The Breaker
by Minette Walters
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-
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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.
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,
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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
