The Ice House Part 17

Walsh sighed. "Why did you tell us they weren't?"

The awful tears swam into her eyes and drizzled over her cheeks. "The devil whispers in my ear." Her fingers fumbled at her shirt b.u.t.tons.

"Give me strength," muttered Walsh.

McLoughlin stood up abruptly and walked to a telephone in one corner. "Pull yourself together, Mrs. Thompson," he ordered sharply. "If you don't, I shall call for an ambulance and have you taken into hospital." She shrank into her chair as if he had slapped her.

Walsh frowned angrily at his Sergeant. "Are these the shoes Mr. Thompson was wearing when he disappeared?" he asked the woman gently.

She examined them closely. "No," she said.

"Are you sure? You told us the other day he had only one pair of brown shoes and he was wearing them the day he went."

Her eyelids fluttered uncontrollably. "Did I?" she gasped. "How very odd. I don't believe I was feeling quite well the last time you came. Daniel loved brown shoes. You can have a look in his cupboard if you like. He had pairs and pairs." She waved her hand at the table. "No, these are the ones Daniel gave to the tramp."

Walsh closed his eyes. His threadbare case against Diana was disintegrating. "What tramp?" he demanded.

"We didn't ask his name," she said. "He came to the door, begging. The shoes were on the stairs to go up and Daniel said he could have them."

"When was this?"

She produced the lace handkerchief and touched it to her eyes. "The day before he left. I remember it very clearly. Daniel was a saint, you know. In spite of all his troubles he had time for a poor beggarman."

Walsh took some papers from his briefcase and flicked through them. "You reported your husband missing on the night of the twenty-fifth of May," he said. "So this tramp came on the twenty-fourth."

"He must have done," she said through her tears.

"What time was it?"

She looked helpless. "Oh, I couldn't remember that. Some time during the day."

"Why was your husband at home during the day, Mrs. Thompson?" asked McLoughlin, looking at his diary. "The twenty-fourth was a Wednesday. Shouldn't he have been at work?"

She pouted. "His beastly business," she said viciously. "All his worries came from that. It wasn't his fault, you know. People expected too much of him. He stopped going in towards the end," she admitted lamely.

"Can you give me a description of this tramp?" asked Walsh.

"Oh, yes," she said. "He'll be able to help you, I'm sure. He was wearing a pair of pink trousers and an old brown hat." She thought back. "He was about sixty, I suppose, not much hair and he smelled terribly. He was very drunk." She paused, a thought suddenly occurring to her. "But you must have found him already," she said, "or why would you have the shoes?"

Walsh picked them up and turned them over. "You said your husband had no connection with the women at Streech Grange, yet one of them, Mrs. Goode, invested money in his business."

A shadow crossed her face. "I didn't know."

"Mrs. Goode claims to have met you," Walsh went on.

There was a long silence. "Possibly. I do recall talking to someone of that name three or four months ago in the street. Daniel told me she was a client." A glint sharpened in her eye. "Bra.s.sy blonde woman, over-dressed, with a come-hither look."

"Yes," said Walsh who found the description inept but entertaining.

"She rang me," said Mrs. Thompson, pursing her lips in disapproval, "wanting to know where Daniel was. I told her to mind her own business." She pinioned the Inspector with a basilisk's glare. "Did she have something to do with Daniel's disappearance?"

"We've been going through your husband's books," said McLoughlin glibly from his corner. "We noted the discrepancy. It puzzled us."

"I didn't know she was one of them." She held her handkerchief to dry eyes. "Now you tell me she invested money in his company?" The floodgates opened and this time her tears were of real distress. "How could he?" she sobbed. "How could he? Such terrible women."

Walsh looked at McLoughlin and stood up. "We'll be off now, Mrs. Thompson. Thank you for your help."

She tried without success to stem the flood.

"Have you thought about going away at all?" the younger man asked.

She gave a long shuddering sigh. "The Vicar's arranged a holiday," she said. "I'm going to a hotel by the seaside at the end of the week, just for a few days' rest. It won't do any good though, not without Daniel."

McLoughlin looked very thoughtful as he closed the door behind him.

Chief Inspector Walsh ground his teeth with fury as he jerked the clutch on his brand new Rover and promptly stalled. "What are you looking so d.a.m.ned cheerful about? We've just lost our only promising lead."

McLoughlin waited until the car was moving. "Who was in charge of the case at the beginning?"

"If you mean Thompson's disappearance, it was Staley."

"Did he do a thorough job? Did he check Mrs. Thompson?"

"Checked everything. I've been through the file."

"Does he know about our body?"

"He does."

"And it hasn't made him suspicious?"

