive. Hang it all, I’m a newsman, first and last.”
“Last, in this case,” I said, smiled to myself, and felt a little better. Possibly I hadn’t suffered permanent brain damage.
“You think you’re bloody amusing, don’t you?” said Digby in a burst of fury I wasn’t prepared for. “Listen to this, Sinclair. I know bloody well why you didn’t call me. You’re as guilty as hell. I’ve got my sources. You saw Sally Ashenfelter yesterday and made damn sure she couldn’t speak to anyone else. You murdered her.”
“Get lost.”
He ranted on. “I’ve written the story. It’s the lead on Sunday. So you can stuff your exclusive. When I put this down, I’m going to call the police and, by Jesus, I hope they rough you up.”
I slammed down the phone and went to look for the aspirin bottle. Then I moved fast.
A shower, a shave, a change of clothes. Black coffee. More black coffee.
I was using a blackthorn stick to help me around the house. Now I devoted more precious minutes to recovering my regular ebony cane, cursing Harry as I hobbled about the wet garden, hampered by the morning mist that afflicts us near the river. My shoes and trouser ends were saturated before I located the stick on the paved area in front of the summerhouse. The leather handle was soggy to the touch. I still preferred it to the blackthorn.
Back to the house. One more item to collect.
Earlier, while shaving, I’d tried to fathom Harry’s behavior. Couldn’t think why he’d chosen to attack me when he w
as already clear and on his way. I was no longer a threat. We were all but shaking hands when he’d left.
Now I understood. He’d taken the gun.
I crawled about on the living room carpet for a minute or two, feeling under furniture in case I’d kicked the thing out of sight when I staggered across the room in the night. I was wasting my time.
My brain was still functioning at ninety percent or less, but I forced it to make some deductions. Harry knew that the Colt was the murder weapon. He’d found me in possession of it. Nothing I’d said had shaken his conviction that I’d shot Morton all those years ago and was desperately covering my traces, leaving Sally to die in the burning house. The gun was his evidence. Where else could he have taken it, except to the police?
And if Harry hadn’t turned me in, Digby certainly had. The squad car could be in the lane by now.
I went to the door.
The first time I tried to start the MG, it failed. What a day to let me down, the most reliable car I’d ever owned. Tried again, three or four times. Nothing. This way I’d rapidly exhaust the battery.
Harry must have done something to immobilize the engine, blast him.
I clambered out and lifted the bonnet.
No disconnected leads that I could see. Plug covers all secure. Distributor cap in place. Everything as it should be. Not sabotage: simply the legacy of leaving the car out all night instead of garaging it. Misty weather is worse than rain for depositing a film of moisture on everything.
I collected a cloth, heated it on the kitchen boiler, and systematically dried the ignition system. Switched on again, got action first time-and overchoked. When anyone wants to make a fast getaway in the movies, they get in their cars and go. I swore, tried again, and achieved a stuttering response that persevered into a regular engine note. I was finally ready to leave.
No police car met me as I rattled up the lane. I was soon on the A4, heading west. The mist that I’d assumed was local persisted right through Marlborough, slowing my speed but making it less likely that I’d be spotted if a call had been radioed to patrol cars. It lifted for a stretch in the approach to Devizes on the A36l, and as quickly returned when I was through the town.
Rough Cider Page 17
