One

‘FRED PHILLIPS IS running.’ Anne Cattrell’s remark burst upon the silence of that August afternoon like a fart at a vicar’s tea-party.

Startled, her two companions looked up, Diana from her sketch-pad, Phoebe from her gardening book, their eyes watering at this abrupt transition from the printed page to brilliant sunlight. They had sat in contented stillness for an hour, grouped about a wrought-iron table on the terrace of their house where the wreckage of a lazy tea jostled with the flotsam of their professional lives: a pair of secateurs, an open paint-box, pages of manuscript, one with a circular tea stain where Anne had dumped a cup without thinking.

Phoebe was perched on an upright chair at right angles to the table, crossed ankles tucked neatly beneath her, red hair corkscrewing in flaming whorls about her shoulders. Her position was hardly changed from half an hour previously when she had finished her tea and guiltily buried her nose in her book instead of returning to the greenhouse to finish off a bulk order for five hundred Ivyleaf Pelargonium cuttings. Diana, unashamedly glistening with Ambre Solaire, reclined on a sun-lounger, the pleated skirt of her printed cotton dress spilling over the sides and brushing the flagstones. One elegant hand toyed with the underbelly of the Labrador lying beside her, the other drew swirling doodles in the margin of her sketch-pad which should have been filled – but was not – with commissioned designs for a cottage interior in Fowey. Anne, who had been struggling between intermittent dozes to conjure up a thousand words on ‘Vaginal Orgasm – Fact or Fiction’ for an obscure magazine, was drawn up tight against the table, chin on hands, dark eyes staring down the long vista of landscaped garden in front of her.

Phoebe glanced at her briefly then turned to follow her gaze, peering over her spectacles across the wide expanse of lawn. ‘Good lord!’ she exclaimed.

Her gardener, a man of massive proportions, was pounding across the grass, naked to the waist, his huge belly lapping at his trousers like some monstrous tidal wave. The semi-nudity was surprising enough, for Fred held strong views about his position at Streech Grange. Among other things, this required Phoebe to whistle a warning of her approach in the garden so that he might clothe himself suitably for what he referred to as a parley-vous, even in the heat of summer.

‘Perhaps he’s won the pools,’ suggested Diana, but without conviction, as the three women watched his rapidly slowing advance.

‘Highly unlikely,’ countered Anne, pushing her chair away from the table. ‘Fred’s inertia would demand a more powerful stimulus than filthy lucre to prompt this bout of activity.’

They watched the rest of Fred’s approach in silence. He was walking by the time he reached the terrace. He paused for a moment, leaning one hand heavily on the low wall bordering the flagstones, catching his breath. There was a tinge of grey to the weathered cheeks, a rasp in his throat. Concerned, Phoebe gestured to Diana to pull forward a vacant chair, then she stood up, took Fred’s arm and helped him into it.

‘Whatever’s happened?’ she asked anxiously.

‘Oh, madam, something awful.’ He was sweating profusely, unable to get the words out quickly. Perspiration ran in streams over his fat brown breasts, soft and round like a woman’s, and the smell was all-pervading, consuming the sweet scent of the roses which nodded in beds at the edge of the terrace. Aware of this and of his nakedness, he wrung his hands in embarrassment. ‘I’m so sorry, madam.’

Diana swung her legs off the lounger and sat up, twitching a rug off the back of her chair and placing it neatly across his shoulders. ‘You should keep yourself warm after a run like that, Fred.’

He wrapped the rug around him, nodding his appreciation. ‘What’s happened, Fred?’ Phoebe asked again.

‘I don’t rightly know how to say it’ – she thought she saw compassion in his eyes – ‘but it’s got to be told.’

‘Then tell me,’ she prompted gently. ‘I’m sure it can’t be that bad.’ She glanced at Benson, the yellow Labrador, still lying placidly by Diana’s chair. ‘Has Hedges been run over?’

He reached out a rough, mud-caked hand from between the folds of the rug and with a familiarity that was quite out of character placed it on hers and squeezed gently. The gesture was as brief as it was unexpected. ‘There’s a body in the old ice house, madam.’

There was a moment’s silence. ‘A body?’ echoed Phoebe. ‘What sort of body?’ Her voice was unemotional, steady.

Anne flicked a glance in her direction. There were times, she thought, when her friend’s composure frightened her.

‘To tell you the truth, madam, I didn’t look too close. It was a shock, coming on it the way I did.’ He stared unhappily at his feet. ‘Stepped on it, like, before I saw it. There was a bit of a smell afterwards.’ They all looked in fascination at his gardening boots and he, regretting his impulsive statement, shuffled them awkwardly out of sight under the rug. ‘It’s all right, madam,’ he said, ‘wiped them on the grass soon as I could.’

The cup and saucer in Phoebe’s hand rattled and she put them carefully on the table beside her secateurs. ‘Of course you did, Fred. How thoughtful of you. Would you like some tea? A cake perhaps?’ she asked him.

‘No, thank you, madam.’

Diana turned away, suppressing an awful desire to laugh. Only Phoebe, she thought, of all the women she knew would offer cake in such circumstances. In its way it was admirable, for Phoebe, more than any of them, would be affected by Fred’s shocking revelation.

Anne scrabbled among the pages of her manuscript in search of her cigarettes. With an abrupt movement she flicked the box open and offered it to Fred. He glanced at Phoebe for a permission he didn’t need and she nodded gravely. ‘Thank you kindly, Miss Cattrell. My nerves are that shook up.’

Anne lit it for him, holding his hand steady with hers. ‘Let’s get this straight, Fred,’ she said, her dark eyes searching his. ‘It’s a person’s dead body. Is that right?’

‘That’s right, Miss Cattrell.’

‘Do you know who it is?’

‘I can’t say I do, miss.’ He spoke with reluctance. ‘I can’t say anyone will know who it is.’ He drew deeply on his cigarette, the sweat of suppressed nausea breaking out on his forehead. ‘The truth is, from the quick look I had, there’s not much of it left. It must have been there a while.’

The three women looked at him aghast. ‘But surely it’s got clothes on, Fred?’ Diana asked nervously. ‘At least you know if it’s a man or woman.’

‘No clothes that I could see, Mrs Goode.’

‘You’d better show me.’ Phoebe stood up with sudden decision and Fred rose awkwardly to his feet. ‘I’d rather not, madam. You shouldn’t see it. I don’t want to take you down there.’

‘Then I’ll go on my own.’ She smiled suddenly and laid a hand on his arm. ‘I’m sorry but I have to see it. You do understand that, don’t you, Fred?’

He stubbed out his cigarette and pulled the rug tighter about his shoulders. ‘If you’re that intent on going, I’ll come with you. It’s not something you should see alone.’

‘Thank you.’ She turned to Diana. ‘Will you phone the police for me?’

‘Of course.’

Anne pushed her chair back. ‘I’ll come with you,’ she told Phoebe. Then she called after Diana as she followed the other two across the grass. ‘You might lay on some brandy, I’ll be needing some, even if no one else does.’

They grouped themselves in a nervous huddle a few yards from the entrance to the ice house. It was an unusual structure, designed and built in the eighteenth century to resemble a small hillock. Its function as an ice-store had ceased years ago with the advent of the refrigerator, and Nature had reasserted her dominion over it so that ranks of nettles marched in their hundreds around the base, making a natural fusion between the man-made dome and the solid earth. The only entrance, a wide low doorway, was set into the ice-house wall at the end of an overgrown pathway. The doorway, too, had long since lost itself in a mass of tangled brambles which grew over it in a thorny curtain from above and below. It was revealed now only because Fred had hacked and trampled the curtain aside to reach it.

A lighted torch lay abandoned on the ground at their feet. Phoebe picked it up.‘What made you go in there?’ she asked Fred. ‘We haven’t used it for years.’

He pulled a face. ‘I wish I hadn’t, madam, God knows. What the eye doesn’t see, the heart doesn’t grieve over and that’s a fact. I’ve been repairing the kitchen garden wall, where it collapsed a week ago. Half the bricks are unusable – I understood, when I saw the state of them, why the wall collapsed. Handful of dust, some of them. Anyway, I thought of the bricks we stored in here some years back, the ones from the outhouse we demolished. You said: “Hang on to the good ones, Fred, you never know when we might need them for repairs.”’

‘I remember.’

‘So I wanted to use them for the wall.’

‘Of course. You had to cut the brambles away?’

He nodded. ‘I couldn’t see the door, it was overgrown.’ He pointed to a scythe lying to one side of the ice house. ‘I used that and my boots to reach it.’

‘Come on,’ said Anne suddenly. ‘Let’s get it over with. Talking isn’t going to make it any easier.’

‘Yes,’ said Phoebe quietly. ‘Does the door open any wider, Fred?’

‘It does, madam. I had it full open before I stepped on what’s in there. Pulled it to as far as I could when I left in case anyone came by.’ He pursed his lips. ‘To tell you the truth, it’s wider now than when I left it.’

He walked forward reluctantly and, with a sudden movement, kicked the door. It swung open on creaking hinges. Phoebe crouched and shone the torch into the interior, bathing the contents with warm golden light. It wasn’t so much the blackened and eyeless corpse that caused her to vomit, as the sight of Hedges rolling quietly and purposefully in the decomposing remains of the bowels. He came out with his tail between his legs and lay on the grass watching her, head between paws, as she heaved her tea on to the grass.

 

Two

SILVERBORNE POLICE STATION, a modern triumph of polished chrome features and sealed tinted windows, baked in the sun amid its more traditional neighbours. Inside, the air-conditioning had broken down again and as the hours passed and the atmosphere overheated so did the policemen. They grew sticky and squabbled amongst themselves like young children. Those who could, got out; those who couldn’t, jealously guarded their electric fans and prayed for a quick end to their shift. For Detective Chief Inspector Walsh, sweating profusely over some paperwork in his office, the order to take a team to Streech Grange came like a miraculous breath of air through the sealed windows. He whistled happily to himself as he made his way to the briefing room. But for Detective Sergeant McLoughlin, detailed to assist him, the knowledge that he was going to miss opening time and the cold lager he’d promised himself was the last straw.

Diana heard the approaching cars before the others. She finished her brandy and put the glass on the sideboard. ‘Fingers out, girls. Here they come.’

Phoebe walked over to the mantelpiece, her face abnormally white against the vivid red hair. She was a tall woman who was rarely seen out of checked shirts and old Levis. But on her return from the ice house she had taken the trouble to change into a long-sleeved, high-collared silk dress. There was no doubting she looked at home in the elegant room with its pastel shades and draped velvet curtains but, to Anne at least, she had the air of a stranger. She smiled distantly at her two friends. ‘I’m terribly sorry about this.’

Anne, as usual, was chain-smoking. She blew a stream of grey into the air above her where she sat on the sofa, head resting against the back. ‘Don’t be a fool,’ she said bluntly. ‘No one’s going to hold you responsible because some idiot chooses to die on your property. There’ll be a simple explanation: a tramp took shelter and had a heart attack.’

‘My thoughts precisely,’ said Diana, walking to the sofa. ‘Give me a cigarette, there’s a dear. My nerves are like piano wires, waiting for a Rachmaninov concerto to hit them.’

Anne chuckled and handed over the packet. ‘Do you want one, Pheeb?’

She shook her head and started to polish her spectacles on her skirt hem, absent-mindedly lifting it to waist level and revealing her lack of knickers. Anne found the vagueness of the gesture reassuring.

‘There won’t be any glass left if you go on doing that,’ she pointed out gently.

Phoebe sighed, dropped her skirt and put the spectacles back on. ‘Tramps don’t have heart attacks on other people’s property in the nude,’ she said.

The doorbell rang. They heard Molly Phillips, Fred’s wife, walk to the front door and without a word, indeed quite by instinct, Anne and Diana positioned themselves on either side of the mantelpiece, flanking Phoebe. As the door opened it occurred to Diana that this might not have been a wise move. To the police mind, she feared, they would seem not so much to be supporting her – the intention – as guarding her.

Molly ushered in two men. ‘Chief Inspector Walsh and Detective Sergeant McLoughlin, madam. There’s a whole lot more outside. Shall I ask Fred to keep an eye on them?’

‘No, that’s all right, Molly. I’m sure they’ll behave themselves.’

‘If you say so, madam. Me, I’m not so sure. They’ve already scuffed their great clumsy feet over the gravel where Fred raked it so careful this morning.’ She glared accusingly at the two men.

‘Thank you, Molly. Perhaps you could make tea for everyone. I’m sure it will be welcome.’

‘Right you are, madam.’ The housekeeper closed the door behind her and stomped off down the corridor towards the kitchen.

George Walsh listened till her footsteps died away, then he came forward and held out his hand. He was a thin stooping man who had a bizarre habit of jerking his head from side to side, like a sufferer from Parkinson’s disease. It gave him an appearance of vulnerability that was deceptive.

‘Good afternoon, Mrs Maybury. We’ve met before, if you remember.’ He could recall her vividly as she had been that first time, standing where she was now. Ten years, he thought, and she had hardly changed, still the lady of the manor, remote and aloof in the security of her position. The dramas of those years might never have been. There was certainly no evidence in the calm, unlined face which smiled at him now. There was a quality of stillness about her that was unnatural. The village called her a witch, and he had always understood why.

Phoebe shook his hand. ‘Yes, I do remember. It was your first big case.’ Her voice was low-pitched, attractive. ‘You had just been made Detective Inspector, I think. I don’t believe you’ve met my friends, Miss Cattrell and Mrs Goode.’ She gestured to Anne and Diana who shook hands solemnly in turn with the Chief Inspector. ‘They live here now.’

Walsh studied the two women with interest. ‘Permanently?’ he asked.

‘Most of the time,’ said Diana, ‘when our work doesn’t take us away. We’re both self-employed. I’m an interior designer, Anne’s a freelance journalist.’

Walsh nodded, but Anne could see that Diana had told him nothing he didn’t already know. ‘I envy you.’ He spoke the truth. He had coveted Streech Grange since the first time he had seen it.

Phoebe put out her hand to the other man. ‘Good afternoon, Sergeant McLoughlin. May I introduce Mrs Goode and Miss Cattrell.’

He was in his mid-thirties, of an age with the women, a dark, brooding man with cold eyes. In the twist of his lips, he had brought with him the irritability of the Police Station, concentrated, malignant. He regarded Phoebe and her friends with weary contempt and paid lip-service to etiquette by brushing their fingers with his in the briefest of exchanges. His dislike, uncalled-for, slapped against their unprotected cheeks.

To the consternation of her friends, who could feel the vibrations of her anger, Anne rose recklessly to the challenge. ‘My, my, Sergeant, what have you been hearing about us?’ She lifted a sardonic eyebrow then deliberately wiped her fingers down her Levis. ‘You’re scarcely off your mother’s breast, so won’t have been around the last time the Grange was the centre of police attention. Let me guess now. Our reputation – ’ she indicated herself and the other two women – ‘has preceded us. Which of our widely talked-about activities upsets you the most, I wonder? Child abuse, witchcraft or lesbianism?’ She searched his face with scornful eyes. ‘Lesbianism,’ she murmured. ‘Yes, you would find that the most threatening but, then, it’s the only one that’s true, isn’t it?’

McLoughlin’s temper, already fired by the heat of the day, nearly erupted. He breathed deeply. ‘I’ve nothing against dykes, Miss Cattrell,’ he said evenly. ‘I just wouldn’t stick my finger in one, that’s all.’

Diana stubbed out her cigarette with rather more violence than was necessary. ‘Don’t tease the poor man, Anne,’ she said dryly. ‘He’s going to need all his wits to sort out the mess in the ice house.’

Stiffly, Phoebe took the seat nearest her and gestured the others to sit down. Walsh sat in the chair opposite her, Anne and Diana on the sofa, leaving McLoughlin to perch on a delicate tapestry stool. His discomfort, as he folded his long legs awkwardly beneath him, was obvious to all.

‘Take care you don’t break that, Sergeant,’ snapped Walsh. ‘I don’t like clumsiness any more than the housekeeper does. Well now, Mrs Maybury, perhaps you’d like to tell us why you called us out.’

‘I thought Mrs Goode explained it on the telephone.’

He fished a piece of paper from his pocket. ‘“Body in ice house, Streech Grange. Discovered at 4.35 p.m.” Not much of an explanation, is it? Tell me what happened.’

‘That’s it, really. Fred Phillips, my gardener, found the body about that time and came and told us. Diana phoned you while Fred took Anne and me to look at it.’

‘So you’ve seen it?’

‘Yes.’

‘Who is it? Do you know?’

‘The body’s unrecognisable.’

With an abrupt movement, Anne lit another cigarette. ‘It’s putrid, Inspector, black, disgusting. No one would know who it was.’ She spoke impatiently, her deep voice clipping the words short.

Walsh nodded. ‘I see. Did your gardener suggest you look at the body?’

Phoebe shook her head. ‘No, he suggested I shouldn’t. I insisted on going.’

‘Why?’

She shrugged. ‘Natural curiosity, I suppose. Wouldn’t you have gone?’

He was silent for a moment. ‘Is it your husband, Mrs Maybury?’

‘I’ve already told you the body is unrecognisable.’

‘Did you insist on going because you thought it might be your husband?’

‘Of course. But I’ve realised since it couldn’t possibly be.’

‘Why is that?’

‘It was something Fred said. He reminded me that we stored some bricks in the ice house about six years ago when we demolished an outhouse. David had been gone four years by that time.’

‘His body was never found. We never traced him,’ Walsh reminded her. ‘Perhaps he came back.’

Diana laughed nervously. ‘He couldn’t come back, Inspector. He’s dead. Murdered.’

‘How do you know, Mrs Goode?’

‘Because he’d have been back long before this if he wasn’t. David always knew which side his bread was buttered.’

Walsh crossed his legs and smiled. ‘The case is still open. We’ve never been able to prove he was murdered.’

Diana’s face was suddenly grim. ‘Because you concentrated all your energies on trying to pin the murder on Phoebe. You gave up when you couldn’t prove it. You never made any attempt to ask me for a list of suspects. I could have given you a hundred likely names; Anne could have given you another hundred. David Maybury was the most out-and-out bastard who ever lived. He deserved to die.’ She wondered if she had overdone it and glanced briefly at Phoebe. ‘Sorry, love, but if more people had said it ten years ago, things might have been less hard for you.’

Anne nodded agreement. ‘You’ll waste a lot of time if you think that thing out there is David Maybury.’ She stood up and walked over to sit on the arm of Phoebe’s chair. ‘For the record, Inspector, both Diana and I helped clear years of accumulated rubbish out the ice house before Fred stacked the bricks in it. There were no corpses in there six years ago. Isn’t that right, Di?’

Diana looked amused and inclined her head. ‘It wouldn’t have been the place to look for him, anyway. He’s at the bottom of the sea somewhere, food for crabs and lobsters.’ She looked at McLoughlin. ‘Are you partial to crabs, Sergeant?’

Walsh intervened before McLoughlin could say anything. ‘We followed up every known contact or associate Mr Maybury had. There was no evidence to connect any of them with his disappearance.’

Anne tossed her cigarette into the fireplace. ‘Balls!’ she exclaimed amiably. ‘I’ll tell you something, you never questioned me either and in my list of a hundred possible suspects I should have featured in the top ten.’

‘You’re quite mistaken, Miss Cattrell.’ Inspector Walsh was unruffled. ‘We went into your background very thoroughly. At the time of Mr Maybury’s disappearance, in fact throughout most of our investigation, you were camped with your lady friends on Greenham Common under the eyes not only of the guards at the American Airforce base but also of the Newbury police and assorted television cameras. It was quite an alibi.’

‘You’re right. I’d forgotten. Touché, Inspector.’ She chuckled. ‘I was researching a feature for one of the colour supplements.’ Out of the corner of her eye, she saw McLoughlin’s lips thin to a disapproving line. ‘But, hell, it was fun,’ she went on in a dreamy voice. ‘That camp is the best thing that’s ever happened to me.’

Frowning, Phoebe laid a restraining hand on her arm and stood up. ‘This is all irrelevant. Until you’ve examined the body, it seems to me quite pointless to speculate on whether or not it’s David’s. If you care to come with me, gentlemen, I will show you where it is.’

