had been about. It wasn't hard to guess that the two boys had found the person who had been winched off the beach by helicopter, nor that the handsome Englishman had reported it to the police for them, but she was curious about why he had reemerged on the hillside half an hour after the police car's departure to retrieve the rucksack he'd abandoned there. She had watched him take out some binoculars and scan the bay and the cliffs before making his way down to the foreshore beyond the boat sheds. She had filmed him for several minutes, staring out to sea, but she was no wiser, having reached his vantage point above Chapman's Pool, than she'd been before, and thoroughly bored, she abandoned the puzzle.
It would be another five days before her father came across the tape and humiliated her in front of the English police...
At six o'clock that evening the Fairline Squadron weighed anchor and motored gently out of Chapman's Pool in the direction of St. Alban's Head. Two languid girls sat on either side of their father on the flying bridge, while his latest companion sat, alone and excluded, on the seat behind them. Once clear of the shallow waters at the mouth of the bay, the boat roared to full power and made off at twenty-five knots on the return journey to Poole, carving a V-shaped wake out of the flat sea behind it.
Heat and alcohol had made them all soporific, particularly the father, who had overexerted himself in his efforts to please his daughters, and after setting the autopilot he appointed the elder one lookout before closing his eyes. He could feel the daggers of his girlfriend's fury carving away at his back, and with a stifled sigh, wished he'd had the sense to leave her behind. She was the latest in a string of what his daughters called his 'bimbos,' and as usual, they had set out to trample on the fragile shoots of his new relationship. Life, he thought resentfully, was bloody...
'Watch out, Dad!' his daughter screamed in sudden alarm. 'We're heading straight for a rock.'
The man's heart thudded against his chest as he wrenched the wheel violently, slewing the boat to starboard, and what his daughter had thought was a rock slid past on the port side to dance in the boisterous wake. 'I'm too old for all of this,' he said shakily, steering his three-hundred-thousand-pound boat back on to course and mentally checking the current state of his insurance. 'What the hell was it? It can't have been a rock. There are no rocks out here.'
The two youngsters, eyes watering, squinted into the burning sun to make out the black, bobbing shape behind them. 'It looks like one of those big oil drums,' said the elder.
'Jesus wept,' growled her father. 'Whoever let that wash overboard deserves to be shot. It could have ripped us open if we'd hit it.'
His girlfriend, still twisted around, thought it looked more like an upturned dinghy but was reluctant to voice an opinion for fear of attracting any more of his beastly daughters' derision. She'd had a bucketful already that day and heartily wished she had never agreed to come out with them.
'I bumped into Nick Ingram this morning,' said Maggie as she made a pot of tea in her mother's kitchen at Broxton House.
It had been a beautiful room once, lined with old oak dressers, each one piled with copper pans and ornate crockery, and with an eight-foot-long, seventeenth-century refectory table down its middle. Now it was merely drab. Everything worth selling had been sold. Cheap white wall and floor units had replaced the wooden dressers, and a molded plastic excrescence from the garden stood where the monks' table had reigned resplendent. It wouldn't be so bad, Maggie often thought, if the room was cleaned occasionally, but her mother's arthritis and her own terminal exhaustion from trying to make money out of horses meant that cleanliness had long since gone the way of godliness. If God was in his heaven and all was right with the world, then he had a peculiar blind spot when it came to Broxton House. Maggie would have cut her losses and moved away long ago if only her mother had agreed to do the same. Guilt enslaved her. Now she lived in a flat over the stables on the other side of the garden and made only intermittent visits to the house. Its awful emptiness was too obvious a reminder that her mother's poverty was her fault.
'I took Jasper down to Chapman's Pool. A woman drowned in Egmont Bight, and Nick had to guide the helicopter in to pick up the body.'
'A tourist, I suppose?'
'Presumably,' said Maggie, handing her a cup. 'Nick would have said if it was someone local.'
'Typical!' snorted Celia crossly. 'So Dorset will foot the bill for the helicopter because some inept creature from another county never learned to swim properly. I've a good mind to withhold my taxes.'
'You usually do,' said Maggie, thinking of the final reminders that littered the desk in the drawing room.
Her mother ignored the remark. 'How was Nick?'
'Hot,' said her daughter, remembering how red-faced he had been when he returned to the car, 'and not in the best of moods.' She stared into her tea, screwing up the courage to address the thorny issue of money, or more accurately lack of money, coming into the riding and livery business she ran from the Broxton House stableyard. 'We need to talk about the stables,' she said abruptly.
Celia refused to be drawn. 'You wouldn't have been in a good mood either if you'd just seen a drowned body.' Her tone became conversational as a prelude to a series of anecdotes. 'I remember seeing one floating down the Ganges when I was staying with my parents in India. It was the summer holidays. I think I was about fifteen at the time. It was a horrible thing, gave me nightmares for weeks. My mother said...'
Maggie stopped listening and fixed instead on a long black hair growing out of her mother's chin which needed plucking. It bristled aggressively as she spoke, like one of Bertie's whiskers, but they'd never had the kind of relationship that meant Maggie could tell her about it. Celia, at sixty-three, was still a good-looking woman with the same dark brown hair as her daughter, touched up from time to time with Harmony color rinses, but the worry of their straitened circumstances had taken a heavy toll in the deep lines around her mouth and eyes.
When she finally drew breath, Maggie reverted immediately to the subject of the stables. 'I've been totting up last month's receipts,' she said, 'and we're about two hundred quid short. Did you let Mary Spencer-Graham off paying again?'
Celia's mouth thinned. 'If I did it's my affair.'
'No it's not, Ma,' said Maggie with a sigh. 'We can't afford to be charitable. If Mary doesn't pay, then we can't look after her horse. It's as simple as that. I wouldn't mind so much if we weren't already charging her the absolute minimum, but the fees barely cover Moondust's fodder. You really must be a bit tougher with her.'
'How can I? She's almost as badly off as we are, and it's our fault.'
Maggie shook her head. 'That's not true. She lost ten thousand pounds, peanuts compared with what we lost, but she knows she only has to turn on the waterworks for half a second and you fall for it every time.' She gestured impatiently toward the hall and the drawing room beyond. 'We can't pay the bills if we don't collect the money, which means we either decide to hand everything over now to Matthew and go and live in a council flat, or you go
