Rough Cider

by Peter Lovesey

  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.

  He’d rested the shotgun against the wall. For some obscure reason, he was rearranging the bales, dragging one from the back of the barn towards the center, than a second one. He took a knife from his pocket, cut the cord on the second bale, and scattered loose hay across the floor.

  Presently he disappeared from view below me, and I heard a muffled, dragging sound, which I assumed was a third bale about to be added to the stack.

  I was wrong. The object that Bernard was tugging across the barn was a body. A dead body. Male.

  The jacket and shirt were heavily bloodstained. I couldn’t tell yet if I knew the face, because it was upside down from my vantage point.

  Irrespective of who it was, I shivered. I understood now why Bernard had shrugged off my warnings. It was no use telling him that killing me would be something else, a different class of crime, because he’d already enrolled himself for the class. He was blooded, a killer like his mother.

  Reasoning with him was a futile exercise. He meant to kill me, too, and there was no way I could dissuade him.

  I watched him hump the corpse onto the bales. They served as a catafalque, as if for a lying-in-state. Except that the body was spreadeagled across the top with legs apart, one arm hanging down and eyes open, seeming to stare up at me.

  I stared back, for the face was right-way-up now, and I could see who it was.

  Harry Ashenfelter.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Death had colored him blue and white. A leaden blue with blotches of white down the left side of the forehead, cheekbone, and jaw. He’d been face down on a hard surface for some time, and these were the points of contact. I didn’t have to be a pathologist to work that out. Another observation for the medics among you: his limbs had flopped over the sides of the bales, so rigor mortis had not yet developed to any obvious extent. As I picture the scene, it helps me to be clinical. It subdues the horror.

  I stared down at him from the loft with more respect than I’d felt for him as a living being. He’d shown precious little concern for either of his wives while they were alive, but it seemed that some vestige of loyalty or husbandly duty towards Sally had impelled him to try to find her murderer. He must have driven through the night to Somerset after leaving me stunned in Pangbourne. He’d believed me when I’d told him that the answer to the mystery would be found at Gifford Farm. Like me, he’d decided to investigate alone.

  For this, he’d been shot through the heart.

  These people were steeped in blood.

  My turn next.

  You, my wily reader, may already have deduced how Bernard Lockwood proposed to kill me. I hadn’t. I must tell you that my blitzed brain was barely functioning. I couldn’t think past the shock of Harry’s corpse.

  My eyes were still on him when I heard the creak of the barn door. Bernard had opened it and stepped outside.

  I blinked, snapped my thoughts roughly together, and shifted my focus. He’d taken the shotgun with him.

  Escape, an inner voice urgently told me. Move yourself. Get out of here. You can break your fall on the bales. All right, there’s a body down there, but he’s dead, and that’s how you’ll be if you’re squeamish now.

  I braced myself. Felt a paralyzing pain in my back as I heaved myself up into a crouching position. Looked down into Harry’s sightless eyes. Froze.

  The door creaked a second time, and Bernard came in again, without the shotgun. He was carrying something just as lethal: a can of petrol.

  Without even raising his eyes, he unscrewed the cap and literally doused Harry’s body and the bales it was mounted on. The fumes wafted up to me. It wasn’t a catafalque that I was looking down on. It was a funeral pyre. It would dispose of Harry as soon as it was lit. Not to mention me, trapped ten feet above him.

  I shouted, “Bloody maniac!”

  Oblivious, Bernard busied himself on the flagstone floor, drawing loose hay by the armful into a narrow, heaped trail leading from the body towards the door. As he backed away from me I yelled more abuse at him. To no effect.

  He didn’t lay the trail all the way to the door. About six feet short, he stopped. He wanted space to turn and get out quickly. He pushed open the door.

  Next he went methodically back along the line of hay, sprinkling it with petrol, priming the fuse he’d created. Then he returned to the door, set the can on the floor, felt in his pocket, and produced a cigarette lighter.

