Griffiths eased Hannah on her hip and turned the child's head into her shoulder in a somewhat futile attempt to block her ears. 'It's standard procedure, William, but I don't think it's something we should talk about in front of your daughter. I suggest you take it up with DI Galbraith tomorrow.'
But he was either too insensitive or too careless of his daughter's welfare to take the hint. He stared at a photograph of his wife on the mantelpiece. 'I couldn't have done it,' he said. 'I was in Liverpool.'
At the request of Dorsetshire Constabulary, the Liverpool police had already begun preliminary inquiries at the Regal Hotel. It was early days, of course, but the account William Sumner had settled that morning made interesting reading. Despite being a heavy user of the telephone, coffee lounge, restaurant, and bar in the first two days, there was a period of twenty-four hours between lunchtime on Saturday and a noon drink in the bar on Sunday when he had failed to make use of a single hotel service.
*10*
During the twenty minutes that he waited in the sitting room at Langton Cottage the following morning to speak to William Sumner, John Galbraith learned two things about the man's dead wife. The first was that Kate Sumner was vain. Every photograph on display was either of herself, or of herself and Hannah, and he searched without success for a likeness of William, or even of an elderly woman who might have been William's mother. In frustration he ended up counting the pictures that were there-thirteen-each of which showed the same prettily smiling face within its framework of golden curls. Was this the cult of the personality taken to its extreme, he wondered, or an indication of a deep-seated inferiority which needed constant reminders that to be photogenic was a talent like any other?
The second thing he learned was that he could never have lived with Kate. She delighted, it seemed, in applying frills to everything: lace curtains with frills, valances with frills, armchairs with frills-even the lampshades had tassels attached to them. Nothing, not even the walls, had escaped her taste for overembellishment. Langton Cottage was of nineteenth-century origin with beamed ceilings and brick fireplaces, and instead of the plain white plaster that would have shown these features off to their best advantage, she had covered the walls of the sitting room-probably at considerable expense-with mock Regency wallpaper, adorned with gilt stripes, white bows, and baskets of unnaturally colored fruit. Galbraith shuddered at the desecration of what could have been a charming room and unconsciously contrasted it with the timbered simplicity of Steven Harding's sloop, which was currently being put under a microscope by scene-of-crime officers while Harding, exercising his right to remain silent, cooled his heels in a police cell.
Rope Walk was a quiet tree-lined avenue to the west of the Royal Lymington and Town yacht clubs, and Langton Cottage had clearly not been cheap. As he knocked on the door at eight o'clock on Tuesday morning after two hours' sleep, Galbraith wondered how big a mortgage William had had to raise to buy it and how much he earned as a pharmaceutical chemist. He could see no logic behind the move from Chichester, particularly as neither Kate nor William appeared to have any links with Lymington.
He was let in by WPC Griffiths, who pulled a face when he told her he needed to talk to Sumner. 'You'll be lucky,' she whispered. 'Hannah's been bawling her head off most of the night, so I doubt you'll get any sense out of him. He's had almost as little sleep as I've had.'
'Join the club.'
'You, too, eh?'
Galbraith smiled. 'How's he holding up?'
She shrugged. 'Not too well. Keeps bursting into tears and saying it's not supposed to be like this.' She lowered her voice even further. 'I'm really concerned about Hannah. She's obviously scared of him. She works herself into a tantrum the minute he enters the room, then calms down rapidly as soon as he leaves. I ordered him to bed in the end to try and get her to sleep.'
Galbraith looked interested. 'How does he react?'
'That's the odd thing. He doesn't react at all. He just ignores it as if it's something he's grown used to.'
'Has he said why she does it?'
'Only that, being out at work so much, he's never had a chance to bond with her. It could be true, you know. I get the impression Kate swaddled her in cotton wool. There are so many safety features in this house that I can't see how Hannah was ever expected to learn anything. Every door has a child lock on it-even the wardrobe in her own bedroom-which means she can't explore, can't choose her own clothes, or even make a mess if she wants to. She's almost three, but she's still sleeping in a crib. That's pretty weird, you know. More like prison bars than a nursery. It's a damned odd way to bring up a child and, frankly, I'm not surprised she's a withdrawn little thing.'
'I suppose it's occurred to you that she might be scared of him because she watched him kill her mother,' murmured Galbraith.
Sandy Griffiths spread her hand and made a rocking motion. 'Except I don't see how he can have done it. He's made a list of some colleagues who can alibi him for Saturday night in Liverpool, and if that holds good then there's no way he could have been shoving his wife in the water at one a.m. in Dorset.'
'No,' agreed Galbraith. 'Still...' He pursed his lips in thought. 'Do you realize the SOCOs found no drugs in this house at all, not even paracetamol? Which is odd, considering William's a pharmaceutical chemist.'
'Maybe that's why there aren't any. He knows what goes into them.'
'Mmm. Or they were deliberately cleared out before we got here.' He glanced toward the stairs. 'Do you like him?' he asked her.
'Not much,' she admitted, 'but you don't want to go by what I say. I've always been a lousy judge of character where men are concerned. He could have done with a good smacking thirty years ago, in my opinion, just to teach him some manners but as things are, he seems to view women as serving wenches.'
He laughed. 'Are you going to be able to stick it out?'
She rubbed her tired eyes. 'God knows! Your chap left about half an hour ago, and there's supposed to be
