Breaker

by Minette Walters

Bridges shook his head. "Steve's not like that."

  "And William Sumner is?"

  "I wouldn't know. I've never met the bloke."

  "According to your statement you and Steve had a drink with him one evening."

  "Okay. Correction. I don't know the bloke. I stayed fifteen minutes tops and exchanged maybe half a dozen words with him."

  Galbraith steepled his fingers in front of his mouth and studied the young man. "But you seem to know a lot about him," he said. "Kate, too, despite only meeting each of them once."

  Bridges returned his attention to his patchwork quilt, sliding the papers into different positions with the balls of his fingers. "Steve talks a lot."

  Galbraith seemed to accept this explanation, because he gave a nod. "Why was Steve planning to go to France this week?"

  "I didn't know he was."

  "He had a reservation at a hotel in Concarneau, which was canceled this morning when he failed to confirm it."

  Bridges' expression became suddenly wary. "He's never mentioned it."

  "Would you expect him to?"

  "Sure."

  "You said you and he had grown apart," Galbraith reminded him.

  "Figure of speech, mate."

  A look of derision darkened the inspector's eyes. "Okay, last question. Where's Steve's lock-up, Tony?"

  "What lock-up?" asked the other guilelessly.

  "All right. Let me put it another way. Where does he store the equipment off his boat when he's not using it? His dinghy and his outboard, for example."

  "All over the place. Here. The flat in London. The back of his car."

  Galbraith shook his head. "No oil spills," he said. "We've searched them all." He smiled amiably. "And don't try and tell me an outboard doesn't leak when it's laid on its side, because I won't believe you."

  Bridges scratched the side of his jaw but didn't say anything.

  "You're not his keeper, son," murmured Galbraith kindly, "and there's no law that says when your friend digs a hole for himself you have to get into it with him."

  The man pulled a wry face. "I did warn him, you know. I said he'd do better to volunteer information rather than have it dragged out of him piecemeal. He wouldn't listen, though. He has this crazy idea he can control everything, when the truth is he's never been able to control a damn thing from the first day I met him. Talk about a loose cannon. Sometimes, I wish I'd never met the stupid bugger, because I'm sick to death of telling lies for him." He shrugged. "But, hey! He is my friend."

  Galbraith's boyish face creased into a smile. The young man's sincerity was about as credible as a Ku Klux Klan assertion that it wasn't an association of racists, and he was reminded of the expression: with friends like this who needs enemies? He glanced idly about the room. There were too many discrepancies, he thought, particularly in relation to fingerprint evidence, and he felt he was being steered in a direction he didn't want to go. He wondered why Bridges thought that was necessary.

  Because he knew Harding was guilty? Or because he knew he wasn't?

  *22*

  A call from the Dorsetshire Constabulary to the manager of the Hotel Angelique in Concarneau, a pretty seaside town in southern Brittany, revealed that Mr. Steven Harding had telephoned on 8 August, requesting a double room for three nights from Saturday, 16 August, for himself and Mrs. Harding. He had given his mobile telephone as the contact number, saying he would be traveling the coast of France by boat during the week 11-17 August and could not be sure of his exact arrival date. He had agreed to confirm the reservation not less than twenty-four hours prior to his arrival. In the absence of any such confirmation, and with rooms in demand, the manager had left a message with Mr. Harding's telephone answering service and had canceled the reservation when Mr. Harding failed to return his call. He was not acquainted with Mr. Harding and was unable to say if Mr. or Mrs. Harding had stayed in the hotel before. Where exactly was his hotel in Concarneau? Two streets back from the waterfront, but within easy walking distance of the shops, the sea, and the lovely beaches. And the marinas, too, of course.

  A complete check of the numbers listed in Harding's mobile telephone, which had been unavailable to the police at the time of his arrest because it had been under a pile of newspapers in Bob Winterslow's house, produced a series of names already known and contacted by the investigators. Only one call remained a mystery, either because the subscriber had deliberately withheld the number or because it had been routed through an exchange-possibly a foreign one-which meant the SIM card had been unable to record it.

  "Steve? Where are you? I'm frightened. Please phone me. I've tried twenty times since Sunday."

