Rough Cider

by Peter Lovesey

  I’d already unhitched my arm from Alice’s. I said firmly, “As far as I’m concerned, it’s no story at all. I don’t know who set this up, but I want you off my property now.”

  He put up a pacifying hand. “Rest assured, my friend, we’ll keep your address out of it. I don’t even need a statement.”

  “You’re not getting one.”

  “Merely a head-and-shoulders shot with Miss Ashenfelter. My photographer is waiting in the limousine.”

  “Piss off.”

  He stood his ground, unimpressed.

  Alice spoke up. “Digby, would you mind if I had a few words in private with Dr. Sinclair?”

  He dipped his head into his chins. “I sense that it might be opportune. I shall confer with the cameraman.” He made a wide turn and retreated.

  As soon as the door was closed, Alice said, “Okay, I deserve to have my butt kicked.” Back in the kitchen, she stood in front of me, nervously tugging the hem of her sweater. “Theo, you’ve got to forgive me. I was so caught up in all the things you told me that I totally forgot Digby. I really planned to tell you about him.”

  I said ungraciously, “Don’t bother. Just pick up your things, walk to the car, and tell him to drive you away. Now.”

  She colored deeply. “No.”

  It was like dealing with a defiant twelve-year-old, except that she knew I couldn’t enforce my instruction.

  While I stood dumbly with my blood pressure rocketing, she added, “Listen, Theo, you don’t suppose I came to England and found you without any help, do you? I went to the newspaper, the one those clippings were from. They were really helpful. They tracked you down to Reading University and gave me an intro to Digby. He’s just a local guy, a free-lance who sends them stories from here.”

  “And so incredibly cute,” I said, aping her accent. “A wonderful English eccentric who wants nothing more than a little old photograph. Have you ever read that paper? It wallows in sex and violence. Your chum Digby’s sniffing out a story here. It’s old stuff, but he’ll dust it off and give it a fresh slant. MURDER QUEST OF GI KILLER’S DAUGHTER. I WATCHED HAYLOFT RAPE, SAYS COLLEGE LECTURER. Is that what you came to England for?”

  Alice countered with her own shaft of sarcasm. “So where would you have preferred me to go for help-The Times?”

  “Clear out, will you? I’ve got things to do.” I picked the plates off the table and carried them to the sink.

  There was a long silence.

  Then she announced in a flat voice, “If that’s what you really want.” She went through to the living room while I busied myself with the washing-up.

  In a moment she returned with the rucksack hoisted, looking immense on her slim back. If you think I had a flicker of concern, you’re right. I couldn’t see how it would fit into Digby’s car.

  She told me, “I’m sorry I was such a drag, but thanks for everything, anyway. I can let myself out.”

  I nodded. I’d said enough.

  Let’s admit that I did feel a twinge of something-guilt, remorse, I don’t know precisely what-as I watched from the window. That heavily burdened figure walking staunchly out of my life was, after all, Duke’s daughter. He’d helped me through the most difficult patch in my life. The fact that he’d killed a man didn’t take anything from his kindness to me. He’d good-naturedly filled the gap in a small boy’s life that a father’s death had left. I’d loved him with the passionate loyalty of a son. And when my evidence had helped to convict him, I’d been sick with grief. Yet here I was, twenty years on, cold-shouldering his daughter.

  I turned away, not wanting to look anymore, and slumped in my chair. I reached for the Sunday papers. I heard the click of the front door as she closed it.

  Although I had The Observer open and was scanning the front page, I wasn’t reading it. Something was troubling me, and it wasn’t just my uneasy conscience. There was a job I’d meant to do and hadn’t. I’d finished clearing the breakfast things, hadn’t I? I lowered the paper and stared at the blank, laminated surface of the kitchen table.

  Then I remembered what I should have done: put the gun away. It was no longer there.

  Alice.

  Thieving bitch.

  I grabbed my stick, hopped and hobbled the length of the passage, and flung open the door. She was already through the gate.

