The Breaker (39 page)

"When was this?"

"End of February."

"What happened then?"

"Nothing. I told her to fuck off. Then Steve started dropping hints that he was balling her. I think she must have told him I'd made a pass, so he thought he'd swagger a bit just to rub it in. He said everyone had had her except me."

Carpenter pulled forward a piece of paper and flicked the plunger on his pen. "Give me a list," he said. "Everyone you know who had anything to do with her."

"Steve Harding."

"Go on."

"I don't know of anyone else."

Carpenter laid his pen on the table again and stared at the young man. "That's not good enough, Tony. You describe her as a tart, then offer me one name. That gives me very little confidence in your assessment of Kate's character. Assuming you're telling the truth, we know of only three men who had a relationship with her-her husband, Steven Harding, and one other from her past." His eyes bored into Bridges'. "By any standards that's a modest number for a thirty-year-old woman. Or would you call any woman who's had three lovers a tart? Your girlfriend, for example? How many partners has Bibi had?"

"Leave Bibi out of this," said Bridges angrily. "She's got nothing to do with it."

Galbraith leaned forward. "She gave you your alibi for Saturday night," he reminded him. "That means she has a great deal to do with it." He folded his hands in front of his mouth and studied Bridges intently. "Did she know you fancied Kate Sumner?"

The solicitor laid a hand on the young man's arm. "You don't need to answer that."

"Well, I'm going to," he said, shaking himself free. "I'm fed up with them trying to drag Bibi into it." He addressed Galbraith. "I didn't fucking well fancy Kate. I loathed the stupid bitch. I just thought she was easy, that's all, so I tried it on once. Listen, she was a cockteaser. It gave her a buzz to get blokes excited."

"That's not what I asked you, Tony. I asked you if Bibi knew you fancied Kate."

"No," he muttered.

Galbraith nodded. "But she knew about
Steve
and Kate?"

"Yes."

"Who told her? You or Steve?"

Bridges slumped angrily in his chair. "Steve mostly. She got really worked up when Kate started smearing Hannah's crap all over his car, so he told her what had been going on."

Galbraith leaned back, letting his hands drop to the tabletop. "Women don't give a toss about a car unless the guy who drives it matters to her. Are you sure your girlfriend isn't playing away from home?"

Bridges erupted out of his seat in a fury of movement, "You are
so
fucking patronizing. You think you know it all, don't you? She got mad because there was shit all over the handle when she tried to open the door. That's what got her worked up. Not because she cares about Steve or the car, but because her hand was covered in crap. Are you so stupid you can't work that out for yourselves?"

"But doesn't that prove my point?" said Galbraith unemotionally. "If she was driving Steve's car, she must have had more than a nodding acquaintance with him."

"
I
was driving it," said Bridges, ignoring the solicitor's restraining hand to lean across the table and thrust his face into the inspector's. "I checked the driver's-side handle and it was clean, so I released the locks. What never occurred to me was that the bloody bitch might have changed tactics. This time the crap was on the passenger's side. Now, get this, dickhead. It was still soft when Bibi touched it, so that meant Kate must have put it there minutes before. It also meant that Bibi's hand stank to high bloody heaven. Can you follow all that, or do you want me to repeat it?"

"No," said Galbraith mildly. "The tape recorder's pretty reliable. I think we got it." He nodded toward the chair on the other side of the table. "Sit down, Tony." He waited while Bridges resumed his seat. "Did you see Kate walk away?"

"No."

"You should have done. You said the feces were still soft."

Tony pulled both hands across his peroxided hair and bent forward over the table. "There were plenty of places she could have been hiding. She was probably watching us."

"Did you ever wonder if you were the target and not Steve? You describe her as sick and say she spat at you."

"No."

"She must have known Steve allows you to drive his car."

"Once in a while. Not often."

Galbraith flipped another page of his notebook. "You told me this afternoon that you and Steve had an arrangement regarding your grandfather's garage and
Crazy Daze
. A straight swap, you called it."

"Yes."

"You said you took Bibi there two weeks ago."

"What of it?"

"Bibi doesn't agree with you. I phoned her at her parents' house two hours ago, and she said she's never been on
Crazy Daze
."

"She's forgotten," he said dismissively. "She was drunk as a skunk that night. What does it matter anyway?"

"Let's just say we're interested in discrepancies."

The young man shrugged. "I don't see what difference it makes. It's got nothing to do with anything."

"We like to be accurate." Galbraith consulted his notebook. "According to her, the reason she's never been on Crazy Daze is because Steve banned you from using it the week before you met her.
'Tony trashed the boat when he was drunk,'
" he read, "
'and Steve blew his stack. He said Tony could go on using the car but Crazy Daze was off limits.'
" He looked up. "Why did you lie about taking Bibi on board?"

"To wipe the stupid smirk off your face, I expect. It pisses me off the way you bastards behave. You're all fascists." He hunched forward, eyes burning angrily. "I haven't forgotten you were planning to drag me through the streets in the buff even if you have."

"What's that got to do with Bibi?"

"You wanted an answer so I gave you one."

"How about this for an answer instead? You knew Bibi had been on board with Steve, so you decided to offer an explanation for why her fingerprints were there. You knew we'd find yours because you went out to
Crazy Daze
on Monday, and you thought you'd be safe pretending you and Bibi had been there together. But the only place we lifted your prints in the cabin, Tony, was on the forward hatch, while Bibi's were all over the headboard behind the bed. She likes being on top, presumably?"

He dropped his head in misery. "Fuck off."

"It must drive you up the wall the way Steve keeps stealing your girlfriends."
 