  Before he returned to Winfrith, Detective Superintendent Carpenter took Ingram aside for a briefing. He had spent much of the last hour with his telephone clamped to his ear, while the PC and the two DCs continued to dig into the shale slide and scour the shoreline in a fruitless search for further evidence. He had watched their efforts through thoughtful eyes while jotting the various pieces of information that came through to him into his notebook. He was unsurprised by their failure to find anything else. The sea, as he had learned from the coastguards' descriptions of how bodies vanished without a trace and were never seen again, was a friend to murderers.

  "Harding's being discharged from the Poole hospital at five," he told the constable, "but I'm not ready to talk to him yet. I need to see the Frenchman's video and question Tony Bridges before I go anywhere near him." He clapped the tall man on the back. "You were right about the lockup, by the way. He's been using a garage near the Lymington yacht club. John Galbraith's on his way there now to have a look at it. What I need you to do, lad, is nail our friend Steve for the assault on Miss Jenner and hold him on ice till tomorrow morning. Keep it simple-make sure he thinks he's only being arrested for the assault. Can you do that?"

  "Not until I've taken a statement from Miss Jenner, sir."

  Carpenter looked at his watch. "You've got two and a half hours. Pin her to her story. I don't want her weaseling out because she doesn't want to get involved."

  "I can't force her, sir."

  "No one's asking you to," said Carpenter irritably.

  "And if she isn't as amenable as you hope?"

  "Then use some charm," said the superintendent, thrusting his frown under Ingram's nose. "I find it works wonders."

  "The house belongs to my grandfather," said Bridges, directing Galbraith to pass the yacht club and take the road to the right, which was lined with pleasant detached houses set back behind low hedges. It was at the wealthier end of town, not far from where the Sumners lived, in Rope Walk, and Galbraith realized that Kate must have passed Tony's grandfather's house whenever she walked into town. He realized, too, that Tony must come from a "good" family, and he wondered how they viewed their rebellious offspring and if they ever visited his shambolic establishment. "Grandpa lives on his own," Tony went on. "He can't see to drive anymore, so he lends me the garage to store my rib." He indicated an entrance a hundred yards farther on. "In here. Steve's stuff is at the back." He glanced at the DI as they drew to a halt in the small driveway. "Steve and I have the only keys."

  "Is that important?"

  Bridges nodded. "Grandpa hasn't a clue what's in there."

  "It won't help him if it's drugs," said Galbraith unemotionally, opening his door. "You'll all be for the high jump, never mind how blind, deaf, or dumb any of you are."

  "No drugs," said Bridges firmly. "We never deal."

  Galbraith shook his head in cynical disbelief. "You couldn't afford to smoke the amount you do without dealing," he said in a tone that brooked no disagreement. "It's a fact of life. A teacher's salary couldn't fund a habit like yours." The garage was detached from the house and set back twenty yards from it. Galbraith stood looking at it for a moment before glancing up the road toward the turning in to Rope Walk. "Who comes here more?" he asked idly. "You or Steve?"

  "Me," said the young man readily enough. "I take my rib out two or t
hree times a week. Steve just uses it for storage."

  Galbraith gestured toward the garage. "Lead the way." As they walked toward it, he caught the twitch of a curtain in one of the downstairs windows, and he wondered if Grandpa Bridges was quite as ignorant about what went into his garage as Tony claimed. The old, he thought, were a great deal more curious than the young. He stood back while the young man unlocked the double doors and pulled them wide. The entire front was taken up with a twelve-foot orange rib on a trailer, but when Tony pulled it out, an array of imported but clearly illicit goods was revealed at the back-neat stacks of cardboard boxes with vin de table stenciled prominently on them, cases of Stella Artois lager, wrapped in plastic, and shelves covered in multipack cartons of cigarettes. Well, well, thought Galbraith with mild amusement, did Tony really expect him to believe that good old-fashioned smuggling of "legal" contraband was the worst crime either he or his friend had ever been engaged in? The screed floor interested him more. It was still showing signs of dampness where someone had hosed it down, and he wondered what had been washed away in the process.

  "What's he trying to do?" he asked. "Stock an entire off-license? He's going to have a job persuading Customs and Excise this is for his own use."

