The Ice House Part 9

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 ma.s.s 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. "h.e.l.lo, 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 t.i.tillating 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 gla.s.ses 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 gla.s.ses. 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 gla.s.s.

"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 b.u.g.g.e.r all else we can do."

11.

In dribs and drabs, as messages got through, Walsh's men a.s.sembled on the gra.s.s 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 pa.s.s them on."

"d.a.m.n," said the Chief Inspector with feeling. "Have you got a copy?"

"Not yet. It was the landlord at the pub who told me about it and he's looking for his copies now. If he finds them, he'll give me a ring."

"Anything else?"

"Do me a favour, sir, I've hardly started," said Nick Robinson plaintively. "I asked about strangers. Several people remembered seeing an old tramp hanging around the village about two, three months ago but I couldn't get a definite date on him. He had money because he bought a couple of drinks in the pub."

"I've a date, sir," Constable Williams interrupted eagerly. "He knocked at two houses on the council estate asking for food and money. The first was an old lady called Mrs. Hogarth who gave him a sandwich; the second was a Mrs. Fowler who sent him off with a flea in his ear because he came in the middle of her son's birthday party. The twenty-seventh of May,'* he finished triumphantly. "I've got a good description, too. He shouldn't be too hard to find. Old brown trilby, green jacket and, this is the clincher, bright pink trousers."

Walsh was doubtful. "There's probably no connection. Tramps are two a penny round here in the summer. They follow the sun and the scenic routes just like the tourists. Any more?"

DS Robinson caught a sardonic gleam in McLoughlin's eye which told him what he'd already guessed, that the old man was in another of his moods. G.o.d rot his soul, he thought. It was like working with a yo-yo, up one minute, down the next. Any other time and all his efforts of the morning would have earned him a pat on the back. As things stood now, he'd be lucky if he got away with a kick in the pants.

He returned to his notebook. "I followed a lead I was given and spoke to one of the condom users," he went on. "He comes up here with his girlfriend when it's warm enough, usually around eleven o'clock-"

"Name," snapped Walsh.

"Sorry, sir. Promised I wouldn't reveal his name, not unless it became absolutely necessary for a prosecution and, even then, not without his permission." In Sergeant Robinson's view, Paddy Clarke's threat to string him up by the b.a.l.l.s had been no idle one. The big man had offered no reasons for his promiscuity but Robinson had guessed them when Mrs. Clarke returned unexpectedly as he was leaving. She was big, meaty and domineering with a brittle smile and hard eyes. A Gorgon who wore the trousers. G.o.d knows, Robinson had thought, no one could blame Paddy for wanting something soft, sweet and compliant to cuddle from time to time.

"Go on," said Walsh.

"I asked him if he'd seen anything unusual up here in the last six months. Seen, no, he said, but heard, yes. According to him it's normally pretty quiet, the odd owl or nightjar, dogs barking in the distance, that sort of thing." He consulted his notebook. "On two occasions in June, during the first two weeks, he reckons, he and his girlfriend were-and I'm quoting him, sir-'scared s.h.i.tless by the most G.o.d-awful racket you've ever heard. Like souls crying out in h.e.l.l.' The first time it happened, his girlfriend was so frightened she took to her heels and ran. He followed pretty sharpish and when they reached the road, she told him she'd left her knickers behind."

A muted sn.i.g.g.e.r rippled round the seated men like a soft breeze through the gra.s.s. Even Walsh smiled. "What was it, did they know?"

"They sussed it the second time. They came up a week later and it happened again but to a much lesser degree. This time, my man hung on to his girl and made her listen. It was cats yowling and spitting, either at each other or something else-he thought he could hear growling as well. He couldn't say where it was coming from, but it was fairly close." He looked at Walsh. "They've been up several times since but it's not happened again."

McLoughlin stirred himself. "The colony of feral cats at the farm," he said, "fighting over the body. If that's right and the date's accurate it gives us the beginnings of a timescale. Our victim was murdered during or before the first week in June."

"How sure is your man of his dates?" Walsh asked Robinson.

"Pretty sure. He's going to check with the girlfriend but he remembers it being during that spell of very hot weather at the beginning of June, said the ground was dry as a bone both times so he didn't need to take anything for them to lie on."

Walsh made some notes on his pad. "Is that it?"