*24*

Maggie lowered her aching arms and tapped pointedly on her watch when Nick shouldered his way through the scullery door, carrying an aluminum stepladder. She was perched precariously on a garden chair on top of the kitchen table, her hair sticky with cobwebs, her rolled-up sleeves saturated with water. "What sort of time do you call this?" she demanded. "It's a quarter to ten, and I have to be up at five o'clock tomorrow morning to see to the horses."

"Good God, woman!" he declared plaintively. "A night without sleep won't kill you. Live dangerously and see how you enjoy it."

"I expected you hours ago."

"Then don't marry a policeman," he said, setting up his ladder under the uncleaned part of the ceiling.

"Chance'd be a fine thing."

He grinned up at her. "You mean you'd contemplate it?"

"Absolutely not," she said, as if offering him a challenge to even try to chat her up. "All I meant was that no policeman has ever asked me."

"He wouldn't dare." He opened the cupboard under the sink and hunkered down to inspect it for cleaning implements and buckets. She was above him-like the rare occasions when she met him on horseback-and she felt an awful temptation to take advantage of the fact by dripping water onto the back of his neck. "Don't even think about it," he said, without looking up, "or I'll leave you to do the whole bloody lot on your own."

She chose to ignore him, preferring dignity to humiliation. "How did you get on?" she asked, stepping down from the chair to dunk her sponge in the bucket on the table.

"Rather well."

"I thought you must have done. Your tail's wagging." She climbed back onto the chair. "What did Steve say?"

"You mean apart from agreeing with everything in your statement?"

"Yes."

"He told me what he was doing at Chapman's Pool on Sunday." He looked up at her. "He's a complete idiot, but I don't think he's a rapist or a murderer."

"So you were wrong about him?"

"Probably."

"Good. It's bad for your character to have everything your own way. What about pedophile?"

"It depends on your definition of pedophilia." He swung forward a chair and straddled it, resting his elbows along the back, content to watch her work. "He's besotted with a fifteen-year-old girl who's so unhappy at home she keeps threatening to kill herself. She's an absolute stunner apparently, nearly six feet tall, looks twenty-five, ought to be a supermodel, and turns heads wherever she goes. Her parents are separated and fight like cat and dog-her mother's jealous of her-her father has a string of bimbos-she's four months pregnant by Steve-refuses to have an abortion-weeps all over his manly bosom every time she sees him"-he lifted a sardonic eyebrow-"which is probably why he finds her attractive-and is so desperate to have the baby and so desperate to be loved that she's twice tried to slit her wrists. Steve's solution to all this was to whisk her off to France in
Crazy Daze
, where they could live"-another sardonic lift of an eyebrow-"love's young dream without her parents having any idea where she'd gone or who she'd gone with."

Maggie chuckled. "I told you he was a good Samaritan."

"Bluebeard, more like. She's fifteen."

"And looks twenty-five."

"If you believe Steve."

"Don't you?"

"Put it this way," he said dispassionately, "I wouldn't let him within half a mile of a daughter of mine. He's oversexed, deeply enamored with himself, and has the morals of an alleycat."

"A bit like the weasel I married, in other words?" she asked dryly.

"No question about it." He grinned up at her. "But then I'm prejudiced, of course."

There was a glint of amusement in her eyes. "So what happened? He got sidetracked by Paul and Danny and the whole thing was deep-sixed?"

He nodded. "He realized, when he had to identify himself, that there was no point going on with it and signaled to his girlfriend to abandon it. Since then, he's had one tearful conversation with her over his mobile on his way back to Lymington on Sunday night, and hasn't been able to talk to her since because he's either been under arrest or separated from his phone. The rule is, she always calls him, and as he hasn't heard from her he's terrified she's killed herself."

"Is it true?"

"No. One of the messages on his mobile was from her."

"Still ... poor boy. You've locked him up again, haven't you? He must be worried sick. Couldn't you have let him talk to her?"

He wondered at the vagaries of human nature. He would have bet on her sympathies being with the girl. "Not allowed."

"Oh, come on," she said crossly. "That's just cruel."

"No. Common sense. Personally, I wouldn't trust him farther than I could throw him. He's committed several crimes, don't forget. Assault on you, sex with an underage girl, conspiracy to abduct, not to mention gross indecency and committing lewd acts in public..."

"Oh my God! You haven't charged him with having an erection, have you?"

"Not yet."

"You
are
cruel," she said in disgust. "It was obviously his girlfriend he was looking at through the binoculars. On that basis you should have arrested Martin every time he put his hand on my arse."

"I couldn't," he said seriously. "You never objected, so it didn't constitute an assault."

There was a twinkle in her eye. "What happened to indecency?"

"I never caught him with his trousers down," he said with regret. "I did try, but he was too bloody quick every time."

"Are you winding me up?"

"No," he said. "I'm courting you."
 

Half asleep, Sandy Griffiths squinted at the luminous hands on her clock through gritty eyes, saw that it was three o'clock, and tried to remember if William had gone out earlier. Yet again, something had disturbed her intermittent dozing. She thought it was the front door closing, although she couldn't be sure if the sound had been real or if she'd dreamed it. She listened for footfalls on the stairs but, hearing only silence, stumbled out of bed and dragged on her dressing gown. Babies she thought she could probably cope with-a husband,
never
...

She switched on the landing lamp and pushed open Hannah's bedroom door. A wedge of light cut across the crib, and her alarm subsided immediately. The child sat in the concentrated immobility that seemed to be her nature, thumb in mouth, staring wide-eyed with her curiously intense gaze. If she recognized Griffiths, she didn't show it. Instead she looked through her as if her mind saw behind and beyond the woman images that had no basis in reality, and Griffiths realized she was fast asleep. It explained the crib and the locks on all the doors. They were there to protect a sleepwalker, she understood belatedly, not to deprive a conscious child of adventure.