Ice House

by Walters, Minette

  He asked her if she would prefer to have her mother present, but she shook her head and said no, it wasn't necessary. Phoebe, with a faintly troubled smile, showed them into her drawing-room and closed the door. They sat by the French windows. The girl was very pale, with a skin like creamy alabaster, but McLoughlin guessed this was her natural colouring. She was wearing a pair of faded jeans and a baggy tee-shirt with BRISTOL CITY emblazoned across the chest. He thought how incongruous it looked on the waif-like body.

  She read his mind. "It's the triumph of hope over experience," she said. "I go in for a lot of that."

  He smiled. "I suppose everyone does, one way or another. If at first you don't succeed and all that."

  She settled herself a little nervously. "What do you want to ask me?"

  "Just a few things but, first, I want you to understand that I have no desire to distress you. If you find my questions upsetting, please say so and we'll stop. If at any point you decide you'd rather talk to a policewoman, again just tell me and I'll arrange it."

  She nodded. "I understand."

  He took her back to the night of the assault and quickly ran through her account of watching television and hearing the sound of the breaking glass. "Your brother was the first to go downstairs, I think you said."

  "Yes. He decided it was a burglar and told Lizzie and me to stay where we were until he called for us."

  "But did you stay?"

  "No. Lizzie insisted on going downstairs after him to get through to Diana's wing. We didn't know at that stage which window had been broken. I said I'd check Mum's rooms and Jon ran through to where you were."

  "What happened then?"

  "Mum and Diana arrived in the hall at the same time as us. Mum followed Jonathan. I checked this room, Diana checked the library and Lizzie the kitchen. When I got back to the hall, Mum was running downstairs with some blankets and a hot-water bottle and yelling at Diana to call an ambulance. I said, someone ought to warn Fred to open the gate and Mum said, of course, she hadn't thought of that." She spread her hands in her lap. "So I took the torch from the hall table and left."

  "Why you? Why didn't Mrs. Goode's daughter go?"

  She shrugged. "It was my idea. Anyway, Lizzie hadn't come back from the kitchen."

  "You weren't frightened? You didn't think of waiting for her to go with you?"

  "No," she said, "it never occurred to me." She was surprised now that it hadn't. She thought about it. "To be honest, there was nothing to be frightened of. Mum just said Anne was ill. I suppose I thought she'd got an appendix or something. I just kept thinking what a nuisance it was that we had to keep the reporters at bay by locking the gates." Her voice rose. "And it's not as if I've never been up the drive before on my own. I've done it hundreds of times, and in the dark. I sometimes go and chat to Molly when Fred goes to the pub."

  "Fine," he said unemotionally. "That's all very logical." He smiled encouragement. "You're a fast runner. I had the devil's own job to catch you and I was going like a train."

  She unknit her fingers from the tangled bottom of her tee-shirt. "I was worried about Anne," she admitted. "I keep telling her she's going to drop dead of cancer any minute. I had this ghastly thought that that was exactly what she'd done. So I put a spurt on."

  "You're fond of her, aren't you?"

  "Anne's good news," she said. "Live and let live, that's her motto. She never interferes or criticises, but I suppose it's easier for her. She doesn't have children to worry about."

  "My mother's a worrier," lied McLoughlin, thinking the only thing Mrs. McLoughlin Snr ever worried about was whether she was going to be late for Bingo.

  Jane put her chin on her hands. "Mum's an absolute darling," she confided naively, "but she still thinks I need protection. Anne keeps telling her to let me fight my own battles." She twisted a lock of the long dark hair round her finger.

  He crossed his legs and pushed himself down into the chair, deliberately relaxed. "Battles?" he teased gently. "What battles do you have?"

  "Silly things," she assured him. "Molehills to you, mountains to me. They'd make you laugh."

  "I shouldn't think so. You're just as likely to laugh at some of my battles."

  "Tell me," she demanded.

