The Ice House

5

Streech Grange was a fine old Jacobean mansion built of grey stone, with mullioned, leaded windows and steep slate roofs. Two wings, later additions, extended out at either end of the main body of the house, embracing the sides of the flagged terrace where the women had taken their tea. Stud partitions inside made each of these wings self-contained, with unlocked doors on the ground floor giving access to and from them. Sergeant McLoughlin, after a fruitless search of the drawing-room and the kitchen which were both empty, came to the communicating door with the east wing. He tapped lightly but, getting no response, turned the handle and walked down the corridor in front of him.

A door stood ajar at the end. He could hear a deep voice-unmistakably Anne Cattrell's-coming from inside the room. He listened.

"…stick to your guns and don't let the bastards intimidate you. God knows, I've had more experience of them than most. Whatever happens, Jane must be kept out of the way. You agree?" There was a murmur of assent. "And, old love, if you can wipe the smirk off that Sergeant's face, you'll have my lifelong admiration."

"I suppose it's occurred to you"-the lighter amused voice was Diana's-"that he might have been born with that smirk. Perhaps it's a disability he's had to learn to cope with, like a withered arm. You'd be quite sympathetic if that were the case."

Anne gave her throaty laugh. "The only disabilities that idiot has are both in his trousers."

"Namely?"

"He's a prick and an arsehole."

Diana crowed with laughter and McLoughlin felt a dull flush creep up his neck. He trod softly to the communicating door, closed it behind him and knocked again, this time more loudly. When, after some moments, Anne opened the door, he was ready with his most sardonic smile.

"Yes, Sergeant?"

"I'm looking for Mrs. Goode. Inspector Walsh would like a word with her."

"This is my wing. She's not here."

The lie was so blatant that he looked at her in astonishment. "But-" He paused.

"But what, Sergeant?"

"Where will I find her?"

"I've no idea. Perhaps the Inspector would like to speak to me instead?"

McLoughlin pushed past her impatiently and walked down the corridor and into the room. There was no one in there. He frowned. The room was a large one with a desk at one end and a sofa and armchairs grouped about a wide fireplace at the other. Pot plants grew in profusion everywhere, cascading like green waterfalls from the mantelpiece, climbing up lattice-work on one of the walls, dappling the light from the lamps on low occasional tables. Floor to ceiling curtains in a herringbone pattern of pale pinks, greys and blues were drawn along the length of the two outside walls, a royal blue carpet covered the floor, bright abstract paintings laughed merrily from the picture rails. Books in bookcases stood as straight as soldiers wherever there was a space. It was a delightful room, not one that McLoughlin would ever have associated with the tiny muscular woman who had followed him in and was now leaning her cropped, dark head against the door-jamb, waiting.

"Do you make a habit of forcing your way into people's private apartments, Sergeant? I have no recollection of inviting you in."

"We have Mrs. Maybury's permission to come and go as we please," he said dismissively.

She walked over to one of the armchairs and slumped into it, taking a cigarette from a packet on the arm. "Of course, in her house," she agreed, lighting the cigarette. "But this wing is mine. You have no authority to enter here except by permission or with a warrant."

"I'm sorry," he said stiffly. He felt suddenly uncomfortable, towering over her, conspicuously ill-at-ease while she, by contrast, was relaxed. "I was not aware you owned this part of the house."

"I don't own it, I rent it, but the legal position with regard to police entry is the same." She smiled thinly. "As a matter of interest, what possible reason had you for thinking Mrs. Goode might be in here?"

He saw one of the curtain edges lift as a gentle breeze caught it, and realised Diana must have left by a French window. He cursed himself silently for allowing this woman to make a mockery of him. "I couldn't find her anywhere else," he said brusquely, "and Inspector Walsh wants to speak to her. Does she live in the other wing?"

"She rents the other wing. As to living in it-surely you've guessed we all three rather muck in together. It's what's known as a menage a tross, though in our case, rather loosely. The average threesome includes both sexes. We, I'm afraid, are more exclusive, preferring, as we do, our peculiarly-how shall I describe it?-spicy female sex. Three makes for more exciting encounters than two, don't you think. Or have you never tried?"

His dislike of her was irrational and intense. He jerked his head in the direction of the main part of the house. "Have you corrupted her children the way you've corrupted her?"

She laughed softly and stood up. "You'll find Mrs. Goode in her sitting-room, I expect. I'll show you out." She led the way along her corridor and opened the door. "Walk straight through the main body of the house until you reach the west wing. It's a mirror image of this. You'll find a similar door to mine leading into it." She pointed to a bell on the wall which he hadn't previously noticed. "I should ring that if I were you. At the very least, it would be polite." She stood watching him as he walked away, a scornful smile distorting her lips.

