The Breaker (4 page)

Next on Ingram's agenda was an isolated farmhouse where the elderly occupants had reported the theft of three valuable paintings during the night. He had been on his way there when he was diverted to Chapman's Pool, and while he guessed he was wasting his time, community policing was what he was paid for.

"Oh God, Nick, I'm so sorry," said the couple's harassed daughter-in-law, who, herself, was on the wrong side of seventy. "Believe me, they did
know
the paintings were being auctioned. Peter's been talking them through it for the last twelve months, but they're so forgetful, he has to start again from scratch every time. He has power of attorney, so it's all quite legal, but, honestly, I nearly
died
when Winnie said she'd called you. And on a
Sunday
, too. I come over every morning to make sure they're all right, but
sometimes
..." She rolled her eyes to heaven, expressing without the need for words exactly what she thought of her ninety-five-year-old parents-in-law.

"It's what I'm here for, Jane," he said, giving her shoulder an encouraging pat.

"No, it's not. You should be out catching criminals," she said, echoing the words of people across the nation who saw the police only as thief-takers. She heaved a huge sigh. "The trouble is their outgoings are way in excess of their income, and they're incapable of grasping the fact. The home help
alone
costs over ten thousand pounds a year. Peter's having to sell off the family silver to make ends meet. The silly old things seem to think they're living in the nineteen-twenties, when a housemaid cost five bob a week. It drives me mad, it really does. They ought to be in a home, but Peter's too soft-hearted to put them there.
Not
that they could afford it. I mean
we
can't afford it, so how could they? It would be different if Celia Jenner hadn't persuaded us to gamble everything on that beastly husband of Maggie's but..." She broke off on a shrug of despair. "I get so angry sometimes I could scream, and the only thing that stops me is that I'm afraid the scream would go on forever."

"Nothing lasts forever," he said.

"I know," she said mutinously, "but once in a while I think about giving eternity a hand. It's such a pity you can't buy arsenic anymore. It was so easy in the old days."

"Tell me about it."

She laughed. "You know what I mean."

"Should I order a postmortem when Peter's parents finally pop their clogs?"

"Chance'd be a fine thing. At this rate I'll be dead long before they are."

The tall policeman smiled and made his farewells. He didn't want to hear about death.
He could still feel the touch of the woman's flesh on his hands
... He needed a shower, he thought, as he made his way back to his car.
 

The blond toddler marched steadfastly along the pavement in the Lilliput area of Poole, planting one chubby leg in front of the other. It was 10:30 on Sunday morning, so people were scarce, and no one took the trouble to find out why she was alone. When a handful of witnesses came forward later to admit to the police that they'd seen her, the excuses varied.
"She seemed to know where she was going." "There was a woman about twenty yards behind her and I thought she was the child's mother." "I assumed someone else would stop." "I was in a hurry." "I'm a bloke. I'd have been strung up for giving a lift to a little girl"

In the end it was an elderly couple, Mr. and Mrs. Green, who had the sense, the time, and the courage to interfere. They were on their way back from church, and as they did every week, they made a nostalgic detour through Lilliput to look at the art deco buildings that had somehow survived the postwar craze for mass demolition of anything out of the ordinary in favor of constructing reinforced concrete blocks and red-brick boxes. Lilliput sprawled along the eastern curve of Poole Bay, and amid the architectural dross that could be found anywhere were elegant villas in manicured gardens and art deco houses with windows like portholes. The Greens adored it. It reminded them of their youth.

They were passing the turning to Salterns Marina when Mrs. Green noticed the little girl. "Look at that," she said disapprovingly. "What sort of mother would let a child of that age get so far ahead of her? It only takes a stumble and she'd be under a car."

Mr. Green slowed. "Where's the mother?" he asked.

His wife twisted in her seat. "Do you know, I'm not sure. I thought it was that woman behind her, but she's looking in a shop window."

Mr. Green was a retired sergeant major. "We should do something," he said firmly, drawing to a halt and putting the car into reverse. He shook his fist at a motorist who hooted ferociously after missing his back bumper by the skin of his teeth. "Bloody Sunday drivers," he said, "they shouldn't be allowed on the road."

