The Ice House

3

Inside the ice house Chief Inspector Walsh firmly suppressed a slight movement in his bowels. Sergeant McLoughlin showed less control. He ran out of the building and was sick in the nettles alongside it. Unaware that she would have sympathised, he was thankful that Phoebe Maybury had returned to the Grange and was not there to see him.

"Not very nice, is it?" remarked Walsh when the Sergeant came back. "Careful where you're stepping. There are bits all over the place. Must have been where the dog disturbed it."

McLoughlin held a handkerchief to his mouth and retched violently. There was a strong smell of beer about him, and the Inspector eyed him with disfavour. A man of moods himself, he found inconsistency in others unendurable. He knew McLoughlin as well as any of the men he worked with, thought of him as a conscientious type, honest, intelligent, dependable. He even liked the man-he was one of the few who could cope with the notorious pendulum-swings of Walsh's temperament-but to see McLoughlin's weaknesses, disclosed like guilty secrets, irritated Walsh. "What the hell's the matter with you?" he demanded. "Five minutes ago you couldn't even be civil, now you're puking like a bloody baby."

"Nothing, sir."

"Nothing, sir," mimicked Walsh savagely. He would have said more but there was an anger about the younger man that stilled his waspish tongue. With a sigh he took McLoughlin's arm and pushed him outside. "Get me a photographer and some decent lights-it's impossible to see properly. And tell Dr. Webster to get down here as fast as he can. I left a message for him so he should be at the Station by now." He patted the Sergeant's arm clumsily, remembering perhaps that McLoughlin was more often his supporter than his detractor. "If it's any consolation, Andy, I've never seen anything as nasty as this."

As McLoughlin returned thankfully to the house, Inspector Walsh took a pipe from his pocket, filled it and lit it thoughtfully, then began a careful examination of the ground and the brambles around the door and pathway. The ground itself told him little. The summer had been an exceptional one and the last four weeks of almost perpetual sunshine had baked it hard. The only visible tracks were where feet, probably Fred's, had trampled the weeds and grass in front of the brambles. Previous tracks, if any, had long since been obliterated. The brambles might prove more interesting. It was evident, if there were no other entrance to the ice house, that the body had at some point traversed this thorny barrier, either alive on its own two legs or dead on the back of someone else's. The big question was, how long ago? How long had that nightmare been in there?

He walked slowly round the hillock. It would, of course, have been easier to satisfy himself that the door was the only entrance from inside the structure. He excused his reluctance to do this on the basis of not wishing to disturb the evidence more than was necessary but, being honest, he knew it was an excuse. The grisly tomb held no attractions for a man alone, even for a policeman intent on discovering the truth.

He spent some time investigating round the base of an untamed laurel which grew at the back of the ice house, using a discarded bamboo stake to stir up the leaf mould which had collected there. His efforts uncovered only solid brickwork, which looked strong enough to withstand another two hundred years of probing roots. In those days, he thought, they built to last.

He sat back orr his heels for a moment, puffing on his pipe, then resumed his search, poking his stick at intervals into the nettles at the base of the ice-house roof but finding no other obvious points of weakness. He returned to the door and a closer examination of the brambles.

He was no gardener, he relied on his wife to tend their small patio garden where everything grew neatly in tubs, but even to his uneducated eye the brambles had a look of permanence. He spent some moments peering thoughtfully at the clods of earth and grass above the doorway, where roots had been torn free in handfuls, then, careful to avoid the grass which had been trodden on, he squatted beside the area of brambles which had been scythed and trampled flat. The broken stems were green with sap, most of the fruit was still unripe but the odd blackberry, more mature than its fellows, showed black and juicy amidst the ruins of its parent. With the end of the bamboo he carefully lifted the flattened mass of vegetation nearest to him and peered beneath it.

"Found anything, sir?" McLoughlin had returned.

"Look under here, Andy, and tell me what you see."

McLoughlin knelt obligingly beside his superior and stared where Walsh was pointing. "What am I looking for?"

