"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 bastard, or I'll empty that entire bucket over your head."
He grinned at her. "This isn't seduction, Maggie, this is courtship. If I wanted to seduce you I'd have brought several bottles of brandy with me." He wrung out the boxer shorts and held them up for inspection. "However ... if you think these would be effective...?"
"...Most of the time it's just me, the boat, and the sea ... I like that ... I feel comfortable with space around me ... people can get on your nerves after a while ... they always want something from you ... usually love ... but it's all pretty shallow ... Marie? She's okay ... nothing great ... sure I feel responsible for her, but not forever ... nothing's forever ... except the sea ... and death..."
*26*
John Galbraitb paused beside William Sumner's car in tbe Chichester street and stooped to look in through the window. The weather was still fair, and the heat from the sun-baked roof warmed his face. He walked up the path toward Angela Sumner's flat and rang the doorbell. He waited for the chain to rattle into place. "Good afternoon, Mrs. Sumner," he said when her bright eyes peered anxiously through the gap. "I think you must have William in there." He gestured toward the parked car. "May I talk to him?"
With a sigh, she released the chain and pulled the door wide. "I wanted to phone you, but he pulled the wire out of the wall when I suggested it."
Galbraith nodded. "We've tried your number several times, but there was never any answer. If the phone wasn't plugged in, that explains it. I thought I'd come anyway."
She turned her chair to lead him down the corridor. "He keeps saying he didn't know what to do. Does that mean he killed her?"
Galbraith laid a comforting hand on her shoulder. "No," he said. "Your son isn't a murderer, Mrs. Sumner. He loved Kate. I think he'd have given her the earth if she'd asked him for it."
They paused in the sitting-room doorway. William sat huddled in an armchair, arms wrapped protectively about himself and the telephone in his lap, his jaw dark with stubble and his eyes red-rimmed and puffy from too much weeping and too little sleep. Galbraith studied him with concern, recognizing that he bore some of the responsibility for pushing him toward the brink. He could excuse his prying into William's and Kate's secrets on the grounds of justice, but it was a cold logic. He could have been kinder, he thought-one could always be kinder-but, sadly, kindness rarely elicited truth.
He squeezed Angela Sumner's shoulder. "Perhaps you could make us a cup of tea," he suggested, moving aside for her wheelchair to reverse. "I'd like to have a few words with William alone, if that's possible."
She nodded gratefully. "I'll wait till you call me."
He closed the door behind her and listened to the whine of the battery fading into the kitchen. "We've caught Kate's killer, William," he said, taking the seat opposite the man. "Steven Harding has been formally charged with her abduction, rape, and murder, and will be remanded to prison shortly to await trial. I want to stress that Kate was not a party to what happened to her, but on the contrary fought hard to save herself and Hannah." He paused briefly to search William's face but went on when there was no reaction. "I'm not going to pretend she didn't have sex with Steven Harding prior to the events of last week, because she did. However, it was a brief affair some months ago, and followed a prolonged campaign by Harding to break her down. Nevertheless-and this is important"-he glossed the truth deliberately in Kate's favor-"it's clear she made up her mind very quickly to put an end to the relationship when she recognized that her marriage was more important to her than a mild infatuation with a younger man. Her misfortune was her failure to recognize that Steven Harding is self-fixated and dangerously immature and that she needed to be afraid of him." Another pause. "She was lonely, William."