In view of the cheese and apples in the galley, Kate Sumner's last meal looked like something the police could run with until the pathologist pointed out that it was impossible to link semidigested food with a particular purchase. A Tesco's Golden Delicious, minced with gastric acids, showed the same chemical printout as a Sainsbury's Golden Delicious. Even the child's bib proved inconclusive when the fingerprint evidence on the plastic surface demonstrated that, while Steven Harding and two unidentified others had certainly touched it, Kate Sumner had not.
Briefed by Nick Ingram, attention was paid to the only rucksack found on the boat, a triangular black one with a handful of sweet wrappers in the bottom. Neither Paul nor Danny Spender had been able to give an accurate description of it-Danny: "It was a big black one..."; Paul: "It was quite big ... I think it might have been green..."- but it told them nothing about what it might have contained on Sunday morning or indeed identified it as the one the boys had seen. Steven Harding, who seemed baffled by police interest in his rucksack, claimed it was certainly the one he had been using that day and explained he had left it on the hillside because it had a liter bottle of water in it, and he couldn't be bothered to lug it down to the boat sheds simply to lug it all the way up again. He further said that PC Ingram had never asked him about a rucksack, which is why he hadn't mentioned it at the time. The nail in the coffin of police suspicion was supplied by a cashier at Tesco's in Lymington High Street who had been on duty the previous Saturday.
" 'Course I know Steve," she said, identifying his photograph. "He comes in every Saturday for provisions. Did I see him talking to a blond woman and child last week? Sure I did. He spotted them as he was about to leave and he said, 'Damn!' so I said, 'What's the problem?' and he said, 'I know that woman and she's going to talk to me because she always does,' so I said, jealous-like, 'She's very pretty,' and he said, 'Forget it, Dawn, she's married, and anyway I'm in a hurry.' And he was right. She did talk to him, but he didn't hang around, just tapped his watch and scarpered. You want my opinion? He had something good lined up, and he didn't want delaying. She looked mighty miffed when he left, but I didn't blame her for it. Steve's a bit of a hunk. I'd go for him myself if I wasn't a grandmother three times over."
William Sumner claimed to know little about the management of Langton Cottage or his wife's regular movements. "I'm away from the house for twelve hours a day, from seven in the morning till seven at night," he told Galbraith as if it were something to be proud of. "I was much more au fait with her routine in Chichester, probably because I knew the people and the shops she was talking about. Things register better when you recognize names. It's all so different here."
"Did Steven Harding feature in her conversation?" asked Galbraith.
"Is he the bastard who had Hannah's shoes?" demanded Sumner angrily.
Galbraith shook his head. "We'll get on a lot faster if you don't keep second-guessing me, William. Let me remind you that we still don't know if the shoes belonged to Hannah." He held the other man's gaze. "And, while I'm about it, let me warn you that if you start speculating on anything to do with this case, you could prejudice any prosecution we try to bring. And that could mean Kate's killer going free."
"I'm sorry." He raised his hands in apology. "Go on."
"Did Steven Harding feature in her conversation?" Galbraith asked again.
"No."
Galbraith referred to the lists of names he had produced. "Are any of the men on here ex-boyfriends? The ones in Portsmouth, for example. Did she go out with any of them before she went out with you?"
Another shake of the head. "They're all married."
Galbraith wondered about the naivete of that statement, but didn't pursue the issue. Instead, he went on to try to build a picture of Kate's early life. It was about as easy as building houses out of straw. The potted history that William gave him was notable more for its gaps than its inclusions. Her maiden name had been Hill, but whether that was her mother's or her father's surname, he didn't know.
"I don't think they were married," he said.
"And Kate never knew him?"
"No. He left when she was a baby."
She and her mother had lived in a council flat in Birmingham, although he had no idea where it was, which school Kate had gone to, where she had trained as a secretary, or even where she had worked before joining Pharmatec UK. Galbraith asked him if she had any friends from that time with whom she had kept in contact, but William shook his head and said he didn't think so. He produced an address book from a drawer in a small bureau in the corner of the room and said Galbraith could check for himself. "But you won't find anyone from Birmingham in there."
