Minette Walters - The Ice House

McLoughlin waited until the car was moving. "Who was in charge of the case at the beginning?"

"If you mean Thompson's disappearance, it was Staley."

"Did he do a thorough job? Did he check Mrs. Thompson?"

"Checked everything. I've been through the file."

"Does he know about our body?"

"He does."

"And it hasn't made him suspicious?"

"No. Her alibi's too good. She took Mr. T. to Winchester station where he boarded a train to London. Various people remember seeing him during the journey and one remembers seeing him on the platform at Waterloo. After dropping him off, Mrs. T. went straight to East Deller Church were she took part in a twenty-four-hour fast with other members of the congregation. The saintly Daniel was due to join her there at six o'clock on his return from London where, incidentally, he was supposed to be raising a loan to keep the business afloat. He never came back. At ten o'clock, the Vicar's wife took Mrs. T. home to Larkfield and waited with her while she telephoned office, friends and acquaintances. At nearly midnight, Mrs. Vicar rang the police and stayed with Mrs. T. who was by then quite hysterical, through the night and most of the following day. Daniel has not been since he got off the train in London."

"But her alibi's only good for the twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth. Supposing he came back later?"

Walsh manoeuvred his way into the traffic on a roundabout. "Why would he, if he'd gone to the lengths of doing the bunk in the first place? Staley reckons he planned to kill two birds with one stone-get shot of the awful wife and duck out of the bankruptcy. He hopped into the bog at Waterloo, reversed his mac, stuck on a false moustache and went to ground with whatever he'd managed to stash away from the business. For what it's worth, Thompson's number two at the radiator firm said he wasn't in the least surprised Thompson legged it, he only wondered why it had taken him so long. According to him, Thompson had no balls and less bottle and from the moment things began to get dicey, he looked like running."

McLoughlin picked at a fingernail. "You must have thought he had a good reason for coming back, sir. Otherwise, how could Mrs. Goode have killed him?"

"Yes, well, Mrs. Goode's a damn sight more attractive than that silly bitch back there. I felt there was a good chance he staged his disappearance in order to throw in his lot with a blonde bombshell."

"But when he turned up on her doorstep, Mrs. Goode, who was down by ten thousand, found she didn't fancy him as much as she thought she did and stuck a knife into him?"

"Something like that."

McLoughlin laughed out loud. "Sorry, sir." He thought for a moment. "The Thompsons don't have any children, do they?"

"No."

"OK, let's say you've been married to a man for thirty-odd years. He's been the be-all and end-all of your existence and he suddenly deserts you." He paused for further thought.

"Go on."

"I'll need to think it through properly but something along these lines. Daniel does a runner because the business has gone down the chute and he can't cope. He hangs around in London for a bit but finds that living off his wits there is worse than facing the music at home, so he comes back. Meanwhile, Mrs. Thompson has discovered, because Mrs. Goode telephones and tells her that Daniel was supposed to have gone to Streech Grange, that her husband has been seeing another woman, worse, a woman steeped in sin. She's very near the edge already and this sends her right over. Bear in mind she's a religious fanatic, her marriage has been a sham and she's had several days to sit and brood. What's she going to do when Daniel comes home unexpectedly?"

"Yes," agreed Walsh thoughtfully. "That works quite nicely. But how did she get the body to the ice house?"

"I don't know. Perhaps she persuaded him to go there when he was alive. But it's entirely logical for her to leave the body somewhere in Streech Grange, the site of Daniel's sin, and it's logical for her to have stripped him and chopped him about a bit so that we'd think it was David Maybury. She'd see that as retribution against the evil women-she probably thought they were all in it-who'd ruined her life. Do we have a follow-up on that report of someone crying near the Grange Farm cottages?"

"We do, but it's not very helpful. Both sets of occupants agreed it was after midnight because they were in bed, and they both agreed it was during the spell of hot weather that spanned the last week in May and the first two weeks in June. One lot said it was May, the other lot said it was the second week in June. Yer pays yer money and takes yer choice."

"It's all too nebulous. We need a fix on some dates. Did Staley search the Thompsons' house?"

"Twice, once on the night of his disappearance and again about two weeks later."

McLoughlin frowned. "Why the second time?"

"Well, it's interesting that. He had an anonymous tip-off that Mrs. T. had lost her marbles, butchered Daniel and hidden him under the floorboards. He turned up out of the blue one day, a couple of weeks into June, and went through the house with a magnifying glass. He found nothing except one sex-starved little woman who kept following him from room to room and making advances. He's convinced it was Mrs. Thompson who made the tip-off."

"Why?"

Walsh chuckled. "He reckons she fancied him."

"Perhaps her conscience was troubling her."

Walsh pulled into the kerb outside the Police Station. "It's all very well, Andy, but where do those blasted shoes fit in? If Daniel was wearing them, why did she leave them in the grounds? And if he wasn't, how did they get there?"

"Yes," mused McLoughlin. "I've been wondering about that. I can't help feeling she's telling the truth about the shoes. There must have been a tramp, you know. The description was too fluent and it matches the one Nick Robinson came up with. I remember the pink trousers." He raised an enquiring eyebrow. "I could try and trace him."

"Waste of time," muttered Walsh. "Even if you found him, what could he tell you?"

"Whether or not Mrs. Thompson's telling lies."

"Hmm." He hunched his shoulders over the steering wheel. "I've had an awful thought." He looked sick.

McLoughlin glanced at him.

"You don't suppose those damn women have been right all along, do you? You don't suppose this miserable tramp went into the ice house and had a heart attack?"

"What happened to his pink trousers?"

Walsh's face cleared. "Yes, yes, of course. All right, then, see if you can find him."

"I'll have to give up on the Maybury file."

"Temporarily," growled Walsh.

"And I want to take a team to search Streech grounds again." He saw thunder clouds gathering across the Inspector's face. "With a view to linking Mrs. Thompson with the ice house," he finished dispassionately.

Elizabeth stood in her favourite position, by the long window in her mother's room, watching the shadows lengthen on the terrace. She wondered how many times she had stood just so in just that place, watching. "I shall have to go back," she said at last. "They won't keep the job open indefinitely."

"You haven't any holiday owing?" asked Diana, glad that the silence was finally broken.

"Not spare. I'm going to the States for two weeks at the end of September. It leaves me with nothing to play with." She turned round. "I'm sorry, Mum."

Diana shook her head. "No need to be. Will you be staying with your father?"

Elizabeth nodded. "It's three years since I've seen him," she excused herself, "and the flight's booked."

What a gulf of misunderstanding lay between them, Diana thought, and all because they found each other so hard to talk to. When she thought back over the years, she realised their conversations had been polite but safe, never touching on anything that might lead to embarrassment. In one way, Phoebe had been lucky. There had been no division of loyalties for her children, no lingering love for their father, no need for her to justify why he had deserted them.