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."