The Breaker

by Minette Walters

  ‘Then forget the lead and use something else – something you can get a grip on – a T-shirt maybe. Wind it round his arm as tight as you can above the elbow then keep twisting the ends to exert some pressure. Failing that, try and locate the artery on the underside of his upper arm with your fingers and press hard against the bone to stop the flow. But you’ve got to keep the pressure on, Maggie, otherwise he’ll start bleeding again, and that means your hands are going to hurt.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Good girl. I’ll get help to you as fast as I can.’ He cut her off and dialled Broxton House. ‘Mrs Jenner?’ he said, flicking over to the loudspeaker when the receiver was lifted at the other end. ‘It’s Nick Ingram.’ He flung himself out of bed and started to drag on some clothes. ‘Maggie needs help and you’re the closest. She’s trying to stop a man bleeding to death in the quarry gully. They’re at the coastal path end. If you take Sir Jasper and get up there PDQ, then the man stands a chance, otherwise—’

  ‘But I’m not dressed,’ she interrupted indignantly.

  ‘I couldn’t give a shit,’ he said bluntly. ‘Get your arse up there and give your daughter some support because, by God, it’ll be a first if you do.’

  ‘How dare—’

  He cut her off, and set in motion the series of calls that would result in the Portland Search and Rescue helicopter being scrambled in the direction of St Alban’s Head for the second time in less than a week when the ambulance service expressed doubt about their ability to reach a man in a remote grassy valley before he bled to death.

  By the time Nick Ingram reached the scene, having driven his Jeep at breakneck speed along narrow lanes and up the bridleway, the drama was effectively over. The helicopter was on the ground some fifty yards from the scene of the accident, engine idling, Harding was conscious and sitting up being attended by an SAR paramedic, and another hundred yards to the south of the helicopter and halfway up the hillside, Maggie was busy trying to catch Stinger who rolled his eyes and backed away from her every time she came too close. She was clearly trying to head him off from the cliff edge but he was too frightened of the helicopter to move in its direction, and all she was succeeding in doing was driving him towards the three-foot-high fence and the perilously steep steps that edged the cliff. Celia, clad in a pair of pyjama trousers and a tannin-stained bedjacket, stood arrogantly to one side with one hand grasping Sir Jasper’s reins tightly beneath his chin and the other wound into the looped end in case he, too, decided to bolt. She favoured Ingram with a frosty glare, designed to freeze him in his tracks, but he ignored her and turned his attention to Harding.

  ‘Are you all right, sir?’

  The young man nodded. He was dressed in Levi’s and a pale green sweatshirt, both of which were copiously splattered with blood, and his lower right arm was tightly bandaged.

  Ingram turned to the paramedic. ‘What’s the damage?’

  ‘He’ll live,’ said the man. ‘The two ladies managed to stop the bleeding. He’ll need stitching so we’ll take him to Poole and get him sorted there.’ He drew Nick aside. ‘The young lady could do with some attention. She’s shaking like a leaf, but she says it’s more important to catch the horse. The trouble is he’s torn his reins off and she can’t get close enough to get a grip on his throat strap.’ He jerked his head towards Celia. ‘And the older one’s not much better. She’s got arthritis, and she wrecked her hip riding up here. By rights, we ought to take them with us, but they’re adamant they won’t leave the animals. There’s also a time problem. We need to get moving, but the loose horse is going to bolt in real earnest the minute we take off. It’s terrified out of its wits already and damn nearly skidded over the cliff when we landed.’

  ‘Where’s the dog?’

  ‘Vanished. I gather the young lady had to thrash him with his lead to get him off the lad, and he’s fled with his tail between his legs.’

  Nick rumpled his sleep-tousled hair. ‘Okay, can you give us another five minutes? If I help Miss Jenner round up the horse, we may be able to persuade her mother to go in for some treatment. How about it?’

  The paramedic turned to look at Steven Harding. ‘Why not? He says he’s strong enough to walk but it’ll take me a good five minutes to get him in and settled. I don’t fancy your chances much, but good luck.’