  “Alice,” I shouted, “you’ve taken something that belongs to me.”

  She hesitated.

  I yelled her name again. I started after her. I could see Digby opening the car door. Wouldn’t News on Sunday just love to have a picture of that gun?

  Alice had started walking on again, without even turning round. She reached the front gate and groped for the catch, which was placed low on the post. Tricky, against the weight of the rucksack.

  I negotiated that path in about six strides, angling my stick like a ski pole. I reached out and grabbed her arm with my free hand.

  I said breathlessly, “I want it back. You’ve no right to take it.”

  She turned and gave me a cold-eyed look. “Who are you to talk about rights? It wasn’t yours in the first place.”

  I said, “I made you a present of the carving. Isn’t that enough?”

  “That was something else,” said Alice. “What are you afraid of, Theo?”

  I didn’t answer. Digby had hauled himself out of the Anglia and lumbered over to us.

  He asked, “What’s all this? Do you require the services of an arbitrator?”

  I warned him, “Keep out of this.” To Alice I said firmly, “Would you come back into the house, please?”

  Digby said, “What is the young lady supposed to have done-walked out with the family silver?”

  I said, “Sod off.”

  Alice was looking thoughtful. She asked me, “Can we do a deal on this?”

  The words I’d used on Digby were almost out of my mouth again before I thought better of it. She’d outsmarted me. I wanted the gun back. If she handed it to Digby, my story would be headlined in next week’s issue: MURDER BOY’S 20-YEAR SECRET. She had all the top trumps. I was bound to fall in with her offer.

  I nodded to Alice and tilted my head towards the house. We left Digby standing openmouthed at the gate.

  Inside, she took off the rucksack. I moved forward to reclaim the gun, but she waved me away. “Don’t come any closer, Theo. I have reinforcements out there.”

  “What do you mean by a deal?”

  “I want you to take me to Somerset and show me the farm where it happened.”

  I screwed up my face in disbelief. “Why?”

  “I thought you’d have my number by now. I want to find out what really happened at that place.”

  “I told it to you last night.”

  She shook her head. “Theo, I don’t want to seem ungrateful, but I find it impossible to believe. I’m not getting at you personally.”

  “What’s so incredible about it?”

  She sighed. “Let’s just consider the gun. You said you found it in the barn.”

  “Correct.”

  “So the murderer must have dropped it after he shot Cliff Morton, right? If it was my daddy, why would he do such a stupid thing, for crying out loud? He must have known it was vital evidence, an American Army automatic. Wouldn’t he have taken it away with him, gotten rid of it someplace else?”

  I shook my head. “He was afraid the others would see it. He was coming back later, you see, to dispose of the body and clean up the blood. So he tucked the gun out of sight, between two bales of hay.’”

  She clicked her tongue in disbelief. “I don’t swallow that, either, but let’s stay with the gun. He didn’t pick it up later, did he?”

  “Because I’d already found it.”

  “And you secretly kept it: that much I’m forced to go along with.”

  I said ironically, “Thanks.”

  Alice regarded me with that penetrating gaze of hers. “Theo, has it ever occurred to you that you weren’t actually protecting my d
addy by withholding the gun from the police?”

  I frowned back.

  She went on. “If you’d handed it in, they would have asked the questions I just did. As it is, they assumed he got rid of the murder weapon himself, like the ruthless killer they made him out to be.”

  A pulse started drumming in my forehead.

  She said, “Disturbing thought, huh?”

  I answered hollowly, “It’s another way of looking at it. It didn’t occur to me at the time.”

  “Because, like everyone else, you assumed Daddy was guilty.”

  “He was.”

  She simply looked at me and said nothing.

  She’d made her demand. A quixotic trip to Somerset to prove her daddy’s innocence. I suppose I should have seen it in her eyes the first moment she mentioned him. To my mind it was misguided and likely to cause us both unnecessary distress, but I was lumbered. I could see she wouldn’t be argued out of it. The best I could do was get some safeguards into the contract.