  He flicked his thumb to light the thing. I saw it spark, but no flame appeared. At the second try the fuel ignited and was immediately blown out by a draft from the doorway. It was straight out of Hitchcock when I think about it. Everything set for a mighty burn-up, and the lighter refuses to function. He shielded it against his chest with his free hand and tried again.

  This time the flame sprouted. Bernard squatted and tentatively extended the lighter towards the fuse of petrol-soaked hay.

  Then, amazingly, a figure appeared through the door, holding the shotgun.

  For pity’s sake, I can practically hear you say. Not the old cliche of the man who appears in the door with a gun. Spare us that!

  Well, for a start, it wasn’t a man. It was a girl. And she was holding the gun by the wrong end, like a sledgehammer. At that moment I sincerely blessed Alice Ashenfelter. I forgave her all the hassle, the slanderous things she’d accused me of, the brazen intrusions into my life and work. This was one intrusion that I welcomed unreservedly.

  She gripped the muzzle and crashed the thick wooden stock onto Bernard’s crouching form. A bold swipe that had to be right the first time.

  Unhappily it wasn’t.

  Bernard must have glimpsed the movement at the edge of his vision, because he ducked suddenly, dipping his head and swaying away. The gun caught his right shoulder, merely toppling him off-balance. Alice gave a frustrated cry and sheered aside, dropping the gun with a clatter.

  Bernard wasn’t hurt. He made a diving tackle and brought Alice down like a skittle. She kicked out and managed to wiggle clear on all fours.

  He picked himself up without hurrying and stalked her, out of my line of sight, to the interior of the barn below the hayloft. She was trapped.

  I heard her scream, “Theo!”

  I threw myself over the edge.

  Up to now life had spared me from the sight of a dead person, let alone a physical contact. The prospect repelled me. Yet this was a reaction so automatic and instantaneous that I was unaffected. I dropped onto Harry’s lifeless form, felt the flesh under the clothes respond flaccidly to my weight, touched one of the cold hands and saw it flop aside, then dragged myself clear and down to floor level.

  My eyes were on Bernard. He was ten feet away from me, in a semi-crouch, with Alice flat to the floor beside him. I would have said face down, were it not that her face was up, and stressfully so. Bernard was grasping the root of her plait, tugging at her head, while his knee pinned her chest to the floor. Her neck looked ready to snap any second.

  She gave an agonized moan.

  I’d started a rescue act I wasn’t equipped to complete. With my stick way out of reach on the other side of the barn, the best I could hope to do was crawl towards them, and then Bernard would tear me to pieces and have me on toast.

  There had to be a better way.

  The previous night, Harry had taken the Colt.45 from my house. If he still had it…

  I put my hand up to the corpse and pressed it against the jacket pocket.

  Nothing.

  The other pocket, then.

  Couldn’t reach.

  Another cry of pain from Alice.

  I grabbed the body with bo
th hands and tugged it towards me, off the bales. It toppled heavily onto me. Next second, I was wrestling with a dead man.

  Thank God my arms are strong. I pushed him upwards and to one side and sat up in the same movement.

  Alice gave a more piercing scream.

  I felt for Harry’s right-hand pocket and this time located the gun. I tugged it out, leveled it at Bernard, and squeezed the trigger.

  The bullet ripped into his.back. He was thrown forward, face first, collapsing across a bale of hay. I don’t know if he was dead, but I didn’t fire a second shot.

  Alice lay still for a second, gasping, then rolled over and looked towards me, wide-eyed in horror.

  “You’re on fire!”

  I wasn’t-much. Harry was. His saturated clothes were ablaze.?m not sure if it was Bernard’s lighter or the gunshot that had ignited the petrol. I jerked away from the corpse and ripped off my smoldering jacket.

  The speed of a petrol fire is awesome. I looked towards the door and saw huge white-and-yellow flames leaping for the gap. We’d never get out through there.

