The Breaker

by Minette Walters

  Sumner pressed his finger and thumb to the bridge of his nose. ‘You don’t kill your wife because you’re bored with her,’ he muttered.

  Galbraith wondered again at the man’s naivety. Boredom was precisely why most men killed their wives. They might disguise it by claiming provocation or jealousy but, in the end, a desire for something different was usually the reason – even if the difference was simply escape. ‘Except I’m told it wasn’t so much a question of boredom, but more a question of you taking her for granted. And that interests me. You see, I wonder what a man like you would do if the woman you’d been taking for granted suddenly decided she wasn’t going to play the game any more.’

  Sumner stared back at him with disdain. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Or if’, Galbraith went on relentlessly, ‘you discovered that what you’d been taking for granted wasn’t true. Such as being a father, for example.’

  *

  Ingram’s assumption was that Harding had come back for his rucksack because, despite the man’s claim that the rucksack found on board Crazy Daze was the one he’d been carrying, Ingram remained convinced that it wasn’t. Paul and Danny Spender had been too insistent that it was big for Ingram to accept that a triangular one fitted the description. Also, he remained suspicious about why Harding had left it behind when he took the boys down to the boatsheds. Nevertheless, the logic of why he had descended to the beach that morning, only to climb up again empty-handed, was far from obvious. Had someone else found the rucksack and removed it? Had Harding weighted it with a rock and thrown it into the sea? Had he even left it there in the first place?

  In frustration, he slithered down a gully in the shale precipice to where the grassy slope at the end of the quarry valley undulated softly towards the sea. It was a western-facing cliff out of sight of the sun, and he shivered as the cold and damp penetrated his flimsy T-shirt and sweater. He turned to look back towards the cleft in the cliff, giving himself a rough idea of where Harding must have emerged in front of Maggie. Shale still pattered down the gully Ingram himself had used, and he noticed what was obviously a recent slide further to the left. He walked over to it, wondering if Harding had dislodged it in his ascent, but the surface was damp with dew and he decided it must have happened a few days previously.

  He turned his attention to the shore below, striding down the grass to take a closer look. Pieces of driftwood and old plastic containers had wedged themselves into cracks in the rocks, but there was no sign of a black or green rucksack. He felt exhausted suddenly, and wondered what the hell he was doing there. He’d planned to spend his day in total idleness aboard Miss Creant, and he really didn’t appreciate giving it up for a wild-goose chase. He raised his eyes to the clouds skudding in on a south-westerly breeze and sighed his frustration to the winds . . .

  Maggie put a cup of tea on the table beside her mother’s bed. ‘I’ve made it very sweet,’ she said. ‘Nick said you needed your energy levels raising.’ She looked at the dreadful state of the top blanket, worn and covered in stains, then noticed the tannin dribbles on Celia’s bedjacket. She wondered what the sheets looked like – it was ages since Broxton House had boasted a washing machine – and wished angrily that she had never introduced the word ‘slut’ into her conversation with Nick.

  ‘I’d rather have a brandy,’ said Celia with a sigh.

  ‘So would I,’ said Maggie shortly, ‘but we haven’t got any.’ She stood by the window, looking at the garden, her own cup cradled between her hands. ‘Why does he want to get even with you, Ma?’

  ‘Did you ask him?’

  ‘Yes. He said it was a private joke.’

  Celia chuckled. ‘Where is he?’

  ‘Gone.’

  ‘I hope you thanked him for me.’

  ‘I didn’t. He started ordering me about so I sent him away with a flea in his ear.’

  Her mother eyed her curiously for a moment. ‘How odd of him,’ she said, reaching for her tea. ‘What sort of orders was he giving you?’

  ‘Snide ones.’

  ‘Oh, I see.’

  Maggie shook her head. ‘I doubt you do,’ she said, addressing the garden. ‘He’s like Matt and Ava, thinks society would have better value out of this house if we were evicted and it was given to a homeless family.’

  Celia took a sip of her tea and leaned back against her pillows. ‘Then I understand why you’re so angry,’ she said evenly. ‘It’s always irritating when someone’s right.’