  I said, “If I agree, it’s between you and me, a private trip.

  No press. Right?”

  She nodded. “I can handle Digby.”

  “No pictures. Nothing.”

  “Okay.”

  “We go today and come back tonight. We can do it in under two hours.”

  “Fine.”

  “And whatever the outcome, you’re on your own after this.”

  “All right.” She held out her hand. “Is it a deal?”

  I said, “When you return the gun.”

  She gave a slight smile. “I didn’t take it, Theo. It’s in the box in the filing cabinet where I found it. I put it back there when I went to collect my backpack.”

  TEN

  We were on the A4, heading west to Somerset. Surprised? By now you must have got me down as a hard-nosed opportunist, so I won’t blame you for assuming I reneged on the deal after Alice made an idiot of me over the gun. Only I didn’t.

  I’d like you to believe it was because, after all, I’m a man of integrity. Duke’s daughter had asked me to show her the place where the tragedy was enacted, and I was uniquely fitted to act as guide. It was a small repayment on my debt of gratitude to Duke.

  I’d like you to believe all that, but you’re sharp enough to see that she still had me by the short and curlies while Digby Watmore was in attendance. Who wants to feature in News on Sunday?

  So I remained out of sight while she went out and talked to him. I’m not sure what was said. It took about ten minutes. The photographer got out to say his piece as well and looked decidedly annoyed. But Alice prevailed. Shaking their heads, the two men got back into the car and drove off.

  When she came in, she handed me Digby’s card, which he’d wanted me to have in case I changed my mind about a photograph. She told me that he’d promised to keep in touch, and I took the hint. There was to be no ducking out of the Somerset trip.

  I insisted that the rucksack traveled with us, telling Alice that she might wish to spend a few days in Somerset. She was a dream of a girl, terrific in bed, only, please God, not mine again. For peace of mind I was going to have to settle for Val, who went at it like a blanket bath but never mentioned her daddy.

  For some while the only sound in the car had been the moan of the windscreen wipers working on a steady but meager drizzle. I can assure you that the weather wasn’t on our minds. I was still stewing over Digby when Alice rather fazed me by saying, “I had no idea he would be so handsome.”

  I frowned. I simply couldn’t see it.

  After a pause she added, “I mean my daddy.”

  “Ah.” My brain did some quick backtracking. She must have found those mug shots of Duke in the books on the trial that I’d tried to hide from her. Sad, wasn’t it, that the first sight she’d ever had of her father had to be a picture like that? I don’t know whether you’d agree, but I found it pathetic, really pathetic, in the old-fashioned meaning of the word. It was the kind of thing that gets to me. More touching, I think, because she was unaware of it herself.

  I’d be a right bastard to abandon her.

  I’m not a total idiot when it comes to women. I know when I’m being manipulated. For two days I’d been putting up a wall of cynicism, and she kept knocking it down.

  She continued unselfconsciously and with a touch of pride. “I mean, it’s not surprising that a girl like Barbara should have found him attractive. I can picture that first meeting between them, the day the two guys drove you back to the farm in the jeep. He must have looked terrific in his uniform.”

  I gave a nod.

  We let the wipers take over again.

  Sometime after Newbury she said, “The jury was out for less than an hour. That’s not long, is it?”

  “Not long.”

  Another silence. Her thinking was precise and unhurried. She meshed in her statements with the car’s engine note, making sure I was listening.

  “The prosecution had a very strong case.”

  “Devastating.”

  “All that ballistics evidence. I skimmed through it, but it must have impressed the court.”

  “Textbook stuff.”

  “They found some bullets fired from the same gun, right?”

  “Right,” I said.

  “Where did they pick them up, Theo?”

  “I told you about the shooting lesson Duke and Harry gave to me and Barbara.”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “The police combed that field and collected all the used bullets they could find and compared them with the bullet found in the barn.”

