Desperate Measures: A Mystery (23 page)

“Wicked,” said Saturday.

“You did tell them about…”

“The laptop? Yeah.”

Hazel was genuinely impressed. “What did they say?”

“That asking them for a job showed chutzpah,” Saturday declared smugly.

Hazel frowned. “They speak Yiddish?”

Thus pressed, the boy passed on their exact words. “‘Some nerve,’” he said happily. “It means the same thing.”

Hazel wasn’t entirely convinced, but if he’d got the job, he’d got the job. “Well, well done. Welcome to the world of money in your pocket and responsibilities on your plate.”

In truth, Saturday’s job didn’t seem to offer a great deal of either. But this was a boy who’d got by week after week, season after season, on small change and things he found lying around. Even a part-time job at minimum wage promised unfamiliar plenty.

“When do you start?”

“Eight o’clock tonight. Finish at midnight.”

Which meant she either had to warn Ash or leave him a note. If she left a note, he’d know she was avoiding him, and think he’d done something to upset her. She’d have to hope that sheer amazement at Saturday’s news would keep him from wondering what else was occupying her mind.

In the event, Ash didn’t come that night. Hazel was watching late-night television with Patience when Saturday came in at half past midnight.

He assumed she’d stayed up until he got home. Hazel was about to put him right, but stopped herself when she realized there were two good reasons to hold her tongue. One was that she couldn’t tell him why she’d stayed up. The other was that it was years since anybody had cared enough about this boy to stay up until he was safely home. It was something only families did, and he hadn’t had a family for a while; and if a bit of him dared to think that maybe he’d got something like a family again, Hazel wasn’t going to tell him he was wrong.

“So how did it go? Any problems? What’s the boss like?”

But another thing Saturday wasn’t used to was protracted physical effort. Generally, when he’d had enough of doing something, he stopped doing it and put his feet up. But for four hours this evening he’d been constantly lifting, carrying, serving, helping, and cleaning, and he was exhausted. His eyes were bleary with tiredness. “Can I tell you in the morning? I’m knackered.”

Hazel sat up a little longer, but still Ash didn’t come. Then she went to bed.

*   *   *

She paid for the analysis herself. She had no doubt that if she’d taken her suspicions to DI Gorman, he’d have signed for it on the CID account. But then the results would have gone to him instead of coming to her, and she would have no say in what followed. By footing the bill herself—and it wouldn’t be easy, since lab work is never cheap—she retained control over who would know what when.

It wasn’t that she had any intention of keeping the results from the police. Almost whatever they showed, they would be helpful to the inquiry, and Hazel was as keen as Gorman to see justice done. What she was buying with the contents of her piggy bank was time. Not enough to allow the guilty parties to scuttle out of reach of the law. Just enough that if there were things Gabriel Ash had to be told, he could hear them from her.

The downside of receiving the results directly was that she had no one to help her understand them when they arrived on Monday. She read them through again and again, making notes of the questions they raised; then she phoned the laboratory for further clarification; and even after that, she spent the afternoon on the Internet, cross-checking that the information in front of her did indeed mean what she thought it meant. And it did. Whichever way she came at it, it checked out, all the way down to the geology. She experienced a brief surge of hope when limestone turned up in the bedrock under both Somalia and the east of England, but they were different kinds of limestone, and they occurred in conjunction with different minerals. By the time she’d made her last phone call and turned her computer off, there was no longer any doubt in her mind.

She looked at Patience. “Now we wait.”

Patience, of course, said nothing. But it didn’t take a great deal of imagination to sense an impulse of sympathy in the golden-toffee eyes.

*   *   *

Ash spent five days in London. A black van with darkened windows had collected him from the rear of Laura Fry’s office a little after midnight on Thursday; now it returned him to a Norbold whose streets were silent and empty under a sky whose stars were paling with the first promise of dawn.

He nodded to the driver—they hadn’t exchanged names in all the hours it took to drive from Norbold to London and back again—climbed down into the dark alleyway, and let himself in at Laura’s back door. There was no one else in the house, but he didn’t turn the lights on. He made his way upstairs by the narrow beam of a penlight, unlocked the door at the top of the second flight, and sat on the makeshift bed in the dark. His body ached for sleep, but he was too tired to undress or even just pull the covers over him. Instead, he sat hunched about his weariness and reflected on the developments of the last few days.

