"No, thank you, madam."
Diana turned away, suppressing an awful desire to laugh. Only Phoebe, she thought, of all the women she knew would offer cake in such circumstances. In its way it was admirable, for Phoebe, more than any of them, would be affected by Fred's shocking revelation.
Anne scrabbled among the pages of her manuscript in search of her cigarettes. With an abrupt movement she flicked the box open and offered it to Fred. He glanced at Phoebe for a permission he didn't need and she nodded gravely. "Thank you kindly, Miss Cattrell. My nerves are that shook up."
Anne lit it for him, holding his hand steady with hers. "Let's get this straight, Fred," she said, her dark eyes searching his. "It's a person's dead body. Is that right?"
"That's right, Miss Cattrell."
"Do you know who it is?"
"I can't say I do, miss." He spoke with reluctance. "I can't say anyone will know who it is." He drew deeply on his cigarette, the sweat of suppressed nausea breaking out on his forehead. "The truth is, from the quick look I had, there's not much of it left. It must have been there a while."
The three women looked at him aghast. "But surely it's got clothes on, Fred?" Diana asked nervously. "At least you know if it's a man or woman."
"No clothes that I could see, Mrs. Goode."
"You'd better show me." Phoebe stood up with sudden decision and Fred rose awkwardly to his feet. "I'd rather not, madam. You shouldn't see it. I don't want to take you down there."
"Then I'll go on my own." She smiled suddenly and laid a hand on his arm. "I'm sorry but I have to see it. You do understand that, don't you, Fred?"
He stubbed out his cigarette and pulled the rug tighter about his shoulders. "If you're that intent on going, I'll come with you. It's not something you should see alone."
"Thank you." She turned to Diana. "Will you phone the police for me?"
"Of course."
Anne pushed her chair back. "I'll come with you," she told Phoebe. Then she called after Diana as she followed the other two across the grass. "You might lay on some brandy, I'll be needing some, even if no one else does."
They grouped themselves in a nervous huddle a few yards from the entrance to the ice house. It was an unusual structure, designed and built in the eighteenth century to resemble a small hillock. Its function as an ice-store had ceased years ago with the advent of the refrigerator, and Nature had reasserted her dominion over it so that ranks of nettles marched in their hundreds around the base, making a natural fusion between the man-made dome and the solid earth. The only entrance, a wide low doorway, was set into the ice-house wall at the end of an overgrown pathway. The doorway, too, had long since lost itself in a mass of tangled brambles which grew over it in a thorny curtain from above and below. It was revealed now only because Fred had hacked and trampled the curtain aside to reach it.
A lighted torch lay abandoned on the ground at their feet. Phoebe picked it up. "What made you go in there?" she asked Fred. "We haven't used it for years."
He pulled a face. "I wish I hadn't, madam, God knows. What the eye doesn't see, the heart doesn't grieve over and that's a fact. I've been repairing the kitchen garden wall, where it collapsed a week ago. Half the bricks are unusable-I understood, when I saw the state of them, why the wall collapsed. Handful of dust, some of them. Anyway, I thought of the bricks we stored in here some years back, the ones from the outhouse we demolished. You said: 'Hang on to the good ones, Fred, you never know when we might need them for repairs.' "
"I remember."
"So I wanted to use them for the wall."
"Of course. You had to cut the brambles away?"
He nodded. "I couldn't see the door, it was that overgrown." He pointed to a scythe lying to one side of the ice house. "I used that and my boots to reach it."
"Come on," said Anne suddenly. "Let's get it over with. Talking isn't going to make it any easier."
"Yes," said Phoebe quietly. "Does the door open any wider, Fred?"
"It does, madam. I had it full open before I stepped on what's in there. Pulled it to as far as I could when I left in case anyone came by." He pursed his lips. "To tell you the truth, it's wider now than when I left it."
He walked forward reluctantly and, with a sudden movement, kicked the door. It swung open on creaking hinges. Phoebe crouched and shone the torch into the interior, bathing the contents with warm golden light. It wasn't so much the blackened and eyeless corpse that caused her to vomit, as the sight of Hedges rolling quietly and purposefully in the decomposing remains of the bowels. He came out with his tail between his legs and lay on the grass watching her, head between paws, as she heaved her tea on to the grass.
2
Silverborne Police Station, a modern triumph of polished chrome features and sealed tinted windows, baked in the sun amid its more traditional neighbours. Inside, the air-conditioning had broken down again and as the hours passed and the atmosphere overheated so did the policemen. They grew sticky and squabbled amongst themselves like young children. Those who could, got out; those who couldn't, jealously guarded their electric fans and prayed for a quick end to their shift. For Detective Chief Inspector Walsh, sweating profusely over some paperwork in his office, the order to take a team to Streech Grange came like a miraculous breath of air through the sealed windows. He whistled happily to himself as he made his way to the briefing room. But for Detective Sergeant McLoughlin, detailed to assist him, the knowledge that he was going to miss opening time and the cold lager he'd promised himself was the last straw.
Diana heard the approaching cars before the others. She finished her brandy and put the glass on the sideboard. "Fingers out, girls. Here they come."
Phoebe walked over to the mantelpiece, her face abnormally white against the vivid red hair. She was a tall woman who was rarely seen out of checked shirts and old Levis. But on her return from the ice house she had taken the trouble to change into a long-sleeved, high-collared silk dress. There was no doubting she looked at home in the elegant room with its pastel shades and draped velvet curtains but, to Anne at least, she had the air of a stranger. She smiled distantly at her two friends. "I'm terribly sorry about this."
Anne, as usual, was chain-smoking. She blew a stream of grey into the air above her where she sat on the sofa, head resting against the back. "Don't be a fool," she said bluntly. "No one's going to hold you responsible because some idiot chooses to die on your property. There'll be a simple explanation: a tramp took shelter and had a heart attack."
"My thoughts precisely," said Diana, walking to the sofa. "Give me a cigarette, there's a dear. My nerves are like piano wires, waiting for a Rachmaninov concerto to hit them."
Anne chuckled and handed over the packet. "Do you want one, Pheeb?"
She shook her head and started to polish her spectacles on her skirt hem, absent-mindedly lifting it to waist level and revealing her lack of knickers. Anne found the vagueness of the gesture reassuring.
"There won't be any glass left if you go on doing that," she pointed out gently.
Phoebe sighed, dropped her skirt and put the spectacles back on. "Tramps don't have heart attacks on other people's property in the nude," she said.
The doorbell rang. They heard Molly Phillips, Fred's wife, walk to the front door and without a word, indeed quite by instinct, Anne and Diana positioned themselves on either side of the mantelpiece, flanking Phoebe. As the door opened it occurred to Diana that this might not have been a wise move. To the police mind, she feared, they would seem not so much to be supporting her-the intention-as guarding her.
Molly ushered in two men. "Chief Inspector Walsh and Detective Sergeant McLoughlin, madam. There's a whole lot more outside. Shall I ask Fred to keep an eye on them?"