"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."