  "All right." He looked at her smiling, trusting face and he thought, pray God there is nothing you can tell me or that smile will never come again. "The worst battle I ever had was with my mother when I was about your age," he told her. "I'd sneaked my girlfriend into my bedroom for a night of passion. Ma walked in on us in the middle."

  "Golly," she breathed. "Why didn't you lock the door?"

  "No key."

  "How embarrassing," said Jane with feeling.

  "Yes, it was," he said reminiscently. "My girlfriend hopped it and I had to do battle with the old dragon in the nuddy. She gave me two choices: if I swore on oath I'd never do it again, I'd be allowed to stay; if I refused to swear, then she'd boot me out just as I was."

  "What did you do?"

  "Guess," he invited.

  "You left, starkers."

  He pointed his finger at her with thumb cocked. "Got it in one."

  She was like a wide-eyed child. "But where did you get clothes from? What did you do?"

  He grinned. "I hid in the bushes until all the lights went out, then I took a ladder from the shed and climbed up to my bedroom. The window was open. It was very easy. I crept back into bed, had a decent night's kip and scarpered with a suitcase before she got up in the morning."

  "Do you still see her?"

  "Oh, yes," he said, "I do my duty Sunday lunches. To tell you the truth, I think she regretted it afterwards. The house became very quiet when I left." He was silent for a moment. "Your turn now," he said.

  She giggled. "That's not fair. Your battle was funny, mine are all pathetic. Things like: Will I or will I not eat my mashed potato? Am I working too hard? Shouldn't I go out and enjoy myself?"

  "And do you?"

  "Go out and enjoy myself?" He nodded. "Not much." Her lips twisted cynically and made her look older. "Mum's idea of my enjoying myself is to go out with boys. I don't find that enjoyable." Her eyes narrowed. "I don't like men touching me. Mum hates that."

  "It's not surprising," he said. "She must feel it's her fault."

  "Well, it's not," she said dismissively, "and I wish she'd realise it. The hardest thing in the world is to cope with someone else's guilt."

  "What do you think happened to your father, Jane?"

  The question hung in the air between them like a bad smell. She turned away and looked out of the window and he wondered if he had pushed too fast and lost her. He hoped not, as much for her own sake as for the sake of the enquiry.

  "I'll tell you what happened the night he left," she said at last, speaking to the window. "I remember it very clearly but even my psychiatrist doesn't know all of it. There are bits I kept back, bits that at the time didn't fit the pattern and which I left out." She paused for a moment. "I hadn't thought about it for ages until the other night. Since then I've thought of nothing else, and I think now that what I left out may be important."

  She spoke slowly and clearly as though, having geared herself to tell the story, she saw no point in making it garbled. She told him how, after her mother had left for work, her father had run her bath. That was the signal, she said, that he intended to have sex with her. It was a routine he had established and which she had learned to accept. She described the entire process without a flicker of emotion and McLoughlin guessed she had rehearsed it many times on the psychiatrist's couch. She spoke of her father's approaches and her removal to her bedroom as if she were commentating on a chess game.

  "But he did something different that night," she said, turning her dark gaze on the Sergeant.

  He found his voice. "What was it?"

  "He told me he loved me. He'd never done that before."

  McLoughlin was shocked. So much pain and without a word of love. Yet, after all, what good would ki
nd words have done except make the man a hypocrite? "Why do you think that's important?" he asked dispassionately.

  "Let me finish the story," she suggested, "and perhaps it will strike you, too." Before raping her this time, he had given her a present, carefully wrapped in tissue paper. "He'd never done that before either."

  "What was it?"

  "A little teddy bear. I used to collect them. When he had finished," she said, dismissing the entire incident in four words, "he stroked my hair and said he was sorry. I asked him why because he'd never apologised before, but my mother came in and he never answered." She fell silent and stared at her hands.

  He waited but she didn't go on. "What happened then?" he asked after several minutes.

