The Ice House

16

There was a new sense of urgency about police activities. They moved into top gear with alacrity, demonstrating all too clearly that there was another gear to move into. It was as if the attempted murder of a known woman was on a different scale from the murder of an anonymous male stiff in the garden. Anne would have found it disquieting, except that she was in a coma in Intensive Care and knew nothing about it. Walsh would have denied it vigorously, but his irascible temper flayed his men instead when, after a thorough search of the house and grounds, they failed to come up with anything.

In the press, Streech Grange was likened, quite inappropriately, to 10 Rillington Place, as a setting for mass murder and decomposing remains. To Anne's friends, the burden of their association with it was heavy. In retrospect, their previous interrogations had the relaxed air of a social gathering. After the assault on Anne, the gloves came off and they were grilled dry. Walsh was looking for a pattern. Logic told him there was one. The odds against three unconnected mysteries in one house were so incalculable as to be beyond consideration.

For the children, it was a new experience altogether. As yet none of them had been questioned and it came like a baptism of fire. Jonathan hated his sense of impotence, of being involved in something over which he had no control. He was surly and uncooperative and treated the police with a sort of weary disdain. Walsh wanted nothing so much as to kick him up the backside, but after two hours of questioning he was satisfied there was nothing more he could get out of him. Jonathan had vindicated the three youngsters of the assault on Anne. According to him, they had changed into their nightclothes after the impromptu Lafite party, wrapped themselves in duvets and curled up in Jane's room to watch the late film on her television. The shattering glass, followed by McLoughlin's shouts for help, had startled them. No, they had heard nothing before that, but then the television had been quite loud. Walsh questioned Elizabeth. She was nervous but helpful. When asked for her movements on the previous evening, her account tallied exactly with Jonathan's, down to the most trivial detail. Jane, after a day's respite, gave a similar story. Unless they were in some fantastic and well-organised conspiracy, they had had nothing to do with the attempt on Anne's life.

For Phoebe it was a case of deja vu. The only difference this time was that her interrogators now had information she had withheld from them ten years previously. She answered them with the same stolid patience she had shown before, annoyed them with her unshakable composure and refused to be drawn when they needled her on the subject of her husband's perversions.

"You say you blame yourself for not knowing what he was doing to your daughter," said Walsh on more than one occasion.

"Yes, I do," she answered. "If I had known earlier, perhaps I could have minimised the damage."

He got into the habit of leaning forward for the next question, waiting for the tell-tale flicker of weakening resolve. "Weren't you jealous, Mrs. Maybury? Didn't it madden you that your husband preferred sex with your daughter? Didn't you feel degraded?"

She always paused before she answered, as if she were about to agree with him. "No, Inspector," she would say. "I had no such feelings."

"But you've said you could easily have murdered him."

"Yes."

"Why did you want to murder him?"

She smiled faintly at this. "I should have thought it was obvious, Inspector. If I had to, I'd kill any animal I found savaging my children."

"Yet you say you didn't kill your husband."

"I didn't have to. He ran away."

"Did he come back?"

She laughed. "No, he didn't come back."

"Did you kill him and leave him to rot in the ice house?"

"No."

"It would have been a sort of justice, wouldn't it?"

"It certainly would."

"The Phillipses, or should I say Jeffersons, believe in that kind of justice, don't they? Did they do it for you, Mrs. Maybury? Are they your avenging arm?"

It was always at this point that Phoebe's anger threatened to spill over. The first time he put the question it had come like a blow to the solar plexus. Afterwards, she was better prepared, though it still required iron self-control to keep from tearing and gouging at his hated face. "I suggest you ask Mr. and Mrs. Phillips that," she always said. "I wouldn't be so presumptuous as to answer anything on their behalf."

"I'm asking you for an opinion, Mrs. Maybury. Are they capable of exacting vengeance for you and your daughter?"

A pitying smile would curl her lips. "No, Inspector."

"Was it you who struck down Miss Cattrell? You say you were in bed, but we only have your word for it. Was she going to reveal something you didn't want revealed?"

