The Breaker

by Minette Walters

  ‘Did they tell you she was raped before she was murdered?’

  Bridges gave a low whistle of understanding as if pieces of a jigsaw were finally coming together. ‘No wonder they were so interested in your porno shoots. Your average rapist’s a sad bastard in a dirty mac who jerks off over that kind of trash.’ He pulled a plastic bag out from the recesses of his chair and started to fill the Rizla papers. ‘They must have had a field day with those photographs.’

  Harding shook his head. ‘I got rid of the lot over the side before they came. I didn’t want any’ – he thought about it – ‘confusion.’

  ‘Jesus, you’re an arsehole! Why can’t you be honest for once? You got shit-scared that if they had evidence of you performing sex acts with an under-age kid, they’d have no trouble pinning a rape on you.’

  ‘It wasn’t for real.’

  ‘Chucking the photos away was. You’re an idiot, mate.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because you can bet your bottom dollar William will have mentioned photos. I sure as hell did. Now the filth will be wondering why they can’t find any.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘They’ll know you were expecting a visit.’

  ‘So?’ said Harding again.

  Bridges cast him another thoughtful glance as he licked the edges of the spliff. ‘Look at it from their point of view. Why would you be expecting a visit if you didn’t know it was Kate’s body they’d found?’

  Chapter Thirteen

  ‘WE CAN GO to the pub,’ said Ingram, locking Miss Creant on to her trailer behind his Jeep, ‘or I can give you some supper at home.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘It’s 9.30, so the pub’ll be pretty raucous by now and it’ll be difficult to get anything to eat.’ He started to peel off his waterproofs which still streamed water from his immersion in the sea at the bottom of the slip as he had guided Miss Creant on to the trailer while Galbraith operated the winch. ‘Home, on the other hand,’ he said with a grin, ‘has drying facilities, a spectacular view and silence.’

  ‘Do I get the impression you’d rather go home?’ asked Galbraith with a yawn, levering off his inadequate waders and turning them upside down to empty them in a Niagara Falls over the slip. He was soaked from the waistband down.

  ‘There’s beer in the fridge and I can grill you a fresh sea bass if you’re interested.’

  ‘How fresh?’

  ‘Still alive Monday night,’ said Ingram, taking some spare trousers from the back of the Jeep and tossing them across. ‘You can change in the lifeboat station.’

  ‘Cheers,’ said Galbraith setting off in stockinged feet towards the grey stone building that guarded the ever-ready Swanage lifeboat, ‘and I’m interested,’ he called over his shoulder.

  Ingram’s cottage was a tiny two-up, two-down, backing on to the downs above Seacombe Cliff, although the two downstairs rooms had been knocked into one with an open-plan staircase rising out of the middle and a kitchen extension added to the back. It was clearly a bachelor establishment and Galbraith surveyed it with approval. Too often, these days, he felt he still had to be persuaded of the joys of fatherhood.

  ‘I envy you,’ he said, bending down to examine a meticulously detailed replica of the Cutty Sark in a bottle on the mantelpiece. ‘Did you make this yourself?’

  Ingram nodded.

  ‘It wouldn’t last half an hour in my house. I reckon anything I ever had of value was smashed within hours of my son getting his first football.’ He chuckled. ‘He keeps telling me he’s going to make a fortune playing for Man United, but I can’t see it myself.’

  ‘How old is he?’ asked Ingram, leading the way through to the kitchen.

  ‘Seven. His sister’s five.’

  The tall constable took the sea bass from the fridge, then tossed Galbraith a beer and opened one for himself. ‘I’d have liked children,’ he said, splitting the fish down its belly, filleting out the backbone and splaying it spatchcock fashion on the grillpan. He was neat and quick in his movements, despite his size. ‘Trouble is I never found a woman who was prepared to hang around long enough to give me any.’

  Galbraith remembered what Steven Harding had said on Monday night about Ingram fancying the woman with the horse and wondered if it was more a case of the right woman not hanging around long enough. ‘A guy like you’d do well anywhere,’ he said, watching him take some chives and basil from an array of herbs on his window sill and chop them finely before sprinkling them over the sea bass. ‘So what’s keeping you here?’