Andy McLoughlin had to pass the library door to reach the west wing so he looked in to tell Walsh it would be a few minutes yet before he returned with Diana Goode. To his surprise, she was in there already, sitting in the chair Phoebe had sat in. She and the Inspector turned their heads as the door opened. They were laughing together like people sharing a private joke.

"There you are, Sergeant. We've been waiting for you."

He took his seat again and viewed Diana with suspicion. "How did you know the Inspector wanted to talk to you?" He pictured her outside the French windows listening to Anne Cattrell making a fool of him.

"I didn't, Sergeant. I popped my head in to see if you wanted a cup of coffee." She smiled good-humouredly and crossed one elegant leg over the other. "What did you want to talk to me about, Inspector?"

There was an appreciative gleam in George Walsh's eye. "How long have you known Mrs. Maybury?" he asked her.

"Twenty-five years. Since we were twelve. We were at boarding school together. Anne, too."

"A long time."

"Yes. We've known her longer than anyone else, I suppose, longer even than her parents did. They died when she was in her early twenties." She came to a halt. "But you know all about that from last time," she finished awkwardly.

"Remind us," Walsh encouraged.

Diana lowered her eyes to hide their expression. It was all very well for Anne to say don't let the bastards intimidate you. Knowledge itself was intimidating. With one casual reference, the sort she might make to anyone, she had rekindled the sparks of an old suspicion. No smoke without fire, everyone had said when David disappeared.

"They died in a car crash, didn't they?" Walsh prompted.

She nodded. "The brakes failed. They were dead when they were cut out of the wreckage." There was a long silence.

"If I remember correctly," said Walsh to McLoughlin when Diana didn't go on, "there were rumours of sabotage. Am I right, Mrs. Goode? The village seemed to think Mrs. Maybury caused the accident to get her hand prematurely on her inheritance. People have long memories. The story was resurrected at the time of Mr. Maybury's disappearance."

McLoughlin studied Diana's bent head. "Why should they think that?" he asked.

"Because they're stupid," she said fiercely. "There was no truth in it. The Coroner's verdict couldn't have been clearer-the brakes failed because fluid had leaked from a corroded hose. The car was supposed to have been serviced three weeks before by a man called Casey who owned the garage in the village. He was just a bloody little crook. He took the money and didn't do the job." She frowned. "There was talk of a prosecution but it never came to anything. Not enough evidence, apparently. Anyway, it was Casey who started rumours that Phoebe had sabotaged the car to get her hands on Streech Grange. He didn't want to lose his customers."

McLoughlin looked her up and down, but there was no appreciative gleam in his eyes. His indifference was complete and, to a woman like Diana who used flirtation to manipulate both sexes, it was daunting. Charm was powerless against a stone wall. "There must have been more to it than that," he suggested dryly. "People aren't usually so gullible."

She played with the hem of her jacket. "It was David's fault. Phoebe's parents had given them a little house in Pimlico as a wedding present which David used as collateral for a loan. He lost the lot on some stock market gamble, couldn't make the repayments and they were in the throes of foreclosure at the time of the accident, with two small children, no money and nowhere to go." She shook her head. "God knows how, but that became public knowledge. The locals lapped up what Casey was saying, put two and two together and made five. From the moment Phoebe took over this house, she was damned. David's disappearance a few years later simply confirmed all their prejudices." She sighed. "The sickening thing is, they didn't believe Casey either. He went bankrupt ten months later when all his customers deserted him. He had to sell up and move away, so there was some justice," she said spitefully. "Not that it did Phoebe any good. They were too damn stupid to see that if he was lying, she was innocent."

McLoughlin leaned back in his chair, splaying strong fingers against the desk-top. He flicked her an unexpectedly boyish smile. "It must have been awful for her."

She responded guardedly. "It was. She was so young and she had to cope with it alone. David either took himself off for weeks'at a time or made matters worse by getting into rows with people."

His eyes softened, as if he understood loneliness and could sympathise with it. "And I suppose her friends here deserted her because of him?"

Diana thawed. "She never really had any, that was half the trouble. If she had, it would have made all the difference. She went away to boarding school at the age of twelve, married at seventeen and only came back when her parents were dead. She's never had any friends in Streech."

McLoughlin drummed his fingers softly on the mahogany. " 'The worst solitude is to be destitute of sincere friendship.' Francis Bacon said that four hundred years ago."

