There was a new sense of urgency about police activities. They moved into top gear with alacrity, demonstrating all too clearly that there was another gear to move into. It was as if the attempted murder of a known woman was on a different scale from the murder of an anonymous male stiff in the garden. Anne would have found it disquieting, except that she was in a coma in Intensive Care and knew nothing about it. Walsh would have denied it vigorously, but his irascible temper flayed his men instead when, after a thorough search of the house and grounds, they failed to come up with anything.

In the press, Streech Grange was likened, quite inappropriately, to 10 Rillington Place, as a setting for mass murder and decomposing remains. To Anne's friends, the burden of their association with it was heavy. In retrospect, their previous interrogations had the relaxed air of a social gathering. After the assault on Anne, the gloves came off and they were grilled dry. Walsh was looking for a pattern. Logic told him there was one. The odds against three unconnected mysteries in one house were so incalculable as to be beyond consideration.

For the children, it was a new experience altogether. As yet none of them had been questioned and it came like a baptism of fire. Jonathan hated his sense of impotence, of being involved in something over which he had no control. He was surly and uncooperative and treated the police with a sort of weary disdain. Walsh wanted nothing so much as to kick him up the backside, but after two hours of questioning he was satisfied there was nothing more he could get out of him. Jonathan had vindicated the three youngsters of the assault on Anne. According to him, they had changed into their nightclothes after the impromptu Lafite party, wrapped themselves in duvets and curled up in Jane's room to watch the late film on her television. The shattering glass, followed by McLoughlin's shouts for help, had startled them. No, they had heard nothing before that, but then the television had been quite loud. Walsh questioned Elizabeth. She was nervous but helpful. When asked for her movements on the previous evening, her account tallied exactly with Jonathan's, down to the most trivial detail. Jane, after a day's respite, gave a similar story. Unless they were in some fantastic and well-organised conspiracy, they had had nothing to do with the attempt on Anne's life.

For Phoebe it was a case of deja vu. The only difference this time was that her interrogators now had information she had withheld from them ten years previously. She answered them with the same stolid patience she had shown before, annoyed them with her unshakable composure and refused to be drawn when they needled her on the subject of her husband's perversions.

"You say you blame yourself for not knowing what he was doing to your daughter," said Walsh on more than one occasion.

"Yes, I do," she answered. "If I had known earlier, perhaps I could have minimised the damage."

He got into the habit of leaning forward for the next question, waiting for the tell-tale flicker of weakening resolve. "Weren't you jealous, Mrs. Maybury? Didn't it madden you that your husband preferred sex with your daughter? Didn't you feel degraded?"

She always paused before she answered, as if she were about to agree with him. "No, Inspector," she would say. "I had no such feelings."

"But you've said you could easily have murdered him."

"Yes."

"Why did you want to murder him?"

She smiled faintly at this. "I should have thought it was obvious, Inspector. If I had to, I'd kill any animal I found savaging my children."

"Yet you say you didn't kill your husband."

"I didn't have to. He ran away."

"Did he come back?"

She laughed. "No, he didn't come back."

"Did you kill him and leave him to rot in the ice house?"

"No."

"It would have been a sort of justice, wouldn't it?"

"It certainly would."

"The Phillipses, or should I say Jeffersons, believe in that kind of justice, don't they? Did they do it for you, Mrs. Maybury? Are they your avenging arm?"

It was always at this point that Phoebe's anger threatened to spill over. The first time he put the question it had come like a blow to the solar plexus. Afterwards, she was better prepared, though it still required iron self-control to keep from tearing and gouging at his hated face. "I suggest you ask Mr. and Mrs. Phillips that," she always said. "I wouldn't be so presumptuous as to answer anything on their behalf."

"I'm asking you for an opinion, Mrs. Maybury. Are they capable of exacting vengeance for you and your daughter?"

A pitying smile would curl her lips. "No, Inspector."

"Was it you who struck down Miss Cattrell? You say you were in bed, but we only have your word for it. Was she going to reveal something you didn't want revealed?"

"Who was she going to reveal it to? The police?"

"Perhaps."

"You're such a fool, Inspector." She smiled humourlessly. "I've told you what I think happened to Anne."

"Guesswork, Mrs. Maybury."

"Perhaps, but in view of what happened to me nine years ago, not unlikely."

"You never reported it."

"You wouldn't have believed me if I had. You'd have accused me of doing it to myself. In any case, nothing would have induced me to have you back in the house, not once I'd got rid of you. In some ways I was luckier than Anne. My scars were all internal."

"It's too convenient. You must think me very gullible."

"No," she said honestly, "narrow-minded and vindictive."

"Because I don't share your taste for melodrama? Your daughter is very vague about what frightened her. Even Sergeant McLoughlin only thinks he heard someone. I'm a realist. I prefer to deal in fact, not female neurosis."

She studied him with a new awareness. "I never realised how much you dislike women. Or is it just me, Inspector? The idea that I might be getting my just deserts really appeals to you, doesn't it? Would I have saved myself all this misery if I'd said 'yes' ten years ago?"

Invariably it was Walsh who became angry. Invariably, after a bout of questioning, Phoebe would get in her car and drive to the hospital to sit at Anne's bedside, massaging her hands and talking to her, willing her back to consciousness.

Diana's interrogations probed and prodded her connection with Daniel Thompson. She couldn't control her anger against Walsh in the way that Phoebe did and she frequently lost her temper. Even so, after two days, he could still detect no flaws in her story.

He tapped the pile of correspondence. "It's perfectly clear from your letters that you were furious with him."

"Of course I was furious," she snapped. "He had squandered ten thousand pounds of my money."

"Squandered?" he repeated. "But he was doing his best, wasn't he?"

"Not in my view."

"Didn't you have the business checked before you agreed to invest in it?"

"We've already been through all this, for God's sake. Don't you listen to anything?"

"Answer the question, please, Mrs. Goode."

She sighed. "I wasn't given much time. I spent a day going through the company books. They seemed in order, so I made over the cheque for ten thousand. Satisfied?"

"So why do you say he squandered your money?"

"Because as I got to know him, I realised he was supremely incompetent, may even have been an out-and-out rogue. The figures I saw had been heavily massaged. For example, I now think he inflated the company's assets by overvaluing his stock and I have discovered he was also using his employees' National Insurance contributions to keep the business afloat. The order books I saw were full, yet after three months he had sold virtually nothing and the little stock he had at his factory apparently had nowhere to go. His PR was a joke. He kept saying that word-of-mouth would spread and the thing would take off."