"When did she move?"
"When her mother died. She told me once that she wanted to put as much distance between herself and where she grew up as she could, so she moved to Portsmouth and rented a flat over a shop in one of the back streets."
"Did she say why distance was important?"
"I think she felt she'd have less of a chance to get on if she stayed put. She was quite ambitious."
"For a career?" asked Galbraith in surprise, recalling Sumner's assertion the day before that Kate's one ambition had been to have a family of her own. "I thought you said she was happy to give up working when she got pregnant."
There was a short silence. "I suppose you're planning to talk to my mother?"
Galbraith nodded.
He sighed. "She didn't approve of Kate, so she'll tell you she was a golddigger. Not in so many words, perhaps, but the implication will be clear. She can be pretty vitriolic when she chooses." He stared at the floor.
"Is it true?" prompted Galbraith after a moment.
"Not in my opinion. The only thing Kate wanted was something better for her children than she had herself. I admired her for it."
"And your mother didn't?"
"It's not important," said Sumner. "She never approved of anyone I brought home, which probably explains why it took me so long to get married."
Galbraith glanced at one of the vacuously smiling photographs on the mantelpiece. "Was Kate a strong character?"
"Oh, yes. She was single-minded about what she wanted." He gave a lopsided smile as he made a gesture that encompassed the room. "This was it. The dream. A house of her own. Social acceptance. Respectability. It's why I know she'd never have had an affair. She wouldn't have risked this for anything."
Yet another display of naivete? Galbraith wondered. "Maybe she didn't realize there was a risk involved," he said dispassionately. "By your own admission, you're hardly ever here, so she could easily have been conducting an affair that you knew nothing about."
Sumner shook his head. "You don't understand," he said. "It wasn't fear of me finding out that would have stopped her. She had me wound around her little finger from the first time I met her." A wry smile thinned his lips. "My wife was an old-fashioned puritan. It was fear of other people finding out that ruled her life. Respectability mattered."
It was on the tip of the DI's tongue to ask this man if he had ever loved his wife, but he decided against it. Whatever answer Sumner gave, he wouldn't believe him. He felt the same instinctive dislike of William that Sandy Griffiths felt, but he couldn't decide if it was a chemical antipathy or a natural revulsion that was inspired by his own unshakable hunch that William had killed his wife.
Galbraith's next port of call was The Old Convent, Osborne Crescent in Chichester, where Mrs. Sumner senior lived in sheltered accommodation at number two. It had obviously been a school once but was now converted into a dozen small flats with a resident warden. Before he went in, he stared across the road at the solidly rectangular 1930s semidetached houses on the other side, wondering idly which had been the Sumners' before it was sold to buy Langton Cottage. They were all so similar that it was impossible to say, and he had a sneaking sympathy for Kate's desire to move. Being respectable, he thought, wasn't necessarily synonymous with being boring.
Angela Sumner surprised him,
because she wasn't what he was expecting. He had pictured an autocratic old snob with reactionary views, and found instead a tough, gutsy woman, wheelchair-bound by rheumatoid arthritis, but with eyes that brimmed with good humor. She told him to put his warrant card through her letter-slot before she'd allow him entrance, then made him follow her electrically operated chair down the corridor into the sitting room. "I suppose you've given William the third degree," she said, "and now you're expecting me to confirm or deny what he's told you."
"Have you spoken to him?" asked Galbraith with a smile.
She nodded, pointing to a chair. "He phoned me yesterday evening to tell me that Kate was dead."
He took the chair she indicated. "Did he tell you how she died?"
She nodded. "It shocked me, although to be honest I guessed something dreadful must have happened the minute I saw Hannah's picture on the television. Kate would never have abandoned the child. She doted on her."