  ‘He called you a slut and said it was a miracle you hadn’t come down with food poisoning.’

  Celia pondered for a moment. ‘I find that hard to believe if he wasn’t prepared to tell you why he wanted to get even with me. Also, he’s a polite young man, and doesn’t use words like “slut”. That’s more your style, isn’t it, darling?’ She watched her daughter’s rigid back for a moment but, in the absence of any response, went on: ‘If he’d really wanted to get even with me, he’d have spiked my guns a long time ago. I was extremely rude to him, and I’ve regretted it ever since.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘He came to me two months before your wedding with a warning about your fiancé, and I sent him away’ – Celia paused to recall the words Maggie had used – ‘with a flea in his ear.’ Neither she nor Maggie could ever think of the man who had wheedled his way into their lives by his real name, Robert Healey, but only by the name they had come to associate with him, Martin Grant. It was harder for Maggie who had spent three months as Mrs Martin Grant before being faced with the unenviable task of informing banks and corporations that neither the name nor the title belonged to her. ‘Admittedly the evidence against Martin was very thin,’ Celia went on. ‘Nick accused him of trying to con Jane Fielding’s parents-in-law out of several thousand pounds by posing as an antiques dealer – with everything resting on old Mrs Fielding’s insistence that Martin was the man who came to their door – but if I’d listened to Nick instead of castigating him . . .’ She broke off. ‘The trouble was he made me angry. He kept asking me what I knew of Martin’s background, and when I told him Martin’s father was a coffee-grower in Kenya, Nick laughed and said, how convenient.’

  ‘Did you show him the letters they wrote to us?’

  ‘Supposedly wrote,’ Celia corrected her. ‘And, yes, of course I did. It was the only proof we had that Martin came from a respectable background. But, as Nick so rightly pointed out, the address was a PO box number in Nairobi which proved nothing. He said anyone could conduct a fake correspondence through an anonymous box number. What he wanted was Martin’s previous address in Britain and all I could give him was the address of the flat Martin was renting in Bournemouth.’ She sighed. ‘But as Nick said, you don’t have to be the son of a coffee-planter to rent a flat, and he told me I’d be wise to make a few enquiries before I allowed my daughter to marry someone I knew nothing about.’

  Maggie turned to look at her. ‘Then why didn’t you?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know.’ Her mother sighed. ‘Perhaps because Nick was so appallingly pompous . . . Perhaps because on the one occasion that I dared to question Martin’s suitability as a husband’ – she lifted her eyebrows – ‘you called me a meddling bitch and refused to speak to me for several weeks. I think I asked you if you could really marry a man who was afraid of horses, didn’t I?’

  ‘Ye-es,’ said her daughter slowly, ‘and I should have listened to you. I’m sorry now that I didn’t.’ She crossed her arms. ‘What did you say to Nick?’

  ‘More or less what you just said about him,’ said Celia. ‘I called him a jumped-up little oik with a Hitler complex and tore strips off him for having the brass nerve to slander my future son-in-law. Then I asked him which day Mrs Fielding claimed to have seen Martin and, when he told me, I lied and said she couldn’t possibly have done because Martin was out riding with you and me.’

  ‘Oh my God!’ said Maggie. ‘How could you do that?’

  ‘Because it never occu
rred to me for one moment that Nick was right,’ said Celia with an ironic smile. ‘After all, he was just a common or garden policeman and Martin was such a gent. Oxford graduate. Old Etonian. Heir to a coffee plantation. So who wins the prize for stupidity now, darling? You or me?’

  Maggie shook her head. ‘Couldn’t you at least have told me about it? Forewarned might have been forearmed.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think so. You were always so cruel about Nick after Martin pointed out that the poor lad blushed like a beetroot every time he saw you. I remember you laughing and saying that even beetroots have more sex appeal than overweight Neanderthals in policemen’s uniforms.’

  Maggie squirmed at the memory. ‘You could have told me about it afterwards.’

