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body. We dug up half Hampshire looking for the blasted thing." He fell silent for a moment, then tapped the photograph of the ice house which lay on the desk in front of him. "You were right about this."
    "In what way?"
    "It is the key. We searched Streech gardens from end to end ten years ago and none of us looked in here. I'd never seen an ice house in my life, never even heard of such a thing. So of course I didn't know the bloody hill was hollow. How the hell could I? No one told me. I remember standing on it at one point to get my bearings. I even remember, telling one of my chaps to delve deep into those brambles. It was like a jungle." He wiped the stem of his pipe on his sleeve again before putting it back in his mouth. Dried tar criss-crossed the tweed like black threads. "I'll lay you any money you like, Andy, Maybury's body was in there all the time."
     
    There was a knock at the door and Phoebe came in carrying a tray of sandwiches. "Constable Williams told me you were hungry, Inspector. I asked Molly to make these up for you."
    "Why thank you, Mrs. Maybury. Come and sit down." Phoebe put the tray of sandwiches on the desk, then seated herself in a leather armchair slightly to one side of it. The lamp on the desk shed a pool of light, embracing the three figures in a reluctant intimacy. The smoke from Walsh's pipe hung above them, floating in the air like curling tendrils of cirrus clouds. For one long moment there was complete silence, before the chiming mechanism of a grandfather clock whirred into action and struck the hour, nine o'clock.
    Walsh, as if on cue, leant forward and addressed the woman. "Why didn't you tell us about the ice house ten years ago, Mrs. Maybury?"
    For a moment he thought she looked surprised, even a little relieved, then the expression vanished. Afterwards, he couldn't be sure it had been there at all. "I don't understand," she said.
    Inspector Walsh gestured to McLoughlin to switch on the overhead lights. The muted lamplight disguised, deceived when he wanted to see every nuance of the extraordinarily impassive face. "It's quite simple," he murmured, after McLoughlin had flooded the room with brilliant white light, "in our search for your husband, we never looked in the ice house. We didn't know it was there." He studied her thoughtfully. "And you didn't tell us."
    "I don't remember," she said simply. "If I didn't tell you, it was because I had forgotten about it. Did you not find it yourselves?"
    "No."
    She gave a tiny shrug. "Does it really matter, Inspector, after all this time?"
    He ignored the question. "Do you recall when the ice house was last used prior to your husband's disappearance?"
    She leant her head tiredly against the back of her chair, her red hair splaying out around her pale face. Behind her glasses her eyes looked huge. Walsh knew her to be in her mid-thirties, yet she looked younger than his own daughter. He felt McLoughlin stir in the seat beside him as if her fragility had touched him in some way. Damn the woman, he thought with irritation, remembering the emotions she had once stirred in him. That appearance of vulnerability was a thin cloak for the sharp mind beneath.
    "You'll have to let me think about it," she said. "At the moment, I honestly can't remember if we ever used it when David was alive. I have no recollection of it." She paused briefly. "I
do
recall my father using it as a darkroom one winter when I was on holiday from school. He didn't do it for very long." She smiled. "He said it was a confounded bore slogging all the way down there in the cold." She gave a low ripple of laughter as if memories of her father made her happy. "He took the films to a professional in Silverborne instead. My mother said it was because he enjoyed blaming someone else when the prints were disappointing, which they often were. He wasn't a very good photographer." She looked steadily at the Inspector. "I can't remember its being used after that, not until we decided to