Breaker

He dropped his head in misery. 'Fuck off.'

'It must drive you up the wall the way Steve keeps stealing your girlfriends.'

*24*

Maggie lowered her aching arms and tapped pointedly on her watch when Nick shouldered his way through the scullery door, carrying an aluminum stepladder. She was perched precariously on a garden chair on top of the kitchen table, her hair sticky with cobwebs, her rolled-up sleeves saturated with water. 'What sort of time do you call this?' she demanded. 'It's a quarter to ten, and I have to be up at five o'clock tomorrow morning to see to the horses.'

'Good God, woman!' he declared plaintively. 'A night without sleep won't kill you. Live dangerously and see how you enjoy it.'

'I expected you hours ago.'

'Then don't marry a policeman,' he said, setting up his ladder under the uncleaned part of the ceiling.

'Chance'd be a fine thing.'

He grinned up at her. 'You mean you'd contemplate it?'

'Absolutely not,' she said, as if offering him a challenge to even try to chat her up. 'All I meant was that no policeman has ever asked me.'

'He wouldn't dare.' He opened the cupboard under the sink and hunkered down to inspect it for cleaning implements and buckets. She was above him-like the rare occasions when she met him on horseback-and she felt an awful temptation to take advantage of the fact by dripping water onto the back of his neck. 'Don't even think about it,' he said, without looking up, 'or I'll leave you to do the whole bloody lot on your own.'

She chose to ignore him, preferring dignity to humiliation. 'How did you get on?' she asked, stepping down from the chair to dunk her sponge in the bucket on the table.

'Rather well.'

'I thought you must have done. Your tail's wagging.' She climbed back onto the chair. 'What did Steve say?'

'You mean apart from agreeing with everything in your statement?'

'Yes.'

'He told me what he was doing at Chapman's Pool on Sunday.' He looked up at her. 'He's a complete idiot, but I don't think he's a rapist or a murderer.'

'So you were wrong about him?'

'Probably.'

'Good. It's bad for your character to have everything your own way. What about pedophile?'

'It depends on your definition of pedophilia.' He swung forward a chair and straddled it, resting his elbows along the back, content to watch her work. 'He's besotted with a fifteen-year-old girl who's so unhappy at home she keeps threatening to kill herself. She's an absolute stunner apparently, nearly six feet tall, looks twenty-five, ought to be a supermodel, and turns heads wherever she goes. Her parents are separated and fight like cat and dog-her mother's jealous of her-her father has a string of bimbos-she's four months pregnant by Steve-refuses to have an abortion-weeps all over his manly bosom every time she sees him'-he lifted a sardonic eyebrow-'which is probably why he finds her attractive-and is so desperate to have the baby and so desperate to be loved that she's twice tried to slit her wrists. Steve's solution to all this was to whisk her off to France in Crazy Daze, where they could live'-another sardonic lift of an eyebrow-'love's young dream without her parents having any idea where she'd gone or who she'd gone with.'

Maggie chuckled. 'I told you he was a good Samaritan.'

'Bluebeard, more like. She's fifteen.'

'And looks twenty-five.'

'If you believe Steve.'

'Don't you?'

'Put it this way,' he said dispassionately, 'I wouldn't let him within half a mile of a daughter of mine. He's oversexed, deeply enamored with himself, and has the morals of an alleycat.'

'A bit like the weasel I married, in other words?' she asked dryly.

'No question about it.' He grinned up at her. 'But then I'm prejudiced, of course.'

There was a glint of amusement in her eyes. 'So what happened? He got sidetracked by Paul and Danny and the whole thing was deep-sixed?'

He nodded. 'He realized, when he had to identify himself, that there was no point going on with it and signaled to his girlfriend to abandon it. Since then, he's had one tearful conversation with her over his mobile on his way back to Lymington on Sunday night, and hasn't been able to talk to her since because he's either been under arrest or separated from his phone. The rule is, she always calls him, and as he hasn't heard from her he's terrified she's killed herself.'

'Is it true?'

'No. One of the messages on his mobile was from her.'