The Ice House

1

"Fred Phillips is running." Anne Cattrell's remark burst upon the silence of that August afternoon like a fart at a vicar's tea-party.

Startled, her two companions looked up, Diana from her sketch-pad, Phoebe from her gardening book, their eyes watering at this abrupt transition from the printed page to brilliant sunlight. They had sat in contented stillness for an hour, grouped about a wrought-iron table on the terrace of their house where the wreckage of a lazy tea jostled with the flotsam of their professional lives: a pair of secateurs, an open paint-box, pages of manuscript, one with a circular tea stain where Anne had dumped a cup without thinking.

Phoebe was perched on an upright chair at right angles to the table, crossed ankles tucked neatly beneath her, red hair corkscrewing in flaming whorls about her shoulders. Her position was hardly changed from half an hour previously when she had finished her tea and guiltily buried her nose in her book instead of returning to the greenhouse to finish off a bulk order for five hundred Ivyleaf Pelargonium cuttings. Diana, unashamedly glistening with Ambre Solaire, reclined on a sun-lounger, the pleated skirt of her printed cotton dress spilling Over the sides and brushing the flagstones. One elegant hand toyed with the underbelly of the Labrador lying beside her, the other drew swirling doodles in the margin of her sketch-pad which should have been filled-but was not-with commissioned designs for a cottage interior in Fowey. Anne, who had been struggling between intermittent dozes to conjure up a thousand words on "Vaginal Orgasm-Fact or Fiction" for an obscure magazine, was drawn up tight against the table, chin on hands, dark eyes staring down the long vista of landscaped garden in front of her.

Phoebe glanced at her briefly then turned to follow her gaze, peering over her spectacles across the wide expanse of lawn. "Good lord!" she exclaimed.

Her gardener, a man of massive proportions, was pounding across the grass, naked to the waist, his huge belly lapping at his trousers like some monstrous tidal wave. The semi-nudity was surprising enough, for Fred held strong views about his position at Streech Grange. Among other things, this required Phoebe to whistle a warning of her approach in the garden so that he might clothe himself suitably for what he referred to as a parley-vous, even in the heat of summer.

"Perhaps he's won the pools," suggested Diana, but without conviction, as the three women watched his rapidly slowing advance.

"Highly unlikely," countered Anne, pushing her chair away from the table. "Fred's inertia would demand a more powerful stimulus than filthy lucre to prompt this bout of activity."

They watched the rest of Fred's approach in silence. He was walking by the time he reached the terrace. He paused for a moment, leaning one hand heavily on the low wall bordering the flagstones, catching his breath. There was a tinge of grey to the weathered cheeks, a rasp in his throat. Concerned, Phoebe gestured to Diana to pull forward a vacant chair, then she stood up, took Fred's arm and helped him into it.

"Whatever's happened?" she asked anxiously.

"Oh, madam, something awful." He was sweating profusely, unable to get the words out quickly. Perspiration ran in streams over his fat brown breasts, soft and round like a woman's, and the smell was all-pervading, consuming the sweet scent of the roses which nodded in beds at the edge of the terrace. Aware of this and of his nakedness, he wrung his hands in embarrassment. "I'm so sorry, madam."

Diana swung her legs off the lounger and sat up, twitching a rug off the back of her chair and placing it neatly across his shoulders. "You should keep yourself warm after a run like that, Fred."

He wrapped the rug around him, nodding his appreciation. "What's happened, Fred?" Phoebe asked again.

"I don't rightly know how to say it"-she thought she saw compassion in his eyes-"but it's got to be told."

"Then tell me," she prompted gently. "I'm sure it can't be that bad." She glanced at Benson, the golden Labrador, still lying placidly by Diana's chair. "Has Hedges been run over?"

He reached out a rough, mud-caked hand from between the folds of the rug and with a familiarity that was quite out of character placed it on hers and squeezed gently. The gesture was as brief as it was unexpected. "There's a body in the old ice house, madam."

There was a moment's silence. "A body?" echoed Phoebe. "What sort of body?" Her voice was unemotional, steady.

Anne flicked a glance in her direction. There were times, she thought, when her friend's composure frightened her.

"To tell you the truth, madam, I didn't look too close. It was a shock, coming on it the way I did." He stared unhappily at his feet. "Stepped on it, like, before I saw it. There was a bit of a smell afterwards." They all looked in fascination at his gardening boots and he, regretting his impulsive statement, shuffled them awkwardly out of sight under the rug. "It's all right, madam," he said, "wiped them on the grass soon as I could."