  Alice sighed. “And proved it was fired from Daddy’s gun.”

  “Beyond any doubt.”

  After a pause she commented, “So they didn’t actually need the gun to prove their case.”

  “Clever, wasn’t it?”

  She doggedly pursued her point. “It didn’t make any difference that you had the gun all the time.”

  I said tersely, “We’ve been over this once.”

  She switched the emphasis. “All this forensic science, the skull and the superimposed photograph, the dental records and the bullets, sounds really impressive. The jury was bound to be dazzled by stuff like that.”

  I didn’t like the drift. I decided to take a firmer line. “The case against Duke would have stuck without all that. He was guilty, Alice, there isn’t any question. Listen, I know what I

  saw. After me Duke was the first to know about Cliff Morton attacking Barbara. I watched him dash towards the barn.”

  “You actually saw him go into the barn?”

  “He ran in there. I’m sorry if this is painful to accept, but he really cared for Barbara. It was a crime of passion.”

  She shook her head. “To me it doesn’t add up.”

  “Why?”

  “He runs into the barn, right? This girl he really cares for is being raped. What does he do about it? Pull the guy off her and throttle him? No, he leaves them there and goes back to the farmhouse to fetch his gun. Is that the conduct of a passionate man?”

  I said, “It’s the difference between manslaughter and murder.”

  “Okay, but how do you explain it?”

  I sighed. “The prosecution went deeply into this. When Duke got into the barn, the attack was over. He could hear voices from the loft, Barbara pitifully distressed, Morton dismissing it all as unimportant. Duke was incensed by what he heard. He could have started a fight with Morton, but a beating-up was nothing to what Barbara had suffered. He ran back to the farmhouse to collect the gun, returned, and went up to the loft.”

  “And put the bullet in Morton’s head right in front of Barbara? Is that what she told her parents?”

  “She told her parents nothing. Duke shot Morton and covered his body with hay, maybe pushed it to the back of the loft behind some bales until he could come back later when no one was about. When he did return, either that night or the next, he had a plan. You have to see it from his point of view, as a serviceman waiting to join
the invasion of Europe.”

  “He figured he’d soon be clear and away?”

  “Yes. Obviously, his first concern was how to get rid of the body. He could use the jeep to transport it somewhere by night, bury it or sink it into a lake with weights attached, but that’s not so simple as it sounds. Digging a grave of any depth is more than one night’s work, and how was a stranger to Britain going to find a boat and a deep, deserted lake? Even if he succeeded, bodies have an inconvenient habit of turning up. Someone walking his dog-”

  “You don’t have to spell it out,” Alice broke in. “We both know what happened. He hacked off the head and put it in the cider barrel so the police wouldn’t know whose body it was or how the killing was done.”

  We were making progress. From the way she was talking now, she was getting reconciled to Duke’s guilt. It was painful for her, and I understood her reasons for seizing on anything that challenged the verdict, but she had to come to terms with what had happened.

  Obstinately, I did spell out the process of disposing of the head. “There were twenty or more open casks in the cider house. They’d been collected from the public houses and scoured ready for the new pressing. They were hogsheads. Are you familiar with the word?”

  “Large barrels,” said Alice, adding sullenly, “You told me last night.”

  “Not just large. Huge. Over five feet high. You have to picture the size of them to understand why the head wasn’t discovered when the tops were hammered down. After the top of a cask was fastened, the cider would be poured in through the bunghole and left to ferment. The cask wouldn’t be opened for scouring for another year. By then Duke expected to be out of England.”

  “And he was.” She was silent again.

  We’d reached the stretch of the Bath Road to the west of Marlborough, flanked on each side by an awesome expanse of downland, profuse with ancient trackways and prehistoric sites. It can be an exhilarating drive, but this morning it was somber. We forked left on the A36l. We were through Devizes before Alice made her next observation. It was a truism that might have been a line in a black comedy.