Desperate Measures: A Mystery (21 page)

He swallowed. “I can’t make that decision. I owe everyone too much. My family are safe in England instead of hostages in Somalia. I couldn’t have done that on my own. I can’t just grab my trophy and run, and leave everyone else to cope with the fallout.”

“Talk to Philip Welbeck,” advised Hazel. “Get him to put a sell-by date on the operation. I don’t…” She bit her lip. “I don’t want you, or Cathy, to have gone through so much only to lose what you did it for. To come so close to happily ever after but end up alone again.”

Ash understood what she was saying. He knew she was right. He just didn’t know what to do about it. “I’ll talk to Philip,” he promised. “Hazel…”

She raised an inquiring eyebrow.

“I haven’t thanked you. For this morning. Well, for everything you’ve done, but especially for this morning.”

Hazel smiled. “You were there, then. I couldn’t see you. But I didn’t think you’d have forgotten.”

“No.”

He seemed to be struggling with something. Hazel frowned. “Gabriel? What is it?”

It was guilt. “I didn’t recognize them,” he admitted. “If you hadn’t been there, if I hadn’t been expecting to see them, I wouldn’t have known them. My sons. But they could have been anybody’s. Any two boys playing in the park. I thought I’d know them a mile away, but I didn’t.”

“Hell, Gabriel,” said Hazel impatiently, “it’s been four years! Of course they’ve changed. Gilbert’s twice the age he was the last time you saw him. Guy’s gone from being a toddler to a six-year-old. A schoolboy. At least he will be when you have time to arrange it.”

Ash hadn’t thought of that. “We’ll have to get them some help. I don’t imagine they’ve had any education. They’ll need to learn to read. Even Gilbert was only just starting—he’ll hardly remember anything he learned four years ago.”

“There’ll be time,” Hazel reassured him. “All the time in the world now. Let them catch their breath first. The important thing is for you all to get used to one another again. If they didn’t look familiar to you, how do you suppose you’ll look to them? Guy may not remember that he ever
had
a father.”

She saw the shock cross his face and hastened to soften the blow. “You’ll deal with it. You’ll spend time together and you’ll deal with all the problems you meet. But it won’t happen overnight. You’re setting yourself up for grief if you think it will.”

“You were with them. You talked to them.” She could hear the envy in his voice. “How did they seem?”

He was asking the wrong person. Hazel was no connoisseur of children. “They seemed fine.”

“But they can’t be, can they?” said Ash fretfully. “Almost all the life they’ve known has been as captives among murderers. They were kept away from Cathy for a lot of the time. God knows who was looking after them. God knows what they’ve seen, what’s happened to them. I don’t know if they’ll ever fully recover, but they certainly can’t be
fine
this soon after!”

“All right!” Hazel spread her hands to ward off his anger. “Poor choice of words. But I don’t know what to tell you. I didn’t know them before, and I don’t know any children their age to compare them to, but to me they seemed pretty normal. Maybe Gilbert seemed a bit … unsettled. Anxious, and looking for someone to take it out on.

“I think that’s pretty normal, too, in the circumstances. Not just the way they’ve been living, but the way they came home. Cathy must have given them some reason why you weren’t at the airport to meet them. If she told them what she believes to be the truth, they think you’re dead; and if she told them some fairy story she thought would make things easier, they must be afraid you don’t want to see them. Either way, that’s a tough thing to deal with before you’re ten.

“But listen, they’re out of danger now, and you have all the time it’s going to take to put things right. You and Cathy will need to get to know each other again, and you’ll have to start afresh with the boys—tell them who you are, learn who they are. You’re going to need patience.”

At the sound of her name, Ash’s dog looked up and smiled. He stroked her head and she settled down again.

“And Cathy. How did Cathy seem?” It was as if he was snatching love letters from the flames. Every fragment he could get his hands on was a treasure.

“I thought she was coping pretty well. I don’t think you need to worry, Gabriel. I think they’ve all come through remarkably well. You’ll have a better idea when you’re able to talk to Cathy in person, but in the meantime, don’t torture yourself. The worst is over, for them and for you. Of course you won’t just slot back into how things were four years ago. But you’ve got what you wanted. Soon you’ll have everything you wanted.”

