Breaker

*25*

Broxton House slumbered peacefully in the afternoon sunshine as Nick Ingram pulled up in front of the porticoed entrance. As always he paused to admire its clean, square lines and, as always, regretted its slow deterioration. To him, perhaps more than to the Jenners, it represented something valuable, a living reminder that beauty existed in everything; but then he, despite his job, was enduringly sentimental, and they were not. The double doors stood wide open, an invitation to any passing thief, and he picked up Celia's handbag from the hall table as he passed on his way to the drawing room. Silence lay across the house like a blanket of dust, and he worried suddenly that he had come too late. Even his own footfalls on the marble floor were just a whisper in the great emptiness that surrounded him.

He eased open the drawing-room door and stepped inside. Celia was propped up in bed, bifocals slipping off the end of her nose, mouth open, snoring quietly, with Bertie's head on the pillow beside her. They looked like a tableau out of The Godfather, and Nick was hard-pushed not to laugh out loud. The sentimentalist in him viewed them fondly. Maybe Maggie was right, he thought. Maybe happiness was more to do with bodily contact than with hygiene. Who cared about tannin in teacups when you had a hairy hot-water bottle who was prepared to lie with you and love you when no one else would? He tapped lightly on one of the door panels and watched with amusement as Bertie opened a cautious eye then closed it again in obvious relief when he realized Nick wasn't going to make demands on his loyalty.

"I'm not asleep, you know," said Celia, raising a hand to adjust her spectacles. "I heard you come in."

"Am I disturbing you?"

"No." She hoisted herself into a more upright position, tugging her bedjacket across her chest in a belated attempt to safeguard her dignity.

"You shouldn't leave your bag on the hall table," he told her, walking across to put it on the bed. "Anyone could steal it."

"They're welcome to it, my dear. There's nothing in it worth taking." She examined him closely. "I prefer you in uniform. Dressed like that, you look like a gardener."

"I said I'd help Maggie with the painting, and I can't paint in my uniform." He pulled forward a chair. "Where is she?"

"Where you told her to be. In the kitchen." She sighed. "I worry about her, Nick. I didn't bring her up to be a manual laborer. She'll have builder's hands before she's finished."

"She already has. You can't muck out stables and scrub horse buckets day after day and keep your hands pretty. The two are mutually exclusive."

She tut-tutted disapprovingly. "A gentleman doesn't notice that kind of thing."

He'd always been fond of her. He didn't know why, except that her forthright approach appealed to him. Perhaps she reminded him of his own mother, a down-to-earth Cockney, who had been dead for ten years. Certainly he found people who spoke their minds easier to get on with than those who cloaked their feelings in hypocritical smiles. "He probably does, you know. He just doesn't mention it."

"But that's the whole point, you silly fellow," she said crossly. "A gentleman is known by his manners."

He grinned. "So you prefer a man who lies to a man who is honest? That's not the impression you gave me four years ago when Robert Healey did his bunk."

"Robert Healey was a criminal."

"But an attractive one."

She frowned at him. "Have you come here to annoy me?"

"No, I came to see if you were all right."

She waved a hand in dismissal. "Well, I am. Go and find Maggie. I'm sure she'll be pleased to see you."

He made no move to go. "Were either of you ever called as a witness in Healey's trial?" he asked her.

"You know we weren't. He was tried only for his last fraud. All the rest of us had to take a backseat in case we confused the issue, and that made me more angry than anything. I wanted my day in court so that I could tell the little beast what I thought of him. I was never going to get my money back, but at least I could have taken my pound of flesh." She folded her arms across her chest like armor plating. "However, it's not a subject I wish to dwell on. It's unhealthy to rake over the past."

"Did you read the reports of the trial?" he went on, ignoring her.

"One or two," she said curtly, "until I gave up in fury."

"What made you furious?"

A small tic started above her lip. "They described his victims as lonely women, desperate for love and attention. I've never been so incensed about anything. It made us look such fools."

"But your case wasn't tried," he pointed out, "and that description applied to his last victims-two elderly unmarried sisters who lived alone in an isolated farmhouse in Cheshire. A perfect target for Healey, in other words. It was only because he tried to speed up the fraud by forging their names on checks that he was discovered. The sisters' bank manager was worried enough to go to the police."

The tic fluttered on. "Except I sometimes think it was true," she said with difficulty. "I never thought of us as lonely, but we did rather blossom when he came into our lives, and I'm humiliated every time I remember it."

