"What's interesting about that?"
"Would you describe your house as a fortress?"
"She's senile." Walsh waved him on impatiently. "Any more?"
"Diana Goode has a daughter, Elizabeth, who spends odd weekends here. Aged nineteen, has a flat in London which was given her by her father, works as a croupier in one of the big West End casinos. She's a bit wild, or that's the impression her mother gave."
Walsh grunted.
"Phoebe Maybury has a licensed shotgun," McLoughlin continued, reading down his notes. "She's responsible for the spent cartridges. According to Fred, there's a colony of feral cats in and around Grange Farm which use his kitchen garden as their private bog. Mrs. Maybury scares them off with a blast from the shotgun but Fred claims she's rather lost interest lately, says it's like trying to hold back the tide."
"Anyone know anything about the condoms?"
McLoughlin raised a sardonic eyebrow. "No," he said with feeling. "But they all found it very amusing, at my expense. Fred said he's raked up quite a few in the past. I questioned him again about finding the body. His story's the same, no discrepancies." He ran through the sequence for Walsh's benefit.
When Fred arrived at the ice house, the door was completely obscured by the brambles. He returned to his shed to fetch a torch and a scythe, and trampled the brambles so thoroughly because he had intended to take a wheelbarrow in to remove the bricks and had wanted a clear path. The door had been half-open when he finally came to it. There had been no indication that anyone had been that way recently. After he had found the body, he had paused long enough to swing the door to as far as it would go, then he had taken to his heels.
"Did you press him hard?" Walsh asked.
"I went over it with him three or four times, but he's like his wife. He's single-minded and he doesn't volunteer information. That's the story and he's sticking to it. If he did flatten the brambles after he found the body, he's not going to admit to it."
"What's your guess, Andy?"
"I"m with you, sir. I'd say it's odds on he found plenty of evidence to show there'd been traffic that way and did his utmost to obliterate it after he found the body." McLoughlin glanced at the mass of torn vegetation on either side of the doorway. "He did a good job, too. There's no way of knowing now how many people went in there or when."
Elizabeth and Jonathan found their mothers and Anne drinking coffee in the drawing-room. Benson and Hedges roused themselves from the carpet to greet the newcomers, sniffing hands, rubbing delightedly against legs, rolling over in an ecstasy of joyful welcome. By contrast the three women were positively diffident. Phoebe held out a hand to her son. Diana patted the seat beside her in tentative invitation. Anne nodded.
Phoebe spoke first. "Hello, darling. Journey down all right?"
Jonathan perched on the arm of her chair and bent down to peck her cheek. "Fine. Lizzie persuaded her boss to give her the night off and met me at the hospital. I've skipped an afternoon's lectures. We were on the M3 by midday. We haven't eaten yet," he added as an afterthought.
Diana stood up. "I'll get you something."
"Not yet," said Elizabeth, catching her hand and pulling her on to the sofa again. "A few minutes won't make any difference. Tell us what's been happening. We had a quick word with Molly in the kitchen but she didn't exactly lavish us with detail. Do the police know whose body it is? Have they said anything about how it was done?" She blurted the questions, insensitive to feelings, eyes overbright.
Her questions were greeted with surprised silence: In twenty-four hours, the women had unconsciously adjusted themselves to a climate of suspicion. A question must be thought about; answers carefully considered.
Predictably, it was Anne who broke the silence. "It's really quite frightening, isn't it? Your judgement becomes impaired." She flicked ash into the fireplace. "Imagine what it must be like in a police state. You wouldn't dare trust anybody."
Diana threw her a grateful glance. "You tell them. I'm not trained for this sort of thing. My forte is amusing anecdotes with a punchline. When this is over, I'll polish it up, exaggerate the more titillating bits and give everyone something to laugh about over dinner." She shook her head. "But not now. At the moment, it's not very funny."
"Oh, I don't know," said Phoebe surprisingly. "I had a good laugh this morning when Molly caught Sergeant McLoughlin in the downstairs cupboard. She chased him out with a broom. The poor man looked absolutely terrified. Apparently he was trying to find the bog."
Elizabeth giggled nervously. "What's he like?"
"Confused," said Anne dryly, catching the points of her shirt collar and holding them together. "Now, Lizzie, what was it you asked? Do they know whose body it is? No. Have they said anything about how it was done? No." She leant forward and held up her fingers to tick off points. "The situation, as far as we know it, is this." Slowly and lucidly she ran through the details of the finding of the body, its removal, the police examination of the ice house and grounds and their subsequent questioning. "The next step, I think, will be a search warrant." She turned to Phoebe. "It would be logical. They'll want to go through the house with a fine-tooth comb."
"I don't understand why they didn't do it last night."
Anne frowned. "I've been wondering about that but I suspect they've been waiting for the results of the postmortem. They'll want to know what they're looking for. In some ways it makes it worse."
Jonathan turned to his mother. "You said on the phone they wanted to question us. What about?"
Phoebe took off her glasses and polished them on her shirt hem. "They want the names of anyone you showed the ice house to." She looked up at him and he wondered, not for the first time, why she wore glasses. Without them she was beautiful; with them she was ordinary. Once, when he was a child, he had looked through them. It had been a kind of betrayal to discover the lenses were clear glass.
"What about Jane?" he said immediately. "Are they going to question her too?"
"Yes."
"You mustn't let them," he said urgently.
She took his hand and held it between hers. "We don't think we can stop them, darling, and if we try we may make it worse. She'll be home tomorrow. Anne says we should trust her."
Jonathan stood up angrily. "You're mad, Anne. She'll destroy herself and Mum."
Anne shrugged. "We have very little option, Johnny." She used his childhood diminutive deliberately. "I suggest you have more faith in your sister and keep your fingers crossed. Frankly, there's bugger all else we can do."
11
In dribs and drabs, as messages got through, Walsh's men assembled on the grass in front of the ice house to make their reports. The day was at its hottest and the company shed their jackets gratefully and sat or reclined on the ground like family men at the beach. McLoughlin, lying now on his stomach, frowned into the middle distance like an anxious father with far-off boisterous children. Sergeant Robinson, oblivious to anyone's needs but his own, guzzled happily on a packet of sandwiches and gave the whole the spurious air of an impromptu picnic. In the background the brambles which had once flourished as a magnificent green curtain quietly leached their sap through shattered stems and turned brown in the sun.
Walsh drew out his handkerchief and wiped the sweat from his forehead. "Let's hear what you've got then," he snarled into the contented silence as if he had already made the suggestion once and been ignored. He was sitting with his legs stretched wide apart and a notebook on the ground between his knees. He turned to a blank page. "Shoes," he said, making a pencilled note then tapping the brown shoes in the bag beside him. "Who went up to the house?"