Before he returned to Winfrith, Detective Superintendent Carpenter took Ingram aside for a briefing. He had spent much of the last hour with his telephone clamped to his ear, while the PC and the two DCs continued to dig into the shale slide and scour the shoreline in a fruitless search for further evidence. He had watched their efforts through thoughtful eyes while jotting the various pieces of information that came through to him into his notebook. He was unsurprised by their failure to find anything else. The sea, as he had learned from the coastguards' descriptions of how bodies vanished without a trace and were never seen again, was a friend to murderers.
'Harding's being discharged from the Poole hospital at five,' he told the constable, 'but I'm not ready to talk to him yet. I need to see the Frenchman's video and question Tony Bridges before I go anywhere near him.' He clapped the tall man on the back. 'You were right about the lockup, by the way. He's been using a garage near the Lymington yacht club. John Galbraith's on his way there now to have a look at it. What I need you to do, lad, is nail our friend Steve for the assault on Miss Jenner and hold him on ice till tomorrow morning. Keep it simple-make sure he thinks he's only being arrested for the assault. Can you do that?'
'Not until I've taken a statement from Miss Jenner, sir.'
Carpenter looked at his watch. 'You've got two and a half hours. Pin her to her story. I don't want her weaseling out because she doesn't want to get involved.'
'I can't force her, sir.'
'No one's asking you to,' said Carpenter irritably.
'And if she isn't as amenable as you hope?'
'Then use some charm,' said the superintendent, thrusting his frown under Ingram's nose. 'I find it works wonders.'
'The house belongs to my grandfather,' said Bridges, directing Galbraith to pass the yacht club and take the road to the right, which was lined with pleasant detached houses set back behind low hedges. It was at the wealthier end of town, not far from where the Sumners lived, in Rope Walk, and Galbraith realized that Kate must have passed Tony's grandfather's house whenever she walked into town. He realized, too, that Tony must come from a 'good' family, and he wondered how they viewed their rebellious offspring and if they ever visited his shambolic establishment. 'Grandpa lives on his own,' Tony went on. 'He can't see to drive anymore, so he lends me the garage to store my rib.' He indicated an entrance a hundred yards farther on. 'In here. Steve's stuff is at the back.' He glanced at the DI as they drew to a halt in the small driveway. 'Steve and I have the only keys.'
'Is that important?'
Bridges nodded. 'Grandpa hasn't a clue what's in there.'
'It won't help him if it's drugs,' said Galbraith unemotionally, opening his door. 'You'll all be for the high jump, never mind how blind, deaf, or dumb any of you are.'
'No drugs,' said Bridges firmly. 'We never deal.'
Galbraith shook his head in cynical disbelief. 'You couldn't afford to smoke the amount you do without dealing,' he said in a tone that brooked no disagreement. 'It's a fact of life. A teacher's salary couldn't fund a habit like yours.' The garage was detached from the house and set back twenty yards from it. Galbraith stood looking at it for a moment before glancing up the road toward the turning in to Rope Walk. 'Who comes here more?' he asked idly. 'You or Steve?'
'Me,' said the young man readily enough. 'I take my rib out two or three times a week. Steve just uses it for storage.'
Galbraith gestured toward the garage. 'Lead the way.' As they walked toward it, he caught the twitch of a curtain in one of the downstairs windows, and he wondered if Grandpa Bridges was quite as ignorant about what went into his garage as Tony claimed. The old, he thought, were a great deal more curious than the young. He stood back while the young man unlocked the double doors and pulled them wide. The entire front was taken up with a twelve-foot orange rib on a trailer, but when Tony pulled it out, an array of imported but clearly illicit goods was revealed at the back-neat stacks of cardboard boxes with vin de table stenciled prominently on them, cases of Stella Artois lager, wrapped in plastic, and shelves covered in multipack cartons of cigarettes. Well, well, thought Galbraith with mild amusement, did Tony really expect him to believe that good old-fashioned smuggling of 'legal' contraband was the worst crime either he or his friend had ever been engaged in? The screed floor interested him more. It was still showing signs of dampness where someone had hosed it down, and he wondered what had been washed away in the process.
'What's he trying to do?' he asked. 'Stock an entire off-license? He's going to have a job persuading Customs and Excise this is for his own use.'
'It's not that bad,' protested Bridges. 'Listen, the guys in Dover bring in more than this every day via the ferries. They're coining it in. It's a stupid law. I mean, if the government can't get its act together to bring down the duty on liquor and cigarettes to the same level as the rest of Europe, then of course guys like Steve are going to do a bit of smuggling. Stands to reason. Everyone does it. You sail to France and you're tempted, simple as that.'
'And you end up in jail when you get busted. Simple as that,' said the DI sardonically. 'Who's funding him? You?'
Bridges shook his head. 'He's got a contact in London who buys it off him.'
'Is that where he takes it from here?'
'He borrows a mate's van and ships it up about once every two months.'
Galbraith traced a line in the dust on top of an opened box lid, then idly flipped it back. The bottoms of all the boxes in contact with the floor showed a tidemark where water had saturated them. 'How does he get it ashore from his boat?' he asked, lifting out a bottle of red table wine and reading the label. 'Presumably he doesn't bring it in by dinghy, or someone would have noticed.'
'As long as it doesn't look like a case of wine there isn't a problem.'
'What
The young man shrugged. 'Something ordinary. Rubbish bags, dirty laundry, duvets. If he sticks a dozen bottles into socks to stop them rattling, then packs them in his rucksack, no one gives him a second glance. They're used to him transporting stuff to and from his boat-he's been working on it long enough. Other times he moors up to a pontoon and uses a marina trolley. People pile all sorts of things into them at the end of a weekend. I mean if you shove a few cases of Stella Artois down a sleeping bag, who's going to notice? More to the point, who's going to care? Everyone stocks up at the hypermarkets in France before they come home.'
