way pathetically towards the door.
As Bernard moved the gun to keep me covered, his mother tensed again and tried to drag it downwards. There was never a chance that she could deflect the aim long enough for me to escape, but as I shortly discovered, she was more concerned about Bernard than me. She blurted out a frenzied appeal to him. “I won’t let you. My son is not a killer. Thou shalt not kill. Killing is something else, Bernard.”
He said tersely, “You should know, Mother,” and in those four words told me what I’d come to find out.
I didn’t believe it.
Mrs. Lockwood stared at him blankly. She released her grip on the gun and took a step back. She raised one hand to her mouth and pressed it edgewise between her teeth, emitting a long, stifled moan. Then she seemed to shrink into herself, crumpling into a posture of despair.
Bernard had refrained from physical aggression towards her, but his words were relentless. “Blaspheming hypocrite. Quoting the Lord’s Commandments at me when the smell of death is still on you.”
She’d sunk into a chair. She looked up and said, “That isn’t true.”
“Isn’t true?” Bernard challenged her, eyes alight with the force of his recrimination. “Like yesterday?”
Mrs. Lockwood winced, as if he’d struck her. She tried to form a word and couldn’t.
He aped her voice cruelly. “ ‘Bernard, darling, would you drive me into Frome early? I made an appointment with the optician’ Optician be buggered! I watched you go into the off-license and come out of it with two bottles of spirit in the carrier bag. I saw you make off to the railway station and buy a ticket. Your appointment weren’t in Frome at all, and it weren’t with no optician. You took the train to Bath.” He half turned and said, “Father! Have you looked at the paper, seen what happened to Sally Ashenfelter yesterday?”
Old George Lockwood had emerged enough from his passive state to stare in horror at his wife.
Bernard continued inexorably to nail the charge. “Mother were always claiming to be sorry for Sally and her weakness for liquor. Forever meaning to visit her again for old time’s sake. Well, she finally did, with two bottles of vodka and a box of matches.”
Then George spoke up with surprising tenderness. “Molly, what have you done, my love? You promised no more killing. No more blood, you said.”
There was a pained cry from Mrs. Lockwood. “I did it to protect us. It was all forgotten and then-” She covered her face.
Bernard was unmoved. He tightened his grip on the gun and gestured to me to get out.
I was reeling under a welter of emotions, repelled, shocked, angry, and pitying. I might as well own up to a slight sense of gratification too. My assumption that the answer to the mystery lay here, with the Lockwoods, had been right. But I hadn’t cast Mrs. Lockwood as a double murderess.
Had you?
Do you need any more convincing?
I did. I backtracked mentally to 1943 and spun the crucial events at the speed of a tape recorder on fast forward. Morton having Barbara in the barn. Me, blurting out my story. To Duke. And to Mrs. Lockwood.
Duke didn’t murder Morton. He looked into the barn, listened, reached his own conclusion, and left.
The Lockwoods had put a ban on Morton. Incensed, Mrs. Lockwood collected the gun from the hallstand drawer. To her, it was irrelevant whether Morton had just raped her daughter or made love to her. She shot him at point-blank range, dropped the gun, and brought Barbara back to the farmhouse.
Sally and I had been in the farmhouse kitchen when Mrs. Lockwood brought Barbara in. Sally, and only Sally outside the family, knew that Barbara and Morton were lovers and that Barbara’s hysteria couldn’t have been caused by rape.
Yet when Duke was put on trial, Sally wasn’t called as a witness. Mine was the evidence that had hanged Duke. Mine, and the Lockwoods’. Prosecution and defense both accepted that Morton was killed because he attacked Barbara. Sally’s story conflicted with both.
They gossiped about poor Sally’s alcoholism in Christian Gifford, but only one couple knew the reason for it: the Lockwoods. So when Alice and I turned up at Gifford Farm and learned from Bernard that Sally was living in Bath, Mrs. Lockwood saw disaster looming. She made an appointment with Sally and bought some vodka.
A murder cold-bloodedly planned and executed.
And not the last I have to describe.
If you’re of a nervous disposition or hoping to get some peaceful sleep in the next hours, better close the book at this point. Thanks for your company, and good night.
For you, the unshakably persistent page-turner, I’ll tell the rest as it happened. We left Bernard pointing the shotgun at me, maneuvering me out of the farmhouse. His mother was sobbing her guilty heart out while the hapless George attempted to comfort her.
I cooperated by opening the door and stepping into the yard. I suppose it was too optimistic to hope that Bernard would let me make a discreet exit while he sorted out his domestic crisis. He prodded me in the back with the shotgun to let me know he was right behind me.
Try to take the heat out of this, I thought. I told him as casually as I could, “I left my car up the lane, but there’s no need for you to come with me.”
Bernard ignored me. He said in a toneless statement of fact that was more chilling than a threat, “You’re going across to the barn.”
I said, “What for?”
He answered in the same level tone. “You’ve got to be put down.”
Like a stricken animal.
My first reaction was petrified funk. A few seconds of numbness, when I felt as if my feet weren’t in contact with the ground. Then anger. The urge to lash out and fight for my life.
I didn’t stand a chance.
I said, “That’s murder you’re talking about.”
He stuck the gun harder into my backbone, forcing me forward. I limped slowly towards the barn, the same small bam where Morton had been shot. The stone building set back from the rest, its gray-tiled roof hoary for the freezing mist.
Talk to him. It’s all you can do.
“You don’t want to kill me,” I told him, putting it as a genial observation between friends. “That’s sure to make more trouble for you. You’re not a murderer, Bernard. You don’t have to repeat your mother’s mistakes.”
He muttered behind me, “Step out or I’ll drop you here.”
I kept moving, talking as we went, trying desperately to hammer home the message. “You’ve got no blood on your hands. It was your father who helped her dispose of Morton’s body after she shot him, wasn’t it? He put the head in one of his cider barrels and buried the rest somewhere off the farm. He meant to keep the barrel here, but someone mistakenly loaded it onto a lorry and delivered it to the Shorn Ram. That’s what happened, isn’t it?”
We were twenty yards from the barn door, and for all the response I’d got, I could have saved my breath-1 was going to need it.
I persisted, “Your father’s an accessory after the fact, but you’re in the clear. There’s no way you can cover up your parents’ crimes. The police are coming here. The press.
We reached the barn. I thought about dashing inside and slamming the door in his face, but for me, it could only be a thought. It assumed agility that I didn’t possess.
Nor was my stick any use as a weapon against a shotgun jammed into my kidneys. He’d pull the trigger before I raised my arm. I knew he wasn’t bluffing. There’s an instinct, a primitive, feral sense that operates when death is imminent.
A bead of sweat ran down my side, as if it were high summer.
I went in.
The barn was moderately dark but not dark enough for me to surprise him with a sudden dive out of range.
What could I do, short of begging for my life?
I said, “It’s your future as well as mine. Have you thought of that?”
Bernard dug the muzzle harder into my back. “Up there.”