“Not quite everything.” Hazel was surprised at the steel vibrating in his voice. “I wanted to rip their kidnappers’ hearts out. I wanted to see them burn.”

“That’s someone else’s job,” she reminded him. “And just because they haven’t been found yet, that doesn’t mean they won’t be. They aren’t faceless anymore. Even in Africa, Graves may find it harder to evade justice than he imagines.”

“What about his office? There could be some evidence there.…”

“A specialist team has gone into Bertram Castings and locked it down,” said Hazel. “They’re picking the computers apart for every scrap of information that might be helpful. They know what they’re doing, Gabriel. You can’t help—truly you can’t.”

“I’m going mad, doing nothing! Venturing out only in the middle of the night, talking only to you and Laura, knowing my family are less than a mile from here and I can’t—I absolutely can’t—go and see them. It’s driving me crazy.”

Hazel understood his frustration, but she was running out of sympathy. This was the bed he’d made; he had no right to complain to her that it was uncomfortable. The events he’d set in motion had to play out to the finale, and both of them had to stay in their seats until someone played the national anthem and set them free.

“So no change there,” she muttered irritably; and was rewarded by the startled look of a man who, bending to sniff a flower, has got a noseful of hornet.

CHAPTER 23

L
ACK OF SLEEP WAS BEGINNING TO TAKE ITS TOLL,
making Hazel not just irritable but stupid as well. It was all right for Ash, she reflected sourly as she dragged herself into Tuesday a little before eight; he could sleep all day in his secret attic while Laura Fry dispensed equal measures of sympathy, wisdom, and waspishness to her clients downstairs. But Hazel had to carry on as if nothing was disturbing her routine except occasional moments of grief.

She hauled herself into the shower, tolerated its assault for a few minutes, then dragged herself out again. Lacking the energy to lather, she wasn’t confident she’d come out much cleaner than she’d gone in, but it was at least a gesture. She found her way into a fresh shirt and jeans and stumbled downstairs.

She was astonished to find the little table in the kitchen set for breakfast, the electric kettle steaming, the toaster toasting, and Saturday—wearing one of his new, unslept-in T-shirts—as attentive as a creepy waiter in a low-budget horror film, ready to fry her egg to order.

She peered myopically at his bright scrubbed face, his amazingly tidy hair, and the cogs of comprehension ground inch by inch toward a conclusion. “You going somewhere?”

“I’ve got a job interview.”

They were words Hazel had never expected to hear from him. More important, they were words Saturday had never expected to speak. They chimed like a carillon of bells, thrilled like the first notes of a fanfare. They fluttered like flags for the launch of a new life.

It wasn’t, in all conscience, the kind of job interview that most people would get excited about. The petrol station where he had acquired the Armitage laptop had put a postcard in the window for someone to stack shelves in the shop and keep the jet-wash machine charged with shampoo. It was a job for someone leaving school with no qualifications, unless you counted an instinct for locating the cheapest bottle of cider in any part of town.

But then, that was pretty much who Saturday was. He hadn’t much to offer, only a certain wiry strength and—it seemed—the desire to do the job.

He hadn’t even—and this immediately struck Hazel as an obstacle—the one qualification his prospective employers would insist on, a track record for honesty. Over her egg she inquired, with as much tact as she could muster, how he intended to deal with the inevitable interest in his probity.

“That’s easy.” He beamed. “I’ll tell them about the laptop.”

Hazel froze mid-chew. “The laptop that was stolen from their washroom?”

Saturday nodded enthusiastically. “I’ll tell them I was going to keep it but I didn’t.”

“Well—good luck with that,” said Hazel, doubtful but entirely sincere.

After he’d gone off, first raiding her side of the linen closet for—dear God!—a clean handkerchief, she slumped back into the armchair, alone with the white dog, and fell to thinking about families. About Saturday’s family, and whether they’d be pleased or appalled to see his keenness to interview for a dead-end job he probably wouldn’t even get. About Charles Armitage, who was willing to go to prison rather than let his fourteen-year-old son pay the price of his Internet obsession. About Gabriel Ash’s family, who thought he’d died to save them and were in for—putting it mildly—a shock.

