The Ice House

4

Three hours later, after the remains had been painstakingly removed under the direction of Dr. Webster, and a laborious investigation of the ice-house interior had revealed little of note beyond a pile of dead bracken in one corner, the door was sealed and Walsh and McLoughlin returned to Streech Grange. Phoebe offered them the library to work in and, with a remarkable lack of curiosity, left them to their deliberations.

A team of policemen remained behind to comb the area in expanding circles round the ice house. Privately, Walsh thought this a wasted exercise-if too much time had elapsed between the body's arrival and its discovery, the surrounding area would tell them nothing. However, routine work had produced unlikely evidence before, and now various samples from the ice house were awaiting dispatch to the forensic labs. These included brick dust, tufts of fur, some discoloured mud off the floor and what Dr. Webster asserted were the splintered remains of a lamb bone which McLoughlin had found amongst the brambles outside the door. Young Constable Williams, still ignorant of exactly what had been in the ice house, was summoned to the library.

He found Walsh and McLoughlin sitting side by side behind a mahogany desk of heroic proportions, the photographic evidence, developed at speed, spread fan-like in front of them. An ancient Anglepoise lamp with a green shade was the only lighting in the rapidly darkening room and, as Williams entered, Walsh bent the light away to soften the brightness of its glare. For the young PC, viewing the pictures upside down and in semi-darkness, it was a tantalising glimpse of the horrors he had so far only imagined. He read his small collection of statements with half an eye on McLoughlin's face, where black hollows were etched deep by the shadowy light. Jesus, but the bastard looked ill. He wondered if the whispers he'd heard were true.

"Their statements about the finding of the body are all consistent, sir. Nothing untoward in that direction." He looked suddenly smug. "But I reckon I've got a lead in another direction."

"You do, do you?"

"Yes, sir. I'm betting Mr. and Mrs. Phillips were inside before they came to work here." He consulted his neat and tiny script. "Mrs. Phillips was very peculiar, wouldn't answer any of my questions, kept accusing me of browbeating her, which I wasn't, and saying: 'That's for me to know and you to find out.' When I told her I'd have to take it up with Mrs. Maybury, she damn near bit my head off. 'Don't you go worrying madam,' she said, 'Fred and me's kept our noses clean since we've been out and that's all you need to know.' " He looked up triumphantly.

Walsh made a note on a piece of paper. "All right, Constable, we'll look into it."

McLoughlin saw the boy's disappointment and stirred himself. "Good work, Williams," he murmured. "I think we should lay on sandwiches, sir. No one's had anything to eat since midday." He thought of the liquid lunch he'd lost into the brambles. He'd have given his right arm for a beer. "There's a pub at the bottom of the hill. Could Gavin get something made up for the lads?"

Testily, Walsh fished two tenners out of his jacket pocket. "Sandwiches," he ordered. "Nothing too expensive. Leave some with us and take the rest to the ice house. You can stay and help the search down there." He glanced behind him out of the window. "They've got the arc-lights. Tell them to keep going as long as they can. We'll be down later. And don't forget my change."

"Sir." Williams left in a hurry before the Inspector could change his mind.

"He wouldn't be so bloody keen if he'd seen what was there," remarked Walsh acidly, poking the photographs with a skinny finger. "I wonder if he's right about the Phillips couple. Does the name ring a bell with you?"

"No."

"Nor with me. Let's run through what we've got." He took out his pipe and stuffed tobacco absentmindedly into the bowl. Aloud, he sifted fussily through what facts they had, picking at them like chicken bones.

McLoughlin listened but didn't hear. His head hurt where a blood vessel, engorged and fat, was threatening to burst. Its roaring deafened him.

He picked a pencil off the desk and balanced it between his fingers. The ends trembled violently and he let it fall with a clatter. He forced himself to concentrate.

"So where do we start, Andy?"

"The ice house and who knew it was there. It has to be the key." He isolated an exterior shot from the photographs on the desk and held it to the lamplight with shaking fingers. "It looks like a hill," he muttered. "How would a stranger know it was hollow?"

Walsh clamped the pipe between his teeth and lit it. He didn't answer but took the photograph and studied it intently, smoking for a minute or two in silence.

Unemotionally, McLoughlin gazed on the pictures of the body. "Is it Maybury?"

"Too early to say. Webster's gone back to check the dental and medical records. The bugger is we can't compare fingerprints. We weren't able to lift any from the house at the time of his disappearance. Not that we'd get a match. Both hands out there were in ribbons." He tamped the burning tobacco with the end of his thumb. "David Maybury had a very distinctive characteristic," he continued after a moment. "The last two fingers of his left hand were missing. He lost them in a shooting accident."

