The Breaker

by Minette Walters

  ‘Ah, shit!’ He emptied the lager can with one swallow then crumpled it between his fist and threw it at the beer crate. ‘Look, it’s pointless asking me any more questions. I don’t know anything about anyone drowning. Okay? I’m a mate of Steve’s not his blasted keeper.’

  Campbell nodded. ‘Fair enough. So, as a mate, do you know if he has a girlfriend down here called Bibi or Didi, Mr Bridges?’

  Tony levelled an accusing finger. ‘What the hell is this?’ he demanded. ‘Over my dead body are these routine questions. What’s going on?’

  The DS looked thoughtful. ‘Steve isn’t answering his telephone so his agent’s the only person we’ve been able to talk to. He told us Steve had a girlfriend in Lymington called Bibi or Didi and he suggested we contact you for her address. Is that a problem for you?’

  ‘TO-ONY!’ called a drunken female voice from upstairs. ‘I’M WA-AITING!’

  ‘Too right it’s a problem,’ said Bridges angrily. ‘That’s Bibi and she’s my sodding girlfriend, not Steve’s. I’ll kill the bastard if he’s been two-timing me.’

  There was the sound of a body slumping on the floor upstairs. ‘I’M GOING TO SLE-EP AGAIN, TONY!’

  Carpenter and Galbraith travelled out to Crazy Daze in the harbour master’s rib – a souped-up dinghy with a fibreglass keel and a steering column – captained by one of his young assistants. The night air had become noticeably cold after the heat of the day and both men wished they had had the sense to wear jumpers or fleeces under their jackets. A stiff breeze was funnelling down the Solent, making rigging lines rattle noisily against the forest of masts in the Berthon and Yacht Haven marinas. Ahead of them the Isle of Wight crouched like a slumbering beast against the shadowy sky and the lights from the approaching Yarmouth to Lymington ferry danced in reflection across the waves.

  The harbour master had been amused by police suspicion over their fruitless attempts to raise Harding via radio or mobile telephone. ‘Do the man a favour! Why should he waste his batteries on the odd chance that you lot want to talk to him? There’s no shore power to boats on the buoys. He lights the saloon with a butane gas lamp – claims it’s romantic – which is why he prefers a buoy in the river to a pontoon in a marina. That, and the fact that once on board the girls are dependent on him and his dinghy to get them off again.’

  ‘Does he take many girls out there?’ asked Galbraith.

  ‘I wouldn’t know. I’ve got better things to do than keep a tally of Steve’s conquests. He prefers blondes, I know that. I’ve seen him with a right little stunner recently.’

  ‘Small, curly blonde hair, blue eyes?’

  ‘Far as I recall, she had straight hair, but don’t quote me on it. I’m no good with faces.’

  ‘Any idea what time Steve’s boat left on Saturday morning?’ asked Carpenter.

  The harbour master shook his head. ‘I can’t even see it from here. Ask at the yacht club.’

  ‘We already have. No luck.’

  ‘Wait till the weekenders come down on Saturday then. They’ll be your best bet.’

  The rib slowed as it approached Harding’s sloop. Yellow light glimmered in the midship portholes and a rubber dinghy bobbed astern in the wash from the ferry. From inside came the faint sound of music.

  ‘Hey, Steve,’ shouted the harbour master’s lad, rapping smartly on the port planking. ‘It’s Gary. You’ve got visitors, mate.’

  Harding’s voice came faintly. ‘Bog off, Gary! I’m sick.’

  ‘No can do. It’s the police. They want to talk to you. Come on, open up, and give us a hand.’

  The music ceased abruptly and Harding hoisted himself through the open companionway into the cockpit. ‘What’s up?’ he asked, surveying the two detectives with an ingenuous smile. ‘I guess this has something to do with that woman yesterday? Were the boys lying about the binoculars?’

  ‘We’ve a few follow-up questions,’ said Detective Superintendent Carpenter with an equally ingenuous smile. ‘Can we come on board?’

  ‘Sure.’ He hopped on to the deck and reached down to assist Carpenter before turning to help his companion.

  ‘My shift ends at ten,’ the lad called to the police officers. ‘I’ll be back in forty minutes to take you off. If you want to leave earlier call on your mobile. Steve knows the number. Otherwise get him to bring you back.’