She was quite taken aback. Anne used Francis Bacon quotes as a matter of course but they tended to be flippant, throw-away lines, tossed into a conversation for careless effect. McLoughlin's dark voice lingered over the words, rolling them on his tongue, giving them weight. She was as surprised by their aptness as by the fact that he knew them. She regarded him thoughtfully.

"But he also said, 'The mould of a man's fortune is in his own hands.' " His lips twisted cruelly. "It's odd, isn't it, how Mrs. Maybury brings out the worst in people? What's her secret, I wonder?" He stirred the photographs of crude death with the end of his pencil, turning them slowly so that Diana could see them. "Why didn't she sell the Grange and move away, once she'd got rid of her husband?"

For all her surface sophistication, Diana was naive. Brutality shocked her because she never saw it coming. "She couldn't," she snapped angrily. "It's not Phoebe's to sell. After a year of marriage to that bastard, she persuaded her father to change his will and leave the house to her children. We three rent it from them."

"Then why haven't her children sold it? Have they no sympathy for their mother?" He caught her eye. "Or perhaps they don't like her? It seems to be a common problem for Mrs. Maybury."

Anger threatened to overwhelm Diana. She forced herself to stay calm. "The idea, Sergeant, was to prevent David turning the house into ready cash and leaving Phoebe and the children homeless the minute the Gallaghers died. He'd have done it, too, given half a chance. He went through the money she inherited in record time. Colonel Gallagher, Phoebe's father, left instructions that the house could not be sold or mortgaged except under the most exceptional circumstances before Jane's twenty-first birthday. The responsibility for deciding whether those circumstances-principally financial distress on the part of Phoebe and her children-ever materialise was left to two trustees. In the view of the trustees, things have never got so bad that the sale of the Grange was the only option."

"Was no other distress taken into account?"

"Of course not," she said with heavy sarcasm. "How could it have been? Colonel Gallagher wasn't clairvoyant. He did give discretion to the trustees but they have chosen to stick to the precise terms of the will. In view of the uncertainty over David, whether he's dead or alive, it seemed the safest thing to do, even if Phoebe did suffer." She glanced at Walsh to draw him back into the discussion. McLoughlin frightened her. "The trustees have always put the children first, as they were instructed to do under the terms of the will."

McLoughlin's amusement was genuine. "I'm beginning to feel quite sorry for Mrs. Maybury. Does she dislike these trustees as much as they seem to dislike her?"

"I wouldn't know, Sergeant. I've never asked her."

"Who are they?"

Chief Inspector Walsh chuckled. The lad had just hanged himself. "Miss Anne Cattrell and Mrs. Diana Goode. It was some will, gave you two ladies a deal of responsibility when you were barely in your twenties. We've a copy on file," he told the sergeant. "Colonel Gallagher must have thought very highly of you both to entrust you with his grandchildren's future."

Diana smiled. She must remember to tell Anne how she'd wiped the smirk off McLoughlin's face. "He did," she said. "Why should that surprise you?"

Walsh pursed his lips. "I found it surprising ten years ago, but then I had never met you and Miss Cattrell. You were abroad at that time, I think, Mrs. Goode." He smiled and dropped one eyelid in what looked remarkably like a wink. "I do not find it surprising now."

She inclined her head. "Thank you. My ex-husband is American. I was with him in the States when David vanished. I returned a year later after my divorce." She continued to look at Walsh but the hairs on her neck bristled under the weight of McLoughlin's gaze. She didn't want to catch his eye again. "Did Colonel Gallagher know about the relationship you and Miss Cattrell had with his daughter?" he asked softly.

"That we were friends, you mean?" She kept her eyes on the Inspector.

"I was thinking more in terms of the bedroom, Mrs. Goode, and the effect your fun and games might have on his grandchildren. Or didn't he know about that?"

Diana stared at her hands. She found people's contempt so difficult to handle and she wished she had one half of Anne's indifference to it. "Not that it's any of your business, Sergeant," she said at last, "but Gerald Gallagher knew everything there was to know about us. He was not a man you had to hide things from."

Walsh had been busily replenishing his pipe with tobacco. He put it into his mouth and lit it, belching more smoke into the already fuggy atmosphere. "After they came back to the house, did either Mrs. Maybury or Miss Cattrell suggest that they thought the body in the ice house was David Maybury's?"

"No."

"Did either of them say who they thought it might be?"

"Anne said it was probably a tramp who had had a heart attack."

"Mrs. Maybury?"

