Breaker

'Maybe he's telling the truth,' said the other man listlessly.

Galbraith smiled slightly. Kindness was a mug's game. 'Don't ever say that in my presence again, William,' he said with a rasp in his throat. 'Because, so help me God, I'll beat the fucking daylights out of you if you do. I saw your wife, remember. I wept for her before you even knew she was dead.'

Sumner blinked in alarm.

Galbraith straightened. 'The bastard drugged her, raped her-several times we think-broke her fingers because she attempted to release her daughter from the rucksack, then put his hands around her neck and throttled her. But she wouldn't die. So he tied her to a spare outboard his friend had given him and set her adrift in a partially inflated dinghy.' He thumped his fist into his palm. 'Not to give her a chance of life, William, but to make sure she died slowly and in fear, tormenting herself about what he was going to do to Hannah and regretting that she'd ever dared to take revenge on him.'

'The kid never cried once after I took her out of the rucksack. She wasn't frightened of me. As a matter of fact I think she felt sorry for me because she could see I was upset. I wrapped her in a blanket and laid her on the floor in the cabin, and she went to sleep. I might have panicked if she'd started crying in the marina, but she didn't. She's a funny kid. I mean she's obviously not very bright, but you get the feeling she knows things...'

'I don't know why he didn't kill Hannah, except that he seems to be afraid of her. He says now that the fact she's alive is proof he didn't want Kate to die either, and he may have decided that as she was never going to be a threat to him he could afford to let her live. He says he changed her, fed her, and gave her something to drink from the bag that was on the back of the buggy, then took her off the boat in his rucksack. He left her asleep in the front garden of a block of flats on the Bournemouth-to-Poole road, a good mile from Lilliput, and seems to be more shocked than anyone that she was allowed to walk all the way back to the marina before anyone questioned why she was on her own.'

'There was some paracetamol in the buggy bag, so I dosed her up with it to make sure she was asleep when I took her off the boat. Not that I really needed to. I reckon the Rohypnol was still working, because I sat and watched her in the cabin for hours and she only woke up once. There's no way she could have known where Salterns Marina was, so how the hell did she find her way back to it? I kept telling you she was weird. But you wouldn't believe me...'

'On the trip back to Lymington he put everything overboard that could connect him in any way at all with Kate and Hannah-the dinghy holdall, Kate's clothes, her ring, the buggy, Hannah's dirty nappy, the rug he wrapped her in-but he forgot the sandals that Kate left behind in April.' Galbraith smiled slightly. 'Although the odd thing is he says he did remember them. He took them out of a locker after he left Hannah asleep on the cabin floor and put them in the buggy bag, and he says now that the only person who could have hidden them under the pile of clothes was Hannah.'

'I got sidetracked worrying about fingerprints. 1 couldn't make up my mind whether to clean the inside of Crazy Daze or not. You see, I knew you'd find Kate and Hannah's fingerprints from when they were on board in April, and I wondered if it would be better to pretend that visit had never happened. In the end I decided to leave it exactly the way it's been for the last three months because I didn't want you lot imagining I'd done something worse than I had. And I was right, wasn 't I? You wouldn't have released me on Wednesday if you'd found any evidence that I set out to hurt Kate the way you're saying I did.'

Sumner's eyes welled again but he didn't say anything.

'Why didn't you tell me Kate and Harding had had an affair?' Galbraith asked him.

It was a moment before William answered and, when he did, he lifted a trembling hand in supplication, like a beggar after charity. 'I was ashamed.'

'For Kate?'

'No,' he whispered, 'for myself. I didn't want anyone to know.'

To know what? Galbraith wondered. That he couldn't keep his wife interested? That he'd made a mistake marrying her? He reached over and took the telephone from Sumner's lap. 'If you're interested, Sandy Griffiths says Hannah's been walking around the house all day, looking for you. I asked Sandy to tell her I'd be bringing you home, and Hannah clapped her hands. Don't make a liar out of me, my friend.'

He shook with grief. 'I thought she'd be better off without me.'

'No chance.' He raised the man to his feet with a hand under his arm. 'You're her father. How could she possibly be better off without you?'

*27*

Maggie lay on the floor stretching her aching back while Nick meticulously poked a loaded paintbrush into all the nooks and crannies that she'd missed. 'Do you think Steve would have done it if Tony Bridges hadn't wound him up by smearing crap all over the place?'

'I don't know,' said Nick. 'The superintendent's convinced he's an out-and-out psychopath, says it was only a matter of time before his obsession with sex spilled over into rape, so maybe he'd have done it anyway, with or without Tony Bridges. I suppose the truth is Kate was in the wrong place at the wrong time.' He paused, remembering the tiny hand waving in the spume. 'Poor woman.'

'Still ... does Tony walk away scot-free? That's hardly fair, is it? I mean he must have known Steve was guilty.'

Nick shrugged. 'Claims he didn't, claims he thought it was the husband.' He dabbed gently at a spider and watched it scurry away into the shadows. 'Galbraith told me he and Carpenter hung Tony up to dry last night for keeping quiet the first time they interviewed him, and Tony's excuse was that Kate was such a bitch he didn't see why he should help the police screw her husband. He reckoned Kate got what she deserved for spouting off about the poor bastard's performance. He has trouble on that front himself, apparently, so his sympathies were with William.'

'And this man's a teacher?' she said in disgust.