McLoughlin felt the first flutterings of awakening interest. "So it is him."

"Could be."

"That body hasn't been there ten years, sir. Dr. Webster was talking in terms of months."

"Maybe, maybe. I'll reserve judgement till I've seen the postmortem report."

"What was he like? Mrs. Goode called him an out-and-out bastard."

"I'd say that's a fair assessment. You can read up about him. It's all on file. I had a psychologist go through the evidence we took from the people who knew him. His unofficial verdict, bearing in mind he never met the man, was that Maybury showed marked psychopathic tendencies, particularly when drunk. He had a habit of beating people up, women as well as men." Walsh puffed a spurt of smoke from the side of his mouth and eyed his subordinate. "He put himself about a bit. We turned up at least three little tarts who kept warm beds for him in London."

"Did she know?" He nodded towards the hall.

Walsh shrugged. "Claimed she didn't."

"Did he beat her up?"

"Undoubtedly, I should think, except she denied it. She had a bruise the size of a football on her face when she reported him missing and we found out she was twice admitted to hospital when he was alive, once with a fractured wrist and once with cracked ribs and a broken collar-bone. She told doctors she was accident-prone." He gave a harsh laugh. "They didn't believe her any more than I did. He used her as his personal punch bag whenever he was drunk."

"So why didn't she leave? Or perhaps she enjoyed the attention?"

Walsh considered him thoughtfully for a moment. He started to say something, then thought better of it. "Streech Grange has been in her family for years. He lived here on sufferance and used her capital to run a small wine business from the house. Presumably most of the stock's still here if she hasn't drunk or sold it. No, she wouldn't leave. In fact I can't imagine any circumstances at all, not even fire, which would make her abandon her precious Streech Grange. She's a very tough lady."

"And, I suppose, as he was in clover, he wouldn't go either."

"That's about the size of it."

"So she got rid of him."

Walsh nodded.

"But you couldn't prove it."

"No."

McLoughlin's bleak face cracked into a semblance of a grin. "She must have come up with one hell of a story."

"Matter of fact, it was bloody awful. She told us he walked out one night and never returned." Walsh wiped a dribble of tar and saliva off the end of his pipe with his sleeve. "It was three days before she reported him missing, and she only did that because people had started to ask where he was. In that time she packed up all his clothes and sent them off to some charity whose name she couldn't remember, she burnt all his photos and went through this house with a vacuum cleaner and a cloth soaked with bleach to remove every last trace of him. In other words she behaved exactly like someone who had just murdered her husband and was trying to get rid of the evidence. We salvaged some hair that she'd missed in a brush, a current passport and photo that she'd overlooked at the back of a desk drawer, and an old blood donor card. And that was it. We turned this house and garden upside down, called in forensic to do a microscopic search and it was a waste of time. We scoured the countryside for him, showed his photo at all the ports and airports in case he'd somehow got through without a passport, alerted Interpol to look for him on the Continent, dredged lakes and rivers, released his photo to the national newspapers. Nothing. He simply vanished into thin air."

"So how did she explain the bruise on her face?"

The Inspector chuckled. "A door. What else? I tried to help her, suggested she killed her husband in self-defence. But no, he never touched her." He shook his head, remembering. "Extraordinary woman. She never made it easy for herself. She could have manufactured any number of stories to convince us he'd planned his disappearance-money troubles, for a start. He left her well-nigh penniless. But she did the reverse-she kept stolidly repeating that one night and for no reason he simply walked out and never came back. Only dead men disappear as completely as that."

"Clever," said McLoughlin reluctantly. "She kept it simple, gave you nothing to pick holes in. So why didn't you charge her? Prosecutions have been brought without bodies before."

The memories of ten years ago flooded back to try Walsh's patience. "We couldn't put a case together," he snapped. "There wasn't one shred of evidence to dispute her bloody stupid story that he'd upped and left. We needed the body. We dug up half Hampshire looking for the blasted thing." He fell silent for a moment, then tapped the photograph of the ice house which lay on the desk in front of him. "You were right about this."

"In what way?"

"It is the key. We searched Streech gardens from end to end ten years ago and none of us looked in here. I'd never seen an ice house in my life, never even heard of such a thing. So of course I didn't know the bloody hill was hollow. How the hell could I? No one told me. I remember standing on it at one point to get my bearings. I even remember, telling one of my chaps to delve deep into those brambles. It was like a jungle." He wiped the stem of his pipe on his sleeve again before putting it back in his mouth. Dried tar criss-crossed the tweed like black threads. "I'll lay you any money you like, Andy, Maybury's body was in there all the time."