"Quite right, dear," said Mrs. Green, opening her door.

She scooped the poor little mite into her arms and set her comfortably on her knee while her eighty-year-old husband drove to the Poole police station. It was a tortuous journey because his preferred speed was twenty miles an hour, and this caused mayhem in the one-way system around the civic center roundabout.

The child seemed completely at ease in the car, smiling happily out of the window, but once inside the police station, it proved impossible to prize her away from her rescuer. She locked her arms about the elderly woman's neck, hiding her face against her shoulder, and clung to kindness as tenaciously as a barnacle clings to a rock. Upon learning that no one had reported a toddler missing, Mr. and Mrs. Green set themselves down with commendable patience and prepared for a long wait.

"I can't understand why her mother hasn't noticed she's gone," said Mrs. Green. "I never allowed my own children out of sight for a minute."

"Maybe she's at work," said the woman police constable who had been detailed to make the inquiries.

"Well, she shouldn't be," said Mr. Green reprovingly. "A child of this age needs her mother with her." He pulled a knowing expression in WPC Griffiths's direction which resolved itself into a series of peculiar facial jerks. "You should get a doctor to examine her. Know what I'm saying? Odd people about these days. Men who should know better. Get my meaning?" He spelled it out. "
P-E-do-files.
S-E-X criminals. Know what I'm saying?"

"Yes, sir, I know exactly what you're saying, and don't worry"-the WPC tapped her pen on the paper in front of her-"the doctor's at the top of my list. But if you don't mind, we'll take it gently. We've had a lot of dealings with this kind of thing, and we've found the best method is not to rush at it." She turned to the woman with an encouraging smile. "Has she told you her name?"

Mrs. Green shook her head. "She hasn't said a word, dear. To be honest, I'm not sure she can."

"How old do you think she is?"

"Eighteen months, two at the most." She lifted the edge of the child's cotton dress to reveal a pair of disposable training pants. "She's still in nappies, poor little thing."

The WPC thought two years old was an underestimation, and added a year for the purposes of the paperwork. Women like Mrs. Green had reared their children on cloth diapers and, because of the washing involved, had had them potty-trained early. The idea that a three-year-old might still be in nappies was incomprehensible to them.

Not that it made any difference as far as this little girl was concerned. Whether she was eighteen months old, two years old or three, she clearly wasn't talking.
 

With nothing else to occupy her that Sunday afternoon, the French girl from the Beneteau, who had been an interested observer of Harding's conversations with the Spender brothers, Maggie Jenner, and PC Ingram through the video camera's zoom lens, rowed herself into shore and walked up the steep slope of West Hill to try to work out for herself what the mystery had been about. It wasn't hard to guess that the two boys had found the person who had been winched off the beach by helicopter, nor that the handsome Englishman had reported it to the police for them, but she was curious about why he had reemerged on the hillside half an hour after the police car's departure to retrieve the rucksack he'd abandoned there. She had watched him take out some binoculars and scan the bay and the cliffs before making his way down to the foreshore beyond the boat sheds. She had filmed him for several minutes, staring out to sea, but she was no wiser, having reached his vantage point above Chapman's Pool, than she'd been before, and thoroughly bored, she abandoned the puzzle.

It would be another five days before her father came across the tape and humiliated her in front of the English police...
 

At six o'clock that evening the Fairline Squadron weighed anchor and motored gently out of Chapman's Pool in the direction of St. Alban's Head. Two languid girls sat on either side of their father on the flying bridge, while his latest companion sat, alone and excluded, on the seat behind them. Once clear of the shallow waters at the mouth of the bay, the boat roared to full power and made off at twenty-five knots on the return journey to Poole, carving a V-shaped wake out of the flat sea behind it.

