"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 in and cleared the whole lot out. He'd taken the Rohypnol off his granddad when the poor old bugger kept falling asleep during the daytime. He found him in the kitchen once with the gas going full blast because he'd nodded off before he had time to put a match to it. Tony was going to chuck the Rohypnol out but I told him it could do him some good with Bibi so he kept it. It worked like a treat on Kate. She went out like a light. The only problem was, she let Hannah drink some of the champagne as well, and when Hannah went out she fell over backward with her eyes wide open. I thought she was dead..."

"He's very unclear what he was intending to do to Kate. He talks about teaching her a lesson but whether the intention was always to rape her then kill her, he can't or won't say."

"I wasn't going to hurt Kate, just give her something to think about. She'd been pissing me off with the crap thing, and it had been really bugging me. Still, I had to have a rethink when Hannah keeled over. That was pretty frightening, you know. I mean, killing a kid, even if it was an accident, is heavy stuff. I thought about leaving them both there while I scarpered to France with Marie, but I was afraid Tony might find them before I met up with her, and I'd already told him I was going to Poole for the weekend. I guess it was the fact that Kate was so small that made me think about taking them both with me..."

"He took them on board under everyone's noses," said Galbraith. "Just motored Crazy Daze into one of the visitors' pontoons near the yacht club and carried Kate on in the canvas holdall that takes his dinghy when it's not in use. They're substantial items, apparently, big enough to take eight feet of collapsed rubber, plus the seat and the floorboarding, and he says he had no trouble folding Kate into it. He took Hannah on board in his rucksack and carried the buggy quite openly under his arm."

"People never question anything if you're up-front about what you 're doing. I guess it has something to do with the British psyche, and the fact we never interfere unless we absolutely have to. But you kind of want them to sometimes. It's almost as if you're being forced to do things you don't really want to do. I kept saying to myself, ask me what's in the bag, you bastards, ask me why I'm carrying a baby's buggy under my arm. But no one did, oj course..."

"Then he left for Poole," said Galbraith. "The time was getting on for midday by then, and he says he hadn't thought what he was going to do beyond smuggling Kate and Hannah aboard. He talks about being stressed out and being unable to think properly"-he raised his eyes to Sumner-"rather like your description of yourself earlier, and it does seem as if he opted to do nothing, left them imprisoned and unconscious inside the bags on the principle of out of sight out of mind."

"I guess I'd realized all along I was going to have to dump them over the side, but I kept putting it off. I'd sailed out into the Channel to get some space around me, and it was around seven o'clock when I hauled them up on deck to get it over with. I couldn't do it, though. I could hear whimpering coming out of the rucksack, so I knew Hannah was still alive. I felt good about that. I never wanted to kill either of them..."

"He claims Kate started to come around at about seven thirty, which is when he released her and let her sit beside him in the cockpit. He also claims it was her idea to take her clothes off. However, in view of the fact that her wedding ring is also missing, we think the truth is he decided to strip her body of anything that could identify her before he threw her overboard."

"I know she was frightened, and I know she probably did it to try to get into my good graces, but I never asked her to strip and I never forced her to have sex with me. I'd already made up my mind to take them back. I wouldn't have altered course otherwise, and she'd never have ended up in Egmont Bight. I gave her something to eat because she said she was hungry. Why would I do that if I was going to kill her...?"

"I know this is distressing for you, William, but we believe he spent hours fantasizing about what he was going to do with her before he killed her, and when he'd stripped her he went ahead and played out those fantasies. However, we don't know how conscious Kate was or how much she knew about what was going on. One of the difficulties we have is that Crazy Daze shows no recent signs of Kate and Hannah being on board. What we think happened is that he kept Kate naked on the deck for about five hours between seven thirty and half past midnight which would explain the evidence of hypothermia and the lack of forensic evidence connecting her with the interior. We're still looking for evidence on the topsides but I'm afraid he had hours during the trip back to Lymington on Sunday to scrub the deck clean with buckets of salt water."

"Okay, I was way out of line at the beginning, I'll admit that. Things got out of control for a while-I mean I panicked like hell when I thought Hannah was dead-but by the time it was dark I'd got it all worked out. I told Kate that if she promised to keep her mouth shut I'd take her to Poole and let her and Hannah off there. Otherwise, I'd say she came on board willingly, and as Tony Bridges knew she had the hots for me, no one would believe her word against mine, particularly not William..."

