Breaker

my notice on the Monday.' He filled the saucepan with water and put it on the gas.

The DI thought sourly of his various life, endowment, and pension policies. 'What's wrong with insurance?'

'Nothing.' He tipped his can in the direction of the DI and took a swill. 'As long as you need it ... as long as you understand the terms of the policy ... as long as you can afford to keep paying the premiums ... as long as you've read the small print. It's like any other product. Buyer beware.'

'Now you're worrying me.'

Ingram grinned. 'If it's any consolation, I'd have felt exactly the same about selling lottery tickets.'

Griffiths had fallen asleep, fully clothed, in the spare room but woke with a start when Hannah started screaming in the next room. She leaped off the bed, heart thudding, and came face to face with William Sumner as he slunk through the child's doorway. 'What the hell do you think you're doing?' she demanded angrily, her nerves shot to pieces by her sudden awakening. 'You've been told not to go in there.'

'I thought she was asleep. I just wanted to look at her.'

'We agreed you wouldn't.'

'You may have done. I never did. You've no right to stop me. It's my house, and she's my daughter.'

'I wouldn't bank on that, if I were you,' she snapped. She was about to add: Your rights take second place to Hannah's at the moment, but he didn't give her the chance.

He clamped fingers like steel bands around her arms and stared at her with dislike, his face working uncontrollably. 'Who have you been talking to?' he muttered.

She didn't say anything, just broke his grip by raising her hands and striking him on both wrists, and with a choking sob he stumbled away down the corridor. But it was a while before she realized what his question had implied.

It would explain a lot, she thought, if Hannah wasn't his child.

Galbraith laid his knife and fork at the side of his plate with a sigh of satisfaction. They were sitting in shirtsleeves on the small patio at the side of the cottage beside a gnarled old plum tree that flavored the air with the scent of fermentation. A storm lantern hissed quietly on the table between them, throwing a circle of yellow light up the wall of the house and across the lawn. On the horizon, moon-silvered clouds floated across the surface of the sea like windblown veils.

'I'm going to have a problem with this,' he said. 'It's too damn perfect.'

Ingram pushed his own plate aside and propped his elbows on the table. 'You need to like your own company. If you don't, it's the loneliest place on earth.'

'Do you?'

The younger man's face creased into an amiable smile. 'I get by,' he said, 'as long as people like you don't drop in too often. Solitude's a state of mind with me, not an ambition.'

Galbraith nodded. 'That makes sense.' He studied the other's face for a moment. 'Tell me about Miss Jenner,' he said then. 'Harding gave us the impression he and she had quite a chat before you got back. Could he have said more to her than she's told you?'

'It's possible. She seemed pretty relaxed with him.'

'How well do you know her?'

But Ingram wasn't so easily drawn about his private life. 'As well as I know anyone else around here,' he said casually. 'What did you make of Harding, as a matter of interest?'

'Difficult to say. He gives a convincing performance of wanting nothing to do with Kate Sumner, but as my boss pointed out, dislike is as good a reason for rape and murder as any other. He claims she was harassing him by smearing crap all over his car because he'd rejected her. It might be true, but none of us really believes it.'

'Why not? There was a case down here three years ago when a wife smashed her husband's Jag through the front door of his lover's house. Women can get pretty riled when they're given the elbow.'

'Except he says he never slept with her.'

'Maybe that was her problem.'

'How come you're on his side all of a sudden?'

'I'm not. The rules say keep an open mind, and that's what I'm trying to do.'

Galbraith chuckled. 'He wants us to believe he's a bit of a stud, presumably on the basis that a man who has access to sex on tap doesn't need to rape anyone, but he can't or won't produce the names of women he's slept with. And neither can anyone else.' He shrugged. 'Yet no one questions his reputation for laddish behavior. They're all quite confident he entertains ladies on his boat even though the SOCOs couldn't come up with any evidence to support it. His bedlinen's stiff with dried semen, but there were only two hairs on it that weren't his, and neither of them was Kate Sumner's. Conclusion, the guy's a compulsive masturbator.' He paused for reflection. 'The problem is his damn boat's positively monastic in every other respect.'

'I don't get you.'

'Not a whisper of anything pornographic,' said Gal-braith. 'Compulsive masturbators, particularly the ones who go on to rape, wank their brains out over hard-core porn videos because sensation begins and ends with their dicks, and they need more and more explicit images to help them jerk off. So how does our friend Harding get himself aroused?'

'Memory?' suggested Ingram wryly.

Galbraith chuckled. 'He's done some pornographic photoshoots himself but claims the only copies he ever kept were the ones he showed William Sumner.' He gave a brief rundown of both Harding's and Sumner's versions of the story. 'He says he threw the magazine in the bin afterward, and as far as he's concerned, porno shoots become history the minute he's paid.'