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.
Escape, an inner voice urgently told me. Move yourself. Get out of here. You can break your fall on the bales. All right, there’s a body down there, but he’s dead, and that’s how you’ll be if you’re squeamish now.
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 lethaclass="underline" 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.
Bernard wasn’t hurt. He made a diving tackle and brought Alice down like a skittle. She kicked out and managed to wiggle clear on all fours.
He picked himself up without hurrying and stalked her, out of my line of sight, to the interior of the barn below the hayloft. She was trapped.
I heard her scream, “Theo!”
I threw myself over the edge.
Up to now life had spared me from the sight of a dead person, let alone a physical contact. The prospect repelled me. Yet this was a reaction so automatic and instantaneous that I was unaffected. I dropped onto Harry’s lifeless form, felt the flesh under the clothes respond flaccidly to my weight, touched one of the cold hands and saw it flop aside, then dragged myself clear and down to floor level.
My eyes were on Bernard. He was ten feet away from me, in a semi-crouch, with Alice flat to the floor beside him. I would have said face down, were it not that her face was up, and stressfully so. Bernard was grasping the root of her plait, tugging at her head, while his knee pinned her chest to the floor. Her neck looked ready to snap any second.
She gave an agonized moan.
I’d started a rescue act I wasn’t equipped to complete. With my stick way out of reach on the other side of the barn, the best I could hope to do was crawl towards them, and then Bernard would tear me to pieces and have me on toast.
There had to be a better way.
The previous night, Harry had taken the Colt.45 from my house. If he still had it…
I put my hand up to the corpse and pressed it against the jacket pocket.
Nothing.
The other pocket, then.
Couldn’t reach.
Another cry of pain from Alice.
I grabbed the body with both hands and tugged it towards me, off the bales. It toppled heavily onto me. Next second, I was wrestling with a dead man.
Thank God my arms are strong. I pushed him upwards and to one side and sat up in the same movement.
Alice gave a more piercing scream.
I felt for Harry’s right-hand pocket and this time located the gun. I tugged it out, leveled it at Bernard, and squeezed the trigger.
The bullet ripped into his.back. He was thrown forward, face first, collapsing across a bale of hay. I don’t know if he was dead, but I didn’t fire a second shot.