Breaker

'Still ... poor boy. You've locked him up again, haven't you? He must be worried sick. Couldn't you have let him talk to her?'

He wondered at the vagaries of human nature. He would have bet on her sympathies being with the girl. 'Not allowed.'

'Oh, come on,' she said crossly. 'That's just cruel.'

'No. Common sense. Personally, I wouldn't trust him farther than I could throw him. He's committed several crimes, don't forget. Assault on you, sex with an underage girl, conspiracy to abduct, not to mention gross indecency and committing lewd acts in public...'

'Oh my God! You haven't charged him with having an erection, have you?'

'Not yet.'

'You are cruel,' she said in disgust. 'It was obviously his girlfriend he was looking at through the binoculars. On that basis you should have arrested Martin every time he put his hand on my arse.'

'I couldn't,' he said seriously. 'You never objected, so it didn't constitute an assault.'

There was a twinkle in her eye. 'What happened to indecency?'

'I never caught him with his trousers down,' he said with regret. 'I did try, but he was too bloody quick every time.'

'Are you winding me up?'

'No,' he said. 'I'm courting you.'

Half asleep, Sandy Griffiths squinted at the luminous hands on her clock through gritty eyes, saw that it was three o'clock, and tried to remember if William had gone out earlier. Yet again, something had disturbed her intermittent dozing. She thought it was the front door closing, although she couldn't be sure if the sound had been real or if she'd dreamed it. She listened for footfalls on the stairs but, hearing only silence, stumbled out of bed and dragged on her dressing gown. Babies she thought she could probably cope with-a husband, never...

She switched on the landing lamp and pushed open Hannah's bedroom door. A wedge of light cut across the crib, and her alarm subsided immediately. The child sat in the concentrated immobility that seemed to be her nature, thumb in mouth, staring wide-eyed with her curiously intense gaze. If she recognized Griffiths, she didn't show it. Instead she looked through her as if her mind saw behind and beyond the woman images that had no basis in reality, and Griffiths realized she was fast asleep. It explained the crib and the locks on all the doors. They were there to protect a sleepwalker, she understood belatedly, not to deprive a conscious child of adventure.

From outside, muffled by closed doors, she heard the sound of a car starting, followed by gears engaging and the scrunch of tires on the drive. What the hell did the bloody man think he was doing now? she wondered. Did he seriously believe that abandoning his daughter in the early hours of the morning would endear him to social services? Or was that the whole point? Had he decided to ditch the responsibility once and for all?

Wearily she leaned against the doorjamb and studied Kate's blank-eyed, blond-haired replica with compassion and thought about what the doctor had said when he saw the smashed photographs in the fireplace. 'She's angry with her mother for deserting her ... it's a perfectly normal expression of grief ... get her father to cuddle her ... that's the best way to fill the gap...'

William Sumner's disappearance raised a few eyebrows in the incident room at Winfrith when Griffiths notified them of it, but little real interest. As so often in his life, he had ceased to matter. Instead, the spotlight turned on Beatrice 'Bibi' Gould, who when police knocked on hei parents' door at 7:00 a.m. on Saturday morning, inviting her back to Winfrith for further questioning, burst into tears and locked herself in the bathroom, refusing to come out. When threatened with immediate arrest for obstruction, and on the promise that her parents could accompany her, she finally agreed to come out. Her fear seemed out of proportion to the police request and when asked to explain it she said, 'Everyone is going to be angry with me.'

Following a brief appearance before magistrates on his assault charge, Steven Harding, too, was invited for further questioning. He was chauffeured by a yawning Nick Ingram, who took the opportunity to impart a few facts of life to the immature young man at his side. 'Just for the record, Steve, I'd break your legs if it was my fifteen-year-old daughter you'd got pregnant. As a matter of fact, I'd break your legs if you even laid a finger on her.'

Harding was unrepentant. 'Life's not like that anymore. You can't order girls to behave the way you want them to behave. They decide for themselves.'

'Watch my lips, Steve. I said it's your legs I'd be breaking, not my daughter's. Trust me, the day I find a twenty-four-year-old man besmirching a beautiful child of mine is the day that bastard will wish he'd kept his zip done up.' Out of the corner of his eye he watched words begin to form on Harding's lips. 'And don't tell me she wanted it just as much as you did,' he snarled, 'or I'd be tempted to break your arms as well. Any little jerk can persuade a vulnerable adolescent into bed with him as long as he promises to love her. It takes a man to give her time to learn if the promise is worth anything.'

Bibi Gould refused to have her father in the interview room with her, but begged for her mother to sit with her and hold her hand. On the other side of the table, Detective Superintendent Carpenter and DI Galbraith took her through her previous statement. She quailed visibly in front of Carpenter's frown, and he only had to say: 'We believe you've been lying to us, young lady,' for the floodgates of truth to open.

'Dad doesn't like me spending weekends at Tony's ... says I'm making myself cheap ... He'd have gone spare if he'd known I'd passed out. Tony said it was alcohol poisoning because I was vomiting blood, but I think it was the bad E that his friend sold him ... I was sick for hours after I came around ... Dad would have killed me if he'd known ... He hates Tony ... He thinks he's a bad influence.' She laid her head on her mother's shoulder and sobbed heartily.

'When was this?' asked Carpenter.

'Last weekend. We were going to this rave in Southampton so Tony got some E from this bloke he knows...' She faltered to a stop.

'Go on.'

'Everyone's going to be angry,' she wailed. 'Tony said why should we get his friend into trouble just because Steve's boat was in the wrong place.'

With considerable effort Carpenter managed to smooth his frown into something approaching fatherly kindness. 'We're not interested in Tony's friend, Bibi, we're only interested in getting an accurate picture of where everyone was last weekend. You've told us you're fond of Steven Harding,' he said disingenuously, 'and it will help Steve considerably if we can clear up some of the discrepancies around his story. You and Tony claimed you didn't see him Saturday because you went to a rave in Southampton. Is that true?'