"Stems with old breaks in them. We are safe in assuming our body didn't pole vault over this little lot."

McLoughlin shook his head. "We'd have to take the brambles apart for that, bit by bit, and I doubt we'd have much joy even then. Whoever flattened them did a thorough job."

Walsh lowered the vegetation and removed the bamboo. "The gardener, according to Mrs. Maybury."

"Looks as if he's put a steam-roller over it."

"It's interesting, isn't it?" Walsh stood up. "Did you get hold of Webster?"

"He's on his way, should be here in ten minutes. I've told the others to wait for him. Nick Robinson's already laid on the lights and the camera, so the gardener's showing them all down here once Webster arrives. Except young Williams. I've left him in the house to take background statements and keep his eyes open. He's a sharp lad. If there's anything to see, he'll see it."

"Good. The mortuary van?"

"On stand-by at the station."

Walsh moved a few yards away and sat down on the grass. "We'll wait. There's nothing to be done until the photographs have been taken." He blew a cloud of smoke out of the side of his mouth and squinted through it at McLoughlin. "What is a nude corpse doing in Mrs Maybury's ice house, Sergeant? And what or, perhaps, who, has been eating it?"

With a groan, McLoughlin reached for his handkerchief.

PC Williams had taken statements from Mrs. Maybury, Mrs. Goode and Miss Cattrell and was now with Molly Phillips in the kitchen. For some reason that he couldn't understand, she was being deliberately obstructive and he thought with irritation that his colleagues had a knack of landing themselves the decent jobs. With ill-disguised satisfaction they had set off down the garden with Fred Phillips and the new arrivals and their assorted paraphernalia. Williams, who had seen Andy McLoughlin's face when he came up from the ice house, was consumed with curiosity as to what was down there. McLoughlin's nerves were sprung with Scottish steel, and he had looked as sick as a dog.

Reluctantly Constable Williams returned to the job in hand. "So the first you knew about his body was when Mrs. Goode came in to telephone?"

"What if it was?"

He looked at her in exasperation. "Do you always answer questions with questions?"

"Maybe, maybe not. That's my business."

He was only a lad, the sort that people looked at and said: Policemen are getting younger. He tried a wheedling approach that had worked for him on a couple of occasions in the past. "Listen, Ma-"

"Don't you 'Ma' me," she spat at him viciously. "You're no son of mine. I don't have kids." She turned her back on him and busied herself slicing carrots into a saucepan. "You should be ashamed of yourself. What would your mother say? She's the only one you've a right to call Ma like that."

Frustrated old cow, he thought. He looked at the thin, drooping shoulders and reckoned her problem was that her old man had never given her a proper working over. "I don't even know who she is."

She was still for a moment, knife poised in mid-air, then went on with her slicing. She said nothing.

Williams tried another tack. "All I'm doing, Mrs. Phillips, is getting some background details on the discovery of the body. Mrs. Goode has told me she came into the house to make the telephone call to us. She said you were in the hall when she made it and that afterwards she went down to the cellar to get some brandy because there was none left on the sideboard. Is that right?"

"If Mrs. Goode says it is, that's enough for you. There's no need to come sneaking round here behind her back trying to find out if she's telling lies."

He looked at her sharply. "Is she telling lies?"

"No, she's not. The very idea."

"Then what's all the mystery?" he asked her angry back. "What are you being so secretive about?"

She rounded on him. "Don't you take that tone with me. I know your sort. None better. You'll not browbeat me." She whisked the teacup from under his nose where he sat at the table and dumped it unceremoniously in her washing-up bowl. He could have sworn there were tears in her eyes.

The police photographer picked his way gingerly out of the doorway and lifted the camera strap over his neck. "Finished, sir," he told Walsh.

The Chief Inspector placed a hand on his shoulder. "Good man. Back to the Station with you then and get that film developed." He turned to the pathologist. "Shall we go in, Webster?"

Dr. Webster smiled grimly. "Do I have a choice?"

"After you," said Walsh maliciously.

