"Fair enough," said Walsh with some embarra.s.sment. "We"ll let ourselves out."

Andy McLoughlin paused in the living-room doorway and looked back at her. "We"re going to ask the Vicar to pop round and see you, Mrs. Thompson. It might do you good to have a chat with him."

The Vicar listened to the expression of police concern with ill-disguised panic. "Frankly, Inspector, there"s nothing I can do. Believe me, our little community has bent over backwards to a.s.sist poor Mrs. Thompson. We"ve enlisted the aid of her doctor and a social worker, but they"re powerless to act unless she herself requests psychiatric help. She"s not mad, you see, nor, in the accepted sense, even depressed. In fact, outwardly, she"s coping magnificently." He had a p.r.o.nounced Adam"s apple which bobbed up and down as he spoke. "It"s only when people visit her, particularly men, that she acts-er-strangely. The doctor"s sure it"s only a matter of time before she snaps out of it." He wrung his hands. "The truth is neither he nor I like to go there any more. She seems to have developed s.e.x and religious mania. I"ll send my wife, though to be honest her last encounter with Mrs. Thompson was less than happy, some accusation about seeing me in church with only my socks and shoes on." The Adam"s apple crowded nervously towards his chin. "Poor woman. Such a tragedy for her. Leave it with me, Inspector. I"m sure it"s only a matter of time, of coming to terms with Daniel"s disappearance. There must be a text to deal with it. Leave it with me."

Detective Sergeant Robinson rang Anne"s doorbell and waited. The door was slightly ajar and a voice called: "Come in," from a distance. He went down the corridor to the room at the end. Anne was sitting at her desk, a pencil tucked behind her ear, one booted foot propped on an open drawer and tapping time to "Jumping Jack Flash" playing quietly from her stereo. She looked up and waved him to an empty chair. "I"m Anne Cattrell," she said, taking the pencil from behind her ear and marking a correction on a page of typed paper. "v.a.g.i.n.al o.r.g.a.s.m-Fact or Fiction," had straggled its way towards some sort of climax on five sheets of A4.

He sat down. "Detective Sergeant Robinson," he introduced himself.

She smiled. "What can I do for you?"

h.e.l.l, he thought, she"s OK-more than OK. With her cap of dark hair and wide-s.p.a.ced eyes, she reminded him of Audrey Hepburn. From the way McLoughlin had talked the previous evening, he"d been expecting a real dog. "It"s not much," he said, "just something that doesn"t square."

"Fire away. Does the music worry you?"

"No. One of my favourites," he said truthfully. "It"s like this, Miss Cattrell, both you and the majority of people in Streech village have made out that you and your friends are lesbians." He paused.

"Go on."

"Yet when I mentioned it to Mr. Clarke at the pub this morning, he roared with laughter and said, though not in quite these words, that you were very definitely heteros.e.xual."

"What were his actual words?" she asked curiously. He noticed the full ashtray on her desk. "Do you mind if I smoke, Miss Cattrell?"

She offered him one of hers. "Be my guest." She watched him light the cigarette in silence.

"He said you"ve had more men that I"ve had hot dinners," he said in a rush.

She chuckled. "Yes, that well-worn cliche sounds like Paddy. So, you want to know if I"m a lesbian, and if I"m not why I"ve given the impression that I am." He could almost hear her mind clicking. "Why would a woman give people reason to despise her unless it"s to put them off the track of something else?" She levelled her pencil at him. "You think I"ve murdered one of my lovers and left him to rot in the ice house." Her hands were as small and delicate as a child"s.

"No," he lied gamely. "To be honest, it"s not very important one way or the other, it"s just something that"s puzzled us. Also," he went on, taking a shot in the dark, "I took to Mr. Clarke more than any of the others I spoke to, and I can"t really believe he"s the one who"s wrong."

"Clever of you," said Anne appreciatively. "In matters unconnected with s.e.x, Paddy has more sense in his little finger than the whole of Streech put together."

"Well?" he asked.

"Was his wife there when you spoke to him?"

He shook his head. "We spoke entirely in confidence though what he said about you was intended to be pa.s.sed on. He said he was fed up with the b-er-rubbish that was spoken about the three of you."

"Bulls.h.i.t?" she supplied helpfully.

"Yes." He grinned boyishly. "Actually, I met his wife as I was leaving. She scared the h.e.l.l out of me."

Anne lit a cigarette. "She was a nun once and incredibly pretty. She met Paddy in church and he swept her off her feet and persuaded her to break her vows. She"s never forgiven him for it. As she gets older, her fall from grace a.s.sumes larger and larger proportions. She thinks it"s G.o.d"s punishment that she hasn"t any children." She was amused by his astonishment.

"You"re having me on?" He couldn"t believe Mrs. Clarke had ever been pretty.

Her dark eyes sparkled. "G.o.d"s truth, m"lud." She blew a smoke ring into the air. "Fifteen years ago she set Paddy on fire. The spark"s still there. It flashes out occasionally when she forgets herself, though Paddy can"t see it. He"s accepted the surface image and forgotten that nine-tenths of her lies hidden."

