"I didn't know."
"Then why are you so surprised she was scared of you? She'd have been scared of any man who appeared out of nowhere on a deserted headland when she wasn't expecting it."
"She wouldn't have been scared of you."
"I'm a policeman. She trusts me."
"She trusted me," said Harding, "until you told her I was a rapist."
It was the same point Maggie had made, and Ingram conceded it was a fair one-to himself if not to Harding. It was the grossest injustice to destroy an innocent person's reputation, however it was done, and while neither he nor Galbraith had said that the young man was a rapist, the implication had been clear enough. They continued for a while in silence. The road to Swanage led southeast along the spine of Purbeck, and the distant sea showed intermittently between folds of pastureland. The sun was warm on Ingram's arm and neck, but Harding, sitting in shade on the left-hand side of the car, hunched tighter into himself as if he was cold and stared sightlessly out of the window. He seemed lost in lethargy, and Ingram wondered if he was still trying to concoct some sort of defense or whether the events of the morning had finally taken their toll.
"That dog of hers should be shot," he said suddenly.
Still concocting a defense then, thought Ingram, while wondering why it had taken him so long to get around to it. "Miss Jenner claims he was only trying to protect her," he said mildly.
"It bloody savaged me."
"You shouldn't have hit her."
Harding gave a long sigh. "I didn't mean to," he admitted as if realizing that continued argument would be a waste of time. "I probably wouldn't have done it if she hadn't called me a pervert. The last person who did that was my father, and I flattened him for it."
"Why did he call you a pervert?"
"Because he's old-fashioned, and I told him I'd done a porno shoot to make money." The young man balled his hands into fists. "I wish people would just keep their noses out of my business. It gets on my tits the way everyone keeps lecturing me about the way I live my life."
Ingram shook his head in irritation. "There's no such thing as a free lunch, Steve."
"What's that got to do with anything?"
"Live now, pay later. What goes around, comes around. No one promised you a rose garden."
Harding turned to stare out of the passenger window, offering a cold shoulder to what he clearly felt was a patronizing police attitude. "I don't know what the fuck you're talking about."
Ingram smiled slightly. "I know you don't." He glanced sideways. "What were you doing on Emmetts Hill this morning?"
"Just walking."
There was a moment's silence before Ingram gave a snort of laughter. "Is that the best you can do?"
"It's the truth," he said.
"Like hell it is. You've had all day to work this one out, but by God, if that's the only explanation you've been able to come up with, you must have a very low opinion of policemen."
The young man turned back to him with an engaging smile. "I do."
"Then we'll have to see if we can change your mind." Ingram's smile was almost as engaging. "Won't we?"
Gregory Freemantle was pouring himself a drink in the front room of his flat in Poole when his girlfriend showed in two detectives. The atmosphere was thick enough to cut with a knife, and it was obvious to both policemen that they had walked in on a humdinger of a row. "DS Campbell and DC Langham," she said curtly. "They want to talk to you."
Freemantle was a Peter Stringfellow lookalike, an aging playboy with straggling blond hair and the beginnings of desperation in the sagging lines around his eyes and chin. "Oh God," he groaned, "you're not taking her seriously about that bloody oil drum, are you? She doesn't know the first thing about sailing"-he paused to consider-"or children, for that matter, but it doesn't stop her being lippy." He raised one hand and worked his thumb and forefingers to mimic a mouth working.
He was the kind of man other men take against instinctively, and DS Campbell glanced sympathetically at the girlfriend. "It wasn't an oil drum, sir, it was an upturned dinghy. And, yes, we took Miss Hale's information very seriously."
Freemantle raised his glass in the woman's direction. "Good one, Jenny." His eyes were already showing alcohol levels well above average, but he still downed two fingers of neat whisky without blinking. "What do you want?" he asked Campbell. He didn't invite them to sit down, merely turned back to the whisky bottle and poured himself another drink.
"We're trying to eliminate people from the Kate Sumner murder inquiry," Campbell explained, "and we're interested in everyone who was in Chapman's Pool on Sunday. We understand you were there on a Fairline Squadron."
"You know I was. She's already told you."
"Who was with you?"
"Jenny and my two daughters, Marie and Fliss. And it was a bloody nightmare, if you're interested. You buy a boat to keep everyone happy, and all they can do is snipe at each other. I'm going to sell the damn thing." His drink-sodden eyes filled with self-pity. "It's no fun going out on your own, and it's even less fun taking a menagerie of cats with you."
"Was either of your daughters wearing a bikini and lying facedown on the bow between twelve thirty and one o'clock on Sunday, sir?"
"I don't know."
"Does either of them have a boyfriend called Steven Harding?"
He shrugged indifferently.
"I'd be grateful for an answer, Mr. Freemantle."
"Well, you're not going to get one, because I don't know and I don't care," he said aggressively. "I've had a bucketful of women today, and as far as I'm concerned the sooner they're all genetically engineered to behave like Stepford wives the better." He raised his glass again. "My wife serves me with notice that she intends to bankrupt my company in order to take three-quarters of what I'm worth. My fifteen-year-old daughter tells me she's pregnant and wants to run away to France with some longhaired git who fancies himself as an actor, and my girlfriend"-he lurched his glass in Jenny Hale's direction-"that one over there-tells me it's all my fault because I've waived my responsibilities as a husband and a father. So cheers! To men, eh!"
Campbell turned to the woman. "Can you help us, Miss Hale?"
She looked questioningly toward Gregory, clearly seeking his support, but when he refused to meet her eyes, she gave a small shrug. "Ah, well," she said, "I wasn't planning on hanging around after this evening anyway. Marie, the fifteen-year-old, was wearing a bikini and was sunbathing on the bow before lunch," she told the two policemen. "She lay on her tummy so that her father wouldn't see her bump, and she was signaling to her boyfriend, who was jerking off on the shore for her benefit. The rest of the time she wore a sarong to disguise the fact that she's pregnant. She has since told us that her boyfriend's name is Steve Harding and that he's an actor in London. I knew she was plotting something because she was hyped up from the moment we left Poole, and I realized it must be to do with the boy on the shore, because she became completely poisonous after he left and has been a nightmare ever since." She sighed. "That's what the row has been about. When she turned up today in one of her tantrums I told her father he should take some interest in what's really going on because it's been obvious to me for a while that she's not just pregnant but has been taking drugs as well. Now open war has broken out."
"Is Marie still here?"
Jenny nodded. "In the spare bedroom."
"Where does she normally live?"
"In Lymington, with her mother and sister."
"Do you know what she and her boyfriend were planning to do on Sunday?"
She glanced at Gregory. "They were going to run away together to France, but when that woman's body was found they had to abandon the plan because there were too many people watching. Steve has a boat apparently, which he'd left at Salterns Marina, and the idea was for Marie to vanish into thin air out of Chapman's Pool after saying she was going for a walk to Worth Matravers. They thought if she changed into some men's clothes that Steve had brought with him, and slogged it back across land to the ferry, they could be on their way to France by the evening and no one would ever know where she'd gone or who she was with." She shook her head. "Now she's threatening to kill herself if her father doesn't let her leave school and go and live with Steve in London."