There was a knock at the door and Phoebe came in carrying a tray of sandwiches. "Constable Williams told me you were hungry, Inspector. I asked Molly to make these up for you."

"Why thank you, Mrs. Maybury. Come and sit down." Phoebe put the tray of sandwiches on the desk, then seated herself in a leather armchair slightly to one side of it. The lamp on the desk shed a pool of light, embracing the three figures in a reluctant intimacy. The smoke from Walsh's pipe hung above them, floating in the air like curling tendrils of cirrus clouds. For one long moment there was complete silence, before the chiming mechanism of a grandfather clock whirred into action and struck the hour, nine o'clock.

Walsh, as if on cue, leant forward and addressed the woman. "Why didn't you tell us about the ice house ten years ago, Mrs. Maybury?"

For a moment he thought she looked surprised, even a little relieved, then the expression vanished. Afterwards, he couldn't be sure it had been there at all. "I don't understand," she said.

Inspector Walsh gestured to McLoughlin to switch on the overhead lights. The muted lamplight disguised, deceived when he wanted to see every nuance of the extraordinarily impassive face. "It's quite simple," he murmured, after McLoughlin had flooded the room with brilliant white light, "in our search for your husband, we never looked in the ice house. We didn't know it was there." He studied her thoughtfully. "And you didn't tell us."

"I don't remember," she said simply. "If I didn't tell you, it was because I had forgotten about it. Did you not find it yourselves?"

"No."

She gave a tiny shrug. "Does it really matter, Inspector, after all this time?"

He ignored the question. "Do you recall when the ice house was last used prior to your husband's disappearance?"

She leant her head tiredly against the back of her chair, her red hair splaying out around her pale face. Behind her glasses her eyes looked huge. Walsh knew her to be in her mid-thirties, yet she looked younger than his own daughter. He felt McLoughlin stir in the seat beside him as if her fragility had touched him in some way. Damn the woman, he thought with irritation, remembering the emotions she had once stirred in him. That appearance of vulnerability was a thin cloak for the sharp mind beneath.

"You'll have to let me think about it," she said. "At the moment, I honestly can't remember if we ever used it when David was alive. I have no recollection of it." She paused briefly. "I do recall my father using it as a darkroom one winter when I was on holiday from school. He didn't do it for very long." She smiled. "He said it was a confounded bore slogging all the way down there in the cold." She gave a low ripple of laughter as if memories of her father made her happy. "He took the films to a professional in Silverborne instead. My mother said it was because he enjoyed blaming someone else when the prints were disappointing, which they often were. He wasn't a very good photographer." She looked steadily at the Inspector. "I can't remember its being used after that, not until we decided to stack the bricks in there. The children might know. I suppose I could ask them."

Walsh remembered her children, a gangling ten-year-old boy, arriving home from his boarding prep-school in the middle of the investigation, his eyes the same clear blue as his mother's, and an eight-year-old daughter with a bush of curling dark hair. They had protected her, he recalled, with the same fierce quality that her two friends had shown earlier in the drawing-room. "Jonathan and Jane," he said. "Do they still live at home, Mrs. Maybury?"

"Not really. Jonathan rents a flat in London. He's a medical student at Guy's. Jane is studying politics and philosophy at Oxford. They spend the odd weekend and holidays here. That's all."

"They've done well. You must be pleased." He thought sourly of his own daughter who had got herself pregnant at sixteen and who now, at the age of twenty-five, was divorced with four children, and had nothing to look forward to except life in a tatty council flat. He consulted his notes. "You seem to have acquired a profession since I last saw you, Mrs. Maybury. Constable Williams tells me you're a market gardener."

Phoebe seemed puzzled by his change of direction. "Fred's helped me build up a small Pelargonium nursery." She spoke warily. "We specialise in the Ivyleaf varieties."

"Who buys them?"

"We have two main customers in this country, one's a supermarket chain and the other's a garden-supplies outlet in Devon and Cornwall. We've also had a few bulk orders from the States which we've air-freighted out." She was intensely suspicious of him. "Why do you want to know?"

"No particular reason," he assured her. He sucked noisily on his pipe. "I expect you get a lot of customers from the village."

"None," she said shortly. "We don't sell direct to the public and, anyway, they wouldn't come here if we did."

