Meredith sniffed hard. ‘Right. Yes, you’re right … OK. Let’s do this.’

She glanced nervously in the direction of the open door. To Pete, it looked like the entrance to a mausoleum, a place so dark that it would inevitably suck the breath from anyone venturing inside. He felt sick at the thought that there really was a dead body behind the door in front of them. He’d never seen one before. They stared mutely at one another, then Pete nodded towards the entrance.

‘You only have to go in for a second, and I’m right here.’ Something occurred to him. He put his hand on her arm and whispered close to her ear. ‘We should just, er, check one thing…’

‘What?’

‘You said he’d either had a heart attack or been strangled, because he looked so purple, and now I can’t stop thinking about it. When you “find” him, we should check his neck … just in case…’

Meredith frowned. ‘Surely nobody would kill Ralph!’ she whispered back. ‘I wasn’t being serious. He always has a red face, and I opened his shirt to do CPR, so I’d have seen if there was anything wrong with his neck.’ She paused. ‘I was only out of the place for a couple of minutes!’

‘Burglars, seeing if there was anything worth nicking?’

‘Oh, come on. In the ice house? Burglars would go straight to the house!’

Pete looked through the bushes and across the empty lawns, worried that Leonard would pop up again at any minute. ‘Well, we can’t stay out here talking about it all day.’ Meredith’s face had gone green again, presumably at the prospect of examining Ralph’s corpse. But she took a deep breath, swallowed hard and pushed open the ice house door.

There was nobody there.

8

Meredith

Meredith stared in disbelief at the earth floor. The only signs that Ralph had ever been there were the buttons she had ripped off his shirt to perform CPR – unnecessarily, but she hadn’t been thinking straight. Some part of her brain must have been blindly assuming that someone would be arriving with the defibrillator, and had made her follow her first aid training. But of course you didn’t need bare flesh to do CPR. And there had been no-one to bring a defibrillator.

Pete looked over her shoulder, his breath hot in her ear, his fingers digging into her shoulder with the shock. ‘What the hell? Have you got the right place?’

‘Of course I bloody well have,’ she snapped. ‘How many ice houses do you think there are? He’s gone!’

‘All right, all right,’ he said, trying to placate her by rubbing the back of her neck with his thumb, but she jerked away from him, her heart pounding with fear. ‘He must have just been unconscious, and woken up,’ he said. ‘This is good news, it means he’s alive! Ring him.’