Breaker

Galbraith's description of Harding's boat, but she didn't want to be rude. It was as she had predicted, insufferably clean, and insufferably boring as well. There was nothing to say this house belonged to an interesting personality, just yards of pallid wall, pallid carpet, pallid curtains, and pallid upholstery, broken occasionally by an ornament on a shelf. It never occurred to her that he was tied to the house through his job, but even if it had, she would still have expected splashes of towering individualism among the uniformity.

He laughed. 'Do I get the impression you don't like it?'

'No, I do. It's-er-'

'Twee?' he suggested.

'Yes.'

'I made it when I was twelve.' He flexed his huge fingers under her nose. 'I couldn't do it now.' He straightened his tie. 'How's the brandy?'

'Very good.' She dropped into a chair. 'Does exactly what it's supposed to do. Hits the spot.'

He took her empty glass. 'When did you last drink alcohol?'

'Four years ago.'

'Shall I give you a lift home?'

'No.' She closed her eyes. 'I'm going to sleep.'

'I'll look in on your mother on my way back from Chapman's Pool,' he promised her, shrugging on his jacket. 'Meanwhile, don't encourage your dog to sit on my sofa. It's bad for both your characters.'

'What will happen if I do?'

'The same thing that happened to Bertie when he wiped his bottom on my carpet.'

Despite another day of brilliant sunshine, Chapman's Pool was empty. The southwesterly breeze had created an unpleasant swell, and nothing was more guaranteed to discourage visitors than the likelihood of being sick over their lunch. Carpenter and two detective constables followed Ingram away from the boat sheds toward an area marked out on the rocky shore with pieces of driftwood.

'We won't know until we see the video, of course,' said Carpenter, taking his bearings from the description the Dartmouth sergeant had given of where Harding had been sitting, 'but it looks about right. He was certainly on this side of the bay.' They were standing on a slab of rock at the shoreline, and he touched a small pebble cairn with the toe of his shoe. 'And this is where you found the T-shirt?'

Ingram nodded as he squatted down and put his hand in the water that lapped against the base of the rock. 'But it was well and truly wedged. A gull had a go at getting it out, and failed, and I was saturated doing my retrieval act.'

'Is that important?'

'Harding was dry as a bone when I saw him, so it can't have been the T-shirt he came back for. I think that's been here for days.'

'Mmm.' Carpenter pondered for a moment. 'Does fabric easily get wedged between rocks?'

Ingram shrugged. 'Anything can get wedged if a crab takes a fancy to it.'

'Mmm,' said Carpenter again. 'All right. Where's this rucksack?'

'It's only a guess, sir, and a bit of a flaky one at that,' said Ingram standing up.

'I'm listening.'

'Okay, well, I've been puzzling about the ruddy thing for days. He obviously didn't want it anywhere near a policeman, or he'd have brought it down to the boat sheds on Sunday. By the same token it wasn't on his boat when you searched it-or not in my opinion, anyway-and that suggests to me that it's incriminating in some way and he needed to get rid of it.'

'I think you're right,' said Carpenter. 'Harding wants us to believe he was carrying the black one we found on his boat, but the Dartmouth sergeant described the one on the video as green. So what's he done with it, eh? And what's he trying to hide?'

'It depends on whether the contents were valuable to him. If they weren't, then he'll have dropped it in the ocean on his way back to Lymington. If they were, he'll have left it somewhere accessible but not too obvious.' Ingram shielded his eyes from the sun and pointed toward the slope behind them. 'There's been a mini-avalanche up there,' he said. 'I noticed it because it's just to the left of where Miss Jenner said Harding appeared in front of her. Shale's notoriously unstable-which is why these cliffs are covered in warnings-and it looks to me as though that fall's fairly recent.'

Carpenter followed his gaze. 'You think the rucksack's under it?'

'Put it this way, sir, I can't think of a quicker or more convenient way of burying something than to send an avalanche of shale over the top of it. It wouldn't be hard to do. Kick out a loose rock, and hey presto, you've got a convenient slide of loose cliff pouring over whatever it is you want to hide. No one's going to notice it. Slides like that happen every day. The Spender brothers set one off when they dropped their father's binoculars, and I can't help feeling that might have given Harding the idea.'

'Meaning he did it on Sunday?'

Ingram nodded.

'And came back this morning to make sure it hadn't been disturbed?'

'I suspect it's more likely he intended to retrieve it, sir.'

Carpenter brought his ferocious scowl to bear on the constable. 'Then why wasn't he carrying it when you saw him?'

'Because the shale's dried in the sunshine and become impacted. I think he was about to go looking for a spade when he ran into Miss Jenner by accident.'