The Ice House

"I don't believe this."

She walked across to her armchair and took a cigarette from the packet on the arm. "Why not?" she asked coolly, flicking her lighter. "What makes you think you have a monopoly on wanting to ball murder suspects?" Her eyes mocked him. "God knows what it is, but there's something very attractive about us. Perhaps it's the uncertainty."

He shook his head. "What did you mean when you said he held her future in his hands? You said she was naive."

"Oh, for pity's sake," she countered scornfully. "Who told the world and his wife that Phoebe killed her husband? Who briefed the press, McLoughlin?"

He looked very thoughtful. "She could have sued."

"Who?"

"The newspapers."

"She was never libelled. They weren't so crude as to call her a murderess. They referred to her as 'an avid gardener' in one sentence, then in the next revealed that the police were digging up the flowerbeds. And all neatly sign-posted for them by your boss."

"Why didn't she put in a complaint?" He saw the expression on her face and held up his hands. "Don't say it. Her word against his and he was a detective inspector." He lapsed into silence. "So what happened?"

She drew on her cigarette and raked him with angry eyes. "Walsh couldn't produce the goods because of course David had never been murdered, so the investigation was eventually stopped. It was then the fun started. She found herself on the wrong end of a malicious smear campaign and there wasn't a soul in this bloody place who would give her the time of day. She was on the verge of a nervous breakdown by the time I moved in. Jonny, at the age of eleven, had started to wet his bed and Jane-" She searched his face. "It's going to happen again. That bastard is going to throw Phoebe to the wolves a second time." She looked pale beneath the scarlet bandanna.

"Why didn't you tell me all this at the beginning?"

"Would you have believed me?"

"No."

"And now?"

"Maybe." He eyed her for a long time, rubbing his jaw in thoughtful silence. "You're a good journalist, Anne. Couldn't you have written Phoebe's side of it and got her off the hook?"

"You tell me how I can do that without giving Jane as her alibi and I'll write it. Phoebe would burn at the stake before she let her daughter become a sideshow for ghouls. Me, too, if it comes to that." She inhaled deeply. "It's not an alibi anyway. Jane might have fallen asleep."

He nodded. "In that case, why are you so sure he left this house alive?"

She turned away to stub out her cigarette. "Why are you so sure?" She looked back at him. "You are, aren't you?"

"Yes."

"Because someone claims now it was David in the ice house?"

"No."

"Why then?"

He looked at her for a long moment. "Because you chose to bury yourself in Streech Grange. That's how I know he walked out of here alive."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"You're a bloody awful liar, Cattrell."

"I wish you wouldn't keep saying that," she said crossly, stamping her foot, "and I'm freezing."

"So, stop waggling your fanny at me and put some clothes on," he said reasonably, reaching down for her pyjama trousers and tossing them across to her. He watched while she put them on. "It's a nice fanny, Cattrell," he murmured, "but I only came for the truth. I got rather more than I bargained for."

He drove to the forensic laboratories and searched out Dr. Webster in his office. "I was passing," he said. "I wondered if you'd had any new ideas on that corpse of ours."

If Dr. Webster found this approach a little unorthodox, he didn't remark on it. "I've the full report here," he said, tapping a folder on the desk beside him. "The typist finished this morning. You can take a copy back with you if you like." He chuckled. "Mind you, I don't think it's going to please George much, but there we are, he will push for instant opinions and they're not always accurate. Made any progress?"

McLoughlin made a see-saw motion with his hand. "Not much. Our most promising lead turned up alive. Now we're in the dark again."

"In that case I doubt that anything I've managed to piece together is going to help you much. Give me a description, better still a photograph, and I'll say yea or nay to whether he's on my slab. But I can't tell you who he is. George is on the phone every day, yelling for results, but miracles take time. Fresh bodies are one thing, bits of old shoe leather need patience to sort out."

"What about Maybury?"

The pathologist grunted impatiently. "You're all obsessed with that wretched man. Of course it's not Maybury. And you can tell George I've taken a second opinion and it agrees with mine. Facts are facts," he grumbled, "and in this case they are not open to interpretation."

McLoughlin breathed deeply through his nose. "How do you know?"

"Too old. I've done a lot of work on the X-rays and the fusion's more advanced than I thought. I'm sure now we're looking at a sixty-five to seventy-year-old. The bottom line's sixty. Maybury would be what? Fifty-four, fifty-five?"

"Fifty-four."

Webster reached for the folder and removed some photographs. "In the report, I've come down against mutilation but it's only an opinion and I'm prepared to be proved wrong. There are some scratches on the bone that might have been made with a sharp knife, but my own view is it wasn't." He pointed to one of the photographs. "Clearly rat droppings."

McLoughlin nodded. "Anything else?"

"I'm in two minds about how he died. It really depends on whether he was wearing any clothes at the time of his death. Have you sorted that one out yet?"

"No."

"I scraped up a lot of earth from the floor round the body. We've analysed it but, frankly, there's a negligible amount of blood in it."

McLoughlin frowned. "Go on."

"Well, that makes it very difficult for me to say with any certainty how he died. If he was nude and he was stabbed, the ground would have been saturated with blood. If he was fully clothed and stabbed, then the clothes would have soaked up most of the blood. You"ll have to find his clothes."

"Hang on a minute, Doctor. You're saying that if he was nude he couldn't have been stabbed, but if he was clothed he might have been?"

"In essence, that's right. There's an outside chance animals might have licked the floor but you'll never get a prosecution on that."

"Does Chief Inspector Walsh know this?"

Webster peered at him over his glasses. "Why do you ask that?"

McLoughlin rumpled his hair. "He hasn't mentioned it." Or had he? McLoughlin could remember very little of what Walsh had said that first night. "OK. Supposing he was nude. How did he die?"

Webster pursed his lips. "Old age. Cold. From the little that's left, it's impossible to say. I couldn't find any traces of barbiturates or asphyxia, but-" He shrugged and tapped the photographs. "Shoe leather. Find the clothes. They'll tell you more than I can."

McLoughlin put his hands on the desk and hunched his shouiders. "We've been conducting a murder enquiry on the basis that he was stabbed in the belly. Now you're telling me he could have died of natural causes. Have you any idea how many hours I've worked in the last week?"