The Breaker Read online

  MINETTE WALTERS

  The Breaker

  PAN BOOKS

  Sunday, 10 August 1997 – 1.45 a.m.

  SHE DRIFTED with the waves, falling off their rolling backs and waking to renewed agony every time salt water seared down her throat and into her stomach. During intermittent periods of lucidity when she revisited, always with astonishment, what had happened to her, it was the deliberate breaking of her fingers that remained indelibly printed on her memory, and not the brutality of her rape.

  Sunday, 10 August 1997 – 5.00 a.m.

  THE CHILD sat cross-legged on the floor like a miniature statue of Buddha, the grey dawn light leeching her flesh of colour. He had no feelings for her, not even common humanity, but he couldn’t bring himself to touch her. She watched him as solemnly as he watched her, and he was enthralled by her immobility. He could break her neck as easily as a chicken’s, but he fancied he saw an ancient wisdom in her concentrated gaze, and the idea frightened him. Did she know what he’d done?

  Prologue

  Extract from: The Mind of a Rapist by Helen Barry

  THE most widely held view is that rape is an exercise in male domination, a pathological assertion of power, usually performed out of anger against the entire sex or frustration with a specific individual. By forcing a woman to accept penetration, the man is demonstrating not only his superior strength but his right to sow his seed wherever and whenever he chooses. This has elevated the rapist to a creature of legendary proportions – demoniacal, dangerous, predatory – and the fact that few rapists merit such labels is secondary to the fear the legend inspires.

  In a high percentage of cases (including domestic, date and gang rape) the rapist is an inadequate individual who seeks to bolster poor self-image by attacking someone he perceives to be weaker than himself. He is a man of low intelligence, few social skills, and with a profound sense of his own inferiority in his dealings with the rest of society. A deep-seated fear of women is more common to the rapist than a feeling of superiority, and this may well lie in early failure to make successful relationships.

  Pornography becomes a means to an end for such a person because masturbation is as necessary to him as the regular fix is to a heroin addict. Without orgasm the sex-fixator experiences nothing. However, his obsessive nature, coupled with his lack of achievement, will make him an unattractive mate to the sort of woman his inferiority complex demands, namely a woman who attracts successful men. If he has a relationship at all, his partner will be someone who has been used and abused by other men which only exacerbates his feelings of inadequacy and inferiority.

  It could be argued that the rapist, a man of limited intelligence, limited sensation and limited ability to function, is more to be pitied than feared, because his danger lies in the easy ascendancy society has given him over the so-called weaker sex. Every time judges and newspapers demonize and mythologize the rapist as a dangerous predator, they merely reinforce the idea that the penis is a symbol of power . . .

  CONTENTS

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter One

  THE WOMAN LAY on her back on the pebble foreshore at the foot of Houns-tout Cliff, staring at the cloudless sky above, her pale blonde hair drying into a frizz of tight curls in the hot sun. A smear of sand across her abdomen gave the impression of wispy clothing, but the brown circles of her nipples and the hair sprouting at her crotch told anyone who cared to look that she was naked. One arm curved languidly around her head while the other rested palm-up on the shingle, the fingers curling in the tiny wavelets that bubbled over them as the tide rose; her legs, opened shamelessly in relaxation, seemed to invite the sun’s warmth to penetrate directly into her body.

  Above her loomed the grim shale escarpment of Houns-tout Cliff, irregularly striped with the hardy vegetation that clung to its ledges. So often shrouded in mist and rain during the autumn and winter, it looked benign in the brilliant summer sunlight. A mile away to the west on the Dorset Coast Path that hugged the clifftops to Weymouth, a party of hikers approached at a leisurely pace, pausing every now and then to watch cormorants and shags plummet into the sea like tiny guided missiles. To the east, on the path to Swanage, a single male walker passed the Norman chapel on St Alban’s Head on his way to the rock-girt crucible of Chapman’s Pool whose clear blue waters made an attractive anchorage when the wind was light and offshore. Because of the steep hills that surround it, pedestrian visitors to its beaches were rare, but at lunchtime on a fine weekend upwards of ten boats rode at anchor there, bobbing in staggered formation as the gentle swells passed under each in turn.

