A strangled sob issued from the other man’s mouth. ‘I’ve been hating her so much . . . I knew he was more than a casual acquaintance when she said she didn’t want him in the house any more. She used to flirt with him at the beginning, then she turned vicious and started calling him names . . . I guessed he’d got bored with her . . .’
‘Is that when he showed you the photographs?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why did he do that, William?’
‘He said he wanted me to show them to Kate but . . .’ He lifted a trembling hand to his mouth.
Galbraith recalled something Tony had said the previous evening. ‘The only reason Steve does pornography is because he knows it’s inadequate guys who’re going to look at it. He doesn’t have any hang-ups about sex so it gives him a buzz to think of them squirming over pictures of him . . .’
‘But he really wanted to show them to you?’
Sumner nodded. ‘He wanted to prove that Kate would sleep with anyone – even a man who preferred other men – rather than sleep with me.’ Tears streamed down his face. ‘I think she must have told him I wasn’t very good. I said I didn’t want to see the pictures, so he put the magazine on the table in front of me and told me to’ – he struggled with the words, closing his eyes in pain, as if to blot out the memory – ‘ “suck on it”.’
‘Did he say he’d slept with Kate?’
‘He didn’t need to. I knew when Hannah let him pick her up in the street that something was going on . . . she’s never let me do that.’ More tears squeezed from his tired eyes.
‘What did he say, William?’
He plucked at his mouth. ‘That Kate was making his life hell by smearing Hannah’s nappies on his possessions, and that if I didn’t make her stop he’d go to the police.’
‘And you believed him?’
‘Kate was – like that,’ he said with a break in his voice. ‘She could be spiteful when she didn’t get her own way.’
‘Did you show her the magazine?’
‘No.’
‘What did you do with it?’
‘Kept it in my car.’
‘Why?’
‘To look at . . . remember . . .’ He rested his head against the back of the chair and stared at the ceiling. ‘Have something to hate, I suppose.’
‘Did you tackle Kate about it?’
‘There was no point. She’d have lied.’
‘So what did you do?’
‘Nothing,’ he said simply. ‘Went on as if nothing had happened. Stayed late at work . . . sat in my study . . . avoided her . . . I couldn’t think, you see. I kept wondering if the baby was mine.’ He turned to look at the policeman. ‘Was it?’
Galbraith leaned forward and clamped his hands between his knees. ‘The pathologist estimated the foetus at fourteen weeks, making conception early May, but Kate’s affair with Harding finished at the end of March. I can ask the pathologist to run a DNA test if you want absolute proof, but I don’t think there’s any doubt Kate was carrying your son. She didn’t sleep around, William.’ He paused to let the information sink in. ‘But there’s no doubt Steven Harding accused her wrongly of harassment. Yes, she lashed out once in a moment of pique, but probably only because she was annoyed with herself for having given in to him. The real culprit was a friend of Harding’s. Kate rejected him, so he used her as a shield for his own revenge without ever considering the sort of danger he might be putting her into.’
‘I never thought he’d do anything to her . . . Jesus! Do you think I wanted her killed? She was a sad person . . . lonely . . . boring . . . God, if she had anything going for her she kept it well hidden . . . Look, I know this sounds bad – I’m not proud of it now – but I found it funny the way Steve reacted. He was shit-scared of her. That stuff about dodging round corners was all true. He thought she was going to attack him in the middle of the street if she managed to catch him unawares. He kept talking about the movie Fatal Attraction, and saying Michael Douglas’s mistake was not to let the Glenn Close character die when she tried to kill herself.’
‘Why didn’t you tell us this before?’ Carpenter had asked.
‘Because you have to believe someone’s guilty before you get yourself into trouble. In a million years I wouldn’t have thought Steve had anything to do with it. He doesn’t go in for violence.’
‘Try violation instead,’ Carpenter had said. ‘Off-hand, can you think of anything or anyone your friend has not violated? Hospitality . . . friendship . . . marriage . . . women . . . young girls . . . every bloody law you can think of . . . Did it never occur to you, Tony, that someone so intensely sociopathic as Steven Harding, so careless of other people’s sensibilities, might represent a danger to a woman he thought had been terrorizing him?’
Sumner continued to stare at the ceiling, as if answers lay somewhere within its white surface. ‘How did he get her on to his boat if she wasn’t interested any more?’ he asked flatly. ‘You said no one had seen her with him after he spoke to her outside Tesco’s.’
‘She smiled at me as if nothing had happened,’ Harding had told them, ‘asked me how I was and how the acting was going. I said she had a bloody nerve even talking to me after what she’d done, and she just laughed and told me to grow up. “You did me a favour,” she said. “You taught me to appreciate William, and if I don’t hold any grudges why should you?” I told her she knew fucking well why I held a grudge, so she started to look cross. “It was payment in kind,” she said. “You were crap.” Then she walked away. I think that’s what made me angry – I hate it when people walk away from me – but I knew the woman in Tesco’s was watching so I crossed the High Street and went down behind the market stalls on the other side of the road, watching her. All I planned to do was have it out with her, tell her she was lucky I hadn’t gone to the police . . .’