‘Let Fred do it,’ Diana protested.

‘No. He’s had enough shocks for one day. I’m all right. Could you make sure Molly’s organising the tea?’

She opened the French windows and led the way on to the terrace. Benson and Hedges roused themselves from the warm flagstones and pushed their noses into her hand. Hedges’s fur was still fluffy from his bath. She paused to stroke his head gently and pull his ears. ‘There’s one thing I really ought to tell you, Inspector,’ she said.

Anne, watching from inside the drawing-room, gave a gurgle of laughter. ‘Phoebe’s confessing to Hedges’s little peccadillo and the Sergeant’s turned green around the gills.’

Diana pushed herself out of the sofa and walked towards her. ‘Don’t underestimate him, Anne,’ she said. ‘You’re such a fool sometimes. Why do you always have to antagonise people?’

‘I don’t. I simply refuse to kowtow to their small-minded conventions. If they feel antagonised that’s their problem. Principles should never be compromised. The minute they are, they cease to be principles.’

‘Maybe, but you don’t have to shove them down reluctant throats. A little common sense wouldn’t come amiss at the moment. We do have a dead body on the premises. Or had you forgotten?’ Her voice was more anxious than ironic.

Anne turned away from the window. ‘You’re probably right,’ she agreed meekly.

‘So you’ll be careful?’

‘I’ll be careful.’

Diana frowned. ‘I do wish I understood you. I never have, you know.’

Affection surged in Anne as she studied her friend’s worried face. Poor old Di, she thought, how she hated all this. She should never have come to Streech. Her natural environment was an ivory tower where visitors were vetted and unpleasantness unheard of. ‘You have no problem understanding me,’ she pointed out lightly, ‘you have a problem agreeing with me. My petty anarchies offend your sensibilities. I often wonder why you go along with them.’

Diana walked to the door. ‘Which reminds me, next time you want me to lie for you, warn me first, will you? I’m not as good at controlling my facial muscles as you are.’

‘Nonsense,’ said Anne, dropping into an armchair. ‘You’re the most accomplished liar I know.’

Diana paused with her hand on the doorknob. ‘Why do you say that?’ she asked sharply.

‘Because,’ Anne teased her rigid back, ‘I was there when you told Lady Weevil that her choice of colours for her drawing-room was sophisticated. Anyone who could do that with a straight face must have unlimited muscle control.’

‘Lady Keevil,’ corrected Diana, looking round with a smile. ‘I should never have let you come with me. That contract was worth a fortune.’

Anne was unrepentant. ‘I needed the lift and you can hardly blame me if I got her name wrong. Everything she said sounded as if it had been squeezed through a wet flannel. Anyway, I did you a favour. Cherry-red carpets and lime-green curtains, for God’s sake! Think of your reputation.’

‘You know her father was a fruit wholesaler.’

‘You do surprise me,’ said Anne dryly.

 

Three

INSIDE THE ICE house Chief Inspector Walsh firmly suppressed a slight movement in his bowels. Sergeant McLoughlin showed less control. He ran out of the building and was sick in the nettles alongside it. Unaware that she would have sympathised, he was thankful that Phoebe Maybury had returned to the Grange and was not there to see him.

‘Not very nice, is it?’ remarked Walsh when the Sergeant came back. ‘Careful where you’re stepping. There are bits all over the place. Must have been where the dog disturbed it.’

McLoughlin held a handkerchief to his mouth and retched violently. There was a strong smell of beer about him, and the Inspector eyed him with disfavour. A man of moods himself, he found inconsistency in others unendurable. He knew McLoughlin as well as any of the men he worked with, thought of him as a conscientious type, honest, intelligent, dependable. He even liked the man – he was one of the few who could cope with the notorious pendulum-swings of Walsh’s temperament – but to see McLoughlin’s weaknesses, disclosed like guilty secrets, irritated Walsh. ‘What the hell’s the matter with you?’ he demanded. ‘Five minutes ago you couldn’t even be civil, now you’re puking like a bloody baby.’

‘Nothing, sir.’

‘Nothing, sir,’ mimicked Walsh savagely. He would have said more but there was an anger about the younger man that stilled his waspish tongue. With a sigh he took McLoughlin’s arm and pushed him outside. ‘Get me a photographer and some decent lights – it’s impossible to see properly. And tell Dr Webster to get down here as fast as he can. I left a message for him so he should be at the Station by now.’ He patted the Sergeant’s arm clumsily, remembering perhaps that McLoughlin was more often his supporter than his detractor. ‘If it’s any consolation, Andy, I’ve never seen anything as nasty as this.’

As McLoughlin returned thankfully to the house, Inspector Walsh took a pipe from his pocket, filled it and lit it thoughtfully, then began a careful examination of the ground and the brambles around the door and pathway. The ground itself told him little. The summer had been an exceptional one and the last four weeks of almost perpetual sunshine had baked it hard. The only visible tracks were where feet, probably Fred’s, had trampled the weeds and grass in front of the brambles. Previous tracks, if any, had long since been obliterated. The brambles might prove more interesting. It was evident, if there were no other entrance to the ice house, that the body had at some point traversed this thorny barrier, either alive on its own two legs or dead on the back of someone else’s. The big question was, how long ago? How long had that nightmare been in there?

He walked slowly round the hillock. It would, of course, have been easier to satisfy himself that the door was the only entrance from inside the structure. He excused his reluctance to do this on the basis of not wishing to disturb the evidence more than was necessary but, being honest, he knew it was an excuse. The grisly tomb held no attractions for a man alone, even for a policeman intent on discovering the truth.

He spent some time investigating round the base of an untamed laurel which grew at the back of the ice house, using a discarded bamboo stake to stir up the leaf mould which had collected there. His efforts uncovered only solid brickwork, which looked strong enough to withstand another two hundred years of probing roots. In those days, he thought, they built to last.

He sat back on his heels for a moment, puffing on his pipe, then resumed his search, poking his stick at intervals into the nettles at the base of the ice-house roof but finding no other obvious points of weakness. He returned to the door and a closer examination of the brambles.

He was no gardener, he relied on his wife to tend their small patio garden where everything grew neatly in tubs, but even to his uneducated eye the brambles had a look of permanence. He spent some moments peering thoughtfully at the clods of earth and grass above the doorway, where roots had been torn free in handfuls, then, careful to avoid the grass which had been trodden on, he squatted beside the area of brambles which had been scythed and trampled flat. The broken stems were green with sap, most of the fruit was still unripe but the odd blackberry, more mature than its fellows, showed black and juicy amidst the ruins of its parent. With the end of the bamboo he carefully lifted the flattened mass of vegetation nearest to him and peered beneath it.

‘Found anything, sir?’ McLoughlin had returned.

‘Look under here, Andy, and tell me what you see.’

McLoughlin knelt obligingly beside his superior and stared where Walsh was pointing. ‘What am I looking for?’

‘Stems with old breaks in them. We are safe in assuming our body didn’t pole vault over this little lot.’

McLoughlin shook his head. ‘We’d have to take the brambles apart for that, bit by bit, and I doubt we’d have much joy even then. Whoever flattened them did a thorough job.’

Walsh lowered the vegetation and removed the bamboo. ‘The gardener, according to Mrs Maybury.’

‘Looks as if he’s put a steam-roller over it.’

‘It’s interesting, isn’t it?’ Walsh stood up. ‘Did you get hold of Webster?’

‘He’s on his way, should be here in ten minutes. I’ve told the others to wait for him. Nick Robinson’s already laid on the lights and the camera, so the gardener’s showing them all down here once Webster arrives. Except young Williams. I’ve left him in the house to take background statements and keep his eyes open. He’s a sharp lad. If there’s anything to see, he’ll see it.’

‘Good. The mortuary van?’

‘On stand-by at the station.’

Walsh moved a few yards away and sat down on the grass. ‘We’ll wait. There’s nothing to be done until the photographs have been taken.’ He blew a cloud of smoke out of the side of his mouth and squinted through it at McLoughlin. ‘What is a nude corpse doing in Mrs Maybury’s ice house, Sergeant? And what or, perhaps, who, has been eating it?’

With a groan, McLoughlin reached for his handkerchief.

PC Williams had taken statements from Mrs Maybury, Mrs Goode and Miss Cattrell and was now with Molly Phillips in the kitchen. For some reason that he couldn’t understand, she was being deliberately obstructive and he thought with irritation that his colleagues had a knack of landing themselves the decent jobs. With ill-disguised satisfaction they had set off down the garden with Fred Phillips and the new arrivals and their assorted paraphernalia. Williams, who had seen Andy McLoughlin’s face when he came up from the ice house, was consumed with curiosity as to what was down there. McLoughlin’s nerves were sprung with Scottish steel, and he had looked as sick as a dog.

Reluctantly Constable Williams returned to the job in hand. ‘So the first you knew about this body was when Mrs Goode came in to telephone?’

‘What if it was?’

He looked at her in exasperation. ‘Do you always answer questions with questions?’

‘Maybe, maybe not. That’s my business.’

He was only a lad, the sort that people looked at and said: Policemen are getting younger. He tried a wheedling approach that had worked for him on a couple of occasions in the past. ‘Listen, Ma – ’

‘Don’t you “Ma” me,’ she spat at him viciously. ‘You’re no son of mine. I don’t have kids.’ She turned her back on him and busied herself slicing carrots into a saucepan. ‘You should be ashamed of yourself. What would your mother say? She’s the only one you’ve a right to call Ma like that.’

Frustrated old cow, he thought. He looked at the thin, drooping shoulders and reckoned her problem was that her old man had never given her a proper working over. ‘I don’t even know who she is.’

She was still for a moment, knife poised in mid-air, then went on with her slicing. She said nothing.

Williams tried another tack. ‘All I’m doing, Mrs Phillips, is getting some background details on the discovery of the body. Mrs Goode has told me she came into the house to make the telephone call to us. She said you were in the hall when she made it and that afterwards she went down to the cellar to get some brandy because there was none left on the sideboard. Is that right?’

‘If Mrs Goode says it is, that’s enough for you. There’s no need to come sneaking round here behind her back trying to find out if she’s telling lies.’

He looked at her sharply. ‘Is she telling lies?’

‘No, she’s not. The very idea.’

‘Then what’s all the mystery?’ he asked her angry back. ‘What are you being so secretive about?’

She rounded on him. ‘Don’t you take that tone with me. I know your sort. None better. You’ll not browbeat me.’ She whisked the teacup from under his nose where he sat at the table and dumped it unceremoniously in her washing-up bowl. He could have sworn there were tears in her eyes.

The police photographer picked his way gingerly out of the doorway and lifted the camera strap over his neck. ‘Finished, sir,’ he told Walsh.

The Chief Inspector placed a hand on his shoulder. ‘Good man. Back to the Station with you then and get that film developed.’ He turned to the pathologist. ‘Shall we go in, Webster?’

Dr Webster smiled grimly. ‘Do I have a choice?’

‘After you,’ said Walsh maliciously.

The scene was lit now with battery-run arc-lights, every detail showing with stark clarity, no shadows to soften the shocking impact. Walsh gazed dispassionately on the body. It was true, he thought, that exposure to violence desensitised a man. He could barely recall his earlier repugnance, though perhaps the lights had something to do with this. As a child the dark had held terrors for him, with nightmare creations of his imagining lurking in the corners of his bedroom. His father, in other respects a kind man but fearing the embarrassment of an effeminate son, was unsympathetic and had closed his ears to the muffled weeping inside a bedroom from which all the light bulbs had been removed.

‘Good God,’ said Webster, surveying the ice-house floor with marked distaste. He picked his way carefully towards the centre of it, avoiding tattered pieces of hardened entrail which lay on the flagstones. He looked at the head. ‘Good God,’ he said again.

The head, still tethered to the upper torso by blackened sinew, was wedged in a gap in the top row of a neat stack of bricks. Dull grey hair, long enough to be a woman’s, spilled out of the gap. Eyeless sockets, showing bone underneath, and exposed upper and lower jaw bones gleamed white against the blackened musculature of the face. The chest area, anchored by the head against the vertical face of bricks, looked as if it had been skilfully filleted. The lower half of the body lay unnaturally askew of its top half in a position that no living person, however supple, could have achieved. The abdominal region had all but disappeared though shreds of it lay about as mute witnesses that it had once existed. There were no genitals. The lower half of the left arm, propped on a smaller pile of bricks, was some four feet from the body, much of the flesh stripped away, but some sinews remaining to show it had been wrenched from its elbow. The right arm, pressed against the torso, had the same blackened quality as the head with patches of white bone showing through. Of the legs, only the calves and feet were immediately recognisable, but at a distance from each other in a grotesque parody of the splits and twisted upside down so that soles pointed at the ice-house roof. Of the thighs, only splintered bones remained.

‘Well?’ said Walsh after some minutes during which the pathologist took temperature readings and made a rough sketch of the lie of the body.

‘What do you want to know?’

‘Man or woman?’

Webster pointed to the feet. ‘From the size, I’d guess a man. We can’t be sure until we’ve done some measurements, of course, but it looks like it. If it’s not a man, it was a big woman and a mannish one.’

‘The hair’s on the long side for a man. Unless it grew significantly after death.’

‘Where have you been living, George? Even if it were down to the waist, it wouldn’t tell you anything about the sex. And hair growth after death is minimal. No,’ continued Webster, ‘all things considered, I’d say we’re dealing with a man, subject to confirmation, of course.’

‘Any idea of age?’

‘None, except that he’s probably over twenty-one and even that’s not certain. Some people go grey in their teens. I’ll have to X-ray the skull for fusion between the plates.’

‘How long has he been dead?’

Webster pursed his lips. ‘That’s going to be a bugger to decide. Old Fred out there said there was a bit of a stink when he stepped on it which would indicate a comparatively recent demise.’ He sucked his teeth thoughtfully for some minutes, then shook his head and examined the floor carefully, using a spatula to loosen some dark material near the door. He sniffed the spatula. ‘Excreta,’ he announced, ‘fairly recent, probably animal. You’d better take a cast of that to see if it’s got Fred’s boot prints. How long’s he been dead?’ He shivered suddenly. ‘This is an ice house and several degrees cooler than it is outside. No obvious maggot infestation which implies the blowflies weren’t attracted. If they had been, there’d be even less of it left. Frankly, George, your guess is as good as mine how long dead flesh would keep in this temperature. There is also the small matter of decomposition being hastened by consumption. We could be talking weeks, we could be talking months. I just don’t know. I’ll need to consult on this one.’

‘Years?’

‘No,’ Webster said firmly. ‘You’d be looking at a skeleton.’

‘Supposing he was frozen when he came in. Would that make a difference?’

The pathologist snorted. ‘You mean frozen as in fish fingers?’ Walsh nodded. ‘That’s really too fantastic, George. You’d need a commercial freezer to freeze a man this size, and how would you transport him here? And why freeze him in the first place?’ Webster frowned. ‘It wouldn’t make much difference as far as your investigation goes either. An ice house only keeps things frozen when it’s full of ice. A frozen man would defrost in here just like a turkey in a larder. No, that’s got to be out of the question.’

Walsh was staring thoughtfully at the severed arm. ‘Has it? Odder things have happened. Perhaps he’s been in cold storage for ten years and was left here recently for someone to find.’

Webster whistled. ‘David Maybury?’

‘It’s a possibility.’ He squatted down and gestured to the distorted and tattered hand. ‘What do you make of this? Looks to me as if the last two fingers are missing.’

Webster joined him. ‘It’s difficult to say,’ he said doubtfully. ‘Something’s had a damn good go at it.’ He glanced about the floor. ‘You’ll have to sweep up very thoroughly, make sure you don’t miss anything. It’s certainly odd. Could be coincidence, I suppose.’

Walsh stood up. ‘I don’t believe in coincidences. Any idea what he died of?’

‘A first guess, George. Massive bleeding from a wound or wounds in his abdomen.’

Walsh glanced at him in surprise. ‘You’re very positive.’

‘A guess, I said. You’ll have to find his clothes to be sure. But look at him. The area from the abdomen down has been completely devoured, except for the lower halves of the legs. Imagine him sitting up, legs out in front of him, with blood pouring out of his belly. It would be seeping over precisely those parts which have been eaten.’

Inspector Walsh felt suddenly faint. ‘Are you saying whatever it was ate him while he was still alive?’

‘Well, don’t have nightmares about it, old chap. If he was alive, he’d have been in a coma and wouldn’t have known anything about it, otherwise he’d have scared the scavengers off. Stands to reason. Of course,’ he continued thoughtfully, ‘if he was defrosting slowly, the blood and water would liquefy to achieve the same result.’

Walsh performed the laborious ritual of lighting his pipe again, billowing clouds of blue smoke from the side of his mouth. Webster’s mention of smell had made him aware of an underlying odour which he hadn’t previously noticed. For some minutes he watched the doctor making a close examination of the head and chest, at one point taking some measurements. ‘What sort of scavengers are we talking about? Foxes, rats?’

‘Difficult to say.’ He peered closely at one of the eye sockets, before indicating the fractured thigh bones. ‘Something with strong jaws, I would guess. One thing’s for certain, two of them have had a fight over him. Look at the way the legs are lying and that arm, pulled apart at the elbow. I’d say there’s been a tug-of-war here.’ He pursed his lips again. ‘Badgers possibly. More likely dogs.’

Walsh thought of the yellow Labradors lying on the warm flagstones, remembered how one of them had nuzzled the palm of his hand. With an abrupt movement, he wiped the hand down his trouser leg. He puffed smoke relentlessly into the atmosphere. ‘I follow your reasoning about why the animals should have gone for the abdomen and thighs, but they seem to have done a pretty good job on the top half as well. Why is that? Is it normal?’

Webster stood up and wiped his forehead with the sleeve of his shirt. ‘God knows, George. About the only thing I’m sure of is that this whole thing is abnormal. I’ll hazard a guess that the poor sod pressed his left hand to his belly to try to stop the blood running out or hold his guts in, whichever you prefer, then did what I just did – wiped the sweat off his face and smeared himself with blood. That would have attracted rats or whatever to his left hand and arm and the upper half of his body.’

‘You said he’d have been in a coma.’ Walsh’s tone was accusing.

‘Maybe he was, maybe he wasn’t. How the hell should I know? Anyway, people move in comas.’

Walsh took his pipe out of his mouth and used its stem to point at the chest. ‘Shall I tell you what that looks like to me?’

‘Go on.’

‘The bones on a breast of lamb after my wife’s skinned the meat off it with a sharp knife.’

Webster looked tired. ‘I know. I’m hoping it’s deceptive. If it’s not – well, you don’t need me to spell out what it means.’

‘The villagers say the women here are witches.’

Webster peeled off his gloves. ‘Let’s get out of here – unless there’s anything else you think I can tell you. My own view is I’ll find out more when I’ve got him on the slab.’

‘Just one thing. Do you reckon he got his abdominal wound here or somewhere else?’

Webster picked up his case and led the way out. ‘Don’t ask me, George. The only thing I’m sure of is that he was alive when he got here. Whether he was already bleeding, I wouldn’t know.’ He paused in the doorway. ‘Unless there’s anything in this freezer theory, of course. Then he’d have been good and dead.’

 

Four

THREE HOURS LATER, after the remains had been painstakingly removed under the direction of Dr Webster, and a laborious investigation of the ice-house interior had revealed little of note beyond a pile of dead bracken in one corner, the door was sealed and Walsh and McLoughlin returned to Streech Grange. Phoebe offered them the library to work in and, with a remarkable lack of curiosity, left them to their deliberations.

A team of policemen remained behind to comb the area in expanding circles round the ice house. Privately, Walsh thought this a wasted exercise – if too much time had elapsed between the body’s arrival and its discovery, the surrounding area would tell them nothing. However, routine work had produced unlikely evidence before, and now various samples from the ice house were awaiting dispatch to the forensic labs. These included brick dust, tufts of fur, some discoloured mud off the floor and what Dr Webster asserted were the splintered remains of a lamb bone which McLoughlin had found amongst the brambles outside the door. Young Constable Williams, still ignorant of exactly what had been in the ice house, was summoned to the library.

