The Ice House

6

Diana found Phoebe watching the ten o'clock news in the television room. The flickering colours from the set provided the only light and they played across Phoebe's glasses, hiding her eyes and giving her the look of a blind woman. Diana snapped on the table lamp.

"You'll get a headache," she said, flopping into the seat beside Phoebe, reaching out to stroke the softly tanned forearm.

Phoebe muted the sound of the television with the remote control on her lap, but left the picture running. "I've got one already," she admitted tiredly. She took off her glasses and held a handkerchief to her red-rimmed eyes. "Sorry," she said.

"What about?"

"Blubbing. I thought I'd grown out of it."

Diana pulled a footstool forward with her toes and settled her feet on it comfortably. "A good blub is one of my few remaining pleasures."

Phoebe smiled. "But not very helpful." She tucked the handkerchief into her sleeve and replaced her glasses.

"Have you had anything to eat?"

"I'm not hungry. Molly left a casserole in the Aga if you are."

"Mm, she told me before she left. I'm not hungry either."

They lapsed into silence.

"It's a bloody mess, isn't it?" said Phoebe after a while.

"I'm afraid so." Diana pushed her sandals off her feet and let them drop to the floor. "The Inspector's no fool." She kept her voice deliberately light.

Phoebe spoke harshly. "I hate him. How old would you say he is?"

"Late fifties."

"He hasn't aged much. He looked like a genial professor ten years ago." She considered for a moment. "But that's not his character. He's anything but genial. He's dangerous, Di. For God's sake don't forget it."

The other woman nodded. "And his incubus, Jock-the-Ripper? What did you make of him?"

Phoebe looked surprised as if the other woman had mentioned an irrelevance. "The Sergeant? He didn't say much. Why do you ask?"

With rhythmical movements, as if she were stroking a cat, Diana smoothed the woollen pile on the front of her jacket. "Anne's spoiling for a fight with him and I'm not sure why." She glanced speculatively at Phoebe, who shrugged. "She's making a mistake. She took one look at him in the drawing-room, labelled him 'Pig-ignorant' and made up her mind to walk all over him. Damn!" she said with feeling. "Why can't she learn to compromise occasionally? She'll have us up to our necks in shit if she's not careful."

"Have they spoken to her yet?"

"No, they've told her they'll talk to her tomorrow. They seem very relaxed about it all. We have their official permission to go to bed."

Phoebe closed her eyes and pressed long fingers against her temples. "What did they ask you?"

Diana twisted in her chair to look at her friend. "From what they implied, exactly what they asked you."

"Except that I walked out and refused to answer their questions." She opened her eyes and looked ruefully at the other woman. "I know," she said. "It was very silly of me but they made me so angry. Strange, isn't it? I stood up to hours of interrogation when David went. This time, I lasted five minutes. I found myself hating that man so much, I wanted to claw his eyes out. I could have done it, too."

Diana reached out again and briefly touched her arm. "I don't think it's strange-any psychiatrist would tell you that anger is a normal reaction to stress-but it's probably unwise." She pulled a face. "Anne will say I've bottled out, of course, but my view is we should give them all the co-operation we can. The sooner they sort it out and leave us alone, the better."

"They want to question the children."

"I know and I don't think we can prevent it."

"I could ask Jane's psychiatrist to write a report advising against it. Would that stop them?"

"For a day or two perhaps before they secured an order for a second opinion. That would declare her competent to answer questions. You know yourself, her own psychiatrist pronounced her fit eighteen months ago."

"Not for this." Phoebe massaged her temples vigorously. "I'm frightened, Di. I really think she's managed to blot it all out. If they make her remember now, God knows what will happen."

"Talk to Anne," Diana said. "She can be more objective than you. You may find that you're underestimating Jane's strengths. She is your daughter, after all."

"Meaning that I am less able to be objective?"

Go easy, Diana told herself. "Meaning that she will have inherited the rigid Gallagher backbone, you oaf."

"You're forgetting her father. However much I might like to pretend otherwise, there is some of David in each of them."

"He wasn't all bad, Pheeb."

Tears welled uncontrollably in Phoebe's eyes. She blinked them away angrily. "But he was, and you know it as well as I do. You told the Inspector so this afternoon and you were right. He was rotten to the core. In time, if we hadn't got shot of him, he'd have turned me and the children rotten too. He had a damn good try in all conscience." She was silent for a moment. "It's the only thing I hold against my parents. If they hadn't been so conventional I need never have married him. I could have had Johnny and brought him up on my own."

"It was difficult for them." But I agree with her, thought Diana. There was no excuse for what her parents did, so why am I defending them? "They did what they thought was right."

"I was seventeen, for Christ's sake-" Phoebe's nails bit deep into her palms-"younger than Jane is now. I allowed myself to be married off to a bastard twice my age simply because he'd seduced me, and then I just stood by and watched him rewarded for it. Christ," she spat, "it makes me sick to think of the money he bled from my father."

