The Breaker (31 page)

"Like what?"

"Shale falling?"

She shook her head. "All I remember is how quiet it was. That's why he gave me such a fright. One minute I was on my own, the next he was crouching on the ground in front of me like a rabid dog. It was really peculiar. I don't know what he thought he was doing, but there's a lot of scrub vegetation and bushes around there, so I think he must have heard me coming and ducked down to hide."

He nodded. "What about his clothes? Were they wet?"

"No."

"Dirty?"

"You mean before he bled all over them?"

"Yes."

She shook her head again. "I remember thinking that he hadn't shaved, but I don't remember thinking he was dirty."

He stacked the cling film bundle, notes, and phone into a pile and lifted them off the table. "Okay. That's great. I'll take a statement this afternoon." He held her gaze for a moment. "You'll be all right," he told her. "Harding's not going to come back."

"He wouldn't dare," she said, clenching her fists.

"Not if he has any sense," murmured Ingram, moving out of her range.

"Do you have any brandy in your house?"

The switch was so abrupt that he needed time to consider. "Ye-es," he murmured cautiously, fearing another assault if he dared to question why she was asking. He suspected four years of angry frustration had gone into her punch, and he wished she'd chosen Harding for target practice instead of himself.

"Can you lend me some?"

"Sure. I'll drop it in on my way back to Chapman's Pool."

"If you give me a moment to tell Ma where I'm going, I'll come with you. I can walk back."

"Won't she miss you?"

"Not for an hour or so. The painkillers have made her sleepy."
 

Bertie was lying on the doorstep in the sunshine as Ingram drew the Jeep to a halt beside his gate. Maggie had never been inside Nick's little house, but she had always resented the neatness of his garden. It was like a reproach to all his less organized neighbors with its beautifully clipped privet hedges and regimented hydrangeas and roses in serried ranks before the yellow-stone walls of the house. She often wondered where he found the time to weed and hoe when he spent most of his free hours on his boat, and in her more critical moments put it down to the fact that he was boring and compartmentalized his life according to some sensible duty roster.

The dog raised his shaggy head and thumped his tail on the mat before rising leisurely to his feet and yawning. "So this is where he comes," she said. "I've often wondered. How long did it take you to train him, as a matter of interest?"

"Not long. He's a bright dog."

"Why did you bother?"

"Because he's a compulsive digger, and I got fed up with having my garden destroyed," he said prosaically.

"Oh God," she said guiltily. "Sorry. The trouble is he never takes any notice of me."

"Does he need to?"

"He's
my
dog," she said.

Ingram opened the Jeep door. "Have you made that clear to him?"

"Of course I have. He comes home every night, doesn't he?"

He reached into the back for the stack of evidence. "I wasn't questioning ownership," he told her. "I was questioning whether or not Bertie knows he's a dog. As far as he's concerned, he's the boss in your establishment. He gets fed first, sleeps on your sofa, licks out your dishes. I'll bet you even move over in bed in order to make sure he's more comfortable, don't you?"

She colored slightly. "What if I do? I'd rather have him in my bed than the weasel that used to be in it. In any case, he's the closest thing I've got to a hot-water bottle."

Ingram laughed. "Are you coming in or do you want me to bring the brandy out? I guarantee Bertie won't disgrace you. He has beautiful manners since I took him to task for wiping his bottom on my carpet."

Maggie sat in indecision. She had never wanted to go inside, because it would tell her things about him that she didn't want to know. At the very least it would be insufferably clean, she thought, and her bloody dog would shame her by doing exactly what he was told.

"I'm coming in," she said defiantly.
 

(Carpenter took a phone call from a Dartmouth police sergeant just as he was about to leave for Chapman's Pool. He listened to a description of what was on the Frenchman's video then asked: "What does he look like?"

"Five eight, medium build, bit of a paunch, thinning dark hair."

"I thought you said he was a young chap."

"No. Mid-forties, at least. His daughter's fourteen."

Carpenter's frown dug trenches out of his forehead. "Not the bloody Frenchman," he shouted, "the toe-rag on the video!"

"Oh, sorry. Yes, he's young all right. Early twenties, I'd say. Longish dark hair, sleeveless T-shirt, and cycling shorts. Muscles. Tanned. A handsome bugger, in fact. The kid who filmed him said she thought he looked like Jean-Claude Van Damme. Mind you, she's mortified about it now, can't believe she didn't realize what he was up to, considering he's got a rod like a fucking salami. This guy could make a fortune in porno movies."

"All right, all right," said Carpenter testily. "I get the picture. And you say he's wanking into a handkerchief?"

"Looks like it."

"Could it be a child's T-shirt?"

"Maybe. It's difficult to tell. Matter of fact, I'm amazed the French geezer spotted what the bastard was up to. It's pretty discreet. It's only because his knob's so damn big that you can see anything at all. The first time I watched it I thought he was peeling an orange in his lap." There was a belly laugh at the other end of the line. "Still, you know what they say about the French. They're all wankers. So I guess our little geezer's done a spot of it himself and knew what to look for. Am I right or am I right?"

Carpenter, who spent all his holidays in France, cocked a finger and thumb at the telephone and pulled the trigger-bloody racist, he was thinking-but there was no trace of irritation in his voice when he spoke. "You said the young man had a rucksack. Can you describe it for me?"

"Standard camping type. Green. Doesn't look as if it's got much in it."

"Big?"

"Oh, yes. It's a full-size job."

"What did he do with it?"

"Sat on it while he jerked himself off."

"Where? Which part of Chapman's Pool? Eastern side? Western side? Describe the scenery for me."

"Eastern side. The Frenchman showed me on the map. Your wanker was down on the beach below Emmetts Hill, facing out toward the Channel. Green slope behind him."