He found Walsh and McLoughlin sitting side by side behind a mahogany desk of heroic proportions, the photographic evidence, developed at speed, spread fan-like in front of them. An ancient Anglepoise lamp with a green shade was the only lighting in the rapidly darkening room and, as Williams entered, Walsh bent the light away to soften the brightness of its glare. For the young PC, viewing the pictures upside down and in semi-darkness, it was a tantalising glimpse of the horrors he had so far only imagined. He read his small collection of statements with half an eye on McLoughlin’s face, where black hollows were etched deep by the shadowy light. Jesus, but the bastard looked ill. He wondered if the whispers he’d heard were true.

‘Their statements about the finding of the body are all consistent, sir. Nothing untoward in that direction.’ He looked suddenly smug. ‘But I reckon I’ve got a lead in another direction.’

‘You do, do you?’

‘Yes, sir. I’m betting Mr and Mrs Phillips were inside before they came to work here.’ He consulted his neat and tiny script. ‘Mrs Phillips was very peculiar, wouldn’t answer any of my questions, kept accusing me of browbeating her, which I wasn’t, and saying: “That’s for me to know and you to find out.” When I told her I’d have to take it up with Mrs Maybury, she damn near bit my head off. “Don’t you go worrying madam,” she said, “Fred and me’s kept our noses clean since we’ve been out and that’s all you need to know.”’ He looked up triumphantly.

Walsh made a note on a piece of paper. ‘All right, Constable, we’ll look into it.’

McLoughlin saw the boy’s disappointment and stirred himself. ‘Good work, Williams,’ he murmured. ‘I think we should lay on sandwiches, sir. No one’s had anything to eat since midday.’ He thought of the liquid lunch he’d lost into the brambles. He’d have given his right arm for a beer. ‘There’s a pub at the bottom of the hill. Could Gavin get something made up for the lads?’

Testily, Walsh fished two tenners out of his jacket pocket. ‘Sandwiches,’ he ordered. ‘Nothing too expensive. Leave some with us and take the rest to the ice house. You can stay and help the search down there.’ He glanced behind him out of the window. ‘They’ve got the arc-lights. Tell them to keep going as long as they can. We’ll be down later. And don’t forget my change.’

‘Sir.’ Williams left in a hurry before the Inspector could change his mind.

‘He wouldn’t be so bloody keen if he’d seen what was there,’ remarked Walsh acidly, poking the photographs with a skinny finger. ‘I wonder if he’s right about the Phillips couple. Does the name ring a bell with you?’

‘No.’

‘Nor with me. Let’s run through what we’ve got.’ He took out his pipe and stuffed tobacco absent-mindedly into the bowl. Aloud, he sifted fussily through what facts they had, picking at them like chicken bones.

McLoughlin listened but didn’t hear. His head hurt where a blood vessel, engorged and fat, was threatening to burst. Its roaring deafened him.

He picked a pencil off the desk and balanced it between his fingers. The ends trembled violently and he let it fall with a clatter. He forced himself to concentrate.

‘So where do we start, Andy?’

‘The ice house and who knew it was there. It has to be the key.’ He isolated an exterior shot from the photographs on the desk and held it to the lamplight with shaking fingers. ‘It looks like a hill,’ he muttered. ‘How would a stranger know it was hollow?’

Walsh clamped the pipe between his teeth and lit it. He didn’t answer but took the photograph and studied it intently, smoking for a minute or two in silence.

Unemotionally, McLoughlin gazed on the pictures of the body. ‘Is it Maybury?’

‘Too early to say. Webster’s gone back to check the dental and medical records. The bugger is we can’t compare fingerprints. We weren’t able to lift any from the house at the time of his disappearance. Not that we’d get a match. Both hands out there were in ribbons.’ He tamped the burning tobacco with the end of his thumb. ‘David Maybury had a very distinctive characteristic,’ he continued after a moment. ‘The last two fingers of his left hand were missing. He lost them in a shooting accident.’

McLoughlin felt the first flutterings of awakening interest. ‘So it is him.’

‘Could be.’

‘That body hasn’t been there ten years, sir. Dr Webster was talking in terms of months.’

‘Maybe, maybe. I’ll reserve judgement till I’ve seen the post-mortem report.’

‘What was he like? Mrs Goode called him an out-and-out bastard.’

‘I’d say that’s a fair assessment. You can read up about him. It’s all on file. I had a psychologist go through the evidence we took from the people who knew him. His unofficial verdict, bearing in mind he never met the man, was that Maybury showed marked psychopathic tendencies, particularly when drunk. He had a habit of beating people up, women as well as men.’ Walsh puffed a spurt of smoke from the side of his mouth and eyed his subordinate. ‘He put himself about a bit. We turned up at least three little tarts who kept warm beds for him in London.’

‘Did she know?’ He nodded towards the hall.

Walsh shrugged. ‘Claimed she didn’t.’

‘Did he beat her up?’

‘Undoubtedly, I should think, except she denied it. She had a bruise the size of a football on her face when she reported him missing and we found out she was twice admitted to hospital when he was alive, once with a fractured wrist and once with cracked ribs and a broken collar-bone. She told doctors she was accident-prone.’ He gave a harsh laugh. ‘They didn’t believe her any more than I did. He used her as his personal punch bag whenever he was drunk.’

‘So why didn’t she leave? Or perhaps she enjoyed the attention?’

Walsh considered him thoughtfully for a moment. He started to say something, then thought better of it. ‘Streech Grange has been in her family for years. He lived here on sufferance and used her capital to run a small wine business from the house. Presumably most of the stock’s still here if she hasn’t drunk or sold it. No, she wouldn’t leave. In fact I can’t imagine any circumstances at all, not even fire, which would make her abandon her precious Streech Grange. She’s a very tough lady.’

‘And, I suppose, as he was in clover, he wouldn’t go either.’

‘That’s about the size of it.’

‘So she got rid of him.’

Walsh nodded.

‘But you couldn’t prove it.’

‘No.’

McLoughlin’s bleak face cracked into a semblance of a grin. ‘She must have come up with one hell of a story.’

‘Matter of fact, it was bloody awful. She told us he walked out one night and never returned.’ Walsh wiped a dribble of tar and saliva off the end of his pipe with his sleeve. ‘It was three days before she reported him missing, and she only did that because people had started to ask where he was. In that time she packed up all his clothes and sent them off to some charity whose name she couldn’t remember, she burnt all his photos and went through this house with a vacuum cleaner and a cloth soaked with bleach to remove every last trace of him. In other words she behaved exactly like someone who had just murdered her husband and was trying to get rid of the evidence. We salvaged some hair that she’d missed in a brush, a current passport and photo that she’d overlooked at the back of a desk drawer, and an old blood donor card. And that was it. We turned this house and garden upside down, called in forensic to do a microscopic search and it was a waste of time. We scoured the countryside for him, showed his photo at all the ports and airports in case he’d somehow got through without a passport, alerted Interpol to look for him on the Continent, dredged lakes and rivers, released his photo to the national newspapers. Nothing. He simply vanished into thin air.’

‘So how did she explain the bruise on her face?’

The Inspector chuckled. ‘A door. What else? I tried to help her, suggested she killed her husband in self-defence. But no, he never touched her.’ He shook his head, remembering. ‘Extraordinary woman. She never made it easy for herself. She could have manufactured any number of stories to convince us he’d planned his disappearance – money troubles, for a start. He left her well-nigh penniless. But she did the reverse – she kept stolidly repeating that one night and for no reason he simply walked out and never came back. Only dead men disappear as completely as that.’

‘Clever,’ said McLoughlin reluctantly. ‘She kept it simple, gave you nothing to pick holes in. So why didn’t you charge her? Prosecutions have been brought without bodies before.’

The memories of ten years ago flooded back to try Walsh’s patience. ‘We couldn’t put a case together,’ he snapped. ‘There wasn’t one shred of evidence to dispute her bloody stupid story that he’d upped and left. We needed the body. We dug up half Hampshire looking for the blasted thing.’ He fell silent for a moment, then tapped the photograph of the ice house which lay on the desk in front of him. ‘You were right about this.’

‘In what way?’

‘It is the key. We searched Streech gardens from end to end ten years ago and none of us looked in here. I’d never seen an ice house in my life, never even heard of such a thing. So of course I didn’t know the bloody hill was hollow. How the hell could I? No one told me. I remember standing on it at one point to get my bearings. I even remember telling one of my chaps to delve deep into those brambles. It was like a jungle.’ He wiped the stem of his pipe on his sleeve again before putting it back in his mouth. Dried tar criss-crossed the tweed like black threads. ‘I’ll lay you any money you like, Andy, Maybury’s body was in there all the time.’

There was a knock at the door and Phoebe came in carrying a tray of sandwiches. ‘Constable Williams told me you were hungry, Inspector. I asked Molly to make these up for you.’

‘Why thank you, Mrs Maybury. Come and sit down.’ Phoebe put the tray of sandwiches on the desk, then seated herself in a leather armchair slightly to one side of it. The lamp on the desk shed a pool of light, embracing the three figures in a reluctant intimacy. The smoke from Walsh’s pipe hung above them, floating in the air like curling tendrils of cirrus clouds. For one long moment there was complete silence, before the chiming mechanism of a grandfather clock whirred into action and struck the hour, nine o’clock.

Walsh, as if on cue, leant forward and addressed the woman. ‘Why didn’t you tell us about the ice house ten years ago, Mrs Maybury?’

For a moment he thought she looked surprised, even a little relieved, then the expression vanished. Afterwards, he couldn’t be sure it had been there at all. ‘I don’t understand,’ she said.

Inspector Walsh gestured to McLoughlin to switch on the overhead lights. The muted lamplight disguised, deceived when he wanted to see every nuance of the extraordinarily impassive face. ‘It’s quite simple,’ he murmured, after McLoughlin had flooded the room with brilliant white light, ‘in our search for your husband, we never looked in the ice house. We didn’t know it was there.’ He studied her thoughtfully. ‘And you didn’t tell us.’

‘I don’t remember,’ she said simply. ‘If I didn’t tell you, it was because I had forgotten about it. Did you not find it yourselves?’

‘No.’

She gave a tiny shrug. ‘Does it really matter, Inspector, after all this time?’

He ignored the question. ‘Do you recall when the ice house was last used prior to your husband’s disappearance?’

She leant her head tiredly against the back of her chair, her red hair splayed out around her pale face. Behind her glasses her eyes looked huge. Walsh knew her to be in her mid-thirties, yet she looked younger than his own daughter. He felt McLoughlin stir in the seat beside him as if her fragility had touched him in some way. Damn the woman, he thought with irritation, remembering the emotions she had once stirred in him. That appearance of vulnerability was a thin cloak for the sharp mind beneath.

‘You’ll have to let me think about it,’ she said. ‘At the moment, I honestly can’t remember if we ever used it when David was alive. I have no recollection of it.’ She paused briefly. ‘I do recall my father using it as a darkroom one winter when I was on holiday from school. He didn’t do it for very long.’ She smiled. ‘He said it was a confounded bore slogging all the way down there in the cold.’ She gave a low ripple of laughter as if memories of her father made her happy. ‘He took the films to a professional in Silverborne instead. My mother said it was because he enjoyed blaming someone else when the prints were disappointing, which they often were. He wasn’t a very good photographer.’ She looked steadily at the Inspector. ‘I can’t remember its being used after that, not until we decided to stack the bricks in there. The children might know. I suppose I could ask them.’

Walsh remembered her children, a gangling ten-year-old boy, arriving home from his boarding prep-school in the middle of the investigation, his eyes the same clear blue as his mother’s, and an eight-year-old daughter with a bush of curling dark hair. They had protected her, he recalled, with the same fierce quality that her two friends had shown earlier in the drawingroom. ‘Jonathan and Jane,’ he said. ‘Do they still live at home, Mrs Maybury?’

‘Not really. Jonathan rents a flat in London. He’s a medical student at Guy’s. Jane is studying politics and philosophy at Oxford. They spend the odd weekend and holidays here. That’s all.’

‘They’ve done well. You must be pleased.’ He thought sourly of his own daughter who had got herself pregnant at sixteen and who now, at the age of twenty-five, was divorced with four children, and had nothing to look forward to except life in a tatty council flat. He consulted his notes. ‘You seem to have acquired a profession since I last saw you, Mrs Maybury. Constable Williams tells me you’re a market gardener.’

Phoebe seemed puzzled by his change of direction. ‘Fred’s helped me build up a small Pelargonium nursery.’ She spoke warily. ‘We specialise in the Ivyleaf varieties.’

‘Who buys them?’

‘We have two main customers in this country, one’s a supermarket chain and the other’s a garden-supplies outlet in Devon and Cornwall. We’ve also had a few bulk orders from the States which we’ve air-freighted out.’ She was intensely suspicious of him. ‘Why do you want to know?’

‘No particular reason,’ he assured her. He sucked noisily on his pipe. ‘I expect you get a lot of customers from the village.’

‘None,’ she said shortly. ‘We don’t sell direct to the public and, anyway, they wouldn’t come here if we did.’

‘You’re not very popular in Streech, are you, Mrs Maybury?’

‘So it would seem, Inspector.’

‘You worked as a receptionist in the doctor’s surgery ten years ago. Didn’t you like that job?’

A flicker of amusement lifted the corners of her mouth. ‘I was asked to leave. The patients felt uncomfortable with a murderess.’

‘Did your husband know about the ice house?’ He shot the question at her suddenly, unnerving her.

‘That it was there, you mean?’

He nodded.

‘I’m sure he must have done, though, as I say, I don’t remember him ever going in there.’

Walsh made a note. ‘We’ll follow that up. The children may remember something. Will they be here this weekend, Mrs Maybury?’

She felt cold. ‘I suppose if they don’t come down, you’ll send a policeman to them.’

‘It’s important.’

There was a tremor in her voice. ‘Is it, Inspector? You have our word there was no body in there six years ago. What possible connection can that – that thing have with David’s disappearance?’ She took off her glasses and pressed her fingertips against her eyelids. ‘I don’t want the children harassed. They suffered enough when David went missing. To have the whole ghastly trauma played out a second time and for no obvious reason would be intolerable.’

Walsh smiled indulgently. ‘Routine questions, Mrs Maybury. Hardly very traumatic, surely?’

She put her glasses on again, angered by his response. ‘You were extraordinarily stupid ten years ago, of course. Why I ever assumed the passage of time would make you any brighter, I can’t think. You sent us to hell and you call it “hardly traumatic”. Do you know what hell is? Hell is what a little girl of eight goes through when the police dig up all the flowerbeds and question her mother for hours on end in a closed room. Hell is what is in your young son’s eyes when his father deserts him without a word of explanation and his mother is accused of murder. Hell is seeing your children hurting and not being able to do a damn thing to stop it. You asked me if I was pleased with their achievements.’ She leaned forward, her face twisted. ‘Surely even you could have come up with something a little more imaginative? They have lived through the mysterious disappearance of their father, their mother being branded a murderess, their home being turned into a tourist attraction for the ghoulish and they have survived it relatively unscathed. I think “ecstatic” might be a better description of how I feel about the way they’ve turned out.’

‘We suggested at the time you should send the children away, Mrs Maybury.’ Walsh kept his voice carefully neutral. ‘You chose to keep them here against our advice.’

Phoebe stood up. It was only the second time he had ever seen any violent emotion on that face. ‘My God, I hate you.’ She put her hands on the desk and he saw that the fingers trembled uncontrollably. ‘Where was I to send them? My parents were dead, I had no brothers or sisters, neither Anne nor Diana was in a position to care for them. Was I supposed to entrust them to strangers when their own secure world was turning upside down?’ She thought of her only relation, her father’s unmarried sister, who had fallen out with the family years before. The old lady had read between every line of every newspaper with voracious delight and had penned her own small piece of poison to Phoebe on the subject of the sins of the parents. What her intentions were in writing the letter was anyone’s guess but, in a strange way, her warped predictions for Jonathan and Jane had been a liberation for Phoebe. She had seen clearly then – and for the first time – that the past was dead and buried and that regrets would achieve her nothing.

‘How dare you speak to me of choice! My only choice was to smile while you shat on me and never once let the children know how frightened and alone I felt.’ Her fingers gripped the edge of the desk. ‘I will not go through all that again. I will not allow you to stick your dirty fingers into my children’s lives. You’ve spread your filthy muck here once. You’re bloody well not going to do it again.’ She turned away and walked to the door.

‘I’ve some more questions for you, Mrs Maybury. Please don’t go.’

She looked round briefly as she opened the door. ‘Fuck off, Inspector.’ The door slammed behind her.

McLoughlin had listened to their exchange with rapt attention. ‘Bit of a sea-change from this afternoon. Is she always as volatile?’

‘Quite the reverse. Ten years ago we never rattled her composure once.’ He sucked thoughtfully on his filthy briar.

‘It’s those two dykes she’s shacked up with. They’ve turned her against men.’

Walsh was amused. ‘I should think David Maybury did that years ago. Let’s talk to Mrs Goode. Will you go and find her?’

McLoughlin reached for a sandwich and crammed it into his mouth before standing up. ‘What about the other one? Shall I line her up too?’

The Chief Inspector thought for a moment. ‘No. She’s a dark horse, that one. I’ll let her stew till I’ve checked up on her.’

From where he was standing, McLoughlin could see pink scalp shining through Walsh’s thinning hair. He felt a sudden tenderness for the older man, as if Phoebe’s hostility had exorcised his own and reminded him where his loyalties lay. ‘She’s your most likely suspect, sir. She’d have enjoyed cutting that poor sod’s balls off. The other two would have hated it.’

‘You’re probably right, lad, but I’m betting he was dead when she did it.’

 

Five

STREECH GRANGE WAS a fine old Jacobean mansion built of grey stone, with mullioned, leaded windows and steep slate roofs. Two wings, later additions, extended out at either end of the main body of the house, embracing the sides of the flagged terrace where the women had taken their tea. Stud partitions inside made each of these wings self-contained, with unlocked doors on the ground floor giving access to and from them. Sergeant McLoughlin, after a fruitless search of the drawing-room and the kitchen which were both empty, came to the communicating door with the east wing. He tapped lightly but, getting no response, turned the handle and walked down the corridor in front of him.

A door stood ajar at the end. He could hear a deep voice – unmistakably Anne Cattrell’s – coming from inside the room. He listened.

‘. . . stick to your guns and don’t let the bastards intimidate you. God knows, I’ve had more experience of them than most. Whatever happens, Jane must be kept out of the way. You agree?’ There was a murmur of assent. ‘And, old love, if you can wipe the smirk off that Sergeant’s face, you’ll have my lifelong admiration.’

‘I suppose it’s occurred to you’ – the lighter amused voice was Diana’s – ‘that he might have been born with that smirk. Perhaps it’s a disability he’s had to learn to cope with, like a withered arm. You’d be quite sympathetic if that were the case.’

Anne gave her throaty laugh. ‘The only disabilities that idiot has are both in his trousers.’

‘Namely?’

‘He’s a prick and an arsehole.’

Diana crowed with laughter and McLoughlin felt a dull flush creep up his neck. He trod softly to the communicating door, closed it behind him and knocked again, this time more loudly. When, after some moments, Anne opened the door, he was ready with his most sardonic smile.

‘Yes, Sergeant?’

‘I’m looking for Mrs Goode. Inspector Walsh would like a word with her.’

‘This is my wing. She’s not here.’

The lie was so blatant that he looked at her in astonishment. ‘But – ’ He paused.

‘But what, Sergeant?’

‘Where will I find her?’

‘I’ve no idea. Perhaps the Inspector would like to speak to me instead?’

McLoughlin pushed past her impatiently and walked down the corridor and into the room. There was no one in there. He frowned. The room was a large one with a desk at one end and a sofa and armchairs grouped about a wide fireplace at the other. Pot plants grew in profusion everywhere, cascading like green waterfalls from the mantelpiece, climbing up lattice-work on one of the walls, dappling the light from the lamps on low occasional tables. Floor to ceiling curtains in a herring-bone pattern of pale pinks, greys and blues were drawn along the length of the two outside walls, a royal blue carpet covered the floor, bright abstract paintings laughed merrily from the picture rails. Books in bookcases stood as straight as soldiers wherever there was a space. It was a delightful room, not one that McLoughlin would ever have associated with the tiny muscular woman who had followed him in and was now leaning her cropped, dark head against the door-jamb, waiting.