"No. Her alibi's too good. She took Mr. T. to Winchester station where he boarded a train to London. Various people remember seeing him during the journey and one remembers seeing him on the platform at Waterloo. After dropping him off, Mrs. T. went straight to East Deller Church were she took part in a twenty-four-hour fast with other members of the congregation. The saintly Daniel was due to join her there at six o'clock on his return from London where, incidentally, he was supposed to be raising a loan to keep the business afloat. He never came back. At ten o'clock, the Vicar's wife took Mrs. T. home to Larkfield and waited with her while she telephoned office, friends and acquaintances. At nearly midnight, Mrs. Vicar rang the police and stayed with Mrs. T. who was by then quite hysterical, through the night and most of the following day. Daniel has not been since he got off the train in London."

"But her alibi's only good for the twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth. Supposing he came back later?"

Walsh manoeuvred his way into the traffic on a roundabout. "Why would he, if he'd gone to the lengths of doing the bunk in the first place? Staley reckons he planned to kill two birds with one stone-get shot of the awful wife and duck out of the bankruptcy. He hopped into the bog at Waterloo, reversed his mac, stuck on a false moustache and went to ground with whatever he'd managed to stash away from the business. For what it's worth, Thompson's number two at the radiator firm said he wasn't in the least surprised Thompson legged it, he only wondered why it had taken him so long. According to him, Thompson had no b.a.l.l.s and less bottle and from the moment things began to get dicey, he looked like running."

McLoughlin picked at a fingernail. "You must have thought he had a good reason for coming back, sir. Otherwise, how could Mrs. Goode have killed him?"

"Yes, well, Mrs. Goode's a d.a.m.n sight more attractive than that silly b.i.t.c.h back there. I felt there was a good chance he staged his disappearance in order to throw in his lot with a blonde bombsh.e.l.l."

"But when he turned up on her doorstep, Mrs. Goode, who was down by ten thousand, found she didn't fancy him as much as she thought she did and stuck a knife into him?"

"Something like that."

McLoughlin laughed out loud. "Sorry, sir." He thought for a moment. "The Thompsons don't have any children, do they?"

"No."

"OK, let's say you've been married to a man for thirty-odd years. He's been the be-all and end-all of your existence and he suddenly deserts you." He paused for further thought.

"Go on."

"I'll need to think it through properly but something along these lines. Daniel does a runner because the business has gone down the chute and he can't cope. He hangs around in London for a bit but finds that living off his wits there is worse than facing the music at home, so he comes back. Meanwhile, Mrs. Thompson has discovered, because Mrs. Goode telephones and tells her that Daniel was supposed to have gone to Streech Grange, that her husband has been seeing another woman, worse, a woman steeped in sin. She's very near the edge already and this sends her right over. Bear in mind she's a religious fanatic, her marriage has been a sham and she's had several days to sit and brood. What's she going to do when Daniel comes home unexpectedly?"

"Yes," agreed Walsh thoughtfully. "That works quite nicely. But how did she get the body to the ice house?"

"I don't know. Perhaps she persuaded him to go there when he was alive. But it's entirely logical for her to leave the body somewhere in Streech Grange, the site of Daniel's sin, and it's logical for her to have stripped him and chopped him about a bit so that we'd think it was David Maybury. She'd see that as retribution against the evil women-she probably thought they were all in it-who'd ruined her life. Do we have a follow-up on that report of someone crying near the Grange Farm cottages?"

"We do, but it's not very helpful. Both sets of occupants agreed it was after midnight because they were in bed, and they both agreed it was during the spell of hot weather that spanned the last week in May and the first two weeks in June. One lot said it was May, the other lot said it was the second week in June. Yer pays yer money and takes yer choice."

"It's all too nebulous. We need a fix on some dates. Did Staley search the Thompsons' house?"

"Twice, once on the night of his disappearance and again about two weeks later."

McLoughlin frowned. "Why the second time?"

"Well, it's interesting that. He had an anonymous tip-off that Mrs. T. had lost her marbles, butchered Daniel and hidden him under the floorboards. He turned up out of the blue one day, a couple of weeks into June, and went through the house with a magnifying gla.s.s. He found nothing except one s.e.x-starved little woman who kept following him from room to room and making advances. He's convinced it was Mrs. Thompson who made the tip-off."

"Why?"

Walsh chuckled. "He reckons she fancied him."

"Perhaps her conscience was troubling her."

Walsh pulled into the kerb outside the Police Station. "It's all very well, Andy, but where do those blasted shoes fit in? If Daniel was wearing them, why did she leave them in the grounds? And if he wasn't, how did they get there?"

"Yes," mused McLoughlin. "I've been wondering about that. I can't help feeling she's telling the truth about the shoes. There must have been a tramp, you know. The description was too fluent and it matches the one Nick Robinson came up with. I remember the pink trousers." He raised an enquiring eyebrow. "I could try and trace him."

"Waste of time," muttered Walsh. "Even if you found him, what could he tell you?"

"Whether or not Mrs. Thompson's telling lies."

"Hmm." He hunched his shoulders over the steering wheel. "I've had an awful thought." He looked sick.

McLoughlin glanced at him.

"You don't suppose those d.a.m.n women have been right all along, do you? You don't suppose this miserable tramp went into the ice house and had a heart attack?"

"What happened to his pink trousers?"

