DC Friar muttered into his colleague's ear, loud enough for McLoughlin to hear. "Like hell there isn't! It's packed with fucking information!"
He wasn't prepared for the sudden grip of McLoughlin's fingers on the underside of his upper arm. They bit into the tender flesh like iron marlinspikes, gouging, probing, unrelenting in their viciousness. Quite unwittingly, he had reminded McLoughlin of Jack Booth.
A head taller than Friar, McLoughlin smiled gently down on him. His voice, curling lovingly round the Scots vernacular, murmured softly and sweetly: " 'Ye ugly, creepin blastit wonner, Destested, shunn'd by saunt and sinner, How daur ye set a fit upon her, sae fine a Lady! Gae somewhere else and seek your dinner, on some poor body.' " There was no emotion in his dark face but his knuckles whitened. "Recognise that, Friar?"
The DC pulled himself free with an effort and rubbed his arm. He looked thoroughly startled. "Give over, Sarge," he muttered uncomfortably. "I didn't understand a bloody word." He looked to the other constable for support but Jansen was staring at his feet. He was new to Silverborne and Andy McLoughlin scared the shit out of him.
McLoughlin placed his briefcase on the corner of Anne's desk and opened it. "It's from a poem by Robert Burns," he told Friar affably. "It's called 'To A Louse.' Now, Miss Cattrell," he went on, turning his attention to her, "this is a murder investigation. Your diary will help us establish your movements during the last few months." He removed a pad of receipts and wrote on the top one. "It will be returned as soon as we've finished with it." He tore off the piece of paper and held it out to her and, for a brief moment, his eyes looked into hers and saw the laughter in them. A surge of warmth lapped around the frozen heart of his solitude. She bent her head to study the receipt and his gaze was attracted to the soft curls round the base of her neck, tiny inverted question marks which posed as many problems for him as she did herself. He wanted to touch them.
"I don't record my movements in that diary," she told him after a moment, "only my thoughts." She looked up and her eyes laughed still. "It's poor fare, Sergeant, just bees in my bonnet. I fear ye'll dine but sparely on sic a place."
He smiled. Burns had written his poem after seeing a louse on a lady's bonnet in church. "Ye've nae got the accent, Miss Cattrell. Ye grate ma lug wi' your crabbet sound." She laughed out loud, and he hooked his foot round a chair and drew it forward to sit on. It was such a tiny face, he thought, and so expressive. Too expressive? Did sorrow come as easily as laughter? "You recorded some interesting thoughts in your diary on June second. You wrote"-he pictured the written page in his mind-" 'I have looked into the grave and eternity frightens me.' " He examined her closely. "Why did you write that, Miss Cattrell, and why did you write it then?"
"No reason. I often write about death."
"Had you just seen inside a grave?"
"No."
"Does death frighten you?"
"Not in the least. It annoys me."
"In what way?"
Her eyes were amused. They would always betray her, he thought. "Because I'll never know what happened next. I want to read the whole book, not just the first chapter. Don't you?"
Yes, he thought, I do. "Yet you feared it at the beginning of June. Why?"
"I don't remember."
" 'I dreamed there was awareness after death,' " he prompted her. "You went on to say that you would keep your light on that night because the darkness frightened you."
She thought back. "I had a dream and my dreams are very real. That one particularly vivid. I woke early, when it was still dark, and I couldn't think where I was. I thought the dream was true." She shrugged. "That's what frightened me."
"You told Mrs. Goode something on June third which troubled her conscience. What was that?"
"Did I?" He opened the diary and read the extract to her. She shook her head. "It was probably something trivial. Di has a sensitive conscience."
"Perhaps," he suggested, "you'd decided to tell her about the corpse you'd found in the ice house?"
"No, it certainly wasn't that." Her eyes danced wickedly. "I'd remember that."
He was silent for a moment. "Tell me why you don't feel sorry for that wretched man out there, Miss Cattrell."
She turned away to look for a cigarette. "I do feel sorry for him."
"Do you?" He picked up her lighter and flicked the flame for her. "You've never said so. Neither has Mrs. Maybury or Mrs. Goode. It's hardly normal. Most people would have expressed some sympathy, said 'Poor man' as the minimum gesture of regret. The only emotion any of you has shown so far is irritation."
It was true, she thought. How.stupid they had been. "We save our sympathies for ourselves," she told him coolly. "Compassion is a frail thing. It dies at the first touch of frost. You would have to live at Streech Grange to understand that."
"You depress me. I assumed compassion was one of your muses." He splayed his hands on the desk, then stood up. "You would have felt sorry for a stranger, I think. But you knew him and you didn't like him, did you?" His chair scraped back. "Right, Friar, Jansen, let's get on with it. We'll be as quick as we can, Miss Cattrell. At the end I will ask you to go upstairs with a WPC who will search you for anything you may have concealed in your clothing. You are welcome to stay while we work in here but, if you prefer to wait outside, one of the constables will wait with you."
She puffed a smoke ring into the air and stabbed its centre with the end of her cigarette. "Oh, I'll stay, Sergeant," she told him. "Police searches are meat and drink to me. It should run to a couple of thousand words on a woman's page somewhere. I rather fancy a headline like the pry trade or licence to snoop. What do you think?"
Sallow-faced bitch, he thought, as he watched the smoke drift from her mouth. The room stank of her cigarettes. "Please yourself, Miss Cattrell." He turned away. The blood swelled and throbbed and thickened in his head till he thought only a scream would relieve its pressure.
They went through everything with a fine-tooth comb and with infinite patience. Inside books, behind pictures, beneath chairs, through drawers; they ran long needles into the earth in the plant pots, felt for lumps under the fitted carpet, upended the sofa and poked deftly into its soft cushions; and when they had finished, the room looked exactly as it had done before they started. Anne, who had been moved courteously from her place behind her desk, was duly impressed.
"Very professional," she told them. "I congratulate you. Is that it?"
"Not quite," said McLoughlin. "Would you open the safe for me, please?"
She gave him a startled look. "What on earth makes you think I've got a safe?"
He walked over to the oak-panelled mantelpiece which was an exact replica of the one in the library. He pressed on the edge of the middle panel and slid it back, revealing the dull green metal of a wall-safe with a chromium handle and lock. He glanced at Friar and Jansen. "I found the one in the library this morning," he said. "Neat, isn't it?" He couldn't look at her. Her panic, brief though it had been, had shocked him.
She walked back to her desk, collecting her thoughts. She had always believed Phoebe the better judge of character, but it was Diana who was scared of McLoughlin.
"Would you open it, please?" he asked her again.
She took an unbroached packet of cigarettes from a carton of two hundred in her top drawer and tore the seal off it. He watched her patiently, saying nothing.
"Just who do you think you are?" snapped DG Friar angrily. "You heard the Sergeant. Open the bloody safe."
She ignored him, flipped the lid of the packet and turned the whole thing upside down, shaking a key into the palm of her hand. "How are you on Spenser?" she asked McLoughlin with a quirky smile. " 'A man by nothing is so well betrayed as by his manners.' It might have been written for your friend here."