"Who was she going to reveal it to? The police?"

"Perhaps."

"You're such a fool, Inspector." She smiled humourlessly. "I've told you what I think happened to Anne."

"Guesswork, Mrs. Maybury."

"Perhaps, but in view of what happened to me nine years ago, not unlikely."

"You never reported it."

"You wouldn't have believed me if I had. You'd have accused me of doing it to myself. In any case, nothing would have induced me to have you back in the house, not once I'd got rid of you. In some ways I was luckier than Anne. My scars were all internal."

"It's too convenient. You must think me very gullible."

"No," she said honestly, "narrow-minded and vindictive."

"Because I don't share your taste for melodrama? Your daughter is very vague about what frightened her. Even Sergeant McLoughlin only thinks he heard someone. I'm a realist. I prefer to deal in fact, not female neurosis."

She studied him with a new awareness. "I never realised how much you dislike women. Or is it just me, Inspector? The idea that I might be getting my just deserts really appeals to you, doesn't it? Would I have saved myself all this misery if I'd said 'yes' ten years ago?"

Invariably it was Walsh who became angry. Invariably, after a bout of questioning, Phoebe would get in her car and drive to the hospital to sit at Anne's bedside, massaging her hands and talking to her, willing her back to consciousness.

Diana's interrogations probed and prodded her connection with Daniel Thompson. She couldn't control her anger against Walsh in the way that Phoebe did and she frequently lost her temper. Even so, after two days, he could still detect no flaws in her story.

He tapped the pile of correspondence. "It's perfectly clear from your letters that you were furious with him."

"Of course I was furious," she snapped. "He had squandered ten thousand pounds of my money."

"Squandered?" he repeated. "But he was doing his best, wasn't he?"

"Not in my view."

"Didn't you have the business checked before you agreed to invest in it?"

"We've already been through all this, for God's sake. Don't you listen to anything?"

"Answer the question, please, Mrs. Goode."

She sighed. "I wasn't given much time. I spent a day going through the company books. They seemed in order, so I made over the cheque for ten thousand. Satisfied?"

"So why do you say he squandered your money?"

"Because as I got to know him, I realised he was supremely incompetent, may even have been an out-and-out rogue. The figures I saw had been heavily massaged. For example, I now think he inflated the company's assets by overvaluing his stock and I have discovered he was also using his employees' National Insurance contributions to keep the business afloat. The order books I saw were full, yet after three months he had sold virtually nothing and the little stock he had at his factory apparently had nowhere to go. His PR was a joke. He kept saying that word-of-mouth would spread and the thing would take off."

"And that made you angry?"

"God give me strength," she said, raising her hands to heaven. "Do you need it spelled out? It made me livid. I was conned."

"Do you know anything about Mr. Thompson's disappearance?"

"For the last time, no. N-O, no."

"But you knew he'd disappeared before we told you."

"Yes, Inspector, I knew. He was supposed to come here to explain what was going on." She leaned forward and banged her fist on the letters. "You've got the date and the time in front of you. He never turned up. I rang his office and was told he wasn't there. I rang his home and was given a flea in my ear by his wife. I rang his office again a couple of days later and was told Mrs. Thompson had reported him missing. I went to the office the next day to find some very angry employees who had not been paid for three weeks and had just discovered that their insurance contributions had not been paid for nearly a year. There has been no sign of Daniel Thompson since. The business is bankrupt and a lot of people, not just me, are owed a considerable amount of money."

"Frankly, Mrs. Goode, anyone who invests money in see-through radiators should expect to lose it."

Ice-blue eyes, he thought, had a capacity for murderous dislike that the greens and browns lacked. The epithets she now applied to him were unprintable.

"It's your pride that's hurt, isn't it?" he said with interest. "Your amour-propre. I can easily imagine you killing someone who made a fool of you."

"Can you?" she snapped. "Then you've an over-active imagination. No wonder the police have such a poor detection record."

"I think Mr. Thompson did come here, Mrs. Goode, and I think you got as angry with him as you are with me, and you hit out at him."

