The Breaker (43 page)

"Martin didn't have a problem."

"No," he said dryly. "But then Martin wouldn't have had a problem with the Elephant Man as long as there was money in it. Does your mother have a scrubbing brush? We need to remove the hardened paint from this tray."

"You'll have to look in the scullery." She watched in an infuriated silence while he scrabbled around among four years' detritus in search of cleaning implements. "You're such a hypocrite," she said then. "You've just spent half an hour boosting Ma's self-esteem by telling her how lovable she is, but I get compared with the Elephant Man."

There was a muffled laugh. "Martin didn't sleep with your mother."

"What difference does that make?"

He emerged with a bucket full of impacted rags. "I'm having trouble with the fact that you sleep with a dog," he said severely. "I'm buggered if I'll turn a blind eye to a weasel as well."

There was a brief silence before Maggie gave a splutter of laughter. "Bertie's in bed with Ma at the moment."

"I know. He's about the worst guard dog I've ever encountered." He took the bundle of cloth out of the bucket and held it up for inspection. "What the hell is this?"

More laughter. "They're my father's Y-fronts, you idiot. Ma uses them instead of J-cloths because they don't cost anything."

"Oh, right." He put the bucket in the sink to fill it with water. "I can see the logic. He was a big fellow, your dad. There's enough material here to cover a three-piece suite." He separated out a pair of striped boxer shorts. "Or a deckchair," he finished thoughtfully.

Her eyes narrowed suspiciously. "Don't even think about using my father's underpants to seduce me, you bastard, or I'll empty that entire bucket over your head."

He grinned at her. "This isn't seduction, Maggie, this is courtship. If I wanted to seduce you I'd have brought several bottles of brandy with me." He wrung out the boxer shorts and held them up for inspection. "However ... if you think these would be effective...?"
 

"...Most of the time it's just me, the boat, and the sea ... I like that ... I feel comfortable with space around me ... people can get on your nerves after a while ... they always want something from you ... usually love ... but it's all pretty shallow ... Marie? She's okay ... nothing great ... sure I feel responsible for her, but not forever ... nothing's forever ... except the sea ... and death..."

*26*

John Galbraitb paused beside William Sumner's car in tbe Chichester street and stooped to look in through the window. The weather was still fair, and the heat from the sun-baked roof warmed his face. He walked up the path toward Angela Sumner's flat and rang the doorbell. He waited for the chain to rattle into place. "Good afternoon, Mrs. Sumner," he said when her bright eyes peered anxiously through the gap. "I think you must have William in there." He gestured toward the parked car. "May I talk to him?"

With a sigh, she released the chain and pulled the door wide. "I wanted to phone you, but he pulled the wire out of the wall when I suggested it."

Galbraith nodded. "We've tried your number several times, but there was never any answer. If the phone wasn't plugged in, that explains it. I thought I'd come anyway."

She turned her chair to lead him down the corridor. "He keeps saying he didn't know what to do. Does that mean he killed her?"

Galbraith laid a comforting hand on her shoulder. "No," he said. "Your son isn't a murderer, Mrs. Sumner. He loved Kate. I think he'd have given her the earth if she'd asked him for it."

They paused in the sitting-room doorway. William sat huddled in an armchair, arms wrapped protectively about himself and the telephone in his lap, his jaw dark with stubble and his eyes red-rimmed and puffy from too much weeping and too little sleep. Galbraith studied him with concern, recognizing that he bore some of the responsibility for pushing him toward the brink. He could excuse his prying into William's and Kate's secrets on the grounds of justice, but it was a cold logic. He could have been kinder, he thought-one could always be kinder-but, sadly, kindness rarely elicited truth.

He squeezed Angela Sumner's shoulder. "Perhaps you could make us a cup of tea," he suggested, moving aside for her wheelchair to reverse. "I'd like to have a few words with William alone, if that's possible."

She nodded gratefully. "I'll wait till you call me."

He closed the door behind her and listened to the whine of the battery fading into the kitchen. "We've caught Kate's killer, William," he said, taking the seat opposite the man. "Steven Harding has been formally charged with her abduction, rape, and murder, and will be remanded to prison shortly to await trial. I want to stress that Kate was not a party to what happened to her, but on the contrary fought hard to save herself and Hannah." He paused briefly to search William's face but went on when there was no reaction. "I'm not going to pretend she didn't have sex with Steven Harding prior to the events of last week, because she did. However, it was a brief affair some months ago, and followed a prolonged campaign by Harding to break her down. Nevertheless-and this is important"-he glossed the truth deliberately in Kate's favor-"it's clear she made up her mind very quickly to put an end to the relationship when she recognized that her marriage was more important to her than a mild infatuation with a younger man. Her misfortune was her failure to recognize that Steven Harding is self-fixated and dangerously immature and that she needed to be afraid of him." Another pause. "She was lonely, William."

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 anymore. 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 fetus 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 around 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' 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. "Offhand, 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 oj 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 onto his boat if she wasn't interested anymore?" 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 favor,' 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 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 toward 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 lovemaking 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 ancient history. She didn't know his car was being daubed with feces, didn't know he'd approached you and told you to warn her off, so when she accepted a glass of champagne in the garage, she genuinely thought it was the peace offering he said it was."