  With a wry smile, Nick put his fingers to his lips and gave a piercing whistle before scanning both hillsides with narrowed eyes. To his relief, he saw Bertie rise out of the grass on the breast of Emmetts Hill about two hundred and fifty yards away. He gave another whistle and the dog came like a torpedo towards him. He raised his arm and dropped him to the ground when he was still fifty yards away, then went back to Celia. ‘I need a quick decision,’ he told her. ‘We’ve got five minutes to catch Stinger before the helicopter leaves, and it strikes me Maggie’ll have more chance if she’s riding Sir Jasper. You’re the expert. Do I take him up to her or do I leave him with you, bearing in mind I know nothing about horses and Jasper’s likely to be just as frightened of the noise as Stinger is?’

  She was a sensible woman and didn’t waste time on recriminations. She handed the loop of the reins into his left hand and guided his right into position under Jasper’s chin. ‘Keep clicking your tongue,’ she said, ‘and he’ll follow. Don’t try and run, and don’t let go. We can’t afford to lose both of them. Remind Maggie they’ll both go mad the minute the helicopter takes off so tell her to ride like the devil for the middle of the headland and give herself some space.’

  He set off up the slope, whistling Bertie to follow and gathering him into his left leg so that the dog walked like a shadow beside him.

  ‘I didn’t realize it was his dog,’ said the paramedic to Celia.

  ‘It’s not,’ she said thoughtfully, shading her eyes against the sun to watch what happened.

  She saw her daughter come stumbling down towards the tall policeman, who had a quick word with her then hefted her lightly into Jasper’s saddle before, with a gesture of his arm, he sent Bertie out in a sweeping movement towards the cliff edge to circle round behind the excited gelding. He followed in Bertie’s wake, placing himself as an immovable obstacle between the horse and the brink, while directing the dog to hamper Stinger’s further retreat up the hillside by dashing to and fro above him. Meanwhile, Maggie had turned Sir Jasper towards the quarry site and had kicked him into a canter. Faced with the unpalatable alternatives of a dog on one side, a helicopter on the other and a man behind, Stinger chose the sensible option of pursuing the other horse towards safety.

  ‘Impressive,’ said the paramedic.

  ‘Yes,’ said Celia even more thoughtfully. ‘It was, wasn’t it?’

  *

  Polly Garrard was about to leave for work when DI John Galbraith rang her front doorbell and asked if she was willing to answer a few more questions about her relationship with Kate Sumner. ‘I can’t,’ she told him. ‘I’ll be late. You can come to the office if you like.’

  ‘Fine, if that’s the way you want it,’ he assured her. ‘It might make things difficult for you, though. You probably won’t want eavesdroppers to some of the things I’m going to ask you.’

  ‘Oh, shit!’ she said immediately. ‘I knew this was going to happen.’ She opened the door wide. ‘You’d better come in,’ she said, leading the way into a tiny sitting room, ‘but you can’t keep me long. Half an hour max, okay? I’ve already been late twice this month and I’m running out of excuses.’

  She dropped on to one end of a sofa, hooking an arm over its back, and inviting him to sit at the other end. She twisted round to face him, one leg curled beneath her so that her skirt rose up to her crotch and her breasts stood out in response to her pulled-back shoulder. The pose was deliberate, thought Galbraith with some amusement, as he lowered himself on to the seat beside her. She was a well-built young woman with a taste for tight T-shirts, heavy make-up and blue nail varnish, and he wondered how Angela Sumner would have coped with Polly as a daughter-in
-law in place of Kate. For all her real or imagined sins, Kate seemed to have looked the part of William’s wife even if she did lack the necessary social and educational skills that would have satisfied her mother-in-law.

  ‘I want to ask you about a letter you wrote to Kate in July which concerns some of the people you work with,’ he told Polly, taking a photocopy of it out of his breast pocket. He spread it on his knee and handed it to her. ‘Do you remember sending that?’

  She read it through quickly, then nodded. ‘Yup. I’d been phoning on and off for about a week, and I thought, what the hell, she’s obviously busy, so I’ll drop her a note instead and get her to phone me.’ She screwed her face into cartoon pique. ‘Not that she ever did. She just sent a scrotty little note, saying she’d call when she was ready.’

  ‘This one?’ He handed her a copy of Kate’s draft reply.

