The Breaker

by Minette Walters

  ‘Oh, come on! You all but accused him of lying.’

  ‘He was lying.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘I’m not sure yet. I’ll know when I’ve made a few enquiries.’

  ‘Is this a male thing?’ she asked in a voice made silky by long-pent-up grudges. He had been her community policeman for five years, and she had much to feel resentful for. At times of deep depression, she blamed him for everything. Other times, she was honest enough to admit that he had only been doing his job.

  ‘Probably.’ He could smell the stables on her clothes, a musty scent of hay dust and horse manure that he half-liked and half-loathed.

  ‘Then wouldn’t it have been simpler just to whip out your willy and challenge him to a knob-measuring contest?’ she asked sarcastically.

  ‘I’d have lost.’

  ‘That’s for sure,’ she agreed.

  His smile widened. ‘You noticed then?’

  ‘I could hardly avoid it. He wasn’t wearing those shorts to disguise anything. Perhaps it was his wallet. There was precious little room for it anywhere else.’

  ‘No,’ he agreed. ‘Didn’t you find that interesting?’

  She looked at him suspiciously, wondering if he was making fun of her. ‘In what way?’

  ‘Only an idiot sets out from Poole for Lulworth with no money and no fluid.’

  ‘Maybe he was planning to beg water off passers-by or telephone a friend to come and rescue him. Why is it important? All he did was play the good Samaritan to those kids.’

  ‘I think he was lying about what he was doing here. Did he give a different explanation before I got back?’

  She thought about it. ‘We talked about dogs and horses. He was telling the boys about the farm he grew up on in Cornwall.’

  He reached for the handle on the driver’s door. ‘Then perhaps I’m just suspicious of people who carry mobile telephones,’ he said.

  ‘Everyone has them these days, including me.’

  He ran an amused eye over her slender figure in its tight cotton shirt and stretch jeans. ‘But you don’t bring yours on country rambles whereas that young man does. Apparently he leaves everything behind except his phone.’

  ‘You should be grateful,’ she said tartly. ‘But for him, you’d never have got to the woman so quickly.’

  ‘I agree,’ he said without rancour. ‘Mr Harding was in the right place at the right time with the right equipment to report a body on a beach and it would be churlish to ask why.’ He opened the door and squeezed his huge frame in behind the wheel. ‘Good day, Miss Jenner,’ he said politely. ‘My regards to your mother.’ He pulled the door to and fired the engine.

  The Spender brothers were in two minds who to thank for their untroubled return home. The actor because his pleas for tolerance worked? Or the policeman because he was a decent bloke after all? He had said very little on the drive back to their rented cottage other than to warn them that the cliffs were dangerous and that it was foolish to climb them, however tempting the reason. To their parents he gave a brief, expurgated account of what had happened, ending with the suggestion that, as the boys’ fishing had been interrupted by the events of the morning, he would be happy to take them out on his boat one evening. ‘It’s not a motor cruiser,’ he warned them, ‘just a small fishing boat, but the sea bass run at this time of year and if we’re lucky we might catch one or two.’ He didn’t put his arms round their shoulders or call them heroes, but he did give them something to look forward to.

  Next on Ingram’s agenda was an isolated farmhouse where the elderly occupants had reported the theft of three valuable paintings during the night. He had been on his way there when he was diverted to Chapman’s Pool and, while he guessed he was wasting his time, community policing was what he was paid for.

  ‘Oh God, Nick, I’m so sorry,’ said the couple’s harassed daughter-in-law who, herself, was on the wrong side of seventy. ‘Believe me, they did know the paintings were being auctioned. Peter’s been talking them through it for the last twelve months but they’re so forgetful, he has to start again from scratch every time. He has power of attorney, so it’s all quite legal, but, honestly, I nearly died when Winnie said she’d called you. And on a Sunday, too. I come over every morning to make sure they’re all right but sometimes . . .’ She rolled her eyes to heaven, expressing without the need for words exactly what she thought of her ninety-five-year-old parents-in-law.

  ‘It’s what I’m here for, Jane,’ he said, giving her shoulder an encouraging pat.