‘Do you make a habit of forcing your way into people’s private apartments, Sergeant? I have no recollection of inviting you in.’

‘We have Mrs Maybury’s permission to come and go as we please,’ he said dismissively.

She walked over to one of the armchairs and slumped into it, taking a cigarette from a packet on the arm. ‘Of course, in her house,’ she agreed, lighting the cigarette. ‘But this wing is mine. You have no authority to enter here except by permission or with a warrant.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said stiffly. He felt suddenly uncomfortable, towering over her, conspicuously ill-at-ease while she, by contrast, was relaxed. ‘I was not aware you owned this part of the house.’

‘I don’t own it, I rent it, but the legal position with regard to police entry is the same.’ She smiled thinly. ‘As a matter of interest, what possible reason had you for thinking Mrs Goode might be in here?’

He saw one of the curtain edges lift as a gentle breeze caught it, and realised Diana must have left by a French window. He cursed himself silently for allowing this woman to make a mockery of him. ‘I couldn’t find her anywhere else,’ he said brusquely, ‘and Inspector Walsh wants to speak to her. Does she live in the other wing?’

‘She rents the other wing. As to living in it – surely you’ve guessed we all three rather muck in together. It’s what’s known as a ménage à trois, though in our case, rather loosely. The average threesome includes both sexes. We, I’m afraid, are more exclusive, preferring, as we do, our peculiarly – how shall I describe it? – spicy female sex. Three makes for more exciting encounters than two, don’t you think. Or have you never tried?’

His dislike of her was irrational and intense. He jerked his head in the direction of the main part of the house. ‘Have you corrupted her children the way you’ve corrupted her?’

She laughed softly and stood up. ‘You’ll find Mrs Goode in her sitting-room, I expect. I’ll show you out.’ She led the way along her corridor and opened the door. ‘Walk straight through the main body of the house until you reach the west wing. It’s a mirror image of this. You’ll find a similar door to mine leading into it.’ She pointed to a bell on the wall which he hadn’t previously noticed. ‘I should ring that if I were you. At the very least, it would be polite.’ She stood watching him as he walked away, a scornful smile distorting her lips.

Andy McLoughlin had to pass the library door to reach the west wing so he looked in to tell Walsh it would be a few minutes yet before he returned with Diana Goode. To his surprise, she was in there already, sitting in the chair Phoebe had sat in. She and the Inspector turned their heads as the door opened. They were laughing together like people sharing a private joke.

‘There you are, Sergeant. We’ve been waiting for you.’

He took his seat again and viewed Diana with suspicion. ‘How did you know the Inspector wanted to talk to you?’ He pictured her outside the French windows listening to Anne Cattrell making a fool of him.

‘I didn’t, Sergeant. I popped my head in to see if you wanted a cup of coffee.’ She smiled good-humouredly and crossed one elegant leg over the other. ‘What did you want to talk to me about, Inspector?’

There was an appreciative gleam in George Walsh’s eye. ‘How long have you known Mrs Maybury?’ he asked her.

‘Twenty-five years. Since we were twelve. We were at boarding school together. Anne, too.’

‘A long time.’

‘Yes. We’ve known her longer than anyone else, I suppose, longer even than her parents did. They died when she was in her early twenties.’ She came to a halt. ‘But you know all about that from last time,’ she finished awkwardly.

‘Remind us,’ Walsh encouraged.

Diana lowered her eyes to hide their expression. It was all very well for Anne to say don’t let the bastards intimidate you. Knowledge itself was intimidating. With one casual reference, the sort she might make to anyone, she had rekindled the sparks of an old suspicion. No smoke without fire, everyone had said when David disappeared.

‘They died in a car crash, didn’t they?’ Walsh prompted.

She nodded. ‘The brakes failed. They were dead when they were cut out of the wreckage.’ There was a long silence.

‘If I remember correctly,’ said Walsh to McLoughlin when Diana didn’t go on, ‘there were rumours of sabotage. Am I right, Mrs Goode? The village seemed to think Mrs Maybury caused the accident to get her hands prematurely on her inheritance. People have long memories. The story was resurrected at the time of Mr Maybury’s disappearance.’

McLoughlin studied Diana’s bent head. ‘Why should they think that?’ he asked.

‘Because they’re stupid,’ she said fiercely. ‘There was no truth in it. The Coroner’s verdict couldn’t have been clearer – the brakes failed because fluid had leaked from a corroded hose. The car was supposed to have been serviced three weeks before by a man called Casey who owned the garage in the village. He was just a bloody little crook. He took the money and didn’t do the job.’ She frowned. ‘There was talk of a prosecution but it never came to anything. Not enough evidence, apparently. Anyway, it was Casey who started rumours that Phoebe had sabotaged the car to get her hands on Streech Grange. He didn’t want to lose his customers.’

McLoughlin looked her up and down, but there was no appreciative gleam in his eyes. His indifference was complete and, to a woman like Diana who used flirtation to manipulate both sexes, it was daunting. Charm was powerless against a stone wall. ‘There must have been more to it than that,’ he suggested dryly. ‘People aren’t usually so gullible.’

She played with the hem of her jacket. ‘It was David’s fault. Phoebe’s parents had given them a little house in Pimlico as a wedding present which David used as collateral for a loan. He lost the lot on some stock market gamble, couldn’t make the repayments and they were in the throes of foreclosure at the time of the accident, with two small children, no money and nowhere to go.’ She shook her head. ‘God knows how, but that became public knowledge. The locals lapped up what Casey was saying, put two and two together and made five. From the moment Phoebe took over this house, she was damned. David’s disappearance a few years later simply confirmed all their prejudices.’ She sighed. ‘The sickening thing is, they didn’t believe Casey either. He went bankrupt ten months later when all his customers deserted him. He had to sell up and move away, so there was some justice,’ she said spitefully. ‘Not that it did Phoebe any good. They were too damn stupid to see that if he was lying, she was innocent.’

McLoughlin leaned back in his chair, splaying strong fingers against the desk-top. He flicked her an unexpectedly boyish smile. ‘It must have been awful for her.’

She responded guardedly. ‘It was. She was so young and she had to cope with it alone. David either took himself off for weeks at a time or made matters worse by getting into rows with people.’

His eyes softened, as if he understood loneliness and could sympathise with it. ‘And I suppose her friends here deserted her because of him?’

Diana thawed. ‘She never really had any, that was half the trouble. If she had, it would have made all the difference. She went away to boarding school at the age of twelve, married at seventeen and only came back when her parents were dead. She’s never had any friends in Streech.’

McLoughlin drummed his fingers softly on the mahogany. ‘“The worst solitude is to be destitute of sincere friendship.” Francis Bacon said that four hundred years ago.’

She was quite taken aback. Anne used Francis Bacon quotes as a matter of course but they tended to be flippant, throw-away lines, tossed into a conversation for careless effect. McLoughlin’s dark voice lingered over the words, rolling them on his tongue, giving them weight. She was as surprised by their aptness as by the fact that he knew them. She regarded him thoughtfully.

‘But he also said, “The mould of a man’s fortune is in his own hands.”’ His lips twisted cruelly. ‘It’s odd, isn’t it, how Mrs Maybury brings out the worst in people? What’s her secret, I wonder?’ He stirred the photographs of crude death with the end of his pencil, turning them slowly so that Diana could see them. ‘Why didn’t she sell the Grange and move away, once she’d got rid of her husband?’

For all her surface sophistication, Diana was naive. Brutality shocked her because she never saw it coming. ‘She couldn’t,’ she snapped angrily. ‘It’s not Phoebe’s to sell. After a year of marriage to that bastard, she persuaded her father to change his Will and leave the house to her children. We three rent it from them.’

‘Then why haven’t her children sold it? Have they no sympathy for their mother?’ He caught her eye. ‘Or perhaps they don’t like her? It seems to be a common problem for Mrs Maybury.’

Anger threatened to overwhelm Diana. She forced herself to stay calm. ‘The idea, Sergeant, was to prevent David turning the house into ready cash and leaving Phoebe and the children homeless the minute the Gallaghers died. He’d have done it, too, given half a chance. He went through the money she inherited in record time. Colonel Gallagher, Phoebe’s father, left instructions that the house could not be sold or mortgaged except under the most exceptional circumstances before Jane’s twenty-first birthday. The responsibility for deciding whether those circumstances – principally financial distress on the part of Phoebe and her children – ever materialise was left to two trustees. In the view of the trustees, things have never got so bad that the sale of the Grange was the only option.’

‘Was no other distress taken into account?’

‘Of course not,’ she said with heavy sarcasm. ‘How could it have been? Colonel Gallagher wasn’t clairvoyant. He did give discretion to the trustees but they have chosen to stick to the precise terms of the Will. In view of the uncertainty over David, whether he’s dead or alive, it seemed the safest thing to do, even if Phoebe did suffer.’ She glanced at Walsh to draw him back into the discussion. McLoughlin frightened her. ‘The trustees have always put the children first, as they were instructed to do under the terms of the Will.’

McLoughlin’s amusement was genuine. ‘I’m beginning to feel quite sorry for Mrs Maybury. Does she dislike these trustees as much as they seem to dislike her?’

‘I wouldn’t know, Sergeant. I’ve never asked her.’

‘Who are they?’

Chief Inspector Walsh chuckled. The lad had just hanged himself. ‘Miss Anne Cattrell and Mrs Diana Goode. It was some Will, gave you two ladies a deal of responsibility when you were barely in your twenties. We’ve a copy on file,’ he told the Sergeant. ‘Colonel Gallagher must have thought very highly of you both to entrust you with his grandchildren’s future.’

Diana smiled. She must remember to tell Anne how she’d wiped the smirk off McLoughlin’s face. ‘He did,’ she said. ‘Why should that surprise you?’

Walsh pursed his lips. ‘I found it surprising ten years ago, but then I had never met you and Miss Cattrell. You were abroad at that time, I think, Mrs Goode.’ He smiled and dropped one eyelid in what looked remarkably like a wink. ‘I do not find it surprising now.’

She inclined her head. ‘Thank you. My ex-husband is American. I was with him in the States when David vanished. I returned a year later after my divorce.’

She continued to look at Walsh but the hairs on her neck bristled under the weight of McLoughlin’s gaze. She didn’t want to catch his eye again. ‘Did Colonel Gallagher know about the relationship you and Miss Cattrell had with his daughter?’ he asked softly.

‘That we were friends, you mean?’ She kept her eyes on the Inspector.

‘I was thinking more in terms of the bedroom, Mrs Goode, and the effect your fun and games might have on his grandchildren. Or didn’t he know about that?’

Diana stared at her hands. She found people’s contempt so difficult to handle and she wished she had one half of Anne’s indifference to it. ‘Not that it’s any of your business, Sergeant,’ she said at last, ‘but Gerald Gallagher knew everything there was to know about us. He was not a man you had to hide things from.’

Walsh had been busily replenishing his pipe with tobacco. He put it into his mouth and lit it, belching more smoke into the already fuggy atmosphere. ‘After they came back to the house, did either Mrs Maybury or Miss Cattrell suggest that they thought the body in the ice house was David Maybury’s?’

‘No.’

‘Did either of them say who they thought it might be?’

‘Anne said it was probably a tramp who had had a heart attack.’

‘Mrs Maybury?’

Diana thought for a moment. ‘Her only comment was that tramps don’t die of heart attacks in the nude.’

‘What’s your view, Mrs Goode?’

‘I don’t have a view, Inspector, except that it isn’t David. You’ve already had my reasons for that.’

‘Why do you and Miss Cattrell want Jane Maybury kept out of the way?’ McLoughlin asked suddenly.

There was no hesitation in her answer though she glanced at him curiously as she spoke. ‘Jane was anorexic until eighteen months ago. She took a place at Oxford last September with her consultant’s blessing, but he warned her not to put herself under unnecessary pressure. As trustees, we endorse Phoebe’s view that Jane should be protected from this. She’s still painfully thin. Undue anxiety would use up her reserves of energy. Do you consider that unreasonable, Sergeant?’

‘Not at all,’ he answered mildly.

‘I wonder why Mrs Maybury didn’t explain her daughter’s condition to us,’ asked Walsh. ‘Has she a particular reason for keeping quiet about it?’

‘None that I know of, but perhaps experience has taught her to be circumspect where the police are concerned.’

‘How so?’ He was affable.

‘It’s in your nature to go for the weak link. We all know that Jane can tell you nothing about that body, but Phoebe’s probably afraid you’ll question her until she cracks. And only when you’ve broken her will you be satisfied that she knew nothing in the first place.’

‘You’ve a very twisted view of us, Mrs Goode.’

Diana forced a light laugh. ‘Surely not, Inspector. Of the three of us, I’m the only one who retains some confidence in you. It is I, after all, who is giving you information.’ She uncrossed her legs and drew them up on to the chair, covering them entirely with her knitted jacket. Her eyes rested briefly on the photographs. ‘Is it a man’s body? Anne and Phoebe couldn’t tell.’

‘At the moment we think so.’

‘Murdered?’

‘Probably.’

‘Then take my advice and look in this village or the surrounding ones for your victim and your murderer. Phoebe is such an obvious scapegoat for someone else’s crime. Shove the body on to her property and leave her to carry the can, that will have been the thinking behind this.’

Walsh nodded appreciatively as he pencilled a note on his pad. ‘It’s a possibility, Mrs Goode, a definite possibility. You’re interested in psychology?’

He’s quite a poppet after all, thought Diana, unleashing one of the calculatedly charming smiles she reserved for her more biddable customers. ‘I use it all the time in my work,’ she told him, ‘though I don’t suppose a clinician would call what I use psychology.’

He beamed back at her. ‘So what would he call it?’

‘Hidden persuasion, I should think.’ She thought of Lady Keevil and her lime-green curtains. Lies, Anne would call it.

‘Do your clients come here to consult you?’

She shook her head. ‘No. It’s their interiors they want designing, not mine. I go to them.’

‘But you’re an attractive woman, Mrs Goode.’ His admiration for her was blatant. ‘You must have a lot of friends who come visiting, people from the village, people you’ve met over the years.’

She wondered if he guessed how tender this particular nerve was, how deeply she felt the isolation of their lives. At first, bruised and battered from the break-up of her marriage, it had hardly mattered. She had withdrawn inside the walls of Streech Grange to lick her wounds in peace, grateful for the absence of well-meaning friends and their embarrassing commiserations. The shock of discovery, as her scars healed and she tendered for one or two small design contracts, that Phoebe’s exclusion had been imposed and not chosen had been a real one. She had learnt what it was to be a pariah; she had watched Phoebe nurture her hate; she had watched Anne’s tolerance turn to cynical indifference; she had heard her own voice grow brittle. ‘No,’ she corrected him. ‘We have very few visitors, certainly never from the village.’

His eyes were encouraging. ‘Then tell me, assuming you’re right and our victim and murderer are local, how could they know about the ice house and, if they did know about it, how did they find it? I think you’ll agree it’s well disguised.’

‘Anyone could know about it,’ she said dismissively. ‘Fred may have mentioned it in the pub after he stacked the bricks in there. Phoebe’s parents may have told people about it. I don’t see that as a mystery.’

‘All right. Now tell me how you find it if you haven’t been shown where it is? Presumably none of you has noticed an intruder searching the grounds or you’d have mentioned it. And another thing, why was it necessary to put the body in there at all?’

She shrugged. ‘It’s a good hiding place.’

‘How did the murderer know that? How did he or she know the ice house wasn’t in regular use? And what was the point of hiding the body if the idea was to make Phoebe Maybury the scapegoat? You see, Mrs Goode, the picture is rather unclear.’

She thought for a moment. ‘You can’t rule out pure chance. Someone committed a murder, decided to get rid of the body in the Grange grounds in the hopes that, if it was discovered, the police would concentrate their efforts on Phoebe, and stumbled on the ice house by accident while looking for somewhere to put the body.’

‘But the ice house is half a mile from the gates,’ Walsh objected. ‘Do you seriously believe that a murderer staggered past the Lodge House and all the way down your drive and across your lawn in pitch darkness with a body on his shoulders? We can assume, I think, that no one would have been mad enough to do it during the daytime. Why didn’t he simply bury the body in the wood near the gates?’

She looked uncomfortable. ‘Perhaps he came over the wall at the back and approached the ice house from that direction.’

‘Wouldn’t that have meant negotiating his way through Grange Farm, which if I remember correctly adjoins the Grange at the back?’ She nodded reluctantly. ‘Why run that danger? And why, having run it, not bury the body quickly, in the woodland there? Why was it so important to put him in the ice house?’

Diana shivered suddenly. She understood perfectly that he was trying to box her in, force her on to the defensive and admit that knowledge of the ice house and its whereabouts was a crucial element. ‘It seems to me, Inspector,’ she continued coolly, ‘that you have made a number of assumptions which – correct me if I’m wrong – have yet to be substantiated. First, you are assuming the body was taken there. Perhaps whoever it was went under his – or her – own steam and met the murderer there.’

‘Of course we’ve considered that possibility, Mrs Goode. It doesn’t alter our thinking at all. We must still ask: Why the ice house and how did they know where to find it unless they had been there before?’

‘Well, then,’ she said, ‘work on the assumption that people have been there and find out who they are. Off the top of my head, I could make several suggestions. Friends of Colonel Gallagher and his wife, for example.’

‘Who would be in their seventies or eighties by now. Of course it’s possible that an elderly person was responsible but statistically unlikely.’

‘People to whom Phoebe or David pointed it out.’

McLoughlin moved on his chair. ‘Mrs Maybury has already told us she’d forgotten all about it, so much so that she omitted to tell the police it was there when they were searching the grounds for her husband. It seems unlikely, if she had forgotten it to that extent, that she would have remembered to point it out to casual visitors who, from what you yourself have said, don’t come here anyway.’

‘David then.’

‘Now you have it, Mrs Goode,’ said the Inspector. ‘David Maybury may well have shown the ice house to someone, to several people even, but Mrs Maybury has no recollection of it. Indeed, she cannot recall him ever using it though she did agree that he was probably aware of its existence. Frankly, Mrs Goode, at the moment I don’t see how we can proceed in that direction unless Mrs Maybury or the children can remember occasions or names that might give us a lead.’

‘The children,’ said Diana, leaning forward. ‘I should have thought of it before. They will have taken their friends there when they were younger. You know how inquisitive children are, there can’t be an inch of this estate they won’t have explored with their gang.’ She sank back with sudden relief. ‘That’s it, of course. It’ll be one of the village children who grew up with them, hardly a child now, though – someone in his early twenties.’ She noticed the smirk was back on McLoughlin’s face.

Walsh spoke gently. ‘I agree entirely that that is a possibility. Which is why it’s so important for us to question Jonathan and Jane. It can’t be avoided, you know, however much you and her mother may dislike the idea. Jane may be the only one who can lead us to a murderer.’ He reached for another sandwich. ‘The police are not barbarians, Mrs Goode. I can assure you we will be sympathetic and tactful in our dealings with her. I hope you will persuade Mrs Maybury of that.’

Diana uncurled her legs and stood up. Quite unaware of it, she leant on the desk in just the way Phoebe had done, as if close proximity had taught the women to adopt each other’s mannerisms. ‘I can’t promise anything, Inspector. Phoebe has a mind of her own.’

‘She has no choice in the matter,’ he said flatly, ‘except to influence her daughter over whether we question her here or in Oxford. Under the circumstances, I imagine Mrs Maybury would prefer it to be here.’

Diana straightened. ‘Is there anything else you want to ask me?’

‘Only two more things tonight. Tomorrow Sergeant McLoughlin will question you in more detail.’ He looked up at her. ‘How did Mrs Maybury come to employ the Phillipses? Did she advertise or did she apply to an agency?’

Diana’s hands were fluttering. She thrust them into the pockets of her jacket. ‘I believe Anne arranged it,’ she said. ‘You’ll have to ask her.’

‘Thank you. Now, just one more thing. When you helped clear the rubbish from the ice house what exactly was in there and what did you do with it?’

‘It was ages ago,’ she said uncomfortably. ‘I can’t remember. Nothing out of the way, just rubbish.’

