Minette Walters - The Ice House

"Oh, yes," he said, "I do my duty Sunday lunches. To tell you the truth, I think she regretted it afterwards. The house became very quiet when I left." He was silent for a moment. "Your turn now," he said.

She giggled. "That's not fair. Your battle was funny, mine are all pathetic. Things like: Will I or will I not eat my mashed potato? Am I working too hard? Shouldn't I go out and enjoy myself?"

"And do you?"

"Go out and enjoy myself?" He nodded. "Not much." Her lips twisted cynically and made her look older. "Mum's idea of my enjoying myself is to go out with boys. I don't find that enjoyable." Her eyes narrowed. "I don't like men touching me. Mum hates that."

"It's not surprising," he said. "She must feel it's her fault."

"Well, it's not," she said dismissively, "and I wish she'd realise it. The hardest thing in the world is to cope with someone else's guilt."

"What do you think happened to your father, Jane?"

The question hung in the air between them like a bad smell. She turned away and looked out of the window and he wondered if he had pushed too fast and lost her. He hoped not, as much for her own sake as for the sake of the enquiry.

"I'll tell you what happened the night he left," she said at last, speaking to the window. "I remember it very clearly but even my psychiatrist doesn't know all of it. There are bits I kept back, bits that at the time didn't fit the pattern and which I left out." She paused for a moment. "I hadn't thought about it for ages until the other night. Since then I've thought of nothing else, and I think now that what I left out may be important."

She spoke slowly and clearly as though, having geared herself to tell the story, she saw no point in making it garbled. She told him how, after her mother had left for work, her father had run her bath. That was the signal, she said, that he intended to have sex with her. It was a routine he had established and which she had learned to accept. She described the entire process without a flicker of emotion and McLoughlin guessed she had rehearsed it many times on the psychiatrist's couch. She spoke of her father's approaches and her removal to her bedroom as if she were commentating on a chess game.

"But he did something different that night," she said, turning her dark gaze on the Sergeant.

He found his voice. "What was it?"

"He told me he loved me. He'd never done that before."

McLoughlin was shocked. So much pain and without a word of love. Yet, after all, what good would kind words have done except make the man a hypocrite? "Why do you think that's important?" he asked dispassionately.

"Let me finish the story," she suggested, "and perhaps it will strike you, too." Before raping her this time, he had given her a present, carefully wrapped in tissue paper. "He'd never done that before either."

"What was it?"

"A little teddy-bear. I used to collect them. When he had finished," she said, dismissing the entire incident in four words, "he stroked my hair and said he was sorry. I asked him why because he'd never apologised before, but my mother came in and he never answered." She fell silent and stared at her hands.

He waited but she didn't go on. "What happened then?" he asked after several minutes.

She gave a mirthless laugh. "Nothing really. They just looked at each other for what seemed like hours. In the end, he got off the bed and pulled up his trousers." Her voice was brittle. "It was like one of those awful Whitehall farces. I do remember my mother's face. It was frozen, like a statue's. She was very pale except for the bruise on her face where he hit her the day before. She only moved after he'd left the room, then she lay beside me on the bed and hugged me. We stayed like that all night and in the morning he'd gone." She shrugged. "We've never seen him again."

"Did she say anything to him?" he asked.

"No. She didn't need to."

"Why not?"

"You know that expression 'if looks could kill.' " He nodded. "That was what was frozen on her face." She bit her lip. "What do you think?"

She caught him off guard. He so nearly said, I think your mother killed him. "About what?" he asked her.

She showed her disappointment. "It seems so obvious to me. I hoped it would strike you, too." There was a hunger in the thin face, a yearning for something that he didn't understand.

"Hang on," he said firmly. "Give me a minute to think about it. You know the story backwards. This is the first time I've heard it, remember." He looked at the notes he had been taking and cudgelled his brain to find what she wanted him to find. He had ringed the three things she said her father had never done before: love, present, apology. What was their significance? Why did she think he had done them? Why had he done them? Why would any father tell his daughter he loved her, give her a present and regret his unkindnesses? He looked up and laughed. It was stunningly obvious, after all. "He was planning to leave anyway. He was saying goodbye. That's why he disappeared without trace. He'd arranged it all beforehand." She let out a long sigh. "Yes, I think so."

He leaned forward excitedly. "But do you know why he would want to disappear?"

"No, I don't." She sat up straight and pushed the hair back off her face. "All I do know, Sergeant, is that it wasn't my fault." A slow smile curved her lips. "You can't imagine how good that makes me feel."

"But surely no one's ever suggested it was?" The idea appalled him.

"When I was eight years old, my mother caught me in bed with my father. My father ran away because of it and my mother was labelled a murderess. At the age of ten, my brother's personality changed. He stopped being a child and took his father's place. He was sworn to secrecy about what had happened and has never mentioned his father again." She played with her fingers. "My mother's guilt has been an irrelevancy beside mine." She raised her eyes. "What happened the other night was a blessing in disguise. For years I've sat with a psychiatrist who has done his level best to intellectualise me out of my feelings of guilt. To a certain extent he succeeded and I pushed it all to the back of my mind. I was the victim, not the culprit. I was manipulated by someone I had been taught to respect. I played the role that was demanded of me because I was too young to understand I had a choice." She paused briefly. "But the other night, perhaps because I was so frightened, it all came back to me with amazing clarity. For the first time, I realised how the pattern had changed the night he left. For the first time, I didn't need to consciously justify my innocence, because I saw that the misery and uncertainty of the last ten years would have happened anyway, whether my mother had found us or not."

"Have you told her all this?"

"Not yet. I will after you've gone. I wanted someone else to reach the same conclusion I had."

"Tell me what happened when you were going to the Lodge," he encouraged. "You said you heard breathing."

She compressed her lips in thought. "It's a bit of a blur now," she admitted. "I was fine till I came to the beginning of the long straight bit leading to the gates. I slowed down as I came round the bend because I was getting a stitch and I heard what sounded like someone letting out a long breath, the sort of sound you make when you've been holding your breath for hiccups. It seemed to be very close. I was so frightened, I started to run again. Then I heard running footsteps and someone shouting." She looked at him sheepishly. "That was you. You scared me out of my wits. Now I'm not sure I heard breathing at all."

"OK," he said. "It's not important. And when you said you thought it was your father, that was just because you were frightened? There wasn't anything about the breathing that reminded you of him?"