  She glanced at it. ‘I guess so. That’s what it said, more or less. It was on some fancy headed notepaper, I remember that, but I was pissed that she couldn’t be bothered to write a decent letter back. The truth is, I don’t think she wanted me to go. I expect she was afraid I’d embarrass her in front of her Lymington friends. Which I probably would have done,’ she added in fairness.

  Galbraith smiled. ‘Did you visit the house when they first moved?’

  ‘Nope. Never got invited. She kept saying I could go as soon as the decorating was finished, but’ – she pulled another face – ‘it was just an excuse to put me off. I didn’t mind. Fact is, I’d probably have done the same in her shoes. She’d moved on – new house, new life, new friends – and you grow out of people when that happens, don’t you?’

  ‘She hadn’t moved on completely,’ he pointed out. ‘You still work with William.’

  Polly giggled. ‘I work in the same building as William,’ she corrected him, ‘and it gets up his nose something rotten that I tell everyone he married my best friend. I know it’s not true – it never was, really – I mean I liked her and all that, but she wasn’t the best-friend type, if you know what I mean. Too self-contained by half. No, I just do it to annoy William. He thinks I’m common as muck, and he nearly died when I told him I’d visited Kate in Chichester and met his mother. I’m not surprised. God, she was an old battleaxe! Lecture, lecture, lecture. Do this. Don’t do that. Frankly, I’d’ve wheeled her in front of a bus if she’d been my mother-in-law.’

  ‘Was there ever a chance of that?’

  ‘Do me a favour! I’d need to be permanently comatose to marry William Sumner. The guy has about as much sex appeal as a turnip!’

  ‘So what did Kate see in him?’

  Polly rubbed her thumb and forefinger together. ‘Money.’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘Nothing. A bit of class, maybe, but an unmarried bloke with no children and money was what she was looking for, and an unmarried bloke with no children and money is what she got.’ She cocked her head on one side, amused by his expression of disbelief. ‘She told me once that William’s tackle, even when he had a stiffy, was so limp it was more like an uncooked sausage than a truncheon. So I said, how does he do the business? And she said, with a pint of baby oil and my finger up his fucking arse.’ She giggled again at Galbraith’s wince of sympathy for another man’s problems. ‘He loved it, for Christ’s sake! Why else would he marry her with his mother spitting poison all over the place? Okay, Kate may have wanted money, but poor old Willy just wanted a tart who’d tell him he was bloody brilliant whether he was or not. It worked like a dream. They both got what they wanted.’

  He studied her for a moment, wondering if she was quite as naive as her words made her sound. ‘Did they?’ he asked her. ‘Kate’s dead, don’t forget.’

  She sobered immediately. ‘I know. It’s a bugger. But there’s nothing I can tell you about that. I haven’t seen her since she moved.’

  ‘All right. Tell me what you do know. Why did your story about Wendy Plater insulting James Purdy remind you of Kate?’ he asked her.

  ‘What makes you think it did?’

  He quoted from her letter. ‘“She” – meaning Wendy – “had to apologize, but she doesn’t regret any of it. She says she’s never seen Purdy go purple before! I thought of you immediately, of course . . .”’ He laid the page on the bench between them. ‘Why that last bit, Polly? Why should Purdy going purple make you think of Kate Sumner?’

  She thought for a moment. ‘Because she used to work at Pharmatec?’ she tried unconvincingly. ‘Because she thought Purdy was a prick? It’s just a figure of speech.’

  He tapped the copy of Kate’s draft reply. ‘She crossed out, “You promised on your honour”, in this before going on to write, “The story about Wendy Plater was really funny!”’ he said. ‘What did you promise her, Polly?’

  She looked uncomfortable. ‘Hundreds of things, I should think.’

  ‘I’m only interested in the one that had something to do with either James Purdy or Wendy Plater.’

  She removed her arm from the back of the seat and hunched forward despondently. ‘It’s got nothing to do with her being killed. It’s just something that happened.’

  ‘What?’

  She didn’t answer.

  ‘If it really does have nothing to do with her murder, then I give you my word it’ll go no further than me,’ he said reassuringly. ‘I’m not interested in exposing her secrets, only in finding her killer.’ Even as he spoke, he knew the statement was untrue. All too often, justice for a rape victim meant that she had to endure the humiliation of her secrets being exposed. He looked at Polly with unexpected sympathy. ‘But I’m afraid I’m the one who has to decide whether it’s important.’