"Why didn't you phone the police yourself when you recognized Hannah's photograph?" he asked curiously. "Why did you ask William to do it?"
She sighed. "Because I kept telling myself it couldn't possibly be Hannah-I mean, she's such an unlikely child to be wandering around a strange town on her own-and I didn't want to appear to be causing trouble if it wasn't. I phoned Langton Cottage over and over again, and it was only when it became clear yesterday morning that no one was going to answer that I phoned William's secretary and she told me where he was."
"What kind of trouble would you have been causing?"
She didn't answer immediately. "Let's just say Kate wouldn't have believed my motives were pure if I made a genuine error. You see, I haven't seen Hannah since they moved, twelve months ago, so I wasn't one hundred percent sure I was right anyway. Children change so quickly at that age."
It wasn't much of an answer, but Galbraith let it go for the moment. "So you didn't know William had gone to Liverpool?"
"There's no reason why I should. I don't expect him to tell me where he is all the time. He rings once a week and drops in occasionally on his way back to Lymington, but we don't live in each other's pockets."
"That's quite a change, though, isn't it?" suggested Galbraith. "Didn't you and he share a house before he was married?"
She gave a little laugh. "And you think that means I knew what he was doing? You obviously don't have grown-up children, Inspector. It makes no difference whether they live with you or not, you still can't keep tabs on them."
"I have a seven- and five-year-old who already have a more exciting social life than I've ever had. It gets worse, does it?"
"It depends on whether you approve of them spreading their wings. I think the more space you give them, the more likely they are to appreciate you as they get older. In any case, my husband converted the house into two self-contained flats about fifteen years ago. He and I lived downstairs, and William lived upstairs, and days could go by without our paths crossing. We lived quite separate lives, which didn't change much even after my husband died. I became more disabled, of course, but I hope I was never a burden to William."
Galbraith smiled. "I'm sure you weren't, but it must have been a bit of a worry, knowing he'd get married one day and all the arrangements would have to change."
She shook her head. "Quite the reverse. I was longing for him to settle down, but he never showed any inclination to do it. He adored sailing, of course, and spent most of his free time out on his Contessa. He had girlfriends, but none that he took seriously."
"Were you pleased when he married Kate?"
There was a short silence. "Why wouldn't I be?"
Galbraith shrugged. "No reason. I'm just interested."
Her eyes twinkled suddenly. "I suppose he's told you I thought his wife was a golddigger?"
"Yes."
"Good," she said. "I hate having to tell lies." She raised the back of a gnarled hand to her cheek to wipe away a stray hair. "In any case there's no point pretending I was happy about it when anyone around here will tell you I wasn't. She was a golddigger, but that wasn't why I thought he was mad to marry her. It was because they had so little in common. She was ten years younger than he was, virtually uneducated, and completely besotted by all the material things in life. She told me once that what she really enjoyed in life was shopping." She shook her head in bewilderment that anything so mundane could produce a height of sensation. "Frankly, I couldn't see what was going to keep them together. She wasn't remotely interested in sailing and refused point-blank to have anything to do with that side of William's life."
"Did he go on sailing after they married?"
"Oh, yes. She didn't have a problem with him doing it, she just wouldn't go herself."
"Did she get to know any of his sailing friends?"
"Not in the way you mean," she said bluntly.
"What way's that, Mrs. Sumner?"
"William said you think she was having an affair."
"We can't ignore the possibility."
"Oh, I think you can, you know." She gave him an old-fashioned look. "Kate knew the price of everything and the value of nothing, and she'd certainly have calculated the cost of adultery in terms of what she'd lose if William found out about it. In any case, she wouldn't have been having an affair with any of William's sailing friends in Chichester. They were all far more shocked by his choice of wife than I was. She made no effort to fit in, you see, plus there was a generation gap between her and most of them. Frankly, they were all completely bemused by her rather inane conversation. She had no opinions on anything except soap operas, pop music, and film stars."
