Minette Walters - The Ice House

For Phoebe it was a case of deja vu. The only difference this time was that her interrogators now had information she had withheld from them ten years previously. She answered them with the same stolid patience she had shown before, annoyed them with her unshakable composure and refused to be drawn when they needled her on the subject of her husband's perversions.

"You say you blame yourself for not knowing what he was doing to your daughter," said Walsh on more than one occasion.

"Yes, I do," she answered. "If I had known earlier, perhaps I could have minimised the damage."

He got into the habit of leaning forward for the next question, waiting for the tell-tale flicker of weakening resolve. "Weren't you jealous, Mrs. Maybury? Didn't it madden you that your husband preferred sex with your daughter? Didn't you feel degraded?"

She always paused before she answered, as if she were about to agree with him. "No, Inspector," she would say. "I had no such feelings."

"But you've said you could easily have murdered him."

"Yes."

"Why did you want to murder him?"

She smiled faintly at this. "I should have thought it was obvious, Inspector. If I had to, I'd kill any animal I found savaging my children."

"Yet you say you didn't kill your husband."

"I didn't have to. He ran away."

"Did he come back?"

She laughed. "No, he didn't come back."

"Did you kill him and leave him to rot in the ice house?"

"No."

"It would have been a sort of justice, wouldn't it?"

"It certainly would."

"The Phillipses, or should I say Jeffersons, believe in that kind of justice, don't they? Did they do it for you, Mrs. Maybury? Are they your avenging arm?"

It was always at this point that Phoebe's anger threatened to spill over. The first time he put the question it had come like a blow to the solar plexus. Afterwards, she was better prepared, though it still required iron self-control to keep from tearing and gouging at his hated face. "I suggest you ask Mr. and Mrs. Phillips that," she always said. "I wouldn't be so presumptuous as to answer anything on their behalf."

"I'm asking you for an opinion, Mrs. Maybury. Are they capable of exacting vengeance for you and your daughter?"

A pitying smile would curl her lips. "No, Inspector."

"Was it you who struck down Miss Cattrell? You say you were in bed, but we only have your word for it. Was she going to reveal something you didn't want revealed?"

"Who was she going to reveal it to? The police?"

"Perhaps."

"You're such a fool, Inspector." She smiled humourlessly. "I've told you what I think happened to Anne."

"Guesswork, Mrs. Maybury."

"Perhaps, but in view of what happened to me nine years ago, not unlikely."

"You never reported it."

"You wouldn't have believed me if I had. You'd have accused me of doing it to myself. In any case, nothing would have induced me to have you back in the house, not once I'd got rid of you. In some ways I was luckier than Anne. My scars were all internal."

"It's too convenient. You must think me very gullible."

"No," she said honestly, "narrow-minded and vindictive."

"Because I don't share your taste for melodrama? Your daughter is very vague about what frightened her. Even Sergeant McLoughlin only thinks he heard someone. I'm a realist. I prefer to deal in fact, not female neurosis."

She studied him with a new awareness. "I never realised how much you dislike women. Or is it just me, Inspector? The idea that I might be getting my just deserts really appeals to you, doesn't it? Would I have saved myself all this misery if I'd said 'yes' ten years ago?"

Invariably it was Walsh who became angry. Invariably, after a bout of questioning, Phoebe would get in her car and drive to the hospital to sit at Anne's bedside, massaging her hands and talking to her, willing her back to consciousness.

Diana's interrogations probed and prodded her connection with Daniel Thompson. She couldn't control her anger against Walsh in the way that Phoebe did and she frequently lost her temper. Even so, after two days, he could still detect no flaws in her story.

He tapped the pile of correspondence. "It's perfectly clear from your letters that you were furious with him."

"Of course I was furious," she snapped. "He had squandered ten thousand pounds of my money."

"Squandered?" he repeated. "But he was doing his best, wasn't he?"

"Not in my view."

"Didn't you have the business checked before you agreed to invest in it?"

"We've already been through all this, for God's sake. Don't you listen to anything?"

"Answer the question, please, Mrs. Goode."

She sighed. "I wasn't given much time. I spent a day going through the company books. They seemed in order, so I made over the cheque for ten thousand. Satisfied?"

"So why do you say he squandered your money?"

"Because as I got to know him, I realised he was supremely incompetent, may even have been an out-and-out rogue. The figures I saw had been heavily massaged. For example, I now think he inflated the company's assets by overvaluing his stock and I have discovered he was also using his employees' National Insurance contributions to keep the business afloat. The order books I saw were full, yet after three months he had sold virtually nothing and the little stock he had at his factory apparently had nowhere to go. His PR was a joke. He kept saying that word-of-mouth would spread and the thing would take off."

"And that made you angry?"

"God give me strength," she said, raising her hands to heaven. "Do you need it spelled out? It made me livid. I was conned."

"Do you know anything about Mr. Thompson's disappearance?"

"For the last time, no. N-O, no."

"But you knew he'd disappeared before we told you."

"Yes, Inspector, I knew. He was supposed to come here to explain what was going on." She leaned forward and banged her fist on the letters. "You've got the date and the time in front of you. He never turned up. I rang his office and was told he wasn't there. I rang his home and was given a flea in my ear by his wife. I rang his office again a couple of days later and was told Mrs. Thompson had reported him missing. I went to the office the next day to find some very angry employees who had not been paid for three weeks and had just discovered that their insurance contributions had not been paid for nearly a year. There has been no sign of Daniel Thompson since. The business is bankrupt and a lot of people, not just me, are owed a considerable amount of money."

"Frankly, Mrs. Goode, anyone who invests money in see-through radiators should expect to lose it."

Ice-blue eyes, he thought, had a capacity for murderous dislike that the greens and browns lacked. The epithets she now applied to him were unprintable.

"It's your pride that's hurt, isn't it?" he said with interest. "Your amour-propre . I can easily imagine you killing someone who made a fool of you."

"Can you?" she snapped. "Then you've an over-active imagination. No wonder the police have such a poor detection record."

"I think Mr. Thompson did come here, Mrs. Goode, and I think you got as angry with him as you are with me, and you hit out at him."

She laughed. "Have you ever seen him? No? Well, take it from me, he's built like a tank. Ask his silly wife if you don't believe me. If I'd hit him, he'd have hit me back and I'd still be sporting the bruises."

"Were you sleeping with him?"

"I'll make a confession," she conceded. "I found Daniel even less fanciable than I find you. He had wet lips, very like yours. I don't like wet lips. Does that answer your question?"

"His wife denied any connection between him and the Grange."

"That doesn't surprise me. I've only met her once. She didn't approve of me."