Free Rough Cider by Peter Lovesey Page A

he was obsessed by Barbara and pestered her frequently. On one occasion in September during the apple gathering, he’d tried to force his attentions on her and been ordered off the farm by George Lockwood.
    Cliff Morton was a single man, aged eighteen. His parents had gone to live abroad when he was twelve, leaving him in the care of a maternal aunt who lived in a tied cottage a mile south of Christian Gifford. Two weeks after the inquest into Barbara’s death, police had visited the cottage to interview Morton on another matter: he’d been sent his call-up papers for military service in mid-September and failed to report. The aunt told them that he’d left home suddenly without telling her where he was going.
    So Cliff Morton’s name was on the list of missing men prepared by the police. The age was right, and there was a connection with Gifford Farm. He had been employed gathering apples there, although so briefly that George Lock-wood hadn’t listed him for the police—an oversight he presently came to regret.
    Detectives visited a dentist in Frome and obtained Morton’s dental record. In January 1941, he’d been given two fillings in adjacent upper bicuspids that exactly corresponded with the fillings in the skull.
    As final proof of identification, Dr. Atcliffe photographed the skull and superimposed the negative on the enlargement of a snapshot of Morton provided by the aunt. If criminology is your hobby, you’ll know that this was a method pioneered by Professor Glaister in the Ruxton case in 1935. The match was perfect. Beyond reasonable doubt, Cliff Morton was the murder victim.
    The police descended on Gifford Farm in vanloads and began an exhaustive search. It continued for nine days. They checked every building minutely. They dug up the silage pits and dismantled the haystacks.
    If you feel sorry for George Lockwood, I can tell you that he wasn’t there to see his farm being taken apart. He was at Frome Police Station with Superintendent Judd, “helping the police with their inquiries.” On all evidence he was better placed to help them than anyone else. He’d had both motive and opportunity. The motive was revenge for his daughter’s suicide. He was convinced that Cliff Morton had got Barbara pregnant, and he didn’t mind the police knowing it. And as for opportunity, Morton was known to have been hanging around the farm towards the end of November. Then who could have shot him, dismembered him, and put the head into a Lockwood cider cask but George Lockwood himself?
    Lockwood admitted ordering Morton off his land in September after he’d found him “interfering” with Barbara. He blamed him for her pregnancy and suicide. He’d stupidly failed to notify the police that Morton had worked for him. But he denied murdering him. And he denied possessing a pistol.
    Despite the thoroughness of the search, no further remains were found on Gifford Farm. Nor was the murder weapon discovered.
    But the exercise wasn’t wasted. After the bales of hay had been removed from the loft of the smallest barn, an alert constable spotted something embedded in one of the beams: a bullet.
    Dr. Atcliffe was summoned to Gifford Farm, and he spent the rest of that day and the next alone in the loft, while Judd paced the farmyard like a dispossessed rooster. When Atcliffe finally emerged, he solemnly confirmed that a shot had been fired there. Forensic pathology is a cautious branch of science, but I strongly suspect that someone was being strung along. Judd blew his top, and Atcliffe waited for him to subside before announcing his second finding: traces of blood on the floorboards of the loft. The stains were not recent, and he couldn’t say yet whether they were human in origin, but the pattern of staining, so far as he could trace it, suggested that the victim had lain for some time with the source of bleeding close to the floor.
    Judd was all smiles again. Atcliffe smiled back and told him that he wasn’t ready to