I couldn’t believe it was Barbara.
I worked my way along the barrier of hay and located a triangular space where the last bale met the angle of the roof. By squeezing sideways between the rafters and the hay, I managed to penetrate far enough to get a narrow view of the other side.
What I saw was my poor, gentle Barbara being raped by Cliff Morton. When I say raped, I’m using an adult term for an act that wasn’t comprehensible to me at that age, if it is now. A violent, indecent, and humiliating attack by a strong man on a powerless woman. He was thrusting into her like a rutting stag while she struggled and gasped, beating her fists on the loft floor. Her blouse was open to the waist, and her overalls and knickers had been dragged down and were trapped round one of her legs below the knee.
There was nothing I could do except jump down from the loft and run frantically to find someone, anyone. Fate decreed that it was Duke.
He was coming out of the shed where the farm machinery was stored. I shouted to him that Barbara was in the small barn, and the man Cliff had taken off her clothes and was hurting her. Duke didn’t say a word. He dashed past me across the yard to the barn. I ran on, crying, to the farmhouse where Mrs. Lockwood was talking to Sally, and blurted out what I’d seen. I told them Duke had gone in there. I couldn’t do any more.
Mrs. Lockwood ran out, leaving Sally and me in the kitchen. After about five minutes she came back with her arm around Barbara, who was sobbing hysterically. They went straight up to Barbara’s bedroom.
The only thing I remember about that day is much later, lying in bed. Mrs. Lockwood was leaning over me, giving me something to drink. I asked if Barbara was going to be all right, and she said yes, she would be all right, and I was to get some sleep.
They kept me indoors most of the next day. As soon as I got up, I asked about Barbara and was told she was resting, but I noticed that the curtains of her bedroom weren’t drawn. That night I could hear her sobbing.
I didn’t ever see her again. The next memory I have is the hammering on Sunday morning when they had to break down her door. And the screaming when they found her dead. She’d cut her own throat with her father’s razor.
Later that morning my headmaster, Mr. Lillicrap, collected me from the house. On Monday one of the teachers took me back in the train to London and home. I wasn’t evacuated again.
SEVEN
The rest is on public record, so if you’re familiar with the relevant volume of
I’ll continue as before, reporting the facts as I told them that night to Alice. She’d kept her promise and allowed me to get this far without interruption, except a muttered “Oh, my God!” when I came to Barbara’s suicide, which hadn’t been mentioned in the press clippings she’d found among her mother’s papers.
One evening in October 1944, almost a year after the tragic events I’ve been describing, a man in a public house in Frome, the Shorn Ram, ordered a pint of local cider, a drink strongly preferred in wartime to the watered- down stuff that masqueraded as beer. People didn’t object to drinking from jam jars in those days of crockery shortages, but they were still choosy about what went into the jam jars.
So when the customer complained that the cider was “ropy,” it was a serious matter. The publican had just put a new barrel on, a large one, a hogshead, from Lockwood, a reliable cider maker. He drew off a little for himself and sampled it.
It’s worth pausing to reflect that if the publican had been prepared to admit right away that the cider was off, Duke Donovan might never have been brought to trial. Yet these were days of austerity when you could be fined for throwing bread to the birds. It was against the war effort to throw anything away if there was the remotest possibility that it might be consumed. So the publican sipped the cider and agreed that it tasted more bitter than the previous barrel but adjudged it palatable. He carried on serving it for the rest of the week. Scores of customers imbibed it, but few came back for a second glass.
At the weekend, two of the Shorn Ram regulars went down with food poisoning. The cider was mentioned as a possible source of infection. Ugly rumors circulated of local cider makers who believed in leaving the bunghole of the barrel open after fermentation. It was said that if you looked closely at the sticky surface on the top, you’d see the footprints of rats. They approached but never returned from the open hole.
A Ministry of Health inspector arrived at the pub on Monday and took a sample of the cider for analysis. It was indeed “ropy”; not from the taste of dead rat but from contamination by some form of metal.
The hogshead was opened. When they removed the lid and poured the rest of the liquid down the drain in the yard behind the pub, everyone was expecting to find a metal implement in the lees that had collected at the bottom. Perhaps some careless farmhand had dropped a hand tool in there when they were fastening the lid.
What they found was a human skull with a bullet hole through it.
The process of identifying the victim is a story that has been graphically told elsewhere. Personally, I feel like wearing rubber gloves when I handle books about forensic science. Trust me: I’ll rush you through the really gruesome bits. Suffice to say that the skull was taken to the forensic laboratory at Bristol, to be examined by Dr. Frank Atcliffe, a rising young pathologist who was himself killed tragically the following year in a civil airline crash.
There was precious little to go on. The action of the cider had destroyed all the skin, flesh, and brain tissue. There were no traces of hair remaining. Although the lees were sifted minutely, nothing else of significance was found in the barrel. Care for a glass of water? Or cider?
Dr. Atcliffe found that the skull was that of a man aged between eighteen and twenty-five. Mention sex to a pathologist and he thinks of mastoid processes and orbital ridges. And age is the ossification of the epiphyses.
Some newspapers mistakenly reported that the bullet had been the metallic agent that had caused the cider to go ropy. In fact, the bullet wasn’t found in the cask. It had passed through the skull, leaving a clear exit wound. So what do you think caused the metal contamination?
A couple of dental fillings.
As Dr. Atcliffe later mentioned, had the victim possessed a perfect set of teeth, the cider would have been unimpaired. The cask and what was left at the bottom would have been returned to Gifford Farm for reuse.
Take a deep breath and let’s deal with the bullet holes. The one on the left side, about one and a half inches above the aural orifice, was the entrance wound. The bullet had smashed through the right cheekbone on exit, just behind the eye. Dr. Atcliffe estimated from the size of the holes that the caliber was.45. It had been fired not less than a yard from the victim and not closer than eighteen inches. It wasn’t possible to estimate the date of death.
The prospect of more grisly discoveries was widely discussed. Two more hogshead casks were opened and examined at the Shorn Ram, as well as a further seventeen supplied by Gifford Farm to public houses in Frome, Shep-ton Mallet, and surrounding villages. The publicans made no objection; there had been a marked falling-off in their sales of cider. But the casks contained nothing more sinister than bones of sheep. You and I might flinch at mutton-fed cider, but they didn’t in Somerset in 1944.
The murder investigation was headed by Superintendent Judd of the Somerset Police, a God-fearing Glastonbury man famed for his lay preaching. People packed the chapel each first Sunday in Lent to hear him rattle the tin roof with his famous sermon on temperance. He despised the demon drink. He started his inquiry at the place he named with sinister emphasis “the source/’ Gifford Farm.
They said in the pubs that George Lockwood would be hanged, drawn, and quartered before the case ever came to court. Things couldn’t have looked worse for him. The cask had his name on it. He’d supplied it in August. He’d personally hammered down the top the previous November. There were no indications that anyone had tampered with it.
George Lockwood was unable to recall anyone behaving suspiciously in the three weeks of cider making. Nor was he able to throw any light on the victim’s identity. He listed his farmhands and helpers for Superintendent Judd. Each one was traced and interviewed, with three exceptions: Barbara, Duke, and Harry. Barbara, of course, was
