Minette Walters - The Breaker

Dorset: county of southwesternEngland, bordered to the south by the seas of the English Channel, to the eastby the county of Hampshire, and to the west by the county of Devon. Some 100miles southwest of London, Dorset's total area, mainly rural, is approximately1,000 square miles. Urban development along the coastline is centered on theseaside resorts of Bournemouth and Poole, and farther to the west on Weymouthand Portland. West Dorset (main townDorchester) has been immortalizedas Wessex in the writings of Thomas Hardy and was the scene of the Tolpuddlemartyrs' historic stand for organized labor in the nineteenth century. The Isleof Purbeck, a small peninsula to the southwest of Poole (maintownSwanage) is an isolated area of great beauty, home to Purbeckmarble and the magnificent medieval ruins of Corfe Castle.

While Scotland Yard still maintainslinks between British law-enforcement agencies and Interpol, itsresponsibilities are now limited to metropolitan London. In the forty-sixcounties of England, the responsibility for serious cases is borne by countyconstabulary headquarters, and it is these areas of excellence which take thelead in provincial murders. It should always be remembered that nowhere inEngland is very far from anywhere elsefor example, Lymington, inHampshire, is only thirty-odd miles from Poole, in Dorsethowever, localknowledge is always invaluable, and in this story I have given a starring roleto Police Constable Ingram, a uniformed constable in a tiny police station onthe Isle of Purbeck, who mayor may not? know what he'stalking about. Dorset Constabulary HQ (familiarly known as Winfrith) is locatedequidistantly between Poole and Dorchester, and is home to my fictionalheavyweights, Detective Superintendent Carpenter and Detective InspectorGalbraith. Minette Walters

Sunday, 10 August 19971:45 A.M.

She drifted with the waves, fallingoff their rolling backs and waking to renewed agony every time salt waterseared down her throat and into her stomach. During intermittent periods oflucidity when she revisited, always with astonishment, what had happened toher, it was the deliberate breaking of her fingers that remained indeliblyprinted on her memory, and not the brutality of her rape.

Sunday, 10 August 19975:00 A.M.

The child sat cross-legged on thefloor like a miniature statue of Buddha, the gray dawn light leeching her fleshof color. He had no feelings for her, not even common humanity, but he couldn'tbring himself to touch her. She watched him as solemnly as he watched her, andhe was enthralled by her immobility. He could break her neck as easily as achicken'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

The most widely held view is thatrape is an exercise in male domination, a pathological assertion of power, usuallyperformed out of anger against the entire sex or frustration with a specificindividual. By forcing a woman to accept penetration, the man is demonstratingnot only his superior strength but his right to sow his seed wherever andwhenever he chooses. This has elevated the rapist to a creature of legendaryproportionsdemoniacal, dangerous, predatoryand the fact thatfew 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 individualwho seeks to bolster poor self-image by attacking someone he perceives to beweaker than himself. He is a man of low intelligence, few social skills, andwith a profound sense of his own inferiority in his dealings with the rest ofsociety. A deepseated fear of women is more common to the rapist than afeeling of superiority, and this may well lie in early failure to makesuccessful relationships.

Pornography becomes a means to an endfor such a person because masturbation is as necessary to him as the regularfix is to a heroin addict. Without orgasm the sex-fixator experiences nothing.However, his obsessive nature, coupled with his lack of achievement, will makehim 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, whichonly exacerbates his feelings of inadequacy and inferiority.

It could be argued that the rapist, aman of limited intelligence, limited sensation, and limited ability tofunction, is more to be pitied than feared, because his danger lies in the easyascendancy society has given him over the so-called weaker sex. Every timejudges and newspapers demonize and mythologize the rapist as a dangerous predator,they merely reinforce the idea that the penis is a symbol of power...Helen Barry, The Mind of a Rapist

*1*

The woman lay on her back on thepebble foreshore at the foot of Houns-tout Cliff, staring at the cloudless skyabove, her pale blond hair drying into a frizz of tight curls in the hot sun. Asmear of sand across her abdomen gave the impression of wispy clothing, but thebrown circles of her nipples and the hair sprouting at her crotch told anyonewho cared to look that she was naked. One arm curved languidly around her headwhile the other rested palm-up on the sea-washed pebbles, the fingers curlingin the tiny wavelets that bubbled over them as the tide rose; her legs, openedshamelessly in relaxation, seemed to invite the sun's warmth to penetratedirectly into her body.

Above her loomed the grim shaleescarpment of Houns-tout Cliff, irregularly striped with the hardy vegetationthat clung to its ledges. So often shrouded in mist and rain during the autumnand winter, it looked benign in the brilliant summer sunlight. A mile away tothe west, on the Dorset Coast Path that hugged the clifftops to Weymouth, aparty of hikers approached at a leisurely pace, pausing every now and then towatch cormorants and shags plummet into the sea like tiny guided missiles. Tothe east, on the path to Swanage, a single male walker passed the Norman chapelon 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 lightand offshore. Because of the steep hills that surround it, pedestrian visitorsto its beaches were rare, but at lunchtime on a fine weekend upwards of tenboats rode at anchor there, bobbing in staggered formation as the gentle swellspassed under each in turn.

A single boat, a thirty-two-footPrincess, had already nosed in through the entrance channel, and the rattle ofits anchor chain over its idling engines carried clearly on the air. Not farbehind, the bow of a Fairline Squadron carved through the race off St. Alban'sHead, giving the yachts that wallowed lazily in the light winds a wide berth inits progress toward the bay. It was a quarter past ten on one of the hottestSundays of the year, but out of sight around Egmont Point the naked sunbatherappeared oblivious to both the shimmering heat and the increasing likelihood ofcompany.

The Spender brothers, Paul andDaniel, had spotted the nudist as they rounded the Point with their fishingrods, and they were now perched precariously on an unstable ledge some hundredfeet above her and to her right. They took turns looking at her through theirfather's expensive binoculars, which they had smuggled out of the rentedholiday cottage in a bundle of T-shirts, rods, and tackle. It was the middleweekend of their two weeks' holiday, and as far as the elder brother wasconcerned, fishing had only ever been a pretext. This remote part of the Isleof Purbeck held little attraction for an awakening adolescent, having fewinhabitants, fewer distractions, and no sandy beaches. His intention had alwaysbeen to spy on bikini-clad women draped over the expensive motor cruisers inChapman's Pool.