Breaker

by Minette Walters

  He reached into the back for the stack of evidence. "I wasn't questioning ownership," he told her. "I was questioning whether or not Bertie knows he's a dog. As far as he's concerned, he's the boss in your establishment. He gets fed first, sleeps on your sofa, licks out your dishes. I'll bet you even move over in bed in order to make sure he's more comfortable, don't you?"

  She colored slightly. "What if I do? I'd rather have him in my bed than the weasel that used to be in it. In any case, he's the closest thing I've got to a hot-water bottle."

  Ingram laughed. "Are you coming in or do you want me to bring the brandy out? I guarantee Bertie won't disgrace you. He has beautiful manners since I took him to task for wiping his bottom on my carpet."

  Maggie sat in indecision. She had never wanted to go inside, because it would tell her things about him that she didn't want to know. At the very least it would be insufferably clean, she thought, and her bloody dog would shame her by doing exactly what he was told.

  "I'm coming in," she said defiantly.

  (Carpenter took a phone call from a Dartmouth police sergeant just as he was about to leave for Chapman's Pool. He listened to a description of what was on the Frenchman's video then asked: "What does he look like?"

  "Five eight, medium build, bit of a paunch, thinning dark hair."

  "I thought you said he was a young chap."

  "No. Mid-forties, at least. His daughter's fourteen."

  Carpenter's frown dug trenches out of his forehead. "Not the bloody Frenchman," he shouted, "the toe-rag on the video!"

  "Oh, sorry. Yes, he's young all right. Early twenties, I'd say. Longish dark hair, sleeveless T-shirt, and cycling shorts. Muscles. Tanned. A handsome bugger, in fact. The kid who filmed him said she thought he looked like Jean-Claude Van Damme. Mind you, she's mortified about it now, can't believe she didn't realize what he was up to, considering he's got a rod like a fucking salami. This guy could make a fortune in porno movies."

  "All right, all right," said Carpenter testily. "I get the picture. And you say he's wanking into a handkerchief?"

  "Looks like it."

  "Could it be a child's T-shirt?"

  "Maybe. It's difficult to tell. Matter of fact, I'm amazed the French geezer spotted what the bastard was up to. It's pretty discreet. It's only because his knob's so damn big that you can see anything at all. The first time I watched it I thought he was peeling an orange in his lap." There was a belly laugh at the other end of the line. "Still, you know what they say about the French. They're all wankers. So I guess our little geezer's done a spot of it himself and knew what to look for. Am I right or am I right?"

  Carpenter, who spent all his holidays in France, cocked a finger and thumb at the telephone and pulled the trigger-bloody racist, he was thinking-but there was no trace of irritation in his voice when he spoke. "You said the young man had a rucksack. Can you describe it for me?"

  "Standard camping type. Green. Doesn't look as if it's got much in it."

  "Big?"

  "Oh, yes. It's a full-size job."

  "What did he do with it?"

  "Sat on it while he jerked himself off."

  "Where? Which part of Chapman's Pool? Eastern side? Western side? Describe the scenery for me."

  "Eastern side. The Frenchman showed me on the map. Your wanker was down on the beach below Emmetts Hill, facing out toward the Channel. Green slope behind him."

  "What did he do with the rucksack after he sat on it?"

  "Can't say. The film ends."

  With a request to send the tape on by courier, together with the Frenchman's name, proposed itinerary for the rest of his holiday, and address in France, Carpenter thanked the sergeant and rang off.

  "Did you make this yourself?" asked Maggie, peering at the Cutty Sark in the bottle on the mantelpiece as Ingram came downstairs in uniform, buttoning the sleeves of his shirt.

  "Yes."

  "I thought you must have done. It's like everything else in this house. So"-she waved her glass in the air-"well behaved." She might have said masculine, minimal, or monastic, in an echo of Galbraith's description of Harding's boat, but she didn't want to be rude. It was as she had predicted, insufferably clean, and insufferably boring as well. There was nothing to say this house belonged to an interesting personality, just yards of pallid wall, pallid carpet, pallid curtains, and pallid upholstery, broken occasionally by an ornament on a shelf. It never occurred to her that he was tied to the house through his job, but even if it had, she would still have expected splashes of towering individualism among the uniformity.