  "It's not that bad," protested Bridges. "Listen, the guys in Dover bring in more than this every day via the ferries. They're coining it in. It's a stupid law. I mean, if the government can't get its act together to bring down the duty on liquor and cigarettes to the same level as the rest of Europe, then of course guys like Steve are going to do a bit of smuggling. Stands to reason. Everyone does it. You sail to France and you're tempted, simple as that."

  "And you end up in jail when you get busted. Simple as that," said the DI sardonically. "Who's funding him? You?"

  Bridges shook his head. "He's got a contact in London who buys it off him."

  "Is that where he takes it from here?"

  "He borrows a mate's van and ships it up about once every two months."

  Galbraith traced a line in the dust on top of an opened box lid, then idly flipped it back. The bottoms of all the boxes in contact with the floor showed a tidemark where water had saturated them. "How does he get it ashore from his boat?" he asked, lifting out a bottle of red table wine and reading the label. "Presumably he doesn't bring it in by dinghy, or someone would have noticed."

  "As long as it doesn't look like a case of wine there isn't a problem."

  "What does it look like?"

  The young man shrugged. "Something ordinary. Rubbish bags, dirty laundry, duvets. If he sticks a dozen bottles into socks to stop them rattling, then packs them in his rucksack, no one gives him a second glance. They're used to him transporting stuff to and from his boat-he's been working on it long enough. Other times he moors up to a pontoon and uses a marina trolley. People pile all sorts of things into them at the end of a weekend. I mean if you shove a few cases of Stella Artois down a sleeping bag, who's going to notice? More to the point, who's going to care? Everyone stocks up at the hypermarkets in France before they come home."

  Galbraith made a rough count of the wine boxes. "There's six-hundred-odd bottles of wine here. It'd take him hours to move these a dozen at a time, not to mention the lager and the cigarettes. Are you seriously saying no one's ever questioned why he's plying to and fro in a dinghy with a rucksack?"

  "That's not how he shifts the bulk of it. I was only pointing out that it's not as difficult to bring stuff off boats as you seem to think it is. He moves most of it at night. There are hundreds of places along the coast you can make a drop as long as there's someone to meet you."

  "You, for example?"

  "Once in a while," Bridges admitted.

  Galbraith turned to look at the rib on its trailer. "Do you go out in the rib?"

  "Sometimes."

  "So he calls you on his mobile and says I'll be in such-and-such a place at midnight. Bring your rib and the mate's van and help me unload."

  "More or less, except he usually comes in about three o'clock in the morning, and two or three of us will be in different places. It makes it easier if he can choose the nearest to where he is."

  "Like where?" asked Galbraith dismissively. "I don't swallow that garbage about there being hundreds of dropoff points. This whole coast is built over."

  Bridges grinned. "You'd be amazed. I know of at least ten private landing stages on rivers between Chichester and Christchurch where you can bet on the owners being absent twenty-six weekends out of fifty-two, not to mention slips along Southampton Water. Steve's a good sailor, knows this area like the back of his hand, and providing he comes in on a rising tide in order to avoid being stranded, he can tuck himself pretty close in to shore. Okay, we may get a bit wet, wading to and fro, and we may have a trek to the van, but two strong guys can usually clear a load in an hour. It's a doddle."

  Galbraith shook his head, remembering his own soaking off the Isle of Purbeck and the difficulties involved in winching boats up and down slips. "It sounds like bloody hard work to me. What does he make on a shipment like this?"

  "Anything between five hundred and a thousand quid a trip."

  "What do you make out of it?"

  "I take payment in kind. Cigarettes, lager, whatever."

  "For a drop?"

  Bridges nodded.

  "What about rent on this garage?"

  "Use of Crazy Daze whenever I want it. It's a straight swap."

  Galbraith eyed him thoughtfully. "Does he let you sail it or just borrow it to shag your girlfriends?"

  Bridges grinned. "He doesn't let anyone sail it. It's his pride and joy. He'd kill anyone who left a mark on it."

  "Mmm." Galbraith lifted a white wine bottle out of another box. "So when was the last time you used it for a shag?"