  ‘No it’s not. You should be out catching criminals,’ she said, echoing the words of people across the nation who saw the police only as thief-takers. She heaved a huge sigh. ‘The trouble is their outgoings are way in excess of their income and they’re incapable of grasping the fact. The home help alone costs over ten thousand pounds a year. Peter’s having to sell off the family silver to make ends meet. The silly old things seem to think they’re living in the 1920s when a housemaid cost five bob a week. It drives me mad, it really does. They ought to be in a home, but Peter’s too soft-hearted to put them there. Not that they could afford it. I mean we can’t afford it, so how could they? It would be different if Celia Jenner hadn’t persuaded us to gamble everything on that beastly husband of Maggie’s but . . .’ She broke off on a shrug of despair. ‘I get so angry sometimes I could scream, and the only thing that stops me is that I’m afraid the scream would go on for ever.’

  ‘Nothing lasts for ever,’ he said.

  ‘I know,’ she said mutinously, ‘but once in a while I think about giving eternity a hand. It’s such a pity you can’t buy arsenic any more. It was so easy in the old days.’

  ‘Tell me about it.’

  She laughed. ‘You know what I mean.’

  ‘Should I order a post-mortem when Peter’s parents finally pop their clogs?’

  ‘Chance’d be a fine thing. At this rate I’ll be dead long before they are.’

  The tall policeman smiled and made his farewells. He didn’t want to hear about death. He could still feel the touch of the woman’s flesh on his hands . . . He needed a shower, he thought, as he made his way back to his car.

  The blonde toddler marched steadfastly along a pavement in the Lilliput area of Poole, planting one chubby leg in front of the other. It was 10.30 on Sunday morning so people were scarce, and no one took the trouble to find out why she was alone. When a handful of witnesses came forward later to admit to the police that they’d seen her, the excuses varied. ‘She seemed to know where she was going.’ ‘There was a woman about twenty yards behind her and I thought she was the child’s mother.’ ‘I assumed someone else would stop.’ ‘I was in a hurry.’ ‘I’m a bloke. I’d have been strung up for giving a lift to a little girl.’

  In the end it was an elderly couple, Mr and Mrs Green, who had the sense, the time and the courage to interfere. They were on their way back from church and, as they did every week, they made a nostalgic detour through Lilliput to look at the art deco buildings that had somehow survived the post-war craze for mass demolition of anything out of the ordinary in favour of constructing reinforced concrete blocks and red-brick boxes. Lilliput sprawled along the eastern curve of Poole Bay and, amid the architectural dross that could be found anywhere, were elegant villas in manicured gardens and art deco houses with windows like portholes. The Greens adored it. It reminded them of their youth.

  They were passing the turning to Salterns Marina when Mrs Green noticed the little girl. ‘Look at that,’ she said disapprovingly. ‘What sort of mother would let a child of that age get so far ahead of her? It only takes a stumble and she’d be under a car.’

  Mr Green slowed. ‘Where’s the mother?’ he asked.

  His wife twisted in her seat. ‘Do you know, I’m not sure. I thought it was that woman behind her, but she’s looking in a shop window.’

  Mr Green was a retired sergeant major. ‘We should do something,’ he said firmly, drawing to a halt and putting th
e car into reverse. He shook his fist at a motorist who hooted ferociously after missing his back bumper by the skin of his teeth. ‘Bloody Sunday drivers,’ he said, ‘they shouldn’t be allowed on the road.’

  ‘Quite right, dear,’ said Mrs Green, opening her door.

  She scooped the poor little mite into her arms and sat her comfortably on her knee while her eighty-year-old husband drove to Poole police station. It was a tortuous journey because his preferred speed was twenty miles an hour and this caused mayhem in the one-way system round the Civic Centre roundabout.

  The child seemed completely at ease in the car, smiling happily out of the window, but once inside the police station, it proved impossible to prise her away from her rescuer. She locked her arms about the elderly woman’s neck, hiding her face against her shoulder and clung to kindness as tenaciously as a barnacle clings to a rock. Upon learning that no one had reported a toddler missing, Mr and Mrs Green sat themselves down with commendable patience and prepared for a long wait.