"You could say that about anyone," Robinson pointed out.

"You could indeed."

"Jumping Jack Flash" had given way to "Mother"s Little Helper." Her foot tapped out a new rhythm.

He waited for a moment but she didn"t go on. "Was Mr. Clarke"s information about you correct, Miss Cattrell?"

"Hopelessly wrong on numbers unless your mother"s deprived you of hot dinners, but the general drift"s accurate."

"So why did you tell Sergeant McLoughlin you were a lesbian?"

She made another pencilled note on the page. "I didn"t," she said, without looking up. "He heard what he wanted to hear."

"He"s not a bad sort," he said lamely, wondering why he felt a need to defend McLoughlin. "He"s been going through a rough patch lately."

She raised her eyes. "Is he a friend of yours?"

Robinson shrugged. "I suppose so. He"s done me some favours, stood by me a couple of times. We have the odd drink together."

Anne found his answer depressing. Who listened, she wondered, when a man needed to talk? Women had friends; men, it seemed, had drinking companions. "Whatever I said wouldn"t have made any difference," she told the Sergeant. "It doesn"t matter twopence to this case whether we bonk women every night or men every night. Or if," she waved her pencil at her bookcase, "we go to bed for the simple pleasures of reading ourselves to sleep. When you"ve solved your murder, you"ll see I"m right." She bent to her corrections once more.

12.

Chief Inspector Walsh gathered his men about him on the drive in front of the Grange and divided them into four groups. Three to search the properties inside, and a fourth to comb the outhouses behind the kitchen, the garage block, the greenhouses and the cellars. Robinson had come out of the house to join them.

"What are we looking for, sir?" asked one man.

Walsh handed some typed sheets round the groups. "Read these pointers, then use your common sense. If anyone here is connected with this murder, they are not going to make you a free gift of their involvement so keep your wits about you and your eyes open. The important facts to remember are these; one, our man died approximately ten weeks ago; two, he was stabbed; three, his clothes and dentures were removed; four, and most importantly, it would help if we knew who the h.e.l.l he was. David Maybury and Daniel Thompson seem the most likely contenders and there"s a brief description of both of them on those sheets." He paused to let the men read the descriptions. "You will notice that in terms of height, colouring and shoe size, the two are not dissimilar, but bear in mind, please, that Maybury will have aged ten years since his description was written. I shall head up the search in Mrs. Maybury"s house, McLoughlin will take Miss Cattrell, Jones, Mrs. Goode and Robinson will mastermind the outhouses. If anyone finds anything, notify me immediately."

With a sense of reluctance, McLoughlin presented himself and his two men outside Anne"s door and rang her bell. Nick Robinson"s crowing account of his chat with her had set a pile-driver beating in his head. "Got your wires crossed there, old son," Nick had said breathily into his ear. "Given half a chance, I"d have a shot myself. They always say the bright ones are the least inhibited."

McLoughlin, starved of alcohol, poked stiff fingers into the fat man"s beer gut and listened to the satisfying ejection of air. "You mean they stick a knife between your ribs when the performance is lousy," he hissed into the other man"s face.

Robinson notched up a direct hit and chuckled between deep breaths. "I wouldn"t know. I never have that problem."

McLoughlin tried to remember a time when his head hadn"t hurt, when shutters stayed open in his mind, and when he hadn"t felt sick. His feelings see-sawed violently between intense dislike of Anne coupled with certainty that she was responsible for the mangled body in the ice house, and a hot shame that set the sweat pouring under his arms whenever he thought of his behaviour of the morning. He bunched his fist till the knuckles gleamed white. "So why did she say she was a d.y.k.e?"

With a wary eye on the fist, Nick Robinson took a pace or two backwards. "Claims she didn"t. Face it, Andy, she reckons you"re a pompous a.s.s so she took the p.i.s.s." And it"ll do you good, he thought. He liked McLoughlin, he had no reason not to, but the man fancied himself a cut above the rest of them which was why his wife"s desertion had come so hard. The joke was that the Station had known about it for days, ever since Jack Booth had spilled the beans to Bob Rogers, but they had waited tactfully for McLoughlin to tell them himself. He never had. For two weeks he had come in every morning with a ferocious hangover and rambling stories about what Kelly had said or done the night before. Only his pride was hurt, they all knew it, and that not for much longer the way the WPCs were queuing up to get between his sheets. The clever money was on WPC Brownlow. And for Nick, fat, prematurely bald and with a penchant for WPC Brownlow himself, Anne"s indifference to McLoughlin had been a soothing balm.

Anne opened the door and gestured them inside. McLoughlin removed the search warrant from his briefcase and gave it to her. She read it through carefully before handing it back with a shrug. There was no change in her manner towards him, no indication to him or his colleagues that he had overstepped that invisible mark beyond which behaviour is censured.