  She gave a mirthless laugh. "Nothing really. They just looked at each other for what seemed like hours. In the end, he got off the bed and pulled up his trousers." Her voice was brittle. "It was like one of those awful Whitehall farces. I do remember my mother's face. It was frozen, like a statue's. She was very pale except for the bruise on her face where he hit her the day before. She only moved after he'd left the room, then she lay beside me on the bed and hugged me. We stayed like that all night and in the morning he'd gone." She shrugged. "We've never seen him again."

  "Did she say anything to him?" he asked.

  "No. She didn't need to."

  "Why not?"

  "You know that expression 'if looks could kill.' " He nodded. "That was what was frozen on her face." She bit her lip. "What do you think?"

  She caught him off guard. He so nearly said, I think your mother killed him. "About what?" he asked her.

  She showed her disappointment. "It seems so obvious to me. I hoped it would strike you, too." There was a hunger in the thin face, a yearning for something that he didn't understand.

  "Hang on," he said firmly. "Give me a minute to think about it. You know the story backwards. This is the first time I've heard it, remember." He looked at the notes he had been taking and cudgelled his brain to find what she wanted him to find. He had ringed the three things she said her father had never done before: love, present, apology. What was their significance? Why did she think he had done them? Why had he done them? Why would any father tell his daughter he loved her, give her a present and regret his unkindnesses? He looked up and laughed. It was stunningly obvious, after all. "He was planning to leave anyway. He was saying goodbye. That's why he disappeared without trace. He'd arranged it all beforehand." She let out a long sigh. "Yes, I think so."

  He leaned forward excitedly. "But do you know why he would want to disappear?"

  "No, I don't." She sat up straight and pushed the hair back off her face. "All I do know, Sergeant, is that it wasn't my fault." A slow smile curved her lips. "You can't imagine how good that makes me feel."

  "But surely no one's ever suggested it was?" The idea appalled him.

  "When I was eight years old, my mother caught me in bed with my father. My father ran away because of it and my mother was labelled a murderess. At the age of ten, my brother's personality changed. He stopped being a child and took his father's place. He was sworn to secrecy about what had happened and has never mentioned his father again." She played with her fingers. "My mother's guilt has been an irrelevancy beside mine." She raised her eyes. "What happened the other night was a blessing in disguise. For years I've sat with a psychiatrist who has done his level best to intellectualise me out of my feelings of guilt. To a certain extent he succeeded and I pushed it all to the back of my mind. I was the victim, not the culprit. I was manipulated by someone I had been taught to respect. I played the role that was demanded of me because I was too young to understand I had a choice." She paused briefly. "But the other night, perhaps because I was so frightened, it all came back to me with amazing clarity. For the first time, I realised how the pattern had changed the night he left. For the first time, I didn't need to consciously justify my innocence, because I saw that the misery and uncertainty of the last ten years would have happened anyway, whether my mother had found us or not."

  "Have you told her all this?"

  "Not yet. I will after you've gone. I wanted someone else to reach the same conclusion I had."

  "Tell me what happened when you were going to the Lodge," he encouraged. "You said you heard breathing."

  She compressed her lips in thought. "It's a bit of a blur now," she admitted. "I was fine till I came to the beginning of the long straight bit leading to the gates. I slowed down as I came round the bend because I was getting a stitch and I heard what sounded like someone letting out a long breath, the sort of sound you make when you've been holding your breath for hiccups. It seemed to be very close. I was so frightened, I started to run again. Then I heard running footsteps and someone shouting." She looked at him sheepishly. "That was you. You scared me out of my wits. Now I'm not sure I heard breathing at all."

  "OK," he said. "It's not important. And when you said you thought it was your father, that was just because you were frightened? There wasn't anything about the breathing that reminded you of him?"

  "No," she said. "I can't even remember what he looked like. It was so long ago and Mum's burnt all his photos. I couldn't possibly recognise his breathing." She watched him gather his bits and pieces together. "Have I been any good?"