  Alice was on her feet and beside me, trying to drag me to the other side of the barn where the fire wasn’t raging yet. With her help I crawled and slithered across, but there wasn’t much comfort there. No petrol, certainly, but black smoke swirled in our faces. They say that you usually suffocate before you burn.

  “The ladder,” I shouted, dragging myself upright against a beam. If we could get up there, the hayloft would screen us from the worst of the flames and the heat. I wasn’t thinking about survival, just the immediate need to put something between us and the fire.

  Together we hoisted the ladder and propped it against the hayloft. The heat was intense. There was a roar like Niagara, and things were cracking and spitting all round us.

  Alice shinnied up first.

  You may think this ridiculous, but I looked for my stick before I followed her. I groped in the hay until I found it and threw it up. Then I grabbed the ladder and climbed rapidly hand over hand, with a technique that was improving with practice.

  Up there, the smoke was the main problem. Alice had unfurled her polo-neck collar to cover her mouth.

  I’ll take some credit now for smart thinking. I gestured to her to help me pull up the ladder.

  Together we hauled it up to our level. It was blackened and smoking at the lower end. I indicated to Alice that we should use it as a battering ram to attack the tiled roof from the underside.

  It was a high risk. There was a chance that the flames would be drawn up and leap through any gap we made. I pinned my faith on the loft floor screening us for long enough to make an escape. At the rate the fire was progressing, the floor couldn’t last many minutes more. It was a moot point whether it would collapse from underneath before the sparks ignited the bales stored on top.

  I propped myself on a bale, and with Alice guiding the front of the ladder, we drew it back and thrust it against the tiles at the innermost end of the loft. All we got was a numbing jolt in our arms. I thought cynically of the truism that old structures like this were built to last. Oh, for a nineteenth-century jerry-builder or an apprentice tiler on his first job.

  We gave it another crack. With an exhilarating crunch, two tiles split open together and the end of the ladder projected through. We tugged it back and drove at the rest more frenziedly. Another tile fell out, and then, praise be, a group of four. A sizable hole. We dropped the ladder and rushed forward, desperate for air. I picked up my stick and poked out more tiles, then signaled to Alice to climb through.

  She was quick. I tried pushing the ladder through after her, thinking we could use it to get down from the roof, but she shouted, “Theo, forget it. It’s too short!”

  I could feel the heat of the loft floor through my shoes. I told Alice to move aside. Then I hauled up a bale of hay and thrust it through the gap and over the edge of the building. It would cushion our landing when we jumped. I dragged another towards me and shoved it after the first.

  Alice cried, “Theo, for God’s sake!”

  I climbed out onto the tiles.

  The top couldn’t have been much over fifteen feet, and the smoke gushing out behind us was a strong incentive to jump. I looked down at the bales and said a familiar phrase. “All right, then?”

  Alice was black-faced, and her glasses were peppered with carbon. She smiled and put out her hand to me and we jumped together.

  TWENTY-THREE

  “I hope to God I had the exposure right,” said Digby for I the third time at least. “If you’d given me more warning, I’d have brought a photographer with me.”

  “Quit complaining, will you?” Alice told him in an up-rush of anger, letting the tension out. “You got your scoop.”

  Digby bunched his shoulders and tried to look uninvolved, like a perching vulture.

  “What’s one picture?” demanded Alice.

  In a pained voice Digby said, “You two jumping off the blazing roof? I’ll tell you what it is. It’s?scape From Death Barn’-the shot of a lifetime. Millions will see it on the front page of their paper tomorrow.”

  Tomorrow. I didn’t want to know about tomorrow. Coping with the past was more than I could manage. The three of us were sitting around the kitchen table in the farmhouse. One young constable was in attendance. In another room, Inspector Voss was questioning the Lockwoods. Across the yard, a fire crew was hosing the gutted barn.