  ‘You mean apart from the great view and the clean air?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Ingram pushed the fish to one side and started washing the mud off some new potatoes before chucking them into a saucepan. ‘That’s it,’ he said. ‘Great view, clean air, a boat, fishing, contentment.’

  ‘What about ambition? Don’t you get frustrated? Feel you’re standing still?’

  ‘Sometimes. Then I remember how much I hated the rat race when I was in it and the frustrations pass.’ He glanced at Galbraith with a self-deprecating smile. ‘I did five years with an insurance company before I became a policeman, and I hated every minute of it. I didn’t believe in the product, but the only way to get on was to sell more and it was driving me nuts. I had a long think over one weekend about what I wanted out of life, and gave in my notice on the Monday.’ He filled the saucepan with water and put it on the gas.

  The DI thought sourly of his various life, endowment and pension policies. ‘What’s wrong with insurance?’

  ‘Nothing.’ He tipped his can in the direction of the DI and took a swill. ‘As long as you need it . . . as long as you understand the terms of the policy . . . as long as you can afford to keep paying the premiums . . . as long as you’ve read the small print. It’s like any other product. Buyer beware.’

  ‘Now you’re worrying me.’

  Ingram grinned. ‘If it’s any consolation, I’d have felt exactly the same about selling lottery tickets.’

  WPC Griffiths had fallen asleep, fully clothed, in the spare room but woke with a start when Hannah started screaming in the next room. She leapt off the bed, heart thudding, and came face to face with William Sumner as he slunk through the child’s doorway. ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ she demanded angrily, her nerves shot to pieces by her sudden awakening. ‘You’ve been told not to go in there.’

  ‘I thought she was asleep. I just wanted to look at her.’

  ‘We agreed you wouldn’t.’

  ‘You may have done. I never did. You’ve no right to stop me. It’s my house, and she’s my daughter.’

  ‘I wouldn’t bank on that, if I were you,’ she snapped. She was about to add: Your rights take second place to Hannah’s at the moment, but he didn’t give her the chance.

  He clamped fingers like steel bands around her arms and stared at her with dislike, his face working uncontrollably. ‘Who have you been talking to?’ he muttered.

  She didn’t say anything, just broke his grip by raising her hands and striking him on both wrists, and with a choking sob he stumbled away down the corridor. But it was a while before she realized what his question had implied.

  It would explain a lot, she thought, if Hannah wasn’t his child.

  Galbraith laid his knife and fork at the side of his plate with a sigh of satisfaction. They were sitting in shirt-sleeves on the small patio at the side of the cottage beside a gnarled old plum tree that flavoured the air with the scent of fermentation. A storm lantern hissed quietly on the table between them, throwing a circle of yellow light up the wall of the house and across the lawn. On the horizon, moon-silvered clouds floated across the surface of the sea like windblown veils.

  ‘I’m going to have a problem with this,’ he said. ‘It’s too damn perfect.’

  Ingram pushed his own plate aside and propped his elbows on the table. ‘You need to like your own company. If you don’t, it’s the loneliest place on earth.’

  ‘Do you?’

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nbsp; The younger man’s face creased into an amiable smile. ‘I get by,’ he said, ‘as long as people like you don’t drop in too often. Solitude’s a state of mind with me, not an ambition.’

  Galbraith nodded. ‘That makes sense.’ He studied the other’s face for a moment. ‘Tell me about Miss Jenner,’ he said then. ‘Harding gave us the impression he and she had quite a chat before you got back. Could he have said more to her than she’s told you?’

  ‘It’s possible. She seemed pretty relaxed with him.’

  ‘How well do you know her?’

  But Ingram wasn’t so easily drawn about his private life. ‘As well as I know anyone else round here,’ he said casually. ‘What did you make of Harding, as a matter of interest?’

  ‘Difficult to say. He gives a convincing performance of wanting nothing to do with Kate Sumner but, as my boss pointed out, dislike is as good a reason for rape and murder as any other. He claims she was harassing him by smearing crap all over his car because he’d rejected her. It might be true, but none of us really believes it.’

