'What's that got to do with anything?'
'Live now, pay later. What goes around, comes around. No one promised you a rose garden.'
Harding turned to stare out of the passenger window, offering a cold shoulder to what he clearly felt was a patronizing police attitude. 'I don't know what the fuck you're talking about.'
Ingram smiled slightly. 'I know you don't.' He glanced sideways. 'What were you doing on Emmetts Hill this morning?'
'Just walking.'
There was a moment's silence before Ingram gave a snort of laughter. 'Is that the best you can do?'
'It's the truth,' he said.
'Like hell it is. You've had all day to work this one out, but by God, if that's the only explanation you've been able to come up with, you must have a very low opinion of policemen.'
The young man turned back to him with an engaging smile. 'I do.'
'Then we'll have to see if we can change your mind.' Ingram's smile was almost as engaging. 'Won't we?'
Gregory Freemantle was pouring himself a drink in the front room of his flat in Poole when his girlfriend showed in two detectives. The atmosphere was thick enough to cut with a knife, and it was obvious to both policemen that they had walked in on a humdinger of a row. 'DS Campbell and DC Langham,' she said curtly. 'They want to talk to you.'
Freemantle was a Peter Stringfellow lookalike, an aging playboy with straggling blond hair and the beginnings of desperation in the sagging lines around his eyes and chin. 'Oh God,' he groaned, 'you're not taking her seriously about that bloody oil drum, are you? She doesn't know the first thing about sailing'-he paused to consider-'or children, for that matter, but it doesn't stop her being lippy.' He raised one hand and worked his thumb and forefingers to mimic a mouth working.
He was the kind of man other men take against instinctively, and DS Campbell glanced sympathetically at the girlfriend. 'It wasn't an oil drum, sir, it was an upturned dinghy. And, yes, we took Miss Hale's information very seriously.'
Freemantle raised his glass in the woman's direction. 'Good one, Jenny.' His eyes were already showing alcohol levels well above average, but he still downed two fingers of neat whisky without blinking. 'What do you want?' he asked Campbell. He didn't invite them to sit down, merely turned back to the whisky bottle and poured himself another drink.
'We're trying to eliminate people from the Kate Sumner murder inquiry,' Campbell explained, 'and we're interested in everyone who was in Chapman's Pool on Sunday. We understand you were there on a Fairline Squadron.'
'You know I was. She's already told you.'
'Who was with you?'
'Jenny and my two daughters, Marie and Fliss. And it was a bloody nightmare, if you're interested. You buy a boat to keep everyone happy, and all they can do is snipe at each other. I'm going to sell the damn thing.' His drink-sodden eyes filled with self-pity. 'It's no fun going out on your own, and it's even less fun taking a menagerie of cats with you.'
'Was either of your daughters wearing a bikini and lying facedown on the bow between twelve thirty and one o'clock on Sunday, sir?'
'I don't know.'
'Does either of them have a boyfriend called Steven Harding?'
He shrugged indifferently.
'I'd be grateful for an answer, Mr. Freemantle.'
'Well, you're not going to get one, because I don't know and I don't care,' he said aggressively. 'I've had a bucketful of women today, and as far as I'm concerned the sooner they're all genetically engineered to behave like Stepford wives the better.' He raised his glass again. 'My wife serves me with notice that she intends to bankrupt my company in order to take three-quarters of what I'm worth. My fifteen-year-old daughter tells me she's pregnant and wants to run away to France with some longhaired git who fancies himself as an actor, and my girlfriend'-he lurched his glass in Jenny Hale's direction-'that one over there-tells me it's all my fault because I've waived my responsibilities as a husband and a father. So cheers! To men, eh!'
Campbell turned to the woman. 'Can you help us, Miss Hale?'
She looked questioningly toward Gregory, clearly seeking his support, but when he refused to meet her eyes, she gave a small shrug. 'Ah, well,' she said, 'I wasn't planning on hanging around after this evening anyway. Marie, the fifteen-year-old, was wearing a bikini and was sunbathing on the bow before lunch,' she told the two policemen. 'She lay on her tummy so that her father wouldn't see her bump, and she was signaling to her boyfriend, who was jerking off on the shore for her benefit. The rest of the time she wore a sarong to disguise the fact that she's pregnant. She has since told us that her boyfriend's name is Steve Harding and that he's an actor in London. I knew she was plotting something because she was hyped up from the moment we left Poole, and I realized it must be to do with the boy on the shore, because she became completely poisonous after he left and has been a nightmare ever since.' She sighed. 'That's what the row has been about. When she turned up today in one of her tantrums I told her father he should take some interest in what's really going on because it's been obvious to me for a while that she's not just pregnant but has been taking drugs as well. Now open war has broken out.'
'Is Marie still here?'
Jenny nodded. 'In the spare bedroom.'
'Where does she normally live?'
'In Lymington, with her mother and sister.'
'Do you know what she and her boyfriend were planning to do on Sunday?'
