The Breaker

Dorset: county of southwestern England, bordered to the south by the seas of the English Channel, to the east by the county of Hampshire, and to the west by the county of Devon. Some 100 miles southwest of London, Dorset's total area, mainly rural, is approximately 1,000 square miles. Urban development along the coastline is centered on the seaside resorts of Bournemouth and Poole, and farther to the west on Weymouth and Portland. West Dorset (main town-Dorchester) has been immortalized as Wessex in the writings of Thomas Hardy and was the scene of the Tolpuddle martyrs' historic stand for organized labor in the nineteenth century. The Isle of Purbeck, a small peninsula to the southwest of Poole (main town-Swanage) is an isolated area of great beauty, home to Purbeck marble and the magnificent medieval ruins of Corfe Castle.

While Scotland Yard still maintains links between British law-enforcement agencies and Interpol, its responsibilities are now limited to metropolitan London. In the forty-six counties of England, the responsibility for serious cases is borne by county constabulary headquarters, and it is these areas of excellence which take the lead in provincial murders. It should always be remembered that nowhere in England is very far from anywhere else-for example, Lymington, in Hampshire, is only thirty-odd miles from Poole, in Dorset-however, local knowledge is always invaluable, and in this story I have given a starring role to Police Constable Ingram, a uniformed constable in a tiny police station on the Isle of Purbeck, who may-
or may not?
- know what he's talking about. Dorset Constabulary HQ (familiarly known as Winfrith) is located equidistantly between Poole and Dorchester, and is home to my fictional heavyweights, Detective Superintendent Carpenter and Detective Inspector Galbraith. 

-
Minette Walters

Sunday, 10 August 1997-1:45 A.M.

She drifted with the waves, falling off their rolling backs and waking to renewed agony every time salt water seared down her throat and into her stomach. During intermittent periods of lucidity when she revisited, always with astonishment, what had happened to her, it was the deliberate breaking of her fingers that remained indelibly printed on her memory, and not the brutality of her rape.

Sunday, 10 August 1997-5:00 A.M.

The child sat cross-legged on the floor like a miniature statue of Buddha, the gray dawn light leeching her flesh of color. He had no feelings for her, not even common humanity, but he couldn't bring himself to touch her. She watched him as solemnly as he watched her, and he was enthralled by her immobility. He could break her neck as easily as a chicken's, but he fancied he saw an ancient wisdom in her concentrated gaze, and the idea frightened him. Did she know what he'd done?
 

Prologue

The most widely held view is that rape is an exercise in male domination, a pathological assertion of power, usually performed out of anger against the entire sex or frustration with a specific individual. By forcing a woman to accept penetration, the man is demonstrating not only his superior strength but his right to sow his seed wherever and whenever he chooses. This has elevated the rapist to a creature of legendary proportions-demoniacal, dangerous, predatory-and the fact that few rapists merit such labels is secondary to the fear the legend inspires.

In a high percentage of cases (including domestic, date and gang rape) the rapist is an inadequate individual who seeks to bolster poor self-image by attacking someone he perceives to be weaker than himself. He is a man of low intelligence, few social skills, and with a profound sense of his own inferiority in his dealings with the rest of society. A deepseated fear of women is more common to the rapist than a feeling of superiority, and this may well lie in early failure to make successful relationships.

Pornography becomes a means to an end for such a person because masturbation is as necessary to him as the regular fix is to a heroin addict. Without orgasm the sex-fixator experiences nothing. However, his obsessive nature, coupled with his lack of achievement, will make him an unattractive mate to the sort of woman his inferiority complex demands, namely a woman who attracts successful men. If he has a relationship at all, his partner will be someone who has been used and abused by other men, which only exacerbates his feelings of inadequacy and inferiority.

It could be argued that the rapist, a man of limited intelligence, limited sensation, and limited ability to function, is more to be pitied than feared, because his danger lies in the easy ascendancy society has given him over the so-called weaker sex. Every time judges and newspapers demonize and mythologize the rapist as a dangerous predator, they merely reinforce the idea that the penis is a symbol of power... -Helen Barry,
The Mind of a Rapist

*1*

The woman lay on her back on the pebble foreshore at the foot of Houns-tout Cliff, staring at the cloudless sky above, her pale blond hair drying into a frizz of tight curls in the hot sun. A smear of sand across her abdomen gave the impression of wispy clothing, but the brown circles of her nipples and the hair sprouting at her crotch told anyone who cared to look that she was naked. One arm curved languidly around her head while the other rested palm-up on the sea-washed pebbles, the fingers curling in the tiny wavelets that bubbled over them as the tide rose; her legs, opened shamelessly in relaxation, seemed to invite the sun's warmth to penetrate directly into her body.

Above her loomed the grim shale escarpment of Houns-tout Cliff, irregularly striped with the hardy vegetation that clung to its ledges. So often shrouded in mist and rain during the autumn and winter, it looked benign in the brilliant summer sunlight. A mile away to the west, on the Dorset Coast Path that hugged the clifftops to Weymouth, a party of hikers approached at a leisurely pace, pausing every now and then to watch cormorants and shags plummet into the sea like tiny guided missiles. To the east, on the path to Swanage, a single male walker passed the Norman chapel on St. Alban's Head on his way to the rock-girt crucible of Chapman's Pool, whose clear blue waters made an attractive anchorage when the wind was light and offshore. Because of the steep hills that surround it, pedestrian visitors to its beaches were rare, but at lunchtime on a fine weekend upwards of ten boats rode at anchor there, bobbing in staggered formation as the gentle swells passed under each in turn.

