Breaker

'He reckons he's a pedophile,' said Paul matter-of-factly.

WPC Sandra Griffiths whistled tunelessly to herself as she made a cup of tea in the kitchen at Langton Cottage. Hannah was sitting mesmerized in front of the television in the sitting room, while Sandy was blessing the memory of whatever genius had invented the electronic nanny. She turned toward the fridge in search of milk and found William Sumner standing directly behind her. 'Did I frighten you?' he asked as she gave a little start of surprise.

You know you did, you stupid bastard...! She forced a smile to her face to disguise the fact that he was beginning to give her the creeps. 'Yes,' she admitted. 'I didn't hear you come in.'

'That's what Kate used to say. She'd get quite angry about it sometimes.'

Who can blame her...? She was beginning to think of him as a voyeur, a man who got his rocks off by secretly watching a woman go about her business. She had stopped counting the number of times she'd glimpsed him peering around a doorjamb like an unwelcome intruder in his own house. She put distance between herself and him by removing the teapot to the kitchen table and pulling out a chair. There was a lengthy silence during which he sulkily kicked the toe of his shoe against the table leg, shoving the top in little jerks against her belly.

'You're afraid of me, aren't you?' he said suddenly.

'What makes you think that?' she asked as she held the table firm against his kicks.

'You were afraid last night.' He looked pleased, as if the idea excited him, and she wondered how important it was to him to feel superior.

'Don't flatter yourself,' she declared bluntly, lighting a cigarette and blowing the smoke deliberately in his direction. 'Trust me, if I'd been remotely afraid, I'd have taken your fucking balls off. Cripple first and ask questions later, that's my motto.'

'I don't like you smoking or swearing in this house,' he said with another petulant kick at the table leg.

'Then put in a complaint,' she answered. 'It just means I'll be reassigned.' She held his gaze for a moment. 'And that wouldn't suit you one little bit, would it? You're too damn used to having an unpaid skivvy about the place.'

Ready tears sprang to his eyes. 'You don't understand what it's like. Everything worked so well before. And now ... well, I don't even know what I'm supposed to be doing.'

His performance was amateur at best, diabolical at worst, and it brought out the bully in Griffiths. Did he think she found male helplessness attractive? 'Then you should be ashamed of yourself,' she snapped. 'According to the health visitor you didn't even know where the vacuum cleaner was, let alone how to work it. She came here to teach you elementary parenting and housekeeping skills because no one- and I repeat no one-is going to allow a three-year-old child to remain in the care of a man who is so patently indifferent to her welfare.'

He moved around the kitchen, opening and shutting cupboard doors as if to demonstrate familiarity with their contents. 'It's not my fault,' he said. 'That's how Kate wanted it. I wasn't allowed to interfere in the running of the house.'

'Are you sure it wasn't the other way around?' She tapped the ash off her cigarette into her saucer. 'I mean you didn't marry a wife, did you? You married a housekeeper who was expected to run this house like clockwork and account for every last penny she spent.'

'It wasn't like that.'

'What was it like then?'

'Living in a cheap boardinghouse,' he said bitterly. 'I didn't marry a wife or a housekeeper, I married a landlady who allowed me to live here as long as I paid my rent on time.'

The French yacht Mirage motored up the Dart River early on Thursday afternoon and took a berth in the Dart Haven Marina on the Kingswear side of the estuary, opposite the lovely town of Dartmouth and alongside the steam railway line to Paignton. Shortly after they made fast, there was a blast on a whistle and the three o'clock train set off in a rush of steam, raising in the Beneteau's owner a romantic longing for days he himself couldn't remember.

By contrast his daughter sat sunk in gloom, unable to comprehend why they had moored on the side of the river that boasted nothing except the station when everything that was attractive-shops, restaurants, pubs, people, life, men!-was on the other side, in Dartmouth. Scornfully, she watched her father take out the video camera and search through the case for a new tape in order to film steam engines. He was like a small boy, she thought, in his silly enthusiasms for the treasures of rural England when what really mattered was London. She was the only one of her friends who had never been there, and it mortified her. God, but her parents were sad!

Her father turned to her in mild frustration, asking where the unused tapes were, and she had to admit there were none. She'd used them all to film irrelevancies in order to pass the time, and with irritating tolerance (he was one of those understanding fathers who refused to indulge in rows) he played the videos back, squinting into the eyepiece, in order to select the least interesting for reuse.

When he came to a tape of a young man scrambling down the slope above Chapman's Pool toward two boys, followed by shots of him sitting alone on the foreshore beyond the boat sheds, he lowered the camera and looked at his daughter with a worried frown. She was fourteen years old, and he realized he had no idea if she was still innocent or whether she knew exactly what she'd been filming. He described the young man and asked her why she had taken so much footage of him. Her cheeks flushed a rosy red under her tan. No particular reason. He was there and he was-she spoke with defiance-handsome. In any case, she knew him. They'd introduced themselves when they'd chatted together in Lymington. And he fancied her. She could tell these things.

Her father was appalled.

His daughter flounced her shoulders. What was the big deal? So he was English. He was just a good-looking guy who liked French girls, she said.

Bibi Gould's face fell as she swung lightheartedly out of the hairdressing salon in Lymington where she worked and saw Tony Bridges standing on the pavement, half turned away from her, watching a young mother hoist a toddler onto her hip. Her relationship, such as it was, with Tony had become more of a trial than a pleasure, and for a brief second she thought about retreating through the door again until she realized he had seen her out of the corner of his eye. She forced a sickly smile to her lips. 'Hi,' she said with unconvincing jauntiness.

He stared at her with his peculiarly brooding expression, taking note of the skimpy shorts and cropped top that barely covered her tanned arms, legs, and midriff. A blood vessel started to throb in his head, and he had trouble