Breaker

'Not for much longer,' Nick reassured her, 'unless his fellow inmates have a yen for chemistry. Carpenter's thrown the book at him-perverting the course of justice, supplying drugs, false imprisonment of his girlfriend, rape of said girlfriend under the influence of Rohypnol, incitement to murder ... even'-he chuckled-'criminal damage to Harding's car ... and that's not to mention whatever Customs and Excise chooses to throw at him.'

'Serves him right,' said Maggie unsympathetically.

'Mmm.'

'You don't sound convinced.'

'Only because I can't see what prison will do for someone like Tony. He's not a bad guy, just a misguided one. Six months' community service in a home for the disabled would do him more good.' He watched the spider sink into a pool of wet emulsion. 'On a scale of one to ten, spasmodic impotence doesn't even register compared with severe physical or mental handicap.'

Maggie sat up and clasped her arms about her knees. 'I thought policemen were supposed to be hard bastards. Are you going soft on me, Ingram?'

He looked down at her with a gleam of amusement in his dark eyes. 'Courtship's like that, I'm afraid. The hardness comes and goes whether you like it or not. It's nature.'

She lowered her face to her knees, refusing to be diverted. 'I don't understand why Steve drowned Kate off Chapman's Pool,' she said next. 'He knew he was going there the next morning and he must have realized there was a chance she'd wash up on the beach. Why would he want to put his meeting with Marie in jeopardy?'

'I'm not sure you can apply logic to the actions of someone like Harding,' he said. 'Carpenter's view is that, once he had Kate on board, there would only ever be one place he'd kill her. He says you can tell from the Frenchman's video how hyped up he was by all the excitement.' He watched the spider lift his legs from the wet paint and wave them in useless protest. 'But I don't think Steve expected her body to be there. He'd broken her fingers and tied her to an outboard, so it must have been a hell of a shock to find she'd managed to free herself. Presumably the intention was to gloat over her grave before absconding with Marie. Carpenter thinks Harding's an embryo serial killer, so in his view Marie's lucky to be alive.'

'Do you agree with him?'

'God knows.' He mourned the spider's inevitable death as the exhausted creature dipped its abdomen into the paint. 'Steve says it was a terrible accident, but I've no idea if he's telling the truth. Carpenter doesn't believe him and neither does DI Galbraith, but I have a real problem accepting that anyone so young can be so evil. Let's just say I'm glad you had Bertie with you yesterday.'

'Does Carpenter think he wanted to kill me, too?'

Nick shook his head. 'I don't know. He asked Steve what was so important about the rucksack that he'd risked going back for it, and do you know what Steve said? 'My binoculars.' So then Carpenter asked him why he'd left it there at all, and he said: 'Because I'd forgotten the binoculars were in it.' '

'What does that mean?'

Nick gave a low laugh. 'That there was nothing in it he wanted, so he decided to dump it. He hadn't had any sleep, he was knackered, and Marie's desert boots kept banging against his back and giving him blisters. All he wanted to do was get rid of it as fast as possible.'

'Why is that funny?'

'It's the exact opposite of why I thought he'd left it there.'

'No, it's not,' she contradicted him. 'You told me it would incriminate him because he used it to carry Hannah off his boat.'

'But he didn't kill Hannah, Maggie, he killed Kate.'

'So?'

'All I did by finding it was help the defense. Harding will argue it proves he never intended to murder anyone.'

He sounded depressed, she thought. 'Still,' she said brightly, 'I suppose they'll be offering you a job at headquarters. They must be awfully impressed with you. You homed in on Steve as soon as you saw him.'

'And homed straight out again the minute he spun me a plausible yarn.' Another low laugh, this time self- deprecating. 'The only reason I took against him was because he got up my nose, and the superintendent knows that. I think Carpenter thinks I'm a bit of a joke. He called me a suggestion-junky.' He sighed. 'I'm not sure I'm cut out for CID work. You can't take a wild guess then invent arguments to support the theory. That's how miscarriages of justice happen.'

She cast him a speculative glance. 'Is that something else Carpenter said?'

'More or less. He said the days are long past when policemen could play hunches. It's all about putting data into computers now.'

She felt angry on his behalf. 'Then I'll phone the bastard and give him a piece of my mind,' she said indignantly. 'If it hadn't been for you, it would have taken them months to make the connection between Kate and Harding-if ever, frankly-and they'd never have found that stranded dinghy or worked out where it was stolen from. He ought to be congratulating you, not finding fault. I'm the one who got it all wrong. There's obviously a flaw in my genes that makes me gravitate toward scumbags. Even Ma thought Harding was the most frightful creep. She said: 'Fancy making such a performance over a dog bite. I've had far worse, and all anyone offered me was antiseptic.' '

'She'll have my guts for garters when she finds out I made her wreck her hip for a murderer.'

'No, she won't. She says you remind her of James Stewart in Destry Rides Again.'

'Is that good?'

'Oh, yes,' said Maggie with a sardonic edge to her voice. 'She goes weak at the knees every time she sees it. James Stewart plays a peace-loving sheriff who brings law and order to a violent city by never raising his voice or drawing his gun. It's fantastically sentimental. He falls in love with Marlene Dietrich, who throws herself in front of a