  He laughed. "Do I get the impression you don't like it?"

  "No, I do. It's-er-"

  "Twee?" he suggested.

  "Yes."

  "I made it when I was twelve." He flexed his huge fingers under her nose. "I couldn't do it now." He straightened his tie. "How's the brandy?"

  "Very good." She dropped into a chair. "Does exactly what it's supposed to do. Hits the spot."

  He took her empty glass. "When did you last drink alcohol?"

  "Four years ago."

  "Shall I give you a lift home?"

  "No." She closed her eyes. "I'm going to sleep."

  "I'll look in on your mother on my way back from Chapman's Pool," he promised her, shrugging on his jacket. "Meanwhile, don't encourage your dog to sit on my sofa. It's bad for both your characters."

  "What will happen if I do?"

  "The same thing that happened to Bertie when he wiped his bottom on my carpet."

  Despite another day of brilliant sunshine, Chapman's Pool was empty. The southwesterly breeze had created an unpleasant swell, and nothing was more guaranteed to discourage visitors than the likelihood of being sick over their lunch. Carpenter and two detective constables followed Ingram away from the boat sheds toward an area marked out on the rocky shore with pieces of driftwood.

  "We won't know until we see the video, of course," said Carpenter, taking his bearings from the description the Dartmouth sergeant had given of where Harding had been sitting, "but it looks about right. He was certainly on this side of the bay." They were standing on a slab of rock at the shoreline, and he touched a small pebble cairn with the toe of his shoe. "And this is where you found the T-shirt?"

  Ingram nodded as he squatted down and put his hand in the water that lapped against the base of the rock. "But it was well and truly wedged. A gull had a go at getting it out, and failed, and I was saturated doing my retrieval act."

  "Is that important?"

  "Harding was dry as a bone when I saw him, so it can't have been the T-shirt he came back for. I think that's been here for days."

  "Mmm." Carpenter pondered for a moment. "Does fabric easily get wedged between rocks?"

  Ingram shrugged. "Anything can get wedged if a crab takes a fancy to it."

  "Mmm," said Carpenter again. "All right. Where's this rucksack?"

  "It's only a guess, sir, and a bit of a flaky one at that," said Ingram standing up.

  "I'm listening."

  "Okay, well, I've been puzzling about the ruddy thing for days. He obviously didn't want it anywhere near a policeman, or he'd have brought it down to the boat sheds on Sunday. By the same token it wasn't on his boat when you searched it-or not in my opinion, anyway-and that suggests to me that it's incriminating in some way and he needed to get rid of it."

  "I think you're right," said Carpenter. "Harding wants us to believe he was carrying the black one we found on his boat, but the Dartmouth sergeant described the one on the video as green. So what's he done with it, eh? And what's he trying to hide?"

  "It depends on whether the contents were valuable to him. If they weren't, then he'll have dropped it in the ocean on his way back to Lymington. If they were, he'll have left it somewhere accessible but not too obvious." Ingram shielded his eyes from the sun and pointed toward the slope behind them. "There's been a mini-avalanche up there," he said. "I noticed it because it's just to the left of where Miss Jenner said Harding appear
ed in front of her. Shale's notoriously unstable-which is why these cliffs are covered in warnings-and it looks to me as though that fall's fairly recent."

  Carpenter followed his gaze. "You think the rucksack's under it?"

  "Put it this way, sir, I can't think of a quicker or more convenient way of burying something than to send an avalanche of shale over the top of it. It wouldn't be hard to do. Kick out a loose rock, and hey presto, you've got a convenient slide of loose cliff pouring over whatever it is you want to hide. No one's going to notice it. Slides like that happen every day. The Spender brothers set one off when they dropped their father's binoculars, and I can't help feeling that might have given Harding the idea."

  "Meaning he did it on Sunday?"

  Ingram nodded.

  "And came back this morning to make sure it hadn't been disturbed?"

  "I suspect it's more likely he intended to retrieve it, sir."

