Minette Walters - The Ice House

"You're having me on?" He couldn't believe Mrs. Clarke had ever been pretty.

Her dark eyes sparkled. "God's truth, m'lud." She blew a smoke ring into the air. "Fifteen years ago she set Paddy on fire. The spark's still there. It flashes out occasionally when she forgets herself, though Paddy can't see it. He's accepted the surface image and forgotten that nine-tenths of her lies hidden."

"You could say that about anyone," Robinson pointed out.

"You could indeed."

"Jumping Jack Flash" had given way to "Mother's Little Helper." Her foot tapped out a new rhythm.

He waited for a moment but she didn't go on. "Was Mr. Clarke's information about you correct, Miss Cattrell?"

"Hopelessly wrong on numbers unless your mother's deprived you of hot dinners, but the general drift's accurate."

"So why did you tell Sergeant McLoughlin you were a lesbian?"

She made another pencilled note on the page. "I didn't," she said, without looking up. "He heard what he wanted to hear."

"He's not a bad sort," he said lamely, wondering why he felt a need to defend McLoughlin. "He's been going through a rough patch lately."

She raised her eyes. "Is he a friend of yours?"

Robinson shrugged. "I suppose so. He's done me some favours, stood by me a couple of times. We have the odd drink together."

Anne found his answer depressing. Who listened, she wondered, when a man needed to talk? Women had friends; men, it seemed, had drinking companions. "Whatever I said wouldn't have made any difference," she told the Sergeant. "It doesn't matter twopence to this case whether we bonk women every night or men every night. Or if," she waved her pencil at her bookcase, "we go to bed for the simple pleasures of reading ourselves to sleep. When you've solved your murder, you'll see I'm right." She bent to her corrections once more.

Chief Inspector Walsh gathered his men about him on the drive in front of the Grange and divided them into four groups. Three to search the properties inside, and a fourth to comb the outhouses behind the kitchen, the garage block, the greenhouses and the cellars. Robinson had come out of the house to join them.

"What are we looking for, sir?" asked one man.

Walsh handed some typed sheets round the groups. "Read these pointers, then use your common sense. If anyone here is connected with this murder, they are not going to make you a free gift of their involvement so keep your wits about you and your eyes open. The important facts to remember are these; one, our man died approximately ten weeks ago; two, he was stabbed; three, his clothes and dentures were removed; four, and most importantly, it would help if we knew who the hell he was. David Maybury and Daniel Thompson seem the most likely contenders and there's a brief description of both of them on those sheets." He paused to let the men read the descriptions. "You will notice that in terms of height, colouring and shoe size, the two are not dissimilar, but bear in mind, please, that Maybury will have aged ten years since his description was written. I shall head up the search in Mrs. Maybury's house, McLoughlin will take Miss Cattrell, Jones, Mrs. Goode and Robinson will mastermind the outhouses. If anyone finds anything, notify me immediately."

With a sense of reluctance, McLoughlin presented himself and his two men outside Anne's door and rang her bell. Nick Robinson's crowing account of his chat with her had set a pile-driver beating in his head. "Got your wires crossed there, old son," Nick had said breathily into his ear. "Given half a chance, I'd have a shot myself. They always say the bright ones are the least inhibited."

McLoughlin, starved of alcohol, poked stiff fingers into the fat man's beer gut and listened to the satisfying ejection of air. "You mean they stick a knife between your ribs when the performance is lousy," he hissed into the other man's face.

Robinson notched up a direct hit and chuckled between deep breaths. "I wouldn't know. I never have that problem."

McLoughlin tried to remember a time when his head hadn't hurt, when shutters stayed open in his mind, and when he hadn't felt sick. His feelings see-sawed violently between intense dislike of Anne coupled with certainty that she was responsible for the mangled body in the ice house, and a hot shame that set the sweat pouring under his arms whenever he thought of his behaviour of the morning. He bunched his fist till the knuckles gleamed white. "So why did she say she was a dyke?"

With a wary eye on the fist, Nick Robinson took a pace or two backwards. "Claims she didn't. Face it, Andy, she reckons you're a pompous ass so she took the piss." And it'll do you good, he thought. He liked McLoughlin, he had no reason not to, but the man fancied himself a cut above the rest of them which was why his wife's desertion had come so hard. The joke was that the Station had known about it for days, ever since Jack Booth had spilled the beans to Bob Rogers, but they had waited tactfully for McLoughlin to tell them himself. He never had. For two weeks he had come in every morning with a ferocious hangover and rambling stories about what Kelly had said or done the night before. Only his pride was hurt, they all knew it, and that not for much longer the way the WPCs were queuing up to get between his sheets. The clever money was on WPC Brownlow. And for Nick, fat, prematurely bald and with a penchant for WPC Brownlow himself, Anne's indifference to McLoughlin had been a soothing balm.

Anne opened the door and gestured them inside. McLoughlin removed the search warrant from his briefcase and gave it to her. She read it through carefully before handing it back with a shrug. There was no change in her manner towards him, no indication to him or his colleagues that he had overstepped that invisible mark beyond which behaviour is censured.

"Go ahead," she said, nodding towards the small staircase leading to her upper rooms. "I'll be in my study if you want me." She returned to her desk in the big sunlit room. "I Can't Get No Satisfaction" throbbed in the amplifiers.

Her spare room revealed nothing. McLoughlin doubted if it had been used for months, even years. There was a depression in the counterpane of one of the twin beds which implied that Benson or Hedges had found a comfortable retreat there, but no indication of a human presence. They moved on to her bedroom.

"Not bad," said one of the men approvingly. "The wife's just paid a fortune for pink frills, white melamine and mirrors. Can't get into the bloody bedroom now. Bet we could have done something like this for half the price." He ran his hand along the front of a low oak chest.

The room gave an impression of space because it contained so little: only the chest, a delicate wicker chair, and a low double bed with a pile of pillows and a bottle-green duvet. In a recess in one corner was a built-in wardrobe. A white carpet stretched to infinity with no line to show where carpet ended and white skirting boards began. Huge colour close-ups of glorious flowers against jet-black backgrounds marched in a brilliant band round white walls. The room both challenged the eye and relaxed it.

"You two go through the chest and wardrobe," said McLoughlin. "I'll have a look in the bathroom." He retreated gratefully to the normality of a pale pink bathroom but found nothing exceptional, unless two tins of shaving foam, a large packet of disposable razors and three used toothbrushes could be considered unusual possessions for a spinster. As he turned to the door, the corner of his eye caught a movement behind him. He spun sharply, heart struggling like a live thing in his mouth, and hardly recognised himself in the drawn and angry man who stared out of the mirror. He flicked the tap and splashed water over his face, dabbing it dry with a towel which smelt of roses. His head ached unbearably. He was at war with himself and the effort of trying to hold the warring parts together was destroying him. It was nothing to do with Kelly. The thought, unprompted, surprised him. It was inside him and had been inside him for a long time, a simmering rage that he could neither direct nor control, but which Kelly's departure had fired.