Ingram reached into the back pocket of his jeans and pulled out a newspaper clipping. "I brought something I want to read to you. It's what the judge told Healey before he passed sentence." He smoothed the paper on his lap. " 'You're an educated man with a high IQ and an engaging manner' " he read, " 'and these qualities make you extremely dangerous. You display a ruthless disregard for your victims' feelings while at the same time exercising considerable charm and intelligence to convince them of your sincerity. Too many women have been taken in by you for anyone to believe that their' "-he stressed the word-" 'gullibility was the only reason for your success, and I am persuaded that you represent a real menace to society.' " He laid the clipping on the bed. "What the judge recognized is that Healey was a charming and intelligent man."

"It was pretense," she said, reaching for the comfort of Bertie's ears and tugging at them. "He was an actor."

Ingram thought of Steven Harding's very moderate acting skills, and shook his head. "I don't think so," he said gently. "No one could keep up a pretense like that for a year. The charm was genuine, which is what you and Maggie were attracted by, and it seems to me that the problem you both have is coming to terms with that. It makes his betrayal so much worse if you liked him."

"No." She pulled a tissue from under her pillow and blew her nose. "What upsets me more is that I thought he liked us. We're not so difficult to love, are we?"

"Not at all. I'm sure he adored you both. Everyone else does."

"Oh, don't be absurd!" Celia snapped. "He wouldn't have stolen from us if he had."

"Of course he would." Ingram propped his chin in his hands and stared at her. "The trouble with you, Mrs. J, is that you're a conformist. You assume everyone does and should behave the same way. But Healey was a professional con man. Theft was his business. He'd made a ten-year career out of it, don't forget. That doesn't mean he wasn't fond of you, any more than it would mean I wasn't fond of you if I had to arrest you." His mouth twitched into a crooked smile. "We do what we're good at in this life if we don't want to starve, and we cry all the way to the bank if it upsets us."

"That's nonsense."

"Is it? Do you think I take pleasure arresting a ten-year-old kid for vandalism when I know he comes from a lousy home, is truant because he can't read, and is likely to get a belting from his drunken mother because she's too stupid to deal with him in any other way? I caution the boy because that's what I'm paid to do, but I'm always a damn sight fonder of him than I am of his mother. Criminals are human like everyone else, and there's no law that says they aren't likable."

She peered at him over her bifocals. "Yes, but you didn't like Martin, Nick, so don't pretend you did."

"No, I didn't," he admitted, "but it was a personal thing. I thought the guy was a grade-A jerk. If I'm honest, though, I never believed for one moment that Mrs. Fielding was telling the truth when she accused him of trying to steal her antiques. As far as I was concerned he was whiter than white ... bloody perfect, in fact ... every young woman's dream." The smile became even more crooked. "I assumed-and still do because it didn't fit Healey's MO-that it was Mrs. Fielding's senility talking, and the only reason I came to you about it was because I couldn't resist the opportunity to take him down a peg or two." He raised his eyes to hers. "It certainly didn't give me any insights into what he was really up to. Even when Simon Farley told me he'd passed a couple of dud checks in the pub and asked me to get it sorted quietly because he didn't want any fuss, it never occurred to me that Martin was a professional. If it had, I'd have approached it differently, and maybe you wouldn't have lost your money and maybe your husband would still be alive."

"Oh, for God's sake!" she said gruffly, pulling so hard on Bertie's ears that the poor animal furrowed his brow in pain. "Don't you start feeling guilty, too."

"Why not? If I'd been older and wiser I might have done my job better."

With an uncharacteristic display of tenderness, she laid a hand on his shoulder. "I have enough trouble coping with my own guilt without carrying yours and Maggie's as well. According to Maggie, her father dropped dead because she was shouting at him. My recollection is that he threw a two-week tantrum then dropped dead after a drinking bout in his study. If my son is to be believed, he died of a broken heart because Maggie and I treated him like a cipher in his own house." She sighed. "The truth is Keith was a chronic alcoholic with a history of heart disease who could have died at any moment, although clearly Martin's shenanigans didn't help. And it wasn't as though it was Keith's money that was stolen. It was mine. My father left me ten thousand in his will twenty years ago, and I managed to work it up to over a hundred thousand by playing the stock market." She frowned in irritation at the memory before giving Ingram's shoulder a sudden sharp rap. "This is ridiculous. When all's said and done, the only person to blame is Robert Healey, and I refuse to let anyone else take responsibility."

"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..."