  Carpenter brought his ferocious scowl to bear on the constable. "Then why wasn't he carrying it when you saw him?"

  "Because the shale's dried in the sunshine and become impacted. I think he was about to go looking for a spade when he ran into Miss Jenner by accident."

  "Is that your best suggestion?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "You're a bit of a suggestion-junky, aren't you, lad?" said Carpenter, his frown deepening. "I've got DI Galbraith chasing over half of Hampshire on the back of the suggestions you faxed through last night."

  "It doesn't make them wrong, sir."

  "It doesn't make them right either. We had a team scouring this area on Monday, and they didn't find a damn thing."

  Ingram jerked his head toward the next bay. "They were searching Egmont Bight, sir, and with respect, no one was interested in Steven Harding's movements at that point."

  "Mmm. These search teams cost money, lad, and I like a little more certainty before I commit taxpayers' money to guesses." Carpenter stared out across the sea. "I could understand him revisiting the scene of the crime to relive his excitement-it's the sort of thing a man like him might do-but you're saying he wasn't interested in that."

  Ingram had said no such thing, but he wasn't going to argue the point. For all he knew, the superintendent was right anyway. Maybe that's exactly what Harding had come back for. His own avalanche theory looked horribly insignificant beside the magnitude of a psychopath gloating over the scene of murder.

  "Well?" demanded Carpenter.

  The constable smiled self-consciously. "I brought my own spade, sir," he said. "It's in the back of my Jeep."

  *21*

  Galbraith stood up and walked across to one of the windows which overlooked the road. The crowd of earlier had dispersed, although a couple of elderly women still chatted on the pavement, glancing occasionally toward Langton Cottage. He watched them for several minutes in silence, envying the normality of their lives. How often did they have to listen to the dirty little secrets of murder suspects? Sometimes, when he heard the confessions of men like Sumner, he thought of himself in the role of a priest offering a kind of benediction merely by listening, but he had neither the authority nor the desire to forgive sins and invariably felt diminished by being the recipient of their furtive confidences.

  He turned to face the man. "So a more accurate description of your marriage would be to say it was a form of sexual slavery? Kate was so desperate to make sure her daughter grew up in the sort of security she herself never enjoyed that you were able to blackmail her?"

  "I said she would have done it, not that she did or that I ever asked her to." Triumph crept stealthily into Sumner's eyes as if he had won an important point. "There's no median way with you, is there? Half an hour ago you were treating me like a cretin because you thought Kate had suckered me into marrying her. Now you're accusing me of sexual slavery because I got so tired of her lies about Hannah that I pointed out-very mildly, as a matter of fact-that I knew the truth. Why would I buy her this house if she had no say in the relationship? You said yourself I was better off in Chichester."

  "I don't know. Tell me."

  "Because I loved her."

  Impatiently, Galbraith shook his head. "You describe your marriage as a war zone, then expect me to swallow garbage like that. What was the real reason?"

  "That was the real reason. I loved my wife, and I'd have given her whatever she wanted."

  "At the same time as blackmailing her into giving you blow jobs whenever you fancied it?" The atmosphere in the room was stifling, and he felt himself grow cruel in response to the cruelty of Kate and William's marriage. He couldn't rid himself of memories of the tiny pregnant woman on the pathologist's slab and Dr. Warner's casual raising of her hand in order to shake it to and fro in convincing demonstration that the fingers were broken. The noise of grating bone had lodged in Galbraith's head like a maggot, and his dreams were of charnel houses. "You see, I can't make up my mind whether you loved or hated her. Or maybe it was a bit of both? A love/hate relationship that turned sour?"

  Sumner shook his head. He looked defeated suddenly, as if whatever game he was playing was no longer worth the candle. Galbraith wished he understood what William was trying to achieve through his answers, and studied the man in perplexity. William was either extremely frank or extremely skillful at clouding an issue. On the whole he gave the impression of honesty, and it occurred to Galbraith that, in a ham-fisted way, he was trying to demonstrate that his wife was the sort of woman who could easily have driven a man to rape her. He remembered what James Purdy had said about Kate. "No one has ever done to me what Kate did that night ... It's the sort of thing most men dream of ... I can only describe Kate as a fever in the blood..."