  They watched him turn away in a wide circle, carving a gleaming wake out of the water as he headed upriver towards the town.

  ‘You’d better come below,’ said Harding. ‘It’s cold out here.’ He was dressed – much to Galbraith’s relief – in the same sleeveless T-shirt and shorts he’d been wearing the day before, and he shivered as a wind blew across the salt flats at the entrance to the river. Barefoot himself, he looked critically at the policemen’s shoes. ‘You’ll have to take those off,’ he told them. ‘It’s taken me two years to get the planking looking like this and I don’t want it marked.’

  Obligingly, the two men unlaced their boots before padding across to the companionway in search of welcome warmth. The atmosphere inside the saloon was still redolent of the previous night’s heavy drinking session and, even without the evidence of the empty whisky bottle which stood on the table, neither officer had any difficulty guessing why Harding had described himself as ‘sick’. The muted light of the single gas-operated lamp served only to accentuate the hollows in his cheeks and the dark stubble around his unshaven jaw, and the brief glimpse they had of the tumbled sheets in the forward cabin before he closed the door left neither of them in any doubt that he’d spent most of the day sleeping off a ferocious hangover.

  ‘What kind of follow-up questions?’ he asked, sliding on to a bench seat at the side of the table and gesturing them to take the other.

  ‘Routine ones, Mr Harding,’ said the Superintendent.

  ‘About what?’

  ‘Yesterday’s events.’

  He pressed the heels of his palms against his lids and rotated them fiercely as if to drive out demons. ‘I don’t know any more than I told the other guy,’ he said, eyes watering as he lowered his hands. ‘And most of that was what the boys told me. They reckoned she drowned and got left on the beach. Were they right?’

  ‘It certainly looks that way.’

  He hunched forward over the table. ‘I’m thinking about making a complaint against that copper. He was bloody rude, made out me and the kids had something to do with the body being there. I didn’t mind for myself so much, but I was pretty pissed off for the boys. They were scared of him. I mean, let’s face it, it can’t be much fun finding a corpse – and then to have some idiot in hobnailed boots making the whole situation worse . . .’ He broke off with a shake of his head. ‘Matter of fact I think he was jealous. I was chatting up this bird when he came back, and he looked bloody furious about it. I reckon he fancies her himself, but he’s such a dozy pillock he hasn’t done anything about it.’

  As neither Galbraith nor Carpenter rose in Ingram’s defence, a silence fell during which the two policemen cast interested glances about the saloon. In other circumstances the light may well have been romantic, but to a couple of law officers intent on spotting anything that might connect its owner to a brutal rape and murder it was worse than useless. Too much of the interior was obscured by shadow and if there was evidence that Kate and Hannah Sumner had been on board the previous Saturday then it wasn’t obvious.

  ‘What do you want to know?’ asked Harding then. He was watching John Galbraith as he spoke, and there was something in his eye – triumph? amusement? – that made Galbraith think the silence had been deliberate. He had given them an opportunity to look, and they had only themselves to blame if they were disappointed.

  ‘We understand you berthed in Salterns Marina on Saturday night and stayed there most of Sunday?’ said Carpenter.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What time did you tie up, Mr Harding?’

  ‘I’ve no idea.’ He frowned. ‘Pretty late. What’s that got to d
o with anything?’

  ‘Do you keep a log?’

  He glanced towards his chart table. ‘When I remember.’

  ‘May I look at it?’

  ‘Why not?’ He leaned over and retrieved a battered exercise book from the clutter of paper on the lid of the chart table. ‘It’s hardly great literature.’ He handed it across.

  Carpenter read the last six entries.

  09.08.97. 10.09. Slipped mooring.

  ” ” 11.32. Rounded Hurst Castle.

  10.08.97. 02.17. Berthed, Salterns Marina.

  ” ” 18.50. Slipped mooring.

  ” ” 19.28. Exited Poole Harbour.

  11.08.97. 00.12. Berthed, Lymington.

  ‘You certainly don’t waste your words much, do you?’ he murmured, flicking back through the pages to look at other entries. ‘Doesn’t wind speed or course ever feature in your log?’

