Ice House

by Walters, Minette

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 houseroom 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 Fred cast in the role of satanic stallion because of his prison record."

  "Confidentially, sir," said Robinson after a brief hesitation while he contemplated Fred Phillips in the role 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 sunbaked 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 laceups. 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 a
wkwardly 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 singleminded 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 postmortem. 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, Johnny." 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."

  Chapter 11

  In dribs and drabs, as messages got through, Walsh's men
assembled on the grass in front of the ice house to make their reports. The day was at its hottest and the company shed their jackets gratefully and sat or reclined on the ground like family men at the beach. McLoughlin, lying now on his stomach, frowned into the middle distance like an anxious father with far-off boisterous children. Sergeant Robinson, oblivious to anyone's needs but his own, guzzled happily on a packet of sandwiches and gave the whole the spurious air of an impromptu picnic. In the background the brambles which had once flourished as a magnificent green curtain quietly leached their sap through shattered stems and turned brown in the sun.

  Walsh drew out his handkerchief and wiped the sweat from his forehead. "Let's hear what you've got then," he snarled into the contented silence as if he had already made the suggestion once and been ignored. He was sitting with his legs stretched wide apart and a notebook on the ground between his knees. He turned to a blank page. "Shoes," he said, making a pencilled note then tapping the brown shoes in the bag beside him. "Who went up to the house?"

  "I did, sir," said one of Jones's search party. "Fred Phillips takes size ten and his feet are about as broad as they are long. He took off his boots to show me." He chuckled at the memory. "He's not just built like an elephant, he's got feet to match." He caught Walsh's eye and peered hurriedly at the shoes in the bag. He shook his head. "No chance. I doubt he'd even get those over his big toes. Jonathan Maybury takes size nine." He looked up. "Incidentally, he and Mrs. Goode's daughter have arrived, sir. They're with their mothers now."

  Walsh murmured acknowledgement as he jotted down the sizes. "OK, Robinson, what have you got?"

  The DS crammed the last of his sandwich into his mouth and fished out his pad. "Promotion," he muttered under his breath to the man next to him.

  "What was that?" demanded Walsh coldly.

  "Sorry, sir, wind," replied Robinson, thumbing through his pages. "I hit upon a mine of information, sir. I'll put it all in my report, but the important bits are these: one, these woods are used regularly by local courting couples, have been for years apparently; two, David Maybury had a hundred copies of a booklet printed, showing a map of the grounds and giving a potted history of the place." He glanced at Walsh. "He wanted to attract tourists," he explained, "and gave the booklets away to anyone in the village who would pass them on."