  A single boat, a thirty-two-foot Princess, had already nosed in through the entrance channel, and the rattle of its anchor chain over its idling engines carried clearly on the air. Not far behind, the bow of a Fairline Squadron carved through the race off St Alban’s Head, giving the yachts that wallowed lazily in the light winds a wide berth in its progress towards the bay. It was a quarter past ten on one of the hottest Sundays of the year, but out of sight around Egmont Point the naked sunbather appeared oblivious to both the shimmering heat and the increasing likelihood of company.

  The Spender brothers, Paul and Daniel, had spotted the nudist as they rounded the Point with their fishing rods, and they were now perched precariously on an unstable ledge some hundred feet above her and to her right. They took it in turns to look at her through their father’s expensive binoculars which they had smuggled out of the rented holiday cottage in a bundle of T-shirts, rods and tackle. It was the middle weekend of their two weeks’ holiday, and as far as the elder brother was concerned, fishing had only ever been a pretext. This remote part of the Isle of Purbeck held little attraction for an awakening adolescent, having few inhabitants, fewer distractions and no sandy beaches. His intention had always been to spy on bikini-clad women draped over the expensive motor cruisers in Chapman’s Pool.

  ‘Mum said we weren’t to climb the cliffs because they’re dangerous,’ whispered Danny, the virtuous ten-year-old, less interested than his brother in the sight of bare flesh.

  ‘Shut up.’

  ‘She’d kill us if she knew we were looking at a nudie.’

  ‘You’re just scared because you’ve never seen one before.’

  ‘Neither’ve you,’ muttered the younger boy indignantly. ‘Anyway, she’s a dirty person. I bet loads of people can see her.’

  Paul, the elder by two years, treated this remark with the scorn it deserved – they hadn’t passed a soul on their way round Chapman’s Pool. Instead, he concentrated on the wonderfully accessible body below. He couldn’t see much of the woman’s face because she was lying with her feet pointing towards them, but the magnification of the lenses was so powerful that he could see every other detail of her. He was too ignorant of the naked female form to question the bruises that blotched her skin, but he knew afterwards that he wouldn’t have questioned them anyway, even if he’d known what they meant. He had fantasized a
bout something like this happening – discovering a quiescent, unmoving woman who allowed him to explore her at his leisure, if only through binoculars. He found the soft flow of her breasts unbearably erotic and dwelt at length on her nipples, wondering what it would be like to touch them and what would happen if he did. Lovingly he traversed the length of her midriff, pausing on the dimple of her belly button, before returning to what interested him most, her opened legs and what lay between them. He crawled forward on his elbows, writhing his body beneath him.

  ‘What are you doing?’ demanded Danny suspiciously, crawling up beside him. ‘Are you being dirty?’

  ‘’Course not.’ He gave the boy a savage thump on the arm. ‘That’s all you ever think about, isn’t it? Being dirty. You’d better watch it, penis-brain, or I’ll tell Dad on you.’

  In the inevitable fight that followed – a grunting, red-faced brawl of hooked arms and kicking feet – the Zeiss binoculars slipped from the elder brother’s grasp and clattered down the slope, dislodging an avalanche of shale in the process. The boys, united in terror of what their father was going to say, abandoned the fight to wriggle back from the brink and stare in dismay after the binoculars.

  ‘It’s your fault if they’re broken,’ hissed the ten-year-old. ‘You’re the one who dropped them.’

  But for once his brother didn’t rise to the bait. He was more interested in the body’s continued immobility. With an awful sense of foreboding it dawned on him that he’d been masturbating over a dead woman.