Diana thought for a moment. "Her only comment was that tramps don't die of heart attacks in the nude."

"What's your view, Mrs, Goode?"

"I don't have a view, Inspector, except that it isn't David. You've already had my reasons for that."

"Why do you and Miss Cattrell want Jane Maybury kept out of the way?" McLoughlin asked suddenly.

There was no hesitation in her answer though she glanced at him curiously as she spoke. "Jane was anorexic until eighteen months ago. She took a place at Oxford last September with her consultant's blessing, but he warned her not to put herself under unnecessary pressure. As trustees, we endorse Phoebe's view that Jane should be protected from this. She's still painfully thin. Undue anxiety would use up her reserves of energy. Do you consider that unreasonable, Sergeant?"

"Not at all," he answered mildly.

"I wonder why Mrs. Maybury didn't explain her daughter's condition to us," asked Walsh. "Has she a particular reason for keeping quiet about it?"

"None that I know of, but perhaps experience has taught her to be circumspect where the police are concerned."

"How so?" He was affable.

"It's in your nature to go for the weak link. We all know that Jane can tell you nothing about that body, but Phoebe's probably afraid you'll question her until she cracks. And only when you've broken her will you be satisfied that she knew nothing in the first place."

"You've a very twisted view of us, Mrs. Goode."

Diana forced a light laugh; "Surely not, Inspector. Of the three of us, I'm the only one who retains some confidence in you. It is I, after all, who is giving you information." She uncrossed her legs and drew them up on to the chair, covering them entirely with her knitted jacket. Her eyes rested briefly on the photographs. "Is it a man's body? Anne and Phoebe couldn't tell."

"At the moment we think so."

"Murdered?"

"Probably."

"Then take my advice and look in this village or the surrounding ones for your victim and your murderer. Phoebe is such an obvious scapegoat for someone else's crime. Shove the body on to her property and leave her to carry the can, that will have been the thinking behind this."

Walsh nodded appreciatively as he pencilled a note on his pad. "It's a possibility, Mrs. Goode, a definite possibility. You're interested in psychology?"

He's quite a poppet after all, thought Diana, unleashing one of the calculatedly charming smiles she reserved for her more biddable customers. "I use it all the time in my work," she told him,, "though I don't suppose a clinician would call what I use psychology."

He beamed back at her. "So what would he call it?"

"Hidden persuasion, I should think." She thought of Lady Keevil and her lime-green curtains. Lies, Anne would call it.

"Do your clients come here to consult you?"

She shook her head. "No. It's their interiors they want designing, not mine. I go to them."

"But you're an attractive woman, Mrs. Goode." His admiration for her was blatant. "You must have a lot of friends who come visiting, people from the village, people you've met over the years."

She wondered if he guessed how tender this particular nerve was, how deeply she felt the isolation of their lives. At first, bruised and battered from the break-up of her marriage, it had hardly mattered. She had withdrawn inside the walls of Streech Grange to lick her wounds in peace, grateful for the absence of well-meaning friends and their embarrassing commiserations. The shock of discovery, as her scars healed and she tendered for one or two small design contracts, that Phoebe's exclusion had been imposed and not chosen had been a real one. She had learnt what it was to be a pariah; she had watched Phoebe nurture her hate; she had watched Anne's tolerance turn to cynical indifference; she had heard her own voice grow brittle. "No," she corrected him. "We have very few visitors, certainly never from the village."

His eyes were encouraging. "Then tell me, assuming you're right and our victim and murderer are local, how could they know about the ice house and, if they did know about it, how did they find it? I think you'll agree it's well disguised."

"Anyone could know about it," she said dismissively. "Fred may have mentioned it in the pub after he stacked the bricks in there. Phoebe's parents may have told people about it. I don't see that as a mystery."

"All right. Now tell me how you find it if you haven't been shown where it is? Presumably none of you has noticed an intruder searching the grounds or you'd have mentioned it. And another thing, why was it necessary to put the body in there at all?"

She shrugged. "It's a good hiding place."

"How did the murderer know that? How did he or she know the ice house wasn't in regular use? And what was the point of hiding the body if the idea was to make Phoebe Maybury the scapegoat? You see, Mrs. Goode, the picture is rather unclear."

She thought for a moment. "You can't rule out pure chance. Someone committed a murder, decided to get rid of the body in the Grange grounds in the hopes that, if it was discovered the police would concentrate their efforts on Phoebe, and stumbled on the ice house by accident while looking for somewhere to put the body."