  “Let me get this right,” I said to Digby, letting my resentment show. “You were actually waiting outside with a camera while Alice and I were in that inferno in danger of our lives?”

  “It’s not a pressman’s job to get involved, old man.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Digby.”

  “I couldn’t have got near, anyway, once the fire started.”

  “Before it started, you stood and watched Alice go in there to tackle a man of Bernard Lockwood’s size?”

  Digby said blandly, “She acted independently, didn’t you, my dear?”

  Alice ignored him and said to me, “What happened is this, Theo. I read in the paper about Sally being killed in the fire, and I knew I was wrong about you-shooting Morton, I mean. Whoever killed Sally did it to silence her. They were scared of you and me getting to speak to her. Whatever mean and hostile things I said about you, you’re no coldblooded killer. I thought of Harry first, but I couldn’t see him burning his own house, and I was certain he wouldn’t actively harm Sally, for all his insensitivity. I mean, he was willing to let her speak to us on Sunday. He was really upset when she got drunk. So who else could have done it? The answer had to be at Gifford Farm. After Digby called you on the phone and you hung up on him, I told him that’s where we have to go. He snatched up a camera and drove us here fast. We left the car up the lane and came in quietly to avoid Bernard and his shotgun, if we could.”

  “We saw the kitchen door open,” put in Digby, “so I advised a discreet withdrawal to the farm-machinery shed.”

  “Then we saw you come out of the back door with Bernard holding his gun to your back.”

  “And what did you make of that?” I asked Alice with faint amusement. “Me-your number-one suspect.”

  I believe Alice reddened under the smears of soot. “I already told you, I changed my mind about that. Anyway, Bernard took you into the barn. After a while he came out and put down the shotgun and collected the gasoline, so I went closer and took a peek inside. When I saw him pouring gas over the floor, I thought, Somebody’s got to stop this.”

  She sighed and gave a weary smile. “I could use a few lessons in how to disable a man.”

  I reached out my hand and clasped it over hers. “You did all right. I’d never have got out alive without you.”

  At this she laughed suddenly and openly. “I figure you’d never have been in there if you hadn’t met me.”

  I think it was the first time I’d seen her laugh without a trace of unease or suspicion in her features. Her glasses were twisted askew and h
er elegant nose was heavily smudged, but I warmed to her. I laughed too. Then I said impulsively, “Now that we’ve straightened out a few things, let’s meet again.”

  Digby felt into his pocket and said, ‘I’ll quote that, if you don’t mind.”

  I said, “Shut up.”

  But as you, my loyal reader, will appreciate, life isn’t what you want, it’s what you get. Alice had her return flight booked for the following day. We didn’t even manage a night out together, or a night in, because that puddinghead Voss kept me waiting for the rest of the afternoon and evening sorting out what had happened in the barn. I admitted to shooting Bernard in self-defense, which seem straightforward enough, but Voss tied himself in knots trying to decide whether it was manslaughter or justifiable homicide. As they didn’t propose to charge me, anyway, I lost all patience with them. By the time I was free to leave, Digby had long since driven Alice back to Reading.

  Digby’s photograph didn’t turn out, by the way, but he still had his exclusive story, and I’m sure he was well paid for it.

  If you’re looking for an upbeat ending, there’s not much I can offer. George Lockwood admitted to his part in disposing of Morton’s body in 1943. He took the police to a lake near Frome where he’d weighted and sunk the headless corpse. They sent some frogmen down, but after so long, it wasn’t surprising that nothing was found.

  Mrs. Molly Lockwood was convicted of the murder of Sally Ashenfelter and was given a life sentence. She also confessed to shooting Clifford Morton in 1943 and to perjury at the trial of Duke Donovan. In view of her advanced age, the Director of Public Prosecutions deferred bringing her to court on these charges.

  The Home Secretary recommended a posthumous Royal Pardon for Duke, which I know pleased Alice. It pleased me.