"He says he promised to take Kate to Poole, and she may have believed him, but we don't think he had any intention of doing it. He's a good sailor, yet he steered a course that brought him back to land to the west of St. Alban's Head when he should have been well to the east. He's arguing that he lost track of his position because Kate kept distracting him, but it's too much of a coincidence that he put her into the sea where he did, bearing in mind he was planning to walk there the next morning."

"She should have trusted me. I told her I wasn't going to hurt her. I didn't hurt Hannah, did I...?"

"He says she lunged at him and tried to push him overboard, and in the process went over herself."

"I could hear her shouting and thrashing about in the water, so I brought the helm around to try and locate her. But it was so dark I couldn't see a damn thing. I kept calling to her but it all went silent very quickly and in the end I had to give up. I don't think she could swim very well..."

"He's claiming he made every attempt to find her but thinks she must have drowned within a few minutes. He refers to it as a terrible accident."

"Of course it was a coincidence we were off Chapman's Pool. It was pitch black, for Christ's sake, and there's no lighthouse at St. Alban's Head. Have you any idea what it's like sailing at night when there's nothing to tell you where you are? I hadn't been concentrating, hadn't taken the tidal drift and wind changes into account. I was pretty sure I'd sailed too far west which is why I altered course to sail due east, but it wasn't until I came within sight of the Anvil Point lighthouse that I had any idea I was within striking distance of Poole. Look, don't you think I'd have killed Hannah as well if I'd meant to kill Kate...?"

When Galbraith fell silent, Sumner finally dragged his gaze away from the ceiling. "Is that what he'll say in court? That she died by accident?"

"Probably."

"Will he win?"

"Not if you stand up for her."

"Maybe he's telling the truth," said the other man listlessly.

Galbraith smiled slightly. Kindness was a mug's game. "Don't ever say that in my presence again, William," he said with a rasp in his throat. "Because, so help me God, I'll beat the fucking daylights out of you if you do. I saw your wife, remember. I wept for her before you even knew she was dead."

Sumner blinked in alarm.

Galbraith straightened. "The bastard drugged her, raped her-several times we think-broke her fingers because she attempted to release her daughter from the rucksack, then put his hands around her neck and throttled her. But she wouldn't die. So he tied her to a spare outboard his friend had given him and set her adrift in a partially inflated dinghy." He thumped his fist into his palm. "Not to give her a chance of life, William, but to make sure she died slowly and in fear, tormenting herself about what he was going to do to Hannah and regretting that she'd ever dared to take revenge on him."

"The kid never cried once after I took her out of the rucksack. She wasn't frightened of me. As a matter of fact I think she felt sorry for me because she could see I was upset. I wrapped her in a blanket and laid her on the floor in the cabin, and she went to sleep. I might have panicked if she'd started crying in the marina, but she didn't. She's a funny kid. I mean she's obviously not very bright, but you get the feeling she knows things..."

"I don't know why he didn't kill Hannah, except that he seems to be afraid of her. He says now that the fact she's alive is proof he didn't want Kate to die either, and he may have decided that as she was never going to be a threat to him he could afford to let her live. He says he changed her, fed her, and gave her something to drink from the bag that was on the back of the buggy, then took her off the boat in his rucksack. He left her asleep in the front garden of a block of flats on the Bournemouth-to-Poole road, a good mile from Lilliput, and seems to be more shocked than anyone that she was allowed to walk all the way back to the marina before anyone questioned why she was on her own."

"There was some paracetamol in the buggy bag, so I dosed her up with it to make sure she was asleep when I took her off the boat. Not that I really needed to. I reckon the Rohypnol was still working, because I sat and watched her in the cabin for hours and she only woke up once. There's no way she could have known where Salterns Marina was, so how the hell did she find her way back to it? I kept telling you she was weird. But you wouldn't believe me..."

"On the trip back to Lymington he put everything overboard that could connect him in any way at all with Kate and Hannah-the dinghy holdall, Kate's clothes, her ring, the buggy, Hannah's dirty nappy, the rug he wrapped her in-but he forgot the sandals that Kate left behind in April." Galbraith smiled slightly. "Although the odd thing is he says he did remember them. He took them out of a locker after he left Hannah asleep on the cabin floor and put them in the buggy bag, and he says now that the only person who could have hidden them under the pile of clothes was Hannah."