Walsh looked at her thoughtfully. ‘Describe the inside of the ice house to me, Mrs Goode.’ He watched her eyes search rapidly amongst the photographs on the desk, but he had turned over all the general shots when she first came in. ‘How big is it? What shape is the doorway? What’s the floor made of?’

‘I can’t remember.’

He smiled a slow, satisfied smile and she was reminded of a stuffed timber wolf she had once seen with bared teeth and staring glass eyes. ‘Thank you,’ he said. She was dismissed.

 

Six

DIANA FOUND PHOEBE watching the ten o’clock news in the television room. The flickering colours from the set provided the only light and they played across Phoebe’s glasses, hiding her eyes and giving her the look of a blind woman. Diana snapped on the table lamp.

‘You’ll get a headache,’ she said, flopping into the seat beside Phoebe, reaching out to stroke the softly tanned forearm.

Phoebe muted the sound of the television with the remote control on her lap, but left the picture running. ‘I’ve got one already,’ she admitted tiredly. She took off her glasses and held a handkerchief to her red-rimmed eyes. ‘Sorry,’ she said.

‘What about?’

‘Blubbing. I thought I’d grown out of it.’

Diana pulled a footstool forward with her toes and settled her feet on it comfortably. ‘A good blub is one of my few remaining pleasures.’

Phoebe smiled. ‘But not very helpful.’ She tucked the handkerchief into her sleeve and replaced her glasses.

‘Have you had anything to eat?’

‘I’m not hungry. Molly left a casserole in the Aga if you are.’

‘Mm, she told me before she left. I’m not hungry either.’

They lapsed into silence.

‘It’s a bloody mess, isn’t it?’ said Phoebe after a while.

‘I’m afraid so.’ Diana pushed her sandals off her feet and let them drop to the floor. ‘The Inspector’s no fool.’ She kept her voice deliberately light.

Phoebe spoke harshly. ‘I hate him. How old would you say he is?’

‘Late fifties.’

‘He hasn’t aged much. He looked like a genial professor ten years ago.’ She considered for a moment. ‘But that’s not his character. He’s anything but genial. He’s dangerous, Di. For God’s sake don’t forget it.’

The other woman nodded. ‘And his incubus, Jock-the-Ripper? What did you make of him?’

Phoebe looked surprised as if the other woman had mentioned an irrelevance. ‘The Sergeant? He didn’t say much. Why do you ask?’

With rhythmical movements, as if she were stroking a cat, Diana smoothed the woollen pile on the front of her jacket. ‘Anne’s spoiling for a fight with him and I’m not sure why.’ She glanced speculatively at Phoebe, who shrugged. ‘She’s making a mistake. She took one look at him in the drawing-room, labelled him “Pig-ignorant” and made up her mind to walk all over him. Damn!’ she said with feeling. ‘Why can’t she learn to compromise occasionally? She’ll have us up to our necks in shit if she’s not careful.’

‘Have they spoken to her yet?’

‘No, they’ve told her they’ll talk to her tomorrow. They seem very relaxed about it all. We have their official permission to go to bed.’

Phoebe closed her eyes and pressed long fingers against her temples. ‘What did they ask you?’

Diana twisted in her chair to look at her friend. ‘From what they implied, exactly what they asked you.’

‘Except that I walked out and refused to answer their questions.’ She opened her eyes and looked ruefully at the other woman. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘It was very silly of me but they made me so angry. Strange, isn’t it? I stood up to hours of interrogation when David went. This time, I lasted five minutes. I found myself hating that man so much, I wanted to claw his eyes out. I could have done it, too.’

Diana reached out again and briefly touched her arm. ‘I don’t think it’s strange – any psychiatrist would tell you that anger is a normal reaction to stress – but it’s probably unwise.’ She pulled a face. ‘Anne will say I’ve bottled out, of course, but my view is we should give them all the co-operation we can. The sooner they sort it out and leave us alone, the better.’

‘They want to question the children.’

‘I know and I don’t think we can prevent it.’

‘I could ask Jane’s psychiatrist to write a report advising against it. Would that stop them?’

‘For a day or two perhaps before they secured an order for a second opinion. That would declare her competent to answer questions. You know yourself, her own psychiatrist pronounced her fit eighteen months ago.’

‘Not for this.’ Phoebe massaged her temples vigorously. ‘I’m frightened, Di. I really think she’s managed to blot it all out. If they make her remember now, God knows what will happen.’

‘Talk to Anne,’ Diana said. ‘She can be more objective than you. You may find that you’re underestimating Jane’s strengths. She is your daughter, after all.’

‘Meaning that I am less able to be objective?’

Go easy, Diana told herself. ‘Meaning that she will have inherited the rigid Gallagher backbone, you oaf.’

‘You’re forgetting her father. However much I might like to pretend otherwise, there is some of David in each of them.’

‘He wasn’t all bad, Pheeb.’

Tears welled uncontrollably in Phoebe’s eyes. She blinked them away angrily. ‘But he was, and you know it as well as I do. You told the Inspector so this afternoon and you were right. He was rotten to the core. In time, if we hadn’t got shot of him, he’d have turned me and the children rotten too. He had a damn good try in all conscience.’ She was silent for a moment. ‘It’s the only thing I hold against my parents. If they hadn’t been so conventional I need never have married him. I could have had Jonny and brought him up on my own.’

‘It was difficult for them.’ But I agree with her, thought Diana. There was no excuse for what her parents did, so why am I defending them? ‘They did what they thought was right.’

‘I was seventeen, for Christ’s sake – ’ Phoebe’s nails bit deep into her palms – ‘younger than Jane is now. I allowed myself to be married off to a bastard twice my age simply because he’d seduced me, and then I just stood by and watched him rewarded for it. Christ,’ she spat, ‘it makes me sick to think of the money he bled from my father.’

Then don’t think about it, Diana wanted to say. You’ve tried to forget them, but there were good times, times at the beginning when Anne and I envied you because you were a woman and we were still gangling schoolgirls. One weekend in particular, it was still vivid in her memory, when David on some mad whim had taken the three of them on a business trip to Paris. She forgot which company he was working for, there had been so many, but the weekend she would never forget. David, so assured, so deft in his choice of where to go and what to do, so unaffected by the foreignness of it all; Phoebe, four months pregnant, lovely face framed in a glorious picture hat, so delighted with herself and with David; and Anne and Diana, out for half-term, in a fantasy of beautiful people in beautiful places. And it was fantasy, of course, for the reality of David Maybury was brutish, ugly – Diana had discovered that for herself – yet once, in Paris, they had known enchantment.

Phoebe stood abruptly, walked over to the television set and switched it off. She spoke with her back to Diana. ‘Do you know what kept me going through all those hours of police questioning last time? How it was I managed to stay so calm in spite of what they were accusing me of?’ She turned round and Diana saw that the tears had stopped as suddenly as they had started. ‘It was relief, sheer bloody relief that I had got rid of the bastard so easily.’

Diana glanced at the curtains. It was cold for a night in August, she thought, and Phoebe must have left the window open. ‘You’re talking rubbish,’ she said firmly. ‘The last ten years have addled your brain. There was nothing easy about getting rid of David. Good God, woman, he’d been an albatross round your neck since the day you married him, still is.’ She pulled her jacket tighter about her. ‘If only they’d found a body somewhere that you could have identified.’

‘If pigs could fly,’ reflected Phoebe as she tidied the room and punched the cushions ferociously into airy plumpness.

Diana picked up an empty coffee cup and walked through into the kitchen. ‘They’re concentrating their efforts on the ice house,’ she announced over her shoulder. She ran the tap and washed the cup. ‘They’re working on the assumption that no one knows where it is.’ She heard the sound of the window being closed in the televison room. ‘If I were you, I’d make a list of anyone you, David or the children have ever shown it to. I’m sure there’ll be a lot of names.’

Phoebe laughed bitterly and drew a scrap of paper from her pocket. ‘I’ve been racking my brains ever since I left the library. Result: Peter and Emma Barnes, and I can’t swear to them.’

‘You mean the awful Dilys’s children?’

‘Yes. They used to roam about the garden during one school holidays, looking for Jonathan and Jane. I’m sure Dilys put them up to it as a way of getting in with us.’

‘But there must have been other children, Pheeb, in the early days.’

‘No, not even schoolfriends. Jon was boarding, remember, and never wanted friends to stay, and Jane never wanted friends full stop. It was my fault. I should have encouraged them but things were just so difficult that I was really glad they were antisocial.’

‘So what happened with Peter and Emma?’

‘It all became rather unpleasant. Emma kept taking her knickers down in front of Jonathan.’ She shook her head. ‘I drew the line when he started taking his down, too. He was nine.’ She sighed. ‘Anyway, like a fool, I told David. So he promptly phoned Dilys and gave her an earful. He called her a vulgar bitch and said “like mother, like daughter”. After that, they never came up here again, but I suppose Jon might have shown them the ice house before they were banned.’

Diana gave a guilty giggle. ‘For once David was probably right. Emma hasn’t improved much with the passing years, let’s face it.’

‘He had no business to speak to anyone like that,’ said Phoebe coldly. ‘God knows, I can’t stand the woman, but Jon was behaving as badly as Emma. David never even told him off for it. He thought it was a great joke, talking about Jon becoming a man. I could have killed him for that. If anyone was vulgar, David was.’

Diana was disturbed by Phoebe’s mood. She had known her to be bitter before but never with such a depth of feeling over something so petty. It was as if the events of the afternoon had caused a breach in her long-held defences, releasing the pent-up emotions of years. She saw the dangers of it only too clearly. She and Anne had thought of Jane as the weak link. Were they wrong? Was it not Phoebe, after all, who was the more vulnerable?

‘You’re tired, old thing,’ she said calmly, putting her arm through the other woman’s. ‘Let’s go to bed and sleep on it.’

Phoebe’s head drooped wearily. ‘I’ve got such a bloody awful headache.’

‘Hardly surprising in the circumstances. Take some aspirin. You’ll be a new woman in the morning.’

They walked arm in arm down the corridor. ‘Did they ask you about Fred and Molly?’ queried Phoebe suddenly.

‘A bit.’

‘Oh, lord.’

‘Don’t worry about it.’ They had reached the stairs. Diana gave her a kiss and released her. ‘Walsh also asked me to describe the ice house,’ she said with reluctance.

‘I told you he was dangerous,’ said Phoebe, walking up the stairs.

Diana’s footsteps were loud in the silence. The phrase ‘quiet as the grave’ came to haunt her as she took off her shoes and tip-toed along the corridor. She eased Anne’s door open and looked round it. Anne was at the desk, working at her word-processor. Diana whistled quietly to attract her attention, then pointed at the ceiling. Together they crept up the stairs to Anne’s bedroom.

Anne followed her in, eyes alight with mischief and laughter. ‘My God, Di, this is so unlike you. You’re always such a stickler for appearances. You do realise the place is still crawling with filth?’

‘Don’t be an idiot. It’s not a game this time, so just shut up and listen.’

She pushed Anne on to the bed and perched, cross-legged, beside her. As she spoke, her hands worked nervously, kneading and pummelling the softness of the duvet.

 

Seven

THE CURTAIN WAS drawn aside and Phoebe Maybury appeared at the window. She stared out for a moment, her hair a fiery red where the lamplight caught it from behind, her eyes huge in her strained white face. Looking at her, George Walsh wondered what emotions had stirred her. Fear? Guilt? Madness even? There was something amiss in those staring eyes. She was so close he could have touched her. He held his breath. She reached out, caught the handle and pulled the window to. The curtain fell back into place and moments later the light was switched off. The murmur of Phoebe’s and Diana’s voices continued in the kitchen, but their words were no longer audible.

Walsh beckoned to McLoughlin, whom he could dimly see, and led the way on soft feet across the terrace and on to the grass. He had been keeping a wary eye on the lighted windows of Anne’s wing where her silhouette, seated at her desk, showed up strongly against the curtains. She had changed position frequently in the last half hour, but had not moved from her seat. Walsh was as sure as he could be that his and McLoughlin’s short spell of eavesdropping had been unobserved.

They set off silently in the direction of the ice house, McLoughlin lighting their way with a torch which he kept shaded with one hand. When Walsh judged them far enough away from the house to be unheard, he stopped and turned to his colleague.

‘What did you make of that, Andy?’

‘I’d say we just heard the clearest admission of guilt we’re ever likely to hear,’ the other threw out.

‘Hm.’ Walsh chewed thoughtfully on his lower lip. ‘I wonder. What was it she said?’

‘She admitted to relief at having got rid of her husband so easily.’ He shrugged. ‘Seems clear enough to me.’

Walsh started to walk again. ‘It wouldn’t stand up in a court of law for a minute,’ he mused. ‘But it’s interesting, definitely interesting.’ He came to an abrupt halt. ‘I think she’s cracking at long last. I got the impression that Mrs Goode certainly thinks so. What’s her part in this? She can’t have been involved in Maybury’s disappearance. We had her thoroughly checked and there’s no doubt she was in America at the time.’

‘Accessory after the fact? She and the Cattrell woman have known Mrs Maybury did it but have kept quiet for the sake of the children.’ He shrugged again. ‘Bar that, she seems straight enough. She doesn’t know much about the ice house, that’s for sure.’

‘Unless she’s bluffing.’ He pondered for a few minutes. ‘Doesn’t it seem odd to you that she can have lived here for eight years and not have seen inside that place?’

The moon came out from behind a cloud and lit their way with a cold grey lustre. McLoughlin switched off the torch. ‘Perhaps she didn’t fancy it,’ he observed with grim humour. ‘Perhaps she knew what was in there.’

This remark brought Walsh up short again. ‘Well, well,’ he murmured, ‘I wonder if that’s it. It makes sense. No one’s going to poke around in a place where they know there’s a dead body. They’re a hard-bitten trio. I can’t see any of them going out of her way to do what’s morally right. They’d harbour a corpse quite happily, provided it was out of sight. What do you think?’

His Sergeant scowled. ‘Women are a closed book to me, sir. I wouldn’t even pretend to understand them.’

Walsh chuckled. ‘Kelly been playing you up again?’

The laugh pierced McLoughlin’s brain, scintillating and sharp as a needle. He turned away and thrust his hands and the torch deep into the pockets of his bomber jacket. Tempt me, he thought, just tempt me. ‘We’ve had a row. Nothing serious.’

Walsh, who knew enough of McLoughlin’s prolonged marital problems to be sympathetic, grunted. ‘Funnily enough, I saw her a couple of days ago with Jack Booth. She was swinging along without a care in the world, never seen her so cheerful. She’s not pregnant, I suppose? She had a real bloom on her.’

The bastard should have hit him. It would have hurt less. ‘That’s probably because she’s gone to live with Jack,’ he said casually. ‘She left last week.’ Now laugh, you sod, laugh, laugh, laugh, and give me an excuse to smash your face in.

Walsh, at a loss, gave McLoughlin’s arm an awkward pat. He understood now why the lad had been so touchy the last few days. To lose your wife was bad enough, to lose her to your closest friend was a belter. My God! Jack Booth, of all people! He’d been best man at their wedding. Well, well. It explained a good deal. Why McLoughlin walked alone these days. Why Jack had suddenly decided to leave the force to work for a security firm in Southampton. ‘I had no idea. I’m sorry.’

‘It’s no big deal, sir. It was all very amicable. No hard feelings on either side.’

He was very cool about it. ‘Perhaps it’s a temporary infatuation,’ Walsh suggested lamely. ‘Perhaps she’ll come back when she’s got over it.’

McLoughlin’s teeth gleamed white inside his grin, but the night hid the black rage in his eyes. ‘Do me a favour, sir, that’s about the last thing I want to hear. God knows we never had much to say to each other before she went. What the hell would we talk about if she came back?’ Jesus, he wanted to hit someone. Did they all know? Were they all laughing? He would kill the first person who laughed.

He quickened his pace. ‘Thank God we didn’t have children. This way, no one loses.’

Walsh, following a few steps behind, pondered the capriciousness of human nature. He could recall a conversation he had had with McLoughlin only months before when the younger man had blamed his marital problems on the fact that he and Kelly had no children. She was bored, he claimed, found her job as a secretary unsatisfying, needed a baby to keep her occupied. Walsh had wisely kept silent, knowing from experience with his daughter that advice on domestic disputes was rarely appreciated, but he had hoped quite fervently that Fate would intervene to prevent some wretched baby being born to keep this ill-matched couple occupied. His own daughter’s first pregnancy at the age of sixteen when she was still at school and unmarried had been a shock to him, but the greater shock was to discover that his wife and daughter had never really liked each other. His daughter blamed two disastrous marriages and four children on her restless seeking after love; while his wife blamed their daughter for her wasted opportunities and lack of self-esteem. George tried to make up for past failings by taking an interest in his grandchildren, but he found it difficult. His interest tended to be critical. He thought them wild and undisciplined and blamed this on his daughter’s leniency and their lack of a father-figure.

Walsh’s recurring nightmare was that with the careless conception of his daughter he had sown seeds of unhappiness which would grow and mature with every succeeding generation.

He caught up with McLoughlin. ‘Life’s a puzzle, Andy. You’ll look back at the end and see where all the pieces fitted, even if you can’t see it now. Things will work out for the best. They always do.’

‘Of course they will, sir. “All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.” You believe that crap, do you?’

Walsh was crushed. ‘Yes, as a matter of fact.’

They were approaching the ice house which stood silhouetted against the arc-lights on the far side. McLoughlin jerked his head at the open doorway and the blackness inside. ‘I can guess where he would have told you to stick your little aphorism. He wouldn’t agree with it.’

‘But his murderer might.’ And so might your wife, Walsh thought acidly, tucked up in bed with a little warm and jovial humanity in the shape of Jack Booth. He raised a hand in greeting to DC Jones as they rounded the building. ‘Found anything?’

Jones pointed to a piece of canvas on the ground. ‘That’s it, sir. We’ve worked a fifty-metre radius round the ice house. I’ve told the lads to leave the woodland along the back wall until tomorrow. The lights throw too many shadows to see properly.’

Walsh squatted on his haunches and used a pencil to sort and turn the collection of empty crisp packets, sweet wrappers, two thread-bare tennis balls and other odds and ends. He isolated three used condoms, a pair of faded bikini underpants and several spent cartridges. ‘We’ll follow these up. I don’t think the rest is going to tell us anything.’ He pushed himself to his feet. ‘Right, I think we’ll call it a day. Jones, I want you to continue searching the grounds tomorrow. Concentrate on the areas of woodland, along the back wall and up by the front gates. Get a team together to help you. Andy, you carry on with the questioning until I join you. Ask Fred Phillips if he’s used a shotgun recently. We’ll check at the station to see whether he or anyone else here is licensed to use one. Sergeant Robinson and the PCs can go door to door in the village.’ He indicated the condoms and the knickers. ‘They seem unlikely objects for anyone in the Grange to have abandoned in the garden though you’ – he looked at McLoughlin – ‘might ask tactfully.’ He turned to Jones. ‘Were they together in the same place?’

‘Scattered about, sir. We marked the positions.’

‘Good man. It looks as if a local Lothario is in the habit of bringing his girlfriends up here. If so, he may be able to give us some information. I’ll have Nick Robinson concentrate on that.’

There was a sour look on McLoughlin’s face. He didn’t relish the prospect of discussing used condoms with the women at the Grange. ‘And you, sir?’ he asked.

‘Me? I’m going to check back through one or two files, particularly our friend Ms Cattrell’s. That’s a tough nut. I don’t fancy it, not one little bit.’ He pursed his lips and tugged at them with a finger and thumb.

‘There’s a Special Branch file on her as long as your arm, dating back to when she was a student. I had access to bits of it when Maybury went missing. It’s how I knew she was at Greenham Common. She’s thrown a few spanners in the works over the years. Do you remember the furore a couple of years ago over creative accounting in the Defence Ministry? Someone added a nought to a three million pound tender and the Ministry paid out ten times what the contract was worth. That was an Anne Cattrell scoop. Heads rolled. She’s a dab hand at getting heads to roll.’ He fingered his jaw thoughtfully. ‘I suggest you remember that, Andy.’

