Breaker

a note of the rest, together with the last ten calls Harding had made, the first of which was Maggie's call to him. For further good measure-To hell with it! In for a penny, in for a pound!-he scrolled through the entries under 'names' and took them down together with their numbers.

'Are you doing something illegal?' asked Maggie from the doorway.

He had been so engrossed he hadn't heard the door open, and he looked up with a guilty start. 'Not if DI Galbraith already has this information.' He flattened his palm and made a rocking motion. 'Probable infringement of Harding's rights under the Data Protection Act, if he hasn't. It depends whether the phone was on Crazy Daze when they searched it.'

'Won't Steven Harding know you've been playing his messages when you give it back to him? Our answerphone never replays the ones you've already listened to unless you rewind the tape.'

'Voice mail's different. You have to delete the messages if you don't want to keep hearing them.' He grinned. 'But if he's suspicious, let's just hope he thinks you buggered it up when you made your phone call.'

'Why drag me into it?'

'Because he'll know you phoned me. My number's in the memory.'

'Oh God,' she said in resignation. 'Are you expecting me to lie for you?'

'No.' He stood up, lacing his hands above his head and stretching his shoulder muscles under his damp clothes. He was so tall he could almost touch the ceiling, and he stood like a Colossus in the middle of the kitchen, easily dominating a room that was big enough to house an entire family.

Watching him, Maggie wondered how she could ever have called him an overweight Neanderthal. It had been Martin's description, she remembered, and it galled her unbearably to think how tamely she had adopted it herself because it had raised a laugh among people she had once regarded as friends but whom she now avoided like the plague. 'Well, I will,' she said with sudden decision.

He shook his head as he lowered his arms. 'It wouldn't do me any good. You couldn't lie to save your life. And that's a compliment, by the way,' he said as she started to scowl, 'so there's no need to hit me again. I don't admire people who lie.'

'I'm sorry,' she said abruptly.

'No need to be. It was my fault. I shouldn't have teased you.' He started to gather the bits and pieces from the table.

'Where are you going now?'

'Back to my house to change, then down to the boat sheds at Chapman's Pool. But I'll look in again this afternoon before I go to see Harding. As you so rightly pointed out, I need to take a statement from you.' He paused. 'We'll talk about this in detail later, but did you hear anything before he appeared?'

'Like what?'

'Shale falling?'

She shook her head. 'All I remember is how quiet it was. That's why he gave me such a fright. One minute I was on my own, the next he was crouching on the ground in front of me like a rabid dog. It was really peculiar. I don't know what he thought he was doing, but there's a lot of scrub vegetation and bushes around there, so I think he must have heard me coming and ducked down to hide.'

He nodded. 'What about his clothes? Were they wet?'

'No.'

'Dirty?'

'You mean before he bled all over them?'

'Yes.'

She shook her head again. 'I remember thinking that he hadn't shaved, but I don't remember thinking he was dirty.'

He stacked the cling film bundle, notes, and phone into a pile and lifted them off the table. 'Okay. That's great. I'll take a statement this afternoon.' He held her gaze for a moment. 'You'll be all right,' he told her. 'Harding's not going to come back.'

'He wouldn't dare,' she said, clenching her fists.

'Not if he has any sense,' murmured Ingram, moving out of her range.

'Do you have any brandy in your house?'

The switch was so abrupt that he needed time to consider. 'Ye-es,' he murmured cautiously, fearing another assault if he dared to question why she was asking. He suspected four years of angry frustration had gone into her punch, and he wished she'd chosen Harding for target practice instead of himself.

'Can you lend me some?'

'Sure. I'll drop it in on my way back to Chapman's Pool.'

'If you give me a moment to tell Ma where I'm going, I'll come with you. I can walk back.'

'Won't she miss you?'

'Not for an hour or so. The painkillers have made her sleepy.'

Bertie was lying on the doorstep in the sunshine as Ingram drew the Jeep to a halt beside his gate. Maggie had never been inside Nick's little house, but she had always resented the neatness of his garden. It was like a reproach to all his less organized neighbors with its beautifully clipped privet hedges and regimented hydrangeas and roses in serried ranks before the yellow-stone walls of the house. She often wondered where he found the time to weed and hoe when he spent most of his free hours on his boat, and in her more critical moments put it down to the fact that he was boring and compartmentalized his life according to some sensible duty roster.