  ‘Of course I could,’ said Celia bluntly, ‘but I didn’t see why I should give you an excuse to shuffle the guilt off on to me. You were just as much to blame as I was. You were living with the wretched creature in Bournemouth, and if anyone should have seen the flaws in his story it was you. You weren’t a child in all conscience, Maggie. If you’d asked to visit his office just once, the whole edifice of his fraud would have collapsed.’

  Maggie sighed in exasperation – with herself – with her mother – with Nick Ingram. ‘Don’t you think I know that? Why do you think I don’t trust anyone any more?’

  Celia held her gaze for a moment, then looked away. ‘I’ve often wondered,’ she murmured. ‘Sometimes I think it’s bloody-mindedness, other times I think it’s immaturity. Usually I put it down to the fact that I spoilt you as a child and made you vain.’ Her eyes fastened on Maggie’s again. ‘You see it’s the height of arrogance to question other people’s motives when you consistently refuse to question your own. Yes, Martin was a conman but why did he pick on us as his victims? Have you ever wondered about that?’

  ‘We had money.’

  ‘Lots of people have money, darling. Few of them get defrauded in the way that we did. No,’ she said with sudden firmness, ‘I was conned because I was greedy, and you were conned because you took it for granted that men found you attractive. If you hadn’t, you’d have questioned Martin’s ridiculous habit of telling everyone he met how much he loved you. It was so American and so insincere, and I can’t understand why any of us believed it.’

  Maggie turned back to the window so that her mother wouldn’t see her eyes. ‘No,’ she said unevenly. ‘Neither can I – now.’

  A gull swooped towards the shore and pecked at something white tumbling at the water’s edge. Amused, Ingram watched it for a while, expecting it to take off again with a dead fish in its beak, but when it abandoned the sport and flapped away in disgust, screaming raucously, he walked down the waterline, curious about what the intermittent flash of white was that showed briefly between each wave. A carrier bag caught in the rocks? A piece of cloth? It ballooned unpleasantly as each swell invaded it, before rearing abruptly in a welter of spume as a larger wave flooded in.

  Chapter Twenty

  GALBRAITH LEANED FORWARD, folding his freckled hands under his chin. He looked completely unalarming, almost mild in fact, like a round-faced schoolboy seeking to make friends. He was quite an actor, like most policemen, and could change his mood as occasion demanded. He tempted Sumner to confide in him. ‘Do you know Lulworth Cove, William?’ he murmured in a conversational tone of voice.

  The other man looked startled but whether from guilt or from the DI’s abrupt switch of tack it was impossible to say. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Have you been there recently?’

  ‘Not that I recall.’

  ‘It’s hardly the sort of thing you’d forget, is it?’

  Sumner shrugged. ‘It depends what you mean by recently. I sailed there several times in my boat, but that was years ago.’

  ‘What about renting a caravan or a cottage? Maybe you’ve taken the family there on holiday?’

  He shook his head. ‘Kate and I only ever had one holiday and that was in a hotel in the Lake District. It was a disaster,’ he said in weary recollection. ‘Hannah wouldn’t go to sleep so we had to sit in our room, night after night, watching the television to stop her screaming the place down and upsetting the other guests. We thought we’d wait until she was older before we tried again.’wouldn’t go to sleep so we had to sit in our room, night after night, watching the television to stop her screaming the place down and upsetting the other guests. We thought we’d wait until she was older before we tried again.’

  It sounded convincing, and Galbraith nodded. ‘Hannah’s a bit of a handful, isn’t she?’

  ‘Kate managed all right.’

  ‘Perhaps because she dosed her with sleeping drugs?’

  Sumner looked wary. ‘I don’t know anything about that. You’d have to ask her doctor.’

  ‘We already have. He says he’s never prescribed any sedatives or hypnotics for either Kate or Hannah.’

  ‘Well then.’

  ‘You work in the business, William. You can probably get free samples of every drug on the market. And, let’s face it, with all these conferences you go to, there can’t be much about pharmaceutical drugs you don’t know.’

  ‘You’re talking rubbish,’ said Sumner, winking uncontrollably. ‘I need a prescription like anyone else.’