‘You’re coming it a bit strong, aren’t you, sir? If she’s that good what the hell’s she doing stuck out here in the wilds of Hampshire? She should be in London on one of the big nationals.’ Walsh’s tones of amused admiration had needled him.

‘Oh, she’s good,’ said Walsh waspishly, ‘and she did work on a London national before she chucked it all up to come down here and turn freelance. Don’t make the mistake of underestimating her. I’ve seen some of the comments on her file. She’s a gutsy little bitch, not the sort to cross swords with lightly. She has a history of left-wing involvement and she knows everything there is to know about civil rights and police powers. She’s been a press officer with CND, she’s an outspoken feminist, active trade unionist, she’s been linked with the Militant Tendency and at one time she was a member of the British Communist Party – ’

‘Jesus Christ!’ McLoughlin broke in angrily. ‘What the hell’s she doing living in a bloody mansion? Damn it all, sir, they’ve got a couple of servants working for them.’

‘Fascinating, isn’t it? What made her jack in her job and her principles? I suggest you ask her tomorrow. It’s the first damn chance we’ve had to find out.’

The old man reeked of whisky. He sat like a lumpy Guy Fawkes in the doorway of a tobacconist in Southampton, his legs encased in incongruously bright pink trousers, his ancient hat awry on his bald head, a jolly song on his lips. It was nearly midnight. As drunks will, he called out to passers-by between snatches of song; they, with sidelong glances, crossed the road or scurried by with quickened pace.

A policeman approached and stood in front of him, wondering what to do with the silly old fool. ‘You’re a pain in the flaming arse,’ he said amiably.

The tramp glared at him. ‘A blooming bluebottle,’ he said, showing his age, before a gleam of recognition crept into the rheumy eyes. ‘Gawd love me, it’s Sergeant Jordan,’ he cackled. He fished a brown-paper-covered bottle from the recesses of his coat, pulled the cork out with brown teeth and offered it to the bobby. ‘Have a drink, me old mate.’

Sergeant Jordan shook his head. ‘Not tonight, Josephine.’

The old man tipped up the bottle and emptied the contents into his mouth. His hat fell off and rolled across the doorstep. The Sergeant bent down and retrieved it, clapping it firmly on the tramp’s head. ‘Come on, you old fool.’ He put his hand under an unsavoury arm and heaved the filthy object to its feet.

‘You nicking me?’

‘Is that what you want?’

‘Wouldn’t mind, son,’ he whined. ‘I’m tired. Could just do wiv a decent kip.’

‘And I can just do without fumigating the cell after you’ve been in it,’ the policeman muttered, pulling a card out of his pocket and reading the address on it. ‘I’m going to do you a favour, probably the first one you’ve had in years that didn’t involve free booze. Come on, you’re going to sleep in the Hilton tonight.’

George Walsh dropped Sergeants Robinson and McLoughlin at the Lamb and Flag in Winchester Road for a quick pint before closing time, then drove to Silverborne Police Station. His route took him along the High Street past the war memorial and the old cornmarket, now a bank, and between the two rows of darkened shops. Beyond its rapid expansion, Silverborne’s only claim to fame in the last ten years had been its physical proximity to Streech Grange and the mystery surrounding David Maybury’s disappearance. That Streech should again be the centre of police attention was no coincidence in Walsh’s view. There was an inexorability about murder investigations, he believed, with comparatively few remaining unsolved. Certainly lightning like this never struck twice. He was whistling tunelessly as he pushed through the front doors.

Bob Rogers was on duty behind the desk. He looked up as Walsh came in. ‘Evening, sir.’

‘Bob.’

‘The word is you’ve found Maybury.’

Walsh leant an arm on the desk. ‘I’m not taking anything for granted,’ he growled. ‘The bastard’s eluded me for ten years. I can wait another twenty-four hours before I pop the champagne. Any word from Webster?’

Rogers shook his head.

‘Busy tonight?’

‘Not so you’d notice.’

‘Do me a favour then. Get me a list of all persons, men and women, reported missing in our area in, say, the last six months. I’ll be in my office.’

Walsh went upstairs, his feet echoing loudly in the deserted corridor. He liked the place at night, empty, silent, with no ringing telephones and no inane chatter outside his door to intrude on his thoughts. He went into his office and snapped on the light. His wife had bought him a painting two Christmases ago to lend a personal touch to his bleak white walls. It hung on the wall opposite the door and greeted him every time he entered the room. He loathed it. It was a symbol of her taste, not his, a herd of glossy black horses with flowing manes galloping through an autumnal forest. He would have preferred some Van Gogh prints for the same price but his wife had laughed at the suggestion. Darling, she had said, anyone can have a print; surely you’d rather have an original? He glared at the pretty picture and wondered, not for the first time, why he found it so hard to say no to his wife.

He went to his filing cabinet and sorted through the C’s. ‘Cairns’, ‘Callaghan’, ‘Calvert’, ‘Cambridge’, ‘Cattrell’. He gave an exclamation of satisfaction, withdrew the file from the drawer and took it over to his desk. He opened it and settled into his chair, loosening his tie and kicking off his shoes.

The information was set out in the form of a CV, giving details of Anne Cattrell’s history as far as it was known to the Silverborne police at the time of May-bury’s disappearance. Additional, more recent information had been added from time to time on the last page. Walsh fingered his lips thoughtfully as he read. It was disappointing on the whole. He had hoped to find a chink in her armour, some small point of leverage he could use to his advantage. But there was nothing. Unless the fact that the last nine years of her life was contained on one page, while the previous ten years covered several, was worth consideration. Why had she given up a promising career? If she’d stayed in London she’d have been a top name by now. But in nine years her biggest success had been the Defence Ministry scoop and that, published in a monthly magazine, had been hijacked by staff reporters on the nationals. She had got little credit for it. Indeed, Walsh had only known it was her story because the name had registered in connection with Maybury. If she’d got hitched, her sudden drop in profile would have made sense, but – his face creased into a deep scowl. Was it that simple? Had she and those women entered into some sort of perverted marriage the minute they were all free? He found the idea oddly reassuring. If Mrs Maybury had always been a lesbian, it explained so much. He was gathering the file together when Bob Rogers came in.

‘I’ve got those names for you, sir, and a cup of tea.’

‘Good man.’ He took the cup gratefully. ‘How many?’

Sergeant Rogers consulted his list. ‘Five. Two women and three men. The women are pretty obvious runaways – both adolescent or late adolescent, both left home after rows with parents and haven’t been seen since. The youngest was fourteen, Mary Lucinda Phelps, known as Lucy. We mounted quite a search for her, if you remember, but never found anything.’

‘Yes, I do remember. Looked about twenty-five from her photograph.’

‘That’s the one. Parents swore she was a virgin, but it turned out she’d had an abortion at the age of thirteen. Poor kid’s probably on the streets in London by now. The other one’s Suzie Miller, aged eighteen, last seen in early May hitching on the A31 with an older man. We have a witness to that who said she was all over him. Her parents wanted us to treat it as a murder, but there was nothing to suggest anything untoward had happened and we’ve certainly never found a body. Of the three men, one’s a probable suicide, though again we’ve not found a body, one’s semi-senile and gone walkabout, and the other’s bolted. That’s a young Asian lad of twenty-one, with a history of depression, Mohammed Mirahmadi, five previous suicide attempts, all attempted drownings. Left home three months ago. We dragged some nearby quarry pits but without success. The second on the list’s an old man, Keith Chapel, who wandered out of sheltered accommodation in the middle of March, that’s nearly five months, and hasn’t come back. Mind you, it’s odd no one’s spotted him. It says here he was wearing bright pink trousers. And finally, a Daniel Clive Thompson, fifty-two, reported missing by his wife nine, ten weeks ago. Inspector Staley looked into that one quite thoroughly. The man’s business had gone bust and left a lot of people hopping mad, including most of the employees. The Inspector’s view is that he’s done a bunk to London. He was last seen getting off a train on Waterloo station.’ He looked up.

‘Any of them live near Streech?’

‘One of the men, Daniel Thompson. Address: Larkfield, East Deller. That’s the neighbouring village, isn’t it?’

‘What’s the description?’

‘Five feet eleven, grey hair, hazel eyes, well-built, wearing a brown suit, forty-four-inch chest and brown shoes, size eight. Other information: blood group O, appendectomy scar, full set of dentures, tattoos on both forearms. Last sighting, May 25th, at Waterloo. Last seen by his wife on same day when she dropped him at Winchester station. That’s all I’ve got here, but Inspector Staley’s got quite a file on him. Shall I look it out for you?’

‘No,’ Walsh growled angrily. ‘It’s Maybury.’ He watched Bob Rogers walk to the door. ‘Damn and blast it! It’s like leaving your umbrella behind on a fine day. It always rains. Leave me the list. If I hang on to it, it’s bound to be Maybury.’ He waited till the door closed, then stared glumly at the description of Daniel Thompson. His face looked ten years older.

 

Eight

WHEN ANNE ENTERED the library the following morning she found McLoughlin standing by the window, gazing broodingly out over the gravel drive. He turned as she came in and she noticed the black rings of a sleepless night round his eyes and the telltale nicks of a clumsy shave on his neck and chin. He smelled of anger and frustration and yesterday’s beer. He gestured for her to sit down, waited until she had done so, then settled himself in the chair behind the desk. Particles of dust shimmered and danced in the sunlight that shafted between them. They eyed each other with open dislike.

‘I won’t keep you long, Miss Cattrell. Chief Inspector Walsh will be here later and I know he has some questions to ask you. For the moment, I’d like to concentrate on the finding of the body and one or two related matters. Perhaps you could start by running through the events of yesterday afternoon, beginning with the arrival of the gardener.’

Anne did as she was asked, knowing it would be a waste of time to point out that she had already done this the previous afternoon for PC Williams. From time to time she glanced at McLoughlin but looked away again when he refused to drop his gaze. There was a new awareness in his eyes which meant he was better informed about her. And how tiresome that was, she thought. Yesterday, he had despised her; today, he saw her as a challenge. With an inward sigh she began to prepare her defences.

‘You don’t know who he was, how he got there, or when. Had you seen inside the ice house before yesterday?’

‘No.’

‘Then why did you tell us that you and Mrs Goode had cleared the rubbish out of it six years ago?’

Anne had been well prepared for this by Diana. ‘Because it seemed like a good idea at the time.’ She fished a cigarette out of her pocket and lit it. ‘I wanted to save you time and trouble. You should be looking outside the Grange for your victim and your suspects. It’s nothing to do with anyone here.’

He was unimpressed. ‘It’s never a good idea to tell lies to the police. With your experience you should know that.’

‘My experience?’ she queried silkily.

‘If you don’t mind, we’ll dispense with the word games, Miss Cattrell. It’ll save a lot of time.’

‘You’re quite right, of course,’ she agreed mildly. What a prig the man was!

His eyes narrowed. ‘Did you lie because you understood the significance of the ice house and the importance of knowing where it was?’

She was silent for a moment. ‘I certainly understood that you would consider it significant. You have yet to persuade me that it is. I share Mrs Goode’s view that its location is probably known to a number of people, or that chance played a part in the body’s being there.’

‘We have found some used condoms in the area round the ice house,’ McLoughlin said, abruptly changing the subject. ‘Have you any idea who would have left them there?’

Anne grinned. ‘Well, it isn’t me, Sergeant. I don’t use them.’

He showed his irritation. ‘Have you had intercourse there with someone who does, Miss Cattrell?’

‘What, with a man?’ She gave her throaty chuckle. ‘Is that a very sensible question to ask a lesbian?’

He gripped his knees tightly with trembling fingers as a sudden black rage hammered in his head. He felt terrible, his eyes smarting from lack of sleep, his mouth tasting foul. What a loathsome bloody bitch she was, he thought. He took a few shallow breaths and eased his hands on to the desk. They shook with a life of their own. ‘Have you?’ he asked again.

She watched him closely. ‘No, I haven’t,’ she answered calmly. ‘Nor, as far as I know, has anyone else in the house.’ She leaned forward and tapped the end of her cigarette against the side of an ashtray. He moved his hands to his lap.

‘Perhaps you could clear up something that puzzles both Chief Inspector Walsh and myself,’ he continued. ‘We understand you and Mrs Goode have been living here for several years. How is it neither of you has seen inside the ice house?’

‘In the same way that most Londoners have never seen inside the Tower. One doesn’t tend to explore things on one’s own doorstep.’

‘Did you know of its existence?’

‘I suppose so.’ She thought for a moment. ‘I must have done. I don’t remember being surprised at Fred mentioning it.’

‘Did you know where it was?’

‘No.’

‘What did you think the hillock was?’

‘I can only recall walking right round these gardens once and that was when I first came here. I expect I thought the hillock was a hillock.’

McLoughlin didn’t believe her. ‘Don’t you go for walks? With the dogs, with your friends?’

She turned her cigarette in her fingers. ‘Do I look like someone who takes exercise, Sergeant?’

He studied her briefly. ‘As a matter of fact you do. You’re very slim.’

‘I eat very little, drink only neat spirits and smoke like a chimney. It does wonders for the figure but leaves me gasping for breath halfway up the stairs.’

‘Don’t you help with the gardening?’

She raised an eyebrow. ‘I’d be a liability. I couldn’t tell the difference between a rose-bay willow-herb and a Michaelmas daisy. In any case, when would I find the time? I’m a professional woman. I work all day. We leave the gardening arrangements to Phoebe, that’s her province.’

He thought of the pot plants in her room. Was she lying again? But why lie about gardening, for Christ’s sake? His hand wandered to the uneven stubble on his jaw, touching, testing, fingering. Without warning, a shutter of panic snapped shut in his brain, blanking his memory. Had he shaved? Where had he slept? Had he had breakfast? His eyes glazed and he looked straight through Anne into a darkness beyond her, as if she was in a dimension outside his narrow line of vision.

Her voice was remote. ‘Are you all right?’

The shutter opened again and left him with the nausea of relief. ‘Why are you living here, Miss Cattrell?’

‘Probably for exactly the same reason you’re living in your house. It’s as nice a roof over my head as I could find.’

‘That’s hardly an answer. How do you square Streech Grange and its two servants with your conscience? Isn’t it rather too – privileged for your taste?’ His voice grated with derision.

Anne stubbed out her cigarette. ‘I simply can’t answer that question. It’s based on so many false premisses that it’s entirely hypothetical. Nor, frankly, do I see its relevance.’

‘Who suggested you come here? Mrs Maybury?’

‘No one. It was my suggestion.’

‘Why?’

‘Because,’ she repeated patiently, ‘I thought it would be a nice place to live.’

‘That’s crap,’ he said angrily.

She smiled. ‘You’re forgetting the sort of woman I am, Sergeant. I have to take my pleasures where I find them. Phoebe wouldn’t – couldn’t – leave this house to come to London, so I had to come here. It’s very simple really.’

There was a long silence. ‘Pleasures don’t last,’ he said softly. The shutter flickered horribly in his brain. ‘“Pleasures are like poppies spread, You seize the flower, its bloom is shed; Or like the snow falls in the river, A moment white – then melts for ever.”’ He spoke the words to himself. There was another silence. ‘In your case, Miss Cattrell, the price of pleasure would seem to be hypocrisy. That’s a high price to pay. Was Mrs Maybury worth it?’

If he’d turned a knife in her gut, he couldn’t have hurt her more. She took refuge in anger. ‘Let me give you a brief résumé of what led up to this line of questioning. Someone, probably Walsh, told you: she’s a feminist, a lefty, a member of CND, an ex-Commie, and God knows what other rubbish besides. And you, exulting in your superiority because you’re male and heterosexual, leapt at the chance of having a go at me on matters of principle. You’re not interested in truth, McLoughlin. The only issue here is whether you and your inflated ego can make a dent in mine and, Jesus,’ she spat at him, ‘you’re hardly original in that.’

He, too, leant forward so that they were facing each other across the desk. ‘Who are Fred and Molly Phillips?’

She was unprepared, as he had known she would be, and she couldn’t hide the flash of concern in her eyes. She sat back in her chair and reached for another cigarette.

‘They work for Phoebe as housekeeper and gardener.’

‘Mrs Goode told us you arranged their employment here. How did you find them?’

‘I was introduced to them.’

‘Through your work, through your political contacts? Perhaps penal reform is one of your interests?’

Damn him to hell and back, she thought, he wasn’t a complete clod after all. ‘I’m on the committee of a London-based group for the rehabilitation of ex-prisoners. I met them through that.’

She expected triumph and gave him reluctant credit when he didn’t show it. ‘Have they always been called Phillips?’

‘No.’

‘What was their surname?’

‘I think you should ask them that.’

He passed a weary hand across his face. ‘Well, of course, I can, Miss Cattrell, and that will simply drag out the agony for everybody. We will find out one way or the other.’

She looked out of the window, over his shoulder, to where Phoebe was pinching the dead-heads off the roses bordering the drive. She had lost her tension of the previous evening and squatted contentedly in the sun, tongues of flame curling in her shining hair, nimble fingers snapping through the flower stems. Benson sat hotly beside her, Hedges lay panting in the shade of a dwarf rhododendron. The sun’s heat, still far from its peak, shimmered above the warm gravel.

‘Jefferson,’ said Anne.

The Sergeant made the connection immediately. ‘Five years each for the murder of their lodger, Ian Donaghue.’

Anne nodded. ‘Do you know why the sentences were so lenient?’

‘Yes, I do. Donaghue buggered and killed their twelve-year-old son. They found him before the police did and hanged him.’

She nodded.

‘Do you approve of personal vengeance, Miss Cattrell?’

‘I sympathise with it.’

He smiled suddenly and for a brief moment she thought he looked quite human. ‘Then at last we’ve found something we can agree on.’ He tapped his pencil on the desk. ‘How well do the Phillipses get on with Mrs Maybury?’

‘Extremely well.’ Surprisingly, she giggled. ‘Fred treats her like royalty and Molly treats her like muck. It’s a stunning combination.’

‘I expect they’re grateful to her.’

‘The reverse. I’d say Phoebe is more grateful to them.’

‘Why? She’s given them a new home and employment.’

‘You see the Grange as it is now but when I moved in nine years ago, Phoebe had been managing on her own for a year. She was shunned by everybody. No one from the village or even Silverborne would work for her. She had to do the gardening, the housework and house maintenance herself and the place was like a tip.’ A stone lurched sickeningly in her mind as memories struggled to get out. It was the stench of urine, she thought. Everywhere. On the walls, the carpets, the curtains. She would never forget the terrible stench of urine. ‘Fred and Molly’s arrival a couple of months after us changed her life.’

McLoughlin stared about the library. There was a good deal that was original, the carved oak bookcases, moulded plaster cornices, the panelled fireplace, but there were other things that were new, the paintwork, a radiator under the window, secondary glazing in white stove-enamel frames, all certainly under ten years old.

‘Have the local people changed their attitude to Mrs Maybury now?’

She followed his gaze. ‘Not at all. They still won’t do any work for her.’ She flicked ash from her cigarette. ‘She tries from time to time without success. Silverborne’s a dead duck. She’s been as far as Winchester and Southampton with the same result. Streech Grange is notorious, Sergeant, but then you already know that, don’t you?’ She smiled cynically. ‘They all seem to think they’re going to be murdered the minute they set foot in the place. With some justification, it would seem, after yesterday’s little discovery.’

He jerked his head at the window. ‘Then who put in the central heating and the double glazing? Fred?’

‘Phoebe.’

He laughed with genuine amusement. ‘Oh, for God’s sake! Look, I know you’re on some personal crusade to prove that women are the be-all and end-all, but you can’t expect me to swallow that.’ He got up and strode across to the window. ‘Have you any idea how much glass like this weighs?’ He tapped a pane of the double-glazing and drew the unwelcome attention of Phoebe outside. She looked at him curiously for a moment then, seeing him turn away, resumed her gardening. He came back to his chair. ‘She couldn’t begin to lift it, let alone set it professionally in its frame. It would need at least two men, if not three.’

‘Or three women,’ said Anne, unmoved by his outburst. ‘We all lend a hand with the lifting. There are five of us after all, eight on the week-ends when the children come home.’

‘Eight?’ he queried sharply. ‘I thought there were only two children.’

