'What did you do with it?'
'Kept it in my car.'
'Why?'
'To look at ... remember...' He rested his head against the back of the chair and stared at the ceiling. 'Have something to hate, I suppose.'
'Did you tackle Kate about it?'
'There was no point. She'd have lied.'
'So what did you do?'
'Nothing,' he said simply. 'Went on as if nothing had happened. Stayed late at work ... sat in my study ... avoided her ... I couldn't think, you see. I kept wondering if the baby was mine.' He turned to look at the policeman. 'Was it?'
Galbraith leaned forward and clamped his hands between his knees. 'The pathologist estimated the fetus at fourteen weeks, making conception early May, but Kate's affair with Harding finished at the end of March. I can ask the pathologist to run a DNA test if you want absolute proof, but I don't think there's any doubt Kate was carrying your son. She didn't sleep around, William.' He paused to let the information sink in. 'But there's no doubt Steven Harding accused her wrongly of harassment. Yes, she lashed out once in a moment of pique, but probably only because she was annoyed with herself for having given in to him. The real culprit was a friend of Harding's. Kate rejected him, so he used her as a shield for his own revenge without ever considering the sort of danger he might be putting her into.'
'I never thought he'd do anything to her ... Jesus! Do you think I wanted her killed? She was a sad person ... lonely ... boring ... God, if she had anything going for her she kept it well hidden ... Look, I know this sounds bad-I'm not proud of it now-but I found it funny the way Steve reacted. He was shit-scared of her. That stuff about dodging around corners was all true. He thought she was going to attack him in the middle of the street if she managed to catch him unawares. He kept talking about the movie Fatal Attraction, and saying Michael Douglas' mistake was not to let the Glenn Close character die when she tried to kill herself.'
'Why didn't you tell us this before?' Carpenter had asked.
'Because you have to believe someone's guilty before you get yourself into trouble. In a million years I wouldn't have thought Steve had anything to do with it. He doesn't go in for violence.'
'Try violation instead,' Carpenter had said. 'Offhand, can you think of anything or anyone your friend has not violated? Hospitality ... friendship ... marriage ... women ... young girls ... every bloody law you can think of ... Did it never occur to you, Tony, that someone so intensely sociopathic as Steven Harding, so careless oj other people's sensibilities, might represent a danger to a woman he thought had been terrorizing him?'
Sumner continued to stare at the ceiling, as if answers lay somewhere within its white surface. 'How did he get her onto his boat if she wasn't interested anymore?' he asked flatly. 'You said no one had seen her with him after he spoke to her outside Tesco's.'
She smiled at me as if nothing had happened,' Harding had told them, 'asked me how I was and how the acting was going. I said she had a bloody nerve even talking to me after what she 'd done, and she just laughed and told me to grow up. 'You did me a favor,' she said. 'You taught me to appreciate William, and if I don't hold any grudges, why should you?' I told her she knew fucking well why I held a grudge, so she started to look cross. 'It was payment in kind,' she said. 'You were crap.' Then she walked away. I think that's what made me angry-I hate it when people walk away from me-but I knew the woman in Tesco's was watching, so I crossed High Street and went down behind the market stalls on the other side of the road, watching her. All I planned to do was have it out with her, tell her she was lucky I hadn't gone to the police...'
'Saturday's market day in Lymington High Street,' said Galbraith, 'so the place was packed with visitors from outside. People don't notice things in a crowd. He followed her at a distance, waiting for her to turn toward home again.'
'She looked pretty angry, so I think I must have upset her. She turned down Captain's Row, so I knew she was probably going home. I gave her a chance, you know. I thought if she took the top road I'd let her go, but if she took the bottom road past the yacht club and Tony's garage I'd teach her a lesson...'
'He has the use of a garage about two hundred yards from your house,' Galbraith went on. 'He caught up with her as she was passing it and persuaded her and Hannah to go inside. She'd been in several times before with Harding's friend Tony Bridges, so it obviously didn't occur to her there was anything to worry about.'
'Women are such stupid bitches. They'll fall for anything as long as a bloke sounds sincere. All I had to do was tell her I was sorry and squeeze a couple of tears out-I'm an actor so I'm good at that-and she was all smiles again and said, no, she was sorry, she hadn't meant to be cruel and couldn't we let bygones be bygones and stay friends ? So I said, sure, and why didn't I give her some champagne out of Tony's garage to show there were no hard feelings? You can drink it with William, I said, as long as you don't tell him it came from me. If there'd been anyone in the street or if old Mr. Bridges had been at his curtains, I wouldn't have done it. But it was so bloody easy. Once I'd closed the garage doors, I knew I could do anything I wanted...'
'You need to remember how little she knew about him, William. According to Harding himself, her entire knowledge of him came from two months of constant flattery and attention while he wanted to get her into bed, a brief period of unsatisfactory lovemaking on both sides which resulted in him giving her the cold shoulder and her taking petty revenge with Hannah's nappy on his cabin sheets, then four months of mutual avoidance. As far as she was concerned, it was ancient history. She didn't know his car was being daubed with feces, didn't know he'd approached you and told you to warn her off, so when she accepted a glass of champagne in the garage, she genuinely thought it was the peace offering he said it was.'
'If she hadn't told me William was away for the weekend I wouldn't have gone through with it, but you kind of get the feeling that some things are meant to happen. It was her fault really. She kept on about how she had nothing to go home for, so I offered her a drink. If I'm honest, I'd say she was up for it. You could tell she was pleased as bloody punch to find herself alone with me. Hannah wasn't a problem. She's always liked me. I'm about the only person, other than her mother, who could pick her up without her screaming...'
'He put her to sleep, using a benzodiazepine hypnotic drug called Rohypnol, which he dissolved in the champagne. It's been called the date-rape drug because it's easy to give to a woman without her knowing. It's powerful enough to keep her out for six to ten hours, and in the cases reported so far, women claim intermittent periods of consciousness when they know what's happening to them but an inability to do anything about it. We understand there are moves to change it to a schedule-three controlled drug in 1998, add a blue dye to it, and make it harder to dissolve, but at the moment it's open to abuse.'
'Tony keeps his drug supplies in the garage, or did until he heard you'd arrested me, then he went
