Minette Walters - The Ice House

"He won't find it," said Anne, mopping her eyes. "Mr. Thompson sounds like a real pro. It'll all be neatly tied up in a villa in Spain by now."

"Perhaps." McLoughlin stretched his arms above his head, then subsided comfortably into his chair. He had been up all night again and he was tired.

Jane had told Anne that McLoughlin was in the wrong job. Why? Anne had asked. Because he was over-sensitive to other people's problems. Anne watched him through the smoke from her cigarette. She had none of her goddaughter's naivety so her appraisal was untinged by sentiment. Lust after him she might, but it in no way affected her objectivity. He was not troubled by over-sensitivity towards others, she concluded, but by over-sensitivity towards himself, a trap, in Anne's view, that far too many men fell into. To burden oneself with a socially acceptable image was to put oneself in a strait-jacket. She wondered when McLoughlin had last had a good laugh at himself-if ever. Life for him, she thought, was a series of hurdles which had to be taken cleanly. To touch one would represent failure.

"What are you thinking?" he asked.

"I was wondering why men take themselves so seriously."

"I didn't know they did."

"I'm trying to think if I've ever met one who doesn't. Your Mr. Thompson sounds a likely candidate." She waggled her toes on the tapestry stool. "A woman's problems centre round her biological programming. Without her willingness to reproduce and nurture a new generation, the species would die out. Her frustrations come from the species' unwillingness to recognise the sacrifices she makes for the general good. You don't get paid by a grateful government for being on duty twenty-four hours a day to raise a family; you don't get an MBE for training your children to be good citizens; nine times out of ten even your children don't thank you for your efforts, but chuck in your face that they didn't ask to be born anyway." She tapped the end of her cigarette against the ashtray and chuckled. "It's a dog's life being a mother. There's no management structure to speak of, no independent arbitrator, no dismissal procedure for repeated offences and no promotion prospects. Emotional blackmail and sexual harassment are rampant and backhanders commonplace." Her eyes gleamed as she leant forward. "No man would tolerate it. His self-esteem would suffer."

McLoughlin cursed himself silently for being a fool. He should have trusted his first impressions and steered clear. She would have to be very special in bed to make it worth his while to sit through feminist clap-trap to get her there. After all, he thought, was there really so much difference between her and his absent wife? The complaints were the same, merely more fluent and better articulated from Anne. He vowed to become celibate. He had neither the inclination nor the energy to wage war every time he fell randy. If the price of pleasure was capitulation, he could do without it. He'd had to grovel past his wife's headaches and stay awake through low-budget late films for Saturday night sex. He was damned if he'd do it for a woman he wasn't tied to.

He stood up abruptly and unleashed his pent-up rage and disappointment. "Let me tell you something, Ms. Cattrell. I'm sick to death of hearing women complain about their lot. You're all so bloody strident about what a grand time men have and how badly we treat you." He walked to the fireplace and leaned both hands on the mantelpiece, staring into the unlit fire. "Do you think yours is the only sex to suffer from biological programming? The burden on men to perform is infinitely greater. If we weren't programmed to sow our seed, female disinclination would have wiped out the human race centuries ago. You try persuading a woman to have sex. It costs money, effort, emotional commitment and the trauma of regular rejection. If a man wants to do his bit by society, he has to spend a lifetime in chains flogging his guts out to keep his woman content and well-fed so that she first agrees to have his offspring and then looks after them properly when she's got them." He turned to look at her. "It's humiliating and degrading," he said with bitterness. "My procreative chemistry is no different from a dog's. Nature compels us both to eject sperm into a fertile female, the difference is that he doesn't have to justify why he wants to do it whereas I do. Think about that next time you feel like sneering at male self-esteem. It's fragile in the extreme. You're damn right I take myself seriously. I bloody well have to. I've only my office left where rules of behaviour still apply and where I don't have to tie myself in knots to achieve the goals set for me."

She took an apple from the bowl beside her and tossed it to him. "You're doing great, McLoughlin. In a minute you'll be telling me you'd rather be a woman."

He looked at her, saw the amused lift of her lips and laughed. "I damn nearly did. You're winding me up."

"No," she said with a smile, "I'm winding you down. Life is pure farce from beginning to end, with a little black comedy thrown in for shade. If it was anything else, mankind would have stuck his collective head in the gas oven years ago. No one could tolerate seventy years of tragedy. When I die-probably of cancer-Jane has promised to put on my tombstone: 'Here lies Anne Cattrell who laughed her way through it. The joke was on her but at least she knew it.' She tossed another apple into the air and caught it. "In a couple of weeks, if you last the pace, you could be as cynical as I am, McLoughlin. You'll be a happy man, my son."

He sat down with the apple clenched between his teeth and drew his briefcase towards him. "You're not all cynic," he said, speaking round the apple.

She smiled. "What makes you say that?"

"I've read your diary." He snapped the locks on the briefcase, half-opened it and withdrew the slim volume.

She watched him curiously. "Did you enjoy it?"

"Was I supposed to?"

"No," she said tartly. "I didn't write it for publication."

"Good thing too," he said frankly. "It needs editing to make it readable."

She glared at him. "You would know, I suppose?" She was incredibly hurt. Her writing, even the writing she did for herself, mattered to her.

"I can read."

"I can hold a paintbrush. That doesn't make me an expert on art." She looked pointedly at her watch. "Shouldn't you be trying to solve a murder? As far as I can see you're still no nearer finding out who the body belongs to or, for that matter, who hit me on the head." She couldn't give a damn what he thought, he was only a policeman, so why did her stomach feel as if it had just bounced off the floor?

He munched on his apple. "P. needs editing out," he told her. "P. ruins it." He flicked the diary into her lap. "The carving-knife is still at the Station, awaiting your signature. I rescued this early on to prevent Friar sneaking it out to photocopy the rude bits." He was sitting with his back to the windows and his eyes, shadowed, gave nothing away. She couldn't tell if he was joking.

"Pity. Friar might have appreciated it."

"Tell me about P., Anne."

She eyed him cautiously. "What do you want to know?"

"Would he have attacked you?"

"No."

"Sure? Perhaps he's the jealous type. It was one of his Special Brew bottles that was used to hit you, and I'm told he never lets them out of the pub."

She could deny that P. and Paddy were one-the prospect of McLoughlin meeting the P. he had read about rather appalled her-but that would be coy, and Anne was never coy. "I'm positive," she said. "Have you spoken to him?"

"Not yet. We only got confirmation of the forensic results this morning." The match on Anne's blood and hair proved the bottle was the weapon, but the other results were disappointing. A smudged set of fingerprints round the neck and an incomplete footprint built up from barely seen depressions in the ground. It wasn't enough to take them any further. Anne wished she knew what he was thinking. Was he a harsh judge? Would he ever understand how Paddy, just because he always came back, however irregularly, made Streech bearable? Somehow she doubted it, for, in spite of his strange attraction to her, McLoughlin was a conventional man. The attraction wouldn't last, she knew that. Sooner or later he would snap back into character and then she would be remembered only as a brief madness. And for Anne, there would be just Paddy, once again, to remind her that the walls of Streech Grange were not totally impenetrable. Tired tears pricked at the back of her eyes. "He's a kind man," she said, "and he understands everything."