Breaker

'Oh, for God's sake!' she said gruffly, pulling so hard on Bertie's ears that the poor animal furrowed his brow in pain. 'Don't you start feeling guilty, too.'

'Why not? If I'd been older and wiser I might have done my job better.'

With an uncharacteristic display of tenderness, she laid a hand on his shoulder. 'I have enough trouble coping with my own guilt without carrying yours and Maggie's as well. According to Maggie, her father dropped dead because she was shouting at him. My recollection is that he threw a two-week tantrum then dropped dead after a drinking bout in his study. If my son is to be believed, he died of a broken heart because Maggie and I treated him like a cipher in his own house.' She sighed. 'The truth is Keith was a chronic alcoholic with a history of heart disease who could have died at any moment, although clearly Martin's shenanigans didn't help. And it wasn't as though it was Keith's money that was stolen. It was mine. My father left me ten thousand in his will twenty years ago, and I managed to work it up to over a hundred thousand by playing the stock market.' She frowned in irritation at the memory before giving Ingram's shoulder a sudden sharp rap. 'This is ridiculous. When all's said and done, the only person to blame is Robert Healey, and I refuse to let anyone else take responsibility.'

'Does that include you and Maggie, or are you going to go on wearing sackcloth and ashes so that the rest of us feel guilty by association?'

She regarded him thoughtfully for a moment. 'I was right about you yesterday,' she said. 'You are a very provoking young man.' She flapped a hand toward the hall. 'Go away and make yourself useful. Help my daughter.'

'She's doing a fine job on her own. I'll probably just stand back and watch.'

'I wasn't talking about painting the kitchen,' Celia retorted.

'Neither was I, but the answer's still the same.'

She peered at him blankly for a moment, then gave a throaty chuckle. 'On the principle that everything comes to him who waits?'

'It's worked up till now,' he said, reaching for one of her hands and holding it lightly. 'You're a gutsy lady, Mrs. J. I always wanted to know you better.'

'Oh, for goodness sake, get on with you!' she said, smacking him away. 'I'm beginning to think Robert Healey was a novice compared with you.' She wagged a finger at him. 'And don't call me Mrs. J. It's appallingly infra dig and makes me sound like a cleaner.' She closed her eyes and took a deep breath as if she were about to bestow the crown jewels on him. 'You may call me Celia.'

'...I couldn 't think properly, that was the trouble ... if she'd just listened to me instead of shouting all the time ... I suppose what surprised me was how strong she was ... I wouldn 't have broken her fingers otherwise ... it was easy ... they were tiny, like little wishbones, but it's not the kind of thing a man wants to do ... put it this way, I'm not proud of it...'

Nick found Maggie in the kitchen, arms crossed, staring out of the window at the horses in the drought-starved paddock. The ceiling had received a coat of brilliant white emulsion but none of the walls had yet been touched, and the paint roller had been abandoned to harden in the tray. 'Look at those poor brutes,' she said. 'I think I'm going to phone the RSPCA and have their beastly owners prosecuted.'

He knew her too well. 'What's really bugging you?'

She swung around defiantly. 'I heard it all,' she said. 'I was listening outside the door. I suppose you thought you were being clever?'

'In what way?'

'Martin took the trouble to seduce Mother before he seduced me,' she said. 'At the time I was impressed by his tactics. Afterward, I decided it was the one thing that should have warned me he was a cheat and a liar.'

'Perhaps he found her easier to get on with,' Nick suggested mildly. 'She's good news, your ma. And, for the record, I have no intention of seducing you. It'd be like fighting my way through half a mile of razor wire-painful, unrewarding, and bloody hard work.'

She favored him with a twisted smile. 'Well, don't expect me to seduce you,' she said tartly, 'because you'll be waiting forever if you do.'

He prized the paint roller out of the tray and held it under a running tap in the sink. 'Trust me. Nothing is further from my mind. I'm far too frightened of having my jaw broken.'

'Martin didn't have a problem.'

'No,' he said dryly. 'But then Martin wouldn't have had a problem with the Elephant Man as long as there was money in it. Does your mother have a scrubbing brush? We need to remove the hardened paint from this tray.'

'You'll have to look in the scullery.' She watched in an infuriated silence while he scrabbled around among four years' detritus in search of cleaning implements. 'You're such a hypocrite,' she said then. 'You've just spent half an hour boosting Ma's self-esteem by telling her how lovable she is, but I get compared with the Elephant Man.'

There was a muffled laugh. 'Martin didn't sleep with your mother.'

'What difference does that make?'

He emerged with a bucket full of impacted rags. 'I'm having trouble with the fact that you sleep with a dog,' he said severely. 'I'm buggered if I'll turn a blind eye to a weasel as well.'

There was a brief silence before Maggie gave a splutter of laughter. 'Bertie's in bed with Ma at the moment.'

'I know. He's about the worst guard dog I've ever encountered.' He took the bundle of cloth out of the bucket and held it up for inspection. 'What the hell is this?'

More laughter. 'They're my father's Y-fronts, you idiot. Ma uses them instead of J-cloths because they don't cost anything.'

'Oh, right.' He put the bucket in the sink to fill it with water. 'I can see the logic. He was a big fellow, your dad. There's enough material here to cover a three-piece suite.' He separated out a pair of striped boxer shorts. 'Or a deckchair,' he finished thoughtfully.

Her eyes narrowed suspiciously. 'Don't even think about using my father's underpants to seduce me, you