"So?" said Harding again.
Bridges cast him another thoughtful glance as he licked the edges of the spliff. "Look at it from their point of view. Why would you be expecting a visit if you didn't know it was Kate's body they'd found?"
*13*
We can go to the pub," said Ingram, locking Miss Creant onto her trailer behind his Jeep, "or I can give you some supper at home." He glanced at his watch. "It's nine thirty, so the pub'll be pretty raucous by now, and it'll be difficult to get anything to eat." He started to peel off his waterproofs, which still streamed water from his immersion in the sea. He had stood at the bottom of the slip as he had guided Miss Creant onto the trailer while Galbraith operated the winch. "Home, on the other hand," he said with a grin, "has drying facilities, a spectacular view, and silence."
"Do I get the impression you'd rather go home?" asked Galbraith with a yawn, levering off his inadequate waders and turning them upside down to empty them in a Niagara Falls over the slip. He was soaked from the waistband down.
"There's beer in the fridge, and I can grill you a fresh sea bass if you're interested."
"How fresh?"
"Still alive Monday night," said Ingram, taking some spare trousers from the back of the Jeep and tossing them across. "You can change in the lifeboat station."
"Cheers," said Galbraith, setting off in stockinged feet toward the gray stone building that guarded the ever-ready Swanage lifeboat, "and I'm interested," he called over his shoulder.
Ingram's cottage was a tiny two-up, two-down, backing onto the downs above Seacombe Cliff, although the two downstairs rooms had been knocked into one with an open-plan staircase rising out of the middle and a kitchen extension added to the back. It was clearly a bachelor establishment, and Galbraith surveyed it with approval. Too often, these days, he felt he still had to be persuaded of the joys of fatherhood.
"I envy you," he said, bending down to examine a meticulously detailed replica of the Cutty Sark in a bottle on the mantelpiece. "Did you make this yourself?"
Ingram nodded.
"It wouldn't last half an hour in my house. I reckon anything I ever had of value was smashed within hours of my son getting his first football." He chuckled. "He keeps telling me he's going to make a fortune playing for Manchester United, but I can't see it myself."
"How old is he?" asked Ingram, leading the way through to the kitchen.
"Seven. His sister's five."
The tall constable took the sea bass from the fridge, then tossed Galbraith a beer and opened one for himself. "I'd have liked children," he said, splitting the fish down its belly, filleting out the backbone, and splaying it spatchcock fashion on the grillpan. He was neat and quick in his movements, despite his size. "Trouble is I never found a woman who was prepared to hang around long enough to give me any."
Galbraith remembered what Steven Harding had said on Monday night about Ingram fancying the woman with the horse and wondered if it was more a case of the right woman not hanging around long enough. "A guy like you'd do well anywhere," he said, watching him take some chives and basil from an array of herbs on his windowsill and chop them finely before sprinkling them over the sea bass. "So what's keeping you here?"
"You mean apart from the great view and the clean air?"
"Yes."
Ingram pushed the fish to one side and started washing the mud off some new potatoes before chucking them into a saucepan. "That's it," he said. "Great view, clean air, a boat, fishing, contentment."
"What about ambition? Don't you get frustrated? Feel you're standing still?"
"Sometimes. Then I remember how much I hated the rat race when I was in it, and the frustrations pass." He glanced at Galbraith with a self-deprecating smile. "I did five years with an insurance company before I became a policeman, and I hated every minute of it. I didn't believe in the product, but the only way to get on was to sell more, and it was driving me nuts. I had a long think over one weekend about what I wanted out of life, and gave in my notice on the Monday." He filled the saucepan with water and put it on the gas.
The DI thought sourly of his various life, endowment, and pension policies. "What's wrong with insurance?"
"Nothing." He tipped his can in the direction of the DI and took a swill. "As long as you need it ... as long as you understand the terms of the policy ... as long as you can afford to keep paying the premiums ... as long as you've read the small print. It's like any other product. Buyer beware."
"Now you're worrying me."
Ingram grinned. "If it's any consolation, I'd have felt exactly the same about selling lottery tickets."
Griffiths had fallen asleep, fully clothed, in the spare room but woke with a start when Hannah started screaming in the next room. She leaped off the bed, heart thudding, and came face to face with William Sumner as he slunk through the child's doorway. "What the hell do you think you're doing?" she demanded angrily, her nerves shot to pieces by her sudden awakening. "You've been told not to go in there."
"I thought she was asleep. I just wanted to look at her."
"We agreed you wouldn't."
"You may have done. I never did. You've no right to stop me. It's my house, and she's my daughter."
"I wouldn't bank on that, if I were you," she snapped. She was about to add: Your rights take second place to Hannah's at the moment, but he didn't give her the chance.
He clamped fingers like steel bands around her arms and stared at her with dislike, his face working uncontrollably. "Who have you been talking to?" he muttered.
She didn't say anything, just broke his grip by raising her hands and striking him on both wrists, and with a choking sob he stumbled away down the corridor. But it was a while before she realized what his question had implied.
It would explain a lot, she thought, if Hannah wasn't his child.
Galbraith laid his knife and fork at the side of his plate with a sigh of satisfaction. They were sitting in shirtsleeves on the small patio at the side of the cottage beside a gnarled old plum tree that flavored the air with the scent of fermentation. A storm lantern hissed quietly on the table between them, throwing a circle of yellow light up the wall of the house and across the lawn. On the horizon, moon-silvered clouds floated across the surface of the sea like windblown veils.
"I'm going to have a problem with this," he said. "It's too damn perfect."
Ingram pushed his own plate aside and propped his elbows on the table. "You need to like your own company. If you don't, it's the loneliest place on earth."
"Do you?"
The younger man's face creased into an amiable smile. "I get by," he said, "as long as people like you don't drop in too often. Solitude's a state of mind with me, not an ambition."
Galbraith nodded. "That makes sense." He studied the other's face for a moment. "Tell me about Miss Jenner," he said then. "Harding gave us the impression he and she had quite a chat before you got back. Could he have said more to her than she's told you?"
"It's possible. She seemed pretty relaxed with him."
"How well do you know her?"
But Ingram wasn't so easily drawn about his private life. "As well as I know anyone else around here," he said casually. "What did you make of Harding, as a matter of interest?"
"Difficult to say. He gives a convincing performance of wanting nothing to do with Kate Sumner, but as my boss pointed out, dislike is as good a reason for rape and murder as any other. He claims she was harassing him by smearing crap all over his car because he'd rejected her. It might be true, but none of us really believes it."