The Ice House (5 page)

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.

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.