Rough Cider by Peter Lovesey Page B

terrific in his uniform.”
    I gave a nod.
    We let the wipers take over again.
    Sometime after Newbury she said, “The jury was out for less than an hour. That’s not long, is it?”
    “Not long.”
    Another silence. Her thinking was precise and unhurried. She meshed in her statements with the car’s engine note, making sure I was listening.
    “The prosecution had a very strong case.”
    “Devastating.”
    “All that ballistics evidence. I skimmed through it, but it must have impressed the court.”
    “Textbook stuff.”
    “They found some bullets fired from the same gun, right?”
    “Right,” I said.
    “Where did they pick them up, Theo?”
    “I told you about the shooting lesson Duke and Harry gave to me and Barbara.”
    “Oh, yes.”
    “The police combed that field and collected all the used bullets they could find and compared them with the bullet found in the barn.”
    Alice sighed. “And proved it was fired from Daddy’s gun.”
    “Beyond any doubt.”
    After a pause she commented, “So they didn’t actually need the gun to prove their case.”
    “Clever, wasn’t it?”
    She doggedly pursued her point. “It didn’t make any difference that you had the gun all the time.”
    I said tersely, “We’ve been over this once.”
    She switched the emphasis. “All this forensic science, the skull and the superimposed photograph, the dental records and the bullets, sounds really impressive. The jury was bound to be dazzled by stuff like that.”
    I didn’t like the drift. I decided to take a firmer line. “The case against Duke would have stuck without all that. He was guilty, Alice, there isn’t any question. Listen, I know what I
    saw. After me Duke was the first to know about Cliff Morton attacking Barbara. I watched him dash towards the barn.”
    “You actually saw him go into the barn?”
    “He ran in there. I’m sorry if this is painful to accept, but he really cared for Barbara. It was a crime of passion.”
    She shook her head. “To me it doesn’t add up.”
    “Why?”
    “He runs into the barn, right? This girl he really cares for is being raped. What does he do about it? Pull the guy off her and throttle him? No, he leaves them there and goes back to the farmhouse to fetch his gun. Is that the conduct of a passionate man?”
    I said, “It’s the difference between manslaughter and murder.”
    “Okay, but how do you explain it?”
    I sighed. “The prosecution went deeply into this. When Duke got into the barn, the attack was over. He could hear voices from the loft, Barbara pitifully distressed, Morton dismissing it all as unimportant. Duke was incensed by what he heard. He could have started a fight with Morton, but a beating-up was nothing to what Barbara had suffered. He ran back to the farmhouse to collect the gun, returned, and went up to the loft.”
    “And put the bullet in Morton’s head right in front of Barbara? Is that what she told her parents?”
    “She told her parents nothing. Duke shot Morton and covered his body with hay, maybe pushed it to the back of the loft behind some bales until he could come back later when no one was about. When he did return, either that night or the next, he had a plan. You have to see it from his point of view, as a serviceman waiting to join the invasion of Europe.”
    “He figured he’d soon be clear and away?”
    “Yes. Obviously, his first concern was how to get rid of the body. He could use the jeep to transport it somewhere by night, bury it or sink it into a lake with weights attached, but that’s not so simple as it sounds. Digging a grave of any depth is more than one night’s work, and how was a stranger to Britain going to find a boat and a deep, deserted lake? Even if he succeeded, bodies have an inconvenient habit of turning up. Someone walking his dog—”
    “You don’t have to spell it out,” Alice broke in. “We both know what happened. He hacked off the head and put it in the cider barrel so the police