"But the ice house is half a mile from the gates," Walsh objected. "Do you seriously believe that a murderer staggered past the Lodge House and all the way down your drive and across your lawn in pitch darkness with a body on his shoulders? We can assume, I think, that no one would have been mad enough to do it during the daytime. Why didn't he simply bury the body in the wood near the gates?"

She looked uncomfortable. "Perhaps he came over the wall at the back and approached the ice house from that direction."

"Wouldn't that have meant negotiating his way through Grange Farm, which if I remember correctly adjoins the Grange at the back?" She nodded reluctantly. "Why run that danger? And why, having run it, not bury the body quickly, in the woodland there? Why was it so important to put him in the ice house?"

Diana shivered suddenly. She understood perfectly that he was trying to box her in, force her on to the defensive and admit that knowledge of the ice house and its whereabouts was a crucial element. "It seems to me, Inspector," she continued coolly, "that you have made a number of assumptions which-correct me if I'm wrong-have yet to be substantiated. First, you are assuming the body was taken there. Perhaps whoever it was went under his-or her-own steam and met the murderer there."

"Of course we've considered that possibility, Mrs. Goode. It doesn't alter our thinking at all. We must still ask: Why the ice house and how did they know where to find it unless they had been there before?"

"Well, then," she said, "work on the assumption that people have been there and find out who they are. Off the top of my head, I could make several suggestions. Friends of Colonel Gallagher and his wife, for example."

"Who would be in their seventies or eighties by now. Of course it's possible that an elderly person was responsible but, statistically, unlikely."

"People to whom Phoebe or David pointed it out."

McLoughlin moved on his chair. "Mrs. Maybury has already told us she'd forgotten all about it, so much so that she omitted to tell the police it was there when they were searching the grounds for her husband. It seems unlikely, if she had forgotten it to that extent, that she would have remembered to point it out to casual visitors who, from what you yourself have said, don't come here anyway."

"David then."

"Now you have it, Mrs. Goode," said the Inspector. "David Maybury may well have shown the ice house to someone, to several people even, but Mrs. Maybury has no recollection of it. Indeed, she cannot recall him ever using it though she did agree that he was probably aware of its existence. Frankly, Mrs. Goode, at the moment I don't see how we can proceed in that direction unless Mrs. Maybury or the children can remember occasions or names that might give us a lead."

"The children," said Diana, leaning forward. "I should have thought of it before. They will have taken their friends there when they were younger. You know how inquisitive children are, there can't be an inch of this estate they won't have explored with their gang." She sank back with sudden relief. "That's it, of course. It'll be one of the village children who grew up with them, hardly a child now, though-someone in his early twenties." She noticed the smirk was back on McLoughlin's face.

Walsh spoke gently. "I agree entirely that that is a possibility..Which is why it's so important for us to question Jonathan and Jane. It can't be avoided, you know, however much you and her mother may dislike the idea. Jane may be the only one who can lead us to a murderer." He reached for another sandwich. "The police are not barbarians, Mrs. Goode. I can assure you we will be sympathetic and tactful in our dealings with her. I hope you will persuade Mrs. Maybury of that."

Diana uncurled her legs and stood up. Quite unaware of it, she leant on the desk in just the way Phoebe had done, as if close proximity had taught the women to adopt each other's mannerisms. "I can't promise anything, Inspector. Phoebe has a mind of her own."

"She has no choice in the matter," he said flatly, "except to influence her daughter over whether we question her here or in Oxford. Under the circumstances, I imagine Mrs. Maybury would prefer it to be here."

Diana straightened. "Is there anything else you want to ask me?"

"Only two more things tonight. Tomorrow Sergeant McLoughlin will question you in more detail." He looked up at her. "How did Mrs. Maybury come to employ the Phillipses? Did she advertise or did she apply to an agency?"

Diana's hands were fluttering. She thrust them into the pockets of her jacket. "I believe Anne arranged it," she said. "You'll have to ask her."

"Thank you. Now, just one more thing. When you helped clear the rubbish from the ice house what exactlv was in there and what did you do with it?"

"It was ages ago," she said uncomfortably. "I can't remember. Nothing out of the way, just rubbish."

Walsh looked at her thoughtfully. "Describe the inside of the ice house to me, Mrs. Goode." He watched her eyes search rapidly amongst the photographs on the desk, but he had turned over all the general shots when she first came in. "How big is it? What shape is the doorway? What's the floor made of?"

"I can't remember."

He smiled a slow, satisfied smile and she was reminded of a stuffed timber wolf she had once seen with bared teeth and staring glass eyes. 'Thank you," he said. She was dismissed.