Read The Ice House for Free Online

particularly when drunk. He had a habit of beating people up, women as well as men." Walsh puffed a spurt of smoke from the side of his mouth and eyed his subordinate. "He put himself about a bit. We turned up at least three little tarts who kept warm beds for him in London."
    "Did she know?" He nodded towards the hall.
    Walsh shrugged. "Claimed she didn't."
    "Did he beat her up?"
    "Undoubtedly, I should think, except she denied it. She had a bruise the size of a football on her face when she reported him missing and we found out she was twice admitted to hospital when he was alive, once with a fractured wrist and once with cracked ribs and a broken collar-bone. She told doctors she was accident-prone." He gave a harsh laugh. "They didn't believe her any more than I did. He used her as his personal punch bag whenever he was drunk."
    "So why didn't she leave? Or perhaps she enjoyed the attention?"
    Walsh considered him thoughtfully for a moment. He started to say something, then thought better of it. "Streech Grange has been in her family for years. He lived here on sufferance and used her capital to run a small wine business from the house. Presumably most of the stock's still here if she hasn't drunk or sold it. No, she wouldn't leave. In fact I can't imagine any circumstances at all, not even fire, which would make her abandon her precious Streech Grange. She's a very tough lady."
    "And, I suppose, as he was in clover, he wouldn't go either."
    "That's about the size of it."
    "So she got rid of him."
    Walsh nodded.
    "But you couldn't prove it."
    "No."
    McLoughlin's bleak face cracked into a semblance of a grin. "She must have come up with one hell of a story."
    "Matter of fact, it was bloody awful. She told us he walked out one night and never returned." Walsh wiped a dribble of tar and saliva off the end of his pipe with his sleeve. "It was three days before she reported him missing, and she only did that because people had started to ask where he was. In that time she packed up all his clothes and sent them off to some charity whose name she couldn't remember, she burnt all his photos and went through this house with a vacuum cleaner and a cloth soaked with bleach to remove every last trace of him. In other words she behaved exactly like someone who had just murdered her husband and was trying to get rid of the evidence. We salvaged some hair that she'd missed in a brush, a current passport and photo that she'd overlooked at the back of a desk drawer, and an old blood donor card. And that was it. We turned this house and garden upside down, called in forensic to do a microscopic search and it was a waste of time. We scoured the countryside for him, showed his photo at all the ports and airports in case he'd somehow got through without a passport, alerted Interpol to look for him on the Continent, dredged lakes and rivers, released his photo to the national newspapers. Nothing. He simply vanished into thin air."
    "So how did she explain the bruise on her face?"
    The Inspector chuckled. "A door. What else? I tried to help her, suggested she killed her husband in self-defence. But no, he never touched her." He shook his head, remembering. "Extraordinary woman. She never made it easy for herself. She could have manufactured any number of stories to convince us he'd planned his disappearance-money troubles, for a start. He left her well-nigh penniless. But she did the reverse-she kept stolidly repeating that one night and for no reason he simply walked out and never came back. Only dead men disappear as completely as that."
    "Clever," said McLoughlin reluctantly. "She kept it simple, gave you nothing to pick holes in. So why didn't you charge her? Prosecutions have been brought without bodies before."
    The memories of ten years ago flooded back to try Walsh's patience. "We couldn't put a case together," he snapped. "There wasn't one shred of evidence to dispute her bloody stupid story that he'd upped and left. We needed the