  ‘Why not? There was a case down here three years ago when a wife smashed her husband’s Jag through the front door of his lover’s house. Women can get pretty riled when they’re given the elbow.’

  ‘Except he says he never slept with her.’

  ‘Maybe that was her problem.’

  ‘How come you’re on his side all of a sudden?’

  ‘I’m not. The rules say keep an open mind, and that’s what I’m trying to do.’

  Galbraith chuckled. ‘He wants us to believe he’s a bit of a stud, presumably on the basis that a man who has access to sex on tap doesn’t need to rape anyone, but he can’t or won’t produce the names of women he’s slept with. And neither can anyone else.’ He shrugged. ‘Yet no one questions his reputation for laddish behaviour. They’re all quite confident he entertains ladies on his boat even though the SOCOs couldn’t come up with any evidence to support it. His bedlinen’s stiff with dried semen, but there were only two hairs on it that weren’t his, and neither of them was Kate Sumner’s. Conclusion, the guy’s a compulsive masturbator.’ He paused for reflection. ‘The problem is his damn boat’s positively monastic in every other respect.’

  ‘I don’t get you.’

  ‘Not a whisper of anything pornographic,’ said Galbraith. ‘Compulsive masturbators, particularly the ones who go on to rape, wank their brains out over hard-core porn videos because sensation begins and ends with their dicks, and they need more and more explicit images to help them jerk off. So how does our friend Harding get himself aroused?’

  ‘Memory?’ suggested Ingram wryly.

  Galbraith chuckled. ‘He’s done some pornographic photoshoots himself but claims the only copies he ever kept were the ones he showed William Sumner.’ He gave a brief rundown of both Harding’s and Sumner’s versions of the story. ‘He says he threw the magazine in the bin afterwards and, as far as he’s concerned, porno shoots become history the minute he’s paid.’

  ‘More likely he got rid of everything over the side when it occurred to him I might put his name forward for further questioning.’ Ingram thought for a moment. ‘Did you ask him about what Danny Spender told me? Why he was rubbing himself with the phone?’

  ‘He said it wasn’t true, said the kid made it up.’

  ‘No way. I’ll stake my life on Danny getting that right.’

  ‘Why then?’

  ‘Reliving the rape? Getting himself excited because his victim had been found? Miss Jenner?’

  ‘Which?’

  ‘The rape,’ said Ingram.

  ‘Pure speculation, based on the word of a ten-year-old and a policeman. No jury will believe you, Nick.’

  ‘Then talk to Miss Jenner tomorrow. Find out if she noticed anything before I got there.’ He started to stack the dirty dishes. ‘I suggest you use kid gloves, though. She’s not too comfortable around policemen.’

  ‘Do you mean policemen in general, or just you?’

  ‘Probably just me,’ said Ingram honestly. ‘I tipped off her father that the man she’d married had bounced a couple of bad cheques, and when the old boy tackled him about it, the bastard did a runner with the small fortune he’d conned out of Miss Jenner and her mother. When his fingerprints were run through the computer, it turned out half the police forces in England were looking for him, not to mention the various wives he’d acquired along the way. Miss Jenner was number four, although as he never divorced number one, the marriage was a sham anyway.’

  ‘What was his name?’

  ‘Robert Healey. He was arrested a couple of years ago in Manchester. She knew him as Martin Grant but he admitted to twenty-two other aliases in court.’

  ‘And she blames you because she married a creep?’ asked Galbraith in disbelief.

  ‘Not for that. Her father had had a bad heart for years and the shock of finding out they were on the verge of bankruptcy killed him. I think she feels that if I’d gone to her instead of him, she could somehow have persuaded Healey to give the money back and the old man would still be alive.’

  ‘Could she?’

  ‘I wouldn’t think so.’ He placed the dishes in front of him. ‘Healey had the whole scam down to a fine art, and being open to persuasion wasn’t part of his MO.’

  ‘How did he work it?’

  Ingram pulled a wry face. ‘Charm. She was besotted with him.’

  ‘So she’s stupid?’