"You're not very popular in Streech, are you, Mrs. Maybury?"

"So it would seem, Inspector."

"You worked as a receptionist in the doctor's surgery ten years ago. Didn't you like that job?"

A flicker of amusement lifted the corners of her mouth. "I was asked to leave. The patients felt uncomfortable with a murderess."

"Did your husband know about the ice house?" He shot the question at her suddenly, unnerving her.

"That it was there, you mean?"

He nodded.

"I'm sure he must have done, though, as I say, I don't remember him ever going in there."

Walsh made a note. "We'll follow that up. The children may remember something. Will they be here this weekend, Mrs. Maybury?"

She felt cold. "I suppose if they don't come down, you'll send a policeman to them."

"It's important."

There was a tremor in her voice. "Is it, Inspector? You have our word there was no body in there six years ago. What possible connection can that-that thing have with David's disappearance?" She took off her glasses and pressed her fingertips against her eyelids. "I don't want the children harassed. They suffered enough when David went missing. To have the whole ghastly trauma played out a second time and for no obvious reason would be intolerable."

Walsh smiled indulgently. "Routine questions, Mrs. Maybury. Hardly very traumatic, surely?"

She put her glasses on again, angered by his response. "You were extraordinarily stupid ten years ago, of course. Why I ever assumed the passage of time would make you any brighter, I can't think. You sent us to hell and you call it 'hardly traumatic.' Do you know what hell is? Hell is what a little girl of eight goes through when the police dig up all the flowerbeds and question her mother for hours on end in a closed room. Hell is what is in your young son's eyes when his father deserts him without a word of explanation and his mother is accused of murder. Hell is seeing your children hurting and not being able to do a damn thing to stop it. You asked me if I was pleased with their achievements." She leaned forward, her face twisted. "Surely even you could have come up with something a little more imaginative? They have lived through the mysterious disappearance of their father, their mother being branded a murderess, their home being turned into a tourist attraction for the ghoulish and they have survived it relatively unscathed. I think 'ecstatic' might be a better description of how I feel about the way they've turned out."

"We suggested at the time you should send the children away, Mrs Maybury." Walsh kept his voice carefully neutral. "You chose to keep them here against our advice."

Phoebe stood up. It was only the second time he had ever seen any violent emotion on that face. "My God, I hate you." She put her hands on the desk and he saw that the fingers trembled uncontrollably. "Where was I to send them? My parents were dead, I had no brothers or sisters, neither Anne nor Diana was in a position to care for them. Was I supposed to entrust them to strangers when their own secure world was turning upside down?" She thought of her only relation, her father's unmarried sister, who had fallen out with the family years before. The old lady had read between every line of every newspaper with voracious delight and had penned her own small piece of poison to Phoebe on the subject of the sins of the parents. What her intentions were in writing the letter was anyone's guess but, in a strange way, her warped predictions for Jonathan and Jane had been a liberation for Phoebe. She had seen clearly then-and for the first time-that the past was dead and buried and that regrets would achieve her nothing.

"How dare you speak to me of choice! My only choice was to smile while you shat on me and never once let the children know how frightened and alone I felt." Her fingers gripped the edge of the desk. "I will not go through all that again. I will not allow you to stick your dirty fingers into my children's lives. You've spread your filthy muck here once. You're bloody well not going to do it again." She turned away and walked to the door.

"I've some more questions for you, Mrs. Maybury. Please don't go."

She looked round briefly as she opened the door. "Fuck off, Inspector." The door slammed behind her.

McLoughlin had listened to their exchange with rapt attention. "Bit of a sea-change from this afternoon. Is she always as volatile?"

"Quite the reverse. Ten years ago we never rattled her composure once." He sucked thoughtfully on his filthy briar.

"It's those two dykes she's shacked up with. They've turned her against men."

Walsh was amused. "I should think David Maybury did that years ago. Let's talk to Mrs. Goode. Will you go and find her?"

McLoughlin reached for a sandwich and crammed it into his mouth before standing up. "What about the other one? Shall I line her up too?"

The Chief Inspector thought for a moment. "No. She's a dark horse, that one. I'll let her stew till I've checked up on her."

From where he was standing, McLoughlin could see pink scalp shining through Walsh's thinning hair. He felt a sudden tenderness for the older man, as if Phoebe's hostility had exorcised his own and reminded him where his loyalties lay. "She's your most likely suspect, sir. She'd have enjoyed cutting that poor sod's balls off. The other two would have hated it."

"You're probably right, lad, but I'm betting he was dead when she did it."