Breaker

frantic movements of the Spender brothers. With an audible groan, she switched off the camera and stared in disbelief at the prancing children, who, from a distance, appeared to be showing enthusiastic delight.

Surely he was too young to be anybody's father?

But ... A Gallic shrug...

Who knew with the English?

Behind the questing mongrel which zigzagged energetically in pursuit of a scent, the horse picked its way carefully down the track that led from Hill Bottom to the Pool. Tarmac showed in places where the track had once been a road, and one or two sketchy foundations among the overgrown vegetation beside it spoke of buildings long abandoned and demolished. Maggie Jenner had lived in this area most of her life but had never known why the handful of inhabitants in this corner of the Isle of Purbeck had gone away and left their dwellings to the ravages of time. Someone had told her once that 'chapman' was an archaic word for merchant or peddler, but what anyone could have traded in this remote place she couldn't imagine. Perhaps, more simply, a peddler had drowned in the bay and bequeathed his death to posterity. Every time she took this path she reminded herself to find out, but every time she made her way home again she forgot.

The cultivated gardens that had once bloomed here had left a lingering legacy of roses, hollyhocks, and hydrangeas amid the weeds and grasses, and she thought how pleasant it would be to have a house in this colorful wilderness, facing southwest toward the channel with only her dog and her horses for company. Because of the threat of the ever-sliding cliffs, access to Chapman's Pool was denied to motorized traffic by padlocked gates at Hill Bottom and Kingston, and the attraction of so much stillness was a powerful one. But then isolation and its attendant solitude was becoming something of an obsession with her, and occasionally it worried her.

Even as the thought was in her head, she heard the sound of an approaching vehicle, grinding in first gear over the bumps and hollows behind her, and gave a surprised whistle to bring Bertie to heel behind Sir Jasper. She turned in the saddle, assuming it was a tractor, and frowned at the approaching police Range Rover. It slowed as it drew level with her, and she recognized Nick Ingram at the wheel before, with a brief smile of acknowledgment, he drove on and left her to follow in his dusty wake.

The emergency services had rushed into action following a nine-nine-nine call to the police from a mobile telephone. It was timed at 10:43 a.m. The caller gave his name as Steven Harding and explained that he had come across two boys who claimed a body was lying on the beach at Egmont Bight. The details were confused because the boys omitted to mention that the woman was naked, and their obvious distress and garbled speech led Harding to give the impression that 'the lady on the beach' was their mother and had fallen from the cliff while using a pair of binoculars. As a result the police and coastguards acted on the presumption that she was still alive.

Because of the difficulty of retrieving a badly injured person from the foreshore, the coastguards dispatched a Search and Rescue helicopter from Portland to winch her off. Meanwhile, PC Nick Ingram, diverted from a burglary investigation, approached via the track that skirted the inappropriately named West Hill on the eastern side of Chapman's Pool. He had had to use bolt cutters to slice through the chain on the gate at Hill Bottom, and as he abandoned his Range Rover on the hard standing beside the fishermen's boat sheds, he was hoping fervently that rubberneckers wouldn't grab the opportunity to follow him. He was in no mood to marshal petulant sightseers.

The only access from the boat sheds to the beach where the woman lay was by the same route the boys had taken-on foot around the bay, followed by a scramble over the rocks at Egmont Point. To a man in uniform, it was a hot and sweaty business, and Nick Ingram, who stood over six feet four inches and weighed upward of 240 pounds, was drenched by the time he reached the body. He bent forward, hands on knees, to recover his breath, listening to the deafening sound of the approaching SAR helicopter and feeling its wind on his damp shirt. He thought it a hideous intrusion into what was obviously a place of death. Despite the heat of the sun, the woman's skin was cold to the touch, and her widely staring eyes had begun to film. He was struck by how tiny she seemed, lying alone at the bottom of the cliff, and how sad her miniature hand looked waving in the spume.

Her nudity surprised him, the more so when it required only the briefest of glances about the beach to reveal a complete absence of towels, clothes, footwear, or possessions. He noticed bruising on her arms, neck, and chest, but it was more consistent with being tumbled over rocks on an incoming tide, he thought, than with a dive off a clifftop. He stooped again over the body, looking for anything that would indicate how it had got there, then retreated rapidly as the descending stretcher spiraled dangerously close to his head.

The noise of the helicopter and the amplified voice of the winch operator calling instructions to the man below had attracted sightseers. The party of hikers gathered on the clifftop to watch the excitement, while the yachtsmen in Chapman's Pool motored out of the bay in their dinghies to do the same. A spirit of revelry was abroad because everyone assumed the rescue wouldn't have happened unless the woman was still alive, and a small cheer went up as the stretcher rose in the air. Most thought she'd fallen from the cliff; a few thought she might have floated out of Chapman's Pool on an inflatable airbed and got into difficulties. No one guessed she'd been murdered.

Except, perhaps, Nick Ingram, who transferred the tiny, stiffening body to the stretcher and felt a dreadful anger burn inside him because Death had stolen a pretty woman's dignity. As always, the victory belonged to the thief and not to the victim.

As requested by the nine-nine-nine operator, Steven Harding shepherded the boys down the hill to the police car, which was parked beside the boat sheds, where they waited with varying degrees of patience until its occupant returned. The brothers, who had sunk into an exhausted silence after their mad dash around Chapman's Pool, wanted to be gone, but they were intimidated by their companion, a twenty-four-year-old actor, who took his responsibilities in loco parentis seriously.

He kept a watchful eye on his uncommunicative charges (too shocked to speak, he thought) while trying to cheer them up with a running commentary of what he could see of the rescue. He peppered his conversation with expressions like: 'You're a couple of heroes...' 'Your mum's going to be really proud of you...' 'She's a lucky lady to have two such sensible sons...' But it wasn't until the helicopter flew toward Poole and he turned to them with a smile of encouragement, saying: 'There you are, you can stop worrying now. Mum's in safe hands,' that they realized his mistake. It hadn't occurred to either of them that what appeared to be general remarks about their own mother applied specifically to 'the lady on the beach.'

'She's not our mum,' said Paul, dully.

'Our mum's going to be really angry,' supplied Danny in his piping treble, emboldened by his brother's willingness to abandon the prolonged silence. 'She said if we were late for lunch she'd make us eat bread and water for a week.' (He was an inventive child.) 'She's going to be even angrier when I tell her it's because Paul wanted to look at a nudie.'

'Shut up,' said his brother.

'And he made me climb the cliff so he could get a better look. Dad's going to kill him for ruining the binoculars.'

'Shut up.'