‘Saturday’s market day in Lymington High Street,’ said Galbraith, ‘so the place was packed with visitors from outside. People don’t notice things in a crowd. He followed her at a distance, waiting for her to turn towards home again.’
‘She looked pretty angry so I think I must have upset her. She turned down Captain’s Row, so I knew she was probably going home. I gave her a chance, you know. I thought if she took the top road I’d let her go, but if she took the bottom road past the yacht club and Tony’s garage I’d teach her a lesson . . .’
‘He has the use of a garage about two hundred yards from your house,’ Galbraith went on. ‘He caught up with her as she was passing it and persuaded her and Hannah to go inside. She’d been in several times before with Harding’s friend, Tony Bridges, so it obviously didn’t occur to her there was anything to worry about.’
‘Women are such stupid bitches. They’ll fall for anything as long as a bloke sounds sincere. All I had to do was tell her I was sorry, and squeeze a couple of tears out – I’m an actor so I’m good at that – and she was all smiles again and said, no, she was sorry, she hadn’t meant to be cruel and couldn’t we let bygones be bygones and stay friends? So I said, sure, and why didn’t I give her some champagne out of Tony’s garage to show there were no hard feelings? You can drink it with William, I said, as long as you don’t tell him it came from me. If there’d been anyone in the street or if old Mr Bridges had been at his curtains, I wouldn’t have done it. But it was so bloody easy. Once I’d closed the garage doors, I knew I could do anything I wanted . . .’
‘You need to remember how little she knew about him, William. According to Harding himself, her entire knowledge of him came from two months of constant flattery and attention while he wanted to get her into bed, a brief period of unsatisfactory love-making on both sides which resulted in him giving her the cold shoulder and her taking petty revenge with Hannah’s nappy on his cabin sheets, then four months of mutual avoidance. As far as she was concerned, it was old history. She didn’t know his car was being daubed with faeces, didn’t know he’d approached you and told you to warn her off, so when she accepted a gla
ss of champagne in the garage, she genuinely thought it was the peace-offering he said it was.’
‘If she hadn’t told me William was away for the weekend I wouldn’t have gone through with it, but you kind of get the feeling that some things are meant to happen. It was her fault really. She kept on about how she had nothing to go home for, so I offered her a drink. If I’m honest, I’d say she was up for it. You could tell she was pleased as bloody punch to find herself alone with me. Hannah wasn’t a problem. She’s always liked me. I’m about the only person, other than her mother, who could pick her up without her screaming . . .’
‘He put her to sleep, using a benzodiazepine hypnotic drug called Rohypnol which he dissolved in the champagne. It’s been called the date-rape drug because it’s easy to give to a woman without her knowing. It’s powerful enough to keep her out for six to ten hours, and in the cases reported so far, women claim intermittent periods of consciousness when they know what’s happening to them but an inability to do anything about it. We understand there are moves to change it to a schedule 3 controlled drug in 1998, add a blue dye to it and make it harder to dissolve, but at the moment it’s open to abuse.’
‘Tony keeps his drug supplies in the garage, or did until he heard you’d arrested me, then he went in and cleared the whole lot out. He’d taken the Rohypnol off his grandad when the poor old bugger kept falling asleep during the daytime. He found him in the kitchen once with the gas going full blast because he’d nodded off before he had time to put a match to it. Tony was going to chuck the Rohypnol out but I told him it could do him some good with Bibi so he kept it. It worked like a treat on Kate. She went out like a light. The only problem was, she let Hannah drink some of the champagne as well, and when Hannah went out she fell over backwards with her eyes wide open. I thought she was dead . . .’
‘He’s very unclear what he was intending to do to Kate. He talks about teaching her a lesson but whether the intention was always to rape her then kill her, he can’t or won’t say.’
‘I wasn’t going to hurt Kate, just give her something to think about. She’d been pissing me off with the crap thing, and it had been really bugging me. Still, I had to have a rethink when Hannah keeled over. That was pretty frightening, you know. I mean, killing a kid, even if it was an accident, is heavy stuff. I thought about leaving them both there while I scarpered to France with Marie but I was afraid Tony might find them before I met up with her, and I’d already told him I was going to Poole for the weekend. I guess it was the fact that Kate was so small that made me think about taking them both with me . . .’
‘He took them on board under everyone’s noses,’ said Galbraith. ‘Just motored Crazy Daze into one of the visitors’ pontoons near the yacht club and carried Kate on in the canvas holdall that takes his dinghy when it’s not in use. They’re substantial items, apparently, big enough to take eight feet of collapsed rubber, plus the seat and the floor boarding, and he says he had no trouble folding Kate into it. He took Hannah on board in his rucksack and carried the buggy quite openly under his arm.’
‘People never question anything if you’re up front about what you’re doing. I guess it has something to do with the British psyche, and the fact we never interfere unless we absolutely have to. But you kind of want them to sometimes. It’s almost as if you’re being forced to do things you don’t really want to do. I kept saying to myself, ask me what’s in the bag, you bastards, ask me why I’m carrying a baby’s buggy under my arm. But no one did, of course . . .’