  Galbraith nodded again as if to persuade William that he believed him. ‘Still . . . a difficult, demanding child wasn’t what you signed up for when you got married, was it? At the very least it will have put a blight on your sex life.’

  Sumner didn’t answer.

  ‘You must have thought you’d got yourself a good bargain at the beginning. A pretty wife who worshipped the ground you trod on. All right, you didn’t have much in common with her, and fatherhood left a lot to be desired, but all in all life was rosy. The sex was good, you had a mortgage you could afford, the journey to work was a doddle, your mother was keeping tabs on your wife during the day, your supper was on the table when you came home of an evening, and you were free to go sailing whenever you wanted.’ He paused. ‘Then you moved to Lymington and things started to turn sour. I’m guessing Kate grew less and less interested in keeping you happy because she didn’t need to pretend any more. She’d got what she wanted – no more supervision from her mother-in-law . . . a house of her own . . . respectability – all of which gave her the confidence to make a life for herself and Hannah which didn’t include you.’ He eyed the other man curiously. ‘And suddenly it was your turn to be taken for granted. Is that when you began to suspect Hannah wasn’t yours?’

  Sumner surprised him by laughing. ‘I’ve known since she was a few weeks old that she couldn’t possibly be mine. Kate and I are blood group O, and Hannah’s blood group A. That means her father has to be either blood group A or AB. I’m not a fool. I married a pregnant woman and I had no illusions about her, whatever you or my mother may think.’

  ‘Did you challenge Kate with it?’

  Sumner pressed a finger to his fluttering lid. ‘It was hardly a challenge. I just showed her an Exclusions of Paternity table on the ABO system and explained how two blood group O parents can only produce a group O child. She was shocked to have been found out so easily but, as my only purpose in doing it was to show her I wasn’t as gullible as she seemed to think I was, it never became an issue between us. I had no problem acknowledging Hannah as mine which is all Kate wanted.’

  ‘Did she tell you who the father was?’

  He shook his head. ‘I didn’t want to know. I assume it’s someone I work with – or have worked with – but as she broke all contact with Pharmatec after she left, except for the odd visit from Polly Garrard, I knew the father didn’t figure in her life any more.’ He stroked the arm of his chair. ‘You probably won’t believe me, but I couldn’t see the point of getting hot under the collar about someone who had become an irrelevance.’

  He was right. Galbraith didn’t believe him. ‘Presumably the fact that Hannah isn’t your child explains your lack of interest in her?’

  On
ce again the man didn’t answer and a silence lengthened between them.

  ‘Tell me what went wrong when you moved to Lymington,’ Galbraith said then.

  ‘Nothing went wrong.’

  ‘So you’re saying that from day one’ – he emphasized the word – ‘marriage was like living with a landlady? That’s a pretty unattractive proposition, isn’t it?’

  ‘It depends what you want,’ said Sumner. ‘Anyway, how would you describe a woman whose idea of an intellectual challenge was to watch a soap opera, who had no taste in anything, was so houseproud that she believed cleanliness was next to godliness, preferred overcooked sausages and baked beans to rare steak, and accounted voluntarily for every damn penny that either of us ever spent?’

  There was a rough edge to his voice which to Galbraith’s ears sounded more like guilt at exposing his wife’s shortcomings than bitterness that she’d had them, and he had the impression that William couldn’t make up his mind if he’d loved his wife or loathed her. But whether that made him guilty of her murder, Galbraith didn’t know.

  ‘If you despised her to that extent, why did you marry her?’

  Sumner rested his head against the back of his chair and stared at the ceiling. ‘Because the quid pro quo for helping her out of the hole she’d dug for herself was sex whenever I wanted it.’ He turned to look at Galbraith, and his eyes were bright with unshed tears. ‘That’s all I was interested in. That’s all any man’s interested in. Isn’t it? Sex on tap. Kate would have sucked me off twenty times a day if I’d told her to, just so long as I kept acknowledging Hannah as my daughter.’

  The memory brought him little pleasure, apparently, because tears streamed in murky rivers down his cheeks while his uncontrollable lid winked . . . and winked . . .