The Breaker (2 page)

But ... A Gallic shrug...

Who knew with the English?

Behind the questing mongrel which zigzagged energetically in pursuit of a scent, the horse picked its way carefully down the track that led from Hill Bottom to the Pool. Tarmac showed in places where the track had once been a road, and one or two sketchy foundations among the overgrown vegetation beside it spoke of buildings long abandoned and demolished. Maggie Jenner had lived in this area most of her life but had never known why the handful of inhabitants in this corner of the Isle of Purbeck had gone away and left their dwellings to the ravages of time. Someone had told her once that "chapman" was an archaic word for merchant or peddler, but what anyone could have traded in this remote place she couldn't imagine. Perhaps, more simply, a peddler had drowned in the bay and bequeathed his death to posterity. Every time she took this path she reminded herself to find out, but every time she made her way home again she forgot.

The cultivated gardens that had once bloomed here had left a lingering legacy of roses, hollyhocks, and hydrangeas amid the weeds and grasses, and she thought how pleasant it would be to have a house in this colorful wilderness, facing southwest toward the channel with only her dog and her horses for company. Because of the threat of the ever-sliding cliffs, access to Chapman's Pool was denied to motorized traffic by padlocked gates at Hill Bottom and Kingston, and the attraction of so much stillness was a powerful one. But then isolation and its attendant solitude was becoming something of an obsession with her, and occasionally it worried her.

Even as the thought was in her head, she heard the sound of an approaching vehicle, grinding in first gear over the bumps and hollows behind her, and gave a surprised whistle to bring Bertie to heel behind Sir Jasper. She turned in the saddle, assuming it was a tractor, and frowned at the approaching police Range Rover. It slowed as it drew level with her, and she recognized Nick Ingram at the wheel before, with a brief smile of acknowledgment, he drove on and left her to follow in his dusty wake.

The emergency services had rushed into action following a nine-nine-nine call to the police from a mobile telephone. It was timed at 10:43 a.m. The caller gave his name as Steven Harding and explained that he had come across two boys who claimed a body was lying on the beach at Egmont Bight. The details were confused because the boys omitted to mention that the woman was naked, and their obvious distress and garbled speech led Harding to give the impression that "the lady on the beach" was their mother and had fallen from the cliff while using a pair of binoculars. As a result the police and coastguards acted on the presumption that she was still alive.

Because of the difficulty of retrieving a badly injured person from the foreshore, the coastguards dispatched a Search and Rescue helicopter from Portland to winch her off. Meanwhile, PC Nick Ingram, diverted from a burglary investigation, approached via the track that skirted the inappropriately named West Hill on the eastern side of Chapman's Pool. He had had to use bolt cutters to slice through the chain on the gate at Hill Bottom, and as he abandoned his Range Rover on the hard standing beside the fishermen's boat sheds, he was hoping fervently that rubberneckers wouldn't grab the opportunity to follow him. He was in no mood to marshal petulant sightseers.

The only access from the boat sheds to the beach where the woman lay was by the same route the boys had taken-on foot around the bay, followed by a scramble over the rocks at Egmont Point. To a man in uniform, it was a hot and sweaty business, and Nick Ingram, who stood over six feet four inches and weighed upward of 240 pounds, was drenched by the time he reached the body. He bent forward, hands on knees, to recover his breath, listening to the deafening sound of the approaching SAR helicopter and feeling its wind on his damp shirt. He thought it a hideous intrusion into what was obviously a place of death. Despite the heat of the sun, the woman's skin was cold to the touch, and her widely staring eyes had begun to film. He was struck by how tiny she seemed, lying alone at the bottom of the cliff, and how sad her miniature hand looked waving in the spume.

Her nudity surprised him, the more so when it required only the briefest of glances about the beach to reveal a complete absence of towels, clothes, footwear, or possessions. He noticed bruising on her arms, neck, and chest, but it was more consistent with being tumbled over rocks on an incoming tide, he thought, than with a dive off a clifftop. He stooped again over the body, looking for anything that would indicate how it had got there, then retreated rapidly as the descending stretcher spiraled dangerously close to his head.