Heat and alcohol had made them all soporific, particularly the father, who had overexerted himself in his efforts to please his daughters, and after setting the autopilot he appointed the elder one lookout before closing his eyes. He could feel the daggers of his girlfriend's fury carving away at his back, and with a stifled sigh, wished he'd had the sense to leave her behind. She was the latest in a string of what his daughters called his "bimbos," and as usual, they had set out to trample on the fragile shoots of his new relationship. Life, he thought resentfully, was bloody...

"Watch out, Dad!" his daughter screamed in sudden alarm. "We're heading straight for a rock."

The man's heart thudded against his chest as he wrenched the wheel violently, slewing the boat to starboard, and what his daughter had thought was a rock slid past on the port side to dance in the boisterous wake. "I'm too old for all of this," he said shakily, steering his three-hundred-thousand-pound boat back on to course and mentally checking the current state of his insurance. "What the hell was it? It can't have been a rock. There are no rocks out here."

The two youngsters, eyes watering, squinted into the burning sun to make out the black, bobbing shape behind them. "It looks like one of those big oil drums," said the elder.

"Jesus wept," growled her father. "Whoever let that wash overboard deserves to be shot. It could have ripped us open if we'd hit it."

His girlfriend, still twisted around, thought it looked more like an upturned dinghy but was reluctant to voice an opinion for fear of attracting any more of his beastly daughters' derision. She'd had a bucketful already that day and heartily wished she had never agreed to come out with them.
 

"I bumped into Nick Ingram this morning," said Maggie as she made a pot of tea in her mother's kitchen at Broxton House.

It had been a beautiful room once, lined with old oak dressers, each one piled with copper pans and ornate crockery, and with an eight-foot-long, seventeenth-century refectory table down its middle. Now it was merely drab. Everything worth selling had been sold. Cheap white wall and floor units had replaced the wooden dressers, and a molded plastic excrescence from the garden stood where the monks' table had reigned resplendent. It wouldn't be so bad, Maggie often thought, if the room was cleaned occasionally, but her mother's arthritis and her own terminal exhaustion from trying to make money out of horses meant that cleanliness had long since gone the way of godliness. If God was in his heaven and all was right with the world, then he had a peculiar blind spot when it came to Broxton House. Maggie would have cut her losses and moved away long ago if only her mother had agreed to do the same. Guilt enslaved her. Now she lived in a flat over the stables on the other side of the garden and made only intermittent visits to the house. Its awful emptiness was too obvious a reminder that her mother's poverty was her fault.

"I took Jasper down to Chapman's Pool. A woman drowned in Egmont Bight, and Nick had to guide the helicopter in to pick up the body."

"A tourist, I suppose?"

"Presumably," said Maggie, handing her a cup. "Nick would have said if it was someone local."

"Typical!" snorted Celia crossly. "So Dorset will foot the bill for the helicopter because some inept creature from another county never learned to swim properly. I've a good mind to withhold my taxes."

"You usually do," said Maggie, thinking of the final reminders that littered the desk in the drawing room.

Her mother ignored the remark. "How was Nick?"

"Hot," said her daughter, remembering how red-faced he had been when he returned to the car, "and not in the best of moods." She stared into her tea, screwing up the courage to address the thorny issue of money, or more accurately lack of money, coming into the riding and livery business she ran from the Broxton House stableyard. "We need to talk about the stables," she said abruptly.

Celia refused to be drawn. "You wouldn't have been in a good mood either if you'd just seen a drowned body." Her tone became conversational as a prelude to a series of anecdotes. "I remember seeing one floating down the Ganges when I was staying with my parents in India. It was the summer holidays. I think I was about fifteen at the time. It was a horrible thing, gave me nightmares for weeks. My mother said..."

Maggie stopped listening and fixed instead on a long black hair growing out of her mother's chin which needed plucking. It bristled aggressively as she spoke, like one of Bertie's whiskers, but they'd never had the kind of relationship that meant Maggie could tell her about it. Celia, at sixty-three, was still a good-looking woman with the same dark brown hair as her daughter, touched up from time to time with Harmony color rinses, but the worry of their straitened circumstances had taken a heavy toll in the deep lines around her mouth and eyes.