‘Three. There’s Elizabeth, Diana’s daughter, as well.’

McLoughlin ruffled his fingers through his hair, leaving a dark crest pointing towards the ceiling. ‘She never mentioned a daughter,’ he said sourly, wondering what other surprises lay in store.

‘You probably didn’t ask her.’

He ignored this. ‘You said Mrs Maybury also did the central heating. How?’

‘The same way plumbers do it, presumably. I remember she favoured capillary joints so there was a lot of wire wool involved and flux and soldering equipment. There were also numerous lengths of fifteen- and twenty-two-millimetre copper piping lying around. She hired a pipe-bending machine for several weeks with different sized pre-formers to make S-bends and right angles. I got a damned good article on women and DIY out of it.’

He shook his head. ‘Who showed her how to do it? Who connected up the boiler?’

‘She did.’ She was amused by his expression. ‘She got a book from the library. It told her exactly what to do.’

Andy McLoughlin was intensely sceptical. In his experience, a woman who could connect a central-heating boiler simply didn’t exist. His mother, who held unenlightened ideas about a woman’s place in the home, rooted herself firmly in the kitchen, scrubbed and cleaned, washed and cooked and refused adamantly even to learn how to change an electric plug, maintaining it was man’s work. His wife, who by contrast had claimed enlightened ideas, had enrolled as a temporary secretary and called herself a career woman. In reality she had idled her days away, painting her nails, playing with her hair, complaining constantly of boredom but doing nothing about it. She had reserved her energies for when her husband came home, unleashing them in a fury of recriminations over his long hours of work, his neglect of her, his failure to notice her appearance, his inability to be the admiring prop her insecure personality demanded. The irony was that he had been attracted to her in the first place because his mother’s kitchen mentality appalled him and yet, of the two of them, his mother had the brightest intellect. He had come away from both relationships with a sense, not of his own inadequacy, but of theirs. He had looked for equality and found only an irritating dependence.

‘What else has she done?’ he demanded curtly, eyeing the professional finish on the rag-rolled emulsion. ‘The decorating?’

‘No, that’s mostly Diana’s work, though we’ve all lent a hand. Di’s also done the upholstery and curtaining. What else has Phoebe done?’ She thought for a moment. ‘She’s rewired the house, made two extra bathrooms and put up the stud partitions between our wings and the main body. At the moment, she and Fred are working out how best to tackle a complete overhaul of the roof.’ She felt the weight of his scepticism and shrugged. ‘She’s not trying to prove anything, Sergeant, nor am I by telling you. Phoebe’s done what everyone else does and has adapted herself to the situation she finds herself in. She’s a fighter. She’s not the type to throw in her hand when the cards go against her.’

He thought of his own circumstances. Loneliness frightened him.

‘Were you and Mrs Goode worried about Mrs Maybury’s mental condition after twelve months alone in this house? Was that your real reason for moving here?’

Could reality be quantified, Anne wondered, any more than truth? To say yes to such a question from such a man would be a betrayal. His capacity for understanding was confined by his prejudices. ‘No, Sergeant,’ she lied. ‘Diana and I have never had a moment’s concern over Phoebe’s mental condition, as you put it. She’s a good deal more stable than you are, for example.’

His eyes narrowed angrily. ‘You’re a psychiatrist, are you, Miss Cattrell?’

‘Put it this way,’ she said, leaning forward and studying him coolly. ‘I can always recognise a chronic drink problem when I see one.’

The speed with which his hand shot out and gripped her throat was staggering. He pulled her relentlessly towards him across the desk, his fingers biting into her flesh, a tumult of confused emotions governing his actions. The kiss, if the brutal penetration of another’s mouth can be called a kiss, was as unplanned as the assault. He released her abruptly and stared at the red weals on her neck. A cold sweat drenched his back as he realised how vulnerable he had made himself. ‘I don’t know why I did that,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry.’ But he knew that under the same circumstances he would do it again. At last he felt revenged.

She wiped his saliva from her mouth and pulled her shirt collar up round her neck. ‘Did you want to ask me anything else?’ She spoke as if nothing had happened.

He shook his head. ‘Not at the present.’ He watched her stand up. ‘You can report me for that, Miss Cattrell.’

‘Of course.’

‘I don’t know why I did it,’ he said again.

‘I do,’ she said. ‘Because you’re an inadequate little shit.’

 

Nine

SERGEANT NICK ROBINSON looked up and saw with relief that he had only two more houses to do before he reached the pub. Off to his right rose the hill which passed Streech Grange gates; behind him, some miles distant, lay Winchester; ahead of him, the brick wall which surrounded the southern flank of the Grange Estate hugged the road to East Deller. He checked his watch. It was ten minutes to opening time and he could murder a pint. If there was one thing he loathed, it was door-to-door questioning. With a lighter step he walked up the short drive to Clementine Cottage and – he checked his list – Mrs Amy Ledbetter. He rang the bell.

After some minutes and the laborious rattle of an anti-burglar chain, the door opened six inches. A pair of bright eyes examined him. ‘Yes?’

He held out his identification. ‘Police, Mrs Ledbetter.’

The card was taken by an arthritically deformed hand and disappeared inside. ‘Wait there, please,’ said her voice. ‘I intend to phone the Police Station and make sure you are who you say you are.’

‘Very well.’ He leaned against the side of her porch and lit a cigarette. This was the third telephoned check on him in two hours. He wondered if the uniformed constables were having as much trouble as he was.

Three minutes later the door opened wide and Mrs Ledbetter gestured him into the living-room. She was well into her seventies with a leathery skin and a no-nonsense look about her. She returned his warrant and told him to take a seat. ‘There’s an ashtray on the table. Well, Sergeant, what can I do for you?’

No need to beat about the bush with this old bat, he thought. Not like her twee little neighbour who claimed that to hear about murder on the television gave her palpitations. ‘The remains of a murdered man were discovered in the garden of the Grange yesterday afternoon,’ he said baldly. ‘We’re making enquiries to see if anyone in the village knows anything about it.’

‘Oh, no,’ said Amy Ledbetter. ‘Poor Phoebe.’

DS Robinson looked at her with interest. This was a reaction he hadn’t met with before. The mood of the other villagers he had spoken to had been one of vituperative satisfaction.

‘Would it surprise you,’ he asked the old lady, ‘if I said you’re the only person so far who’s expressed any sympathy for Mrs Maybury?’

She wrinkled her lips into a moue of disgust. ‘Of course it wouldn’t. The lack of intelligence in this community is staggering. I’d have moved away years ago if I wasn’t so fond of my garden. I suppose it’s David’s body?’

‘We don’t know yet.’

‘I see.’ She considered him thoughtfully. ‘Well, fire away. What do you want to ask me?’

‘Do you know Mrs Maybury well?’

‘I’ve known her all her life. Gerald Gallagher, Phoebe’s father, and my husband were old friends. I used to see a lot of her when she was younger and my husband was still alive.’

‘And now?’

She frowned. ‘No, I see very little of her now. My fault.’ She raised one of her gnarled hands. ‘Arthritis is the devil. It’s more comfortable to stay at home and potter than go out paying calls and it makes you irritable. I was very short with her last time she came to see me and she hasn’t been back since. That was about twelve months ago. My fault,’ she said again.

Game old bird, he thought, and probably more reliable than the others he’d talked to who had dealt in innuendo and gossip. ‘Do you know anything about her two friends, Mrs Goode and Miss Cattrell?’

‘I’ve met them, knew them quite well at one time. Phoebe used to bring them home from school. Nice girls, interesting, full of character.’

Robinson consulted his notebook. ‘One of the villagers told me – ’ he looked up briefly – ‘and I quote: “Those women are dangerous. They have made several attempts to seduce girls in the village, they even tried to get my daughter to join one of their lesbian orgies.”’ He looked up again. ‘Do you know anything about that?’

She brushed a stray hair from her forehead with the back of her curled hand. ‘Dilys Barnes, I suppose. She won’t thank you for describing her as a villager. She’s a shocking snob, likes to think she’s one of us.’

He was intrigued. ‘How did you know?’

‘That it was Dilys? Because she’s a very silly woman who tells lies. It’s lack of breeding, of course. That type will do anything to avoid being laughed at. They’ve ruined their children with all their snobbish ideas. They sent the boy off to public school, and he’s come back with a chip on his shoulder the size of a mountain. And the daughter, Emma,’ she pulled a wry face. ‘I’m afraid poor little Emma has become very loose. I think it’s her way of getting back at her mother.’

‘I see,’ he said, completely lost.

She chuckled at his expression. ‘She copulates in the woods at Streech Grange,’ she explained. ‘It’s a favourite spot for it.’ She chuckled again as the Sergeant’s mouth dropped open. ‘Emma was seen sneaking out of the grounds late one night and the story her mother put about the next day was that absurd one she’s repeated to you.’ She shook her head. ‘It’s nonsense, of course, and no one really believes it, but they pay lip-service to it because they don’t like Phoebe. And she’s her own worst enemy. She will let them see how much she despises them. That’s always a mistake. Anyway, ask Emma. She’s not a bad girl. If you keep what she says confidential, she’ll tell you the truth I expect.’

He made a note. ‘Thank you, I will. You say the woods are a favourite spot for – er – copulation.’

‘Very much so,’ she said firmly. ‘Reggie and I used them a lot before we were married. They’re particularly nice in the spring. Bluebell woods, you know. Very pretty.’

He boggled at her.

‘Well, well,’ she said calmly, ‘that surprises you, I see, but the young are really very ignorant about sex. People were no more able to control their desire for it in my day than they are now and, thanks to Marie Stopes, we were not unprotected.’ She smiled. ‘When you’re as old as I am, young man, you’ll know that where human nature is concerned, very little changes. Life, for most of us, is the pursuit of pleasure.’

Well, that’s true, he thought, thinking of his pint. He abandoned his inhibitions. ‘We’ve found some used condoms on the Grange Estate which ties in with what you’ve been saying, Mrs Ledbetter. Apart from Emma Barnes, do you know of anyone else who might have been making love up there?’

‘Precise knowledge, no. Guesses, yes. If you promise to be tactful in approaching the people concerned, I’ll give you two more names.’

He nodded. ‘I promise.’

‘Paddy Clarke, the landlord at the pub. He’s married to a harridan who has no idea how highly sexed he is. She thinks he takes the dog for a walk after closing time while she clears up inside, but I’ve seen the dog running loose in the moonlight too often to believe that. I don’t sleep well,’ she added, by way of explanation.

‘And the other?’

‘Eddie Staines, one of the farmhands up at Bywater Farm. A good-looking young devil, out with a different girlfriend every month. I’ve seen him set off up that hill a few times.’ She nodded in the direction of the Grange.

‘That’s very helpful,’ he said.

‘Anything else?’

‘Yes.’ He looked a little sheepish. ‘Have you noticed any strangers about? In the last six months, say?’ This question had been greeted with universal amusement.

Mrs Ledbetter cackled. ‘Twenty-five years ago I might have been able to give you a sensible answer to a question like that. Nowadays, impossible.’ She shrugged. ‘There are always strangers about, especially in the summer. Tourists, people driving through and stopping at the pub for lunch, campers from the site at East Deller. We’ve had a few caravans get stuck in the ditch on the corner, usually French ones, such bad drivers they are. Ask Paddy. He pulls them out with his jeep. No, I can’t help you there, I’m afraid.’

‘Sure?’ he prompted. ‘Someone on foot perhaps, someone you remember from years ago?’

She gave an amused snort. ‘David Maybury, you mean? I certainly haven’t seen him in the last few months. I’d have reported that. The last time I saw David was a week before he disappeared. It was in Winchester in the days when I could still drive and I came across him in Woolworths buying a teddy-bear for Jane. He was a strange character. Vile one day, charming the next, what my husband would have called a cad, the sort of man that women are invariably attracted to.’ She lapsed into silence for a moment. ‘There was the tramp, of course,’ she said.

‘What tramp?’

‘He came through the village some weeks back. Funny old man with a brown trilby hanging off the back of his head. He was singing “Molly Malone”, I remember. Quite beautifully. Ask Paddy. I’m sure he went into the pub.’ Her head sank wearily against the back of her chair. ‘I’m tired. I can’t help you any more. Show yourself out, young man, and don’t forget to shut the gate.’ She closed her eyes.

DS Robinson rose smartly to his feet. ‘Thank you for giving me so much of your time, Mrs Ledbetter.’

She was snoring quietly as he tip-toed out.

Inspector Walsh replaced the telephone receiver and stared thoughtfully into the middle distance. Dr Webster had been irritatingly unhelpful.

‘Can’t prove it is Maybury, can’t prove it isn’t,’ he had said cheerfully along the wire, ‘but my professional guess is it isn’t.’

‘Why, for God’s sake?’

‘Too many discrepancies. I can’t make a match on the hair for a kick-off, though I’m not saying that’s the end of it. I’ve sent samples off to a friend of mine who claims to be an expert in these things but don’t get your hopes up. He warned me that the sample you got off Maybury’s hairbrush may have deteriorated too far. Certainly I couldn’t do anything with it.’

‘What else?’

‘Teeth. Did you notice our corpse was toothless? Not an incisor or molar in sight. Indications that he had dentures, but there were none with him. Looks like something or someone removed them. Now, Maybury on the other hand had all his teeth ten years ago and his records show they were in pretty good shape, only four fillings between them. That’s a very different picture, George. He’d have to have suffered appalling gum disease to necessitate having all his teeth out within ten years.’

Walsh pondered for a moment. ‘Let’s say, for whatever reason, he wanted to lose his old identity. He could have had them taken out on purpose.’

Webster chuckled good-humouredly. ‘Far-fetched though not impossible. But why would Mrs Maybury remove his dentures in that case, assuming she’s our murderer? She, of all people, would know they couldn’t identify him. To be honest, George, I’d say it’s the other way round. Whoever murdered our chap in the ice house removed anything that would show he wasn’t Maybury. He’s had all his toes and fingertips mauled, for example, as if someone wanted to prevent us taking prints. Yet everyone at that house knows you didn’t manage to lift a single workable print ten years ago.’

‘God damn it,’ exploded Walsh. ‘I thought I had the bastard at last. Are you sure, Jim? What about the missing fingers?’

‘Well, they’re certainly missing, but it looks as though they’ve been chopped off with a meat cleaver. I’ve compared them with the records of Maybury’s amputations and they’re nothing like. Maybury had lost the top two joints of both fingers. Our corpse has had his severed at the base of each finger.’

‘Doesn’t prove it’s not Maybury.’

‘I agree, but it does look as if someone who knew only that he’d lost his last two fingers has tried to make us think it’s Maybury. To be honest, George, I’m not even positive at the moment that a human agency is involved. It is quite conceivable, if a little bizarre, that very sharp teeth have mutilated him in the way I’ve described. Take that filleting you pointed out. I’ve taken some close-ups of some furrows on the ribs and it’s damned hard to say what they are. I can’t rule out tooth marks.’

‘Blood group?’

‘Yup, you’ve got a match there all right. Both O positive, just like fifty per cent of the population. And, talking of blood, you must find his clothes. There’s very little in that mud we scraped off the floor.’

‘Great,’ Walsh had growled, ‘so what good news have you got for me?’

‘I’m getting the report typed now, but I’ll give you the gist. Male, white, five feet ten inches – give or take an inch on either side, both femurs have been well and truly smashed so I wouldn’t be too dogmatic on that one – broad build probably running to fat, hair on chest and shoulder blades, indication of tattoo discolouration on right forearm, size eight shoe. No idea of hair colour but hair was probably dark brown before it went grey. Age, over fifty.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake, Jim. Can’t you be more precise?’

‘It’s not a precise science as people get older, George, and a few teeth would have helped. It’s all a question of fusion between the skull plates, but somewhere between fifty and sixty is my guess at the moment. I’ll come back to you when I’ve done some more homework.’

‘All right,’ said Walsh grudgingly. ‘When did he die?’

‘I’ve taken some advice on this one. The consensus is, weighing the heat of the summer against the cool of the ice house – bearing in mind that the ambient temperature in the ice house may have been quite high if the door was open – and balancing that against the acceleration in decomposition after the scavengers had pulled him open and devoured him, plus possible mutilation by human agency but minus severe maggot infestation because the blowflies didn’t lay in numbers, though I’ve sent some larvae off for further examination – ’

‘All right, all right, I didn’t ask for a bloody biology lesson. How long’s he been dead?’

‘Eight to twelve weeks or two to three months, whichever you prefer.’

‘I don’t prefer either of them. They’re too vague. There’s a month’s difference. Which do you favour, eight or twelve?’

‘Probably somewhere in the middle, but don’t quote me.’

‘You’ll be lucky,’ was Walsh’s parting shot. He slammed the phone down crossly, then buzzed his secretary on the intercom. ‘Mary, love, could you get me all the details on a man who was reported missing about two months ago? Name: Daniel Thompson, address: somewhere in East Deller. I think you’ll find Inspector Staley covered it. If he’s free, ask him to give me five minutes, will you?’

‘Sure thing,’ she breezed back.

His eyes strayed to the huge file on David Maybury which he’d resurrected from the archives that morning, and which, refurbished and glossy in its pristine new folder, sat now on the edge of his desk like a promise of spring. ‘You bastard!’ said Chief Inspector Walsh.

 

Ten

SUMMONED BY URGENT telephone calls, Jonathan Maybury and Elizabeth Goode arrived early that afternoon in Jonathan’s battered red Mini. As he drove it in through the gates and past the Lodge, Elizabeth turned to him with a worried frown. ‘You won’t tell anyone, will you?’

‘Tell anyone what?’

‘You know perfectly well. Promise me, Jon.’

He shrugged. ‘OK, but I think you’re mad. Much better to come clean now.’

‘No,’ she said firmly. ‘I know what I’m doing.’

He glanced out of the window at the azaleas and rhododendrons, long past their best, which hedged the length of the driveway. ‘I wonder if you do. From where I stand, there’s very little difference between your paranoia on the subject and your mother’s. You’ll have to find the guts to speak out sooner or later, Lizzie.’

‘Don’t be an idiot,’ she snapped.

He slowed as the wide sweep of gravel in front of the house opened up before them. Two cars were already parked there. ‘Plain-clothes police cars,’ he said with grim humour, drawing the Mini alongside one of them. ‘I hope you’re ready for the thumbscrews.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake grow up,’ she exploded angrily, her worry and her uncertain temper getting the better of her. ‘There are times when I could quite happily murder you, Jon.’

‘We’ve found a pair of shoes, sir.’ DC Jones placed a transparent plastic bag on the ground at Walsh’s feet.

Walsh, who was sitting on a tree stump at the edge of the woodland surrounding the ice house, leaned forward to peer at the bag’s contents. The shoes were good quality brown leather with irregular cloudy patches on the surface where damp had penetrated and then dried. One shoe had a brown lace, the other a black lace. Walsh turned the bag over and looked at the soles.

‘Interesting,’ he said. ‘New heels with metal studs. There’s hardly a mark on them. What size are they?’

‘Eights, sir.’ Jones pointed to the shoe with the brown lace. ‘You can just make it out on that one.’

Walsh nodded. ‘Tell one of your men to go up to the house and find out what size shoes Fred Phillips and Jonathan Maybury wear, then on down to the village to see how Robinson and his chaps are getting on. If they’ve finished, I want them up here.’

‘Righto,’ said Jones irreverently.

Walsh stood up. ‘I’ll be at the ice house with Sergeant McLoughlin.’

DS Robinson returned to the pub as the last customer left.

‘Sorry, mate,’ said the landlord amiably, recognising him from the pint he had bought earlier. ‘Too late. Can’t serve you now.’

Robinson proffered his identification. ‘DS Robinson, Mr Clarke. I’m asking questions around the village. You’re my last port of call.’

Paddy Clarke leaned his elbows on the bar and chuckled. ‘The body at the Grange, I suppose. There’s been talk of nothing else all lunchtime. Sod all I can tell you about it.’

Nick Robinson perched himself on a bar stool and offered Paddy a cigarette before taking one himself. ‘You’d be surprised. People often know more than they think they do.’

