The Ice House

"I can't guarantee no court appearances," said Robinson. "If the prosecution serves a writ on you, you'll have to attend. But it may never happen. The woman may have no bearing on the case."

"You reckon?" Staines snorted. "More'n I do."

"I could take you in for questioning," said Robinson mildly.

"Wouldn't get you nowhere. I won't say nothing till I'm certain Bob Trewin won't find out. He'd kill me, no mistake." He flexed his muscles and returned to his raking.

Nick Robinson wrote his name and the address of the Police Station on a page of his notebook. He tore it out and handed it to Staines. "Write down what happened and when, and send it to me unsigned," he suggested. "I'll treat it as an anonymous tip-off. That way no one will know where it came from."

"You'll know."

"If you don't," Robinson warned, "I'll come back and next time I'll bring the Inspector. He won't take no for an answer."

"I'll think on it."

"You do that." He started to leave. "I suppose you weren't up there three nights ago?"

Staines hefted a lump of dung to the top of his straw pile. "You suppose right."

"One of the women was attacked."

"Oh, yeah?"

"You hadn't heard?"

Staines shrugged. "Maybe." He cast a sideways glance at the detective. "One of her girlfriends did it, bound to be. Bitches fight like the devil when they're roused."

"So you didn't hear or see anything that night?"

Eddie turned his back to attack the farthest corner of the shed. "Like I just said, I wasn't there."

Now, why don't I believe you, Robinson wondered, as he picked his way with distaste through the cow dung in the yard. The apple-cheeked girl giggled as he passed her by the gate then, like a moth to the flame, she dashed back to the cow-sheds and the arms of her philanderer.

17

Walsh was still nursing a bloody nose when McLoughlin got back to the Station. It had long since stopped bleeding but he persisted in holding his blood-stained handkerchief to it. McLoughlin, who hadn't overheard that part of Phoebe's and Jonathan's conversation, looked at him in surprise.

"What happened?" he asked.

"Mrs. Goode hit me, so I arrested her for assault," said Walsh maliciously. "That soon wiped the smile off her face."

McLoughlin sat down. "Is she still here?"

"No, dammit. Mrs. Maybury persuaded her to apologise and I let her go with a caution. Bloody women," he said. He stuffed the handkerchief into his pocket. "We've had a result on the shoes. Young Gavin Williams turned up an old cobbler in East Deller who does it for pin money."

McLoughlin whistled. "And?"

"Daniel Thompson's for sure. The old boy keeps records, bless him. Writes a description of the shoes-in this case, made a special note of the different coloured laces-what needs to be done, name of owner and the dates they come in and go out. Thompson collected them a week before he went missing." Walsh fingered his nose tenderly. "The timescale's perfect. It's not looking good for Mrs. Goode." He chuckled at his witticism. "If we can find just one person who saw him going into the Grange-" He let the thought hang in the air while he took out his pipe and started to clean it with cheerful industry. "How do you fancy Miss Cattrell for that part? She went through the little pantomime with her solicitor to steer us away from her friend, then panicked her friend by letting on how much she knew." He tapped the pipe against his head. "Goodbye Miss Cattrell."

"No chance," said McLoughlin decidedly, watching the pipe-cleaner turn black with tar. "I dropped into the hospital on my way here. She's come round. I've sent Brownlow down to sit with her."

"Has she now? Did you speak to her?"

"Briefly, before I was booted out by the Sister. She needs a good sleep, apparently, before she can answer questions."

"Well?" demanded Walsh sharply. "What did she say?"

"Nothing much. The whole thing's a complete blank to her." He examined his nails. "She did say she thought she heard something outside."

Walsh grunted suspiciously. "Suits your case rather neatly, doesn't it?"

McLoughlin shrugged. "You're barking up the wrong tree, sir, and if you hadn't tied my hands I'd have proved it by now."

There was malice in the older man's voice. "Jones has taken his team over the ground twice and they haven't found anything."

"Then let me have a look. I'm wasting my time on the Maybury file. No one I've spoken to so far knew anything about his penchant for little girls. Jane appears to be the only one. It's a dead end, sir."

Walsh dropped the fouled pipe-cleaner into his waste-paper basket and glared at his Sergeant with open dislike. McLoughlin's admission that he had been trying to steal a march rankled with him, all the more because his own grip on the case was so tenuous. He was deeply suspicious of the man in front of him. What did McLoughlin know that he didn't? Had he found the pattern? "You'll stick with that file till you've talked to everyone who knew Maybury," he said angrily. "It's a whole new line of enquiry and I want it thoroughly explored."

"Why?"

Walsh's brows snapped together. "What do you mean, why?"

"Where will it lead us?"

"To Maybury's murderer."

McLoughlin looked at him with amusement. "She's got the better of you, sir, and there's damned all you can do about it. Raking over dead ashes isn't going to produce a prosecution. He terrorised one child and that was his own daughter, and now he's dead. My guess is he's buried in that garden somewhere, possibly in one of the flowerbeds at the front. She does those herself. Fred is never allowed near them. I think you were right and she hid the body in the ice house till the coast was clear and I doubt very much if, after ten years, there's anything left for us to find. Those dogs of hers are rather partial to human remains."

Walsh plucked at his lips. "I'm keeping an open mind. Webster still hasn't proved to my satisfaction that it wasn't Maybury in the ice house."

McLoughlin gave a derisive snort. "A minute ago you were convinced it was Daniel Thompson. For God's sake, sir, face up to the fact that you've got a closed mind on this whole thing. Result, we're all working with one hand behind our backs." He leaned forward. "There is no pattern, or not the sort you're looking for. You're trying to force unrelated facts to fit and you're making a mess of it."

A panic of indecision gripped Walsh's belly. It was true, he thought. There was too much pressure. Pressure from within him to close the Maybury case once and for all, pressure from the media for eye-catching headlines, pressure from above to find quick solutions. And, always, the unrelenting pressure from below as the new bloods challenged for his job. He eyed McLoughlin covertly as he fingered tobacco into his pipe bowl. He had liked and trusted this devil once, he reminded himself, when the devil was shackled to a tiresome wife and troubled by his inadequacies. "What do you suggest?"

McLoughlin, who had been up for three nights in a row, rubbed his tired eyes vigorously. "A constant watch on Streech Grange. I'd suggest a minimum of two in each shift. Another thorough search of the grounds, but concentrated up near the Lodge. And, finally, let's be done with Maybury and put our energies into pursuing the Thompson angle."

"With Mrs. Goode as chief suspect?"

McLoughlin pondered for a moment or two. "We can't ignore her certainly, but it doesn't feel right."

Walsh touched his sore nose tenderly. "It feels very right to me, lad."

Mrs. Thompson greeted them with her look of long-suffering martyrdom and showed them into the pristine but characterless room. McLoughlin had a sense of going back in time, as if the intervening days hadn't happened and they were about to explore the same conversation in the same way and with the same results. Walsh produced the shoes, no longer in their polythene bag, but with the odd meagre dusting of powder where an attempt had been made to bring up fingerprints and had failed. He put them on a low coffee table for her to look at. "You said these weren't your husband's shoes, Mrs. Thompson," he accused her mildly.