The Ice House

He leaned forward excitedly. "But do you know why he would want to disappear?"

"No, I don't." She sat up straight and pushed the hair back off her face. "All I do know, Sergeant, is that it wasn't my fault." A slow smile curved her lips. "You can't imagine how good that makes me feel."

"But surely no one's ever suggested it was?" The idea appalled him.

"When I was eight years old, my mother caught me in bed with my father. My father ran away because of it and my mother was labelled a murderess. At the age of ten, my brother's personality changed. He stopped being a child and took his father's place. He was sworn to secrecy about what had happened and has never mentioned his father again." She played with her fingers. "My mother's guilt has been an irrelevancy beside mine." She raised her eyes. "What happened the other night was a blessing in disguise. For years I've sat with a psychiatrist who has done his level best to intellectualise me out of my feelings of guilt. To a certain extent he succeeded and I pushed it all to the back of my mind. I was the victim, not the culprit. I was manipulated by someone I had been taught to respect. I played the role that was demanded of me because I was too young to understand I had a choice." She paused briefly. "But the other night, perhaps because I was so frightened, it all came back to me with amazing clarity. For the first time, I realised how the pattern had changed the night he left. For the first time, I didn't need to consciously justify my i

"Have you told her all this?"

"Not yet. I will after you've gone. I wanted someone else to reach the same conclusion I had."

"Tell me what happened when you were going to the Lodge," he encouraged. "You said you heard breathing."

She compressed her lips in thought. "It's a bit of a blur now," she admitted. "I was fine till I came to the begi

"OK," he said. "It's not important. And when you said you thought it was your father, that was just because you were frightened? There wasn't anything about the breathing that reminded you of him?"

"No," she said. "I can't even remember what he looked like. It was so long ago and Mum's burnt all his photos. I couldn't possibly recognise his breathing." She watched him gather his bits and pieces together. "Have I been any good?"

"Good?" On impulse, he reached forward and gave her hands a quick impersonal squeeze. "I'd say your godma's going to be pretty pleased with you, young lady. Forget about fighting battles, you've just scaled your own Mount Everest. And it's all downhill from now on."

Phoebe was sitting on a garden seat beside the front door, chin on hands, staring unseeingly at the flowerbeds which bordered the gravel drive. "May I join you?" he asked her.

She nodded.

They sat in silence for some minutes. "The dividing line between a fortress and a prison is a fine one," he remarked softly. "And ten years is a long time. Do you not think, Mrs. Maybury, that you've served your sentence?"

She sat up straight and gestured bitterly in the direction of Streech Village and beyond. "Ask them," she said. "It was they who put up the barbed wire."

"Was it?"

Instinctively, defensively, she pressed her glasses up her nose. "Of course. It was never my choice to live like this. But what do you do when people turn against you? Beg them to be kind?" She gave a harsh laugh. "I wouldn't do it."

He stared at his hands. "It wasn't your fault," he said quietly. "Jane understands that. He was what he was. Nothing you did or didn't do would have made any difference."

She withdrew into herself and let the silence lengthen. Above them swallows and house martens dipped and darted and a lark swelled its little throat and sang. At long last she took a handkerchief from her sleeve and held it to her eyes. "I don't think I like you very much," she said.

He looked at her. "We all carry our burden of guilt-it's human nature. Listen to anyone newly bereaved or divorced and you'll hear the same story-if only I had done this… if only I tyadn't done that… if only I had been kinder… if only I had realised. Our capacity for self-punishment is enormous. The trick is to know when to stop." He rested a light hand on her shoulder. "You've been punishing yourself for far too long. Can you not see that?"

She turned her face away from him. "I should have known," she said into her handkerchief. "He was hurting her and I should have known."

"How could you have known? You're no different from the rest of us," he told her brutally. "Jane loved you, she wanted to protect you. If you blame yourself, you take away everything she tried to do for you."

There was another long silence while she fought to control her tears. "I'm her mother. There was only me to save her, but when she needed me I never came. I can't bear to think about it." A convulsive tremor rocked the shoulder beneath his hand.

He didn't stop to consider whether it was a good idea but reacted instinctively, drawing her into the fold of his arm and letting her weep. They were not the first tears she had shed, he guessed, but they were the first she had shed for her lost self, that self who had come into an enchanted world, wide-eyed and sure that she could do anything. The triumph of the human condition was to face one small defeat after another and to survive them relatively intact. The tragedy, as for Phoebe, was to face the worst defeat too soon and never to recover. His heart, still bruised and battered, ached for her.

He stopped his car on the bend before the straight stretch of drive and got out. Close, Jane had said, which meant in all probability crouched among the rhododendron bushes along the edge of the way. His searches so far had been disappointing. While he had set a team to scour the ice house for a link with Mrs. Thompson, he himself had gone on hands and knees about the terrace for signs of A

He sank to hands and knees again and began to inch along the drive. If there was anything, it wouldn't be easy to find. A team had been over here once without success but then he had told them to concentrate further down, near where he had caught her and where, for one brief moment, he had had the feeling that he and Jane were being watched. He crawled along the left-hand side, knees aching, eyes constantly alert, but after half an hour he had found nothing.

He sat back wearily on his heels and swore at the injustice of it. Just once, he thought, let me be lucky. Just once, let something come my way that I haven't had to work my bloody butt off for.