  ‘I can’t understand why her mother hasn’t noticed she’s gone,’ said Mrs Green. ‘I never allowed my own children out of sight for a minute.’

  ‘Maybe she’s at work,’ said the woman police constable who had been detailed to make the enquiries.

  ‘Well, she shouldn’t be,’ said Mr Green reprovingly. ‘A child of this age needs her mother with her.’ He pulled a knowing expression in WPC Griffiths’s direction which resolved itself into a series of peculiar facial jerks. ‘You should get a doctor to examine her. Know what I’m saying? Odd people about these days. Men who should know better. Get my meaning?’ He spelled it out. ‘P-A-E-do-fills. S-E-X criminals. Know what I’m saying?’

  ‘Yes, sir, I know exactly what you’re saying, and don’t worry’ – the WPC tapped her pen on the paper in front of her – ‘the doctor’s at the top of my list. But if you don’t mind we’ll take it gently. We’ve had a lot of dealings with this kind of thing and we’ve found the best method is not to rush at it.’ She turned to the woman with an encouraging smile. ‘Has she told you her name?’

  Mrs Green shook her head. ‘She hasn’t said a word, dear. To be honest, I’m not sure she can.’

  ‘How old do you think she is?’

  ‘Eighteen months, two at the most.’ She lifted the edge of the child’s cotton dress to reveal a pair of disposable trainer pants. ‘She’s still in nappies, poor little thing.’

  The WPC thought two years old was an underestimation, and added a year for the purposes of the paperwork. Women like Mrs Green had reared their children on terry towelling and, because of the washing involved, had had them potty-trained early. The idea that a three-year-old might still be in nappies was incomprehensible to them.

  Not that it made any difference as far as this little girl was concerned. Whether she was eighteen months old, two years old or three, she clearly wasn’t talking.

  With nothing else to occupy her that Sunday afternoon, the French girl from the Beneteau, who had been an interested observer of Harding’s conversations with the Spender brothers, Maggie Jenner and PC Ingram through the video camera’s zoom lens, rowed herself into shore and walked up the steep slope of West Hill to try to work out for herself what the mystery had been about. It wasn’t hard to guess that the two boys had found the person who had been winched off the beach by helicopter, nor that the handsome Englishman had reported it to the police for them, but she was curious about why he had re-emerged on the hillside half an hour after the police car’s departure to retrieve the rucksack he’d abandoned there. She had watched him take out some binoculars and scan the bay and the cliffs before making his way down to the foreshore beyond the boatsheds. She had filmed him for several minutes, staring out to sea, but she was no wiser, having reached his vantage point above Chapman’s Pool, than she’d been before and, thoroughly bored, she abandoned the puzzle.

  It would be another five days before her father came across the tape and humiliated her in front of the English police . . .

  At six o’clock that evening the Fairline Squadron weighed anchor and motored gently out of Chapman’s Pool in the direction of St Alban’s Head. Two languid girls sat on either side of their father on the flying bridge, while his latest companion sat, alone and excluded, on the seat behind them. Once clear of the shallow waters at the mouth of the bay, the boat roared to full power and made off at twenty-five knots on the return journey to Poole, carving a V-shaped wake out of the flat sea behind it.

  Heat and alcohol had made them all soporific, particularly the father who had overexerted himself in his efforts to please his daughters, and after setting the autopilot he appointed the elder one lookout before closing his eyes. He could feel the daggers of his girlfriend’s fury carving away at his back and, with a stifled sigh, wished he’d had the sense to leave her behind. She was the latest in a string of what his daughters called his ‘bimbos’ and, as usual, they had set out to trample on the fragile shoots of his new relationship. Life, he thought resentfully, was bloody . . .

  ‘Watch out, Dad!’ his daughter screamed in sudden alarm. ‘We’re heading straight for a rock.’

  The man’s heart thudded against his chest as he wrenched the wheel violently, slewing the boat to starboard, and what his daughter had thought was a rock slid past on the port side to dance in the boisterous wake. ‘I’m too old for all of this,’ he said shakily, steering his three hundred thousand-pound boat back on to course and mentally checking the current state of his insurance. ‘What the hell was it? It can’t have been a rock. There are no rocks out here.’