He hadn’t known what to expect when he’d got the message to pack a bag—although everything of his own that he currently had access to wouldn’t have filled a bag—and wait to be collected. If the driver knew any more than he did, he had been specially selected for his disinclination to converse. Only when the van arrived in the familiar streets around Whitehall did Ash guess that his appointment was with his old boss, Philip Welbeck.

In the days when he worked in an office, Ash had mostly worked office hours. But there had been times when he’d burned the midnight oil in response to some developing situation, and the department still carried a skeleton staff around the clock to deal with whatever occurred. So there were lights on in some of the offices, and a handful of people wandering around in loosened ties and cardigans. Since none of them blanched or held up their paper knives in the shape of a cross, Ash inferred that everyone here knew his suicide had been faked. Indeed, staging it must have involved some of them.

Welbeck ushered him into his own office and poured coffee from the big percolator in the corner. All security operations run on three things: information, mental acuity, and coffee. The coffee is the easy part.

“You’re looking better,” observed Welbeck.

“The last time you saw me, I had a hole in my head and fake brains on my shirt.”

Welbeck laughed. “I meant generally. You’re looking more like your old self.”

Ash nodded. “I’m a lot better, thanks. Especially…” He hesitated on the cusp of an indiscretion. But both of these men guarded too many secrets to keep secrets from each other. “I’ve seen them. The boys. And Cathy. I’ve seen them.”

Alarm flickered in Welbeck’s eyes like a tiny flare going up. That hadn’t been part of the deal. “You’ve been home?” All their carefully laid plans, all their costly machinations, brought to nothing by something as human as a lonely man wanting to see his family …

“No,” Ash reassured him quickly. “No, they haven’t seen me. Hazel Best laid it on. She took them to the park. I could see them from the window over Laura’s office.”

Welbeck was only slightly mollified. “So the Best girl knows.”

Ash nodded. “I … made a mistake. I went to check on my dog. I thought I could get in and out without anyone knowing.” His eyes dipped. “I was wrong.”

“Can we trust her not to talk?”

“Absolutely,” swore Ash. “I’d trust her with my life.”

“You’re trusting her with something much more important than that,” murmured Welbeck. “My operation.”

“You can trust her, too.”

Welbeck nodded slowly. He was a smaller man than Ash, shorter and lighter in build, and though he wasn’t much older, the stresses of his job, or perhaps just adverse genes, were already playing havoc with his hairline. “Anything else I should know? Anyone else who might have seen you?”

“Just Laura Fry. And my dog.”

“Ms. Fry works for me. And I don’t imagine your dog will shoot its mouth off after one too many in the Rose and Crown.”

Ash shook his head. “She’s careful that way.” He almost added, “Most people don’t even know she can talk.” But he wasn’t sure how Welbeck would react. If he thought Ash was being flippant, well and good. But he might send the black van away and whistle up a white one. Again.

Ash spent most of the following days and nights working in a tiny room behind Welbeck’s office, going through his old files for any clues, hidden in the mass of material and not recognized when he was originally collating it, to where Stephen Graves might have gone to ground.

“Four years ago,” said Welbeck, looking over his shoulder, “as a result of your work on these files, the pirates decided you were getting too close and arranged for Cathy and your boys to be abducted. Then they felt safe—until you went to see Graves six weeks ago. You didn’t know he’d thrown his hand in with them, but he wasn’t willing to take the chance that you’d work it out.”

Ash didn’t look up from the computer. “How deep do you suppose Graves’s involvement goes?”

Welbeck watched him, head cocked to one side like a bird’s. “You’re the security analyst. What do you think?”

Ash considered. “I think—I
think
—he may be in it as deep as any of them. It’s possible the whole bloody business was his idea.”

“Have you any evidence for that?”

“Not yet.” Ash nodded at the screen. “Maybe it’s in these files. That’s why you brought me here, isn’t it?”