"Go ahead," she said, nodding towards the small staircase leading to her upper rooms. "I"ll be in my study if you want me." She returned to her desk in the big sunlit room. "I Can"t Get No Satisfaction" throbbed in the amplifiers.

Her spare room revealed nothing. McLoughlin doubted if it had been used for months, even years. There was a depression in the counterpane of one of the twin beds which implied that Benson or Hedges had found a comfortable retreat there, but no indication of a human presence. They moved on to her bedroom.

"Not bad," said one of the men approvingly. "The wife"s just paid a fortune for pink frills, white melamine and mirrors. Can"t get into the b.l.o.o.d.y bedroom now. Bet we could have done something like this for half the price." He ran his hand along the front of a low oak chest.

The room gave an impression of s.p.a.ce because it contained so little: only the chest, a delicate wicker chair, and a low double bed with a pile of pillows and a bottle-green duvet. In a recess in one corner was a built-in wardrobe. A white carpet stretched to infinity with no line to show where carpet ended and white skirting boards began. Huge colour close-ups of glorious flowers against jet-black backgrounds marched in a brilliant band round white walls. The room both challenged the eye and relaxed it.

"You two go through the chest and wardrobe," said McLoughlin. "I"ll have a look in the bathroom." He retreated gratefully to the normality of a pale pink bathroom but found nothing exceptional, unless two tins of shaving foam, a large packet of disposable razors and three used toothbrushes could be considered unusual possessions for a spinster. As he turned to the door, the corner of his eye caught a movement behind him. He spun sharply, heart struggling like a live thing in his mouth, and hardly recognised himself in the drawn and angry man who stared out of the mirror. He flicked the tap and splashed water over his face, dabbing it dry with a towel which smelt of roses. His head ached unbearably. He was at war with himself and the effort of trying to hold the warring parts together was destroying him. It was nothing to do with Kelly. The thought, unprompted, surprised him. It was inside him and had been inside him for a long time, a simmering rage that he could neither direct nor control, but which Kelly"s departure had fired.

He went into the bedroom.

"Here"s something, Sarge," said DC Friar. He was on the bed, reclining against the pillows in a posture absurdly reminiscent of Manet"s " Olympia." He held a small leather-bound book in one hand and was chuckling over it. "Jesus, it"s obscene."

"Off," said McLoughlin with a jerk of his head. He watched the man slide his feet reluctantly to the floor. "What is it?"

"Her diary. Listen to this. "I cannot look on a p.e.n.i.s, post-e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n, in a condom without laughing. I am transported immediately to my childhood and the time when my father"s finger turned septic. He constructed a finger-stall out of industrial polythene-"to keep an eye on the b.u.g.g.e.r"-and summoned my mother and me to witness the exciting climax when the finger, after much squeezing, burst. It was a jolly occasion." Jesus, that"s sick!" He twitched the book out of McLoughlin"s reach. "And this one, listen to this one-" he flicked a page-" "Phoebe and Diana sunbathed nude on the terrace today. I could have watched them for hours, they were so beautiful." " Friar grinned. "She"s a dirty little b.u.g.g.e.r, isn"t she? I wonder if the other two know she"s a peeper." He looked up and was surprised by the expression of distaste on McLoughlin"s face. He took it for prudery. "I was reading the entries for end of May, beginning of June," he said. "Take a look at June second and third."

McLoughlin turned the pages. Her handwriting was black and strong and not always legible. He found Sat.u.r.day, June 2nd. She had written: "I have looked into the grave and eternity frightens me. I dreamed there was awareness after death. I hung alone in a great darkness, unable to speak or move, but knowing" (this word was underscored three times) "that I had been abandoned to exist forever without love and without hope. I could only yearn, and the pain of my yearning was terrible. I shall keep my light on tonight. Just at the moment, the darkness frightens me." He read on. June 3rd: "Poor Di. "Conscience does make cowards of us all." Should I have told her?" June 4th: "P. is a mystery. He tells me he screws fifty women a year, and I believe him, yet he remains the most considerate of lovers. Why, when he can afford to take women for granted?"

McLoughlin snapped the diary shut in his palm. "Anything else? Anything on her clothes?" The two men shook their heads. "We"ll tackle the living-room."

Anne looked up as they went in. She saw the diary in McLoughlin"s hand and a faint colour washed her cheeks. d.a.m.n, she thought. Why, of all things, had she forgotten that? "Is that necessary?" she asked him.

"I"m afraid so, Miss Cattrell." The Stones struck a final chord which lingered as a vibration in the air before fading into silence.

"There"s nothing in it," she said. "Nothing that will help you, at least."

DC Friar muttered into his colleague"s ear, loud enough for McLoughlin to hear. "Like h.e.l.l there isn"t! It"s packed with f.u.c.king 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 blast.i.t 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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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 s.h.i.t 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. "Compa.s.sion 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 a.s.sumed compa.s.sion 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 sc.r.a.ped 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 b.i.t.c.h, 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.