dead. Both GIs had left England in June 1944, to take part in the invasion of Europe.
When Judd raised the question of Barbara’s suicide, George Lockwood admitted that it had happened on November 30, two days after the cider making had finished and the last cask was closed, but he could see no possible connection with what had happened. The coroner at the inquest had established that Barbara had taken her own life while the balance of her mind was disturbed. Judd didn’t press any further at that stage but ordered one of his senior men to take another look at the circumstances surrounding Barbara’s death.
In the meantime a check was made of missing persons, particularly young men aged between eighteen and twenty-five, in the Frome and Shepton Mallet districts. This wasn’t easy. Some had volunteered for military service without informing their families; others had gone missing as deserters; and some had been killed visiting places like Bristol where there’d been massive bombing action.
But a list was compiled, and within days the victim was identified. Several lines of inquiry converged in a most convincing way.
The inspector who reopened the file in Barbara’s death learned from the postmortem report that she had been two months’ pregnant. Her sense of shame about the pregnancy, which she hadn’t mentioned to her family, was held to be the main reason why she took her life. The identity of the man responsible wasn’t established, and it wasn’t a function of the inquest to name anyone. The family had been unable or unwilling to comment, but there were strong rumors locally that the man was Cliff Morton. It was said that he was obsessed by Barbara and pestered her frequently. On one occasion in September during the apple gathering, he’d tried to force his attentions on her and been ordered off the farm by George Lockwood.
Cliff Morton was a single man, aged eighteen. His parents had gone to live abroad when he was twelve, leaving him in the care of a maternal aunt who lived in a tied cottage a mile south of Christian Gifford. Two weeks after the inquest into Barbara’s death, police had visited the cottage to interview Morton on another matter: he’d been sent his call-up papers for military service in mid-September and failed to report. The aunt told them that he’d left home suddenly without telling her where he was going.
So Cliff Morton’s name was on the list of missing men prepared by the police. The age was right, and there was a connection with Gifford Farm. He had been employed gathering apples there, although so briefly that George Lock-wood hadn’t listed him for the police-an oversight he presently came to regret.
Detectives visited a dentist in Frome and obtained Morton’s dental record. In January 1941, he’d been given two fillings in adjacent upper bicuspids that exactly corresponded with the fillings in the skull.
As final proof of identification, Dr. Atcliffe photographed the skull and superimposed the negative on the enlargement of a snapshot of Morton provided by the aunt. If criminology is your hobby, you’ll know that this was a method pioneered by Professor Glaister in the Ruxton case in 1935. The match was perfect. Beyond reasonable doubt, Cliff Morton was the murder victim.
The police descended on Gifford Farm in vanloads and began an exhaustive search. It continued for nine days. They checked every building minutely. They dug up the silage pits and dismantled the haystacks.
If you feel sorry for George Lockwood, I can tell you that he wasn’t there to see his farm being taken apart. He was at Frome Police Station with Superintendent Judd, “helping the police with their inquiries.” On all evidence he was better placed to help them than anyone else. He’d had both motive and opportunity. The motive was revenge for his daughter’s suicide. He was convinced that Cliff Morton had got Barbara pregnant, and he didn’t mind the police knowing it. And as for opportunity, Morton was known to have been hanging around the farm towards the end of November. Then who could have shot him, dismembered him, and put the head into a Lockwood cider cask but George Lockwood himself?
Lockwood admitted ordering Morton off his land in September after he’d found him “interfering” with Barbara. He blamed him for her pregnancy and suicide. He’d stupidly failed to notify the police that Morton had worked for him. But he denied murdering him. And he denied possessing a pistol.
Despite the thoroughness of the search, no further remains were found on Gifford Farm. Nor was the murder weapon discovered.
But the exercise wasn’t wasted. After the bales of hay had been removed from the loft of the smallest barn, an alert constable spotted something embedded in one of the beams: a bullet.
Dr. Atcliffe was summoned to Gifford Farm, and he spent the rest of that day and the next alone in the loft, while Judd paced the farmyard like a dispossessed rooster. When Atcliffe finally emerged, he solemnly confirmed that a shot had been fired there. Forensic pathology is a cautious branch of science, but I strongly suspect that someone was being strung along. Judd blew his top, and Atcliffe waited for him to subside before announcing his second finding: traces of blood on the floorboards of the loft. The stains were not recent, and he couldn’t say yet whether they were human in origin, but the pattern of staining, so far as he could trace it, suggested that the victim had lain for some time with the source of bleeding close to the floor.
Judd was all smiles again. Atcliffe smiled back and told him that he wasn’t ready to identify the bullet. After photographing it
The following afternoon he phoned through his preliminary report. The blood was human, from the group 0, common to about half the population. He’d identified the bullet as a 45, of U.S. Army issue, probably fired from an automatic pistol.
That bullet turned the investigation on its head. George Lockwood was questioned for another hour and then allowed home to rebuild his haystacks. The suspicion had shifted to Duke. He, too, had a plausible motive. He’d been dating Barbara. It was an open secret that she was slipping out in the evenings to meet him. He knew about Morton pestering her.
Moreover, Duke had opportunity. He was around on the crucial dates. And it emerged that he’d brought a gun out to the farm, a.45 service-issue automatic.
Superintendent Judd hated GIs. If that sounds to you like unfair comment, try reading his memoirs. According to him, they destroyed our culture and seduced our women. The fact that they fought our war isn’t mentioned.
He notified the U.S. Army base of his suspicions. The Americans agreed that there was a case to answer. They confided to Judd that Duke and Harry were “somewhere in Europe.” To invite them back for questioning in the middle of an invasion was a practical impossibility. The American Army Criminal Investigation Department would deal with it at the earliest opportunity. This wasn’t bloody-mindedness. Parliament had laid down a procedure under the U.S.A. Visiting Forces Act of 1942.
Judd must have gone spare with frustration. All he could do now was wait for the war to end. He went back to Gifford Farm and redoubled the search for the murder weapon and the rest of the body. The haystacks came down again, the silage was given another airing. Nothing surfaced.
I firmly believe it was only because time hung so heavily for Superintendent Judd that he decided to interview me.
By then we were into 1945. I’d been back in London over a year when the policeman knocked on our door. I’d come back from Somerset just in time for Hitler’s buzz bombs. We’d had one in our street that killed six people. After that, Gifford Farm seemed like another world. I’d stopped crying over Barbara; our minds have ways of adjusting to grief. But I sometimes wondered about Duke. Everything had happened in a rush at the end. I’d left without seeing him. I had no idea how he’d taken the news of Barbara’s suicide. I wished I’d had the chance to speak to him.
As I said, a policeman called. It was lunchtime, so I was home from school. When I saw the shape of the helmet through the frosted glass, I opened the door myself, remembering how it was a policeman who came in 1940 after Dunkirk to tell us that Dad was dead. I couldn’t think of anyone else who might have been killed, but I didn’t want Mum to faint again.
Instead of doing long division and nature study with Junior 5 and Miss Coombs, I spent that afternoon in the police station. Superintendent Judd questioned me for a long time. He told me at the beginning that God would be listening, but all I could see was a lady policeman with a shorthand notebook.
I remember Judd for his shaggy brown eyebrows. They twitched a lot, sometimes together, sometimes independently. I must have given him a few surprises.
Most of his questions concerned Duke and Barbara, and I told him everything I’ve told you. I had no reason to be evasive. You see, he didn’t say anything to me about the murder or his suspicions of Duke. I thought he was on about Barbara’s suicide. At the end he reminded me that God had terrible punishments in store for boys who didn’t keep His Commandments and asked me if everything I’d told him was the truth. It was.
