The Ice House Wages

The case file

Sunday cold case. On the night of the great freeze in January 1914, the Hollow Mere Ice Company's wage box, $400 in gold, vanished from the ice house before pay time. The company went under that spring. This week men pulling the ice house down found a bag of gold coin buried deep in the old sawdust, where only a shovel could have put it.

Five people were there that night, one each in the office, the loading bay, the sawdust loft, the stable and at the top of the ice ramp. Each had a tool in hand: ice tongs, an ice saw, a pike pole, a sawdust shovel or a hay fork. One of them lied then and is lying still.

Who was there

• Jethro Kneebone, ice master of the old company. Seventy, broad as a door, and still angry at the bank that closed him down.
• Mrs. Loveday Kneebone, the ice master's wife, who kept the books. Neat gray braids, small careful hands, and a habit of finishing her husband's sentences.
• Perran Uren, ice cutter, now a foreman at the gasworks. Steady, slow to speak, and the one cutter who never left the town after the company folded.
• Caleb Rodda, ice cutter, now the Skating Club's ice marshal. Lean and weathered, with a cutter's scarred knuckles and a cutter's grudges.
• Desmond Carlyon, fish merchant, now a town councillor. Good gloves, a councillor's pin, and a memory that improves when he is flattered.