  The two youngsters, eyes watering, squinted into the burning sun to make out the black, bobbing shape behind them. ‘It looks like one of those big oil drums,’ said the elder.

  ‘Jesus wept,’ growled her father. ‘Whoever let that wash overboard deserves to be shot. It could have ripped us open if we’d hit it.’

  His girlfriend, still twisted round, thought it looked more like an upturned dinghy but was reluctant to voice an opinion for fear of attracting any more of his beastly daughters’ derision. She’d had a bucketful already that day, and heartily wished she had never agreed to come out with them.

  ‘I bumped into Nick Ingram this morning,’ said Maggie as she made a pot of tea in her mother’s kitchen at Broxton House.

  It had been a beautiful room once, lined with old oak dressers, each one piled with copper pans and ornate crockery, and with an eight-foot-long, seventeenth-century refectory table down its middle. Now it was merely drab. Everything worth selling had been sold. Cheap white wall and floor units had replaced the wooden dressers and a moulded plastic excrescence from the garden stood where the monks’ table had reigned resplendent. It wouldn’t be so bad, Maggie often thought, if the room was cleaned occasionally, but her mother’s arthritis and her own terminal exhaustion from trying to make money out of horses meant that cleanliness had long since gone the way of godliness. If God was in his heaven, and all was right with the world, then he had a peculiar blind spot when it came to Broxton House. Maggie would have cut her losses and moved away long ago if only her mother had agreed to do the same. Guilt enslaved her. Now she lived in a flat over the stables on the other side of the garden, and made only intermittent visits to the house. Its awful emptiness was too obvious a reminder that her mother’s poverty was her fault.

  ‘I took Jasper down to Chapman’s Pool. A woman drowned in Egmont Bight and Nick had to guide the helicopter in to pick up the body.’

  ‘A tourist, I suppose?’

  ‘Presumably,’ said Maggie, handing her a cup. ‘Nick would have said if it was someone local.’

  ‘Typical!’ snorted Celia crossly. ‘So Dorset will foot the bill for the helicopter because some inept creature from another county never learnt to swim properly. I’ve a good mind to withhold my taxes.’

  ‘You usually do,’ said Maggie, thinking of the final reminders that littered the desk in the drawing room.

  Her mother ignored the remark. ‘
How was Nick?’

  ‘Hot,’ said her daughter, remembering how red-faced he had been when he returned to the car, ‘and not in the best of moods.’ She stared into her tea, screwing up the courage to address the thorny issue of money, or more accurately lack of money, coming into the riding and livery business she ran from the Broxton House stableyard. ‘We need to talk about the stables,’ she said abruptly.

  Celia refused to be drawn. ‘You wouldn’t have been in a good mood either if you’d just seen a drowned body.’ Her tone became conversational as a prelude to a series of anecdotes. ‘I remember seeing one floating down the Ganges when I was staying with my parents in India. It was the summer holidays. I think I was about fifteen at the time. It was a horrible thing, gave me nightmares for weeks. My mother said . . .’

  Maggie stopped listening and fixed instead on a long black hair growing out of her mother’s chin which needed plucking. It bristled aggressively as she spoke, like one of Bertie’s whiskers, but they’d never had the kind of relationship that meant Maggie could tell her about it. Celia, at sixty-three, was still a good-looking woman with the same dark brown hair as her daughter, touched up from time to time with Harmony colour rinses, but the worry of their straitened circumstances had taken a heavy toll in the deep lines around her mouth and eyes.

  When she finally drew breath, Maggie reverted immediately to the subject of the stables. ‘I’ve been totting up last month’s receipts,’ she said, ‘and we’re about two hundred quid short. Did you let Mary Spencer-Graham off paying again?’

  Celia’s mouth thinned. ‘If I did it’s my affair.’

  ‘No it’s not, Ma,’ said Maggie with a sigh. ‘We can’t afford to be charitable. If Mary doesn’t pay then we can’t look after her horse. It’s as simple as that. I wouldn’t mind so much if we weren’t already charging her the absolute minimum but the fees barely cover Moondust’s fodder. You really must be a bit tougher with her.’