“Found my mother,” said Alice flatly.
“Precisely. Help the living. Elly was in a pitiful state. No job, no pension, and a child to raise. And bitterly ashamed of what Duke had done. I put her right on that for a start. Then I married her. I won’t say it was much of a marriage, but I got her through a bad time. We came to an understanding about Duke-not to make waves, not to write to The Times, not even to mention him. You know why? For your sake, sweetheart. I respected your mother’s wishes.” With that off his chest Harry got to his feet and said, “Whose glass is empty?”
Alice had listened impassively. Now she brushed aside Harry’s diversionary gesture. “If it’s all the same to you, we’d like to meet your wife again.”
“No problem,” claimed Harry. He fairly scuttled through the door.
Alice handed me back my stick. “I have a feeing that Mrs. Ashenfelter II might respond better to you.”
But as it turned out, Sally was in no shape to respond to anyone. Harry came back grim-faced and announced, “No dice. Sally’s out cold. She took a chisel to the cocktail cabinet, and she’s been through a bottle and a half of vodka.”
FIFTEEN
We wanted to eat. A straightforward matter? Not in Bath on a Sunday evening in October 1964. All the restaurants were dark, and the hotels didn’t want to know us. “Sorry, residents only” should be translated into Latin and incorporated in the city’s coat of arms. We finally gained grudging admittance to a dingy basement in Great Pulteney Street that doubled as the dining room and lounge of a small private hotel called the Annual Cure. Top marks for local color, but not, I think, for attracting customers. We were the only diners.
Alice was still brooding on our visit to the Ashenfelters, so I picked up the gravy-stained menu. It was written without much regard to spelling.
“If you fancy something out of the ordinary, I see they serve farmhouse girll,” I commented too loudly, because the manager was standing unseen at my shoulder.
“You don’t like?” he asked. “You go somewhere else.” I believe he was mid-European.
I pointed out the error, wishing I hadn’t spoken.
He snatched the menu from me, penciled in a correction, pushed it back, and said with acid, “Schoolteacher?”
“Something like that.”
We both settled on plaice and french flies without going into the orthography. Alice asked for the rest room, the ladies’, and the lavatory before she was understood and directed upstairs.
As she pushed back her chair I murmured something about a search party but failed to amuse her. Mentally, she hadn’t caught up yet. I doubt whether our shabby surroundings had made any impression on her at all.
Alone at the table, I made my own review of the day’s discoveries. No doubt Alice would snap out of her introspection soon and start an earnest discussion. I wanted my thoughts in trim.
Two observations on Alice.
First, she was dangerous to be with. She might easily have got us shot by blurting out her identity to Bernard Lockwood. She’d treated Harry, another violent character, with reckless disrespect.
Second, on the credit side, she’d got results. Thanks to her open approach, we’d traced Harry and identified him as her stepfather. We’d learned of his marriage to Sally Shoe-smith. And we’d been given a different slant on the relationship between Duke and Barbara: According to Harry, they weren’t lovers, after all. The fact that I knew this to be untrue didn’t detract from its significance. Harry was either deluded or a villain.
But we’re dealing with Alice. I wasn’t blind to her motives. Any female who could slip so rapidly out of a little-girl-lost role and into bed wasn’t dewy-eyed. She’d used me, manipulated me, played on my reactions. As it happened, I didn’t particularly mind, because through the bewildering shifts of character I’d perceived a personality I liked. She was intelligent, resilient, sometimes wrong-headed, but brave, unusually brave. Different.
I’ve told you about the moment when I was toweling Alice’s hair in front of the fire in the pub and I knew that I wanted her. To be brutally honest-and haven’t I kept faith with you up to now? — the wanting was all on my side. I’d picked up no signals from Alice.
Well, almost none. If there had been a moment of mutual closeness, it was earlier. Smile if you wish, but I don’t mean when we were in bed together. That was an experience, a turn-on, as exciting as anything my body had been privileged to share in but exclusively sensual.
I’m talking about another moment. Remember when we stepped over the puddles at Gifford Farm and she took my hand? And slipped her arm about my waist in the hayloft? Then, I believe, other possibilities beckoned us, like understanding, respect, and maybe even affection.
Yet what happened on the drive to Bath when I tried to kiss her? What brought on the frost?
I traced it back to our conversation in the hayloft. I’d balked at some of the intimate questions she’d fired at me concerning Cliff Morton’s attack on Barbara. I mean, I didn’t duck out. I’d simply felt uncomfortable and shown it. I’d appeared evasive.
So if I wanted Alice, there were bridges to be mended. I needed to be constructive about what we’d seen and heard.
For a start, our trip to Gifford Farm. Bernard couldn’t have made it more plain that he was troubled to find us at the farm. What’s past is over was his attitude, and I had some sympathy for it. I’d felt the same until Alice had forced my hand. But I hadn’t seen her off with a shotgun.
I could understand Bernard and his parents wanting to forget. They’d been through hell since Barbara’s rape and suicide. The inquest. The discovery of the skull in the cask and the ruin of their cider business. The police swarming over their farm digging for human remains. The suspicions that George Lockwood had shot Morton. Nor had it ended with Duke’s arrest. They’d all been called to testify at the trial.
A niggling thought intruded here. In their understandable wish to get a positive verdict, and the whole thing forgotten as soon as possible, might the Lockwoods have overstated the evidence against Duke? The prosecution had been mounted largely on forensic testimony, backed by circumstantial evidence from the Lockwoods and myself. We, between us, had provided the picture of Duke as the vengeful lover. I’m not saying that the Lockwoods were guilty of perjury, and I certainly didn’t go along with everything Harry had told us, but could they have misinterpreted some of Barbara’s actions?
Which brought me to Harry.
His version of events was sensational. Maybe fantastic is a better word. By his account Duke had no regard for Barbara whatsoever. He’d had to be persuaded, if not press-ganged, into partnering her. According to Harry, those romantic evening walks in the Somerset lanes simply hadn’t included Duke. On the afternoon of the rape and murder, Duke had appeared disenchanted, but hardly like a man who had just blown out another’s brains.
Why, I wondered, had Harry suggested such things if they weren’t true?
There was a clue. It was his revelation that he and Duke had been boyhood friends, rivals for Alice’s mother, Elly. Harry had treated it lightly. Easy now to dismiss it as casual dates with ice-cream sodas. How had he felt at the time, when Duke had cut him out and married Elly? No bitterness? No festering resentment?
If there was none, and it was nothing to him, why had he married Elly himself when the opportunity came?