'I didn't realize it was his dog,' said the paramedic to Celia.
'It's not,' she said thoughtfully, shading her eyes against the sun to watch what happened.
She saw her daughter come stumbling down toward the tall policeman, who had a quick word with her, then hefted her lightly into Jasper's saddle before, with a gesture of his arm, he sent Bertie out in a sweeping movement toward the cliff edge to circle around behind the excited gelding. He followed in Bertie's wake, placing himself as an immovable obstacle between the horse and the brink, while directing the dog to hamper Stinger's further retreat up the hillside by dashing to and fro above him. Meanwhile, Maggie had turned Sir Jasper toward the quarry site and had kicked him into a canter. Faced with the unpalatable alternatives of a dog on one side, a helicopter on the other, and a man behind, Stinger chose the sensible option of pursuing the other horse toward safety.
'Impressive,' said the paramedic.
'Yes,' said Celia even more thoughtfully. 'It was, wasn't it?'
Polly Garrard was about to leave for work when DI John Galbraith rang her front doorbell and asked if she was willing to answer a few more questions about her relationship with Kate Sumner. 'I can't,' she told him. 'I'll be late. You can come to the office if you like.'
'Fine, if that's the way you want it,' he assured her. 'It might make things difficult for you, though. You probably won't want eavesdroppers to some of the things I'm going to ask you.'
'Oh, shit!' she said immediately. 'I knew this was going to happen.' She opened the door wide. 'You'd better come in,' she said, leading the way into a tiny sitting room, 'but you can't keep me long. Half an hour max, okay? I've already been late twice this month, and I'm running out of excuses.'
She dropped onto one end of a sofa, hooking an arm over its back and inviting him to sit at the other end. She twisted around to face him, one leg curled beneath her so that her skirt rose up to her crotch and her breasts stood out in response to her pulled-back shoulder. The pose was deliberate, thought Galbraith with some amusement, as he lowered himself onto the seat beside her. She was a well-built young woman with a taste for tight T-shirts, heavy makeup, and blue nail polish, and he wondered how Angela Sumner would have coped with Polly as a daughter-in-law in place of Kate. For all her real or imagined sins, Kate seemed to have looked the part of William's wife, even if she did lack the necessary social and educational skills that would have satisfied her mother-in- law.
'I want to ask you about a letter you wrote to Kate in July, which concerns some of the people you work with,' he told Polly, taking a photocopy of it out of his breast pocket. He spread it on his knee and handed it to her. 'Do you remember sending that?'
She read it through quickly, then nodded. 'Yup. I'd been phoning on and off for about a week, and I thought, what the hell, she's obviously busy, so I'll drop her a note instead and get her to phone me.' She screwed her face into cartoon pique. 'Not that she ever did. She just sent a scrotty little note, saying she'd call when she was ready.'
'This one?' He handed her a copy of Kate's draft reply.
She glanced at it. 'I guess so. That's what it said, more or less. It was on some fancy-headed notepaper, I remember that, but I was pissed that she couldn't be bothered to write a decent letter back. The truth is, I don't think she wanted me to go. I expect she was afraid I'd embarrass her in front of her Lymington friends. Which I probably would have done,' she added in fairness.
Galbraith smiled. 'Did you visit the house when they first moved?'
'Nope. Never got invited. She kept saying I could go as soon as the decorating was finished, but'-she pulled another face-'it was just an excuse to put me off. I didn't mind. Fact is, I'd probably have done the same in her shoes. She'd moved on-new house, new life, new friends-and you grow out of people when that happens, don't you?'
'She hadn't moved on completely,' he pointed out, 'You still work with William.'
Polly giggled. 'I work in the same building as William,' she corrected him, 'and it gets up his nose something rotten that I tell everyone he married my best friend. I know it's not true-it never was, really-I mean I liked her and all that, but she wasn't the best-friend type, if you know what I mean. Too self-contained by half. No I just do it to annoy William. He thinks I'm common as muck, and he nearly died when I told him I'd visited Kate in Chichester and met his mother. I'm not surprised. God, she was an old battleaxe! Lecture, lecture, lecture. Do this. Don't do that. Frankly, I'd've wheeled her in front of a bus if she'd been
'Was there ever a chance of that?'
'Do me a favor! I'd need to be permanently comatose to marry William Sumner. The guy has about as much sex appeal as a turnip!'
'So what did Kate see in him?'
Polly rubbed her thumb and forefinger together. 'Money.'
'What else?'
'Nothing. A bit of class, maybe, but an unmarried bloke with no children and money was what she was looking for, and an unmarried bloke with no children and money is what she got.' She cocked her head on one side, amused by his expression of disbelief. 'She told me once that William's tackle, even when he had a stiffy, was so limp it was more like an uncooked sausage than a truncheon. So I said, how does he do the business? And she said, with a pint of baby oil and my finger up his fucking arse.' She giggled again at Galbraith's wince of sympathy for another man's problems. 'He loved it, for Christ's sake! Why else would he marry her with his mother spitting poison all over the place? Okay, Kate may have wanted money, but poor old Willy just wanted a tart who'd tell him he was bloody brilliant whether he was or not. It worked like a dream. They both got what they wanted.'
He studied her for a moment, wondering if she was quite as naive as her words made her sound. 'Did they?' he asked her. 'Kate's dead, don't forget.'
She sobered immediately. 'I know. It's a bugger. But there's nothing I can tell you about that. I haven't seen her since she moved.'
'All right. Tell me what you do know. Why did your story about Wendy Plater insulting James Purdy remind you of Kate?' he asked her.
'What makes you think it did?'