"I got sidetracked worrying about fingerprints. 1 couldn't make up my mind whether to clean the inside of Crazy Daze or not. You see, I knew you'd find Kate and Hannah's fingerprints from when they were on board in April, and I wondered if it would be better to pretend that visit had never happened. In the end I decided to leave it exactly the way it's been for the last three months because I didn't want you lot imagining I'd done something worse than I had. And I was right, wasn 't I? You wouldn't have released me on Wednesday if you'd found any evidence that I set out to hurt Kate the way you're saying I did."

Sumner's eyes welled again but he didn't say anything.

"Why didn't you tell me Kate and Harding had had an affair?" Galbraith asked him.

It was a moment before William answered and, when he did, he lifted a trembling hand in supplication, like a beggar after charity. "I was ashamed."

"For Kate?"

"No," he whispered, "for myself. I didn't want anyone to know."

To know what? Galbraith wondered. That he couldn't keep his wife interested? That he'd made a mistake marrying her? He reached over and took the telephone from Sumner's lap. "If you're interested, Sandy Griffiths says Hannah's been walking around the house all day, looking for you. I asked Sandy to tell her I'd be bringing you home, and Hannah clapped her hands. Don't make a liar out of me, my friend."

He shook with grief. "I thought she'd be better off without me."

"No chance." He raised the man to his feet with a hand under his arm. "You're her father. How could she possibly be better off without you?"

*27*

Maggie lay on the floor stretching her aching back while Nick meticulously poked a loaded paintbrush into all the nooks and crannies that she'd missed. "Do you think Steve would have done it if Tony Bridges hadn't wound him up by smearing crap all over the place?"

"I don't know," said Nick. "The superintendent's convinced he's an out-and-out psychopath, says it was only a matter of time before his obsession with sex spilled over into rape, so maybe he'd have done it anyway, with or without Tony Bridges. I suppose the truth is Kate was in the wrong place at the wrong time." He paused, remembering the tiny hand waving in the spume. "Poor woman."

"Still ... does Tony walk away scot-free? That's hardly fair, is it? I mean he must have known Steve was guilty."

Nick shrugged. "Claims he didn't, claims he thought it was the husband." He dabbed gently at a spider and watched it scurry away into the shadows. "Galbraith told me he and Carpenter hung Tony up to dry last night for keeping quiet the first time they interviewed him, and Tony's excuse was that Kate was such a bitch he didn't see why he should help the police screw her husband. He reckoned Kate got what she deserved for spouting off about the poor bastard's performance. He has trouble on that front himself, apparently, so his sympathies were with William."

"And this man's a teacher?" she said in disgust.

"Not for much longer," Nick reassured her, "unless his fellow inmates have a yen for chemistry. Carpenter's thrown the book at him-perverting the course of justice, supplying drugs, false imprisonment of his girlfriend, rape of said girlfriend under the influence of Rohypnol, incitement to murder ... even"-he chuckled-"criminal damage to Harding's car ... and that's not to mention whatever Customs and Excise chooses to throw at him."

"Serves him right," said Maggie unsympathetically.

"Mmm."

"You don't sound convinced."

"Only because I can't see what prison will do for someone like Tony. He's not a bad guy, just a misguided one. Six months' community service in a home for the disabled would do him more good." He watched the spider sink into a pool of wet emulsion. "On a scale of one to ten, spasmodic impotence doesn't even register compared with severe physical or mental handicap."

Maggie sat up and clasped her arms about her knees. "I thought policemen were supposed to be hard bastards. Are you going soft on me, Ingram?"

He looked down at her with a gleam of amusement in his dark eyes. "Courtship's like that, I'm afraid. The hardness comes and goes whether you like it or not. It's nature."

She lowered her face to her knees, refusing to be diverted. "I don't understand why Steve drowned Kate off Chapman's Pool," she said next. "He knew he was going there the next morning and he must have realized there was a chance she'd wash up on the beach. Why would he want to put his meeting with Marie in jeopardy?"

"I'm not sure you can apply logic to the actions of someone like Harding," he said. "Carpenter's view is that, once he had Kate on board, there would only ever be one place he'd kill her. He says you can tell from the Frenchman's video how hyped up he was by all the excitement." He watched the spider lift his legs from the wet paint and wave them in useless protest. "But I don't think Steve expected her body to be there. He'd broken her fingers and tied her to an outboard, so it must have been a hell of a shock to find she'd managed to free herself. Presumably the intention was to gloat over her grave before absconding with Marie. Carpenter thinks Harding's an embryo serial killer, so in his view Marie's lucky to be alive."

"Do you agree with him?"

