"Found anything, sir?" McLoughlin had returned.
"Look under here, Andy, and tell me what you see."
McLoughlin knelt obligingly beside his superior and stared where Walsh was pointing. "What am I looking for?"
"Stems with old breaks in them. We are safe in assuming our body didn't pole vault over this little lot."
McLoughlin shook his head. "We'd have to take the brambles apart for that, bit by bit, and I doubt we'd have much joy even then. Whoever flattened them did a thorough job."
Walsh lowered the vegetation and removed the bamboo. "The gardener, according to Mrs. Maybury."
"Looks as if he's put a steam-roller over it."
"It's interesting, isn't it?" Walsh stood up. "Did you get hold of Webster?"
"He's on his way, should be here in ten minutes. I've told the others to wait for him. Nick Robinson's already laid on the lights and the camera, so the gardener's showing them all down here once Webster arrives. Except young Williams. I've left him in the house to take background statements and keep his eyes open. He's a sharp lad. If there's anything to see, he'll see it."
"Good. The mortuary van?"
"On stand-by at the station."
Walsh moved a few yards away and sat down on the grass. "We'll wait. There's nothing to be done until the photographs have been taken." He blew a cloud of smoke out of the side of his mouth and squinted through it at McLoughlin. "What is a nude corpse doing in Mrs Maybury's ice house, Sergeant? And what or, perhaps, who, has been eating it?"
With a groan, McLoughlin reached for his handkerchief.
PC Williams had taken statements from Mrs. Maybury, Mrs. Goode and Miss Cattrell and was now with Molly Phillips in the kitchen. For some reason that he couldn't understand, she was being deliberately obstructive and he thought with irritation that his colleagues had a knack of landing themselves the decent jobs. With ill-disguised satisfaction they had set off down the garden with Fred Phillips and the new arrivals and their assorted paraphernalia. Williams, who had seen Andy McLoughlin's face when he came up from the ice house, was consumed with curiosity as to what was down there. McLoughlin's nerves were sprung with Scottish steel, and he had looked as sick as a dog.
Reluctantly Constable Williams returned to the job in hand. "So the first you knew about his body was when Mrs. Goode came in to telephone?"
"What if it was?"
He looked at her in exasperation. "Do you always answer questions with questions?"
"Maybe, maybe not. That's my business."
He was only a lad, the sort that people looked at and said: Policemen are getting younger. He tried a wheedling approach that had worked for him on a couple of occasions in the past. "Listen, Ma-"
"Don't you 'Ma' me," she spat at him viciously. "You're no son of mine. I don't have kids." She turned her back on him and busied herself slicing carrots into a saucepan. "You should be ashamed of yourself. What would your mother say? She's the only one you've a right to call Ma like that."
Frustrated old cow, he thought. He looked at the thin, drooping shoulders and reckoned her problem was that her old man had never given her a proper working over. "I don't even know who she is."
She was still for a moment, knife poised in mid-air, then went on with her slicing. She said nothing.
Williams tried another tack. "All I'm doing, Mrs. Phillips, is getting some background details on the discovery of the body. Mrs. Goode has told me she came into the house to make the telephone call to us. She said you were in the hall when she made it and that afterwards she went down to the cellar to get some brandy because there was none left on the sideboard. Is that right?"
"If Mrs. Goode says it is, that's enough for you. There's no need to come sneaking round here behind her back trying to find out if she's telling lies."
He looked at her sharply. "Is she telling lies?"
"No, she's not. The very idea."
"Then what's all the mystery?" he asked her angry back. "What are you being so secretive about?"
She rounded on him. "Don't you take that tone with me. I know your sort. None better. You'll not browbeat me." She whisked the teacup from under his nose where he sat at the table and dumped it unceremoniously in her washing-up bowl. He could have sworn there were tears in her eyes.
The police photographer picked his way gingerly out of the doorway and lifted the camera strap over his neck. "Finished, sir," he told Walsh.
The Chief Inspector placed a hand on his shoulder. "Good man. Back to the Station with you then and get that film developed." He turned to the pathologist. "Shall we go in, Webster?"
Dr. Webster smiled grimly. "Do I have a choice?"
"After you," said Walsh maliciously.
The scene was lit now with battery-run arc-lights, every detail showing with stark clarity, no shadows to soften the shocking impact. Walsh gazed dispassionately on the body. It was true, he thought, that exposure to violence desensitised a man. He could barely recall his earlier repugnance, though perhaps the lights had something to do with this. As a child the dark had held terrors for him, with nightmare creations of his imagining lurking in the corners of his bedroom. His father, in other respects a kind man but fearing the embarrassment of an effeminate son, was unsympathetic and had closed his ears to the muffled weeping inside a bedroom from which all the light bulbs had been removed.
"Good God," said Webster, surveying the ice-house floor with marked distaste. He picked his way carefully towards the centre of it, avoiding tattered pieces of hardened entrail which lay on the flagstones. He looked at the head. "Good God," he said again.
The head, still tethered to the upper torso by blackened sinew, was wedged in a gap in the top row of a neat stack of bricks. Dull grey hair, long enough to be a woman's, spilled out of the gap. Eyeless sockets, showing bone underneath, and exposed upper and lower jaw bones gleamed white against the blackened musculature of the face. The chest area, anchored by the head against the vertical face of bricks, looked as if it had been skilfully filleted. The lower half of the body lay unnaturally askew of its top half in a position that no living person, however supple, could have achieved. The abdominal region had all but disappeared though shreds of it lay about as mute witnesses that it had once existed. There were no genitals. The lower half of the left arm, propped on a smaller pile of bricks, was some four feet from the body, much of the flesh stripped away, but some sinews remaining to show it had been wrenched from its elbow. The right arm, pressed against the torso, had the same blackened quality as the head with patches of white bone showing through. Of the legs, only the calves and feet were immediately recognisable, but at a distance from each other in a grotesque parody of the splits and twisted upside down so that the soles pointed at the ice-house roof. Of the thighs, only splintered bones remained.
"Well?" said Walsh after some minutes during which the pathologist took temperature readings and made a rough sketch of the lie of the body.
"What do you want to know?"
"Man or woman?"
Webster pointed to the feet. "From the size, I'd guess a man. We can't be sure until we've done some measurements, of course, but it looks like it. If it's not a man, it was a big woman and a mannish one."