  ‘Not often.’

  ‘Is there a reason for that?’

  The young man shrugged. ‘I know the course to everywhere on the south coast so I don’t need to keep reminding myself, and wind speed is wind speed. That’s part of the beauty of it. Any journey takes as long as it takes. If you’re the sort of impatient type who’s only interested in arrivals then sailing will drive you nuts. On a bad day it can take hours to go a few miles.’

  ‘It says here you tied up in Salterns Marina at 2.17 on Sunday morning,’ said Carpenter.

  ‘Then I did.’

  ‘It also says you left Lymington at 10.09 on Saturday morning.’ He did a quick calculation. ‘Which means it took you sixteen hours to sail approximately thirty miles. That’s got to be a record, hasn’t it? It works out at about two knots an hour. Is that as fast as this thing can go?’

  ‘It depends on the wind and the tide. On a good day I can do six knots but the average is probably four. In fact I probably sailed sixty miles on Saturday because I was tacking most of the way.’ He yawned. ‘Like I said, it can take hours on a bad day, and Saturday was a bad day.’

  ‘Why didn’t you use your motor?’

  ‘I didn’t want to. I wasn’t in a hurry.’ His expression grew wary with suspicion. ‘What’s this got to do with the woman on the beach?’

  ‘Probably nothing,’ said Carpenter easily. ‘We’re just tying up some loose ends for the report.’ He paused, assessing the young man thoughtfully. ‘I’ve done a little sailing myself in the past,’ he said then, ‘and I’ll be honest with you, I don’t believe it took you sixteen hours to sail to Poole. If nothing else, the offshore winds as the land cooled in the late afternoon would have boosted your speed well over two knots. I think you sailed on past the Isle of Purbeck, perhaps with the intention of going to Weymouth, and only turned back to Poole when you realized how late it was getting. Am I right?’

  ‘No. I hove to off Christchurch for a few hours to do some fishing and have a nap. That’s why it took so long.’

  Carpenter didn’t believe him. ‘Two minutes ago you gave tacking as the explanation. Now you’re claiming a fishing break. Which was it?’

  ‘Both. Tacking and fishing.’

  ‘Why isn’t it in your log?’

  ‘It wasn’t important.’

  Carpenter nodded. ‘Your approach to time seems a little’ – he sought a suitable word – ‘individualistic, Mr Harding. For example, you told the police officer yesterday that you were planning to walk to Lulworth Cove, but Lulworth’s a good twenty-five miles from Salterns Marina, fifty in total if you intended to walk back again. That’s an ambitious distance for a twelve-hour hike, isn’t it, bearing in mind you told the harbour master at Salterns Marina you’d be back by late afternoon?’

  Harding’s eyes gleamed with sudden amusement. ‘It doesn’t look nearly as far by sea,’ he said.

  ‘Did you make it to Lulworth?’

  ‘Like hell I did!’ he said with a laugh. ‘I was completely whacked by the time I reached Chapman’s Pool.’

  ‘Could that be because you travel light?’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘You were carrying a mobile telephone, Mr Harding, but nothing else. In other words you set out on a fifty-mile hike on one of the hottest days of the year with no fluids, no money, no sunscreen protection, no additional clothes if you started to burn, no hat. Are you usually so careless about your health?’

  He pulled a wry face. ‘Look, all right it was stupid. I admit it. That’s the reason I turned back after your bloke drove the kids away. If you’re interested, the return journey took twice as long as the journey out because I was so damn knackered.’

  ‘About four hours then,’ suggested DI Galbraith.

  ‘More like six. I started after they left, which was 12.30 near enough, and got to the marina around 6.15. I drank about a gallon of water, had something to eat then set off for Lymington maybe half an hour later.’

  ‘So the hike out to Chapman’s Pool took three hours?’ said Galbraith.

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘Which means you must have left the marina shortly after 7.30 to be able to make the emergency call at 10.43.’

  ‘If you say so.’

  ‘I don’t say so at all, Steve. Our information is that you were paying for your berth at eight o’clock which means you couldn’t have left the marina until several minutes later.’

  Harding linked his hands behind his head and stared across the table at the Inspector. ‘Okay, I left at eight,’ he said. ‘What’s the big deal?’