"I've had some conflicting reports about the three women up here. Almost everyone agrees they're lesbians and that they try to seduce the village girls into lesbian orgies. But two of them-in my view, sir, the two most sensible-said it was malicious rubbish. One's an old lady in her seventies or eighties who knows them pretty well, the other's my informant. He said that Anne Cattrell's had so many lovers she could give Fiona Richmond lessons on s.e.x." He took a cigarette out and lit it, glancing through the smoke at McLoughlin. "If it's true, sir, it might give us another angle. Crime pa.s.sionnel, or whatever the Frogs call it. It strikes me she's gone out of her way to make us think she's only interested in women. Why? Could be because she's done away with a jealous lover and doesn't want us to make the connection."

"Your informant's talking c.r.a.p," McLoughlin said bluntly. "Everyone knows they're lesbians. h.e.l.l, I've heard more old jokes about that than I can remember." Jack Booth had had a fund of them. "It's hardly something new that Miss Cattrell's invented for our benefit. And if it's not true, why do they pretend it is? What on earth do they gain by it?"

Walsh was stuffing tobacco into his pipe. "Your problem, Andy, is that you generalise too much," he said acidly. "The fact that everyone knows something doesn't make it true. Everyone knew my brother was a tight-fisted b.a.s.t.a.r.d until he died and we discovered he'd been paying out two hundred quid a year for fifteen years to educate some black kids in Africa." He nodded approvingly at Robinson. "You may have something, Nick, Personally, I couldn't give a monkey's what their s.e.xual habits are and, from what I've seen of them, they couldn't give a monkey's what people say or think about them. Which is why"-he glared at McLoughlin-"they wouldn't trouble to deny or confirm anything. But," he continued thoughtfully, lighting his pipe, "I am interested in the fact that Anne Cattrell's been shoving lesbianism down our throats since we got here. What's her motive?" He fell silent.

DS Robinson waited a moment. "Let me have a go at her, sir. A new face, she might open up. No harm in trying."

"I'll think about it. Has anyone else got anything?"

A constable raised a hand. "Two people I spoke to reported hearing a woman sobbing one night, sir, but they couldn't remember how long ago." "Two people in the same house?"

"No, that's why I thought it worth mentioning. Different houses. There's a couple of farm cottages just off the East Deller road, belong to Grange Farm. Both sets of occupants remembered hearing the woman but said they didn't do anything about it because they thought it was a lovers' tiff. Neither cottage could remember exactly when it was."

"Go and see them again," said Walsh abruptly. "You, too, Williams. Find out if they were watching telly when it happened, what programme was on, were they eating supper? Or if they were in bed, how late it was, were they awake because it was hot, because it was raining? Anything to give us an idea of time and date. If she wasn't sobbing because she'd just killed a man, she might have been sobbing because she'd just seen him killed." He pushed himself awkwardly to his feet, gathering his notebook and jacket as he did so. "McLoughlin, you come with me. We're going to have a chat with Mrs. Thompson. Jones, you and your squad pack up here and get everything back to the Station. You can take an hour's break, then I want you all here for a search of the house. There'll be warrants on my desk," he told Jones. "Bring them with you." He turned to Nick Robinson. "OK, lad, you go and have your quiet little chat about s.e.x with Ms. Cattrell but don't go putting the wind up her. If she did chop our body up, I want to be able to prove it."

"Leave it to me, sir."

Walsh smiled his reptilian smile. "Just remember one thing, Nick. In her time she's eaten Special Branch men for breakfast. You represent a small bag of peanuts."

The door opened after some moments to reveal a drab little woman in a high-b.u.t.toned, long-sleeved black dress. She had sorrowful eyes and a pinched mouth. A gold cross on a long chain lay between her flat b.r.e.a.s.t.s and she needed only a coif and an open prayer book to complete the picture of devoted suffering.

Walsh proffered his ident.i.ty card. "Mrs. Thompson?" he asked.

She nodded but didn't bother to look at the card.

"Chief Inspector Walsh and Sergeant McLoughlin. Could we come in? We'd like to ask you some questions about your husband's disappearance."

She pinched her lips into an unattractive moue. "But I've told the police all I know," she whimpered, the sorrowful eyes welling with tears. "I don't want to think about it any more."

Walsh groaned inwardly. His wife would be like this, he thought, if anything happened to him. Inadequate, tearful, irritating. He smiled kindly. "We'll only keep you a minute," he a.s.sured her.

Reluctantly, she pulled the door wide and gestured towards the living-room, though living-room, thought McLoughlin as he entered it, was a misnomer. It was clean to the point of obsession and bare of anything that might display character or individuality, no books, no ornaments, no pictures, not even a television. In his mind's eye, he compared it with the vivid and colourful room that Anne Cattrell lived in. If the two rooms were an outward expression of the inner person, he had no doubt who was the more interesting. Living with Mrs. Thompson would be like living with an empty sh.e.l.l.