  "A couple of weeks ago."

  "Who with?"

  "Bibi."

  "Just Bibi? Or do you shag other girls behind her back?"

  "Jesus, you don't give up, do you? Just Bibi, and if you tell her any different I'll make a formal complaint."

  Galbraith tucked the bottle back into its box with a smile and moved on to another one. "How does it work? Do you call Steve in London and tell him you want the boat for the weekend? Or does he offer it to you when he doesn't want it?"

  "I get to use it during the week. He gets to use it at weekends. It's a good deal, suits everyone."

  "So it's like your house? Anyone and everyone can pile in for a quick shag whenever the mood takes them?" He flicked the young man a look of disgust. "It sounds pretty sordid to me. Do you all use the same sheets?"

  "Sure." Bridges grinned. "Different times, different customs, mate. It's all about enjoying life these days, not being tied to conventional views of how to conduct yourself."

  Galbraith seemed suddenly bored with the subject. "How often does Steve go to France?"

  "It probably works out at an average of once every two months. It's no big deal, just booze and cigarettes. If he clears five thousand quid in a year he reckons he's done well. But it's peanuts, for Christ's sake. That's why I told him he should come clean. The worst that can happen is a few months in jail. It would be different if he was doing drugs but"-he shook his head vigorously-"he wouldn't touch them with a bargepole."

  "We found cannabis in one of his lockers."

  "Oh, come on," said Bridges with a sigh. "So he smokes the odd joint. That doesn't make him a Colombian drug baron. On that basis, anyone who enjoys a drink is smuggling alcohol by the lorry load. Look, trust me, he doesn't bring in anything more dangerous than red wine."

  Galbraith moved a couple of boxes. "What about dogs?" he asked, lifting a plastic kennel out from behind them and holding it up for Bridges to look at.

  The young man shrugged. "A few times maybe. Where's the harm? He always makes sure they've got their anti-rabies certificates." He watched a frown gather on Galbraith's forehead. "It's a stupid law," he repeated like a mantra. "Six months of quarantine costs the owner a fortune, the dog
s are miserable while it's happening, and not a single one has ever been diagnosed with rabies in all the time this country's been enforcing the rabies regulations."

  "Cut the crap, Tony," said the DI impatiently. "Personally, I think it's a crazy law that allows a smackhead like you within a hundred miles of impressionable children, but I'm not going to break your legs to keep you away from them. How much does he charge?"

  "Five hundred, and I'm no fucking smackhead," he said with genuine irritation. "Smack's for idiots. You should bone up on your drug terminology."

  Galbraith ignored him. "Five hundred, eh? That's a nice little earner. What does he make per person? Five thousand?"

  There was a distinct hesitation. "What are you talking about?"

  "Twenty-five different sets of fingerprints inside Crazy Daze, not counting Steve's or Kate and Hannah Sumner's. You've just accounted for two-yours and Bibi's-that still leaves twenty-three unaccounted for. That's a lot of fingerprints, Tony."

  Bridges shrugged. "You said it yourself, he runs a sordid establishment."

  "Mmm," murmured Galbraith, "I did say that, didn't I?" His gaze shifted toward the trailer again. "Nice rib. Is it new?"

  Bridges followed his gaze. "Not particularly, I've had it nine months."

  Galbraith walked over to look at the two Evinrude outboards at the stern. "It looks new," he remarked, running a finger along the rubber. "Immaculate, in fact. When did you last clean it?"

  "Monday."

  "And you hosed the garage floor for good measure, did you?"

  "It got wet in the process."

  Galbraith slapped the inflated sides of the rib. "When did you last take it out?"

  "I don't know. A week ago maybe."

  "So why did it need cleaning on Monday?"

  "It didn't," said Bridges, his expression growing wary again. "I just like to look after it."

  "Then let's hope Customs and Excise don't rip it apart looking for drugs, my son," said the policeman with poorly feigned sympathy, "because they're not going to buy your story about red wine being Steve's most dangerous import any more than I do." He jerked his head toward the back of the garage. "That's just a blind in case you're sussed for anything more serious. Like illegal immigration. Those boxes have been in there for months. The dust's so thick I can write my name in it."