  She sighed. ‘I could lose my job if Purdy ever finds out I told you.’

  ‘There’s no reason why he should.’

  ‘You reckon?’

  Galbraith didn’t say anything, having learnt from experience that silence often exerted more pressure than words.

  ‘Oh, what the hell!’ she said then. ‘You’ve probably guessed anyway. Kate had an affair with him. He was crazy about her, wanted to leave his wife and everything, then she blew him away and said she was going to marry William instead. Poor old Purdy couldn’t believe it. He’s no spring chicken, and he’d been rogering himself stupid to keep her interested. I think he may even have told his wife he wanted a divorce. Anyway, Kate said he went purple and then collapsed on his desk. He was off work for three months afterwards, so I reckoned he must have had a heart attack, but Kate said he couldn’t face coming back while she was still there.’ She shrugged. ‘He started work again the week after she left so maybe she was right.’

  ‘Why did she choose William?’ he asked. ‘She wasn’t any more in love with him than she was with Purdy, was she?’

  Polly repeated the gesture of rubbing her thumb and fingers together. ‘Dosh,’ she said. ‘Purdy’s got a wife and three grown-up children, all of whom would have demanded their cut before Kate got a look in.’ She pulled a wry face. ‘Like I said, what she really wanted was an unmarried guy without children. She reckoned if she was going to have to bust a gut to make some plonker happy, she wanted access to everything he owned.’

  Galbraith shook his head in perplexity. ‘Then why bother with Purdy at all?’

  She hooked her arm over the sofa again and thrust her tits into his face. ‘She didn’t have a father, did she? Any more than I do.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘She had a thing about older men.’ She opened her eyes wide in flirtatious invitation. ‘Me, too, if you’re interested.’

  Galbraith chuckled. ‘Do you eat them alive?’

  She looked pointedly at his fly. ‘I swallow them whole,’ she said with a laugh.

  He shook his head in amusement. ‘You were telling me why Kate bothered with Purdy,’ he reminded her.

  ‘He was the boss,’ she said, ‘the guy with the loot. She thought she’d take him for a few bob, get him to pay for improvements on her flat, while she looked around for
something better. The trouble was, she didn’t reckon on him getting as smitten as he did so the only way to get rid of him was to be cruel. She wanted security, not love, you see, and she didn’t think she’d get it from Purdy, not after his wife and children had taken their slice. He was thirty years older than she was, remember. Also, he didn’t want any more kids, and that was all she really wanted, kids of her own. She was pretty screwed up in some ways, I guess because she’d had a tough time growing up.’

  ‘Did William know about her affair with Purdy?’

  Polly shook her head. ‘No one knew except me. That’s why she swore me to secrecy. She said William would call the wedding off if he ever found out.’

  ‘Would he have done?’

  ‘Oh, for sure. Look, he was thirty-seven years old, and he wasn’t the marrying kind. Wendy Plater nearly got him up to scratch once till Kate put a spanner in the works by telling him she was a lush. He dumped her so quick, you wouldn’t believe.’ She smiled reminiscently. ‘Kate practically had to put a ring through his nose to get him to the registry office. It might have been different if his mother had approved but old Ma Sumner and Will were like Derby and Joan, and Kate had to work her socks off every night to make sex more attractive to the silly sod than having his laundry done on a regular basis.’

  ‘Was it true about Wendy Plater?’

  Polly looked uncomfortable again. ‘She gets drunk sometimes but not on a regular basis. Still, as Kate said, if Will had wanted to marry her, he wouldn’t have believed it, would he? He just seized on the first good excuse to get out.’

  Galbraith looked down at Kate Sumner’s childish writing in the draft letter she’d written to Polly and wondered about the nature of ruthlessness. ‘Did the affair with Purdy continue after she married William?’

  ‘No,’ said Polly with conviction. ‘Once Kate made up her mind to something, that was it.’

  ‘Would that stop her having an affair with someone else? Let’s say she was bored with William and met someone younger – would she have been unfaithful in those circumstances?’