  "Good?" On impulse, he reached forward and gave her hands a quick impersonal squeeze. "I'd say your godma's going to be pretty pleased with you, young lady. Forget about fighting battles, you've just scaled your own Mount Everest. And it's all downhill from now on."

  Phoebe was sitting on a garden seat beside the front door, chin on hands, staring unseeingly at the flowerbeds which bordered the gravel drive. "May I join you?" he asked her.

  She nodded.

  They sat in silence for some minutes. "The dividing line between a fortress and a prison is a fine one," he remarked softly. "And ten years is a long time. Do you not think, Mrs. Maybury, that you've served your sentence?"

  She sat up straight and gestured bitterly in the direction of Streech Village and beyond. "Ask them," she said. "It was they who put up the barbed wire."

  "Was it?"

  Instinctively, defensively, she pressed her glasses up her nose. "Of course. It was never my choice to live like this. But what do you do when people turn against you? Beg them to be kind?" She gave a harsh laugh. "I wouldn't do it."

  He stared at his hands. "It wasn't your fault," he said quietly. "Jane understands that. He was what he was. Nothing you did or didn't do would have made any difference."

  She withdrew into herself and let the silence lengthen. Above them swallows and house martens dipped and darted and a lark swelled its little throat and sang. At long last she took a handkerchief from her sleeve and held it to her eyes. "I don't think I like you very much," she said.

  He looked at her. "We all carry our burden of guilt—it's human nature. Listen to anyone newly bereaved or divorced and you'll hear the same story—if only I had done this…if only I hadn't done that…if only I had been kinder…if only I had realised. Our capacity for self-punishment is enormous. The trick is to know when to stop." He rested a light hand on her shoulder. "You've been punishing yourself for far too long. Can you not see that?"

  She turned her face away from him. "I should have known," she said into her handkerchief. "He was hurting her and I should have known."

  "How could you have known? You're no different from the rest of us," he told her brutally. "Jane loved you, she wanted to protect you. If you blame yourself, you take away everything she tried to do for you."

  There was another long silence while she fought to control her tears. "I'm her mother. There was only me to save her, but when she needed me I never came. I can't bear to think about it." A convulsive tremor rocked the shoulder beneath his hand.

  He didn't stop to consider whether it was a good idea but reacted instinctively, drawing her into the fold of his arm and letting her weep. They were not the first tears she had shed, he guessed, but t
hey were the first she had shed for her lost self, that self who had come into an enchanted world, wide-eyed and sure that she could do anything. The triumph of the human condition was to face one small defeat after another and to survive them relatively intact. The tragedy, as for Phoebe, was to face the worst defeat too soon and never to recover. His heart, still bruised and battered, ached for her.

  He stopped his car on the bend before the straight stretch of drive and got out. Close, Jane had said, which meant in all probability crouched among the rhododendron bushes along the edge of the way. His searches so far had been disappointing. While he had set a team to scour the ice house for a link with Mrs. Thompson, he himself had gone on hands and knees about the terrace for signs of Anne's attacker. If what he believed had happened, there would have been ample evidence of it. But Walsh was right. Bar some dislodged bricks and a cigarette end which was a brand that neither Fred nor Anne smoked, there was nothing. No weapon—he'd examined every brick and stone minutely for bloodstains; no footprints—the lawn was too hard from lack of rain and the flagstones too clean from Molly's regular sweepings; no blood, not even the tiniest speck, to prove that Anne had been hit outside and not inside. He had begun to wonder if he'd put too much faith in Phoebe's certainty—ten years was a long time and people changed—and she admitted herself it had only happened the once. But if she were wrong or if she were lying? He couldn't bring himself to explore either alternative. Not yet.

  He sank to hands and knees again and began to inch along the drive. If there was anything, it wouldn't be easy to find. A team had been over here once without success but then he had told them to concentrate further down, near where he had caught her and where, for one brief moment, he had had the feeling that he and Jane were being watched. He crawled along the left-hand side, knees aching, eyes constantly alert, but after half an hour he had found nothing.