  ‘The big deal is there’s no way you could have hiked sixteen miles along a rough coastal path in two and a half hours’ – he paused, holding Harding’s gaze – ‘and that includes the time you must have lost waiting for the ferry.’

  There was no hesitation in his reply. ‘I didn’t go along the coastal path, or not to start off with anyway,’ he said. ‘I hitched a lift with a couple on the ferry who were heading for the country park near Durlston Head. They dropped me off by the gates leading up to the lighthouse and I got on to the path there.’

  ‘What time was that?’

  He shifted his gaze to the ceiling. ‘Ten forty-three minus however long it takes to jog from Durlston Head to Chapman’s Pool, I suppose. Look, the first time I remember checking my watch yesterday was just before I made the nine-nine-nine call. Up until then I couldn’t have given a toss what time it was.’ He looked at Galbraith again, and there was irritation in his dark eyes. ‘I hate being ruled by the bloody clock. It’s social terrorism to force people to conform to arbitrary evaluations of how long something should take. That’s why I like sailing. Time’s irrelevant and there’s bugger all you can do about it.’

  ‘What sort of car did the couple drive?’ asked Carpenter, unmoved by the young man’s flights of philosophical fancy.

  ‘I don’t know. A saloon of some sort. I don’t notice cars.’

  ‘What colour?’

  ‘Blue, I think.’

  ‘What were the couple like?’

  ‘We didn’t talk much. They had a Manic Street Preachers album on tape. We listened to that.’

  ‘Can you describe them, Mr Harding?’

  ‘Not really. They were ordinary. I spent most of the time looking at the backs of their heads. She had blonde hair and he had dark hair.’ He reached for the whisky bottle and rolled it between his palms, beginning to lose his patience. ‘Why the hell are you asking me these questions anyway? What the fuck does it matter how long it took me to get from A to B, or who I met along the way? Does everyone who dials nine-nine-nine get the third degree?’

  ‘Just tying loose ends, sir.’

  ‘So you said.’

  ‘Wouldn’t it be truer to say that Chapman’s Pool was your destination, and not Lulworth Cove?’

  ‘No.’

  A silence developed. Carpenter stared fixedly at Harding while he continued to play with the whisky bottle. ‘Were there any passengers on board your boat on Saturday?’ he asked then.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Are you sure abo
ut that, sir?’

  ‘Of course I’m bloody sure. Don’t you think I’d have noticed them? It’s hardly the QE2, is it?’

  Carpenter leafed idly through the logbook. ‘Do you ever carry passengers?’

  ‘That’s none of your business.’

  ‘Maybe not, but we’ve been led to believe you’re a bit of a lad.’ He lifted an amused eyebrow. ‘Legend has it that you regularly entertain ladies on board. I’m wondering if you ever take them sailing with you’ – he jerked his head towards the cabin – ‘or does all the action take place in there when you’re moored up to your buoy?’

  Harding took time to consider his answer. ‘I take some of them out,’ he admitted at last.

  ‘How often?’

  Another long pause. ‘Once a month, maybe.’

  Carpenter slapped the exercise book on to the table and drummed his fingers on it. ‘Then why is there no mention of them in here? Surely you have a responsibility to record the names of everyone on board in case of an accident? Or perhaps you don’t care that someone might drown because the coastguards assume you’re the only person they’re looking for?’

  ‘That’s ridiculous,’ said Harding dismissively. ‘The boat would have to turn turtle for a scenario like that and the log’d be lost anyway.’

  ‘Have any of your passengers ever gone overboard?’

  Harding shook his head but didn’t say anything. His eyes flickered with open suspicion from one man to the other, tasting their mood in the way a snake flicks his tongue to taste scent on the air. There was something very studied about every movement he made, and Galbraith regarded him objectively, mindful that he was an actor. He had the impression that Harding was enjoying himself, but he couldn’t think why this should be unless Harding had no idea the investigation involved rape and murder and was merely using the experience of an interrogation to practise ‘method-acting’ techniques.

  ‘Do you know a woman by the name of Kate Sumner?’ asked Carpenter next.

  Harding pushed the bottle aside and leaned forward aggressively. ‘What if I do?’