Minette Walters - The Ice House

"I don't understand why they didn't do it last night."

Anne frowned. "I've been wondering about that but I suspect they've been waiting for the results of the postmortem. They'll want to know what they're looking for. In some ways it makes it worse."

Jonathan turned to his mother. "You said on the phone they wanted to question us. What about?"

Phoebe took off her glasses and polished them on her shirt hem. "They want the names of anyone you showed the ice house to." She looked up at him and he wondered, not for the first time, why she wore glasses. Without them she was beautiful; with them she was ordinary. Once, when he was a child, he had looked through them. It had been a kind of betrayal to discover the lenses were clear glass.

"What about Jane?" he said immediately. "Are they going to question her too?"

"Yes."

"You mustn't let them," he said urgently.

She took his hand and held it between hers. "We don't think we can stop them, darling, and if we try we may make it worse. She'll be home tomorrow. Anne says we should trust her."

Jonathan stood up angrily. "You're mad, Anne. She'll destroy herself and Mum."

Anne shrugged. "We have very little option, Johnny." She used his childhood diminutive deliberately. "I suggest you have more faith in your sister and keep your fingers crossed. Frankly, there's bugger all else we can do."

In dribs and drabs, as messages got through, Walsh's men assembled on the grass in front of the ice house to make their reports. The day was at its hottest and the company shed their jackets gratefully and sat or reclined on the ground like family men at the beach. McLoughlin, lying now on his stomach, frowned into the middle distance like an anxious father with far-off boisterous children. Sergeant Robinson, oblivious to anyone's needs but his own, guzzled happily on a packet of sandwiches and gave the whole the spurious air of an impromptu picnic. In the background the brambles which had once flourished as a magnificent green curtain quietly leached their sap through shattered stems and turned brown in the sun.

Walsh drew out his handkerchief and wiped the sweat from his forehead. "Let's hear what you've got then," he snarled into the contented silence as if he had already made the suggestion once and been ignored. He was sitting with his legs stretched wide apart and a notebook on the ground between his knees. He turned to a blank page. "Shoes," he said, making a pencilled note then tapping the brown shoes in the bag beside him. "Who went up to the house?"

"I did, sir," said one of Jones's search party. "Fred Phillips takes size ten and his feet are about as broad as they are long. He took off his boots to show me." He chuckled at the memory. "He's not just built like an elephant, he's got feet to match." He caught Walsh's eye and peered hurriedly at the shoes in the bag. He shook his head. "No chance. I doubt he'd even get those over his big toes. Jonathan Maybury takes size nine." He looked up. "Incidentally, he and Mrs. Goode's daughter have arrived, sir. They're with their mothers now."

Walsh murmured acknowledgement as he jotted down the sizes. "OK, Robinson, what have you got?"

The DS crammed the last of his sandwich into his mouth and fished out his pad. "Promotion," he muttered under his breath to the man next to him.

"What was that?" demanded Walsh coldly.

"Sorry, sir, wind," replied Robinson, thumbing through his pages. "I hit upon a mine of information, sir. I'll put it all in my report, but the important bits are these: one, these woods are used regularly by local courting couples, have been for years apparently; two, David Maybury had a hundred copies of a booklet printed, showing a map of the grounds and giving a potted history of the place." He glanced at Walsh. "He wanted to attract tourists," he explained, "and gave the booklets away to anyone in the village who would pass them on."

"Damn," said the Chief Inspector with feeling. "Have you got a copy?"

"Not yet. It was the landlord at the pub who told me about it and he's looking for his copies now. If he finds them, he'll give me a ring."

"Anything else?"

"Do me a favour, sir, I've hardly started," said Nick Robinson plaintively. "I asked about strangers. Several people remembered seeing an old tramp hanging around the village about two, three months ago but I couldn't get a definite date on him. He had money because he bought a couple of drinks in the pub."

"I've a date, sir," Constable Williams interrupted eagerly. "He knocked at two houses on the council estate asking for food and money. The first was an old lady called Mrs. Hogarth who gave him a sandwich; the second was a Mrs. Fowler who sent him off with a flea in his ear because he came in the middle of her son's birthday party. The twenty-seventh of May,'* he finished triumphantly. "I've got a good description, too. He shouldn't be too hard to find. Old brown trilby, green jacket and, this is the clincher, bright pink trousers."

Walsh was doubtful. "There's probably no connection. Tramps are two a penny round here in the summer. They follow the sun and the scenic routes just like the tourists. Any more?"

DS Robinson caught a sardonic gleam in McLoughlin's eye which told him what he'd already guessed, that the old man was in another of his moods. God rot his soul, he thought. It was like working with a yo-yo, up one minute, down the next. Any other time and all his efforts of the morning would have earned him a pat on the back. As things stood now, he'd be lucky if he got away with a kick in the pants.

He returned to his notebook. "I followed a lead I was given and spoke to one of the condom users," he went on. "He comes up here with his girlfriend when it's warm enough, usually around eleven o'clock-"

"Name," snapped Walsh.

"Sorry, sir. Promised I wouldn't reveal his name, not unless it became absolutely necessary for a prosecution and, even then, not without his permission." In Sergeant Robinson's view, Paddy Clarke's threat to string him up by the balls had been no idle one. The big man had offered no reasons for his promiscuity but Robinson had guessed them when Mrs. Clarke returned unexpectedly as he was leaving. She was big, meaty and domineering with a brittle smile and hard eyes. A Gorgon who wore the trousers. God knows, Robinson had thought, no one could blame Paddy for wanting something soft, sweet and compliant to cuddle from time to time.

"Go on," said Walsh.

"I asked him if he'd seen anything unusual up here in the last six months. Seen, no, he said, but heard, yes. According to him it's normally pretty quiet, the odd owl or nightjar, dogs barking in the distance, that sort of thing." He consulted his notebook. "On two occasions in June, during the first two weeks, he reckons, he and his girlfriend were-and I'm quoting him, sir-'scared shitless by the most god-awful racket you've ever heard. Like souls crying out in hell.' The first time it happened, his girlfriend was so frightened she took to her heels and ran. He followed pretty sharpish and when they reached the road, she told him she'd left her knickers behind."

A muted snigger rippled round the seated men like a soft breeze through the grass. Even Walsh smiled. "What was it, did they know?"

"They sussed it the second time. They came up a week later and it happened again but to a much lesser degree. This time, my man hung on to his girl and made her listen. It was cats yowling and spitting, either at each other or something else-he thought he could hear growling as well. He couldn't say where it was coming from, but it was fairly close." He looked at Walsh. "They've been up several times since but it's not happened again."

McLoughlin stirred himself. "The colony of feral cats at the farm," he said, "fighting over the body. If that's right and the date's accurate it gives us the beginnings of a timescale. Our victim was murdered during or before the first week in June."