She laughed. "Have you ever seen him? No? Well, take it from me, he's built like a tank. Ask his silly wife if you don't believe me. If I'd hit him, he'd have hit me back and I'd still be sporting the bruises."

"Were you sleeping with him?"

"I'll make a confession," she conceded. "I found Daniel even less fanciable than I find you. He had wet lips, very like yours. I don't like wet lips. Does that answer your question?"

"His wife denied any connection between him and the Grange."

"That doesn't surprise me. I've only met her once. She didn't approve of me."

"Did Fred and Molly know about this investment of yours?"

"No one here knew."

"Why not?"

"You know bloody well."

"You didn't want to look a fool."

She didn't bother to answer.

"Perhaps Fred and Molly did your dirty work for you, Mrs. Goode?"

She massaged the beginnings of a headache. "What a nasty manipulative man you are."

"Did they, Mrs. Goode?"

She studied him thoughtfully. "No," she said. "And if you ever dare ask me that question again, I'll hit you."

"And be arrested for assault?"

"It would be worth it," she said.

"You're a very aggressive woman, aren't you? Did you take out your aggressions on Miss Cattrell?"

She punched him on the nose.

Jonathan tapped his mother on the shoulder, then bent forward and looked at Anne. "How is she?" She was off the critical list and had been removed from Intensive Care to a side room on a surgical ward. She was attached via a catheter and a plastic tube to an intravenous drip.

"I don't know. She's very restless. She's opened her eyes once or twice, but she's not seeing anything."

He squatted on the floor beside her. "You're going to have to leave her for a bit, I'm afraid. Diana needs you."

"Surely not." Phoebe frowned.

" 'Fraid so. She's been arrested."

She was visibly surprised. "Diana? Whatever for?"

"Assault on a police officer. She punched Inspector Walsh and gave him a nose bleed. She's been carted off to the nick."

Phoebe's mouth dropped open. "Oh, lord, how funny," she said, beginning to laugh. "Is he all right?"

"Bloody but unbowed."

"I'll come. We'd better get hold of poor Bill again." She looked down at Anne. "Nothing I can do for you at the moment, old girl. Keep fighting. We're all rooting for you."

"I'll bring Jane in later," said Jonathan. "She wants to come."

They walked into the corridor. "Is she up to it?"

"I'd say so. She's coped fantastically since it happened. We had a long chat this afternoon. She was more objective than I've ever known her. Ironically, the whole thing may have done her some good, silver linings and all that, made her realise she's tougher than she thought she was. She likes the Sergeant, by the way. If they want to question her again, we should press for him to do it."

"Yes," said Phoebe. "Apart from anything else, he saved Anne's life. That would always commend him to Jane. She dotes on her godma."

Jonathan linked his arm through his mother's. "She dotes on you, too. We all do."

Phoebe gave her rich laugh. "Only because you haven't discovered my clay feet yet."

"No," he said seriously. "It's because you've never pretended they were anything else."

They walked on and disappeared round a bend in the corridor. Behind them, Andy McLoughlin inched with the embarrassment of the eavesdropper from where he had been hiding in a recessed doorway.

Damn Walsh and his bloody pattern, he thought. Logic was fallible. It had to be.

He showed his warrant card to the Sister. "Miss Cattrell?" he asked. "Any change?"

"Not really. She's getting restless and opening her eyes which is a good sign but, as I told the Inspector, you'll be wasting your time if you want to interview her. She could come out of it any moment or she could be like this for a day or two. We'll let you know as soon as she's up to talking."

"I'll stay for a few minutes, if that's all right. You never know."

"She's in side ward two. Chat to her," the Sister encouraged. "Might as well make yourself useful while you're here."

He hadn't seen her since she had been taken away in the ambulance and he was shocked. She was even smaller than he remembered, a tiny, shrunken thing with bandaged head and ugly, sallow skin. But, even unconscious, she seemed to be smiling at some private joke of her own. He felt no lust-how could he?-but his heart warmed with a sense of recognition as if he had known her a long time. He pulled the chair close to her pillows and started to speak. There was no hesitation for he knew, without thinking, just what would give her pleasure. After half an hour he ran dry and looked at his watch. She had moved once or twice, like a child in her sleep, but her eyes had stayed firmly closed. He pushed his chair back. "That's it, Cattrell. Time's up, I'm afraid. I'll see if I can get you alone again tomorrow." He touched her cheek with his fingertips.

