Minette Walters - The Ice House

She puffed a smoke ring into the air and stabbed its centre with the end of her cigarette. "Oh, I'll stay, Sergeant," she told him. "Police searches are meat and drink to me. It should run to a couple of thousand words on a woman's page somewhere. I rather fancy a headline like the pry trade or licence to snoop. What do you think?"

Sallow-faced bitch, he thought, as he watched the smoke drift from her mouth. The room stank of her cigarettes. "Please yourself, Miss Cattrell." He turned away. The blood swelled and throbbed and thickened in his head till he thought only a scream would relieve its pressure.

They went through everything with a fine-tooth comb and with infinite patience. Inside books, behind pictures, beneath chairs, through drawers; they ran long needles into the earth in the plant pots, felt for lumps under the fitted carpet, upended the sofa and poked deftly into its soft cushions; and when they had finished, the room looked exactly as it had done before they started. Anne, who had been moved courteously from her place behind her desk, was duly impressed.

"Very professional," she told them. "I congratulate you. Is that it?"

"Not quite," said McLoughlin. "Would you open the safe for me, please?"

She gave him a startled look. "What on earth makes you think I've got a safe?"

He walked over to the oak-panelled mantelpiece which was an exact replica of the one in the library. He pressed on the edge of the middle panel and slid it back, revealing the dull green metal of a wall-safe with a chromium handle and lock. He glanced at Friar and Jansen. "I found the one in the library this morning," he said. "Neat, isn't it?" He couldn't look at her. Her panic, brief though it had been, had shocked him.

She walked back to her desk, collecting her thoughts. She had always believed Phoebe the better judge of character, but it was Diana who was scared of McLoughlin.

"Would you open it, please?" he asked her again.

She took an unbroached packet of cigarettes from a carton of two hundred in her top drawer and tore the seal off it. He watched her patiently, saying nothing.

"Just who do you think you are?" snapped DG Friar angrily. "You heard the Sergeant. Open the bloody safe."

She ignored him, flipped the lid of the packet and turned the whole thing upside down, shaking a key into the palm of her hand. "How are you on Spenser?" she asked McLoughlin with a quirky smile. " 'A man by nothing is so well betrayed as by his manners.' It might have been written for your friend here."

She's stalling, he thought, she's afraid, and I hate her. God, how I hate her. "The safe, please, Miss Cattrell."

She walked over with a tiny shrug, unlocked the door and pulled it open. The safe was empty except for a carving knife with a blood-stained rag wrapped around its handle. The blade was black and crusted. McLoughlin felt sick. For all his anger, he hadn't wanted this. With a detached part of his mind, he wondered if he was ill. His head was burning as if he had a fever. He leant his shoulder against the mantelpiece to steady himself. "Can you explain this, please?" He heard his voice from a distance, harsh and unnatural.

"What's to explain?" she asked, taking out a cigarette and lighting it.

What indeed? The shutter clicked open and shut, open and shut, behind his eyes. He glanced at the cigarette packet on the desk. "Let's start with why you went to so much trouble to hide the key?"

"Habit."

"That's a lie, Miss Cattrell."

Tension had tightened the skin around his nose and mouth, giving him a curiously flat look. She thought of the steel hawser she had once seen in Shanghai, winding on to a huge capstan and drawing a crippled tanker into the docks. As the slack was taken up, it had risen from the concrete, shaking itself free of dust as it thinned and tautened, and then had come a moment of pure horror when it snapped under the strain and whipped with frightening speed through the defenceless flesh of a man's neck. He had seen it coming, she remembered, had put up his hands to protect himself. She looked at McLoughlin and felt an urge to do the same. "I want to phone my solicitor," she said. "I will not answer any more questions until he gets here."

McLoughlin stirred. "Friar, find Inspector Walsh for me and ask him to come to Miss Cattrell's wing, will you? Tell him it's urgent, tell him she wants to make a phone call. Jansen"-he flicked his head towards the French windows-"rustle up a WPC for a strip search. You'll find Brownlow somewhere outside." He waited till the two men had left then turned to the mantelpiece and stood staring at the open safe. After a moment he swung the door to and put his hands on the mantelpiece, lowering his head to look into the unlit fire. It was a gas replica of a real fire and the artificial coals were peppered with cigarette ash and dog-ends. "You should put them in a bin," he murmured. "They'll leave marks when they burn."

She craned her neck to see what he was looking at. "Oh, those. I keep meaning to hoover them up."

"I thought Mrs. Phillips did the hoovering."

"She does, but she discriminates against certain messes, or more accurately the makers of certain messes, and won't touch them with a barge pole."

He turned to look at her, resting his elbow on the mantelpiece. He was shaking like a man with ague. "I see." He didn't, of course. What sort of discrimination did Molly go in for? Racial? Religious? Class?

"She discriminates on moral grounds," Anne told him. Had he spoken his thoughts aloud? He couldn't remember, his head ached so much. "She's a good old-fashioned Puritan, only truly happy when she's miserable. She can't understand why the rest of us don't feel the same way."

"Like my mother," he said.

She gave her throaty chuckle. "Probably. Mine doesn't bother, thank God. I couldn't do battle with two of them."

"Does she live near here?"

Anne shook her head. "The last I heard of her she was in Bangkok. She remarried after my father died and set off round the world with husband mark two. I've rather lost track of them, to be honest."

That hurt, he thought. "When did you last see her?"

She didn't answer immediately. "A long time ago." She drummed her fingers impatiently on her desk. "Give me one good reason why I should wait for the Inspector's permission to make this telephone call."

Her voice vibrated with irritation. It made him laugh. Laughter swept over him like a kind of madness, wild, uncontrollable, joyous. He put a hand to his streaming eyes. "I'm sorry," he said. "I'm so sorry. There is no good reason. Please. Be my guest." The words, appallingly slurred, seemed to echo in his head and, even to his own ears, he sounded drunk. He clung to the mantelpiece and felt the hearth lurch beneath his feet.

"I suppose it hasn't occurred to you," observed Anne at his shoulder, as she shoved a chair behind his legs and folded him neatly on to it with the pressure of one small hand on the nape of his neck, "that it might be worth eating from time to time." She abandoned him to rummage through her bottom drawer. "Here," she said, a moment later, pressing an unwrapped Mars bar into his hand. "I'll get you something to drink." She took a bottle of mineral water from a small drinks cabinet, poured a tumblerful and carried it back to him.

His hand, clasping the Mars bar, hung loosely between his knees. He made no attempt to eat it. He couldn't have moved, even if he'd wanted to.

"Oh, shit!" she said crossly, putting the glass on a table and squatting on the floor in front of him. "Look, McLoughlin, you're a pain in the bloody arse, you really are. If you're trying to drink yourself into early retirement, fine, that's your choice-God knows why you joined the police force in the first place. You should be writing a biography of Francis Bacon or Rabbie Burns or something equally sensible. But if you're not trying for the chop, then do yourself a favour. Any minute now, that little toe-rag you sent off in search of the Inspector is going to come back through my door, and he'll wet himself when he sees you like this. Take my word for it, I know the type. And if there's anything left of you when Walsh has finished, then your friend the constable is going to piss all over it. He'll do it again and again and again, and he'll have an orgasm every time he does it. I promise you, you won't enjoy the experience."