The Breaker Read Online Free PDF

worry"-the WPC tapped her pen on the paper in front of her-"the doctor's at the top of my list. But if you don't mind, we'll take it gently. We've had a lot of dealings with this kind of thing, and we've found the best method is not to rush at it." She turned to the woman with an encouraging smile. "Has she told you her name?"
    Mrs. Green shook her head. "She hasn't said a word, dear. To be honest, I'm not sure she can."
    "How old do you think she is?"
    "Eighteen months, two at the most." She lifted the edge of the child's cotton dress to reveal a pair of disposable training pants. "She's still in nappies, poor little thing."
    The WPC thought two years old was an underestimation, and added a year for the purposes of the paperwork. Women like Mrs. Green had reared their children on cloth diapers and, because of the washing involved, had had them potty-trained early. The idea that a three-year-old might still be in nappies was incomprehensible to them.
    Not that it made any difference as far as this little girl was concerned. Whether she was eighteen months old, two years old or three, she clearly wasn't talking.
 
    With nothing else to occupy her that Sunday afternoon, the French girl from the Beneteau, who had been an interested observer of Harding's conversations with the Spender brothers, Maggie Jenner, and PC Ingram through the video camera's zoom lens, rowed herself into shore and walked up the steep slope of West Hill to try to work out for herself what the mystery had been about. It wasn't hard to guess that the two boys had found the person who had been winched off the beach by helicopter, nor that the handsome Englishman had reported it to the police for them, but she was curious about why he had reemerged on the hillside half an hour after the police car's departure to retrieve the rucksack he'd abandoned there. She had watched him take out some binoculars and scan the bay and the cliffs before making his way down to the foreshore beyond the boat sheds. She had filmed him for several minutes, staring out to sea, but she was no wiser, having reached his vantage point above Chapman's Pool, than she'd been before, and thoroughly bored, she abandoned the puzzle.
    It would be another five days before her father came across the tape and humiliated her in front of the English police...
 
    At six o'clock that evening the Fairline Squadron weighed anchor and motored gently out of Chapman's Pool in the direction of St. Alban's Head. Two languid girls sat on either side of their father on the flying bridge, while his latest companion sat, alone and excluded, on the seat behind them. Once clear of the shallow waters at the mouth of the bay, the boat roared to full power and made off at twenty-five knots on the return journey to Poole, carving a V-shaped wake out of the flat sea behind it.
    Heat and alcohol had made them all soporific, particularly the father, who had overexerted himself in his efforts to please his daughters, and after setting the autopilot he appointed the elder one lookout before closing his eyes. He could feel the daggers of his girlfriend's fury carving away at his back, and with a stifled sigh, wished he'd had the sense to leave her behind. She was the latest in a string of what his daughters called his "bimbos," and as usual, they had set out to trample on the fragile shoots of his new relationship. Life, he thought resentfully, was bloody...
    "Watch out, Dad!" his daughter screamed in sudden alarm. "We're heading straight for a rock."
    The man's heart thudded against his chest as he wrenched the wheel violently, slewing the boat to starboard, and what his daughter had thought was a rock slid past on the port side to dance in the boisterous wake. "I'm too old for all of this," he said shakily, steering his three-hundred-thousand-pound boat back on to course and mentally checking the current state of his insurance. "What the hell was it? It can't have been a rock. There are no rocks out here."
    The two