The cup and saucer in Phoebe's hand rattled and she put them carefully on the table beside her secateurs. "Of course you did, Fred. How thoughtful of you. Would you like some tea? A cake perhaps?" she asked him.

"No, thank you, madam."

Diana turned away, suppressing an awful desire to laugh. Only Phoebe, she thought, of all the women she knew would offer cake in such circumstances. In its way it was admirable, for Phoebe, more than any of them, would be affected by Fred's shocking revelation.

Anne scrabbled among the pages of her manuscript in search of her cigarettes. With an abrupt movement she flicked the box open and offered it to Fred. He glanced at Phoebe for a permission he didn't need and she nodded gravely. "Thank you kindly, Miss Cattrell. My nerves are that shook up."

Anne lit it for him, holding his hand steady with hers. "Let's get this straight, Fred," she said, her dark eyes searching his. "It's a person's dead body. Is that right?"

"That's right, Miss Cattrell."

"Do you know who it is?"

"I can't say I do, miss." He spoke with reluctance. "I can't say anyone will know who it is." He drew deeply on his cigarette, the sweat of suppressed nausea breaking out on his forehead. "The truth is, from the quick look I had, there's not much of it left. It must have been there a while."

The three women looked at him aghast. "But surely it's got clothes on, Fred?" Diana asked nervously. "At least you know if it's a man or woman."

"No clothes that I could see, Mrs. Goode."

"You'd better show me." Phoebe stood up with sudden decision and Fred rose awkwardly to his feet. "I'd rather not, madam. You shouldn't see it. I don't want to take you down there."

"Then I'll go on my own." She smiled suddenly and laid a hand on his arm. "I'm sorry but I have to see it. You do understand that, don't you, Fred?"

He stubbed out his cigarette and pulled the rug tighter about his shoulders. "If you're that intent on going, I'll come with you. It's not something you should see alone."

"Thank you." She turned to Diana. "Will you phone the police for me?"

"Of course."

Anne pushed her chair back. "I'll come with you," she told Phoebe. Then she called after Diana as she followed the other two across the grass. "You might lay on some brandy, I'll be needing some, even if no one else does."

They grouped themselves in a nervous huddle a few yards from the entrance to the ice house. It was an unusual structure, designed and built in the eighteenth century to resemble a small hillock. Its function as an ice-store had ceased years ago with the advent of the refrigerator, and Nature had reasserted her dominion over it so that ranks of nettles marched in their hundreds around the base, making a natural fusion between the man-made dome and the solid earth. The only entrance, a wide low doorway, was set into the ice-house wall at the end of an overgrown pathway. The doorway, too, had long since lost itself in a mass of tangled brambles which grew over it in a thorny curtain from above and below. It was revealed now only because Fred had hacked and trampled the curtain aside to reach it.

A lighted torch lay abandoned on the ground at their feet. Phoebe picked it up. "What made you go in there?" she asked Fred. "We haven't used it for years."

He pulled a face. "I wish I hadn't, madam, God knows. What the eye doesn't see, the heart doesn't grieve over and that's a fact. I've been repairing the kitchen garden wall, where it collapsed a week ago. Half the bricks are unusable-I understood, when I saw the state of them, why the wall collapsed. Handful of dust, some of them. Anyway, I thought of the bricks we stored in here some years back, the ones from the outhouse we demolished. You said: 'Hang on to the good ones, Fred, you never know when we might need them for repairs.' "

"I remember."

"So I wanted to use them for the wall."

"Of course. You had to cut the brambles away?"

He nodded. "I couldn't see the door, it was that overgrown." He pointed to a scythe lying to one side of the ice house. "I used that and my boots to reach it."

"Come on," said Anne suddenly. "Let's get it over with. Talking isn't going to make it any easier."

"Yes," said Phoebe quietly. "Does the door open any wider, Fred?"

"It does, madam. I had it full open before I stepped on what's in there. Pulled it to as far as I could when I left in case anyone came by." He pursed his lips. "To tell you the truth, it's wider now than when I left it."

He walked forward reluctantly and, with a sudden movement, kicked the door. It swung open on creaking hinges. Phoebe crouched and shone the torch into the interior, bathing the contents with warm golden light. It wasn't so much the blackened and eyeless corpse that caused her to vomit, as the sight of Hedges rolling quietly and purposefully in the decomposing remains of the bowels. He came out with his tail between his legs and lay on the grass watching her, head between paws, as she heaved her tea on to the grass.