A single boat, a thirty-two-foot Princess, had already nosed in through the entrance channel, and the rattle of its anchor chain over its idling engines carried clearly on the air. Not far behind, the bow of a Fairline Squadron carved through the race off St. Alban's Head, giving the yachts that wallowed lazily in the light winds a wide berth in its progress toward the bay. It was a quarter past ten on one of the hottest Sundays of the year, but out of sight around Egmont Point the naked sunbather appeared oblivious to both the shimmering heat and the increasing likelihood of company.

The Spender brothers, Paul and Daniel, had spotted the nudist as they rounded the Point with their fishing rods, and they were now perched precariously on an unstable ledge some hundred feet above her and to her right. They took turns looking at her through their father's expensive binoculars, which they had smuggled out of the rented holiday cottage in a bundle of T-shirts, rods, and tackle. It was the middle weekend of their two weeks' holiday, and as far as the elder brother was concerned, fishing had only ever been a pretext. This remote part of the Isle of Purbeck held little attraction for an awakening adolescent, having few inhabitants, fewer distractions, and no sandy beaches. His intention had always been to spy on bikini-clad women draped over the expensive motor cruisers in Chapman's Pool.

"Mum said we weren't to climb the cliffs because they're dangerous," whispered Danny, the virtuous ten-year-old, less interested than his brother in the sight of bare flesh.

"Shut up."

"She'd kill us if she knew we were looking at a nudie."

"You're just scared because you've never seen one before."

"Neither've you," muttered the younger boy indignantly. "Anyway, she's a dirty person. I bet loads of people can see her."

Paul, the elder by two years, treated this remark with the scorn it deserved-they hadn't passed a soul on their way around Chapman's Pool. Instead, he concentrated on the wonderfully accessible body below. He couldn't see much of the woman's face because she was lying with her feet pointing toward them, but the magnification of the lenses was so powerful that he could see every other detail of her. He was too ignorant of the naked female form to question the bruises that blotched her skin, but he knew afterward that he wouldn't have questioned them anyway, even if he'd known what they meant. He had fantasized about something like this happening-discovering a quiescent, unmoving woman who allowed him to explore her at his leisure, if only through binoculars. He found the soft flow of her breasts unbearably erotic and dwelled at length on her nipples, wondering what it would be like to touch them and what would happen if he did. Lovingly he traversed the length of her midriff, pausing on the dimple of her belly button, before returning to what interested him most, her opened legs and what lay between them. He crawled forward on his elbows, writhing his body.

"What are you doing?" demanded Danny suspiciously, crawling up beside him. "Are you being dirty?"

" 'Course not." He gave the boy a savage thump on the arm. "That's all you ever think about, isn't it? Being dirty. You'd better watch it, penis-brain, or I'll tell Dad on you."

In the inevitable fight that followed-a grunting, red-faced brawl of hooked arms and kicking feet-the Zeiss binoculars slipped from the elder brother's grasp and clattered down the slope, dislodging an avalanche of shale in the process. The boys, united in terror of what their father was going to say, abandoned the fight to wriggle back from the brink and stare in dismay after the binoculars.

"It's your fault if they're broken," hissed the ten-year-old. "You're the one who dropped them."

But for once his brother didn't rise to the bait. He was more interested in the body's continued immobility. With an awful sense of foreboding it dawned on him that he'd been masturbating over a dead woman.
 

*2*

The clear waters of Chapman's Pool heaved in an undulating roll to break in rippling foam around the pebble shore of the bay. By now three boats were anchored there, two flying the red ensign-
Lady Rose
, the Princess, and
Gregory's Girl
, the Fairline Squadron; the third,
Mirage
, a French Beneteau, flew the tricolor. Only
Gregory's Girl
showed any sign of real activity, with a man and a woman struggling to release a dinghy whose winching wires had become jammed in the ratchet mechanism of the davits. On
Lady Rose
, a scantily clad couple lounged on the flying bridge, bodies glistening with oil, eyes closed against the sun, while on
Mirage
, a teenage girl held a video camera to her eye and panned idly up the steep grassy slope of West Hill, searching for anything worth filming.

No one noticed the Spender brothers' mad dash around the bay, although the French girl did zoom in on the lone male walker as he descended the hillside toward them. Seeing only with the tunnel vision of the camera, she was oblivious to anything but the handsome young man in her sight, and her smitten heart gave a tiny leap of excitement at the thought of another chance encounter with the beautiful Englishman. She had met him two days before at the Berthon Marina in Lymington, when with a gleaming smile he'd told her the computer code for the lavatories, and she couldn't believe her good luck that he was here ... today ... in this shit-hole of boring isolation which her parents described as one of England's gems.

To her starved imagination he looked like a longer-haired version of Jean-Claude Van Damme in his sleeveless T-shirt and bottom-hugging shorts-tanned, muscled, sleek dark hair swept back from his face, smiling brown eyes, grittily stubbled jaw-and in the narrative tale of her own life, romanticized, embellished, unbelievably innocent, she pictured herself swooning in his strong arms and capturing his heart. Through the intimacy of magnification she watched his muscles ripple as he lowered his rucksack to the ground, only for the lens to fill abruptly with the frantic movements of the Spender brothers. With an audible groan, she switched off the camera and stared in disbelief at the prancing children, who, from a distance, appeared to be showing enthusiastic delight.

Surely he was too young to be anybody's father?