  "Did she love you, William?"

  "I don't know. I never asked her."

  "Because you were afraid she'd say no?"

  "The opposite. I knew she'd say yes."

  "And you didn't want her to lie to you?"

  The man nodded.

  "I don't like being lied to," murmured Galbraith, his eyes fixing on Sumner's. "It means the other person assumes you're so stupid you'll believe anything they say. Did she lie to you about having an affair?"

  "She wasn't having an affair."

  "She certainly visited Steven Harding on board his boat," Galbraith pointed out. "Her fingerprints are all over it. Did you find out about that? Maybe you suspected that the baby she was carrying wasn't yours? Maybe you were afraid she was going to foist another bastard on to you?"

  Sumner stared at his hands.

  "Did you rape her?" Galbraith went on remorselessly. "Was that part of the quid pro quo for acknowledging Hannah as your daughter? The right to take Kate whenever you wanted her?"

  "Why would I want to rape her when I didn't need to?" he asked.

  "I'm only interested in a yes or a no, William."

  His eyes flashed angrily. "Then no, dammit. I never raped my wife."

  "Maybe you dosed her with Rohypnol to make her more compliant?"

  "No."

  "Then tell me why Hannah's so sexually aware?" Galbraith said next. "Did you and Kate perform in front of her?"

  More anger. "That's revolting."

  "Yes or no, William."

  "No." The word came out in a strangled sob.

  "You're lying, William. Half an hour ago, you described how you had to sit with her in a hotel bedroom because she wouldn't stop crying. I think that happened at home as well. I think sex with Kate involved Hannah as an audience because you got so fed up with Hannah being given as the excuse for the endless brush-offs that you insisted on doing it in front of her. Am I right?"

  He buried his face in his hands and rocked himself to and fro. "You don't know what it's like ... she wouldn't leave us alone ... she never sleeps ... pester, pester all the time ... Kate used her as a shield..."

  "Is that a yes?"

  The answer was a whisper of sound. "Yes."

  "WPC Griffiths said you went into Hannah's room last night. Do you want to tell me why?"


  Another whisper. "You won't believe me if I do."

  "I might."

  Sumner raised a tear-stained face. "I wanted to look at her," he said in despair. "She's all I've got left to remind me of Kate."

  Carpenter lit a cigarette as Ingram's careful spadework disclosed the first strap of a rucksack. "Good work, lad," he said approvingly. He dispatched one of the DCs to his car to collect some disposable gloves and plastic sheeting, then watched as Ingram continued to remove the shale from around the crumpled canvas.

  It took Ingram another ten minutes to release the object completely and transfer it to the plastic sheet. It was a heavy-duty green camper's rucksack, with a waist strap for extra support and loops underneath for taking a tent. It was old and worn, and the integral backframe had been cut out for some reason, leaving frayed canvas edges between the stitched grooves that had contained it. The frays were old ones, however, and whatever had persuaded the owner to remove the frame was clearly ancient history. It sat on the sheeting, collapsed in on itself under the weight of its straps, and whatever it contained took up less than a third of its bulk.

  Carpenter instructed one detective constable to seal each item in a forensic bag as he took it out and the other to note what it was, then he squatted beside the rucksack and carefully undid the buckles with gloved fingertips, flipping back the flap. "Item," he dictated. "One pair of twenty times sixty binoculars, name worn away, possibly Optikon ... one bottle of mineral water, Volvic ... three empty crisp packets, Smith's ... one baseball cap, New York Yankees ... one blue-and-white checked shirt-men's-made by River Island ... one pair of cream cotton trousers-men's-also made by River Island ... one pair of brown safari-style boots, size seven."

  He felt inside the pockets and took out some rancid orange peel, more empty crisp packets, an opened packet of Camel cigarettes with a lighter tucked in among them, and a small quantity of what appeared to be cannabis, wrapped in cling film. He squinted up at the three policemen.

  "Well? What do you make of this little lot? What's so incriminating about it all that Nick mustn't know he had it?"