"You're a mean sod," she mumbled. "Give me 'Tam o' Shanter.' " She opened one eye and glared at him. "I'm dying."

"You've been awake all the time," he accused her.

She opened the other eye and there was a twinkle amidst the confusion. "Was Phoebe here?"

He nodded.

"I remember Phoebe being here. Am I at home?"

"You're in hospital," he told her.

"Oh, shit. I hate hospitals. What day is it?"

"Friday. You've had a two-day snooze."

That worried her. "What happened?"

"I'll find a nurse." He started to get up.

"You bloody well won't," she growled. "I hate nurses too. What happened?"

"Someone hit you. Tell me what you remember."

She knit her brows into a deep furrow. "Curry," she said experimentally.

He gripped her hand tightly. "Can we forget the curry, Cattrell?" he asked her. "It'll be easier all round if you never saw me that evening."

She wrinkled her forehead. "But what happened? Who found me?" He rubbed her fingers. "I found you, but I've had the devil's own job explaining to Walsh what I was doing there. I can hardly admit to carnal designs on a suspect." He searched her face. "Do you understand what I'm saying? I want to stay on the case, Anne. I want justice."

"Of course I bloody understand." Humour danced in the dark eyes and he wanted to hug her. "I can chew gum and walk at the same time, you know." She thought deeply. "I remember now. You were telling me how to live my life." She looked at him accusingly. "You had no right, McLoughlin. As long as I can live with myself, that's all that matters."

He raised her fingertips and brushed them softly across his lips. "I'm learning. Give me time. Tell me what else you remember?"

"I ran all the way back," she said with an effort of concentration. "I opened the window, I remember that. And then"-she frowned-"I heard something, I think."

"Where?"

"I don't remember." She looked worried. "What happened then?"

"Someone hit you on the back of the head."

She looked dazed. "I don't remember."

"I found you inside your room."

A heavy hand descended on his shoulder and made him jump. "You've no business to be asking her questions, Sergeant," said the Sister angrily. "Get me Dr. Renfrew," she called to a nurse in the corridor. "Out," she told McLoughlin.

Anne looked at her with unalloyed horror and clung to his hand. "Don't you dare go," she whispered. "I've seen her picture on World at War and she wasn't fighting for the Allies."

He turned and raised his hands in helpless resignation. "Is there anything I should remember?" she asked him. "I wouldn't want to confuse the Inspector."

His eyes softened. "No, Miss Cattrell. You just concentrate on getting better and leave the remembering to me."

She winked sleepily. "I'll do that."

DS Robinson was after promotion. He had gone diligently door-to-door again, looking for leads to Anne's assailant, but he had come up against the proverbial brick wall. No one had seen or heard anything on that night, except the ambulance, and they'd all heard that. He had had another pint with Paddy Clarke, this time under the beady eye of Mrs. Clarke. He had found her immensely intimidating, more so since Anne's revelation that she had once been a nun. Paddy assured him they had looked for the map of the grounds but hadn't found it and, with Mrs. Clarke breathing over his shoulder, he expressed complete ignorance of Streech Grange and its inhabitants. In particular, he knew nothing at all about Anne Cattrell. Nick Robinson didn't press him. Frankly, he didn't rate his chances if he got caught up between Mr. and Mrs. Clarke and he was unashamedly attached to his balls.

There was nothing to stop him going home now. By rights, he was off-duty. Instead, he turned his car in the direction of Bywater Farm and one Eddie Staines. So far, Mrs. Ledbetter's information had paid dividends. No harm in giving her another whirl.

The farmer pointed him to the cow-sheds where Eddie was cleaning up after the evening's milking. He found Eddie leaning on a rake and carelessly chatting up an apple-cheeked girl who giggled inanely at everything he said. They fell silent as Nick Robinson approached and looked at him curiously.