"What did he do with the rucksack after he sat on it?"

"Can't say. The film ends."

With a request to send the tape on by courier, together with the Frenchman's name, proposed itinerary for the rest of his holiday, and address in France, Carpenter thanked the sergeant and rang off.
 

"Did you make this yourself?" asked Maggie, peering at the
Cutty Sark
in the bottle on the mantelpiece as Ingram came downstairs in uniform, buttoning the sleeves of his shirt.

"Yes."

"I thought you must have done. It's like everything else in this house. So"-she waved her glass in the air-"
well behaved
." She might have said masculine, minimal, or monastic, in an echo of Galbraith's description of Harding's boat, but she didn't want to be rude. It was as she had predicted, insufferably clean, and insufferably boring as well. There was nothing to say this house belonged to an interesting personality, just yards of pallid wall, pallid carpet, pallid curtains, and pallid upholstery, broken occasionally by an ornament on a shelf. It never occurred to her that he was tied to the house through his job, but even if it had, she would still have expected splashes of towering individualism among the uniformity.

He laughed. "Do I get the impression you don't like it?"

"No, I do. It's-er-"

"Twee?" he suggested.

"Yes."

"I made it when I was twelve." He flexed his huge fingers under her nose. "I couldn't do it now." He straightened his tie. "How's the brandy?"

"Very good." She dropped into a chair. "Does exactly what it's supposed to do. Hits the spot."

He took her empty glass. "When did you last drink alcohol?"

"Four years ago."

"Shall I give you a lift home?"

"No." She closed her eyes. "I'm going to sleep."

"I'll look in on your mother on my way back from Chapman's Pool," he promised her, shrugging on his jacket. "Meanwhile, don't encourage your dog to sit on my sofa. It's bad for both your characters."

"What will happen if I do?"

"The same thing that happened to Bertie when he wiped his bottom on my carpet."
 

Despite another day of brilliant sunshine, Chapman's Pool was empty. The southwesterly breeze had created an unpleasant swell, and nothing was more guaranteed to discourage visitors than the likelihood of being sick over their lunch. Carpenter and two detective constables followed Ingram away from the boat sheds toward an area marked out on the rocky shore with pieces of driftwood.

"We won't know until we see the video, of course," said Carpenter, taking his bearings from the description the Dartmouth sergeant had given of where Harding had been sitting, "but it looks about right. He was certainly on this side of the bay." They were standing on a slab of rock at the shoreline, and he touched a small pebble cairn with the toe of his shoe. "And this is where you found the T-shirt?"

Ingram nodded as he squatted down and put his hand in the water that lapped against the base of the rock. "But it was well and truly wedged. A gull had a go at getting it out, and failed, and I was saturated doing my retrieval act."

"Is that important?"

"Harding was dry as a bone when I saw him, so it can't have been the T-shirt he came back for. I think that's been here for days."

"Mmm." Carpenter pondered for a moment. "Does fabric easily get wedged between rocks?"

Ingram shrugged. "Anything can get wedged if a crab takes a fancy to it."

"Mmm," said Carpenter again. "All right. Where's this rucksack?"

"It's only a guess, sir, and a bit of a flaky one at that," said Ingram standing up.

"I'm listening."

"Okay, well, I've been puzzling about the ruddy thing for days. He obviously didn't want it anywhere near a policeman, or he'd have brought it down to the boat sheds on Sunday. By the same token it wasn't on his boat when you searched it-or not in my opinion, anyway-and that suggests to me that it's incriminating in some way and he needed to get rid of it."

"I think you're right," said Carpenter. "Harding wants us to believe he was carrying the black one we found on his boat, but the Dartmouth sergeant described the one on the video as green. So what's he done with it, eh? And what's he trying to hide?"

"It depends on whether the contents were valuable to him. If they
weren't
, then he'll have dropped it in the ocean on his way back to Lymington. If they
were
, he'll have left it somewhere accessible but not too obvious." Ingram shielded his eyes from the sun and pointed toward the slope behind them. "There's been a mini-avalanche up there," he said. "I noticed it because it's just to the left of where Miss Jenner said Harding appeared in front of her. Shale's notoriously unstable-which is why these cliffs are covered in warnings-and it looks to me as though that fall's fairly recent."

Carpenter followed his gaze. "You think the rucksack's under it?"

"Put it this way, sir, I can't think of a quicker or more convenient way of burying something than to send an avalanche of shale over the top of it. It wouldn't be hard to do. Kick out a loose rock, and hey presto, you've got a convenient slide of loose cliff pouring over whatever it is you want to hide. No one's going to notice it. Slides like that happen every day. The Spender brothers set one off when they dropped their father's binoculars, and I can't help feeling that might have given Harding the idea."

"Meaning he did it on Sunday?"

Ingram nodded.

"And came back this morning to make sure it hadn't been disturbed?"

"I suspect it's more likely he intended to retrieve it, sir."

Carpenter brought his ferocious scowl to bear on the constable. "Then why wasn't he carrying it when you saw him?"

"Because the shale's dried in the sunshine and become impacted. I think he was about to go looking for a spade when he ran into Miss Jenner by accident."

"Is that your best suggestion?"

"Yes, sir."

"You're a bit of a suggestion-junky, aren't you, lad?" said Carpenter, his frown deepening. "I've got DI Galbraith chasing over half of Hampshire on the back of the suggestions you faxed through last night."

"It doesn't make them wrong, sir."

"It doesn't make them right either. We had a team scouring this area on Monday, and they didn't find a damn thing."

Ingram jerked his head toward the next bay. "They were searching Egmont Bight, sir, and with respect, no one was interested in Steven Harding's movements at that point."