The scene was lit now with battery-run arc-lights, every detail showing with stark clarity, no shadows to soften the shocking impact. Walsh gazed dispassionately on the body. It was true, he thought, that exposure to violence desensitised a man. He could barely recall his earlier repugnance, though perhaps the lights had something to do with this. As a child the dark had held terrors for him, with nightmare creations of his imagining lurking in the corners of his bedroom. His father, in other respects a kind man but fearing the embarrassment of an effeminate son, was unsympathetic and had closed his ears to the muffled weeping inside a bedroom from which all the light bulbs had been removed.

"Good God," said Webster, surveying the ice-house floor with marked distaste. He picked his way carefully towards the centre of it, avoiding tattered pieces of hardened entrail which lay on the flagstones. He looked at the head. "Good God," he said again.

The head, still tethered to the upper torso by blackened sinew, was wedged in a gap in the top row of a neat stack of bricks. Dull grey hair, long enough to be a woman's, spilled out of the gap. Eyeless sockets, showing bone underneath, and exposed upper and lower jaw bones gleamed white against the blackened musculature of the face. The chest area, anchored by the head against the vertical face of bricks, looked as if it had been skilfully filleted. The lower half of the body lay unnaturally askew of its top half in a position that no living person, however supple, could have achieved. The abdominal region had all but disappeared though shreds of it lay about as mute witnesses that it had once existed. There were no genitals. The lower half of the left arm, propped on a smaller pile of bricks, was some four feet from the body, much of the flesh stripped away, but some sinews remaining to show it had been wrenched from its elbow. The right arm, pressed against the torso, had the same blackened quality as the head with patches of white bone showing through. Of the legs, only the calves and feet were immediately recognisable, but at a distance from each other in a grotesque parody of the splits and twisted upside down so that the soles pointed at the ice-house roof. Of the thighs, only splintered bones remained.

"Well?" said Walsh after some minutes during which the pathologist took temperature readings and made a rough sketch of the lie of the body.

"What do you want to know?"

"Man or woman?"

Webster pointed to the feet. "From the size, I'd guess a man. We can't be sure until we've done some measurements, of course, but it looks like it. If it's not a man, it was a big woman and a mannish one."

"The hair's on the long side for a man. Unless it grew significantly after death."

"Where have you been living, George? Even if it were down to the waist, it wouldn't tell you anything about the sex. And hair growth after death is minimal. No," continued Webster, "all things considered, I'd say we're dealing with a man, subject to confirmation, of course."

"Any idea of age?"

"None, except that he's probably over twenty-one and even that's not certain. Some people go grey in their teens. I'll have to X-ray the skull for fusion between the plates."

"How long has he been dead?"

Webster pursed his lips. "That's going to be a bugger to decide. Old Fred out there said there was a bit of a stink when he stepped on it which would indicate a comparatively recent demise." He sucked his teeth thoughtfully for some minutes, then shook his head and examined the floor carefully, using a spatula to loosen some dark material near the door. He sniffed the spatula. "Excreta," he announced, "fairly recent, probably animal. You'd better take a cast of that to see if it's got Fred's boot prints. How long's he been dead?" He shivered suddenly. "This is an ice house and several degrees cooler than it is outside. No obvious maggot infestation which implies the blowflies weren't attracted. If they had been, there'd be even less of it left. Frankly, George, your guess is as good as mine how long dead flesh would keep in this temperature. There is also the small matter of decomposition being hastened by consumption. We could be talking weeks, we could be talking months. I just don't know. I'll need to consult on this one."

"Years?"

"No," Webster said firmly. "You'd be looking at a skeleton."

"Supposing he was frozen when he came in. Would that make a difference?"

The pathologist snorted. "You mean frozen as in fish fingers?" Walsh nodded. "That's really too fantastic, George. You'd need a commercial freezer to freeze a man this size, and how would you transport him here? And why freeze him in the first place?" Webster frowned. "It wouldn't make much difference as far as your investigation goes either. An ice house only keeps things frozen when it's full of ice. A frozen man would defrost in here just like a turkey in a larder. No, that's got to be out of the question."