  ‘No . . . just overly trusting . . .’ Ingram marshalled his thoughts. ‘He was a professional. Created a fictitious company with fictitious accounts and persuaded the two women to invest in it, or more accurately persuaded Miss Jenner to persuade her mother. It was a very sophisticated operation. I saw the paperwork afterwards, and I’m not surprised they fell for it. The house was littered with glossy brochures, audited accounts, salary cheques, lists of employees, Inland Revenue statements. You’d have to be very suspicious indeed to assume anyone would go to so much trouble to con you out of a hundred thousand quid. Anyway, on the basis that the company stock was going up by 20 per cent a year, Mrs Jenner cashed in all her bonds and securities and handed her son-in-law a cheque.’

  ‘Which he converted back into cash?’

  Ingram nodded. ‘It passed through at least three bank accounts on the way, and then vanished. In all, he spent twelve months working the scam – nine months softening up Miss Jenner, and three months married to her – and it wasn’t just the Jenners who got taken to the cleaners. He used his connection with them to draw in other people, and a lot of their friends got their fingers burnt as well. It’s sad, but they’ve become virtual recluses as a result.’

  ‘What do they live on?’

  ‘Whatever she can make from the Broxton House livery stables. Which isn’t much. The whole place is getting seedier by the day.’

  ‘Why don’t they sell it?’

  Ingram pushed his chair back, preparatory to standing up. ‘Because it doesn’t belong to them. Old man Jenner changed his will before he died and left the house to his son, with the proviso that the two women can go on living there as long as Mrs Jenner remains alive.’

  Galbraith frowned. ‘And then what? The brother throws the sister on the streets?’

  ‘Something like that,’ said Ingram dryly. ‘He’s a lawyer in London, and he certainly doesn’t plan to have a sitting tenant on the premises when he sells out to a developer.’

  Before he left to interview Maggie Jenner on Thursday morning, Galbraith had a quick word with Carpenter to bring him up to speed on the beached dinghy. ‘I’ve organized a couple of SOCOs to go out to it,’ he told him. ‘I’ll be surprised if they find anything – Ingram and I had a poke around to see what had caused it to deflate and frankly it’s all a bit of a mess – but I think it’s worth a try. They’re going to make an attempt to reflate it and float it off the rocks, but the advice is, don’t hold your breath. Even if they get it back, it’s doubtful we’ll learn much from it.’

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sp; Carpenter handed him a sheaf of papers. ‘These’ll interest you,’ he said.

  ‘What are they?’

  ‘Statements from the people Sumner said would support his alibi.’

  Galbraith heard a note of excitement in his boss’s voice. ‘And do they?’

  The other shook his head. ‘Quite the opposite. There are twenty-four hours unaccounted for, between lunchtime on Saturday and lunchtime on Sunday. We’re now blitzing everyone, hotel staff, other conference delegates, but those’ – he levelled a finger at the documents in Galbraith’s hand – ‘are the names Sumner himself gave us.’ His eyes gleamed. ‘And if they’re not prepared to alibi him, I can’t see anyone else doing it. It looks as if you could be right, John.’

  Galbraith nodded. ‘How did he do it, though?’

  ‘He used to sail, must know Chapman’s Pool as well as Harding, must know there are dinghies lying around for the taking.’

  ‘How did he get Kate there?’

  ‘Phoned her Friday night, said he was bored out of his mind with the conference and was planning to come home early, suggested they do something exciting for a change, like spend the afternoon on Studland beach, and arranged to meet her and Hannah off the train in Bournemouth or Poole.’

  Galbraith tugged at his earlobe. ‘It’s possible,’ he agreed.

  A child of three travels free by train, and the record of sales from Lymington station had shown that numerous single adult fares to Bournemouth and Poole had been sold on the Saturday, the trip being a quick and easy one through a change on to regular mainline trains at Brockenhurst. However, if Kate Sumner had purchased one of the tickets she had used cash rather than a cheque or credit card for the transaction. None of the railway staff remembered a small blonde woman with a child but, as they pointed out, the traffic through Lymington station on a Saturday in peak holiday season was so continuous and so heavy because of the ferry link to and from the Isle of Wight that it was unlikely they would.