  Chapter Two

  THE CLEAR WATERS of Chapman’s Pool heaved in an undulating roll to break in rippling foam around the pebble shore of the bay. By now three boats were anchored there, two flying the red ensign – Lady Rose, the Princess, and Gregory’s Girl, the Fairline Squadron; the third, Mirage, a French Beneteau, flew the tricolour. Only Gregory’s Girl showed any sign of real activity with a man and a woman struggling to release a dinghy whose winching wires had become jammed in the ratchet mechanism of the davits. On Lady Rose, a scantily clad couple lounged on the flying bridge, bodies glistening with oil, eyes closed against the sun, while on Mirage, a teenage girl held a video camera to her eye and panned idly up the steep grassy slope of West Hill, searching for anything worth filming.

  No one noticed the Spender brothers’ mad dash around the bay, although the French girl did zoom in on the lone male walker as he descended the hillside towards them. Seeing only with the tunnel vision of the camera, she was oblivious to anything but the handsome young man in her sight, and her smitten heart gave a tiny leap of excitement at the thought of another chance encounter with the beautiful Englishman. She had met him two days before at the Berthon Marina in Lymington when, with a gleaming smile, he’d told her the computer code for the lavatories, and she couldn’t believe her good luck that he was here . . . today . . . in this shit-hole of boring isolation which her parents described as one of England’s gems.

  To her starved imagination he looked like a longer-haired version of Jean-Claude Van Damme in his sleeveless T-shirt and bottom-hugging shorts – tanned, muscled, sleek dark hair swept back from his face, smiling brown eyes, grittily stubbled jaw – and in the narrative tale of her own life, romanticized, embellished, unbelievably innocent, she pictured herself swooning in his strong arms and capturing his heart. Through the intimacy of magnification she watched his muscles ripple as he lowered his rucksack to the ground, only for the lens to fill abruptly with the frantic movements of the Spender brothers. With an audible groan, she switched off the camera and stared in disbelief at the prancing children who, from a distance, appeared to be showing enthusiastic delight.

  Surely he was too young to be anybody’s father?

  But . . . A Gallic shrug . . .

  Who knew with the English?

  Behind the questing mongrel which zigzagged energetically in pursuit of a scent, the horse picked its way carefully down the track that led from Hill Bottom to the Pool. Tarmac showed in places where the track had once been a road, and one or two sketchy foundations among the overgrown vegetation beside it spoke of buildings long abandoned and demolished. Maggie Jenner had lived in this area most of her life but had never known why the handful of inhabitants in this corner of the Isle of Purbeck had gone away and left their dwellings to the ravages of time. Someone had told her once that ‘chapman’ was an archaic word for merchant or pedlar but what anyone could have traded in this remote place she couldn’t imagine. Perhaps, more simply, a pedlar had drowned in the bay and bequeathed his death to posterity. Every time she took this path she reminded herself to find out, but every time she made her way home again she forgot.

  The cultivated gardens that had once bloomed here had left a lingering legacy of roses, hollyhocks and hydrangeas amid the weeds and grasses, and she thought how pleasant it would be to have a house in this colourful wilderness, facing south-west towards the channel with only her dog and her horses for company. Because of the threat of the ever-sliding cliffs, access to Chapman’s Pool was denied to motorized traffic by padlocked gates at Hill Bottom and Kingston, and the attraction of so much stillness was a powerful one. But then isolation and its attendant solitude was becoming something of an obsession with her, and occasionally it worried her.

  Even as the thought was in her head, she heard the sound of an approaching vehicle, grinding in first gear over the bumps and hollows behind her, and gave a surprised whistle to bring Bertie to heel behind Sir Jasper. She turned in the saddle, assuming it was a tractor, and frowned at the approaching police Range Rover. It slowed as it drew level with her and she recognized Nick Ingram at the wheel before, with a brief smile of acknowledgement, he drove on and left her to follow in his dusty wake.

