He wanted me to climb up to the hayloft where the previous murder had been committed. The precise place. The sweat on my body turned to ice. I’d assumed up to now that I was addressing a man who was rational, if hostile. At this moment I lost that confidence. He was planning a ritual slaughter.
Standing by the ladder to the hayloft, I told him flatly, “I can’t climb this.”
Immediately I keeled off-balance. He’d kicked my stick clean out of my hand. Instinctively, I grabbed one of the rungs of the ladder to stop myself falling. I hit the wood as I swung around it.
A piercing pain hit the small of my back, as if one of my ribs had snapped. Then another. He was jabbing me viciously in the kidneys with the point of the gun.
I groped upwards and started climbing like a demented ape to pull myself clear. Using my arms alone, I hauled myself most of the way, then got some leverage with my good leg and forced my aching body high enough to get a hold on the joist supporting the ladder. I put out a knee and heaved myself onto the boards.
Up there I doubled and writhed in agony as the pain bit into my back. I don’t think I cared if he put a shot through my head, so long as he didn’t attack my kidneys again. I rolled against the nearest bale of straw to protect them. But as the spasms subsided to tolerable levels and I became more conscious of my surroundings, I realized that Bernard hadn’t followed me up the ladder. I heard it scrape against the joist and hit the floor with a thud. For some unfathomable reason he’d pulled it away from the hayloft and stranded me up there.
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.
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.
