Breaker

'Is that your best suggestion?'

'Yes, sir.'

'You're a bit of a suggestion-junky, aren't you, lad?' said Carpenter, his frown deepening. 'I've got DI Galbraith chasing over half of Hampshire on the back of the suggestions you faxed through last night.'

'It doesn't make them wrong, sir.'

'It doesn't make them right either. We had a team scouring this area on Monday, and they didn't find a damn thing.'

Ingram jerked his head toward the next bay. 'They were searching Egmont Bight, sir, and with respect, no one was interested in Steven Harding's movements at that point.'

'Mmm. These search teams cost money, lad, and I like a little more certainty before I commit taxpayers' money to guesses.' Carpenter stared out across the sea. 'I could understand him revisiting the scene of the crime to relive his excitement-it's the sort of thing a man like him might do-but you're saying he wasn't interested in that.'

Ingram had said no such thing, but he wasn't going to argue the point. For all he knew, the superintendent was right anyway. Maybe that's exactly what Harding had come back for. His own avalanche theory looked horribly insignificant beside the magnitude of a psychopath gloating over the scene of murder.

'Well?' demanded Carpenter.

The constable smiled self-consciously. 'I brought my own spade, sir,' he said. 'It's in the back of my Jeep.'

*21*

Galbraith stood up and walked across to one of the windows which overlooked the road. The crowd of earlier had dispersed, although a couple of elderly women still chatted on the pavement, glancing occasionally toward Langton Cottage. He watched them for several minutes in silence, envying the normality of their lives. How often did they have to listen to the dirty little secrets of murder suspects? Sometimes, when he heard the confessions of men like Sumner, he thought of himself in the role of a priest offering a kind of benediction merely by listening, but he had neither the authority nor the desire to forgive sins and invariably felt diminished by being the recipient of their furtive confidences.

He turned to face the man. 'So a more accurate description of your marriage would be to say it was a form of sexual slavery? Kate was so desperate to make sure her daughter grew up in the sort of security she herself never enjoyed that you were able to blackmail her?'

'I said she would have done it, not that she did or that I ever asked her to.' Triumph crept stealthily into Sumner's eyes as if he had won an important point. 'There's no median way with you, is there? Half an hour ago you were treating me like a cretin because you thought Kate had suckered me into marrying her. Now you're accusing me of sexual slavery because I got so tired of her lies about Hannah that I pointed out-very mildly, as a matter of fact-that I knew the truth. Why would I buy her this house if she had no say in the relationship? You said yourself I was better off in Chichester.'

'I don't know. Tell me.'

'Because I loved her.'

Impatiently, Galbraith shook his head. 'You describe your marriage as a war zone, then expect me to swallow garbage like that. What was the real reason?'

'That was the real reason. I loved my wife, and I'd have given her whatever she wanted.'

'At the same time as blackmailing her into giving you blow jobs whenever you fancied it?' The atmosphere in the room was stifling, and he felt himself grow cruel in response to the cruelty of Kate and William's marriage. He couldn't rid himself of memories of the tiny pregnant woman on the pathologist's slab and Dr. Warner's casual raising of her hand in order to shake it to and fro in convincing demonstration that the fingers were broken. The noise of grating bone had lodged in Galbraith's head like a maggot, and his dreams were of charnel houses. 'You see, I can't make up my mind whether you loved or hated her. Or maybe it was a bit of both? A love/hate relationship that turned sour?'

Sumner shook his head. He looked defeated suddenly, as if whatever game he was playing was no longer worth the candle. Galbraith wished he understood what William was trying to achieve through his answers, and studied the man in perplexity. William was either extremely frank or extremely skillful at clouding an issue. On the whole he gave the impression of honesty, and it occurred to Galbraith that, in a ham-fisted way, he was trying to demonstrate that his wife was the sort of woman who could easily have driven a man to rape her. He remembered what James Purdy had said about Kate. 'No one has ever done to me what Kate did that night ... It's the sort of thing most men dream of ... I can only describe Kate as a fever in the blood...'

'Did she love you, William?'

'I don't know. I never asked her.'

'Because you were afraid she'd say no?'

'The opposite. I knew she'd say yes.'

'And you didn't want her to lie to you?'

The man nodded.

'I don't like being lied to,' murmured Galbraith, his eyes fixing on Sumner's. 'It means the other person assumes you're so stupid you'll believe anything they say. Did she lie to you about having an affair?'

'She wasn't having an affair.'

'She certainly visited Steven Harding on board his boat,' Galbraith pointed out. 'Her fingerprints are all over it.