‘Then he left for Poole,’ said Galbraith. ‘The time was getting on for midday by then and he says he hadn’t thought what he was going to do beyond smuggling Kate and Hannah aboard. He talks about being stressed out, and being unable to think properly’ – he raised his eyes to Sumner – ‘rather like your description of yourself earlier, and it does seem as if he opted to do nothing, left them imprisoned and unconscious inside the bags on the principle of out of sight out of mind.’
‘I guess I’d realized all along I was going to have to dump them over the side but I kept putting it off. I’d sailed out into the Channel to get some space around me, and it was around seven o’clock when I hauled them up on deck to get it over with. I couldn’t do it, though. I could hear whimpering coming out of the rucksack so I knew Hannah was still alive. I felt good about that. I never wanted to kill either of them . . .’
‘He claims Kate started to come round at about 7.30 which is when he released her, and let her sit beside him in the cockpit. He also claims it was her idea to take her clothes off. However, in view of the fact that her wedding ring is also missing, we think the truth is he decided to strip her body of anything that could identify her before he threw her overboard.’
‘I know she was frightened, and I know she probably did it to try to get into my good books, but I never asked her to strip and I never forced her to have sex with me. I’d already made up my mind to take them back. I wouldn’t have altered course otherwise, and she’d never have ended up in Egmont Bight. I gave her something to eat because she said she was hungry. Why would I do that if I was going to kill her . . .?’
‘I know this is distressing for you, William, but we believe he spent hours fantasizing about what he was going to do with her before he killed her, and when he’d stripped her he went ahead and played out those fantasies. However, we don’t know how conscious Kate was or how much she knew about what was going on. One of the difficulties we have is that Crazy Daze shows no recent signs of Kate and Hannah being on board. What we think happened is that he kept Kate naked on the deck for about five hours between 7.30 and half-past midnight which would explain the evidence of hypothermia and the lack of forensic evidence connecting her with the interior. We’re still looking for evidence on the topsides but I’m afraid he had hours during the trip back to Lymington on Sunday to scrub the deck clean with buckets of salt water.’
‘Okay, I was way out of line at the beginning, I’ll admit that. Things got out of control for a while – I mean I panicked like hell when I thought Hannah was dead – but by the time it was dark I’d got it all worked out. I told Kate that if she promised to keep her mouth shut I’d take her to Poole and let her and Hannah off there. Otherwise, I’d say she came on board willingly, and as Tony Bridges knew she had the hots for me, no one would believe her word against mine, particularly not William . . .’
‘He says he promised to take Kate to Poole, and she may have believed him, but we don’t think he had any intention of doing it. He’s a good sailor, yet he steered a course that brought him back to land to the west of St Alban’s Head when he should have been well to the east. He’s arguing that he lost track of his position because Kate kept distracting him, but it’s too much of a coincidence that he put her into the sea where he did, bearing in mind he was planning to walk there the next morning.’
‘She should have trusted me. I told her I wasn’t going to hurt her. I didn’t hurt Hannah, did I . . .?’
‘He says she lunged at him and tried to push him overboard, and in the process went over herself.’
‘I could hear her shouting and thrashing about in the water, so I brought the helm round to try and locate her. But it was so dark I couldn’t see a damn thing. I kept calling to her but it all went silent very quickly and in the end I had to give up. I don’t think she could swim very well . . .’
‘He’s claiming he made every attempt to find her but thinks she must have drowned within a few minutes. He refers to it as a terrible accident.’
‘Of course it was a coincidence we were off Chapman’s Pool. It was pitch black, for Christ’s sake, and there’s no lighthouse at St Alban’s Head. Have you any idea what it’s like sailing at night when there’s nothing to tell you where you are? I hadn’t been concentrating, hadn’t taken the tidal drift and wind changes into account. I was pretty sure I’d sailed too far west which is why I altered course to sail due east, but it wasn’t until I came within sight of the Anvil Point lighthouse that
I had any idea I was within striking distance of Poole. Look, don’t you think I’d have killed Hannah as well if I’d meant to kill Kate . . .?’
When Galbraith fell silent, Sumner finally dragged his gaze away from the ceiling. ‘Is that what he’ll say in court? That she died by accident?’
‘Probably.’
‘Will he win?’
‘Not if you stand up for her.’
‘Maybe he’s telling the truth,’ said the other man listlessly.
Galbraith smiled slightly. Kindness was a mug’s game. ‘Don’t ever say that in my presence again, William,’ he said with a rasp in his throat. ‘Because, so help me God, I’ll beat the fucking daylights out of you if you do. I saw your wife, remember. I wept for her before you even knew she was dead.’
Sumner blinked in alarm.
Galbraith straightened. ‘The bastard drugged her, raped her – several times we think – broke her fingers because she attempted to release her daughter from the rucksack, then put his hands round her neck and throttled her. But she wouldn’t die. So he tied her to a spare outboard his friend had given him and set her adrift in a partially inflated dinghy.’ He thumped his fist into his palm. ‘Not to give her a chance of life, William, but to make sure she died slowly and in fear, tormenting herself about what he was going to do to Hannah and regretting that she’d ever dared to take revenge on him.’
The Breaker Page 33