They sat on the sterile chairs. Mrs. Thompson perched on the edge of the sofa, crumpling a lace handkerchief between her fingers, dabbing her eyes with it from time to time. Inspector Walsh took his pipe from his pocket, glanced around the room as if noticing it for the first time, then put the pipe away again. "What size shoes does your husband take?" he asked the little woman.

Her eyes opened wide and she stared at him as if he'd made an improper suggestion. "I don't understand," she whispered.

Walsh felt his irritation mounting. If Thompson had done a runner, who could blame him? The woman was ridiculous. "What size shoes does your husband take?" he asked again patiently.

"Does?" she repeated. "Does? Have you found him then? I've been so sure he was dead." She became quite animated. "He's lost his memory, hasn't he? It's the only explanation. He'd never leave me, you know."

"No, we haven't found him, Mrs. Thompson," said the Inspector firmly, "but you reported him missing and we are doing our best to trace him for you. It would help if we knew his shoe size. The missing person's report says size eight. Is that correct?"

"I don't know," she said vacantly. "He always bought his shoes himself." She peeped at him from under her lashes and, rather shockingly, flashed him a coy smile.

McLoughlin leaned forward. "Could you take me upstairs, Mrs. Thompson, and we'll find out from the pairs he left behind?"

She shrank into the sofa. "I couldn't possibly," she said. "I don't know you. It was a young policewoman who came before. Where is she? Why isn't she here?"

Inspector Walsh counted to ten and considered that Daniel Thompson must have been a saint. "How long have you been married?" he asked curiously.

"Thirty-two years," she whispered. The man was a saint, he thought.

"Could you pop up and fetch a pair of his shoes?" he suggested. "Sergeant McLoughlin and I will wait down here for you."

She accepted this without demur and slipped out of the room, shutting the door behind her as if the door would somehow stop them were they really intent on raping her in her bedroom. Walsh raised his eyebrows to heaven. "She needs her head examined."

McLoughlin replied seriously, "She's ill. Looks to me as if her husband's disappearance has sent her off the rails. Don't you think we ought to get her some help?"

Walsh pondered. "There was a vicarage a few houses down, wasn't there? We'll stop off on our way back to the Grange."

They looked up as the door opened again and Mrs. Thompson reappeared with a pair of highly polished black leather shoes clasped against her chest. "Size eight," she said, "and a narrow fitting. I never realised what dainty feet he had. He wasn't a short man, you know."

Reluctantly, Walsh opened his briefcase and produced the clear plastic bag containing the brown shoes. He placed the shoes, in the bag, on the flat of one hand and held them out for the woman to examine. "Are these your husband's shoes, Mrs. Thompson? Do you remember him having a pair like this?"

There was no hesitation in her reply. "Certainly not," she said. "My husband wouldn't dream of wearing corespondent shoes."

"The white patches are where the shoes have got damp, Mrs. Thompson, not white leather. The shoes were uniformly brown once."

"Oh." She moved closer, then after a few moments, shook her head. "No, I've never seen them before. They're certainly not Daniel's. He had only one pair of brown shoes and he was wearing them the day he"-she gave a little sob-"the day he vanished." She used the sodden sc.r.a.p of lace to dab at her eyes again. "They were very expensive Italian shoes with pointed toes. Nothing like those. He was very conscientious about his appearance," she finished.

Walsh put the shoes back in his briefcase. "When you reported your husband missing, Mrs. Thompson, you said he'd had some business worries recently. What exactly did you mean?"

She shied away from him as if he'd tried to touch her. "He wouldn't leave me," she said again.

"Of course he wouldn't, Mrs. Thompson, but pressure at work does make some men act irrationally. Perhaps he couldn't cope with his problems and needed time on his own to sort them out. Is that what you meant?"

Tears poured from the sorrowful eyes in a.flood. She wore her despair like a tatty cardigan, something she had grown used to and was comfortable with in spite of its ugliness. She sank on to the sofa. "His business is bankrupt," she explained. "He owes money all over the place. It's all being sorted out by his a.s.sistant but people-creditors-keep ringing me. There's nothing I can do. I've told them he's dead."

"How do you know?" asked Walsh gently.

"He wouldn't leave me," she said, "not if he was alive."

Walsh looked at McLoughlin and nodded towards the door. They stood up. "Thank you for giving us your time, Mrs. Thompson. There's just one thing. Has your husband ever been to Streech Grange or had dealings with the people living there?"

Her lips thinned to an angry slit. "Is that where those awful women live?" she spat. Walsh nodded. "Daniel would sooner walk into the lion's den"-she fingered her cross-"than be contaminated by their sin." She kissed the cross and started to undo the b.u.t.tons of her dress.