Walsh was staring thoughtfully at the severed arm. "Has it? Odder things have happened. Perhaps he's been in cold storage for ten years and was left here recently for someone to find."

Webster whistled. "David Maybury?"

"It's a possibility." He squatted down and gestured to the distorted and tattered hand. "What do you make of this? Looks to me as if the last two fingers are missing."

Webster joined him. "It's difficult to say," he said doubtfully. "Something's had a damn good go at it." He glanced about the floor. "You'll have to sweep up very thoroughly, make sure you don't miss anything. It's certainly odd. Could be coincidence, I suppose."

Walsh stood up. "I don't believe in coincidences. Any idea what he died of?"

"A first guess, George. Massive bleeding from a wound or wounds in his abdomen."

Walsh glanced at him in surprise. "You're very positive."

"A guess, I said. You'll have to find his clothes to be sure. But look at him. The area from the abdomen down has been completely devoured, except for the lower halves of the legs. Imagine him sitting up, legs out in front of him, with blood pouring out of his belly. It would be seeping over precisely those parts which have been eaten."

Inspector Walsh felt suddenly faint. "Are you saying whatever it was ate him while he was still alive?"

"Well, don't have nightmares about it, old chap. If he was alive, he'd have been in a coma and wouldn't have known anything about it, otherwise he'd have scared the scavengers off. Stands to reason. Of course," he continued thoughtfully, "if he was defrosting slowly, the blood and water would liquefy to achieve the same result."

Walsh performed the laborious ritual of lighting his pipe again, billowing clouds of blue smoke from the side of his mouth. Webster's mention of smell had made him aware of an underlying odour which he hadn't previously noticed. For some minutes he watched the doctor making a close examination of the head and chest, at one point taking some measurements. "What sort of scavengers are we talking about? Foxes, rats?"

"Difficult to say." He peered closely at one of the eye sockets, before indicating the fractured thigh bones. "Something with strong jaws, I would guess. One thing's for certain, two of them have had a fight over him. Look at the way the legs are lying and that arm, pulled apart at the elbow. I'd say there's been a tug-of-war here." He pursed his lip's again. "Badgers possibly. More likely dogs."

Walsh thought of the yellow Labradors lying on the warm flagstones, remembered how one of them had nuzzled the palm of his hand. With an abrupt movement, he wiped the hand down his trouser leg. He puffed smoke relentlessly into the atmosphere. "I follow your reasoning about why the animals should have gone for the abdomen and thighs, but they seem to have done a pretty good job on the top half as well. Why is that? Is it normal?"

Webster stood up and wiped his forehead with the sleeve of his shirt. "God knows, George. About the only thing I'm sure of is that this whole thing is abnormal. I'll hazard a guess that the poor sod pressed his left hand to his belly to try to stop the blood running out or hold his guts in, whichever you prefer, then did what I just did- wiped the sweat off his face and smeared himself with blood. That would have attracted rats or whatever to his left hand and arm and the upper half of his body."

"You said he'd have been in a coma." Walsh's tone was accusing,

"Maybe he was, maybe he wasn't. How the hell should I know? Anyway, people move in comas."

Walsh took his pipe out of his mouth and used its stem to point at the chest. "Shall I tell you what that looks like to me?"

"Go on."

"The bones on a breast of lamb after my wife's skinned the meat off it with a sharp knife."

Webster looked tired. "I know. I'm hoping it's deceptive. If it's not-well, you don't need me to spell out what it means."

"The villagers say the women here are witches."

Webster peeled off his gloves. "Let's get out of here-unless there's anything else you think I can tell you. My own view is I'll find out more when I've got him on the slab."

"Just one thing. Do you reckon he got his abdominal wound here or somewhere else?"

Webster picked up his case and led the way out. "Don't ask me, George. The only thing I'm sure of is that he was alive when he got here. Whether he was already bleeding, I wouldn't know." He paused in the doorway. "Unless there's anything in this freezer theory, of course. Then he'd have been good and dead."