The noise of the helicopter and the amplified voice of the winch operator calling instructions to the man below had attracted sightseers. The party of hikers gathered on the clifftop to watch the excitement, while the yachtsmen in Chapman's Pool motored out of the bay in their dinghies to do the same. A spirit of revelry was abroad because everyone assumed the rescue wouldn't have happened unless the woman was still alive, and a small cheer went up as the stretcher rose in the air. Most thought she'd fallen from the cliff; a few thought she might have floated out of Chapman's Pool on an inflatable airbed and got into difficulties. No one guessed she'd been murdered.

Except, perhaps, Nick Ingram, who transferred the tiny, stiffening body to the stretcher and felt a dreadful anger burn inside him because Death had stolen a pretty woman's dignity. As always, the victory belonged to the thief and not to the victim.

As requested by the nine-nine-nine operator, Steven Harding shepherded the boys down the hill to the police car, which was parked beside the boat sheds, where they waited with varying degrees of patience until its occupant returned. The brothers, who had sunk into an exhausted silence after their mad dash around Chapman's Pool, wanted to be gone, but they were intimidated by their companion, a twenty-four-year-old actor, who took his responsibilities
in loco parentis
seriously.

He kept a watchful eye on his uncommunicative charges (too shocked to speak, he thought) while trying to cheer them up with a running commentary of what he could see of the rescue. He peppered his conversation with expressions like:
"You're a couple of heroes..." "Your mum's going to be really proud of you..." "She's a lucky lady to have two such sensible sons..."
But it wasn't until the helicopter flew toward Poole and he turned to them with a smile of encouragement, saying: "There you are, you can stop worrying now. Mum's in safe hands," that they realized his mistake. It hadn't occurred to either of them that what appeared to be general remarks about their own mother applied specifically to "the lady on the beach."

"She's not our mum," said Paul, dully.

"Our mum's going to be
really
angry," supplied Danny in his piping treble, emboldened by his brother's willingness to abandon the prolonged silence. "She said if we were late for lunch she'd make us eat bread and water for a week." (He was an inventive child.) "She's going to be even angrier when I tell her it's because Paul wanted to look at a nudie."

"Shut up," said his brother.

"
And
he made me climb the cliff so he could get a better look. Dad's going to kill him for ruining the binoculars."

"Shut
up
."

"Yeah, well, it's all your fault. You shouldn't have dropped them. Penis-brain!" Danny added snidely, in the safe knowledge that their companion would protect him.

Harding watched tears of humiliation gather in the older boy's eyes. It didn't take much reading of the references to "nudie," "better look," "binoculars," and "penis-brain" to come up with a close approximation of the facts. "I hope she was worth it," he said matter-of-factly. "The first naked woman I ever saw was so old and ugly, it was three years before I wanted to look at another one. She lived in the house next to us, and she was as fat and wrinkled as an elephant."

"What was the next one like?" asked Danny with the sequential logic of a ten-year-old.

Harding exchanged a glance with the elder brother. "She had nice tits," he told Paul with a wink.

"So did this one," said Danny obligingly.

"Except she was dead," said his brother.

"She probably wasn't, you know. It's not always easy to tell when someone's dead."

"She was," said Paul despondently. "Me and Danny went down to get the binoculars back." He unraveled his bundled T-shirt to reveal the badly scratched casing of a pair of Zeiss binoculars. "I-well, I checked to make sure. I think she drowned and got left there by the tide." He fell into an unhappy silence again.

"He was going to give her mouth-to-mouth," said Danny, "but her eyes were nasty, so he didn't."

Harding cast another glance in the older brother's direction, this time sympathetic. "The police will need to identify her," he said matter-of-factly, "so they'll probably ask you to describe her." He ruffled Danny's hair. "It might be better not to mention nasty eyes or nice tits when you do it."

Danny pulled away. "I won't."

The man nodded. "Good boy." He took the binoculars from Paul and examined the lenses carefully before pointing them at the Beneteau in Chapman's Pool. "Did you recognize her?" he asked.

"No," said Paul uncomfortably.

