The Ice House by Minette Walters

suggested dryly. "People aren't usually so gullible."
    She played with the hem of her jacket. "It was David's fault. Phoebe's parents had given them a little house in Pimlico as a wedding present which David used as collateral for a loan. He lost the lot on some stock market gamble, couldn't make the repayments and they were in the throes of foreclosure at the time of the accident, with two small children, no money and nowhere to go." She shook her head. "God knows how, but that became public knowledge. The locals lapped up what Casey was saying, put two and two together and made five. From the moment Phoebe took over this house, she was damned. David's disappearance a few years later simply confirmed all their prejudices." She sighed. "The sickening thing is, they didn't believe Casey either. He went bankrupt ten months later when all his customers deserted him. He had to sell up and move away, so there was some justice," she said spitefully. "Not that it did Phoebe any good. They were too damn stupid to see that if he was lying, she was innocent."
    McLoughlin leaned back in his chair, splaying strong fingers against the desk-top. He flicked her an unexpectedly boyish smile. "It must have been awful for her."
    She responded guardedly. "It was. She was so young and she had to cope with it alone. David either took himself off for weeks'at a time or made matters worse by getting into rows with people."
    His eyes softened, as if he understood loneliness and could sympathise with it. "And I suppose her friends here deserted her because of him?"
    Diana thawed. "She never really had any, that was half the trouble. If she had, it would have made all the difference. She went away to boarding school at the age of twelve, married at seventeen and only came back when her parents were dead. She's never had any friends in Streech."
    McLoughlin drummed his fingers softly on the mahogany. " 'The worst solitude is to be destitute of sincere friendship.' Francis Bacon said that four hundred years ago."
    She was quite taken aback. Anne used Francis Bacon quotes as a matter of course but they tended to be flippant, throw-away lines, tossed into a conversation for careless effect. McLoughlin's dark voice lingered over the words, rolling them on his tongue, giving them weight. She was as surprised by their aptness as by the fact that he knew them. She regarded him thoughtfully.
    "But he also said, 'The mould of a man's fortune is in his own hands.' " His lips twisted cruelly. "It's odd, isn't it, how Mrs. Maybury brings out the worst in people? What's her secret, I wonder?" He stirred the photographs of crude death with the end of his pencil, turning them slowly so that Diana could see them. "Why didn't she sell the Grange and move away, once she'd got rid of her husband?"
    For all her surface sophistication, Diana was naive. Brutality shocked her because she never saw it coming. "She couldn't," she snapped angrily. "It's not Phoebe's to sell. After a year of marriage to that bastard, she persuaded her father to change his will and leave the house to her children. We three rent it from them."
    "Then why haven't her children sold it? Have they no sympathy for their mother?" He caught her eye. "Or perhaps they don't like her? It seems to be a common problem for Mrs. Maybury."
    Anger threatened to overwhelm Diana. She forced herself to stay calm. "The idea, Sergeant, was to prevent David turning the house into ready cash and leaving Phoebe and the children homeless the minute the Gallaghers died. He'd have done it, too, given half a chance. He went through the money she inherited in record time. Colonel Gallagher, Phoebe's father, left instructions that the house could not be sold or mortgaged except under the most exceptional circumstances before Jane's twenty-first birthday. The responsibility for deciding whether those circumstances-principally financial distress on the part of Phoebe and her children-ever materialise was left to two trustees. In