He assessed his man rapidly and decided here was another where a straightforward approach would pay. Paddy was a big, bluff man with a ready smile and a shrewd eye. But not a person to cross, Robinson thought. His hands were the size of meat plates.

‘We’re interested in any strangers who may have been through Streech in the last few months, Mr Clarke.’

Paddy guffawed with laughter. ‘Give me a break. I get strangers in here every day, people taking the back roads down to the West Country, stopping off for a quick lunch. Can’t help you there.’

‘Fair enough, but someone mentioned seeing an old tramp a while back, thought he may have come in here. Does that ring a bell?’

Paddy squinted through the smoke from his cigarette. ‘Funny. I wouldn’t have remembered him myself, but now you mention it, we did have one in here, said he’d walked from Winchester. Looked like a bundle of old rags, sat in the corner over there.’ He nodded to a corner by the fireplace. ‘The wife wanted me to turn him away, but I’d no reason to. He had money and he behaved himself, made a couple of pints last through to closing time then shambled off along the Grange wall. You think he’s involved?’

‘Not necessarily. We’re just looking for leads at the moment. When was this? Can you remember?’

The big man thought for a moment. ‘It was pissing down outside. Reckon he came in to dry off. The wife might remember when. I’ll ask her and give you a ring if you like.’

‘She’s not here then?’

‘Gone to the Cash and Carry. She’ll be back soon.’

Nick Robinson checked his notebook. ‘I gather you also do a Good Samaritan act with stranded caravans.’

‘About twice a year when idiots cut the corner. It’s good for business, mind. They usually feel obliged to come in and eat something.’ He nodded towards the window. ‘It’s the Council’s fault. They’ve stuck a bloody great sign for the East Deller campsite at the top of the hill. I’ve complained about it but nobody takes any notice.’

‘Anything strike you about the people you’ve rescued, anything unusual?’

‘There was a one-legged German midget once with a wife like Raquel Welch. That struck me as unusual.’

Nick Robinson smiled as he made a note. ‘Nothing unusual.’

‘You don’t have much to go on, do you?’

‘That depends on you.’ Unconsciously, the policeman lowered his voice. ‘Is anyone else here?’

Paddy’s eyes narrowed slightly. ‘No one. What are you after?’

‘A confidential chat, sir, preferably with no eavesdroppers,’ said Robinson, eyeing the large hands.

Paddy squeezed the glowing end of his cigarette into an ashtray with fingers the size of sausages. ‘Go ahead.’ His tone was not inviting.

‘The body was found in the ice house at the Grange. Do you know the ice house?’

‘I know there is one. I couldn’t lead you to it.’

‘Who told you about it?’

‘Probably the same person who told me there’s a two-hundred-year-old oak in the woods,’ said Paddy with a shrug. ‘Maybe I got it from David Maybury’s booklet. I couldn’t say.’

‘What booklet?’

‘I’ve some copies somewhere. David had this idea of fleecing the tourists, wanted to turn the Grange into another Stourhead. He produced a map of the grounds with a short history of the house and had a hundred or so copies printed. It was a dead duck from the word go. He wouldn’t spend any money on advertising and who the hell’s ever heard of Streech Grange?’ Paddy gave a derogatory snort. ‘Stupid bastard. He was a cheapskate, always expected something for nothing.’

Robinson’s eyes were alight with interest. ‘Do you know who else has this booklet?’

‘We’re talking twelve to thirteen years, Sergeant. As far as I remember, David handed them out to anyone who would pass them on to tourists. Testing the water, he said. Whether anyone else’s still got a copy I wouldn’t know.’

‘Can you look yours out?’

The other man was doubtful. ‘Christ knows where they are, but I’ll have a go. The wife might know.’

‘Thanks. I gather you knew Maybury quite well.’

‘As well as I wanted to.’

‘What sort of man was he? What was his background?’

Paddy stared thoughtfully at the ceiling, dredging up memories. ‘Upper-middle-class, I’d say. He was the son of an Army major who was killed during the war. I don’t think David ever really knew his father but old Colonel Gallagher certainly did. I imagine that’s why he let Phoebe’s marriage go ahead, he thought the son would take after his father.’ His lips twisted into a cynical smile. ‘Fat chance. David was a bastard through and through. The story goes that when his mother died he had the choice of going to her funeral or going to the Derby. He chose the Derby because he had a fortune riding on the favourite.’

‘You didn’t like him?’

Paddy accepted another cigarette. ‘He was a shit – the kind who enjoys putting people down – but he kept me supplied with fairly decent plonk, plus he was one of my best customers. Bought all his beer from me and drank in here most nights.’ He took a deep inhalation of smoke. ‘Nobody regretted his disappearance, except me. He left owing me over a hundred quid. I wouldn’t have minded so much if I hadn’t just settled my wine account with his blasted company.’

‘You say “he left”. You don’t think he was murdered?’

‘I’ve no view on it. Left, murdered, same result. It doubled our trade overnight. With all the media coverage, Streech became quite famous. The ghouls dropped in here for local colour before setting off up the hill to gawp through the Grange gates.’ He saw a look of distaste on the Constable’s face and shrugged. ‘I’m a businessman. The same thing’ll happen this time which is why the wife’s gone to the Cash and Carry. Take my word for it, there’ll be a horde of pressmen in here tonight. I pity those wretched women. They’ll not be able to set foot outside their gates without being hounded.’

‘How well do you know them?’

A guarded expression came over the big man’s face. ‘Well enough.’

‘Do you know anything about their lesbian activities?’

Paddy Clarke chuckled. ‘Who’s been winding you up?’ he asked.

‘Several people have mentioned it,’ said Robinson mildly. ‘There’s no truth in it then?’

‘They’ve got minds like sewers,’ said Paddy with disgust. ‘Three women living together, keeping themselves to themselves, minding their own business and tongues start to wag.’ He gave his derogatory snort again. ‘Two of them have kids. That hardly ties in with lesbianism.’

‘Anne Cattrell hasn’t any and she admitted being a lesbian to a colleague of mine.’

Paddy gave such a shout of laughter that he choked on the smoke from his cigarette. ‘For your information,’ he said with watering eyes, ‘Anne could give Fiona Richmond lessons on sex. ’Struth, man, she’s had more lovers than you’ve had hot dinners. What’s your colleague like? A pompous jerk, I’ll bet. Anne would enjoy taking the piss out of someone like that.’

DS Robinson refused to be drawn on the subject of Andy McLoughlin. ‘How come no one’s mentioned this? Surely the people here would find promiscuity as titillating as lesbianism.’

‘Because she’s discreet, for crying out loud. Do you crap on your doorstep? Anyway, there’s no one in this dump she’d give house-room to.’ He spoke scathingly. ‘She prefers her men with brain as well as brawn.’

‘How do you know all this, Mr Clarke?’

Paddy glared at him. ‘Never mind how I know. Confidential, you said, and confidential it is. I’m setting the record straight. There’s enough bullshit been talked about those women to fill a midden. You’ll be telling me next they run a witches’ coven. That’s another favourite, with poor old Fred cast in the rôle of satanic stallion because of his prison record.’

‘Confidentially, sir,’ said Robinson after a brief hesitation while he contemplated Fred Phillips in the rôle of satanic stallion, ‘I’ve heard from a number of sources that you might know something about several used condoms we’ve found near the ice house at the Grange.’

Clarke, he thought, looked positively murderous. ‘What sources?’

‘A number,’ said Robinson firmly, ‘but I’m not going to divulge them, just as I won’t divulge anything you say to me without your permission. We’re in the dark, sir. We need information.’

‘To hell with information,’ said Paddy aggressively, thrusting his face close to Robinson’s. ‘I’m a publican, not a bloody policeman. You’re the one who’s being paid. You do your own dirty work.’

Ten years on the force had given Nick Robinson a certain wiliness. He tucked his pen into his jacket and got off the barstool. ‘That’s your privilege, sir, but as things stand at the moment the finger’s pointing at Mrs Maybury and her friends. They seem to be the only ones with enough knowledge of the grounds to have hidden the body in the ice house. I’ll guarantee that if we don’t get more information, the three of them will be charged with conspiracy.’

There was a long silence while the publican stared at the policeman. Robinson felt he ought to disapprove of Clarke – if Amy Ledbetter was right, the man was a highly sexed stud – but instead he found himself liking him. Whatever his sexual morality, the man looked you in the eye when he spoke to you.

‘God damn it!’ said Paddy suddenly, slamming a massive fist on to the bar. ‘Sit down, man. I’ll get you a beer, but if you ever breathe a word of this to my wife I’ll string you up by your balls.’

McLoughlin was waiting at the entrance to the ice house when Walsh arrived with the plastic bag containing the shoes. ‘I was told you wanted to see me, sir.’

Walsh removed his jacket and lowered himself on to the sun-baked ground, folding the jacket neatly beside him. ‘Sit down, Andy. I’m after a few quiet words away from the house. This whole damned thing’s getting more complicated by the minute and I don’t want any flapping ears around.’ He studied the Sergeant’s drawn face with sudden irritability. ‘What’s the matter with you?’ he snapped. ‘You look terrible.’

McLoughlin transferred his wallet and loose change from his rear trouser pockets and sat down at a short distance from his boss. ‘Nothing,’ he said, trying without success to find a comfortable position for his legs. He regarded the other man through half-closed lids. He could never decide whether he liked or disliked Walsh. The Inspector, for all his irascibility, could surprise with a kindness. But not today.

He looked across at Walsh and saw only an insignificant, skinny man, playing tough because the system allowed it. He was tempted to make the Inspector a free gift of his assault on Anne Cattrell that morning just to see his reaction. Would he bark? Or would he bite? Bark, McLoughlin thought with amused contempt. Walsh was no more able to face an unpleasantness than the next man. It would be different, of course, when she put in her written complaint. Then, the machinery of justice would roll and action would be as mechanical as it was inevitable. His certainty that this would happen lifted rather than depressed him. The cut would be clean and final, so much cleaner and so much more final than if he administered it himself. He even felt a stirring of anger against the woman that she hadn’t delivered the blow already.

Walsh finished summarising the pathologist’s report. ‘Well?’ he demanded.

The shutter clicked maddeningly in McLoughlin’s brain. He stared at Walsh with vacant eyes for a moment, then shook his head. ‘You say he’s exploring the possibility of mutilation. He’s not sure yet?’

Walsh snarled sarcastically. ‘Won’t commit himself. Claims he hasn’t enough experience of eaten bodies. But it’s a damned odd rat that chews selectively on the only two fingers Maybury had missing.’

‘You’ll have to tie Webster down on that,’ McLoughlin pointed out thoughtfully. ‘It makes a hell of a difference to the case if there was no mutilation.’ Dreadful black-and-white footage of Mussolini’s corpse, strung by its feet from a lamppost after an angry mob had emasculated it, floated into his mind. Violent, angry, hating faces, jeering their revenge. ‘A hell of a difference,’ he said quietly.

‘Why?’

‘It’s less likely to be Maybury.’

‘You’re as bad as Webster,’ growled Walsh. ‘Jumping to bloody conclusions. Let me tell you, Andy, that body is more likely to be Maybury’s than anyone else’s. It is a statistical improbability that this house should be the centre of two unconnected police investigations in ten years, and it is a statistical probability, as I’ve said all along, that his wife murdered him.’

‘Even she couldn’t murder him twice, sir. If she did it ten years ago, then it wasn’t him in the ice house. If it was him in the ice house, then, by God, she’s had a raw deal.’

‘She brought it on herself,’ said Walsh coldly.

‘Maybe, but you’ve let Maybury grow into an obsession with you, and you can’t expect the rest of us to chase red herrings just to prove a point.’

Walsh poked around amongst the folds of his jacket for his pipe. He stuffed it in thoughtful silence. ‘I’ve got this gut feeling, Andy,’ he said at last, holding his lighter flame to the tobacco and puffing. ‘The moment I saw that mess yesterday, I knew. Found you, you bastard, I said to myself.’ He looked up and caught McLoughlin’s eye. ‘OK, OK, lad, I’m not a fool. I’m not about to tie you all down because of my gut feeling, but the fact remains that the blasted body is unidentifiable. And why? Because someone, somewhere, doesn’t want it identified, that’s why. Who took the clothes? Where are the dentures? Why no fingerprints? Oh, it’s been mutilated all right, and it was as likely to be mutilated because it was Maybury as because it wasn’t.’

‘So where do we go from here? Missing persons?’

‘Checked. Our area, anyway. We’ll go further afield if necessary, but on the evidence so far a local connection seems probable. We’ve one likely candidate. A Daniel Thompson from East Deller. The description matches very closely and he went missing around the time Webster thinks our man was killed.’ He nodded to the shoes in the plastic bag. ‘When he disappeared, he was wearing brown lace-ups. Jones found these in the woods adjoining the farm.’

McLoughlin whistled through his teeth. ‘If they’re his, is there anyone who can identify them?’

‘A wife.’ Walsh watched McLoughlin push himself awkwardly to his feet. ‘Not so fast,’ he snapped petulantly. ‘Let’s hear how you got on. You spoke to Miss Cattrell? Learn anything?’

McLoughlin plucked at the grass beside him. ‘The Phillipses’ real name is Jefferson. They were sentenced to five years each for the murder of their lodger Ian Donaghue who buggered and killed their son. He was an only child, twelve years old, born when Mrs Jefferson was forty. Miss Cattrell arranged their employment here.’ He looked up. ‘They’re a possibility, sir. What they’ve done once, they might do again.’

‘Different MO. As far as I remember, they made no secret of Donaghue’s execution, even carried out a mock trial in front of his girlfriend and hanged him when he confessed. She was a star witness in their defence, wasn’t she? It doesn’t square with this murder.’

‘Maybe,’ said McLoughlin, ‘but they’ve proved they’re capable of murdering for revenge and they’re pretty attached to Mrs Maybury. We can’t ignore it.’

‘Have you questioned them yet?’

McLoughlin winced. ‘Up to a point. I had her in after Miss Cattrell. It was like trying to prise information out of an oyster. She’s a cantankerous old biddy.’ He pulled his notebook out of his shirt pocket and riffled through the pages. ‘She let slip one thing which struck me as interesting. I asked her if she was happy here. She said: “The only difference between a fortress and a prison is that in a fortress the doors are locked on the inside.”’

‘What’s interesting about that?’

‘Would you describe your house as a fortress?’

‘She’s senile.’ Walsh waved him on impatiently. ‘Any more?’

‘Diana Goode has a daughter, Elizabeth, who spends odd weekends here. Aged nineteen, has a flat in London which was given her by her father, works as a croupier in one of the big West End casinos. She’s a bit wild, or that’s the impression her mother gave.’

Walsh grunted.

‘Phoebe Maybury has a licensed shotgun,’ McLoughlin continued, reading down his notes. ‘She’s responsible for the spent cartridges. According to Fred, there’s a colony of feral cats in and around Grange Farm which use his kitchen garden as their private bog. Mrs Maybury scares them off with a blast from the shotgun but Fred claims she’s rather lost interest lately, says it’s like trying to hold back the tide.’

‘Anyone know anything about the condoms?’

McLoughlin raised a sardonic eyebrow. ‘No,’ he said with feeling. ‘But they all found it very amusing, at my expense. Fred said he’s raked up quite a few in the past. I questioned him again about finding the body. His story’s the same, no discrepancies.’ He ran through the sequence for Walsh’s benefit.

When Fred arrived at the ice house, the door was completely obscured by the brambles. He returned to his shed to fetch a torch and a scythe, and trampled the brambles so thoroughly because he had intended to take a wheelbarrow in to remove the bricks and had wanted a clear path. The door had been half-open when he finally came to it. There had been no indication that anyone had been that way recently. After he had found the body, he had paused long enough to swing the door to as far as it would go, then he had taken to his heels.

‘Did you press him hard?’ Walsh asked.

‘I went over it with him three or four times, but he’s like his wife. He’s single-minded and he doesn’t volunteer information. That’s the story and he’s sticking to it. If he did flatten the brambles after he found the body, he’s not going to admit to it.’

‘What’s your guess, Andy?’

‘I’m with you, sir. I’d say it’s odds on he found plenty of evidence to show there’d been traffic that way and did his utmost to obliterate it after he found the body.’ McLoughlin glanced at the mass of torn vegetation on either side of the doorway. ‘He did a good job, too. There’s no way of knowing now how many people went in there or when.’

Elizabeth and Jonathan found their mothers and Anne drinking coffee in the drawing-room. Benson and Hedges roused themselves from the carpet to greet the newcomers, sniffing hands, rubbing delightedly against legs, rolling over in an ecstasy of joyful welcome. By contrast the three women were positively diffident. Phoebe held out a hand to her son. Diana patted the seat beside her in tentative invitation. Anne nodded.

Phoebe spoke first. ‘Hello, darling. Journey down all right?’

Jonathan perched on the arm of her chair and bent down to peck her cheek. ‘Fine. Lizzie persuaded her boss to give her the night off and met me at the hospital. I’ve skipped an afternoon’s lectures. We were on the M3 by midday. We haven’t eaten yet,’ he added as an afterthought.

Diana stood up. ‘I’ll get you something.’

‘Not yet,’ said Elizabeth, catching her hand and pulling her on to the sofa again. ‘A few minutes won’t make any difference. Tell us what’s been happening. We had a quick word with Molly in the kitchen but she didn’t exactly lavish us with detail. Do the police know whose body it is? Have they said anything about how it was done?’ She blurted the questions, insensitive to feelings, eyes overbright.

Her questions were greeted with surprised silence. In twenty-four hours, the women had unconsciously adjusted themselves to a climate of suspicion. A question must be thought about; answers carefully considered.

Predictably, it was Anne who broke the silence. ‘It’s really quite frightening, isn’t it? Your judgement becomes impaired.’ She flicked ash into the fireplace. ‘Imagine what it must be like in a police state. You wouldn’t dare trust anybody.’

Diana threw her a grateful glance. ‘You tell them. I’m not trained for this sort of thing. My forte is amusing anecdotes with a punchline. When this is over, I’ll polish it up, exaggerate the more titillating bits and give everyone something to laugh about over dinner.’ She shook her head. ‘But not now. At the moment, it’s not very funny.’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Phoebe surprisingly. ‘I had a good laugh this morning when Molly caught Sergeant McLoughlin in the downstairs cupboard. She chased him out with a broom. The poor man looked absolutely terrified. Apparently he was trying to find the bog.’

Elizabeth giggled nervously. ‘What’s he like?’

‘Confused,’ said Anne dryly, catching the points of her shirt collar and holding them together. ‘Now, Lizzie, what was it you asked? Do they know whose body it is? No. Have they said anything about how it was done? No.’ She leant forward and held up her fingers to tick off points. ‘The situation, as far as we know it, is this.’ Slowly and lucidly she ran through the details of the finding of the body, its removal, the police examination of the ice house and grounds and their subsequent questioning. ‘The next step, I think, will be a search warrant.’ She turned to Phoebe. ‘It would be logical. They’ll want to go through the house with a fine-tooth comb.’

‘I don’t understand why they didn’t do it last night.’

Anne frowned. ‘I’ve been wondering about that but I suspect they’ve been waiting for the results of the post-mortem. They’ll want to know what they’re looking for. In some ways it makes it worse.’

Jonathan turned to his mother. ‘You said on the phone they wanted to question us. What about?’

Phoebe took off her glasses and polished them on her shirt hem. ‘They want the names of anyone you showed the ice house to.’ She looked up at him and he wondered, not for the first time, why she wore glasses. Without them she was beautiful; with them she was ordinary. Once, when he was a child, he had looked through them. It had been a kind of betrayal to discover the lenses were clear glass.

‘What about Jane?’ he said immediately. ‘Are they going to question her too?’

‘Yes.’

‘You mustn’t let them,’ he said urgently.

She took his hand and held it between hers. ‘We don’t think we can stop them, darling, and if we try we may make it worse. She’ll be home tomorrow. Anne says we should trust her.’

Jonathan stood up angrily. ‘You’re mad, Anne. She’ll destroy herself and Mum.’

Anne shrugged. ‘We have very little option, Jonny.’ She used his childhood diminutive deliberately. ‘I suggest you have more faith in your sister and keep your fingers crossed. Frankly, there’s bugger all else we can do.’