"Was she an old lady?"

"No."

"Pretty?"

Paul wriggled his shoulders. "I guess so."

"Not fat then?"

"No. She was very little, and she had blond hair."

Harding brought the yacht into sharp focus. "They're built like tanks, these things," he murmured, traversing the sights across the bay. "Okay, the bodywork's a bit scratched, but there's nothing wrong with the lenses. Your dad won't be that angry."
 

Maggie Jenner would never have become involved if Bertie had responded to her whistle, but like all dogs he was deaf when he wanted to be. She had dismounted when the noise of the helicopter alarmed the horse, and natural curiosity had led her to walk him on down the hill while the rescue was under way. The three of them rounded the boat sheds together, and Bertie, overexcited by all the confusion, made a beeline for Paul Spender's crotch, shoving his nose against the boy's shorts and breathing in with hearty enthusiasm.

Maggie whistled, and was ignored. "Bertie!" she called. "Come here, boy'."

The dog was a huge, fearsome-looking brute, the result of a night on the tiles by an Irish wolfhound bitch, and saliva drooled in great white gobbets from his jaws. With a flick of his hairy head, he splattered spittle across Paul's shorts and the terrified child froze in alarm.

"Bertie!"

"It's all right," said Harding, grabbing the dog by the collar and pulling him off, "he's only being friendly." He rubbed the dog's head. "Aren't you, boy?"

Unconvinced, the brothers retreated rapidly to the other side of the police car.

"They've had a tough morning," explained Harding, clicking his tongue encouragingly and walking Bertie back to his mistress. "Will he stay put if I let him go?"

"Not in this mood," she said, pulling a lead from her back trouser pocket and clipping one end into the collar before attaching the other end to the nearest stirrup. "My brother's two boys adore him, and he doesn't understand that the rest of the world doesn't view him in quite the same way." She smiled. "You must have dogs yourself, either that or you're very brave. Most people run a mile."

"I grew up on a farm," he said, stroking Sir Jasper's nose and studying her with frank admiration.

She was a good ten years older than he was, tall and slim with shoulder-length dark hair and deep brown eyes that narrowed suspiciously under his assessing gaze. She knew exactly what type she was dealing with when he looked pointedly at her left hand for the wedding ring that wasn't there. "Well, thanks for your help," she said rather brusquely. "I can manage on my own now."

He stood back immediately. "Good luck then," he said. "It was nice meeting you."

She was all too aware that her distrust of men had now reached pathological proportions, and wondered guiltily if she'd jumped to the wrong conclusion. "I hope your boys weren't too frightened," she said rather more warmly.

He gave an easy laugh. "They're not mine," he told her. "I'm just looking after them till the police get back. They found a dead woman on the beach, so they're pretty shook up, poor kids. You'd be doing them a favor if you persuaded them Bertie's just an overgrown hearth rug. I'm not convinced that adding canophobia to necrophobia all in one morning is good psychology."

She looked undecidedly toward the police car. The boys did look frightened, she thought, and she didn't particularly want the responsibility of inspiring a lifelong fear of dogs in them.

"Why don't we invite them over," he suggested, sensing her hesitation, "and let them pat him while he's under control? It'll only take a minute or two."

"All right," she agreed halfheartedly, "if you think it would help." But it was against her better judgment. She had the feeling that once again she was being drawn into something she wouldn't be able to control.
 

It was after midday by the time PC Ingram returned to his car to find Maggie Jenner, Steven Harding, and the Spender brothers waiting beside it. Sir Jasper and Bertie stood at a distance, secure in the shade of a tree, and the aesthete in Nick Ingram could only admire the way the woman displayed herself. Sometimes he thought she had no idea how attractive she was; other times, like now, when she placed herself side by side with natural, equine, and human beauty, demanding comparison, he suspected the pose was deliberate. He mopped his forehead with a large white handkerchief, wondering irritably who the Chippendale was and how both he and Maggie managed to look so cool in the intolerable heat of that Sunday morning. They were looking at him and laughing, and he assumed, in the eternal way of human nature, they were laughing at him.