Walsh's face cleared. "Yes, yes, of course. All right, then, see if you can find him."

"I'll have to give up on the Maybury file."

"Temporarily," growled Walsh.

"And I want to take a team to search Streech grounds again." He saw thunder clouds gathering across the Inspector's face. "With a view to linking Mrs. Thompson with the ice house," he finished dispa.s.sionately.

Elizabeth stood in her favourite position, by the long window in her mother's room, watching the shadows lengthen on the terrace. She wondered how many times she had stood just so in just that place, watching. "I shall have to go back," she said at last. "They won't keep the job open indefinitely."

"You haven't any holiday owing?" asked Diana, glad that the silence was finally broken.

"Not spare. I'm going to the States for two weeks at the end of September. It leaves me with nothing to play with." She turned round. "I'm sorry, Mum."

Diana shook her head. "No need to be. Will you be staying with your father?"

Elizabeth nodded. "It's three years since I've seen him," she excused herself, "and the flight's booked."

What a gulf of misunderstanding lay between them, Diana thought, and all because they found each other so hard to talk to. When she thought back over the years, she realised their conversations had been polite but safe, never touching on anything that might lead to embarra.s.sment. In one way, Phoebe had been lucky. There had been no division of loyalties for her children, no lingering love for their father, no need for her to justify why he had deserted them.

"Would you like a drink?" She walked over to a mahogany cabinet.

"Are you having one?"

"Yes."

"OK. I'll have a gin and tonic."

Diana poured the drinks and took the gla.s.ses over to the window. "Cheers." She perched on the back of a chair and joined her daughter's contemplation of the terrace. It was easier, on the whole, not to look at her. "For years I couldn't think about your father without getting angry. When his letters arrived for you and I saw his handwriting, I used to get so tensed up my jaw would ache for hours. I kept wondering what Miranda had that I hadn't." She gave a short laugh. "That's when I first understood what 'grinding your teeth' meant." She paused. "It took me a while but I've got over it. Now I try to remember the good times. Is she nice? I never met her, you know."

Elizabeth's attention was riveted on the antics of a sparrow on the flagstones outside, as if in its small person it was about to provide an answer to the mysteries of the universe. "It wasn't all his fault," she said defensively.

"No, it wasn't. Actually, in many ways it was more my fault. I took him for granted. I a.s.sumed he was the sort of man who could cope with a working wife, and he wasn't. He particularly disliked competing with me as a business partner. I don't blame him. He couldn't help that, any more than I could help wanting a career after you were born. The truth is, we should never have married. We were far too young and neither of us knew what we were doing. Phoebe feels the same. She married David because she was pregnant with Jonathan, and propriety amongst the middle cla.s.ses twenty years ago dictated marriage. I married your father for virtually the same reasons. I wanted to go to the States with him and my parents wouldn't hear of my going as his mistress." She sighed. "G.o.d knows, Lizzie, we've all lived to regret it. We made a mess of each other's lives because we didn't have the courage to raise two fingers to convention."

The girl stared at the sparrow. "If you regret the marriage, do you also regret its consequence?"

"Do you mean, do I regret you?"

"Of course," she snapped angrily. "The two are rather closely linked, wouldn't you say?" The hurt ran deep.

Diana sought carefully for the right words. "When you were born, I used to be driven mad by people asking: Who does she take after? Is she like you or Steven? My answer was always the same: Neither. I couldn't understand why they needed to tie you to one or other of us. To me, from the moment you drew breath, you were an individual with your own character, your own looks, your own way of doing things. I love you because you're my daughter and we've grown up together, but much more than that I actually like you. I like Elizabeth Goode." She brushed a speck of dust from the girl's sleeve where it rested on the chair beside her. "You exist in your own right You're not a consequence of a marriage."

"But I am," the girl cried. "Don't you see that? I am what you and Dad have made me."

Diana looked at her. "No, you were bolshy as a baby. I had to put you on solids when you were about eight weeks old because you wouldn't stop yelling for food. Steven always called you 'The Despotic Diaper' because you had us both so well trained. Whatever makes you think now that you were born without personality and had to be fashioned by two untrained people? G.o.d knows, you've a horrible shock coming if you think babies don't have minds of their own."

Elizabeth smiled. "You know what I mean."

"Yes," her mother conceded, "I know what you mean." She was silent for a moment. "The truth is, I should have thought this one out before. On the one hand, I've been patting myself on the back for having a strong-minded, independent daughter even if she is a bit wilful; on the other, I've been nagging at you not to make my mistakes." She smiled ruefully. "Sorry, darling. Hardly a consistent position."

"Phoebe's just the same," said Elizabeth. "It must be a common maternal weakness."

Diana laughed. "What does Phoebe do?"

"Haven't you noticed? Whenever Jonathan takes a drink she quietly marks the level in the bottle with a felt-tip pen. She thinks he's never noticed."

"Well, I haven't," said Diana in some surprise. "How extraordinary. Why does she do it?"