"Mr. Staines?" he asked, producing his warrant card. "Can I have a word?"

Eddie winked at the girl. "Sure," he said. "Would bollocks do?"

The girl shrieked her mirth. "Ooh, Eddie! You are funny!"

"Preferably in private," continued Robinson, making a mental note of Eddie's riposte for his own future use.

"Buzz off, Suzie. I'll see you later in the pub."

She went reluctantly, scuffing her boots through the muck in the yard, looking over her shoulder in the hopes of being invited back. For Eddie, it was clearly a case of out of sight out of mind. "What do you want?" he asked, raking soiled straw into a heap while he spoke. He was wearing a sleeveless tee-shirt which gave full expression to the muscles of his shoulders.

"You've heard about the murder at the Grange?"

"Who hasn't?" said Staines, uninterestedly.

"I'd like to ask you a few questions about it."

Staines leant on his rake and eyed the detective. "Listen, mate, I've already told your lot all I know and that's nothing. I'm a farmhand, a salt-of-the-earth prole. The likes of me don't mix with the people at the Grange."

"No one said you did."

"Then what's the point of asking me questions?"

"We're interested in anyone who's been into the grounds in the last couple of months."

Staines resumed his raking. "Not guilty."

"That's not what I've heard."

The young man's eyes narrowed. "Oh, yeah? Who's been blabbing?"

"It's common knowledge you take your girlfriends up there."

"You trying to pin something on me?"

"No, but there's a chance you may have seen or heard something that could help us." He offered the man a cigarette.

Eddie accepted a light. He appeared to be thinking deeply for several minutes. "Happen I did then," he said surprisingly.

"Go on."

"Seems you've been asking my sister questions about a woman crying one night. Seems you've been back a couple of times."

"The farm cottages on the East Deller road?"

"That's right. Maggie Trewin's my sister, lives in number two. Her man works up at Grange Farm. She tells me you want to know which night this-woman"-he put a derisory emphasis on the word-"was crying."

Robinson nodded.

"Well, now," said Staines, blowing perfect smoke rings into the air above his head, "I can probably tell you, but I'd want a guarantee my brother-in-law'll never know where you got it from. No court appearances, nothing like that. He'd skin me alive if he knew I'd been up there and he'd not give up till he found out who I was with." He shook his head morosely. It's more'n my life's worth." His brother-in-law's young sister was the apple of his eye.

"I can't guarantee no court appearances," said Robinson. "If the prosecution serves a writ on you, you'll have to attend. But it may never happen. The woman may have no bearing on the case."

"You reckon?" Staines snorted. "More'n I do."

"I could take you in for questioning," said Robinson mildly.

"Wouldn't get you nowhere. I won't say nothing till I'm certain Bob Trewin won't find out. He'd kill me, no mistake." He flexed his muscles and returned to his raking.

Nick Robinson wrote his name and the address of the Police Station on a page of his notebook. He tore it out and handed it to Staines. "Write down what happened and when, and send it to me unsigned," he suggested. "I'll treat it as an anonymous tip-off. That way no one will know where it came from."

"You'll know."

"If you don't," Robinson warned, "I'll come back and next time I'll bring the Inspector. He won't take no for an answer."

"I'll think on it."

"You do that." He started to leave. "I suppose you weren't up there three nights ago?"

Staines hefted a lump of dung to the top of his straw pile. "You suppose right."

"One of the women was attacked."

"Oh, yeah?"

"You hadn't heard?"

Staines shrugged. "Maybe." He cast a sideways glance at the detective. "One of her girlfriends did it, bound to be. Bitches fight like the devil when they're roused."

"So you didn't hear or see anything that night?"

Eddie turned his back to attack the farthest corner of the shed. "Like I just said, I wasn't there."

Now, why don't I believe you, Robinson wondered, as he picked his way with distaste through the cow dung in the yard. The apple-cheeked girl giggled as he passed her by the gate then, like a moth to the flame, she dashed back to the cow-sheds and the arms of her philanderer.