Welbeck nodded, a tiny smile playing around his lips. “The same thought occurred to me. It may all be organized from Somalia, which is what we always thought. But it would be easier to run it from England, where the shipments originate. And it would explain why they concentrated on cargoes from British manufacturers. We know that Graves was in contact with the pirates, and we don’t know of anyone else who was.

“Maybe it’s that simple,” he mused. “Graves isn’t helping them under duress, he’s running the operation. He sells his armaments, he insures them for transport, then he steals them back and sells them again, under the counter. Sometimes he steals someone else’s shipment—they share information within the industry precisely to combat this sort of thing—to avoid arousing suspicion. We didn’t get to the truth of it four years ago because we were looking at it the wrong way around. Graves doesn’t answer to the pirates. They answer to him.”

“Everything that’s happened could have been done by Stephen Graves,” Ash said slowly. “Including…”

“Yes.”

“If I find Graves abducted my wife and sons,” Gabriel Ash said carefully, “I will tear his heart out.”

“Prove it,” said Philip Welbeck, “and I’ll let you. Work the files with this alternative scenario in mind. If we’re right, there may be material in there that can tell us how it was done and by whom. Go through it all again, see what you can turn up.”

Ash was scrolling steadily, his attention split between the screen and this conversation with his boss. “There’s no sign of him surfacing?”

“Not yet. He may have got past us, but I think he’s still in the country. It would be the smart thing to do—lie low and wait till the flyers we sent out have had beards and mustaches doodled on them. Then he can hire a boat or a light aircraft to slip him across the Channel. Perhaps there’s someone in the files he could be hiding out with.”

The pages were scrolling past too quickly to read, just slow enough to scan. Ash knew that if there was anything in there that he wanted, he’d spot it. “If we don’t find him, how long do I have to stay dead?”

It was a legitimate question. Welbeck didn’t resent his asking it; he just didn’t know the answer. “Be patient. I know you want to go home, but we’re only going to get one shot at this. You’re my best analyst, and Graves—assuming we’re right about him—knows that. It’s why your family was targeted, rather than mine or someone else’s. While he thinks you’re dead, he knows the police are looking for him, but he probably thinks he’s a low priority—wanted for weakness and making some bad decisions, but not much more. He thinks that if he’s careful, he’ll be able to slip under the radar and pick up again pretty much where he left off.

“If he knew you were alive, he’d shut the whole operation down, get out of England, and disappear for good. We’d never find him; and if we don’t find Graves, it could all start up again. Everything you’ve been through, everything your wife and sons have been through, will have been for nothing.”

Heading back to his own desk, Welbeck paused in the doorway. “One more thing to consider. If he learns that you tricked him, he may want revenge enough to risk breaking cover. He got at Cathy once. We’ll do all we can to protect her, but I can’t guarantee he won’t get at her again. For all the money we spend on witness protection, still sometimes people are found. Be patient, Gabriel. You’ve waited four years. Wait a little longer.”

So Ash sat in the room behind Philip Welbeck’s office, and he worked through his old files, and he tried to remember what had been going through his mind as he made these records four and five years ago. What thoughts had occurred to him and been long-fingered to await corroboration; what notions he had dismissed as implausible. From where he was sitting now, almost nothing seemed entirely implausible.

But too much had happened in the intervening time. He couldn’t put himself back in the place where he was, mentally, professionally, when he was building these files. Looking at it now, he barely recognized the work as his. If there were any coded messages in there, he was unable to read them.

After five days he confessed himself beaten. Welbeck had the black van drive him back to Norbold.

CHAPTER 26

H
E WASN’T SURE HOW SENSIBLE
it was to keep going around to Hazel’s house, but he meant to go just the same, as soon as the streets were empty. Norbold wasn’t London or Brighton, cashing in on an around-the-clock economy; even the drunks liked to be tucked up in their beds by one in the morning. Ash had found that if he waited until half past, then left by Laura’s back door and slipped from one dark alley to the next, he could make it all the way to the back of Hazel’s house without seeing—or, more important, being seen by—anyone except cats. And once an urban fox, and even the fox didn’t notice him.