About Stephen Graves’s family, on whom he turned his back without hesitation when that became the price of his freedom. Who were sitting in their nice house outside Grantham, waiting for the phone to ring, knowing by now that it probably wouldn’t and that even if it did, the call would be taken by one of the quiet, watchful, entirely serious police officers who had moved in with them. The plump middle-aged wife who couldn’t match for glamour the resident of the Cambridge flat, and the children who’d always thought their dad—with his gray suits and his business trips and his conversation full of government regulations and double-entry bookkeeping—was a bit boring, and now would give anything for him to be boring once again.

“He’d already left them,” she said aloud.

Patience lifted one ear, inviting her to elaborate.

“Stephen Graves’s family,” Hazel explained. “I don’t think he’d really been with them for some time. He was still putting food on their table, but the future he saw for himself was with someone who mattered more to him. The woman at the flat wasn’t a casual friend who let him use the place for his secret computer. She’s his mistress.”

The white lurcher yawned, showing teeth that went right back to her ears. Hazel almost heard the words
You could be right.
She blinked.

“That’s where he’s gone. That’s why he came back to England instead of staying in Somalia—to be with her. Miss Carole Anderson—or at least the woman who uses that name. After Gabriel showed up again, he warned her to leave the flat. So she went somewhere safe till he could join her. When Dave Gorman let him go, he didn’t go home, because everything he wanted was somewhere else.”

Hazel paused in her soliloquy. The theory was perfectly feasible; nothing she knew contradicted it. And she was pleased to find she could do this on her own, not just in partnership with Gabriel Ash. But right or wrong, it didn’t take her anywhere. There was no trail of bread crumbs to follow.

If she was right, Graves had gone to ground here in England rather than trust his luck to the airports, with their observant staff and their
WATCH OUT FOR THIS MAN
flyers. But that wouldn’t make him easier to find. He could be anywhere, living with any one of thousands of women the police had no reason to know about. The only thing they knew about this one was that her name wasn’t Carole Anderson. When she left Cambridge she presumably took a flat somewhere else, making a new life that Graves would slip into. They would make new friends, who would have no reason to question whatever account they gave of themselves. He’d got false papers for her; he could get some for himself. To all intents and purposes, they would disappear.

The mistake people make when they’re trying to vanish is to go back when they should be going forward. To return somewhere familiar rather than start from scratch in a place that means nothing to them. If Stephen Graves was the man he increasingly appeared to be—not the pawn of criminals but their partner—he probably wouldn’t make that mistake. But what about his girlfriend? Perhaps she had no experience of this sort of thing. Perhaps the only reprehensible thing she’d ever done was love a bad man. If so, she might have fallen into the trap of escaping her present life by returning to a former one.

All her personal belongings had gone from the Cambridge flat, Ash had said. But it takes more than a couple of suitcases to pack away a woman’s life, and if she’d rolled up with a removal van, the porter would have noticed. So she’d taken everything with her name on it, and the clothes she’d need, and anything that was both portable and valuable, like jewelry, which she could turn into cash if she had to. But she must have left many things behind. Perhaps among them she’d left a clue. A clue to where she’d come from and where she might return.

If Stephen Graves’s love nest had been in Norbold, so that DI Gorman would have overseen the search, Hazel would have asked him what had turned up. Would have offered to help him conduct a second search on the basis that, in a woman’s flat, another woman might spot something that a man might miss. But Cambridge CID owed her nothing, and nothing was what she confidently expected to get out of them.

Which left what Sergeant Mole at the training college had liked to describe as “the old-fashioned way.”

Hazel was on her way to the front door when a disembodied sense of disappointment made her hesitate and look back. “Fancy a drive?”

Patience bounded onto the backseat as soon as the car door was open, and waited for Hazel to fasten her seat belt. Ash said she didn’t like wearing it, but Hazel didn’t care if she liked it or not, and it seemed the dog recognized that pouting worked better on men than on other women.

*   *   *

It was a big apartment block: the job of porter was shared by a pair of brothers, as was the ground-floor flat sandwiched between the boiler room and the laundry. Both incumbents had been interviewed by the police. Neither had remembered anything terribly helpful about the woman who had lived under their roof.