Then don't think about it, Diana wanted to say. You've tried to forget them, but there were good times, times at the beginning when Anne and I envied you because you were a woman and we were still gangling schoolgirls. One weekend in particular, it was still vivid in her memory, when David on some mad whim had taken the three of them on a business trip to Paris. She forgot which company he was working for, there had been so many, but the weekend she would never forget. David, so assured, so deft in his choice of where to go and what to do, so unaffected by the foreignness of it all; Phoebe, four months pregnant, lovely face framed in a glorious picture hat, so delighted with herself and with David; and Anne and Diana, out for half-term, in a fantasy of beautiful people in beautiful places. And it was fantasy, of course, for the reality of David Maybury was brutish, ugly-Diana had discovered that for herself-yet once, in Paris, they had known enchantment.

Phoebe stood abruptly, walked over to the television set and switched it off. She spoke with her back to Diana. "Do you know what kept me going through all those hours of police questioning last time? How it was I managed to stay so calm in spite of what they were accusing me of?" She turned round and Diana saw that the tears had stopped as suddenly as they had started. "It was relief, sheer bloody relief that I had got rid of the bastard so easily."

Diana glanced at the curtains. It was cold for a night in August, she thought, and Phoebe must have left the window open. "You're talking rubbish," she said firmly. "The last ten years have addled your brain. There was nothing easy about getting rid of David. Good God, woman, he's been an albatross round your neck since the day you married him, still is." She pulled her jacket tighter about her. "If only they'd found a body somewhere that you could have identified."

"If pigs could fly," reflected Phoebe as she tidied the room and punched the cushions ferociously into airy plumpness.

Diana picked up an empty coffee cup and walked through into the kitchen. "They're concentrating their efforts on the ice house," she announced over her shoulder. She ran the tap and washed the cup. "They're working on the assumption that no one knows where it is." She heard the sound of the window being closed in the television room. "If I were you, I'd make a list of anyone you, David or the children have ever shown it to. I'm sure there'll be a lot of names."

Phoebe laughed bitterly and drew a scrap of paper from her pocket. "I've been racking my brains ever since I left the library. Result: Peter and Emma Barnes, and I can't swear to them."

"You mean the awful Dilys's children?"

"Yes. They used to roam about the garden during one school holidays, looking for Jonathan and Jane. I'm sure Dilys put them up to it as a way of getting in with us."

"But there must have been other children, Pheeb, in the early days."

"No, not even schoolfriends. Jon was boarding, remember, and never wanted friends to stay, and Jane never wanted friends full stop. It was my fault. I should have encouraged them but things were just so difficult that I was really glad they were anti-social."

"So what happened with Peter and Emma?"

"It all became rather unpleasant. Emma kept taking her knickers down in front of Jonathan." She shook her head. "I drew the line when he started taking his down, too. He was nine." She sighed. "Anyway, like a fool, I told David. So he promptly phoned Dilys and gave her an earful. He called her a vulgar bitch and said 'like mother, like daughter.' After that, they never came up here again, but I suppose Jon might have shown them the ice house before they were banned."

Diana gave a guilty giggle. "For once David was probably right. Emma hasn't improved much with the passing years, let's face it."

"He had no business to speak to anyone like that," said Phoebe coldly. "God knows, I can't stand the woman, but Jon was behaving as badly as Emma. David never even told him off for it. He thought it was a great joke, talked about Jon becoming a man. I could have killed him for that. If anyone was vulgar, David was."

Diana was disturbed by Phoebe's mood. She had known her to be bitter before but never with such a depth of feeling over something so petty. It was as if the events of the afternoon had caused a breach in her long-held defences, releasing the pent-up emotions of years. She saw the dangers of it only too clearly. She and Anne had thought of Jane as the weak link. Were they wrong? Was it not Phoebe, after all, who was the more vulnerable?

"You're tired, old thing," she said calmly, putting her arm through the other woman's. "Let's go to bed and sleep on it."

Phoebe's head drooped wearily. "I've got such'a bloody awful headache."

"Hardly surprising in the circumstances. Take some aspirin. You'll be a new woman in the morning."

They walked arm in arm down the corridor. "Did they ask you about Fred and Molly?" queried Phoebe suddenly.

"A bit."

"Oh, lord."

"Don't worry about it." They had reached the stairs. Diana gave her a kiss and released her. "Walsh also asked me to describe the ice house," she said with reluctance.

"I told you he was dangerous," said Phoebe, walking up the stairs.

Diana's footsteps were loud in the silence. The phrase "quiet as the grave" came to haunt her as she took off her shoes and tip-toed along the corridor. She eased Anne's door open and looked round it. Anne was at the desk, working at her word-processor. Diana whistled quietly to attract her attention, then pointed at the ceiling. Together they crept up the stairs to Anne's bedroom.

Anne followed her in, eyes alight with mischief and laughter. "My God, Di, this is so unlike you. You're always such a stickler for appearances. You do realise the place is still crawling with filth?"

"Don't be an idiot. It's not a game this time, so just shut up and listen."

She pushed Anne on to the bed and perched, cross-legged, beside her. As she spoke, her hands worked nervously, kneading and pummelling the softness of the duvet.