"So what was her attraction for William? He's an intelligent man and certainly doesn't give the impression of someone who likes inane conversation."
A resigned smile. "Sex, of course. He'd had his fill of intelligent women. I remember him saying that the girlfriend before Kate"-she sighed-"her name was Wendy Plater, and she was such a nice girl ... so suitable ... that her idea of foreplay was to discuss the effects of sexual activity on the metabolism. I said, how interesting, and William laughed and said, given the choice, he preferred physical stimulation."
Galbraith kept a straight face. "I don't think he's alone, Mrs. Sumner."
"I'm not going to argue the point, Inspector. In any case, Kate was obviously far more experienced than he was, even though she was ten years younger. She knew William wanted a family, and she gave him a baby before you could say Jack Robinson." He heard the reservation in her voice and wondered about it. "Her approach to marriage was to spoil her husband rotten, and William reveled in it. He didn't have to do a damn thing except take himself to work every day. It was the most old-fashioned arrangement you can imagine, with the wife as chief admirer and bottle-washer, and the husband swanking around as breadwinner. I think it's what's known as a passive-aggressive relationship, where the woman controls the man by making him dependent on her while giving the impression she's dependent on him."
"And you didn't approve?"
"Only because it wasn't my idea of a marriage. Marriage should be a meeting of minds as well as bodies, otherwise it becomes a wasteground where nothing grows. All she could talk about with any enthusiasm were her shopping expeditions and who she'd bumped into during the day, and it was quite clear William never listened to a word she said."
He wondered if she realized William had yet to be eliminated as a suspect. "So what are you saying? That he was bored with her?"
She gave his question long consideration. "No, I don't think he was bored," she said then, "I think he just realized he could take her for granted. That's why his working day got progressively longer and why he didn't object to the move to Lymington. She approved of whatever he did, you see, so he didn't have to bother spending time with her. There was no challenge in the relationship." She paused. "I hoped children would be something they could share, but Kate appropriated Hannah at birth as something that was the preserve of women, and if I'm honest the poor little thing created even more distan
ce between them. She used to roar her head off every time William tried to pick her up, and he soon got bored with her. I took Kate to task about it, as a matter of fact, told her she wasn't doing the child any good by swamping her in mother love, but it only made her angry with me." She sighed. "I shouldn't have interfered. It's what drove them away, of course."
"From Chichester?"
"Yes. It was a mistake. They made too many changes in their lives too quickly. William had to pay off the mortgage on my flat when he sold the house across the road, then take out a much larger one to buy Langton Cottage. He sold his boat, gave up sailing. Not to mention flogging himself to death driving to and from work every day. And all for what? A house he didn't even like very much."
Galbraith was careful to keep the interest out of his voice. "Then why did they move?"
"Kate wanted it."
"But if they weren't getting on, why did William agree to it?"
"Regular sex," she said crossly. "In any case, I didn't say they weren't getting on."
"You said he was taking her for granted. Isn't it the same thing?"
"Not at all. From William's point of view she was the perfect wife. She kept house for him, provided him with children, and never pestered him once to put himself out." Her mouth twisted into a bitter smile. 'They got on like a house on fire as long as he paid the mortgage and kept her in the manner to which she was rapidly becoming accustomed. I know you're not supposed to say these things anymore, but she was awfully common. The few friends she made were quite dreadful ... loud ... over-made-up..." She shuddered. "Dreadful!"
Galbraith pressed his fingertips together beneath his chin and studied her with open curiosity. "You really didn't like her, did you?"
Again Mrs. Sumner considered the question carefully. "No, I didn't," she said then. "Not because she was overtly unpleasant or unkind, but because she was the most self-centered woman I've ever met. If everything-and I do mean everything-in life wasn't revolving around her she maneuvered and manipulated until it did. Look at Hannah if you don't believe me. Why encourage the child to be so dependent on her unless she couldn't bear to compete for her affections?"
Breaker Page 11