"God knows." He mourned the spider's inevitable death as the exhausted creature dipped its abdomen into the paint. "Steve says it was a terrible accident, but I've no idea if he's telling the truth. Carpenter doesn't believe him and neither does DI Galbraith, but I have a real problem accepting that anyone so young can be so evil. Let's just say I'm glad you had Bertie with you yesterday."

"Does Carpenter think he wanted to kill me, too?"

Nick shook his head. "I don't know. He asked Steve what was so important about the rucksack that he'd risked going back for it, and do you know what Steve said? 'My binoculars.' So then Carpenter asked him why he'd left it there at all, and he said: 'Because I'd forgotten the binoculars were in it.' "

"What does that mean?"

Nick gave a low laugh. "That there was nothing in it he wanted, so he decided to dump it. He hadn't had any sleep, he was knackered, and Marie's desert boots kept banging against his back and giving him blisters. All he wanted to do was get rid of it as fast as possible."

"Why is that funny?"

"It's the exact opposite of why I thought he'd left it there."

"No, it's not," she contradicted him. "You told me it would incriminate him because he used it to carry Hannah off his boat."

"But he didn't kill Hannah, Maggie, he killed Kate."

"So?"

"All I did by finding it was help the defense. Harding will argue it proves he never intended to murder anyone."

He sounded depressed, she thought. "Still," she said brightly, "I suppose they'll be offering you a job at headquarters. They must be awfully impressed with you. You homed in on Steve as soon as you saw him."

"And homed straight out again the minute he spun me a plausible yarn." Another low laugh, this time self-deprecating. "The only reason I took against him was because he got up my nose, and the superintendent knows that. I think Carpenter thinks I'm a bit of a joke. He called me a suggestion-junky." He sighed. "I'm not sure I'm cut out for CID work. You can't take a wild guess then invent arguments to support the theory. That's how miscarriages of justice happen."

She cast him a speculative glance. "Is that something else Carpenter said?"

"More or less. He said the days are long past when policemen could play hunches. It's all about putting data into computers now."

She felt angry on his behalf. "Then I'll phone the bastard and give him a piece of my mind," she said indignantly. "If it hadn't been for you, it would have taken them months to make the connection between Kate and Harding-if ever, frankly-and they'd never have found that stranded dinghy or worked out where it was stolen from. He ought to be congratulating you, not finding fault. I'm the one who got it all wrong. There's obviously a flaw in my genes that makes me gravitate toward scumbags. Even Ma thought Harding was the most frightful creep. She said: 'Fancy making such a performance over a dog bite. I've had far worse, and all anyone offered me was antiseptic.' "

"She'll have my guts for garters when she finds out I made her wreck her hip for a murderer."

"No, she won't. She says you remind her of James Stewart in Destry Rides Again."

"Is that good?"

"Oh, yes," said Maggie with a sardonic edge to her voice. "She goes weak at the knees every time she sees it. James Stewart plays a peace-loving sheriff who brings law and order to a violent city by never raising his voice or drawing his gun. It's fantastically sentimental. He falls in love with Marlene Dietrich, who throws herself in front of a bullet to protect him."

"Mmm. Personally, I've always fancied myself as Bruce Willis in Die Hard. The heroic, bloodstained cop with his trusty arsenal who saves the world and the woman he loves by blasting hell out of Alan Rickman and his gang of psychopaths."

She giggled. "Is this another attempt at seduction?"

"No. I'm still courting you."

"I was afraid you might be." She shook her head. "You're too nice, that's your trouble. You're certainly too nice to blast hell out of anyone."

"I know," he said despondently. "I don't have the stomach for it." He climbed down the stepladder and squatted on the floor in front of her, rubbing his tired eyes with the back of his hand. "I was beginning to like Harding. I still do in a funny kind of way. I keep thinking what a waste it all is and what a difference it would have made if someone, somewhere, had warned him that everything has a price." He reached up to put the paintbrush in the tray on the table. "To be fair to Carpenter, he did congratulate me. He even said he'd support me if I decided to apply for the CID. According to him, I have potential"-he mimicked the superintendent's growl-"and he should know because he hasn't been a super for five years for nothing." He smiled his crooked smile. "But I'm not convinced that's where my talents lie."

"Oh, for God's sake!" she declared, revealing more of her genes than she knew. "You'd make a brilliant detective. I can't think what you're worried about. Don't be so bloody cautious, Nick. You should seize your chances."

"I do ... when they make sense to me."