  The emergency services had rushed into action following a nine-nine-nine call to the police from a mobile telephone. It was timed at 10.43 a.m. The caller gave his name as Steven Harding and explained that he had come across two boys who claimed a body was lying on the beach at Egmont Bight. The details were confused because the boys omitted to mention that the woman was naked, and their obvious distress and garbled speech led Harding to give the impression that ‘the lady on the beach’ was their mother and had fallen from the cliff while using a pair of binoculars. As a result the police and coastguards acted on the presumption that she was still alive.

  Because of the difficulty of retrieving a badly injured person from the foreshore, the coastguards dispatched a Search and Rescue helicopter from Portland to winch her off. Meanwhile, PC Nick Ingram, diverted from a burglary investigation, approached via the track that skirted the inappropriately named West Hill on the eastern side of Chapman’s Pool. He had had to use bolt cutters to slice through the chain on the gate at Hill Bottom and, as he abandoned his Range Rover on the hard standing beside the fishermen’s boatsheds, he was hoping fervently that rubber-neckers wouldn’t grab the opportunity to follow him. He was in no mood to marshal petulant sightseers.

  The only access from the boatsheds to the beach where the woman lay was by the same route the boys had taken – on foot around the bay, followed by a scramble over the rocks at Egmont Point. To a man in uniform, it was a hot and sweaty business, and Nick Ingram, who stood over six feet four inches and weighed upwards of sixteen stone, was drenched by the time he reached the body. He bent forward, hands on knees, to recover his breath, listening to the deafening sound of the approaching SAR helicopter and feeling its wind on his damp shirt. He thought it a hideous intrusion into what was obviously a place of death. Despite the heat of the sun, the woman’s skin was cold to the touch and her widely staring eyes had begun to film. He was struck by how tiny she seemed, lying alone at the bottom of the cliff, and how sad her miniature hand looked waving in the spume.

  Her nudity surprised him, the more so when it required only the briefest of glances about the beach to reveal a complete absence of towels, clothes, footwear or possessions. He noticed bruising on her arms, neck and chest, but it was more consistent with being tumbled over rocks
on an incoming tide, he thought, than with a dive off a clifftop. He stooped again over the body, looking for anything that would indicate how it had got there, then retreated rapidly as the descending stretcher spiralled dangerously close to his head.

  The noise of the helicopter and the amplified voice of the winch-operator calling instructions to the man below had attracted sightseers. The party of hikers gathered on the clifftop to watch the excitement while the yachtsmen in Chapman’s Pool motored out of the bay in their dinghies to do the same. A spirit of revelry was abroad because everyone assumed the rescue wouldn’t have happened unless the woman was still alive, and a small cheer went up as the stretcher rose in the air. Most thought she’d fallen from the cliff; a few thought she might have floated out of Chapman’s Pool on a lilo and got into difficulties. No one guessed she’d been murdered.

  Except, perhaps, Nick Ingram who transferred the tiny, stiffening body to the stretcher and felt a dreadful anger burn inside him because Death had stolen a pretty woman’s dignity. As always, the victory belonged to the thief and not to the victim.

  As requested by the nine-nine-nine operator, Steven Harding shepherded the boys down the hill to the police car which was parked beside the boatsheds where they waited with varying degrees of patience until its occupant returned. The brothers, who had sunk into an exhausted silence after their mad dash round Chapman’s Pool, wanted to be gone, but they were intimidated by their companion, a twenty-four-year-old actor, who took his responsibilities in loco parentis seriously.

  He kept a watchful eye on his uncommunicative charges (too shocked to speak, he thought) while trying to cheer them up with a running commentary of what he could see of the rescue. He peppered his conversation with expressions like: ‘You’re a couple of heroes . . .’ ‘Your mum’s going to be really proud of you . . .’ ‘She’s a lucky lady to have two such sensible sons . . .’ But it wasn’t until the helicopter flew towards Poole and he turned to them with a smile of encouragement, saying: ‘There you are, you can stop worrying now. Mum’s in safe hands,’ that they realized his mistake. It hadn’t occurred to either of them that what appeared to be general remarks about their own mother applied specifically to the ‘lady on the beach’.