"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."